Cold SnapDragon

Relationship Dealbreakers

2011-12-13T16:02:00.001Z

#JustThinking: The problem with a #DealBreaker is that love can completely change the equations; what you thought would be one just isn't.

Nonetheless, a compilation of #DealBreaker tweets listing what mine are:

Ok, so, the #DealBreaker list for me: You assume the worst of me, and you make me afraid.
Every conversation feels like a cross-examination. And every letter feels like a plaint / WS. #DealBreaker
You don't make me laugh when I want to. And when I do laugh, it's only coz I'm thinking of the ridiculous. #DealBreaker
You're always unavailable; and will stand me up so that you can spend time with some actress whom you WILL tell me all about. #DealBreaker
I wind up not knowing who I should be when I'm with you; and who I AM is never enough. #DealBreaker
Your politics are different from mine. ie you're a right-wing lunatic in my eyes. #DealBreaker
Your attitude to religion is differs from mine, & u apply scripture so literally that all I can think is "Dude, wrong century" #DealBreaker
You have absolutely no sense of time management, cannot show up on time, and expect compassion for your failure to read a clock #DealBreaker
You advertise information which should remain private. #DealBreaker
You have no time for my friends but expect me to have all the time in the world for yours. #DealBreaker
You like Eminem. You think Dan Brown's work is the epitome of literary endeavour. #DealBreaker
You don't like Beatrix Potter, or Asterix, or Winnie the Pooh. Or claim to be too grown up for them. #DealBreaker
You claim to love to cook but plonk yourself on a sofa and NEVER cook a damn thing. And you HATE my food. #DealBreaker
You think I'm being over-demanding when I'm ill and want you around, even if it's only to get to a doctor. #DealBreaker
You complain if I shop. You don't like it when I don't look well done up in the way only a LOT of shopping can achieve. #DealBreaker
You actually think that you are required to solve problems, and have no idea of how to listen to me vent. #DealBreaker
You interpret every single statement of my being unhappy with anything as a personal allegation against you. #DealBreaker
You don't know how to defend yourself unless it involves whitewashing yourself by slinging mud all over me. #DealBreaker
You say I'm a brilliant lawyer, knowing that I don't give a damn. Or you pick on my brains and refuse to acknowledge doing so. #DealBreaker
You have no conception of people not agreeing with you, and don't know how to handle it when they don't. #DealBreaker
You do not know the joy of a good fish curry, or realise that it's the single most important thing in my life. #DealBreaker
You do not get my need to categorise, file and separate. Or that I don't care that it makes me like Monica Gellar. #DealBreaker
You're full of yourself, and don't get why I'm unimpressed by all ur work-related commendations, and care mainly about just u. #DealBreaker
You have no idea of how to laugh at yourself. #DealBreaker
You think that fuschia is a actually a colour a man can easily wear and pull off. #DealBreaker
You can't tell the difference between religion, ritual, spiritualism, and tradition. And assume that I equate them too. #DealBreaker
You keep talking about not being sure about how I'll fit into your life, without realising that you need to fit into mine too. #DealBreaker
You compare me to your mum, and I always come off really badly in that comparison. #DealBreaker
You love seeing me in insanely high heels, then complain when I can't walk as fast as you in them, and slow you down. #DealBreaker
My having a job is more important to you than it is to me. #DealBreaker
You expect me to be two different people: one in front of your friends, another for your family. And don't get that I'm just me #DealBreaker
Final #DealBreaker for now: You don't know the difference between being childlike and childish, or realise that I appreciate only the former.

What I Love About Delhi

2011-12-11T16:26:00.000Z

The Delhi100 hype got me thinking of Delhi.

Thinking of MM Kaye write of seeing ND's foundations being laid as a child, wondering why anyone would want to build in such desolate place.
MM Kaye wrote of her childhood in India (and a world we will not see again) in "The Sun in the Morning". Loved its content, loved its title.

Here’s a compilation of #WhatIloveaboutdilli tweets:

Friends, the kindness of strangers who've often become friends, the anonymity, the recognition, work, insanity.
The loudness, always having almost everyone in your face, knowing exactly where you stand virtually all the time.
The rudeness, the lack of almost all finesse, & the consequent inability of most people to do anything behind your back
Long walks in an old city, bumping into history routinely, taking monuments for granted, knowing that museums exist.
Being able to live well on a shoestring budget if you're smart, having tons of free cultural dos at embassies etc.
Each time I go to the Delhi High Court, that first glance of Humayun's Tomb in the distance always makes me feel lucky to live in this area.
India Gate used to be the roundabout nearest to my place. Always left me feeling lucky to be there esp with the NGMA, Pandara Road at it.
Winter afternoons reading on the lawns of Humayun's Tomb, eating oranges. The dargah next door. Lodhi Gardens nearby.
Old men taking care of monuments who are almost always willing to talk to you about the city that once was.
Street children who make time to spend with you, regale you with tales of their lives, and leave you in awe of them.
Antique dealers who tell you about all of their wares, even when it's abundantly clear you can't afford to buy a thing.

Find the #WhatIloveaboutdilli tweets interesting; different people's experiences of the city even if ½ the guys can't go beyond "hot women".

Sexual Consent: Exploring the Personal

2011-12-01T16:12:00.001Z

Writing about sexual consent is never easy. Enthusiastic and articulated consent, of course, is clear, as is enthusiastic and articulated refusal. Between those two ends of the spectrum though, lie an entire range of possibilities which run through many shades of grey, and which touch the legal, political, religious, social, and personal spheres.

It is precisely because those spheres exist, and because they intersect, that any academic account of sexual consent must necessarily be nuanced, to satisfy the demands of a multitude of disciplines, some of which may be entirely inconsistent with each other. And therein lies one of the greatest challenges which those people required to deal with consent, from a disinterested position, face: to find a way in which to reconcile a number of often divergent theories on consent, ranging from those addressing personal healing (if need be) to the legal attribution of culpability (if so required).

Personal accounts of consent to sexual activity, though, do not suffer from that particular restriction: all they need to do to be accurate is to remain honest to themselves. While this requirement, in itself, sounds like little enough, once unravelled, even at the most superficial level, it emerges that such honesty is anything but simple, even if only to oneself. It relies not only on lived experience, memory and emotion — all tricky in themselves — but also on social conditioning and religious teaching.

Each person's story is a distinctly individual story, with there being no certainty that one person’s perception of the grant of consent under a particular set of circumstances being the same as that of another person. The safest course of action is, obviously, to ensure that one always obtains explicit consent from one's partner. Unfortunately, though, explicit consent may not always be enough. The grant, even of explicit consent, could easily be dependent on underlying conditions which find their foundation in one’s upbringing and religious beliefs.

Consent obtained within the confines of a committed relationship may, for example, be entirely dependent on the relationship in fact being a committed one, and any breakdown of such the underlying condition could easily vitiate the perception of granted consent having any legitimacy at all, in the mind of grantor. And once the non-personal is applied to the personal, depending on the circumstances, (and the century!), such a change in perception would, in all probability, either be seen as morning-after regret, or a culpable breach of promise.

Coming back to the personal though: underlying conditions often dictate whether or not consent is granted at all. And for better or for worse, conditions relating to underlying conditions such as commitment and religious sanction (possibly through marriage) invariably involve a host of factors: among others, duty, the desire to please, submission, fidelity — unsurprisingly, all drawn from religion and upbringing. And it is all too easy for these factors to result in the (possibly unintentional) application of coercion.

A perceived or communicated or even simply possible failure to honour either duty or fidelity may all too easily result in the grant of consent solely on the basis of wanting to avert such failure. And should the relevant underlying condition itself be negated, it necessarily negates the consent granted consequent to it. What is left, then, is nothing but sexual activity without legitimate consent, although possibly with willingness.

Sex without legitimacy, unsanctified by commitment or love or sacrament, is shunned by both religion and polite society. Sex without legitimacy belongs to worlds not spoken of in polite drawing rooms. And consent obtained in relation to it is easily questioned in the mind of the grantor especially in cases where the illegitimacy was unclear at the time of the grant.

Each person’s story is different. Perceptions vary wildly. And there is is no such thing as unquestionable consent in questionable circumstances.

Also see: The Validity of Advance Sexual Consent

Responsibility and Privilege

2011-11-12T06:04:00.000Z

What’s amazing about societal privilege is that it allows a person to bypass many of the restrictions which bind those without it. Whether privilege is good or bad is another debate altogether. The fact is that it exists, in forms and in ways which we may not consciously be aware of.

There’s privilege by way of race, caste, education, languages known, socio-economic background, gender, health, and religious affiliation — and that’s a list that’s just by way of illustration. These different forms of privilege intersect and interact with each other in ways which sometimes make one their beneficiary, and which can seem grossly unfair to everyone who doesn’t benefit from them, especially since many of the existing forms of privilege have very little to do with individual merit.

On the contrary, many forms of privilege often have to do with the circumstances of one’s birth — the family one is born into, the degree of darkness of one's skin, and one’s gender, for example. And within each form of privilege are nuanced strata. The intersectionality which makes a brother more privileged than his sister, even if all other factors are otherwise equal. The intersectionality which ensures that a brother continues to be more privileged than his sister, even if she is more educated than him — all other factors being equal.

Privilege is hard to deal with and difficult to understand. Each form has its own value, and the value of each form can vary dramatically both on a macro scale such as within a culture, and on a comparatively micro-scale: within a family, for example. To know that one is privileged is to recognise that others are not, to recognise one may have been placed in an extraordinary position where many of the societal rules which apply to others simply do not apply to one.

Consider just one of the most “basic” requirements in India — for women anyway: the requirement of marriage. Societal rules may make no room for a woman not in a marriage whether because of not having been married at all, or because of having seen the end of a marriage regardless of its cause — death, divorce, or separation.Nonetheless, the requirement of marriage is considerably diluted by a number of factors including having an education, a source of income, and a high-quality support structure.

Despite this dilution though, it is still extremely unusual for a woman to feel no real pressure to get married from anyone within her own circle; to be able to say without blinking an eyelid that she will not marry unless marriage enhances her life.

To find oneself in a situation of extraordinary privilege can be overwhelming. To know that you may belong to an extremely small minority which enjoy such privilege can be humbling particularly since, with that knowledge, also comes the corresponding knowledge that there are many who don’t enjoy it, who have no notion of such privilege.

The receipt of privilege is rarely attributable to the person who receives it; more often than anything else, the receipt of privilege is a natural consequence of societal structures and mechanisms in operation. To benefit from privilege in itself is rarely the “fault” of the person who receives it, but to abuse privilege and leverage it against people who don’t have it is.With privilege comes responsibility: the responsibility to recognise that one is in fact privileged, and to not use one’s own privilege against others or in competition with others who do not enjoy it.

On Feeling Old and Dated

2011-11-11T07:31:00.001Z

Reading a personal narrative about the Internet being a reflection of cultural irrelevance for someone at the age of 28 made me think of my most recent round of interaction with people who are much younger than me — and who were not law students in a professional environment, although they were studying law.

I felt old, and inadequate, and completely excluded. Not because, I suspect, anyone was actively trying to exclude me, but simply because I couldn’t for the life of me understand what was happening around me. I didn’t relate to things which were obviously normal for them. I certainly didn’t “get” them — and believe me, I did try.

They were fun, and seemed nice, by and large, although I can’t claim to have known them well. Somehow, almost their entire modus operandi seemed alien to me though. They showed up in a hotel room at late at night — I have no idea what the time was, I was already asleep. What I do remember is that Question 1 from one of them was whether she could intern with me, and Question 2 involved a discussion on getting pot, while drunk in the middle of the night.

I went back to sleep — to the best of my knowledge, the pot plan which had left me horrified wasn’t followed up on. I left in the morning, much disgruntled and in much physical pain, needing to deal with medical issues, work, and family.

The following day, the law students were still there, and I didn’t understand why, although truth be told, I suspect that what really put me off the moment I saw the first one was that she was wearing the tiniest shorts possible with a jacket longer than her shorts, making it look as if she was wearing nothing at all below her waist.

And all the time that the students were there, they smoked, endlessly. The place gave me the impression of a shady bar, partly because it stank, and partly because my throat and lungs stung and I couldn’t breathe easily — I am allergic to smoke.

It isn’t so much the details of what happened though — it’s that at every single stage, I was stunned. Right from the first moment I heard the internship idea. It’s possible that I simply belong to another generation (mentally, anyway) or that my own circles do things differently or, simply, that I’m as stuck up as it gets.

I understand leveraging connections, I understand using contacts to get internships and jobs. It’s what all of us do. I don’t understand meeting someone for the first time though — without knowing who they are / what they do — and having your first thought be “And how can I use this person?” To my mind, it represents a manifest lack of interest in the person you’re seeking help from as a human being, and it’s not something I understand. Intellectually, I can see how it could be interpreted as being a go-getter, or some such thing, but once again, emotionally, I don’t understand it.

People are important to me, not for what they are or what they can do for me, but just for themselves, as themselves. In fact, truth be told, I don’t have the faintest idea of what a lot of my friends do professionally — they’re just people, and they’re friends. And yes, when I need help, I will ask around, and reach out for help, but I’ve never once made friends with anyone based on potential use, and I don’t think that it’s something which most people I know do. And there’s a part of me which wonders whether there’s simply a generational gap there in the way in which one approaches others.

Other things are pettier. They don’t have to do with possible generational gaps, although they may be related to cultural differences. The attire, just for example — I will speak out for the right of a woman to dress exactly how she wants to. That doesn’t mean that I believe that a woman should necessarily exercise all that comes with the right. I believe that the right not to be sexually abused is independent of attire. I believe in not choosing attire on the basis of shame. I also believe in modesty, and not walking around (in India, at any rate) looking as though you’re wearing nothing at all waist-down.

I don’t believe that being sexy is about displaying in public all that you’ve got, although if that’s what makes you comfortable, I’m willing to support your right to dress like that... but I don’t believe that supporting your right also requires me to like your exercising it. I’m judgmental like that. And, yes, to an extent, that is probably cultural — I wasn’t brought up in a world where the human body, male or female, was ever up for display.

The world I was brought up in was full of formal clothes, truth be told. Offhand, I can’t remember a single adult I knew as a child wearing a T-shirt, for example. It was all always shirts, saris, salwaar kameezes, blouses, long skirts. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember jeans either. The only time anyone wore anything less was at the swimming pool or some such place. It wasn’t about either shame or modesty, it was just the way things were done. And it’s still what I feel comfortable with.

That being said, to be honest, there is also a strong element of insecurity involved. Young beautiful women make me feel insecure. I’m neither, and the second I see one, I mentally compare myself to her, and I invariably find myself falling short.

And then, finally, there are personal preferences in the equation, which I suppose are entirely independent of both generational gaps and cultural differences. I like my privacy. I have issues with space. I don’t like people getting too close unless I especially want them there. I would not, for example, be able to be intimate with a man on one side of an unlocked door with a number of people only feet away on the other side of the door. That’s just the way I am, even if it’s a reflection of my being disconnected with normality and what’s entirely acceptable.

It may make me old, and dated, and entirely culturally irrelevant. But it’s still me. I’m not sure I want to change it. Unfortunately, there’s a part of me which feels the need to apologise for who I am.

Clothes, Comfort, Confidence

2011-10-27T11:38:00.001Z

It would probably take a psychologist to speak of the relationship between one’s state of mind and one’s clothing style with any degree of authority. So, at the outset, here’s the disclaimer: this text isn’t academic in any sense of the word; it’s a personal narrative about the journey, from the time I was a teenager, to finally being able to choose clothes based on my own preferences.

It’s a sea-change from the time I first became especially conscious of clothes. At 15, I loved dressing up, and wore everything loud and weird you’d expect a teenager to wear, except while playing at being grown-up; I had beautiful silk blouses, pencil skirts and 80s-style high heels (all hand-me-downs from my mum) for those times.

By 17, I was playing at being grown-up all the time — and, no, that wasn’t voluntary, but it’s another story. Unfortunately, or possibly not, my version of living life involved following an array of dubious conclusions drawn from scripture which dealt with everything, including what I wore: the restrictions regarding adorning oneself with jewellery, the prohibition relating to revealing skin, the mandate to practice “modesty” which — being 17, I suppose — I failed to differentiate from “shame”.

Two years later, by 19, I lived life in long sleeves, Chinese collars, turtlenecks, and long flowing skirts, which had earlier caused a cousin to comment that she thought I should have been born in Jane Austen’s time —my favourite author then. The clothes, by then, had little to do with playing at being an adult: I was one, and neither did they have much to do with religion: I stopped believing that God would judge me on the basis of what I wore, or that He’d stipulated what I should wear. The shapeless, flowing garments were, I now suspect, an attempt to shield myself from the world at large.

And over the course of the next ten years, that’s exactly what I did: shield myself using clothes. Make myself invisible. Hide bruises, when required. And be inconspicuous. Or at least that’s what I tried to do. That isn’t the way it always worked out: intertwined with wanting to hide, was an extremely intense lack of interest in what I wore, which made me stand out, in a way. The clothes were clean, always, and they were also the same, always. I spent years in black. Years too, wearing out a minimal number of sets of clothes, which I’d wash and wear, as predictably as clock work.

I wasn’t interested in spending the time to dress up for other people — I believed, and still do believe, come to think of it, that people who judge you by your attire really aren’t be the kind of people you should be around. And I wasn’t interested in spending time dressing up for myself — on my list of priorities, dolling up didn’t rate especially highly, or so I told myself. While that certainly wasn’t untrue, it wasn’t the whole story either, I’m certain. Looking back, there’s very little doubt in my mind that not trying to dress up had to do with a lack of self-esteem, having no sense of self-worth, about finding it difficult to “measure up” , about never really feeling as though I was “good enough”.

It’s only now, when I’m close to entering my 30s, that I feel more confident about myself, that I have only the last vestiges of shame associated with having the body that I have, and that I feel comfortable in my own skin. I still don’t care, most of the time. I still essentially believe that dolling up is a complete waste of time and energy. But I do know that I can, if I want to. And I do, sometimes.

I don’t choose clothes based on religious precepts or shame — or based on “practical” requirements like the desire to cover bruises. I wear exactly what I want to wear — and, no, that doesn’t involve wearing anything that stereotypically sexy, ever. I find that that’s not what I want, which is the crux of the matter for me: clothes are now beginning to become about what I want. They’re not an escape mechanism, neither are they prescribed by external factors. I get to choose, and I’m comfortable enough to say, “Fuck off,” when confronted with what I don’t want.

Of SlutWalks and Stereotypes

2011-07-04T23:50:00.008Z

Delhi is apparently having a SlutWalk. A city which displays a tendency to treat all women as sluts, regardless of age, attire or figure is apparently having a SlutWalk. Unsurprisingly, the Walk has been at the receiving end of a great deal of flak whether it be from persons who can’t conceive of what would possess women to want to organise a SlutWalk to start off with, or from persons who are avowed feminists and think that a SlutWalk is inappropriate for India.

The first question is, of course: Do we really need to reclaim the word ‘slut’ in the manner contemplated by a SlutWalk? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to the question. The attempted reclamation of the word could be deeply problematic, just as the attempted reclamation of the word ‘nigger’, attendant with all its historical and social implications, has been deeply problematic. That being said, the word ‘slut’ is an attention-grabber, particularly in a society which simply does not use the word ‘slut’ in polite conversation. And considering that the whole point of a SlutWalk is to highlight an issue — primarily that women have the right to not to be assaulted regardless of their appearance — perhaps the use of the word is nothing more than good marketing in this context.

After all, more subtle attempts to highlight virtually the same issue, such as the Blank Noise Project have not garnered anywhere near as much publicity. And whether or not one agrees with the use of the word ‘slut’, what is undeniable is that people are talking about SlutWalk — even if only to denigrate it. Considering that it is dialogue which must precede substantive change with regard to any issue, having the event spoken about cannot adversely affect the purpose of the SlutWalk. This is particularly true since the average person, while talking about the problem, would be hard-pressed to assertively opine (in a polite drawing room, at any rate) that women thought of as sluts should be assaulted, regardless of what he or she may think of the SlutWalk event.

And at the end of the day, what matters is not so much debate about the use of the term ‘slut’ in SlutWalk or the propriety of having a SlutWalk in India at all, but raising awareness about the underlying problem. And a problem there certainly is. Clothing is just one aspect of it; possibly the easiest aspect to speak out about. Almost every woman in Delhi will tell you that clothing is not dictated not just by the weather and the occasion, but also by what should ideally be extraneous considerations. The time. The route. The mode of transport. Whether or not one is accompanied by a man. The destination.

Most of it is common sense. If you plan to travel into central Delhi in an auto for dinner, you would be well-advised not to wear a skirt. Trousers would probably work, but that would be as ‘modern’ as you would be able to get. Unless you were willing to brave the looks your attire would likely get you from men, and not just arbitrary men on the street.

But if you were travelling via/into the lonelier parts of Noida, you’d probably be best off in a salwaar kameez complete with a dupatta. It wouldn’t matter if your ultimate destination was a 5 Star hotel. The aim would be to reach in one piece, and get back just as safely. And it is simply common sense to do what you can to realise that aim.

To spend a considerable amount of time every single day wondering about the ‘safety’ of your clothing is not, by any standards, an insignificant problem. It may not be a problem of the same intensity as bride burning and dowry deaths but that does not mean that it is not a problem on the same scale, the same continuum of issues. Bride burning and dowry deaths — possibly the most often quoted examples of ‘serious issues’ — are primarily a manifestation of the lack of value and respect which Indian society accords to women, as well as a manifestation of its willingness to treat women as commodities which are both easily replaceable and easily interchangeable.

It is this same lack of value and respect which is pivotal in enabling men to judge women, whom they may not even know, whether on the basis of clothes or conduct, and in legitimising violence against women based on such judgments. This is particularly true in the case of those women who are deemed to fall short of a golden standard. A standard which few living women can ever hope to attain partly given that notions of what a ‘good woman’ should be are inextricably linked to mythological figures like Sita, whose virtues are extolled and whose faults, if any, are whispered.

Women are rarely treated as beings who are imperfect but who are also more than the sum of their flaws. Instead they are categorised. Good or bad. Not good and bad. In addition to which the average woman is unlikely to be valued for who she is — individuality barely registers. If valued at all, she is likely to be valued for what she is: a mother, a wife or a daughter. And appearance is undeniably one factor involved in determining the category to which a woman belongs.

It is categories and stereotypes which abound when it comes to violence against women. And it is stereotypes which have also framed much of the criticism against the SlutWalk. The organisers are young, they are reportedly rich, they are privileged, and they do not understand the nuances of caste and class in Indian society. SlutWalk is non-inclusive (even though its name has been changed to Besharmi Morcha), and it is inappropriate in light of more serious problems. Never mind that those more serious problems belong to the same continuum of problems. And never mind that not every event and not every movement need include everyone all the time — women are not a homogeneous mass, and different women do have different concerns, even if all of those concerns are manifestations of the same or similar underlying problems.

Women in this country undoubtedly face massive problems. Healthcare is appalling. Domestic violence is normal. Workplace harassment is generally brushed under the carpet. Equal pay is virtually unheard of. But these issues do not, in themselves, decrease the validity of other problems faced by any one section of women. And that isn’t even the case as far as SlutWalk is concerned: it is doubtful whether any woman, regardless of socio-economic status, feels entirely safe particularly on Delhi’s streets. It’s another matter that she may feel even more unsafe at home.

And, without commenting specifically on the organisers of SlutWalk, being young, rich and privileged does not disqualify anyone from either speaking out or from understanding the issues involved in any problem. Age does not guarantee wisdom (or even a modicum of common sense) of itself. Also, public perception aside, money and privilege are no protection against abuse. If not anything else, one only needs to look at sex ratios from the census: GK, one of Delhi’s most monied neighbourhoods, has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the country. Being conceived in rich and usually well-educated families is not even enabling many would-be girls to be born. And while those who are born may be familiar with Gucci and Givenchy, that does not mean that they have the slightest familiarity with either security or stability.

To assume that a woman from a rich and privileged background is unfamiliar with violence is insupportable, and to assume that she is not even capable of understanding the issues involved because of her background is beyond ludicrous.

There is little doubt that violence against women is often legitimised by the use of stereotypes. Wives require ‘correction’. Sluts ask to be raped. Prostitutes cannot be raped. It would appear that it makes little sense to fall back on stereotypes to refuse to validate, or at least constructively acknowledge, an attempt being made to highlight issues of violence against women.

(Of SlutWalks and Stereotypes by Nandita Saikia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 India License. It was first published at ColdSnapdragon.)

Frozen Cheese Cake

2011-05-21T10:25:00.003Z

Ingredients:

1 large packet bland biscuits
50 gm (approx.) butter
20 gm gelatin (Blue Bird) & 1 small cup water
¼ teaspoon vanilla essence
200 gm sugar
4 egg yolks
A little milk
500 gm curd
500 gm fresh cream

Method:

Powder the biscuits and mix the powder into the butter. Spread the mixture on to the bottom of the cake tray. Leave it in the freezer for 1 ½ - 2 hours.
Lightly beat the cream and curd.
Mix the egg yolks, sugar, vanilla essence and milk, and double boil them. Set aside till cool (room temperature).
Dissolve the gelatin in 1 cup warm water. Set aside to cool completely.
Mix the cooled egg-mixture, gelatin, cream and curd, and pour over the biscuit base in the cake tray.
Set in freezer for at least an hour.

Remains fresh for up to 2 days in the fridge.

Types of Gourds

2011-04-21T19:45:00.002Z

English names and their Assamese equivalents, I think.

Ash/Wax/White gourd : Lao bishesh / kumora (winter melon)
Bitter gourd : Tita kerela
Bottle gourd : Jati lao
Ivy gourd : Tendli / Kunduli
Pointed gourd : Potol
Ridge gourd : Jika (ridged luffa)
Sponge gourd : Bhul (luffa)
Sweet gourd : Ronga lao (pumpkin)
Teasle gourd : Bhat kerela

The Art of Possibility

2010-12-15T12:08:00.002Z

I finally read this book by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, and loved it. I loved the humour in it, the empathy, and the message of living in a world of possibility.

My favourite passage in it though was one where Ben Zander said:

"…I once had a distraught young tenor ask to speak to me after class. He told me he’d lost his girlfriend and was in such despair that he was almost unable to function. I consoled him, but the teacher in me was secretly delighted. Now he would be able to fully express the heartrending passion of the song in Schubert’s Dir Winterreise about the loss of the beloved. That song had completely eluded him the previous week because up to then, the only object of affection he had ever lost was a pet goldfish."

It reminded me of a music teacher who once told me that regardless of how much technical ability you have, you are unlikely to be able to play beautifully as a child because you would (hopefully) not have experienced pain.

The Validity of Advance Sexual Consent

2010-11-09T09:12:00.001Z

Cross-posted at at LawMatters.in.

The validity of “advance consent” is an issue which is being determined by the Canadian judiciary. Advance consent has been held to be invalid only in recent times. Throughout history, advance consent was recognised by both law and society, the most visible example of which was the “advance consent” which a wife granted her husband during the wedding ceremony, and which lasted till death (or, in more recent times, divorce) did them apart.

What is interesting though is that, this time around, the issue of advance consent has not arisen in the context of orthodox sexual practices but with reference to practices which many people would find anything but orthodox. The Canadian courts have been called upon to determine whether a woman who allegedly consented in advance to erotic strangulation also consented to being sodomised while unconscious.

There are several pertinent factors. Firstly, the woman’s story was not always entirely consistent. Secondly, there appears to have been a history of domestic violence involving the woman and her partner, and as such, the validity of any consent she gave, assuming that she did in fact give consent, may not be beyond question. Thirdly, even assuming that she did give consent for one act, it is unclear how consent for one specific act could metamorphose into consent for other acts as well. Finally, considering that consent in these circumstances cannot truly be considered to have been granted if it does not also include an opportunity to withdraw consent, it is unclear whether it would be possible to give consent at all for an act such as strangulation – after all when one is being strangled or is unconscious, the withdrawal of consent is not an option.

Clearly, therefore, to voluntarily engage in acts which leave one incapacitated would require the grant of advance consent. However, blanket recognition of advance consent presents problems in itself. There are, of course, the “standard” issues which the recognition of advance consent has presented throughout history such as the non-recognition of acts such as marital rape as crimes. In addition to this, there are also echoes of that historical legacy which are heard today. This could be in the form of “non-consensual consent” where women consent in advance to an activity, and consent to having their partners force them to engage in it later even if they don’t want to do so at that later time. Alternatively, it could be in the form of pseudo-legal documents such as “abuse contracts” where women consent in advance to being abused.

There is little doubt that there are circumstances in which advance consent runs contrary to our current socio-legal ethos. However, if advance consent were to be considered to be entirely void, it would make it impossible to perform certain acts within consensual relationships, and could, in effect, regulate relationships between consenting adults – which, too, in today’s socio-legal and cultural climate would, inter alia, be considered to be an unacceptable violation of the right to privacy. As such, while the issue may seem to be relatively clear-cut at first glance, a closer look reveals that it is anything but clear. The recognition of advance consent could make women vulnerable to abuse. On the other hand, non-recognition of advance consent could make illegal certain acts between consenting adults which are of an essentially private nature, and in which the law would not generally interfere.

One solution would seem to be draw out lists of circumstances in which advance consent could and could not be recognised. However, this too presents its own problems: primarily, how would one determine to which set a particular case would belong. For example, if advance consent was given within a relationship marred by domestic violence, could it be considered to be “real” and, consequently, valid? Or would the possibility that the advance consent was not voluntary make it void? It is unclear whether there is any way in which to differentiate between circumstances in which advance consent should or should not be recognised. Universal recognition could, however, adversely affect the safety of many, and universal non-recognition could adversely affect the freedom of some. Whether safety should supersede freedom, or freedom should supersede safety, is ultimately a value judgment which would manifest itself as a matter of policy.

(This post is by Nandita Saikia and was first published at LawMatters.in.)

Links via Feminist Legal Forum:

The background: http://www.nationalpost.com/todayspaper/Autonomy+Abuse/3756825/story.html
Trial decision: http://www.canlii.org/en/on/oncj/doc/2008/2008oncj195/2008oncj195.html
Court of Appeal decision: http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2010/2010onca226/2010onca226.html
Sentencing decision: http://www.canlii.org/en/on/oncj/doc/2008/2008oncj624/2008oncj624.html

Your Name is Justine

2010-09-30T06:46:00.007Z

A film about the attempts of young woman sold as a prostitute by her boyfriend to hold on to her sanity and her identity as her captors attempt to break her. Her name is Mariola, but the men who buy her inform her that her name is Justine.

The film, shot in Luxembourg, is set in Berlin, and has its dialogues in Polish, English, and German. It begins with Mariola's boyfriend, Artur, suggesting that they travel to Cologne, Germany from Poland to visit his family. Before the trip, he takes pictures of her including one with her grandmother with whom she lives.

Moriola lies to her grandmother saying that there is a group which will be taking the trip. Her grandmother asks if Artur is a part of the group, and when Mariola confirms that he is, her grandmother remarks that Mariola's mother trusted blokes too much. Before she leaves home though, Mariola leaves a letter for her grandmother letting her know that there is no group, and that only she and Artur are going on the trip.

At the border, a guard asks Mariola whether she is Russian, possibly in recognition that many prostituted women are Russian. However, she says that she is from Poland, and after checking her passport, which by then appears to already be in Artur's custody, he lets them through. Artur claims that he wants to spend the night in Berlin at a friend's place because Cologne is 600 miles away, and convinces Mariola to agree. When they reach the "friend's" apartment, a woman with a baby greets them. It's clear that Mariola is uncomfortable but Artur convinces her to stay, and then, when a man portrayed as the woman's husband comes home, Artur sells Mariola to him along with her passport, her address and a picture of her grandmother.

The last scene in the house appears to be one of the woman who let Mariola and Artur in attempting to quieten the baby as three men rape Mariola. Thereafter, her captors begin to condition her to be a prostitute.

What was surprising was that the version of the film I saw had a UA rating. I'm not sure whether that was because the film had nothing explicit in it or because it had been edited so as to make it "suitable for family viewing" as is done so often in India. If it was edited, so as to sanitise it, I can't help but wonder if the edited film could have been considered to remain honest. And if the film had been edited so as to detract from its honesty, and its ability to portray reality, I'm uncertain whether it is ethical to sanitise what is the experience of thousands of women merely for the sake of making the gruesome palatable for public consumption.

Furniture

2010-08-04T09:02:00.007Z

There's a difference, it appears, between buying furniture, and admiring furniture; one that goes beyond the the fact that the former may involve considerable expense and the latter need not. Being one of those people who loves looking at furniture, and who can spend hours drooling over a chair or a table, it came as something of a surprise to me that being crazy about design in no way qualifies one to buy furniture. Thankfully, I am not thinking of buying any – should I ever have to furnish anything, I’m quite sure I would first want to have some form of basic knowledge of carpentry, and of jargon used by shopkeepers (in Delhi).

Going into workshops, it seems clear that it doesn't take much to convert a piece of insect-eaten wood into a piece of furniture which looks like it's made of good wood to an untrained eye. Teak is rarely teak. Assam teak seems to be some form of plywood. Particle board is what furniture in many of the fancier shops is made of. And furniture in my favourite haunts (including flea markets) may cause even the perfectly healthy to develop asthama.

Somehow, that has not even marginally deterred me from spending time around furniture; I tell myself that it doesn’t matter that I know nothing about wood — after all, I’m there to enjoy design, not to check quality.

What somehow bothers me though is that many contemporary-classic pieces — perhaps they’re called “neo-classical” — look supremely icky to me. I can’t, for example, stand brand new knobs on what’s clearly a piece inspired by furniture from the 1930s, and much prefer pieces from tiny shops than large chains which all sell the same genuine-looking piece.

At this point, I’m reminded of an episode from “Friends” where Rachel stocked the home she shared with Phoebe with pseudo-antiques. As long as Pheobe didn’t know, she loved the pieces. When she found out, she hated the idea of mass-manufactured “antiques” – that, though, was before she got addicted to buying pseudo-antiques.

It's possible that I'll ultimately go down the same road. For now though, I refuse to move away from flea markets. After all, I'm perfectly poised to "enjoy design" without having to worry about fleas.

Nine Lives

2010-07-02T16:36:00.001Z

William Dalrymple narrates his search for the Sacred in Modern India in this book. He speaks not so much of the role of religion and the sacred in the lives of the urban middle class, but of the lives of specific persons who represent various ancient traditions in India related to the sacred. And through their stories, he examines how the sacred has adapted itself to survive in modern -- or at any rate, contemporary -- India. The book is structured in a similar manner to the Canterbury Tales, and in it, the author speaks of the lives of:

a Jain nun;
a male theyyam dancer belonging to a lower caste in Kerela;
a devdasi;
a Rajasthani bhopa who sings the sacred Epic of Pabuji;
a lady fakir at the dargah of the Sufi Saint Lal Shahbaz Qulander; and
a Buddhist monk, among others.

While there is little doubt that it has been written primarily for Western audiences, with its comparisons to not just Chaucer but also Homer --- comparisons which would fall deaf on the average Indian ear --- what is interesting about the book is that it isn't centred in either urban India or rural India, but in the in the metaphorical wasteland which lies somewhere between the two. And as such, it is set in an environment which the average Indian person may not easily be able to relate to although the book seems to give the impression that this is what contemporary India is all about. Perhaps this idea of ancient forms of the sacred mutating to survive in a modern world is what the idea of India being the land of elephants, myths and magic has evolved into?

The book also deals with the interaction of modern (rich, urban) India with traditional (poor, rural) India. For example, it narrates the story of a bhopa or folk singer who sang for the so-called elite in their elite settings in urban India but died without access to healthcare in rural India, his brush with the elite notwithstanding.

Although "Nine Lives" does in fact deal with the sacred in "modern" India, it doesn't do so by looking at the usual manifestations of the sacred in modern India --- the daily pujas and other rituals which millions of Indians perform at home, the software engineer who takes days off for a darshan or audience of/with a religious leader, the working woman who fasts endlessly to "obtain" a husband. Instead, the book focuses on the manner in which ancient manifestations of the sacred have survived in contemporary India --- often a manner with which the average contemporary Indian is only minimally aware.

Artemisia Gentileschi and Agostino Tassi

2010-06-06T13:34:00.004Z

Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by Agostino Tassi, 'an artist her father had hired to teach her perspective'.

Technically, she was not on trial. stood accused of raping her. ... Artemisia, however, was the one who was tortured to see if her story would remain consistent. The authorities used thumbscrews, tied cords around her hands and pulled them tight, which would be agonizing for anyone to go through but for a painter held a special horror. Tassi was not tortured, though his testimony was so contradictory that the judge told him repeatedly to stop lying. Artemisia was also subjected to a public examination to determine whether she had in fact been a virgin before the rape.
Source: Artemisia Gentileschi: Artist and Rape Survivor

The story has somehow always haunted me: true, today no authority (one hopes) would torture a woman who made an allegation of rape. There are, however, far too many instances where people whether they be healthcare providers or those involved in law enforcement who do, nonetheless, engage in the contemporary equivalent.

Even in the most uncontroversial cases, cases where they are not even required to take any action because the person victimised chooses not to, there is a class of people who will, regardless, take it upon themselves to confirm the validity of the woman's story. That confirmation could take myriad forms: asking questions repeatedly to confuse the woman, informing her that her lived realities are invalid, discussing in her presence the likelihood of her lying, making it impossible for her to pursue legal remedies by creating impediments.

What's sad is that Artemisia Gentileschi's story doesn't seem alien in today's context. Neither is that of Agostino Tassi, her rapist. "Tassi originally denied the accusation, stating, 'Never have I had carnal relations nor tried to have it with the said Artemisia... I've never been alone in Artemisia's house with her.' He later claimed that he had visited the her house in order to safeguard her honor."

The trial in relation to which he was not tortured ended with his being convicted of rape in 1612. The trial took seven months and, "it was discovered that Tassi had planned to murder his wife, had committed incest with his sister-in-law and planned to steal some of Orazio's paintings. At the end of the trial Tassi was imprisoned for one year."

One year of imprisonment (apparently). Nothing more. He was, however, probably prematurely pardoned, and therefore remained imprisoned for only eight months after the conclusion of the trial.

Privacy: Content Centric to Control Centric

2010-05-16T17:23:00.001Z

"Devastated but Don't Ask Me Why." That's a status message I saw on a social network, and it once again made me think about the nature of privacy.

Despite obviously being willing to share information over the Net which we may not have been willing to share over coffee, we still demand privacy. We exhibit facets of our lives, and then inform people that our privacy should be respected. And while that's entirely understandable: privacy should be respected, what often seems to happen is that people volunteer more information than they ever should if they want to keep something private, and then demand that others delve no further.

Take the case of the status message -- if you choose to inform the world that you're devastated, perhaps you should not also require people not to ask you questions in the same breath. Yes, you do have the right to privacy, and you have the right to refuse to answer questions, but if those two rights are important to you, why on Earth would you leave a message up for all of your "Friends" on a social network to see saying that you're devastated? Unless of course you do want them to ask (? themselves) why you're devastated.

Although that's perhaps got something to do with the changing nature of the way in which we view privacy. There was a time when certain subjects were private. Nowadays, it is not certain subjects which are "private" -- what defines whether or not a matter is private in our eyes is not its content but our willingness to share the infomation, to control whether or not that information is made public. If we choose to make it public, it certainly isn't private even if it involves the most intimate details of our lives, but if we choose not to share it, it is private even if the "it" involves mundane details of what we ate for dinner.

Opportunities for Women in Prison

2010-04-14T13:47:00.006Z

including candle-making...

I came across this post a short while ago which talks about "Opportunities for Women in an Indian Prison" and thought that it was an amazing idea. Then I read the story...

They're talking about women working in fields, and about teaching them such skills as candle-making, and screen printing. I love the idea of an open jail, but somehow, I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it as one might expect to be.

Partly, that's because I know what the climate in Yerawada is like, and unless these women are used to being outdoors, I'd hate the think of what the effect of working on farms would be for their health. At the moment, and for a large part of the year, being outdoors for extended periods of time is simply not wise. (And depending on the time of year, "extended periods of time" could mean 45 minutes.

The article does not speak about what sort of protective gear the women would be provided (if any), and I can somehow picture a situation where women would "choose" to work outdoors just to get their sentences reduced.

And as far as the indoor skills being taught are concerned, the two which have been mentioned in the articles are candle-making, and screen printing. Really? And that is supposed to help women convicts start a "new life" after their release? The last time I checked, neither candle-making nor screen-printing were lucrative career options in India, except, possibly for the super-rich person who could create a brand name for him/herself, and sell products at exorbitant prices.

That, I somehow doubt is something which the average woman who's in jail would be able to do. So by teaching her a skill which may not actually enable her to support herself (much less her child(ren), if she has any who depend on her), the State may well be putting effort into teaching her a skill which would leave her in poverty; effort which could probably be better expended in teaching women in jails skills which they would be able to use to earn reasonable amounts on their release.

Reporting on the Need to Reform Child Abuse Laws

2010-04-13T11:05:00.004Z

The Indian Express has published an article entitled ‘Need Act to bring child abuses under one law'. All said and done, there’s an element of truth in that – laws related to children are contained in so many diverse laws and rules that it is virtually impossible to be constantly aware of all the laws which relate to children. Among the many laws and rules which contain provisions which deal specifically with children are the Indian Penal Code, the Cable Television Network Rules, the various labour laws, and the Contract Act, the Juvenile Justice Act, and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act.
With reference to Child Abuse though, the applicable laws would probably be Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 and the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973. Section 377 of the Penal Code is an antiquated provision which was enacted during the Raj, and which is simply not designed to deal with child abuse. It is, instead, designed to criminalise homosexuality by making so-called “unnatural acts” criminal. This Section has, nonetheless, been used to prosecute offences involving child sexual abuse simply for the lack of a more appropriate provision under existing law under which to do so.
There have been proposals to restructure sexual abuse law to make child sexual abuse a separate offence. However, the proposals in their current form do not appear to be entirely free of loopholes, to put it mildly.
What got to me in the Indian Express article, however, was its introduction. It began by quoting someone who said, “Neglect is of greater concern than abuse,” which left me rather confused because, to my mind, neglect is a form of abuse. The rest of the article seemed to clarify that the “neglect” referred specifically to the neglect of complaints of child sexual abuse, which, in itself, is an entirely valid point.
The reason why this bothered me is that, it seems to me, that if one is advocating change in the law, or writing about it, it is important that all stakeholders / interested parties / the media use precise language all the time – clarity right from the outset about what the law needs to do, and what exactly the law needs to address, would probably help to ensure that the “finished product” i.e. the enacted statute would be as strong as possible.

Witty Women

2010-04-10T00:38:00.002Z

In 1750 Elizabeth Montagu said:

"Wit in women is apt to have bad consequences. Like a sword without a scabbard it wounds the wearer and provokes assailants. I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity."

Source: English Society in the Eighteenth Century by Roy Porter through Woman of Experience

Writing about Africa and India

2010-04-07T13:17:00.000Z

and the invisibility of the middle class...

There are two pieces I read this afternoon about Africa. The first was a piece with instructions on "How to Write About Africa" and the second was a piece which asked whether the anti-poaching activists, Mark and Delia Owens, went too far in their efforts.

Together, the two pieces made an interesting read. The piece on writing about Africa talked about all the stereotypes which must be spoken of when one writes about Africa. It spoke of the "need" to write about Africa's starving millions, about the corruption of government officials, about the great wilderness, about the amazing wildlife, but never about the individual African who may lead a life of absolutely "ordinariness", who may be a middle class person whose life is not full of unspeakable suffering, torn apart by strife and civil war.

The Indian version of such a piece would probably talk about writing the importance of writing about India as a land of mystery and magic, a land of extremes with its maharajas and their fabled jewels on one hand and its teeming millions which starve on the other. It would speak of the pantheon of Goddesses and the deplorable condition of Indian women – I remember once reading a French text book which described Indian women as “battered, submissive and illiterate.” It would probably mention the lack of the comforts of “Western living” and the wonders which Western influences have had on the country. It would almost certainly talk about seeing elephants on highways, and would probably say something about Indian wildlife. While talking about wildlife, and possibly forests, it would state that it is de rigeur to talk about poaching and the ignorance of the Indians which has lead to environmental damage.

What would often be missing from the narrative would be the Indian middle class. A class that is not starving, whose lives do not involve such things as suicide due to crop-failure, who live perfectly ordinary lives, and who are far removed from the splendours traditionally associated with India’s rich and its riches. This is a class whose lives are possibly comparable to the lives of corresponding classes in the West with their concerns ranging from healthcare to house loans.

The life of this middle class probably isn’t especially interesting from the point of the view of the Western consumer: there is nothing in the life of this middle class which is vastly different from what life in the West would. The result being that the West would neither be able to pity or to envy a person from such an alien middle class, which, as it turned out, wasn’t too different from its own. There would be no tales of diamonds or polo matches or palaces; neither would there be any tales of poverty or starvation or illiteracy.

Perhaps it is because the life of the middle class is so ordinary, it is often ignored in pieces about India. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that it is the middle class which forms the a large section of Indian society.

Pioneer Settlers in Nebraska

2010-04-01T06:24:00.001Z

"A Lantern in Her Hand by Beth Streeter Aldrich" is the story of Abbie and Will Deal, fictious pioneer settlers in Nebraska. Written in much the same style and tone as books like the "What Katy Did" series, the book, now a classic, despite being rather old-fashioned, is incredibly touching, and manages to protray emotions, describe characters and narrate events far more clearly than many contemporary novels manage to do despite being explicit. Perhaps it is the restraint in "A Lantern in Her Hand" which makes a difference coupled, of course, with the talent of its author.

The book focusses on the life of Abbie Deal from the time that she was a child till the time that she died. It isn't a happy-go-lucky book with a feel-good ending but a chronicle of a woman's life in that era. It tells of her falling in love with and eventual marriage to Will Deal, a man who chose to move to Nebraska because land was inexpensive there although he believed that the land was good. It tells of how she herself was less than enthusiastic to shift but that she lived in an era where if her man shifted, she would, of course, do the same. Although it also mentions that as much as she loved her mother, and siblings, and home, her love for them was less than her love for Will.

Life in Nebraska was anything but easy for many years. Crops failed year after year. The rains didn't come. Grasshoppers became abominable pests. Money was short. And it sometimes took great strength of character to keep her love for her husband intact and distinct from the lack of material comfort. Will Deal is described as a man who says little but feels deeply. And Abbie is described as a woman duty-bound, but one who did not truly seem to feel bound by duty.

"A Lantern in Her Hand" speaks of Abbie as a mother, as a daughter, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother-in-law, as a grandmother, as a friend, as a wife, and, finally, as an individual, although all her wants and needs and desires as an individual were invariably subsumed by the deamnds of one or other of the roles which she played. She gave up music and art as a young woman for her husband, and as an older woman, she made way for her daughters. To her, motherhood was about love first and duty second although she never seemed to preach about it.

By the end of the book, it is difficult to feel anything but much respect for the woman who, fictitious thoguh she is, seems just as real as those women who have lived not merely in the pages of a book.

Note: The entire text of "A Lantern in Her Hand" is available online.

A Good Read

2010-03-16T07:56:00.003Z

I just read a post on Puss Reboots about the kind of books the author likes and it made me think of what kind of books I myself enjoy. The first thing I realised, much to my embarrassment, is that I haven’t been reading very many non-legal books recently. When I do read though, these are the factors which influence what I pick up (in brief):

I like books which are easy to read like ‘The MouseDriver Chronicles’ by John Lusk and Kyle Harrison. I don’t like ‘high brow’ books which take me ages to understand; if I wanted to read books which were virtually incomprehensible, I’d stick to reading standard legal texts.
Human rights interest me and I read a large number of books related to them but, even here, I’d much rather read books like ‘The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade’ by Victor Malarek which are well-written and accessible rather than academic papers. In addition to this, I read books which tell personal stories such as ‘The Stoning of Soraya M.’ by Freidoune Sahebjam and ‘Prisoner of Tehran’ by Marina Nemat.
I usually enjoy books which are classified as literary fiction such as ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro which I fell in love with.
Large doses of slang usually turn me off and I don’t enjoy having to read about someone who swears all the time unless the author has something interesting to say or needs to use such language because of the plot as Martina Cole does in her books.
Soppy, sentimental books are sometimes just what I need after a long day. I love simply being able to stop thinking. I don’t particularly enjoy entirely predictable romantic books. I enjoy books like ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ by Philippa Gregory.
If it’s pulp fiction, I’d rather stay away from books in which the nicest characters die (as they often seem to do in Arthur Hailey’s books): if that’s what I wanted to read about, I’d pick up a newspaper.
Anything that makes me laugh is a good read as far as I’m concerned.
I find it difficult to relate to science fiction and rarely read it.
Long descriptions bore me. No matter how good an author is, I don’t want to have to read through a three-page description of how furniture is arranged in a room.
I require books to make me feel something, anything.

“If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
--- Sloane Crosley

I've always believed that you can learn everything you need to know about a person by looking at their bookshelf. The problem with that though is that (a) they may not read at all and (b) even if they do read, they may not buy books because they're on a pro-environment paper-saving binge, because they can't afford them or because they're miserly.

I read about people deciding whether to spend time on a relationship because of the other person's taste in books the other day. As I read the write-up, it seemed a little far-fetched to me but a few minutes ago, I began to think of it after I almost unsubscribed from a blog which reviewed a novel which I'd like to read called 'The Palace of Illusions' by Chitra Divakaruni by saying that although it's 'not as good or as strong as Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’, it’s still very much worth reading'.

Judging people by their taste in books isn't something I thought I did, but when I read that sentence, I almost unsubscribed from the blog. Dan Brown. Strong?

I've enjoyed reading Dan Brown's books but his writing is hardly great literature. If it weren't for the subjects he's chosen, I'm sure he'd be just another novelist in the list: John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, Arthur Hailey, Stephen King.

Thinking about it, I realise that if someone told me that their favourite author was someone I didn't think too highly of, I'd write the person off. Never mind that my own favourite authors are Beatrix Potter and A A Milne.

I somehow believe that a person's tastes and choices reveal who they are with far more clarity than any of their assertions ever do. And those choices are not restricted to what they choose to read.

About 'The Palace of Illusions' from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's site:

"Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to the time of the Indian epic The Mahabharat—a time that is half-history, half-myth, and wholly magical. Through her narrator Panchaali, the wife of the legendary five Pandavas brothers, Divakaruni gives us a rare feminist interpretation of an epic story."

Read the first chapter at randomhouse.com/doubleday/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385515993&view=excerpt

Experiences in Delhi's Buses

2010-03-10T10:54:00.005Z

Somehow, travelling in buses seems to offer one, possibly not a greater insight into the lives of people, but at least a much wider view of the lives of people than travelling by any other means of transport does in Delhi: the metro is too crowded to do anything other than try to stay alive by ensuring that one has enough space to breathe in it, and cars, along with other forms of private transport, for obvious reasons, make it next to impossible for one to see beyond the end of one’s nose (while travelling, anyway).

That being said, it isn’t always clear that the sights which travelling in a bus are sights which one would actually want to see, nor are the experiences which one has necessarily those which one would want to have.

In the last twelve hours, I’ve seen in buses, a man with an awful wound on his leg – his skin had peeled off and the wound was white in places. It seemed pretty clear that he hadn’t had access to good medical care, if at all any medical care; God knows, I’ve never seen a wound like that on a middle class person or anyone higher up on the socio-economic scale.

After that, I found that there was no place to sit down on the bus. There were some seats reserved for women, and I asked a man sitting in one of them to get up, and give me the seat. He wasn’t pleased and said so in no uncertain terms, on the top of his voice, to everyone within earshot. And there’s a part of me which sympathises with what his sentiments: he said that he had paid for a ticket too and that he shouldn’t have to get up just because the seat was reserved for women.

Ordinarily, I don’t think that I would have asked him to get up but I was feeling ill and tired, and I wanted to sit down. It seemed so much easier to tell the chap that he was sitting in a seat reserved for women, than to try explaining that I didn’t feel well especially considering that I didn’t look unwell at all. I wouldn’t want to try telling anyone that I wasn’t feeling unwell unless my being unwell was clearly visible for fear of encountering disbelieving looks and protestations pointing out that I didn’t in fact look unwell. If there was one stereotype that I would love to see changed, it is the stereotype that people who are not well or who are not abled-bodied for whatever reason must also look unwell or disabled at first glance.

Of course, it didn’t really help that the Women’s Reservation Bill has been in the news, and the very idea of reservations for women in any arena whether it be in law-making bodies or in buses is not something which many men (at least among those I know) are especially enthusiastic about.

Finally, I spent what felt like hours sitting next to a woman sobbing her heart out. She was holding a baby and I have no idea of what she was upset about – she didn’t respond when I asked her and I ultimately figured that it’d be kinder to give her what space she seemed to want. She seemed to be alone while she was sitting next to me, but when she got off the bus, it wasn’t alone. Some man, who I assumed was her husband, tapped her on the shoulder and the three of them – man, woman, and baby – got off the bus. I was left wondering why on earth he had left her entirely to her own devices all the time that she was crying.

I’m not entirely certain what to make of travelling in Delhi’s buses.

Medea and Criminal Liability

2010-03-01T06:45:00.010Z

Euripides' Medea has defined the modern perception of her. Some time ago, the Teatro Instabile Di Aosta presented, in Delhi, a contemporary revisiting of Euripides' Medea in a play based on the texts of Euripides and Pasolini revolving around “discriminations and forbearance, power and revenge, and the meeting of two extremely different worlds; the one that is logical and rational, and the other one that grapples with the possible reality of mythology and ritual,” as the brochure said. The performance was meant to portray the universality and power floating in the story culminating in the “terrible decision that Medea comes to as a result of her painful suffering.”

Her “painful suffering” was the suffering which her husband Jason inflicted on her by being unfaithful to her and marrying Glauce, a princess to further his political ambitions. He justified himself by saying that he could not pass up the opportunity to wed a princess, and Medea was, after all, a barbarian woman, never mind that she was a barbarian woman who'd given up family, home, and homeland for him. He ultimately, apparently, planned to "unite" the two families -- his family with Medea, and with Glauce -- and turn Medea into his mistress.

Medea's "terrible decision" was the plan she decided to execute to revenge herself on Jason -- she killed Glauce (and, Glauce's father, Creon) using a poisoned dress, and killed the two children she had had with Jason in order to spite Jason and cause him as much pain as possible, or so one interpretation runs. Whether or not she should have been held accountable is debatable though.

Jason had supposedly remarried so that he could have children with Glauce. And when Glauce and his father-in-law were murdered by Medea, he apparently rushed to find the children he had had with Medea so that they would not be subjected to revenge because of their mother's act. It could well be argued that one of Medea's aims in killing her children was to spare them death at the hands of her enemies.

Then again, by killing the children, she effectively killed a part of Jason. And perhaps that was the ultimate revenge: Jason wanted children, and she not only deprived him of the possibility of having children with Glauce but also killed the children he had already had with her. To kill the children for a reason that was anything but altruistic would involve viewing the children not so much as individuals in themselves but as extensions of their father, which perhaps could be understood given that contemporary Greek society was intensely patriarchal, and viewed women mainly as breeders and chattel.

Contemporary Athenian law also allowed a man to marry and have children by a citizen woman while keeping a foreign woman who was not a citizen, in this case, Medea, as a concubine. And as far as divorce was concerned, all a man had to do was formally repudiate his wife, and send her back to her father or other male guardian with her dowry. There were two reasons who this did not apply to Jason and Medea though: firstly, Medea had contracted her own marriage, and as such, she had no one she could be "returned to". Secondly, Jason had sworn to be wed to Medea before Zeus and Hera, and as such, by divorcing her, he had in fact, broken an oath to the Gods.

Whether on not Medea is, or should be, criminally culpable is an open question though lying on thoroughly ambiguous moral ground. Medea was obviously distraught at the time she developed her plan for revenge. The murders were premeditated to the extent that she did not commit them on the spur of the moment. However, she developed the plan at a time when she was quite obviously not emotionally stable. And the duration of the time from when she first conceived of the plan to the time when she executed it was short.

In addition to this, there is the question of provocation. In law, if a person commits a crime in consequence of being provoked, their criminal liability could be diminished to the point of being non-existent. It isn't clear whether Jason's conduct would be viewed as "adequate provocation" to cause Medea to commit multiple murders -- presumably, it was not unheard of conduct at the time the play was written -- although it would be difficult to argue that Medea's committing the murders had nothing to do with her being cast off, and banished. She lived in a society in which she seems to have had no recourse to any form of justice, as a "barbarian" woman she was especially disadvantaged, and being exiled would have left her in an entirely hopeless position.

Medea states in the play that she knows her own mind, and that she knows that what she is doing is wrong. However, given that the act which seems to have spurred her to commit the murders is her banishment with immediate effect by Creon, Glauce's father, it is unlikely that she did actually know her own mind.

She managed (by being manipulative) to get a twenty-four hour grace period from Creon, during which time she both planned and executed the murders. Jason arrived to meet her after Creon left her, and insulted her. It was in these twenty-four hours that she planned and committed the murders. In the play, she is simply not decisive with regard to murdering her children until the last possible moment.

Medea unequivocally states in the play that she is an autonomous individual -- an assertion which in itself would have been questionable especially given that women were subject to the rule of men in a very literal sense with little autonomy of their own. Perhaps in the way that Glauce seems to have been little beyond a pawn in the schemes of her father and Jason, and who died because of those schemes.

Medea, however, managed to thoroughly subvert Jason's schemes, and escape the consequences of her actions. At the end of the play, she is shown escaping in a chariot provided by the Gods -- leaving no doubt of whom they supported. She speaks in a voice which is reminiscent of that used by the Gods, cold and distant. Driven to murder by Jason, she is ultimately far removed from emotion itself, it would seem.

Image: Medea by Sandys from WikiCommons

Lajpat Nagar Market

2010-02-27T12:37:00.004Z

I finally spent time in Lajpat Nagar today. Strangely enough, despite having been in Delhi for years now, it's one market I'd never been to, and now, having gone there, I'm not regretting not having been to it before.

It's one of those strange, very Delhi-ish markets markets where you not only need a lot of time, but where you also need an insane amount of patience: there are some interesting things in the market but for every one interesting thing, there are a hundred pieces of unqualified rubbish.

At the moment, it looks like leggings appear to be in fashion, and I lost count of the number of roadside shops which sell them for a hundred rupees each. There are also a lot of places where one can buy kurtas for a hundred rupees each too. I think the possibility of buying things without spending too much money is standard in Delhi, but after one spends a while in the city, and the thrill of being able to buy something for "just Rs. 100" wears off, one starts to look a little more closely at the quality of the wares available for a hundred rupees, and question whether they are actually good buys.

That's the stage I'm now at, so I didn't wind up buying any hundred-rupee clothes, and though the market has "showrooms" of various brands too, there isn't very much in many of the showrooms -- perhaps because most people are out buying cheaper things. Also, almost everything in Lajpat Nagar is very loud and garish.

I went into a watch shop just to have a look around and there was not one piece in the shop which I would even have considered wearing. Holding up a watch -- the least loud one in the shop -- with a red and silver streaked strap, the salesperson informed me that it was "simple and sober". He only smiled when I told him that it didn't look either simple or sober to me.

There are people I know who rave about the market, it's possible that they know of shops in the market which I completely missed. Or that they're actually looking for very cheap clothes which they can wear a few times and then junk. That wasn't quite what I had in mind though so I wound up sticking to convenience and grocery stores.

I left with clothes pins which I'd been planning to buy for months but had never got around to picking up.

Acid Attacks and Real Nightmares

2010-02-20T06:55:00.002Z

How can one deal with experiences that cross the borders of language?

Yesterday my friend Vijaya, an experienced medical social worker at the J---- Hospital, baldly described the trauma of a patient. The 'sweet-looking young girl' was brought from Pune to the J---- Hospital in Mumbai in a Sumo, crouched on her hands and knees on the floor of the vehicle for four hours. "She couldn't sit," said Vijaya, matter of factly, "because her buttocks were on fire." I felt a band of steel grip my forehead, even before Vijaya started narrating the sequence of events, which brought this girl-wife across the threshold of the hospital. "A few weeks ago, her husband, who periodically tortured her, threw acid on her private parts, then inserted a bottle of Vicks VapoRub into her vagina before having sex with her. You should have seen her condition two weeks ago. It was horrible!" and Vijaya's face puckered in a ghastly grimace. "Her pelvic region and buttocks are covered with huge sores and boils. But today she seems a little better. She will pull through".

"Her pain was so great that she barely remembered crawling out of the house on her hands and knees. Her neighbours refused to come to her aid. How she reached her sister's home is anybody's guess. The police refused to register an FIR and S---- Hospital closed their doors on her.

In desperation she was brought all the way from Pune to J---- Hospital – her private parts, a mass of burnt flesh." "But her face is so pretty and untouched," she concluded. "And nothing has been done to arrest the husband. That psychopath is still at large! Dr. D----, the head of the Gynaecological Dept is reluctant to allow reporters to interview the girl though the ---- correspondent has managed to see her in Ward 32 of the hospital!"

After Vijaya left, my mother and I watched part of Schindler's List. How could one put into words what the victims of brutality on such a vast scale had suffered? Even personal suffering, on a very modest scale, seems to freeze one into silence. Perhaps Vijaya's tale, and Schindler's List together proved too strong a dose for me and the horror brought on the old, familiar, nightmare which used to haunt me a few years ago, when I had come face to face with a woman whose face was a ghastly mesh of scars, eyeballs bulging out of their sockets, a mouth without lips with protruding teeth, cheeks, neck and shoulders a mass of raw, burnt flesh—the victim of an acid attack. She was standing on the overbridge spanning Queen's Road. As I hurried past her, our eyes interlocked. I could not fathom their expression as they bored into mine. Was it pain, despair, detachment or utter numbness? I stumbled down the steps, feeling giddy and nauseous.

That night I dreamt that acid had been thrown on my face. I could not recognize myself. I knew I was me, but who was I? " I know who I am." I went on proclaiming to myself, hysterically. But I could not identify myself with that ghastly image and if I could not accept that image as myself, then, I was not 'I'. In my dream, I distinctly remember covering myself with a sheet from head to foot. If I could not see myself and no one could see me, then, perhaps, I could be me. I awoke feeling hot and feverish, grateful to see my face unscarred.

Last night, I again dreamt of an acid attack. This time I was given a choice—your face or your vagina. I shielded my face with both arms, screaming, begging, pleading to spare my face. If my face went "I" would be snuffed out. I woke up with the shrill ring of the alarm before I could clearly articulate my choice. I lay quietly in the dark, knowing I would protect my face at all cost because I would not be able to bear the rejection reflected in the eyes of others. What could be covered and hidden could be denied but the denial of oneself by others would be unbearable.

This post was written by Aban Mukherji in 2006. It speaks of a domestic violence incident which involved an acid attack and describes the author's reaction to it.

Published with the author's permission.

Black and Blue

2010-02-19T17:11:00.005Z

In every book you read, there's almost always that one line buried somewhere deep in the text of the book which will strike you.

Reading Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, for me, that line was: "Nobody can tell me different," in a conversation between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law who had been subjected to domestic violence by her son:

"I want to ask you something," I had said that day to Ann Benedetto. "What was your husband like?"
"What kind of question is that?"
I didn't know what kind of question it was. It was maybe the first direct one I'd asked Bobby's mother, but I was emboldened by the tenderness in my elbow where I'd hit one of the dining room chairs after he shoved me, after I said I wanted to stay home Sundays, not go to Ocean Avenue.
"Was he good to you?"
"He was my husband."
"Did he ever hit you?"
She narrowed her eyes to look at me, and her dislike was an atmosphere, too, as thick as the isolation the two of in that clean, clean room, our distance from each other and from the man outside, calling to his son.
"My son is a good man," she said. "Nobody can tell me different."
Her face was hard then, and it was hard when opened the door to find me standing on her concrete steps, clean the way steps are when someone sweeps them everyday.

The book not only describes the violence in detail but also the woman's falling in love at the age of 19, the way her husband acclimatised her to his violence and tested how far her could go, the emotional upheaval, the effect of the violence at home on their son, her fleeing from her husband with their son, her new life without her husband in which she always had to keep looking over her shoulder, her falling in love again with a non-abusive man, her husband's eventually finding her and their son, his leaving her for dead (after assaulting her) and taking the child away, her inability to use the law to claim custody of her child, her husband's cutting her off from their son by remaining constantly on the move and not staying near anyone including his own mother, her son's trying to get back in touch with her without any success.

All of that, and the one line which I distinctly remember is: "Nobody can tell me different." A mother refusing to acknowledge that her son could be abusive. A mother-in-law effectively blaming her daughter-in-law for what had happened. A woman refusing to support another woman in crisis. Two mothers both cut off from their their sons because one of them was abusive.

The Tomb at Tughlaqabad

2010-02-16T07:48:00.004Z

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
— James Shirley

I had visited Tughlaqabad fort which was built by Ghiyas-ud-din Tuglaq in the 14th century. An elevated causeway on the southern side of the fort connects the fort to the mausoleum of Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq which was built by the ruler himself.

The fort itself comprises what were undoubtedly once imposing stone fortifications, now in ruins. The causeway has been cut across to make space for a highway. And the lake over which it apparently once ran has long since dried out, giving way to a rather dusty ground which children play on.The mausoleum is relatively simple; it’s architecture Indo-Islamic. Inside, there are two graves which unnerved me a little bit: one is in the centre and the other to its side. While I know little about mausoleums, stepping in, considering the symmetry which Islamic art and architecture are virtually defined by, it somehow seemed to me that another grave had been planned to have been place in it. Whose, I don’t know.

A private courtyard with fortified walls encloses the mausoleum. Some of its corridors are filled with rubbish.Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq was one of the most powerful men of his time. His son and successor, Muhammad bin Tughlaq is also believed to have been laid to rest in the mausoleum. They were in all probability virtually unapproachable in life. In death, it costs five rupees to do so.

Love, Withered Love

2010-02-14T13:45:00.001Z

Love

Withered Love

Photos: fromoldbooks.org by Liam Quin

Copyright Notices on Blogs

2010-02-13T18:45:00.010Z

CC Licence but Do Not Copy

Licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I just saw a blog called Balancing Life which has this rather curious copyright notice. It isn't the first time I've seen such a notice, and it's baffling to me: it seems to be saying, "Don't copy content which the author's allowed you to copy under a CC licence."

I'm not sure how the two notices of CC and Copyscape are consistent. This one on Blogpourri, however, struck me as being even odder.

The text, photographs, audio and video on Blogpourri are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you intend to use any of the content, please ask first.

I realise that it would be polite to intimate the author, but I don't really believe that an author can simultaneously licence work under a CC licence and require others to take permission to use the licenced work provided the use is in the manner specified in the licence.

I enjoy the blogs on which I saw these notices but I don't know what the bloggers intend their copyright policies to be.

Placebo Buttons

2010-02-13T13:34:00.004Z

So that's what they're called. Giving the example of a thermostat which is connected to nothing, Wikipedia has this to say about them:

A placebo button is a push-button that appears to do something, but actually has no effect, like a placebo. Although non functional they can give the user an illusion of control. In some cases the button may have been functional, but may have failed or been disabled during installation or maintenance. Only in relatively rare cases will the button have been deliberately designed to do nothing. In many cases, a button may not appear to do something, but in fact cause behavior that is not immediately apparent; this can give the appearance of it being a placebo button.

Although I didn't realise that it had a name at the time, several months ago, I saw one such button in Delhi which left me mystified -- it was a button to stop traffic at India Gate so that pedestrians could cross the road. It had elaborate instructions in Hindi on a piece of cardboard about how it should be used. (Basically, "Press the button to stop traffic. Once you've pressed the button, wait for traffic to stop, and then, cross the road.)

As far as I could make out, the button wasn't connected to the traffic light. There was, however, someone directing traffic, and once a crowd (whether or not its members had pressed the button or not) had built up, the person directing traffic would walk into the middle of the road, hold his arm out, and direct traffic to stop.

I wonder whether it wasn't actually a placebo button because although it did not appear to do anything, it in fact caused behavior that was not immediately apparent ...

Americans and Servants in India

2010-02-12T15:25:00.007Z

I'm reading a book called "Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity" by an English journalist, Sam Miller who's written about walking in Delhi. I love the book for several reasons the primary of which is that he walked and didn't go from one touristy place to the other. The downside, if it is that, is that he's seen (and described) Delhi, warts included.

At one point in the book, he's described the American embassy. He starts off by talking about the American School which does not explicitly exclude Indian students but which, according to its website, "is neither designed nor empowered to serve the needs of Indian students." After stating the eligibility criteria for Americans, the website says: " Eligibility for all other nationalities (not Indian passport holders) is limited to children whose parents or legal guardians are temporarily relocated to India for employment purposes and are resident in Delhi." Can't imagine why it makes me think of all the "English-only" places during the Raj.

The author goes on to describe an encounter at the Domestic Staff Registry in a small enclave within the US Registry. Once in the registry where he had to show his passport before entering -- Indians are apparently excluded -- he was given the CVs of prospective domestic helpers, letters of recommendation, medical test results, and comments from members of the American Women's Association who had checked up with previous employers. He says, "There were many sorry stories, full of gossip and sadness, and I read and read, entering a world of pain and pathos," wherein "many job-seekers were described in terms more appropriate to a household pet."

He read of a woman who was described as a good worker who was clean, trustworthy and who bathed regularly but whose husband was a violent alcoholic, and who had caused her to miss work because he beat her. And the husband asked the employer for money.

He read of a woman who was described as not being literate, and whose 'memory it was best not to crowd with complex instructions'.

He read of a woman who 'came with good references' but whose employer found her to be difficult and argumentative, and who thought she had a 'massive chip on her shoulder'.

He read of a woman named Sonu who was exposed as a liar and a thief. She had apparently used an imported nappy as a sanitary napkin. The employer had underlined the word imported twice. As the author points out, "this was clearly an incomplete story. We do not learn how exactly this Sherlock Holmes of an employer found poor Sonu out, or what was her version of these events. And yet just outside, sitting on her haunches like the other women, was Sonu, hoping that I or some other foreigner might give her work, presumably unaware of what her previous employer had written about her."

I can't describe the revulsion I felt for the employers when I read about the "Domestic Workers Registry", and a part of me was glad that a white person, specifically, the universally accepted standard of rationalism and reasonableness, a white man, should have written that he learnt more about the former employers through what he described as "their often deeply prejudiced accounts". And I thought of Harlan Lane who wrote of deafness from the point of view of deaf people and whose "position, as Anna of FWD/Forward pointed out, as a hearing psychologist and linguist allow[ed] him to look “unbiased”, the way men are seen as unbiased about women’s rights, and white folks are supposedly dispassionate arbitrators of what is “really” racist."

I am, nonetheless, amazed that persons would be chosen for jobs on the basis of one-sided gossip from persons whose only qualification for the purpose of providing such gossip appears to be being white. I realise that letting a rank stranger into one's home isn't a bright idea. But Indian registries that I'm aware of collect police reports, and get police verifications. Gossip is not one of the main criteria used to judge a person's employability.

And just as an extra rant:

As for the employer who was so attached to imported nappies, I don't want to know how he/she found out that Sonu had used one but I am wondering (a) how he/she managed to miss one nappy unless he/she was obsessively counting -- babies require a lot, after all, and I'm assuming that the employer had one or more babies and (b) why he/she was living with a baby in India at all, and why he/she was in India if he/she thought that India doesn't even have usable nappies. Yes, I know that jobs can demand relocation, but I also know that I would rather give up a job than take a baby to a place which I think isn't capable of manufacturing usable nappies.

Also, I'm wondering just how many of the Americans and other foreigners who use this Registry would have been able to afford the kind of domestic help they get in India if they were living at home. And whether they would have considered behaving like this if they were living at home and employing persons who were not subjected to domestic abuse, who were not illiterate and who would have been in a far better position to tell them to take a hike.

Foetus at par with a Minor Child

2010-02-07T07:09:00.005Z

In an insurance case which involved the death of a seven-month-old foetus, Justice Midha of the High Court of Delhi has held:

"This court holds that an unborn child — aged five months onwards in mother’s womb till its birth — is treated as equal to a child... the foetus is another life in a woman and loss of foetus is actually loss of child in the offing."

The Kerala High Court had also awarded compensation for the death of a foetus in 2009 in AIR2009Ker36. The difference in the latter case was that the woman was four months pregnant. The rationale of the Kerala High Court was:

"In the first place, foetus is another life in the woman and it comes as a baby in the course of time. Though foetus grows in the body of the woman, it cannot be equated to or considered to be a part of the body of the woman. In effect, loss of the foetus consequent upon the death of the pregnant woman is actually loss of a child in the offing for the husband of the woman. Secondly, there is no scope for considering compensation for the bodily injury of the victim who died in the road accident. Therefore, it would be illogical to grant compensation treating death of the foetus along with the woman dying in the accident treating death of the foetus along with the Woman dying in the accident treating it as another bodily injury. In our view, compensation to be granted for the death of a pregnant woman in motor accident is for loss of two lives. Therefore, appellant in this case is certainly entitled to claim compensation separately for the loss of his child in the womb of his wife who perished in the accident."

The Court, however, recognised that the law on the subject lay in a grey area, stating:

"Decisions of this Court on entitlement of compensation for the death of the foetus are not consistent. Even though the matter is not discussed in detail, this Court in the decision in Oriental Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Rasheed reported in 2004(3) I.L.R. 145 referred to a decision of the High Court of Himachal Pradesh in Rakesh Kumar and Anr. v. Prem Lal and Ors. reported in MANU/HP/0043/1995 wherein that Court held that no separate compensation is payable for loss of foetus.

However, we notice that a Division Bench of this Court in the judgment dated 3.10.1994 in M.F.A. Mp/326 of 1993 granted specific compensation of Rs. 30,000/- on account of medical termination of pregnancy of a woman consequent upon a moor accident. In Minati Das v. Laxmidhar Mohanty reported in 1976 A.C.J. 512, the High Court of Orissa held that loss of foetus in a road accident entitled the claimant for compensation.

We are unable to uphold the view taken by the High Court of Himachal Pradesh and this Court in the decisions above referred that loss of foetus should be taken as an injury sustained by the pregnant woman in the accident."

Finding that the appellant was guilty of contributory negligence "for having taken his pregnant wife as a pillion rider on a motorbike has intrinsic risk in itself" (particularly on Kerala roads the condition of most of which are deplorable), and in view of the compensation awarded for the death of his wife, the Kerala High Court awarded the appellant nominal compensation of Rs. 10,000/- for loss of the foetus. The Court also awarded Rs. 5,000/- to the mother of the deceased since, but for the death of her pregnant daughter, she would have had a grand child.

While I'm all in favour of anything which gets insurance companies to adequately compensate persons in need of such compensation following accidents, I can't help but wonder whether treating a foetus as a minor child is something which will eventually spill into other areas of the law and which will, in the long run, interfere with the rights of persons who have been born, and in particular, with the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion.

Mansplaining

2010-02-04T11:20:00.004Z

Mansplaining is usually annoying while it's taking place and often funny in retrospect. How could it not be funny 'to be told what to do next by a man while playing a game with a man, and being well-ahead of him'? Or to be given a 101 lecture in a subject which is the subject of your professional expertise by a man who knows next to nothing about the subject at hand?

"Every woman knows what it's like to be patronized by a guy who won't let facts get in the way," as Rebecca Solnit pointed out in her essay, while explicitly clarifying that not all men mansplain. And indeed, they don't. And there are women who can be extremely annoying know-it-alls. The difference between men and women who are know-it-alls though is that it's only men who have societal backing when they decide to mansplain, or, as they would probably put it, explain, things to women.

If you don't think that men have societal backing to explain things to women, consider this: as part of the 2010 New York State Bar Association meeting, as Jill reported in Feministe, 'The Committee on Women in the Law decided to sponsor a day-long program for female lawyers, beginning with a panel titled "What's Our Problem: Current Issues Facing Women," in which a group of female attorneys were to discuss practicing law in a changing legal market. Immediately afterward, female lawyers were to be treated to "Their Point of View: Tips From the Other Side," in which a "distinguished panel of gentlemen" opine on the strengths and weaknesses of women's legal work.'

Unsurprisingly, women lawyers were furious, and the programme was tweaked. The "distinguished gentlemen" don't seem to have known that they were to be part of an all-male panel, advising women lawyers, who, incidentally, have comprised half of all law school graduates in the US since 1992. So while one can't hold the individual gentlemen accountable for consenting to be on such a panel, that anyone would even think of constituting such a panel is symptomatic of a larger problem.

On one hand, it is unacceptable to have women first be told that they have a problem as lawyers, and then to be told that a panel of men can give them pointers on how to do better as lawyers, especially when women are just as qualified (at least when they graduate). On the other hand, what makes even the idea of such a panel even more repugnant is that it is very hard to conceive of a programme directed at men beginning with a session called "What's Our Problem: Current Issues Facing Men," followed by "Their Point of View: Tips From the Other Side," in which a "distinguished panel of women" opined on the strengths and weaknesses of men's legal work. It just wouldn't happen. Not in the legal arena, nor would a corresponding panel be constituted in any other "traditionally male" arena.

And while it's a little unnerving that women lawyers were almost treated to ""Their Point of View: Tips From the Other Side," in 2010, the fact of the matter is that the women who were almost treated to this were women who were well-educated, credible, and able to get the programme tweaked. That is much more than many women are capable of; consider women who cannot, for a variety of reasons, fight for themselves or fight against a structure in which men are treated as being inherently superior to women.

The problem with mansplaining, as Ms. Solnit points out, is that it is just one of the manifestations of the way in which women are denied their voice, their opinions, their understanding of their own experience. How many times has one heard a man explain to a woman how she "really" feels? Or explain to her that what she actually thinks is not what she thinks that she thinks? (And how many times has one felt tempted to say something like "It's not PMS, it's your mother?")

Denying a woman a monopoly on her truth is to destroy her credibility. In some countries, this takes the form of disallowing women to be witnesses to the events which occur in their own lives: women are not allowed to testify about having been raped in some Islamic countries. And in the West, the situation is not very much better. Women are, generally, not believed. And credibility which is required to survive whether it be to get health care as desired, whether it be to get police assistance, whether it be to get protection orders or any number or other necessities.

Denying women their credibility and refusing to believe women can quite literally be a death sentence in some cases, and it's a sentence the execution of which is entirely preventable.

A "Must Read": The Archipelago of Arrogance by Rebecca Solnit

The Sexual Contract

2010-02-01T06:50:00.002Z

Reading about marriage and contracts, whether they be marriage as contracts or otherwise, I came across an interesting analysis of the social contract: that it was preceded by rape, and that it finds its genesis in the Sexual Contract which Carole Pateman expounded.

The Social Contract, which Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau dealt with, speaks of political obligation, obedience and legitimacy, and is, remarkably, by and large, silent about women. True, Locke talked about the "person" but a close reading of his work reveals that his individual person was in fact, the individual man. He spoke of wives being subject to their husbands although he had nothing but the Bible and contemporary social norms to support his assertion. In marriage, women were assumed to exchange obedience for protection, they therefore could not have truly entered into a contact with free will and autonomy given that they effectively lost that autonomy when they married. His Social Contract also contained a separate sphere in which women effectively remained --- the private sphere.

Women are not, however, simply missing from the Social Contract though -- they are co-opted into it by being included in the regime established by the Social Contract although they are not parties to the contract itself. It might be possible to think of them as beneficiaries to the contract although just how much women benefited is debatable. The political rights granted in the Social Contract find their roots in the Sexual Right granted by the Sexual Contract which must have been contemporaneous to, if not antecedent to, the Social Contract. And it is only through and after the exercise of the Sexual Right, specifically, men's rights to women's bodies, that the social and civil rights established by the Social Contract can be exercised.

And it is also through the performance of the Sexual Contract that the Natural Right which men enjoyed over women in the State of Nature is transformed into a legitimate, patriarchal, civil right. While the exact story of the Social Contract differs depending on who narrates it, what is common to all 17th and 18th century versions of the contract is that it is a contact entered into by men of their own free will to establish a legitimate structure, and to negate the chaos and anarchy prevalent in the State of Nature. The story of the contract is invariably presented as a story in which free will, rational thought, and individualism prevail, a story in which men give up some of the rights they "enjoyed" in the State of Nature in exchange for social structure and, so to speak, the greater good.

The patriarchy established by the Social Contract comprises a number of different facets including the paternal right and the political right. (Some theorists claimed that the paternal and political right were the same, others claimed that they were different.) In any case, women's rights are not mentioned in the Social Contract, although women must participate in the social regime for the patriarchal right to arise at all. The paternal right cannot arise without a woman becoming a mother, and for this to happen, there must be an incidental and accessory unmentioned right which men enjoy: the Sex Right --- a right incorporated in the Sexual Contract which grants men dominion over women and their bodies.

17th and 18th-century theorists, having no desire to question the paternal right, simply incorporated the Sex Right into the political right. The Sex Right was a right which presumably existed in the state of nature. All that the Social Contract did was to assume the existence of a Sexual Contract, and incorporate it into its own body, thereby providing a legal and orderly manner in which men could exercise a right which they enjoyed in the State of Nature.

As far as the political right is concerned, it is a right which, under the Social Contract, men enjoyed and women did not although women's exclusion from the enjoyment of this right was not explicitly stated -- the philosophers spoke of the "nature of women", their "role in the family" and confined women to the "private sphere", a sphere in which they had already exchanged obedience for protection, and thus a sphere in which they had no autonomy in any case. The political right was a right which manifest itself in the public sphere, a sphere to which women did not, until recently, have any access at all.

The existence of a society based on the performance of the Social Contract must necessarily also be based on the performance of the Sexual Contract. The latter is a contract which is rarely highlighted although its terms and conditions are implicit in the Social Contract as Carole Patemen has argued.

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl

2010-01-30T08:59:00.003Z

Eve Ensler, the creator of the "Vagina Monologues", speaks of the power of women in this passionate and inspiring TED talk.

What Disability Teaches

2010-01-24T15:16:00.008Z

Think about what 'it' has taught you. Break up the task into small manageable parts -- if there's one thing having a limited number of 'spoons' has taught you to do, it's to break work down into small manageable chunks.

There are other things it's taught you as well. In relation to yourself. In relation to your family, your friends, and all those other acquaintances who populate your life.

It's taught you that you cannot ever assume that you will have the energy to do all (or even a small fraction of) the things which you might want to do whether you want to do those things just because you feel like it or whether you want to do those things because it is imperative to do them.

It's taught you to keep your feet very firmly on the ground and have a strategy for everything you do because you know you need to plan how to use your energy which could well be truly limited on any given day.

It's taught you to prioritise and to not waste time or energy on the unimportant, on the unachievable, on the unchangeable, on the unchallengeable because you need to focus on what's important (and "doable") and get it done (or at least try to) before your energy runs out.

It's taught you to pick your battles carefully because you don't have energy to expend on fighting about things if you know that such a fight would be fruitless; you don't want to spend what limited energy you have on anything that would be unproductive.

It's taught you to be more patient with other people simply by forcing you to recognise the very real possibility that others could have disabilities and liabilities and impediments which force them to ration their energy in just the way that you do, and that those disabilities and liabilities and impediments of theirs could be just as invisible to you as yours could be to them.

It's taught you to be realistic about goals, about deadlines, about what you can do, when you can do it, and just how much of it you can do, because you know that if you're not realistic every single hour of every day, you're going to have to pay for having over extended yourself in the next hour, or on the next day -- not ten years down the line when you have a heart attack that you somehow simply didn't expect.

It's taught you to be self-reliant because experience has taught you that people may not want to be around you when you're not 'well', because you know that you live in a society which demands wellness, a society whose gurus advise others to get rid of negativity in their lives with negativity often including the requirements of people who are not healthy or able-bodied.

Then again, you could paraphrase all that it's taught you by saying that it's taught you not to dream, not to take things as they come, not to play it by ear, not to recognise and treat unacceptable behaviour as being unacceptable, not to be idealistic, not to have faith in your relationships with people, not to believe that anyone would stand by you if the need arose.

And you're not entirely certain which interpretation to choose particularly since you know that what you've learnt remains unchanged regardless of what light you choose to see it in.

On Erudition and Indecipherability

2010-01-22T10:06:00.002Z

From Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience:

If you’re anxious for to shine, in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say, As you walk your mystic way,
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.

I couldn't resist quoting this excerpt posted at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Trust Women

2010-01-22T01:00:00.002Z

Dr. George Tiller often wore a button that simply read, "Trust Women".

Reading the words "Trust Women" in the context of supporting the right to choice made me think of all the times when women's right to choice is not trusted not just in the context of women being able and allowed to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy but in other contexts as well, and in particular, in the context of autonomy and the right to determine what happens to one's own body.

It made me think of women who are forced to have abortions because of the gender of the foetuses. It made me think of women who are forced to become pregnant when they don't want to. Of the women who are forced to abort children because of their being single. Of the women forced not to terminate pregnancies because they are not single.

It made me think of how the "right to choice" can mean different things in different societies. About the way how, in India, the right could be considered as not being focussed on the right to have an abortion when the woman pregnant chose to but also of her right to refuse to have one if that was what she wanted to do.

And thinking of that, it made me realise that although the cultural framework in which the right should manifest itself may vary greatly, what remains immutable regardless of the cultural framework, as well as associated socio-legal and economic environments, the basic requirement remains the same -- the all women have autonomy to decide what happens to themselves, their lives, and their bodies, without reference to external agencies whether those external agencies be of church, or state, or government, or courts, or family, or society.

3 Idiots, and Why I Disliked It

2010-01-20T11:44:00.011Z

...or at any rate, failed to love it.

I'm aware that I am one of the very few people who isn't raving about the film "3 Idiots" -- a film about the lives of three average students in a 'top-notch' engineering college. Yes, it did make me laugh. And there definitely were a number of things about it which were commendable.

Nonetheless, there were a number of reasons why I wasn’t comfortable with the film. To begin with, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the title “3 Idiots” simply given the baggage which the word “Idiot” carries with it. (Disclosure, yes, I do use the word myself but it’s a habit of which I’m attempting to disabuse myself.

The word “Idiot”, as FWD/Forward put it, 'is derived from Latin and Greek roots; it originally referred to persons who did not participate in civic activities or to “ordinary persons”, then to unskilled labourers, and eventually to people who were ignorant or who lacked education. It seems to have made its first appearance in English around 1300, in reference to people who lacked reasoning skills and were poorly, if at all, educated. By the 1800s, being an Idiot had turned into a diagnosis of mental inferiority – the hierarchy being imbeciles, morons and, the lowest of the low, idiots. And, not surprisingly, the term made its way into law: Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “Three generations of idiots is enough,” when defending the forcible sterilization of Carrie Buck in Buck v. Bell in 1927. The California penal code was finally amended to remove the word “Idiot” from the law books only in 2007,' and in India, the term is still used at law.

Given that history, it’s not one of my favourite words.

One of the primary things in the film which I disliked was the speech where a student’s speech in a language he didn’t know so that, unbeknownst to him, instead of talking about the achievements of the head of the educational institution, he wound up talking about rape. After that, the students obviously joked about the incident. And, somehow, I didn’t find it funny – I’m entirely unconvinced that the word “rape” should ever be used to describe anything other than, well, rape itself. Even leaving aside all other arguments, one (hopefully) would not walk up to a survivor of torture saying that an exam was torture. Given the sheer number of women who are raped, I do not believe that “rape” should ever be used in a context unrelated to rape in a public forum. It isn’t a word which exists to be appropriated whether for the purpose of analogy, or metaphor, or anything else; it exists in itself. And it profoundly affects the lives of many people.

However, what really put me off was the fact that although the film was very funny in many places, it didn’t treat a serious subject in a humorous manner, or simply be funny while dealing with light-hearted subjects. What the film did was keep oscillating rather wildly between the two extremes of deeply upsetting subjects and extremely funny scenes. And I’m one of those people who, if watching a comedy, would just like to be able to watch without having the comedy interrupted by tragedy such as a student killing himself effectively because of autocratic megalomaniac who was acting as an educator-administrator in the educational institute where the student was studying.

I acknowledge that the lack of accountability by educators in such circumstances, and the other issues which the film highlighted, are issues which should be addressed. And perhaps a film filled with hilarious scenes is a good medium through which to address the issue. For me though, the oscillation between the hilarious and the sad was emotionally draining. And by the time I finished watching the film, despite its feel-good ending and despite the fact that I’d laughed a lot, I also simply felt sad.

Black Orchid

2010-01-18T08:09:00.009Z

The effects of militancy in Manipur were portrayed in this play which was directed by Toijam Shila Devi. Set in a fictional village in Manipur, it focussed on the effects of the militancy particularly on women and children. There were several moments in the play when I wanted to get up and leave, not because the play wasn't good but because it seemed the pain the actors conveyed seemed extremely raw at times -- there was sometimes no "artistic portrayal", and it felt as though the actors were far too familiar with the effects of militancy to need to "act" at all.

Manipur comprises nine districts: four in the Valley and five in hilly areas, and all nine of those districts have been subject to militant activities for years. A separatist insurgency began in Manipur in the 1960s demanding that Manipur secede from India, and that a separate "Kingdom of Manipur" be established -- Manipur was in fact the last kingdom to be annexed by the British and made a part of British India in 1891. The arguments of the militants involve citing a lack of development among other factors. The militants are not a homogeneous group who are united in their cause though. There are several different groups and while "independence" from India is the aim of some of them, others have entirely different aims such as integrating Manipur with Nagaland -- Manipur's hills are inhabited primarily by Nagas and Kukis (Chin-Mizos) while the valley is inhabited primarily by Meiteis (including Meitei Muslims known as Meitei Pangal or Pangal and "Bhamons" who are literally non-Meiteis).

Militancy has, obviously, played a role in suppressing development in the state, and the lack of development has not helped to curb militancy in any way. There have been numerous reports of human rights violations in Manipur. Some of these instances have made headlines across the country. For example, in 2004, a supposed woman militant, Th. Manorama Devi, was allegedly raped by personnel of the Assam Rifles and died in custody. However, the number of instances which make the news appear to be minuscule in comparison to the sheer number of human rights violations. Activists like Sharmila Irom have done much to highlight problems in Manipur (particularly in relation to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) but even so, militancy in Manipur is not a subject which is often discussed in the Indian media.

Not all human rights violations have been perpetrated by security forces though. In an opinion on "Freedom, Liberty, Human Rights And Manipuri Society", H Bhuban Singh described the situation. "In Manipur, there are plenty of Governments and various sets of laws. These unofficial but more powerful Governments issue diktats and enforce their laws. Some are shot in the calf or in the thigh, after due warning as they claim. Some unfortunate ones are tried by their courts of justice and given capital punishments.When anyone steps out of one's house, there is no knowing as to what may befall on you. One can be caught in the crossfire between security forces and underground elements and in the bargain, the innocent 'you' may get killed. Or you may be a victim of a bomb blast. Or you may have to turn back your car without going to Churachandpur when you face a wildcat bandh or strike at Bishnupur. Life is uncertain," he said.

Describing the situation as a breakdown in the rule of law, Human Rights Watch issued a statement saying, "The Manipur state government in northeastern India should act to end a cycle of unpunished violence, including killings, by security forces and armed groups," in 2009.

It was against this background that the play "Black Orchid" was set, and at times, it was heart wrenching.

Emotional Availability

2010-01-16T07:13:00.002Z

From Ms. Robinson:

"I have become this strange combination of extraordinary mental strength and emotional fragility. .... My limits have been tested so much I now do cost benefit equations in my head to make sure I'm not giving away too much of me to anyone. I do them every day. Because I don't jump in easily but when I do I'm more open than anyone I know, giving intensely and with passion. You can't keep doing that."

The whole post is available at Maybe it was Already Broken

1001 Cups : A Contemporary Ceramic Exhibition

2009-12-25T15:25:00.013Z

Claude Presset, a Swiss ceramist and teacher has curated an exhibition of cups by a hundred different ceramists which is currently on display in Delhi. Each ceramist has created a series of ten cups each in which none of the cups are identical although each series has been created using only one technique.

Each cup is approximately the same size as a kulhar : the traditional Indian teacup which was once commonly used but is now rarely seen -- the handcrafted, earthenware cup of yesteryear having now been replaced by mass produced cups often not even made of clay. And yet, the basic shape, structure and purpose of the cup has probably not significantly changed through the millennia. And so, as the exhibits -- displayed in packing cases -- demonstrate, the lines which demarcate 'tradition' from 'living tradition', and 'experimentation' from 're-interpretation' are in fact often amazingly thin.

At the end of the day, there is only so much that can be done to a cup to make it different from its predecessors, and this inability to innovate beyond a point means that the cups which are in use today are essentially the same cups which were in use from the time when men first learnt to fire clay to create not just utensils for daily use but art in terracotta, pottery, and, finally, porcelain. And, if one were to think of it, what that also means is in each cup lies much history.

Countries such as Japan have elaborate rituals associated with tea, and although not all countries have such rituals, it would be hard to argue that the humble cup is not, in some way, a repository of culture.

Image: PericlesofAthens

Plains Song

2009-12-15T06:44:00.011Z

For Female Voices by Wright Morris

"More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings, I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression, sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact." : C. K. Williams

I'm told that Plains Song is the only book by Wright Morris currently in print, and if that's true, I think it's very sad. I picked up Plains Song entirely by accident and it seems like a beautiful piece of work -- I haven't finished reading it yet.

Although the subtitle of the book says that it's for female voices, ironically, the women in the book are more often characterised by their speechlessness than by their words. It's not as though they have nothing to say, it's just that they choose not to say much, if at all anything. And some of the men seem to say just as little.

It doesn't seem as though the characters are reticent; just that they are intensely private, and their feelings are no one's business but their own. The novel speaks of events which occur, and not in the way a contemporary novel would usually speak of them. There is, of course, little dialogue between the characters, but, in addition to that, there is no melodrama of any kind, and major events could easily slip by one's notice if one were to allow oneself to be inattentive over the course of just a few paragraphs.

Despite being called a song, the novel is characterised by silence. It seems to give readers a glimpse into another world -- probably one which once existed. It is a world alien to the one we know now. The people in it live, feel, and work -- but talk little about what they feel. To those in the modern world, the silence could seem oppressive but to the characters in the book, it seems to be a way of life.

And while today, when we look back, we can see, in retrospect, that the silence which dominates this book could, and in fact, did, conceal all kinds of oppression and abuse, that is probably not how the characters in the book would view their lives and their speechlessness -- indeed, they would, as the book says, probably be baffled by such an interpretation. The characters live. And work. And they seem to focus on doing so to the exclusion of all else. Including speaking about their lives and their work.

The novel portrays this in language that is "tightly wound" and haunting. It is understated and elegant.
(Book review)

Contemporary Kathak

2009-11-23T10:35:00.005Z

Recently, I've been to two Kathak performances --- one by the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company, and the other by Isabelle Anna along with Quincy Charles, Aurélie Oudiette, and Hélène Marionneau; and I wasn't entirely certain of what to make of them.

I don't believe that the performing arts should ever be allowed to stagnate, neither do I believe that incorporating new elements into traditional forms of art is necessarily a bad thing to have happen. My feelings towards these two performances were, nonetheless, rather ambivalent.

The idea behind Aditi Mangaldas' Now Is seemed very interesting but I couldn't really understand how the dance portrayed what the write-up said the theme of the programme was:

A simultaneous dialogue between the three art forms of painting, music, and dance that explores the timeless present and is built around the central question: Can one live creatively, live in the 'Now'? The present carries within it burdens of the past as well as the fantasies of the future. Can these links be broken, so that a timeless moment is born? The philosopher J.Krishnamurti held out an invitation 'of living in time, timelessly, without the past and the future mingling on the moment.' Now Is explores the theme, "In the NOW is all time, and to understand the now is to be free of time."

The programme incorporated the images of the paintings of the German artist Siegward Sprotte for reasons that were extremely unclear to me. That being said, although I can't claim to have understood the programme, I enjoyed the performance very much. It was well choreographed, and the music was beautiful.

The second programme though was different. It was interesting and had moments of brilliance, but at places, it seemed, to me, to be an exposition of why neither fusion nor "living tradition" should be extolled. I enjoyed the first piece in the programme --- it was a "duet" in which the Kathak steps bore clear impressions of influences from the West. Later on in the programme though, the dancer interpreted Ravel's Bolero. The usual "muted" drumming in the background was changed to an overwhelming beat provided by a Tabla, and the result was that neither Kathak nor Post-Impressionist music were portrayed in the best possible light.

I am not sure what makes contemporary interpretations of traditional art forms "good", and watching these two experiments certainly hasn't made the answer to that question any clearer to me.

The Area Around Humayun's Tomb

2009-11-21T12:32:00.016Z

One of the first things which one notices about Delhi is that it’s full of monuments (or what could be monuments) but that hardly anyone knows what they are. This roundabout is on the way to Humayun’s Tomb, one of Delhi’s three much touted heritage sites: the others being Ferozshah Kotla and the Qutb Minar. Nonetheless, despite being just some 500 m away, all most people know is that it’s called Subz Burz and that it lies on the Grand Trunk Road.

The area where the tomb stands is full of old structures. I was told when I first asked for directions that it’s in a very Muslim area of town – not information I had asked for and, as it turned out, information which was irrelevant.

There are several tombs in the compound where Humayun’s Tomb is situated. When one first enters it, one sees the entrance to Isa Khan’s Tomb Enclosure to the right and Bu Halima’s straight ahead.

The Compound

Isa Khan’s Tomb Enclosure

Isa Khan’s Tomb dates back to 1547 AD and includes both a mosque and a tomb. The man himself, according to a notice outside the structure, was a nobleman in the court of Sher Shah Sur and both the tomb and the mosque were built during his lifetime. Amazingly, apparently an entire village lived within the enclosure till the early 20th century. It’s a little difficult to imagine how a whole village could have fit into such a space – even if one doesn’t walk too fast it’d be unlikely to take more than three or four minutes to walk from one end to the other.

Even though the tomb pre-dates that of Humayun by only twenty years, the two are hardly comparable. Isa Khan’s tomb is very beautiful -- and if one has the stomach for it, one can climb up both the tomb itself as well as the mosque -- but in terms of sheer grandeur, it does not even begin to compare to Humayun’s.

If one walks along the walls of the enclosure, one can see what appears to be a graveyard just outside the walls of the enclosure. However, it isn’t possible to get to it from the tomb itself since it lies outside the walls of the compound. No guidebook I’ve seen thus far mentions the graveyard.

Bu Halima’s’s Enclosure

This is another tomb of which precious little is known. It's the first thing one sees when one enters the compound: a gateway to Bu Halima’s tomb. It’s a large whitish structure and inside, the gateway feels a little like a doll’s house. No one really knows who Bu Halima was; all that is known is that the tomb belongs to the 16th century and, according to the information provided by the ASI, its western wall was breached in the 19th century to allow access to visitors.

Arab Serai
Once one goes through the Gateway to Bu Halima’s tomb enclosure, one sees two more gates: one is one of the Western Gate to Humayun's Tomb and the other is the Arab Serai Gate which is pretty breathtaking in itself. It is some fourteen metres high and once led to a walled enclosure where the Persian craftsmen who were involved in building Humayun’s tomb lived. It’s is built of red sandstone, Delhi quartzite stone and is inlaid with marble. There are also remnants of glazed ceramic tiles visible on it.

Afsarwala Tomb and Mosque

The Afsarwala Tomb and Mosque can be reached through the Arab Serai or through another entrance: once one steps through the Arab Serai Gate, one winds up in an empty courtyard with the back of the tomb and mosque to one’s left. They are believed to have been built in 1566 AD but no one knows whose tomb it is – all that the name denotes is that it belongs to a man who was an officer. The mosque is still in use and once, when I went there, prayers had just finished, and the prayer mats were being loaded on to a cycle to be taken somewhere.

The Western Gate

The Western Gate is now the main entrance to the Tomb of Humayun. It is some sixteen metres high and has rooms on either side. It is adorned with six-sided stars which the Mughals used as ornamental cosmic symbols. Inside the gate, there is a small bookshop with sells postcards and books about Delhi’s monuments.

Humayun’s Tomb

Once one goes through the Western Gate, one is confronted with Humayun’s Tomb which is truly breathtaking. There is absolutely no dearth of tourists and there are also groups of schoolchildren. Personally, I’ve found that most school trips involve dragging children along to see monuments (and museums) they are not especially interested in which means that they don’t spend their time looking at anything. Instead they spend their time dashing around shouting at the top of their voices which is not generally conducive to allowing anyone else to be able to enjoy or appreciate whatever they’re looking at.

The tomb itself is large though – it apparently contains the bodies of some one hundred and twenty Mughals and is surrounded by a large garden. It is believed to have been built by Humayun’s wife after his death (in Purana Qila). And the style of the tomb inspired the designs of many later tombs including the Taj Mahal.

Most tourists don’t really explore the gardens which means that it is entirely possible to find a spot in the gardens where one is alone. Even within the structure of the tomb, there are places where one can simply walk around quietly absorbing the atmosphere of the place.

Baber’s Tomb

There is another tomb behind that of Humayun’s which is said to be that of Barber. It’s made of red sandstone and contains two ornamental cenotaphs of one woman and one man. It isn’t certain whose tomb it is though. The structure itself is far less impressive than Humayun’s tomb but since very few visitors actually make their way to it, it is very peaceful.

Nila Gumbad

Just outside the compund is a small structure with a beautiful blue dome. It can be seen from inside the compund and, unfortunately, there really isn't too much to it beyond what can be seen from such a distance. It can be reached by going around the compund, but if one were to do that, one would discover that it's rather decrepit; it's a disappointment. Personally, I was much happier before I figured out how to get to it: it was earlier nothing but a mysterious, beautiful blue dome.

Plant Nursery

There's a nursery opposite the Tomb compound in which there's a structure which is certainly very old but of indeterminate nature. There's a board which says that it's a protected structure but unfortunately, when the Archaeological Survey of India puts up such boards, it usually doesn't say why the structure is protected or what in earth it actually is.Although the structure doesn't now look especially imposing, it interests me bacause the inside of the dome seems have had a lot of work put into it -- far more than what one would expect in an entirely functional building.

An Inner Fury

2009-10-31T00:59:00.001Z

Much Indian writing in English isn’t very good. perhaps because you can actually see the author thinking in some other language before he translates what he has to say into English.
However, I’ve begun to wonder whether there was a time when English educational policies in India did create a class of people now no longer in existence who had the ability to think in English and who did in face write amazingly well in the language.
I’ve just finished reading a book called ‘Some Inner Fury’ by Kamala Markandaya which was first published by Putnam in 1955. It’s a love story just as much as ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one. Set in the early 1940s in India, it tells the story of a rich, cultivated Hindu family whose Oxford-returned, sophisticated, son, Kitsamy, joins the civil service and whose other (adopted) son, Govind, joins the freedom struggle. It tells of the difficulties of the former’s traditional wife, Premala, in trying the please her husband. and it speaks of the love which develops between the daughter of the house, Mirabai, with one of Kit’s friends, Richard who becomes the ADC the Governor. Love each other as much as they may, the two ultimately find themselves torn apart by the struggle for independence; on opposite sides of the fence by default. Their relationship does not survive.
The book is an interesting study of India at a time of political upheaval even though it is very limited in its scope. Possibly, the family the author describes is one which belongs to her own class. The prose is understated and very elegant. And at times, heart wrenching.

The Lives of Anglo-Indians in India

2009-10-20T05:57:00.005Z

Queenie by Michael Korda is the story of an Anglo-Indian girl who became a film star and moved to the West. While the story, which begins during the last days of the Raj, is clearly about one woman, and her struggle to make 'it', it also contains fascinating insights into the lives of Anglo-Indians in India, in general.

If the book is to be believed:

The Anglo-Indian community, being a 'people' who were neither completely Indian nor completely English, they were despised by both the Indians and the English. The 'Heaven sent' ICS officers did not, towards the end of the Raj, mingle with Indians, and they didn't live with Indian women. It was only Englishmen who did such things as work in the Railways who had children with Indian women.

The Anglo-Indians had their own special brand of English: the words were English, the inflection Indian. The result was that they sang the language rather than speak it.

Women who were fair might have been able to marry an Englishman and go Home to England -- India was apparently not Home. But there seemed to be little hope for women who were not fair, or for men. And their facial structures, which might have passed as being Welsh at Home, distinguished them as 'wogs' in India.

The English called the Anglo-Indians chee chee, the Anglo-Indians called the Indians wogs. And the all-consuming ambition of an Anglo-Indian was to go Home. The result was that any white man could appear and marry a woman; it didn't matter if he was worth nothing, all that mattered was that he was a pukka sahib.

--

After Independence, the Anglo-Indian community was granted a two percent reservation in the Lok Sabha, and although that's always puzzled me, I'd no idea of what life for an Anglo-Indian person would have been like during the fag end of the Raj.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

2009-10-12T10:16:00.001Z

Lying on the table next to me is a book --- Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’ve been trying to read it for over a fortnight now, and for someone who regularly reads a few hundred pages a day, it is unusual for a book to be left unfinished for so long.

It’s impossible to say that it’s unreadable because the author doesn’t write well, or that the subjects he deals with are uninteresting. The problem for me is that he doesn’t speak of anything which I want to read about.

I’ve read fifteen chapters so far – not a number which means much considering that every chapter is but a few pages long. However, in every chapter, I see nothing which is alien to many women’s everyday lives. Nothing which one wouldn’t hear about while chatting with one’s friends. Nothing which one wouldn’t read about on the crime pages of newspapers. Or sometimes in the Features pages which speak endlessly about The Evils of Society.

Somehow, the content of the book is simply not what I want to read about in a novel. Real life, it seems to me, has more than enough sadness of the kind depicted in the book, and I’m not sure I need to read about a non-existent woman’s fictional life to begin to develop an appreciation for the sadness inherent in the lives of women such as her, and those unlike her.

Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl

2009-10-12T09:50:00.008Z

I came across this book review and have reproduced part of it below. The review is from Blogpourri by Sujatha and has been published under a CC licence.

The sub-title to her book is 'and other things she taught me along the way'. .... At first blush, the memoir is a woman's effort to draw lessons from her mother's life. But it is so much more than that. If a child wrote a letter of love, appreciation, respect and deep gratitude to their mother, it would take the shape and form of Not Becoming My Mother. It is an attempt to peel away the layers and layers of hurt that had enveloped the author over a number of years. It is an attempt to put her mother's actions in context. A mother who was brilliant and wanted to be a doctor, but not that great-looking. In an age where women were expected to be beautiful but not ambitious, it was a double whammy that succeeded in decimating her chances at happiness. .... With the help of her mother's writing she finds in shoe boxes, on scraps of paper, on old receipts, Reichl pieces together the portrait of a woman who somehow figured out how to be the kind of role model that her own daughter did not want to emulate. As the sketch fills out and we slowly start to see the flesh and blood and color appearing on canvas, our viewpoint undergoes a change. We are no longer looking at the dark and foreboding image of a bad mother, we are looking at a woman who desperately does not want her daughter to struggle with the demons she did.

Morphology: Inflectional v. Derivational

2009-09-27T11:08:00.001Z

The inflectional morphology of a language is the study of the ways in which bound grammatical morphemes combine with stems to be realised as grammatical words. On the other hand, the derivational morphology of a language is the study of the ways in which bound lexical morphemes combine with stems to be realised as lexical words.
Classical grammarians of Latin and Greek generally divided grammar into accidence, word formation and syntax. They did not pay much attention to derivation because they did not really consider it to be a part of grammar.
There are three main differences between inflection and derivation. Firstly, inflection refers to the ways in which bound grammatical words combine with stems to form grammatical words as mentioned earlier while derivation ultimately leads to the formation of lexical words. Both grammatical and lexical words ultimately surface as phonological and orthological words in which bound lexical morphemes can usually be identified as having been affixed. These affixes can be divided into inflectional and derivational affixes. Those which realise bound grammatical morphemes (such as –s, –es on plural nouns, ’s on possessive nouns and –d and –ed on the past participle forms of verbs) are called inflectional affixes and have no fixed, concrete meaning of their own while those which realise bound lexical affixes (such as –ish, –al, –able and –ness) are called derivational affixes.
Inflectional affixes never change the grammatical category of the stem: they are all suffixes which form the outer layer of complex words and modify the meaning of the steam in regular ways. This is not the case with derivational affixes which may be either suffixes or prefixes (such as de–, re– and –ize). It is possible for both inflectional and derivational morphemes to occur in the same word. The latter always constitutes the outer layer as no affix can be added after the inflectional affix has been added. Thus, derivation may have an input in inflection but inflection cannot have any input in derivation. For example, in both ‘deindustrialising’ and in ‘depixelating’ the derivational affix ‘de–’ occurs along with a final ‘–ing’ inflectional affix after which no other affix can be added to either word.
Similarly, if there is both compounding and inflection in a word, the latter must follow the former.
In words in which compounding, derivation and inflection all occur, the inflection is last and compounding is first as can be seen in the words ‘kickstarted’ [(kick + start) + ed] and ‘channelhopping’ [(channel + hop) + ing].
Inflectional morphology not only describes bound grammatical morphemes but also the grammatical rules in which they occur, the paradigm they form and the various orthological and phonological forms in which they eventually surface. Derivational morphology, on the contrary, studies the categories of items with which bound lexical morphemes can be combined, the categories to which the resulting forms belong, the changes in meaning brought on by the process of derivation and the orthological and phonological shapes which bound lexical morphemes acquire.
An inflectional affix occurs solely with all the members of a given class unlike derivational affixes which may occur with the members of more than one class or with only some of the members of any particular class. Thus, there are several differences between derivational and inflectional morphology. The most striking though is that the words created through the process of inflectional morphology such as ‘talk’, ‘talks’ and ‘talked’ are not new words. They are merely grammatical forms of the same words. Derivation, however, creates new lexical words with distinct meanings such as ‘amoral’, ‘disown’ and ‘foreground’.

Hair cuts

2009-09-15T05:34:00.001Z

According to the Metro:

"The eye-catching cut was invented in 1909 by Parisian hairdresser Antoine Paris, whose inspiration was Joan of Arc. It was picked up in upper-crust Bloomsbury circles in the early 20th century and then by flappers. But its arrival in America in the 1920s sparked controversy, which reached fever pitch when preachers declared: 'A bobbed woman is a disgraced woman.' "

Apparently, some men went as far as divorcing wives who sported a bob. That's something I hadn't known earlier but when I read about it, I couldn't help but think about how nowadays, women are still judged by how they choose to have their hair cut.

Wear your hair long, and you're traditional; short and you're modern, liberal and possibly, professional. Walk into a salon with long hair and ask to have it cut short and you'll feel as though you have been transported into Louisa Alcott's Little Women, and you'll finally find out what it felt like for Joe to have to sell her long hair for money: the tragic expressions on the hairdressers' faces will teach you that. And that's assuming that they agree to cut your hair in the first place which they probably will not do without cross checking with you half a dozen times first.

An Officer of the Raj

2009-08-19T06:49:00.000Z

Sometime ago, I read a book called 'Trials in Burma' by an Englishman named Maurice Collis who worked there during the Raj. It was an interesting account of life there, of the spread (or lack thereof) of Indian nationalism in the area and of relationship of the Burmese with the Indians who lived there which, as I hadn't realised earlier, were less than smooth.
Frankly, the interaction between the Burmese and the Indians is not even something I'd ever thought of. The book, however, seemed to divide Indians into poor labourers and rich traders, and repeatedly gave the impression that both the Indians and the English thought of the Burmese as being inferior to them in both intellect and ability. Not too surprisingly, the Burmese weren't thrilled.
What struck me most though was the description of the trial of a leader of the Indian nationalist movement for sedition. While speaking of it, Mr Collis says, "The law of England is admired the world over and it is on the excellence of its practice that our moral right to be in India is founded."
The line left me astounded for a number of reasons. The law of England, admired as it may have been, did not apply to natives in the colonies in the same way it did to Englishmen at home. The excellence of its practice is debatable. The practise of law in one country can hardly create a right for that country to colonise and plunder another.
And finally, the author actually seems to believe what he says. Throughout the book, I never once got the impression that he was anything but a conscientious person trying to do his job as well as he could. Nonetheless, his beliefs amaze me.

An English Girl's Indian Childhood during the Raj

2009-07-22T08:34:00.001Z

Studying Indian history in India, one gets a picture of British rule in India being truly awful in many ways. Yes, the British built railroads, but the railroads had more to do with themselves and their trade than with Indians. And yes, the British were also responsible for developing the country's post and telegraph systems but those systems probably served their own interests more than they served Indian interests. For the average Indian, British rule meant much higher taxation than Indian emperors and kings used to levy. It meant the existence of some roads to travel to places most Indians never travelled to. It also meant widespread starvation and deprivation. And for the country as a whole, it meant the redirection of not only national resources to a foreign land but also the theft of tangible pieces of history and culture to another country. As far as India is concerned, the less said about the theft / annexation of Indian treasures, the better.

The strange thing is that this isn't a view shared by the British in general. Some time ago, I read a book called 'The Sun in the Morning' by M M Kaye (the author of 'The Far Pavilions') about the early years of her childhood which she spent primarily in Shimla and Shahjahanabad (in Old Delhi). In it, she repeatedly speaks of thinking of India as her country, and that in itself is understandable since she was then a child who lived in India and did not really think of England with its grey skies as 'home'. Her father, she says in the book, reminded her that India belonged to Indians but she didn't really understand that --- to her, India was her country.

What surprised me though was that she also repeatedly seemed to speak of the sacrifices the British made to serve not in India but to serve India. While it can hardly be denied that the British who worked in India did have to make sacrifices being separated from their native land and, in some cases, from their families, it seemed very strange to me that the tone of the book suggested that those sacrifices had been made not for the benefit of the British Empire but for the benefit of India.

Having always looked at the Raj from the perspective of an Indian, it seemed stunning to me that the author, writing as an old lady, could somehow think that Englishmen serving English interests in India was analogous to Englishmen serving India. She says that they --- or perhaps she specified that it was some of them, I don't remember --- loved India. And while I don't dispute that some of them probably did, as interesting as I found her book, I could not find it in myself to be sympathetic to the British for all the sacrifices they had to make to enrich themselves at India's expense.

That being said, I loved getting a glimpse into what life was like during the Raj. Most of all, I enjoyed the author's descriptions of what is now the national capital region. To her, Okhla was a 'picnic' spot no one ever went to that was infested with crocodiles. Today, it is an area no one would ever want to go to because it is jam packed with traffic and ugly concrete buildings. The Taj Mahal was a monument which was rarely visited by anyone --- she was a child in the days before the Age of Tourism. And when she visited the site where the foundations of New Delhi were being laid, she thought it was the most desolate spot in which anyone could build a city --- today, it is where most of the country's Central Government buildings stand.

The Last Flicker in the Lamp of Mughal Architecture

2009-07-19T06:50:00.007Z

Safdarjung's Tomb.

Safdarjung's Tomb is a strange place. It's not an important monument, so it's not very crowded.

The average person on the road where it stands has no idea what on Earth it is, let alone where it is. They'll give you directions to the locality Safdarjung, to Safdarjung Enclave, and, if you ask, to Lodhi road. But God help you if you ask for the Tomb: all you'll probably get is a blank stare. You'll be asked what it is, and be informed by the helpful that the road you're standing on is not Aurobindo Road but Arvind Road. And that's despite the fact the the Tomb's entrance is bang on the main road, at the T-junction of Lodhi Road and Aurobindo Road.

Inside, the lawns aren't particularly well maintained; there are over 300 sq m of them. Nor is anything else as well maintained as it is in other more well known monuments. The good thing though is that there are few people around because it isn't, well, iconic.

The Tomb is that of Mirza Muqim Abu'l Mansur Khan who was the Viceroy of Oudh under Muhammad Shah and was later his Prime Minister. It was built by his son Shuja ud Daula in 1753, and marble to build a part of Safdarjung's tomb was taken from the nearby tomb of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khana, one of Akbar's nine gems, which had been built around 1598.

Safdarjung's tomb is widely described as 'the last flicker in the lamp of Mughal architecture at Delhi'. It may well be that. While it certainly doesn't have the grandeur of Humayun's Tomb, (or many other structures), it is impressive in its own right. In fact, it has the garden-tomb layout which Humayun's Tomb inspired.

Walking around it, it's all too easy to develop a sense of having history come crashing down on one. And then again, when one walks into it, one can almost feel as though one is invading someone's privacy.

There are areas inside the complex which have been locked. Others which are inaccessible to visitors. But for the most part, visitors can look around with little interference. Sometimes, as good as that sounds, it is hardly ideal. There are no safety warnings and there are places where you could quite easily break a leg if you were to fail to watch your step.

A Moment of Madness

2009-06-28T02:54:00.005Z

The first thing I read after I got up this morning was a piece called A Moment of Madness by Vinita Nangia in the Times of India. I read the text below the title and wound up annoyed. I then skimmed through the piece and felt furious. Do I not think that people have their moments of 'madness'? No. Do I think that they should be unaccountable for their actions? Absolutely not.
The author begins the piece by mixing history and myth, fact and fiction, giving one example after the other of men either treating women badly -- if not actually abusing them -- or of men allegedly simply losing their minds: the Buddha abandoning his wife, a fictional Othello murdering Desdemona, the Mark Antony of history supposedly being bewitched by Cleopatra thus determining his downfall, Shiney Ahuja allegedly committing rape. And at the end of it, somehow seems to be full of sympathy for those who behave badly in such moments of madness, as she calls them, without once talking about the effect of their actions on their victims. (I use the pronoun 'those' because through the dozen or so examples she gives, she does sprinkle some women .)
At any rate, our lady informs us that as far as Shiney Ahuja allegedly raping his 18-year-old maid is concerned, "Maybe if that flash in time had passed, he may have thought better of it and held himself back." Firstly, rape is not a crime about sex in itself, and restraining oneself from having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with one is really not that difficult. Deciding to rape is always a proactive choice, not an 'action of omission' so to speak. It doesn't matter that she's even found a shrink to legitimise her claims saying, "The libidinal impulse that takes birth in the brain may take over so badly that it demands instant gratification," although the shrink has thankfully added that a sense of power and narcissism play a role.
And then the author puts in two bits from some lawyer who says nothing more interesting than that premeditation or lack thereof is considered by the courts, but just in case the moments-of-madness theory isn't doing enough to exonerate rapists and other assorted idiots, the lawyer brings in the "but the woman might have encouraged him" to rape her line. Tried and tested, it certainly is. When all else fails in a rape case, or even before that, talk about what the victim was wearing, how she flirted, and how much alcohol she drank. Bingo, you have yourself an acquittal. Never mind that clothes, suggestive behaviour, or drinking are not in themselves invitations to rape anyone. And despite being repetitive, it's not that difficult not to commit rape. All a man has to do is ask if he has consent. Consent is not a default condition and asking if another person wants to do something is not beyond the realms of the possible.
But guess what, there's case law. And that clinches the deal. Or at least verifies the moments-of-madness theory. In one case, a woman was apparently treated leniently because she had PMS and while I doubt that's right, I am quite certain the next example isn't -- a judge apparently asked a woman to dress in court in the manner she was dressed when she was raped and then sided with the her rapist. And for our author and lawyer, apparently, the fact that the cases were British legitimises them.
Never mind that British judges have come up with a lot of questionable judgments when it comes to rape whether it be saying that a teen contributed to her own rape by hitchhiking or that a rapist 'showed concern and consideration by wearing a contraceptive'. Or that we have our own share of judgments which are best left uncited. Just for example, in one case — Idu Beg, 1881 — a husband who struck his wife on her left side while they were fighting (verbally) thereby causing her to vomit, bleed from the nose and die within an hour due to her spleen having been ruptured by him was not held to be guilty of murder — he was held to be guilty only of having caused grievous hurt. And in a far more recent case — Venkatasen v/s State, 1997 — a husband who suspected the fidelity of his wife and who assaulted her with a stone because her insulting words made him ‘lose control’ and kill her was held guilty of culpable homicide and not of murder.
And never mind that moments of supposed madness do not excuse criminal behaviour. (Yes, insanity is a defence but not when it's of the 'it's merely convenient for me to claim insanity here' variety. Or that, in my experience, I've rarely heard a man say that he was abusive in anything other than in a moment of madness for which, naturally, he is not accountable.
We somehow live in a society where the unqualified acceptance of the concept that women provoke men to abuse them ensures that, as Ptacek has pointed out, “abusive men are neither abnormal enough to be considered to be psychopaths, nor are they responsible enough to be held criminally liable for their actions.” But what still angers me the most about this piece is that there is not one mention of the effects of these so-called moments of madness on their victims.

Brojaweli

2009-06-19T06:48:00.000Z

I’ve always been aware that my knowledge of Assamese is truly abysmal but recently, I’ve been hearing people speak in what they tell me is Assamese without understanding a word of what they’re saying, and I’ve begun to think that small though the state is, its language, like Marathi, could be different not only in different parts of the state but also among different classes of people. To me, as far as Marathi was concerned, the text which I read in legal documents was very different from the lingua franca at the law firm I spent time at, and neither one bore any great resemblance to the language which domestic help used. The words were different, for one thing. For example, at work, I never once heard anyone use ‘tu’ for ‘you’; it was always ‘tumhi’. Outside, I never heard ‘tumhi’ being used anywhere.
Initially, I thought that ‘tu’ and ‘tumhi’ corresponded to the French ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ but while that’s probably true, it clearly isn’t the whole story if one class of people opts to use only one form and a second class opts to use primarily the other form of the word.
Coming back to Assamese though, the other day, I watched a play heavily influenced by Ankia Naat Bhaona: an Assamese form of drama first created by Sankardev in Assam in the 15th century. It has since gone on to become a distinct form of art which comprised elements of Sanskrit drama as well as other traditional art forms along with Sankardev’s own innovations. Before the Bhaona itself begins, a lamp made of bamboo with nine flames is lit up to symbolise nine kinds of devotion.
There is a narrator called a Sutradhar who not only introduces characters and tells the tale but also keeps reminding the audience of the importance of devotion to God by repeatedly saying: “Nirantare Hari Bol, Hari Bol.”
I hadn’t expected to understand too much of the play but what surprised me when I watched it was that the language used in Ankia Naat is not Assamese at all. It’s a language called Brojaweli that’s used: a mixture of Assamese, Hindi, Oriya and Maitheli. Two of the four languages, I had absolutely no knowledge of.
Thankfully, the programme included a copy of the story of the drama in English.

Not for Sale

2009-06-01T05:27:00.003Z

I've been reading a book called 'Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography' edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant. It comprises a collection of essays on the subject by various authors and is both interesting and well written.

From the book:

Pornography is the documentation of prostitution. It is a technologized form of prostitution -- prostitution at one remove.
(Rebecca Whisnant)

Sexuality and conflict are unavoidably part of being human. But blow bangs and cluster bombs are not. There are choices about how to deal with sexuality and conflict. Blow bangs and cluster bombs are neither natural nor inevitable. ... Sexuality is natural and conflict is inevitable. We could choose to create a sexuality rooted in an egalitarian ethic of mutuality and respect. We could choose to create a world order rooted in an egalitarian ethic of mutuality and respect. In such a world, blow bangs and cluster bombs would not exist. ... Letting go of blow bangs creates the space in which new intimacy and sexuality can flourish. Letting go of cluster bombs creates the space in which we can rethink our own affluence and allow new relationships between people to emerge. ... Pornography and the wars of empire are based on the idea that dominance is inevitable.
(Robert Jensen)

'How can you sell your Self?' It is not difficult. Once a woman is abused, as a majority of women in the sex industry have been, she gains the powerful skill of dissociation. Once a woman's ownership rights over her body are stolen, the body becomes foreign, separated from Self. The body becomes a tool, a weapon, a burden to drag around. The body can be used for profit or further cause. Some victims feel betrayed by their bodies and turn to punishing them. The body can be caused with alcohol, food, starvation, self-mutilation, and even death. The victim of cause is left to frantically seek ways to regain her control (by abusing herself) and to increase her power (by abusing others). Promiscuity and prostitution fit here, for if you give sex away it cannot be taken and if you profit economically you are gaining power in this society. It is not difficult at all.
(Taylor Lee)

Most women now are treated as whores; and so are girls growing up, as if their sexuality should be a sexuality of sexual service. It's important to think about the ways in which women have been colonized, because it all has to do with our own bodies. We may also be hurt when men send ships and drop bombs and do all the other really exciting things they do when one takes the remote away from them. But since women are usually hurt by make intimates or acquaintances, and since the hurt takes place in our bodies, it becomes important to realize that the training to accept hurt is hand-delivered by a man or men to the body of a girl. Sometimes the mother is the instrument through which girls are trained to accept pain and humiliation. In childhood, for most women who are prostituted, the training begins with incest or child sexual abuse, often called molestation. Incest is boot camp for prostitution. Incest makes a prostituted consciousness as well as the compliant and knowing body: a human body in which there is the recognition that you do this and you get a reward, you do this and you get punished, including by the loss of what passes for love.
(Andrea Dworkin)

Inconvenient statistics, feral facts like the average life expectancy of prostitutes, the average age of induction into prostitution, the average income of prostitutes, and so forth -- hard demographics -- have never disturbed those who defined the sex business as a force of liberation. The fact that the 'freedom' being realised is mostly the freedom of men to access the bodies of women and children -- or of G8 nations to access the markets and raw materials of Third World nations -- is conveniently overlooked when predation is redefined as progress.
(D A Clarke)

I'm told that the authors are radical feminists. I'm not sure precisely what the term 'radical' means but I do know that, often, when I read the works of those described as being radical feminists, their ideas come across to me as being common sense with nothing especially radical about them. To ask that a human being be treated as a human being with inherent worth, value and dignity really doesn't come across as being all that outlandish.

Years ago, I did, however, start off with the idea of that prostitution should be legal. And I'm still not sure if it's a good idea for prostitution to be made illegal. I say that because in making prostitution illegal, prostitutes are almost certain to be criminalized, and unless a law is drafted which ensures that prostitutes are not made into criminals, as wrong as I think prostitution is, a law making it illegal is not a law I would ever support. I don't think that prostitution is wrong because it involves women sinning or some such thing. I think prostitution, like trafficking and porn, is wrong because it involves treating a person as a commodity, because it involves selling a person's sexuality, because it is the 21st century's version of slavery.

Similarly, when it comes to porn, I'd love to see it being made illegal without the people shown in it being treated as criminals. That, however, is unlikely to happen. Porn is somehow touted as being freedom and liberation. Freedom from what, I can't help but wonder. Is a woman freed from being the 'property' of one man (or more men) to whom she is really available by becoming the property of a thousand (or more) men to whom she is virtually available? I'm not sure how it is liberating and I find it truly appalling that the freedom of speech of those who produce porn is somehow more important than the ability of the women in porn to control what is done with images of their bodies, that the films and images produced by porn makers are protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright and that the women in the films have no such parallel protection under the law except possibly the right to publicity which wouldn't do them much good anyway.

Torture as Art, Hate Mail and Privacy

2009-05-27T12:02:00.003Z

In 2007, Guillermo Vargas, a supposed artist, paid local children to catch a stray dog. He then tied the dog to a leash next to a bowl which said, "You are what you eat," and let the animal starve to death. He was later invited to recreate the installation at the 2008 Bienal Centroamericana Honduras.

Personally, I quite like the idea of showing that one is what one eats but that's what you have the "Ce n'est pas une pipe" genre of art for, what you have modern animation for, not what you use as an excuse to be inexcusably cruel and abusive. Yes, animals do starve. So do people. But usually not because some jerk's decided that watching them starve might be artistic. Also, I can sort of understand one person being a cruel but I cannot even begin to comprehend what the people who saw the installation were doing — surely, they could have given the dog some food and rescued him — and what were the judges thinking when they chose Vargas to be one of the artists to represent his country, Costa Rica, at the Bienal Centroamericana?

Unless we've become so used to cruelty that we don't see anything wrong in voluntarily starving a living being to death. Or unless that is now acceptable art.

A Dutch artist named Katinka Simonse (Tinkebell) seems to be the another person who treats torturing animals as art. Among other things, she killed her cat in 2004, skinned it and made it into a purse. She seems to have called the 'project' 'My dearest cat Pinkeltje'. There isn't too much to be said about her having done that. People who don't get why that isn't acceptable to do such things are unlikely to have enlightenment dawn simply because they're told that it isn't OK or because such legal enactments as the (Dutch) Health and Well-being Act for Animals exist. And the trouble is that there really doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who engage in torture masquerading as art. Take Theo van Meerendonk, another Dutch artist, for example, who, in 2004, covered a goldfish in paint and left it to flounder until it died. He was convicted of 'torturing a goldfish without a reasonable purpose'. Somehow, it's difficult to fathom how he could even have come up with such an idea.

Coming back to Tinkebell, her latest project 'Dearest Tinkebell' finds its base in what she did to her cat. Not too surprisingly, there were a number of people who weren't thrilled with what she had done, and between 2004 and 2008, she received a large quantity of hate mail. What she's now done is compiled this mail and self-published it (after having had her publisher back out because of the copyright and privacy issues involved).

What's creating a stir in legal circles is that she's not only published the mail itself but that she's also published information about its senders. Another artist named Coralie Vogelaar helped her collate information about the persons who sent her the mail. She says that all the information she's got is publicly available and that it was all legally obtained but even if that's the case, it raises some interesting questions. Among others: a) can information which has been posted on, say, a social networking site be collected, compiled and published by a third person? b) can hate mail (or, for that matter, any other mail) be republished without the consent of its senders (which, in this case, the artist does not seem to have obtained)?

And so, the book contains not just the hate mail itself but also the names of the persons who sent the mail along with their addresses and other identifying information. In some cases, this seems to include photographs of the senders. (In case you're wondering who sends hate mail as a general rule, yes, in most part, (it appears from the photos, etc. in the book that) it is bored American teenagers but there are others too.

The fact that the senders sent the mail not intending that it be compiled and published should ensure that if they or any of them should choose to do so, they would be able to get a court order to restrain distribution/sale of the book. If not anything else, they own the copyright in the letters. The fact that the letters are hate mail doesn't change the ownership of copyright nor does it change the fact that by publishing the mail without the senders' permission, the artist is effectively infringing the copyright of the authors of the letters. And similar arguments regarding copyright would exist with regard to the photos of senders downloaded off the net. When it comes to privacy though, the issue could be murky considering that, if what the artist claims is true, the information was made publicly available by the senders themselves.

In all probability, such issues will soon become clearer. Considering how willing people are to go to court these days, it's likely that it'll only be a matter of time before one or more of the senders of the hate mail approaches a court seeking some form of remedy.

Charity Hospital for Birds

2009-05-25T06:21:00.001Z

A pigeon got into my balcony. I saw it yesterday in the afternoon. There was some form of massive outgrowth over its right eye -- which looked like blobs of cement stuck over the eye -- and, having lost a number of feathers on that side of its body, it looked rather scrawny. I thought that it was just resting for a while and went back indoors.

It was only late in the evening that I went back on to the balcony again. The pigeon was still there and it was clear that it wasn't about to go anywhere. It was very weak and you could see that moving even a little was taking more energy than it had.

I didn't have the faintest idea of what to do to help it so I called everyone I could think of to ask if they knew a vet who takes care of birds. It turned out that most people couldn't possibly have cared less but I was ultimately given this address where doctors treat birds free of charge:

CHARITY BIRDS HOSPITAL
Shri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir Compound, Opposite the Red Fort,
Delhi.
Timing: 8:00 AM - 8:00 PM
Phone: 01132909216

The information came too late for my pigeon; it didn't survive the night. Perhaps it'll help some other bird. As for me, I just had a friend turn into a persona non grata because I was so stunned by how little he cared.

Niccolao Manucci

2009-05-21T10:16:00.001Z

Touted as a Pepys of Mogul India, Shrishti Publications published an abridged version of the autobiography of Niccolao Manucci years ago which I just came across. It says that in 1653, he ran away from Venice aged 14 as a stowaway on a vessel bound for Smyrna. Luck and his own resourcefulness seem to have stood by him though. The English Viscount Bellomont took him under his wing, and the young boy went with him from Asia Minor to India via Persia. The nobleman died near Hodal in 1656 though and left him alone in a foreign land. As usual though, luck and his own resourcefulness stood him in good stead and he became an artilleryman for Dara Shukoh, the eldest son of Shahjahan. He refused to work for Aurangzeb who succeeded Shahjahan and gradually began to practise medicine. He died in 1659.
He seems to have been an interesting person. I'm particularly intrigued by his refusal to work for Aurangzeb considering all that is said of the Emperor.

Photographs of Pune University

2009-05-11T01:38:00.000Z

During the days of the Raj, what is now the Pune University campus was the monsoon residence of the Governor of the Province of Bombay. The photo below is of what was once his swimming pool and is situated just next to the residence itself (which has a 300 metre high tower) constructed in the Italian-Gothic style. Usually, the swimming pool — such as it is — has very little water in it and looks nothing like this; the photo below was taken during a particularly heavy monsoon.

More Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22257505@N05/sets/72157603578626033/show/

NE India

2009-05-10T17:14:00.000Z

On a blog I usually enjoy reading, I came across this:

Maybe if Kashmir hadn’t been dragging us [Indians] down it would have been the north-east.

And yeah, it stung the way it does when an MCP makes some extraordinarily sexist remark without even meaning to be sexist. Is that what the rest of India actually thinks? And it's still surprised that the NE isn't thrilled?

Canterbury Tales

2009-05-02T06:49:00.000Z

The ‘Canterbury Tales’ are the most famous of Chaucer’s works. He began to write them in the 1380s and although they display the style he developed in his English Period, they also include some material he had written earlier. (for example, there is evidence of earlier works being revised in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ and the ‘Monk’s Tale’.) Chaucer also specifically referred to ‘The Legende of Good Women’ and to ‘Lyf of Seynt Cecyle’ in the Prologue.
There have been some suggestions that there exist close links between Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ (of which there is no evidence that Chaucer ever saw) and various other continental works. However, apart from the use of an enclosing narrative within which to frame the tales, ‘Canterbury Tales’ appears to be an original and distinctively English work.
The work is a collection of tales told by twenty-nine pilgrims who meet at an inn on their way to Canterbury Cathedral which became a site of pilgrimage after the brutal murder of Thomas Becket there, and the poet himself is a lively presence in the tales.

Bifel that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
--- General Prologue

As Chaucer’s lines quoted above show, he met the pilgrims at the inn. He says that the host of the inn, Harry Bailey said that he would accompany them as a guide and that they should all tell tales – two each, both on the way there and on the way back – and that the one who told the best tale would win a supper at the cost of the other pilgrims on their return from Canterbury.
Thus, the original plan was to have about one hundred and twenty tales told. However, there are only twenty-four tales which have survived the ages and scholars are not sure what the correct sequence of the fragments is – unlike in the case of Shakespeare, there are no metrical tests which can aid such a determination.
Chaucer warns his readers that he must repeat all the tales as he heard them. The tales themselves reveal why he themselves reveal why he feels the need to give his readers this warning – they are distinguished by their humour, satire and naturalism. They tell the stories of a wide variety of people including a prioress, a wife, a man of law, a poet, a cook, a squire and a knight. As this list shows, the pilgrims were neither very rich – the rich would not have mixed in such company –nor were they very poor – the poor would not have been able to go on a pilgrimage.
Thus, the pilgrims belonged to the middle class. Some of their tales such as the Miller’s Tale, the Reeves’s Tale, the Shipmans’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale and the Cook’s Tale belong to a distinctive medieval literary comic genre known as the Fabliau.
The Fabliau was dead as a genre when Chaucer chose to revive it in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It was originally a French genre and there is no concrete evidence to show why Chaucer turned to it but it may have been because he was attracted to its irreverential attitudes towards societal norms and conventional morality – a typical fabliau was a brief comic tale in verse, usually scurrilous and often scatological or otherwise obscene. The style was simple and straightforward and the characters belonged to the middle or lower classes. Considering this though, it is no surprise Chaucer repeatedly warned his readers of the content in the ‘Canterbury Tales’.

Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
--- Miller's Prologue

The first tale in ‘Canterbury Tales’ is the ‘Tale of the Knight’. (The pilgrims drew straws to decide who would begin.) Chaucer's knight had had a distinguished career and his tale was one of romance – it was about the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emily and the eventual marriage of Palamon and Emily which brought peace between Athens and Thebes. It is demi-classical and probably reflects how knights understood the ‘noble ideal’ at the time.
The miller then told a tale where the clerk of a carpenter and a parish clerk both lusted after a carpenter’s wife. The carpenter’s clerk tricked the carpenter into sleeping in a tub in anticipation of Noah’s Flood coming again while he went to the bedroom with the carpenter’s wife. The two were interrupted by the parish clerk who asked for a kiss. The woman stuck her bottom out of the window and, not realising this, the parish clerk planted a kiss on it. Furious, he then heated a plough blade and asked for another kiss. The second time, the carpenter’s clerk took the place of the woman but instead of being kissed, he was struck with the hot blade. In pain, he shouted for water and, in the process, he woke the carpenter and caused the neighbours to rush in. however, not realising what had happened, the carpenter thought that the cries for water were due to the coming of the second flood and the neighbours thought that he was insane. Thus, the ‘Miller’s Tale’ reveals the medieval understanding of Noah’s Flood and embodies the common medieval motif of the misdirected kiss.
After that came the ‘Tale of the Reeve’. The reeve spoke of a thieving miller, the intellectual trickery of clerks and of the miller finally being beaten. It is a slapstick comedy about mistaken beds and is much less jolly than the tale told by the miller. It was probably motivated by the reeve’s desire for revenge and may have been based on ‘Gombert and the Two Clerks’ by Jean Bodel.
Once the reeve finished, the man of law took over and told his tale in the medieval tradition of tales about exiled queens. His tale was about Constance who had also appeared in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’. The man of law praised Chaucer for his exaltation of women and said that he would not tell cursed tales of incest (which is the cause of Constance’s exile in an early work referred to in ‘Emare’ in the fourteenth century) although Gower said nothing about incest. The man of law also ensured that his tale ended happily: in Chaucer’s version of Constance’s Tale told by the man of law, she was reunited with her father, the Emperor of Rome and her son succeeded him to the imperial throne. Chaucer composed the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ in rime royal which he himself created and which is one of his most important contributions to English Poetry.
After this tale, the cook told a tale in which an apprentice moved in with a thief after his master charged him with theft. The thief’s wife ‘swyved’ for a livelihood although she ran a shop as a front. Chaucer himself appears not to have completed this tale. Some medieval scribes inserted the “Tale of the Gamelyn’ after it – this was the source of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ – but this is no longer done. A few scholars have also speculated about whether the gamelyn’s tale was meant to substitute the cook’s tale but there has been no concrete evidence to support this proposition.
‘Canterbury Tales’ continues with the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’. This tale includes a prologue which speaks of the wife of Bath herself. Her name was Alisoun and she had been married five times. She said that three of her husbands had been good and two, bad. The first three were old and rich. One was unfaithful; she got her revenge by pretending to be unfaithful herself. Another knocked her down so hard that she became deaf. She pretended to be dying and when he then leaned over to ask for forgiveness, she responded by knocking him into the fireplace. After this, they made up, he gave her sovereignty in marriage and they apparently lived in bliss.
The tale she told was an Arthurian romance about a man who saved himself from a death sentence and got a beautiful wife by discovering what it is that women most desire: sovereignty over their husbands. By later allowing his wife to choose how she would appear to him instead of choosing for her, she decided to turn herself into a beautiful young maiden all the time and they lived together happily.
Both the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and its prologue are full of advice for would-be wicked wives. The tale also speaks of the ability of love to transform a person and of the nature of true ‘gentillesse’ which depends on deeds and not on birth. Chaucer drew on a number of different sources including Dante’s ‘Convivo’ to write this tale. In fact, having the wife of Bath quote Dante at all significantly increases the complexity of her character.
The ‘Friar’s Tale’ came next and it was directly aimed at the summoner – his rival when it came to preying on the poor. In his tale, a summoner was carried off by the devil when a poor widow on whom he served a false summons cursed him ‘from the heart’. The tale is short and is an Exemplum: a type of story frequently used by medieval preachers to make a moral point.
The summoner responded to this by telling an equally nasty tale about a friar in the ‘Summoner’s Prologue and Tale’. He told the story of a friar who preached a sermon on the evils of anger to a man whose illness had made grouchy. When the friar in the tale insisted on being given a rich gift in payment for the sermon, the man said he would do so only if he swore to divide it equally among the members of his convent and then proceeded to fart on the friar’s hand. The outraged friar complained to the lord of the manor who became far in interested in trying to understand how to divide the indivisible than in addressing the friar’s complaint. His squire ultimately suggested that the friar himself fart at the centre of a wheel around which the members of his convent had place their noses so that they would all smell it equally.
After this, the clerk began to tell a tale. The innkeeper (whose idea it had been to tell tales) asked him to tell the tale in a simple manner. The result is that, unlike the man of law’s tale, the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ is not in the High Style. It is based on a story Boccacio wrote in ‘Decameron’ (Tenth Day, Tenth Tale). The tale describes how Walter, a marquis, chose Griselda, the daughter of a serf as his wife and then proceeded to test her obedience; she had sworn to obey him and not to question anything he did before they got married. He pretended to kill their children and then sent her away telling her that he wanted to take a new wife. He then sent for her son and daughter (whom he had supposedly killed) and told her that the girl was to be his new wife. After her return at his behest, he announced that she had passed his tests and that her children were alive and welcomed her as his wife.
The next tale was about an old man who had been cuckolded by his wife and was told by the merchant. It brings out the medieval understanding of marriage and St Jerome’s ‘Adversus Jovinianum’ is quoted in it. The tale is in the High Style and displays Chaucer’s command over rhetoric. The tale has sparked much debate. In many ways it is like a fabliau but its mixture of genres and violation of many standard norms have made scholars suspect that it reflects the real own marital experiences more than it simply narrates a story detached from the narrator.
Once this rather sombre tale had been told, the squire told his tale. It was about a knight who rode in during a feast bearing gifts for King Cambuskan and his children – two sons and a daughter. The daughter received a magic mirror and a ring which enabled her to understand a wounder falcon he came across who had been betrayed by a false lover. Although it is mentioned in the tale that the stories of the king and his sons will be told, nothing more is said about them in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It is unclear whether Chaucer meant to write these tales later and simply did not do so, or if the tales have been lost, or if the ‘Squire’s Tale’ is meant to be only half told. Many people thought that it had been left to be completed at a later date and a few people did in fact try to complete it themselves. For example, a continuation can be found in books III and IV of Spenser’s ‘Fairie Queen’ although writing such a continuation could not have been easy since the tale has no obvious source; it simply seems to reflect the medieval curiosity about the orient.
In the version of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which has come down to us, the squire was interrupted by the franklin who proceeded to tell a Breton Lay about romance and freedom. In his tale, two people got married swearing never to exercise absolute power over each other. The wife was later wooed by a squire and she told her that she would give him her love if he got some coastal rocks for her. The squire did so with the help of a clerk who demanded a large fee and then demanded that she keep her promise. Her husband too told her to do so when she told him about what had happened. Impressed by the husband’s magnanimity, the squire released the wife from her promise and the clerk, in turn impressed by the squire, did not collect his fee. The unanswered question in this tale is, “Who is the most free?” The tale does not have an obvious source although the moving of rocks is seen in Merlin’s legend, and Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ speaks of setting impossible tasks for would-be lovers. The tale itself is the end of the ‘marriage group’ in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which begins with the wife of Bath’s tale and discusses rules in a marriage.
The next tale is about the consequences of sin and is told by the physician. In this tale, a wicked judge who had his eye on a virginal girl and tried to attain her by awarding her to his churl as a slave in a false case received his just deserts. The girl’s father slayed her and brought her head to the judge after the award was made. The people, infuriated by the whole sequence of events, not only imprisoned the judge but also condemned the churl to be hanged. The girl’s father intervened on the churl’s behalf to have his life spared though and he was therefore merely exiled. This tale shows Chaucer’s ability to convey pitiable circumstances especially in the narration of the father cutting off his daughter’s head (to save her honour). The poet has himself said that he referred to ‘Virginia and Appius’ by Titus Livius although it is obvious that he also referred to ‘La Roman de la Rose’.
The pilgrims were then told about the consequences of gluttony in the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’ in which the pardoner also described the tricks of his own trade. The tale itself is an exemplum which makes its moral point through the story of three riotous young men whose gluttony ultimately directly lead to two of them dying – the three of them set out to kill death. They met an old man en route whom they asked for directions. He led them to a pot of gold. The youngest of them then went to get food and wine from a town. He poisoned the wine though. On his return, the other two killed him and then died themselves when they drank the poisoned wine. The pardoner’s tale was very popular in contemporary stories although the old man is a mysterious figure in Chaucer’s version.
Somehow, the pardoner and the host managed to get into a fight once this tale was told and the knight had to intervene to preserve the peace. After harmony had been restored, the shipman told a tale which, unlike the other tales, was set in France and which exhibited the relationship between sex and money. In this tale, a monk borrowed money from a husband which he gave to the husband’s wife and in exchange, he took her to bed. When the husband asked him to return the money, the monk told him that he had given it to his wife but when he asked her for it, she told him that she had spent it on clothes which he had worn for his honour and that she would repay him in bed.
After this tale was told, the prioress stepped in. she was obviously high-born and was not entirely free from coquettishness as is evidenced by her riding side-saddle – a fashion which had only just come into vogue when Chaucer wrote the ‘Canterbury Tales’. The ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is in the tradition of tales about the Virgin Mary. In this tale, the Virgin apparently places a grain on the tongue of a Christian boy who had been murdered by Jews so that he could sing even after he had died till his corpse was found and the grain was removed. The tale is intensely anti-Semitic and, in it, the boy is buried as a martyr.
Chaucer himself then narrated a minstrel romance to the pilgrims about Sir Thopas, a knight whom all the maidens loved but who was in love with an elf-queen he had seen in a dream. The tale appeared to be interminable so the host cut Chaucer short and asked him to tell another tale. The poet agreed and told a prose tale about a melibee.

...and the tales go on.

Enough Already! Another Dowry Story

2009-04-30T15:26:00.002Z

Today, I read a report in either the Hindustan Times or the Times of India -- I don't remember which -- of a bridegroom who was beaten up by villagers when he demanded even more dowry in what must have been not more than a few hours after the marriage ceremony.
He was given the keys to an Alto but wanted a Scorpio and one and a half million rupees in cash. The villagers beat him and his father up, kept some of his guests as hostages and took the matter to the village panchayat.
The panchayat amazingly enough got the man to divorce his new bride saying that he didn't deserve her and got him to pay her family eight hundred thousand rupees, the amount they had spent since the time of the engagement.
The story was such a refreshing change from the ones one usually hears. I just hope that it's true.

Informed Consent

2009-04-21T16:09:00.002Z

In most countries, when you go to a doctor to have some procedure performed, the doctor is required to obtain your consent to the procedure being performed. He isn't simply supposed to give you the name of the procedure. Instead, he's required to explain the procedure to you, and tell you about precautions you need to take, what the risk factors are, what the possible consequences are, whether the procedure is likely to succeed, what the alternatives are, how much it's likely to cost, and whether it is necessary.

Somehow though, that's not something which the average Indian doctor does. True, they'll all ask that you sign a waiver to the effect that you are aware that death and a whole range of other disasters can result from being put under General Anesthesia, but that doesn't make you aware of surgery-specific risks. For example, scapulo-thoracic fusion involves a 90% chance of your winding up with a punctured lung, and if your orthopaedic surgeon isn't equipped to deal with it -- which it's unlikely he will be -- there's a pretty high chance that you won't leave surgery alive.

Or take something much simpler like being prescribed drugs. Prozac is capable of causing short-term memory loss, something which can be terrifying if you don't know what's going on. But you're still unlikely to hear a doctor tell a patient that when prescribing it.

Even drugs easily obtained OTC can have severe side effects. Something as simple as Aspirin can cause your stomach to bleed. That too isn't information you get when your doctor tells you not to worry.

The problem is that being badly informed makes one's consenting to anything meaningless. Somehow, this is entirely lost on many doctors who respond to questions about treatment and medicines not with answers but with a list of their qualifications. Apparently, the fact that they've got x number of letters stuck after their names entitles them to be treated like gods.

Online Impersonation ?

2009-04-18T16:23:00.003Z

Sometime ago, I deactivated my Facebook account primarily because of the 'duplication of social networks' argument. Besides, I keep in touch with most of the people with whom I want to be in touch without Facebook; I'm not overtly fond of social networking sites.

As a result, I was a bit surprised when I received a message from Orkut saying I had approved someone's 'Add friend' invite. Soon after, I began receiving mails from the friend I'd supposedly added.

The friend signed his name as Sexy, Crazy something-or-the-other. And no, I don't know if he actually expected a rank stranger to reply to a name like that. The mails were in a mixture of Assamese and English, and were familiar to a degree my closest friends would not be.

After a while, I got sick of getting the mails and, on seeing a link to the associated profile, clicked on it. I found myself at "Nandita Saikia's" profile. I couldn't bring myself to read it carefully; the
two bits I remember are "fuck me harder" and the word 'condoms' along with a picture of an actress. I think it was Mallika Sherawat.

I went to the 'Report Abuse' section and filed a complaint. I wasn't sure if it was a case of impersonation since there could well be another person with my name so I stuck to complaining about the mail I was getting.

To my surprise, Orkut replied a day later saying that they agreed that the content violated their terms of service and that they'd removed it.

I feel relieved and grateful that it's gone. What I completely fail to understand though is why anyone would ever put phrases like that up on a public profile (assuming it wasn't about impersonating and embarrassing another person). And what leaves mr stunned is that there
are people who do not think twice before sending explicit messages to others whom they do not know from Adam.

Fictional Biographies

2009-04-17T13:34:00.002Z

I love impressionism. The light and airy feel which so many of their paintings have. It doesn't matter to me that they -- or Renoir, at any rate -- have been written off as chocolate box painters; being inaccessible is not in itself a mark of great talent.

So far, I've read fictional biographies of four of the Impressionists: Renoir, Pissarro, van Gogh and, by Charles Gorham, Gauguin. There's much to be said for fictional biographies. As Guy Endore who wrote 'King of Paris', a novel based on the lives of Alexandre Dumas and his son, said, "One would have no excuse for adding a word to the existing records if human beings were not so obstinately determined to conceal the truth about themselves." And determined to conceal themselves, people are. Dumas, for example, who wrote a six-volume autobiography, devoted to his first Parisian mistress, Catherine Lebay, their affaire and their son a sum total of eight words. The second Alexandre Dumas did not write a six-volume autobiography but he did point out: "Autobiographies are meaningless because no man dares put into writing
the most significant facts of his life."

And then there are those who do not leave autobiographies behind them at all.

Perhaps that is why fictional works based on the lives of historical characters are so compelling. Left to a good author, it could well be that fiction offers far more truth and insight than cold, hard facts lend themselves to. In the hands of a bad author though, one is left with nothing but history mangled.

Gurgaon

2009-04-07T06:02:00.000Z

For some reason, having discovered that Gurgaon is accessible without spending 1000 INR on each trip, I’ve suddenly found that I spend half my time not in Delhi but in Gurgaon.

The cheapest way to get to reach Gurgaon that I know of is to go to Dhaula Kuan and take another bus from there to Gurgaon – there’s one which leaves every few minutes. It costs between 10 and 14 rupees depending on where in Gurgaon one wants to go. It’s also possible to get buses from RKP, Safdarjung and Karol Bagh.

Every time I’ve been to the city – assuming it qualifies as a city – it always strikes me as a very strange place. For one thing, it is mall country and I can’t imagine what one would do there if one wasn’t into shopping. But even if every person in Gurgaon does love to shop, I don’t really know how the malls there are commercially viable. There are so many of them that it almost feels as though there’s a mall for every person.

Then of course, there are the offices. They, combined with the malls and ‘posh’ housing in the vicinity, are probably the reason why you have people make statements like: “There are no holes in Gurgaon.” And on that side of town, it’s entirely possible that there aren’t.

Go beyond where the offices and malls are though and you’ve left the Gurgaon you see in advertisements. You’ll reach a village that’s trying to be a town. It’s not posh. It’s not especially clean. There are no MNCs there. There are no malls: the shops are all in tiny little rooms which close by 8 p.m. The people are not the kind one meets on the other side of town. They’re conservative and they look it.

Gurgaon feels like a place that’s been split in two. The urban and the rural. And no, they’re not competing with each other for anything; they exist oblivious to each other.

Meanwhile, the ground water level in Gurgaon falls by an amazing 12 feet each year. One can only wonder if it’s just a matter of time before the place caves in on itself. Literally.

The Undomestic Goddess

2009-04-01T15:08:00.000Z

I read ‘The Undomestic Goddess’ by Sophie Kinsella a few weeks ago. And then I reread it. It’s the first laugh out loud book I’ve read in a while.

This evening I told a friend about it and asked why there wasn’t a middle ground. Why did the story have to involve a woman choosing between a full equity partnership at a prestigious law firm on one hand and cleaning some else’s loos – Royal Doulton (I think that’s what they were) or not – on the other.

My first response to that was that it was probably because it made good reading. Had she become something else, she wouldn’t have been able to try to melt chick peas, or to manage to bleach her hair while cleaning the loo.

Thinking about it though, if one actually wanted a complete break from a high pressure job, what would one actually do? Become a librarian? Spend time renovating renaissance art? Turn into a shopgirl? The trouble though is that none of those jobs is necessarily low-pressure’. And neither is staying home and doing nothing.

Jantar Mantar

2009-03-31T00:57:00.000Z

After being in Delhi for what’s hardly a short length of time, I finally went to the Jantar Mantar. It’s full of people during the day. And not one of them knows how exactly it works.

Although the Jantar Mantar was built only a few centuries ago, no records survive from the period when it was built which tell contemporary scientists how to use it. The only documents which are in existence are records of observations which are not especially useful in terms of understanding how the observations were conducted. What’s surprising is that in addition to none of the original blueprints being available, the records of subsequent restorations are not easily available either. This doesn’t mean that just the records of 19th century restorations are unavailable but also that records of just how the structure was reinforced with concrete sometime in the 1980s are unavailable.

What this effectively presumably means is that astrophysicists have no easy way of knowing what was a part of the original structure and what is a later addition (or removal).

The structures as they exist themselves are full of peculiarities and even if words like ‘declination’, ‘arc minute’ and ‘azimuth’ mean absolutely nothing to one, some of the peculiarities are visible to the naked eye. And if one doesn’t know what they mean, well, the experts aren’t sure themselves. They’ve made some comparisons with the Jaipur observatory and done some research themselves and, from what they have been able to figure out, it turns out that observations made using the Jantar Mantar are extremely accurate.

And that’s what the Jantar Mantar essentially is. For some reason though, every night, instead of being kept dark as it should be, the instruments are all lit up making the observatory unusable. To be fair though, if someone – meaning, presumably, someone with good credentials – does want to use the Jantar Mantar to observe the skies, the lights are switched off. Although, of course, there’s precious little that can be done about the light pollution in the area situated as it is in the heart of central Delhi’s commercial area.

For the lay person though, even if the thrill of actually using the instruments completely eludes one, just being there late at night is an experience in itself. The Jantar Mantar is surrounded by noisy streets and overlooked by big city buildings all lit up. The compound itself though is quiet and very peaceful. The symmetry and sheer beauty of the instruments is overwhelming. Sitting down on the lawns in the compound, it’s entirely possible to forget that one is in Delhi at all.

The Passions of the Mind

2009-03-06T09:31:00.000Z

My latest addiction is Irving Stone. I’ve always enjoyed his work but somehow, rereading it has brought me more pleasure than any other author has in a long time. The last book I read was ‘Depths of Glory’ about Camille Pissarro. I think I particularly enjoyed it because I love Impressionism though.

At the moment, I’m reading ‘The Passions of the Mind’ about Sigmund Freud. And I’m bored almost out of my mind. The book seems to be similar to the last one except that instead of descriptions of numerous paintings, it’s filled with descriptions of endless neuroses.

I don’t claim to have ever understood Freud. I don’t think that I particularly want to understand him either. Somehow, the idea that every neurosis has its roots in human sexuality is a theory that I find very difficult to swallow.

What astonished me though is how badly Freud’s books did. Of the six hundred copies of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ which were initially printed, very few were actually sold, for example. When I read about his publisher complaining about only a hundred and twenty-three copies being sold despite the fact that books on the subject were popular, I could help but wonder how it was that such a large amount of his work actually survived.

Another thing which surprised me was the anti-Semitism in Austria. Earlier, I had only read about it in the most academic of terms and somehow, its portrayal in the book, fiction though it is, made it seem much more real. And for some reason, I couldn’t help but wonder how, or even if, all of Freud’s work survived WW II and what happened to his family.

Somehow, every time I think of anyone who belonged to the nineteenth century, it’s always in terms of their belonging to history books. Reading biographies has, however, made me realise in a way I never did before that these were not people who belonged to some long forgotten era. They are people who often lived into the twentieth century, whose children and grandchildren were almost certainly affected by the Holocaust.
Speaking of persons relegated to the pages of history texts, the book also contained a poignant description of the Hapsburgs: of the Emperor Franz Josef plodding on while the Empress, Elizabeth of Bavaria, who having developed a distaste for Vienna, toured Europe and was later assassinated, of the Crown Prince Rudolf who was forced into a marriage with Stephanie of Belgium and later had his attempt at obtaining an annulment thwarted by his father, of the untried Archduke Ferdinand who was to become Emperor after the Crown Prince died in a double suicide with the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera at Mayerling. Her body ‘was removed and buried without ceremony in the monastery of Heiligenkreuz’, his was placed in the Crown Prince’s apartment in Vienna till his coffin was placed in the crypt of the Capuchin Church.

Coming back to Irving Stone, the dedication on the book says that he’s written twenty-five books. I’d like to begin collecting them.

Chaucer

2009-03-02T06:45:00.000Z

Geoffrey Chaucer – widely credited as being the father of English Literature – is believed to have been born around 1343. the image his poetry gives us of him is that of a dreamer but even a cursory glance at his life reveals that he was anything but an idealistic dreamer with his head in the clouds: history reveals that Chaucer led a busy official life as a bureaucrat, a courtier, a diplomat and for a time as the Comptroller of Customs.

The name Chaucer is a French form of the Latin ‘Calcearius’ which means a shoemaker. Both Chaucer’s father John and his grandfather Robert appear to have been wealthy merchants though. Chaucer’s birth was earlier said to have been in 1328 but legal proceedings show that his father was about twelve years old in 1324 and that he was till unmarried in 1328 which makes it highly improbable that Chaucer was, in fact, born in 1328. What is undisputed is that Chaucer was born in London.

Chaucer’s Official Life:
The information that has come down to us about Chaucer’s life is primarily from documents of an official character. As a result, there are virtually no known facts about his early life and education. He first appears in the household accounts of Elisabeth, Countess of Ulster whom he served as a page. The accounts show that she paid for small items of clothing for him in April, May and December of 1357.

In 1359, Chaucer travelled to France with Lionel of Antwerp, Elisabeth’s husband, during the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War when Edward III invaded the country. He had the misfortune of being taken prisoner while he was in France and was ransomed with the help of a ₤ 16 contribution from the king in March 1360. Soon after, he joined the Royal Service.

Chaucer married one of the ladies-in-waiting to Phillipa of Hainault, Edward III’s queen, around 1366. Her name was Phillipa (de) Roet and in 1367, the king granted him a pension of twenty marks. His wife, Phillipa had been granted a pension of ten marks the year before and Phillipa’s sister, Katherine Swynford married John of Gaunt after the death of her first husband, Hugh de Swynford in 1372. This marriage may account for the many favours and the patronage which John of Gaunt accorded to Chaucer although the two knew each other even before the marriage had taken place: in 1369, Chaucer wrote a poem after the death of John’s wife, Blanche called The Book of the Duchesse. It had 1334 lines in octosyllabic couplets.

It is obvious that Chaucer used his personal connections to advance his career. He travelled abroad several times with the earliest recorded official trip being in 1372 as one of three commissioners sent to Genoa, Italy to negotiate special maritime facilities for trade. He has also travelled to Italy in 1368 to attend the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante, the daughter of Galeazzo II, Visconti in Milan. It was during this trip that he probably met Jean Froissart and Petrarch.

In 1372, John of Gaunt granted Chaucer’s wife, Phillipa and annuity of ₤ 10 and in 1374, he granted Chaucer himself a like annuity. Further, the king granted Chaucer an annuity and he was appointed ‘Comptroller of Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells’ as well as of ‘Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London’ in the same year.

Chaucer appears to have moved to Kent while he was still working as Comptroller. Around this time, he was appointed ‘Commissioner of the Peace’ and two large windfalls came his way in the form of the wardships of two heirs. He was sent abroad in the king’s sevice in 1376 and 1377 while he was living in Kent and is also believed to have begun writing Canterbury Tales around this time since his fictional characters pass through Kent.

Chaucer became a Member of Parliament for Kent in 1386. England had a new king by this time – Richard II – and Chaucer’s wife, Philippa had died. Richard II confirmed Chaucer’s pensions and offices. Nonetheless, he seems to have been in a financially precarious situation for a while; he inter alia asked for the grant of a butt of wine annually and in 1398 obtained letters of protection against his creditors.

Henry IV became king after Richard II. He not only granted a new pension of 40 marks to Chaucer but confirms all of Richard II’s grants. However, having no ready money himself, he appears not to have paid him – the poet himself hints at this in Compleynt to his Purs.

Chaucer died soon after this and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Although the exact date of his death is uncertain, it is presumed to have been on October 25, 1400. his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb – in what is now called Poets’ Corner – in 1556.

Photograph Backgrounds

2009-02-23T06:50:00.002Z

I've always wondered why when people get photographs taken by 'professionals' at local shops, they wind up with their pictures being superimposed over the most garish and /or unrealistic backgrounds imaginable. Many couples also have wedding pictures of themselves, inter alia, emerging from massive hearts encircled with red roses and surrounded by butterflies the size of their heads.
This afternoon, I came across a passage in The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera which finally explained it to me in terms I actually understood:
"Solomon the township photographer is now a rich man. His studio at the back of the grocers is papered from floor to ceiling with photographs of Africans in European wigs, Africans in mini-skirts, Africans who can pierce the focussing lens with a gaze of paranoia. The background of each photo is the same: waves breaking upon a virgin beach and a lone eagle swivelling like glass fracturing light towards the potent spaces of the universe. A cruel yearning that can only be realised in crude photography. The sqalor of reality was oblliterated in an explosion of flashbulbs and afterwards one could say, 'That's me, man -- me! In the city.'"

Purana Qila

2009-02-15T15:04:00.001Z

I went for a walk in Purana Qila (the Old Fort next to Delhi’s High Court) the other day. It’s surprisingly well-maintained inside. There are lawns and it isn’t very dirty. One can walk around the ‘perimeter’ of the fort – or at least those who have a head for heights can. On one side there’s nothing but a wall which is a few feet in breath and has a drop of about three feet on one side and at least fifty on the other – or what seemed like fifty to me. I could be wrong but I doubt it.

There are a few buildings which survive inside the compound of the fort. One of them apparently once housed a library whose stairs the Mughal Emperor Humayun fell down and died.

What struck me as a bit strange though is that there were notice boards all over the place which said that the buildings were protected monuments but there were surprisingly few boards which said what in God’s name the buildings actually were.

That’s one thing which I find strange about Delhi – the place is full of old structures. Few people know what they are. And even fewer care.

Growing Older

2009-02-13T09:48:00.001Z

Sometimes there are things which you take for granted which one day, you find that you can no longer do. Your eyes may not be what they once were, and you may find that you can no longer embroider a piece of cloth as finely as you'd like to. You may find that your body has given out and that you can no longer spend hour upon hour out gardening. You find that you now know what means when people say that youth is wasted on the young.

Some changes you plan for. You create what you know will be your last tapestry in your twenties by which time, your eyesight has already begun to fail. Yes, you know that with even a minimal amount of luck you'll have half a century left to read but being able to read doesn't mean that you'll be able to spend appreciable amounts of time of petit point.

Other changes you don't plan for. You injure your hand and find that you no longer have the dexterity to be able to play the piano well. You remember the notes but your fingers are unable to reach the keys.

Both ways, with the passage of time, you realise that there are things which your body is simply ill equipped for. Going on a ten mile hike to watch the sun set is unthinkable. And waking up obscenely early to watch it rise is just as unlikely.

But even though you may quite literally be able to feel your body age, and see wrinkles form where there were none before, with every one of your experiences etched on your face for the world to see, the one good thing about growing older is that you begin to feel more and more comfortable with your body.

You stop wishing for a perfect body. You no longer value yourself with a tape-measure, and if you're lucky, you begin to realise that what you're worth has nothing to do with your appearance, that beauty is skin deep and that what matters is what lies inside of you.

You also begin to become more and more comfortable with your body. It's a part of you. And for that, you learn to value it. It doesn't matter if you're not really up to going for those ten mile hikes any more. It feels just as good to lie down in bed, in your own skin, hopefully, with someone who matters to you.

And not embroidering 'monstrosities with neither beauty nor charm' leaves you with so much more time for other things. Perhaps things which matter to you: time to spend with the people you love, at art galleries, at museums, in gardens, with your favourite books; all things which perhaps the passage of time has taught you to appreciate so much more than you did when you were younger. All things which are far more important than being able to run a marathon, or spend an afternoon out in the sun weeding without feeling fatigued.

Growing old, and having your body change in a way which allows you to accomplish less physically need not always be a bad thing.

Design

2009-01-27T06:46:00.001Z

I am absolutely in love with design and don't think twice before sacrificing a little functionality for a lot of style. Sometimes, however, I can't help but wonder if we've let design gain a disproportionate amount of importance in our lives.
The last time I bought a cell phone -- quite a long time ago now -- I ultimately picked up a Nokia E50. Almost completely outdated at the moment but I love it nonetheless. The thing is though that choosing it was painful. I had a look at what was available in the market (in my budget) and ultimately picked on this phone because it had everything I wanted while being slim enough to fit into an evening purse without a problem. (The last phone I owned was a Nokia 3350, if I remember the name of the model correctly, and it lasted me a good six years.)
What I found particularly painful about having to buy the phone is that even though this was the model I focussed on within ten minutes of being in a shop, every time I tried to buy it, I'd have people tell me all about how I should buy something else which looked better (to them). The result was that it took me a good two weeks to actually buy the phone.
And if that wasn't enough, once I got it, I discovered that everything on and in it was treated like an extension of me and my personality whether it was the ringtone I chose or the wall paper.
Quite frankly, I'm not sure if I want design to play such a huge part in my life. For example, I know that I don't want mugs made of white ceramic with grey-steel handles just because they're apparently über cool, never mind that they're also über uncomfortable to hold. I don't want to have to rate cars on how sleek they look -- I just want them to be able to get me to go from point A to B. And I certainly don't want things like my footwear to depend entirely on design.
Quite frankly, I'm willing to leave avant garde design to art galleries. In my personal life, I don't want everything I own to be a so-called extension of my personality, to be heavily imbibed with meaning, to be a way people think that they can read me, to be a factor which people use to judge my values and my priorities, to turn into a tangible manifestation of the design versus functionality debate.

Defined by Blood

2009-01-19T06:34:00.004Z

To learn the value of physical integrity...

1.

A child you're clutching to your bosom. He'd been pushed aside, and hit his head on something which left a nasty gash in his forehead. Blood gushes out of the wound as it always does from head injuries. He's screaming, crying either in pain or in fear — you're not sure which. It's probably a bit of both. You thank God that you're wearing a black shirt. Black satin. Cool. Smooth. It doesn't absorb any appreciable amount of blood but it does camouflage it, making it possible for you not to become every bit as hysterical as the child, ensuring that the child himself does not become even more frightened than he already is. Never mind that the white marble floor is turning red. Or that the child will be marked for life because of, you believe, your failure to provide protection.

2.

Insensate. Unfeeling. You're lying down on your bed, so shell-shocked that you barely know which way is up. You somehow manage to get yourself away from the bed, out of the room. He says he's sorry over and over again; repeats the word so many times that you lose count of the number of times he apologises. You're not sure if his regret means anything to you though. He's asked you if you'd like to sleep and you must have said that you would. You don't remember getting off the chair you'd sunk into but you do remember him guiding you towards your bedroom. His hand on the small of your back, so gentle that you could barely feel it. And then without knowing how, you find yourself lying down on your bed yet again. You know he's said something but, to you, the words are incoherent. Possibly realising that nothing he says means anything to you, he says no more. He covers you with something and then he leaves you, bleeding and broken, in bed. You don't know what he's covered you with and you don't care; you're grateful for anything which allows you to feel as though you've gone into hiding. You do not yet know that it'll be months before you are able to lie down on a bed without having nightmares of him.

3.

Clumps of hair lie on the floor. You hear yourself scream. The doorbell finally rings but it's been a long time since that's made any difference to him. There's blood on the sheets. You can feel it sliding down your body. There's a rag being pushed down your throat; the neighbours do make a difference after all. You cannot scream. Neither can you beg. You pray. He shouts, wondering how someone he loves can do this. You only wonder what he's talking about convinced that he's lost his mind, and then realise that it's you who's becoming insane as you tell yourself that he cares, not knowing why. You see the anguish on his face, through bruised eyelids, so swollen that you can barely see at all. Your arms are tied, you cannot protect yourself. You have not thought of fighting; you are so tired that you give up: you no longer ask God to make him stop. You only ask Him to let you die. That's all he's made you want for so long now.

4.

The Girl in Hyacinth Blue. There were those who called her 'Morning Shine'. She sat by a window with sunlight gently sweeping over her. Her serenity as the world passed by her seemed overwhelming. Can anyone ever do that in real life? Blood seeping on to the floor; thicker than water, it does not spread out only to merge again and form grotesque but interesting patterns as it spills over. Distorted reflections make their appearance in water like that. Hoping to be able to decipher a meaning which, in your heart, you know doesn't even exist in the strange aberrations strewn on the dark black granite around you, you stare at them for what seems like an aeon and thank God for them. You do not want to see reality: it is too bleak. Hallucinations and lies are your respite from pain. Anything seems easier than the truth, and almost everything is. The patterns look like modern art if you stretch your imagination far enough except for the fact that you're certain that they've been randomly created by a lunatic. You can almost hear his raucous laughs echoing in the background. They don't stop and you begin to realize that it isn't your imagination playing tricks at all. You have to go back and face them: after all, they personify what your life has become. 'The Girl in Hyacinth Blue' never was anything more than a story. There still is blood mixed with water on the bathroom floor as you begin to make your way towards the door.

5.

Wounds festering, your body wracked with illness, you find that you're burning up with fever. There's no one around. God knows, you could have used someone's presence if only to get you a glass of water but there's no one there for you. As the fever continues to wreck your body, every last ounce of energy is drained out of it. There's nothing which matters to you: all you do is lie down, allow the fever to run its course and seemingly destroy your body while within you, your body purges itself as it does more often than you'd like it to. Blood drains out, first into cotton inside you which absorbs it, and when it can hold no more, out of your body, on to your limbs, into the mattress. Its smell stale, you can no longer ignore it but you are too tired to move. The blood becomes an extension of you. In its flow, you feel your fatigue and helplessness reflected. It becomes impossible for you to differentiate between your essence and your body. You can no longer dissociate from what happens to you by telling yourself that it's happening only to your body and not, in fact, to you. You are your body, you discover. It's something you'd rather not have known — dissociation, as you know, helps you to survive pain, especially when it's pain he's caused you.

6.

Excruciating pain followed by having blood flow out of your body. Not something he's caused, for once, and not the usual trickle you're accustomed to but a seemingly unstoppable flow which nothing you can think of causes to ebb and which he chooses to be oblivious to. You are not within that 'monthly crisis of destruction' but you can feel 'the purging, tearing, draining of your own structure', as Nadine Gordimer put it. 'You are your womb although you were never before as aware — physically — that you had one.' The sight of so much blood is terrifying and mystifying all at once. As it continues to pour out of your body, you are dimly aware of losing a part of yourself. Cold sets in as your body attempts to compensate for all the fluid you've lost. You begin to lose track of what's happening around you. You see what surrounds you but you notice nothing. Everything is blurry, unreal. All that is real to you is your body, shivering violently, beset by fatigue. You know you'll never again allow yourself to forget how important your body is. You do not exist independently of it no matter what you'd like to believe.

And no one who jeopardises your safety can exist in your life.
(The 'he' in this piece does not refer to any one person, and this is not an accurate description of actual events.)

One Death Every Seven Minutes

2009-01-16T17:18:00.002Z

'They always think that they'll die about now and, mind ye, sometimes they do,' said an 18th century midwife in Diana Gabaldon's 'Cross Stitch'.

Every seven minutes, one woman in India dies due to problems related to childbirth or pregnancy. Indian women are 300 times more likely to die because of such problems than their counterparts in the US or in the UK according to a report in today's Times of India. That is an appalling statistic by any count.

When I read it though, the first thought which came into my head was: and what role do men play in this. And no, I don't mean in getting women pregnant in the first place but in helping to ensure that they're cared for. If they're married, the answer is relatively straightforward. They could be obliged to be around for everything from pre-natal classes to doctors' visits and the delivery itself whether or not they or their wives want that to be the case, or in a country like India, they could just as easily leave their mothers-in-law to take care of everything without lifting a finger except to hold the child after its born. Whatever a husband does though, it'd be well neigh impossible for him to deny all responsibility for his wife's welfare.

It isn't quite as clear what happens if the pair are not married though. Throughout history, possibly as a corollary of the 'maternity is certain, paternity is a question of belief' line of thought, there's very little (if anything) that men have been required to do in with reference to their having been intimate with women they weren't married to. They didn't have to do anything at all to facilitate the welfare of the women if they fell ill as a result, and if there were children involved, well, they couldn't possibly be expected to care for every byblow, could they?

Today, it's fashionable to say that one believes that things have changed, just as one believes that domestic violence is restricted to the 'uneducated lower classes' but the truth is that there's nothing at all which requires a contemporary man to act any differently from his medieval counterpart. True, there are laws which require children to be maintained, and DNA can prove paternity but getting those laws applied is no easy job even if a woman were willing to coerce a man into doing what she believed was the right thing for him to do. And, in any case, those laws definitely don't say a word about things like being around for pre-natal or other doctor's visits.

While one certainly wouldn't be able to argue that a man (married or not) was required to be available night and day, surely, being perpetually unavailable would not be acceptable either. And considering that many women are dependent on men in the absence of extended families to get them medical aid, would so many women die if men were more readily available and more willing to help women get medical care?

One can't help but suspect that many women who die, die simply because of a lack of access to health care. There is, of course, the problem that there are apparently a sum total of 20.000 OB-GYNs in all of rural India. But that says nothing for urban India.

A Rape-Defence World

2009-01-11T17:13:00.001Z

Consent is an affirmative act which requires a person to say yes. For
some reason, this doesn't register with people who use the 'but she
didn't say no' argument in defence of rapists.

The arguments used in the bizarre world of rape-defence tend to fall
apart when they're used in any other scenario though.

Consent, in that world, is:

* a default position -- I haven't said 'no', so I'm clearly willing to
buy everything in your shop.

* about giving in to the inevitable -- Of course I'll give you my
wallet, never mind that you've got a gun to my head.

* about not fighting back -- Why would I hesitate to get into a boxing
match with someone twice my size who could break my neck in half a
minute?

* about failing to say 'no' -- Obviously, if students in an exam hall
aren't specifically told that they are not allowed to copy from each
other, it's because they are allowed to do so.

* about being unsure -- I'm not sure if I've recovered enough after my
back injury to lift weights, so, yes, of course you should pile them
on to me.

If one actually had to live in a community that defined 'consent' as
the rape-defence-world does, life probably wouldn't be safe, orderly
or even minimally comfortable.

Victims

2009-01-01T20:04:00.002Z

The Curvature has a post up which questions why 'victim' is a dirty word, why survivor isn't. It made more sense to me than anything I've read in a long time.

What is it about popular culture which makes it an offence to feel hurt? Why the hell does anyone have the right to tell another not to dwell on something that went wrong? Why is it necessary to pretend to be strong even when you're falling apart?

To tell someone not to live in the part and to pull themselves together when they're clearly unable to do so is to tell them that they are inadequate. To say that they should not play the victim is effectively to say that they should take responsibility for something they may have had no control over.

To tell them to simply forget the past is to ask that they reject what is in all probability an inalienable part of their experience, of themselves. Everyone uses their experiences as a benchmark by which they assess new events in their lives. Why should those who've been
victimised not be allowed to do so?

White Mughals

2009-01-01T15:03:00.000Z

I finally read ‘White Mughals’, and, yes, I do realise that I’m probably one of the last people in the world who has read it.

I didn’t pick it up earlier because it was one of those books which everyone was reading and I figured that that meant that it wasn’t a masterpiece. I didn’t want to pay for a copy of my own and someone never got around to borrowing one from someone else.

Last week though I happened to chance on it and I haven’t been able to decide what to make of the book. It’s obviously well-researched and the subject is interesting. That being said, the book reads like a well-researched Mills and Boon product – without a happy ending. Personally, I’d have liked to have read more about some of the people mentioned in the book other than Khair un Nissa whose love life is the book’s focus.

I can’t really claim to be disappointed: considering that the book did well in the market, one couldn’t have expected too much more, I suppose. That doesn’t stop me from wishing that there was more to it.

Woman Gambled Away

2008-12-27T04:31:00.004Z

Draupadi may be the most well known woman who was lost in a game of cards. She isn't the only woman to have been wagered though.

According to a report in the ToI, Sokendra Kumar of Muzaffarnagar apparently wagered his wife in a game of cards and lost. His friends who won turned up to collect their winnings on December 19. The woman raised an alarm, and neighbours kept her from being dragged away. They later got her to approach to police who told her not to bother them with trivial issues. The woman has now gone into hiding to avoid the risk of being dragged away by the winners.

Although the woman is still in hiding, the police seem to have claimed that the incident was nothing more than an allegation in a domestic dispute which was resolved.

Reading about the incident didn't leave me particularly surprised. It has the usual ingredients: a woman being treated as property, gambling, the complete inability to get the police to act even when something patently illegal happens to a woman in relation to a domestic situation even if outsiders are involved. It's only the combination of ingredients in this story which makes it unusual.

The only part that surprised me was that the neighbours were willing to intervene and that someone's now given her a place to stay instead of leaving her to her own devices. That isn't something which always happens and an idiotic husband notwithstanding, I think this woman's
lucky to have something in the way of a support structure.

Adivasi National Liberation Army

2008-12-24T14:02:00.001Z

I don't have any ties worth speaking of in Assam. Nonetheless, I do
get excited when I see anything with an Assamese connection. And if
there's something in the news about Assam, I read it.

Which is why, when I picked up the paper just now, the first thing I
read was that Gautam Kakoty, the assistant manager of Kuramara tea
garden, had been killed by the Adivasi National Liberation Army.

Right now, I feel the way I did when I first heard of the Deccan
Mujahideen and am asking myself who or what in hell the Adivasi
National Liberation Army is.

I've heard of ULFA, of Bodo Nationalists, of assorted groups of people
who simply either aren't happy with how they've been treated or who
claim not to be happy. But this group, I know nothing of.

I have shadowy memories of Assam in years gone by. Of the lack of
safety while visiting relatives, of the constant sense of fear. For
better or for worse, I have no one there, so I doubt I'll ever go back
but nonetheless, every time I hear of violence there, it makes me feel
especially sad. Particularly since I don't understand why that's the
way life in Assam is.

A Guard at Kotla Ferozshah

2008-12-24T07:12:00.004Z

The last time I went down to Kotla Ferozshah which is supposed to be one of Delhi’s it monuments, I bumped into a security guard while I was trying to figure out what was beyond what appeared to be some form of stairs leading down into another area.

I’ve found that some of the people at monuments can be tremendously helpful and knowledgeable about them. This chap, however, seemed a bit odd. He didn’t start raving about the ruins as most enthusiastic persons – usually old men – who work in such places tend to do. Instead, he asked whether I was Indian. My initial thought was that he might have been wondering whether or not I’d paid the rate foreigners are supposed to pay for a ticket so I said yes. Then, he asked where I was from. Not wanting to be rude, I just smiled while he tried out everything from Jharkhand to Kerela. Seriously.

Not content to stop there, he continued and in addition to asking to where I was from, asked what I do. At that point, not wanting to be too rude, I said I lived in Delhi and am a lawyer which he didn’t believe. I suppose I look too bloody young to be a lawyer. And somewhere along the way, he asked who was with me. Considering that there was no one in the vicinity, it didn’t seem worth saying, “I’m here with my husband who, incidentally, is a boxer.”

By this time, I was beginning to panic although I didn’t know what to do. Turning around and running didn’t seem to be an option since if he had been so minded, I’m sure he’d have caught up with me in about five seconds (or less).

Anyway, at that point, he began to insist that I go down the ‘stairs’ claiming that there was no other way to the other side. I told him that I had no intention of going down them but couldn’t seem to get him to stop insisting that I do. Ultimately, not knowing what else to do, I went down. So did he.

If there was a path to the other side there, I didn’t see it. What I did see was an absolutely isolated courtyard and a structure with small rooms built into it. (The photo here is of the chap’s back while he was walking into the structure because I didn’t really want to ask him to turn around and pose for me.) I left him to walk into them and when he was out of sight, I turned, made my way as fast as possible up the stairs and got out of the area.

It turns out that if you’re desperate enough, you can get up eight-hundred-year-old steps so broken that they’re nothing more than an upward slope very fast even if you’re wearing high heels.

I later saw the guard in another part of the ruins while I was making my way out. He didn’t attempt to approach me. I don’t know if there actually was a path there which he was trying to show me in good faith, or if he had something else in mind entirely.

The chap’s bona fides (or lack thereof) aside though, thinking of the incident later on, what struck me is that a lot of people who say that while men should be taught to behave better instead of women being taught that there are n million things they shouldn’t do are right in the larger scheme of things, when it comes down to it, you’re responsible for not putting yourself in a dangerous situation.

Some men are anything but ethical. And walking into an unsafe situation, as I did, is a stupid thing to do. I was lucky and got away completely unscathed apart from feeling slightly shaken assuming that I was in danger in the first place.

And that’s another thing which bothers me. I think that apart from the consideration that getting into a fight with a man with a cane didn’t strike me as being a particularly bright idea, I wanted to give this chap the benefit of doubt and not assume the worst of him. And I didn’t want to be rude till he’d given me good reason to tell him to fuck off.

Although, at the back of my mind, there lay the thought (which I think I read most clearly expressed by Marcella Chester albeit in a slightly different context) that my safety is more important than some man’s hurt feelings which is why I didn’t feel even minimally guilty about giving the chap the ditch assuming he wasn’t trying to harm me.

A man who actually has your interests in mind won’t hold your being extra-careful against you and he won’t ask to be exempted from the precautions you take. The hard thing to deal with though is that there are times when your precautions can cause real pain to men whom you care about and who care about you, men who see your being careful as your not trusting them. There’s no easy way to explain that it’s got nothing to do with them specifically, it’s about you needing to do whatever you can do to ensure that you feel safe.

The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition

2008-12-23T06:45:00.000Z

It’s late evening. I’m sitting down with some hot cocoa — yes, I am guilty of premature aging — and ‘a novel of the Marquis de Sade called 'The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition' by Rikki Ducornet, the author who said, “What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.”

Written in a lyrical prose style, it’s one of those meandering but intense books: not particularly strong as far as a ‘plot’ is concerned, anything but weak where emotions and ideas are concerned. It speaks of arrogance, superiority complexes, imagination, sex, vanity, and self-righteousness without trying to explain the world. In fact, the novel often emphasizes just how inexplicable and mysterious the world is.

“A fan,” it begins, ”is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather — a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.” It then continues with the inquisition of a Persian fan-maker notorious for her association with the Marquis de Sade, for painting erotic scenes and for being a lesbian as its central theme.

It’s not my favourite book but it has made me question my own openness to new ideas and any book which makes me think, which makes me challenge my own beliefs is a good book as far as I’m concerned.

[1] Review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/bib/991121.duco.html

Indian Writing in English

2008-12-16T09:38:00.001Z

The Sahitya Akademi has been having a book exhibition which is
scheduled to end tomorrow. I dropped in for a short while to have a
look at it.

They had books in a number of Indian languages as well as in English.
Many of them were translations into English but not, I imagine, all.

For some reason, much of what little I've seen of Indian writing in
English annoys me. Some of it is magnificent but the vast majority of
authors and poets seem to be trying just too hard, using turns of
phrase which one would never dream of generally using.

Opening a page of a book at random, I read:
"The deep darkness of a black horse
spreads over my blossoming breasts."
in a poem by Chitra Lahiri. It isn't a line I can relate to.

But leaving aside purple prose and its poetic counterparts, what I
most dislike about many of the pieces I've read is their immediacy,
their emotional intensity. It feels as though there's little room left
for subtlety or for gentleness. And next to no room for any form of
interpretation or, in some cases, for deconstruction.

I often feel as though I have the author imposing on me in ways I do
not want. Although if I were kinder, I'd probably say the my dislike
of Indian writing in English is similar to my prefering Baroque music
to Romantic music.

Safety Plans

2008-12-14T06:35:00.002Z

In the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, there've been plenty of eMail forwards and personal accounts floating around. One which I began to read some time ago was on Nita's blog.

I didn't read the whole thing through, the only part I read was up to the point where the author talks about figuring out where the nearest fire exit is. And when I read that, my first thought was that that's something I'm obsessed about. The nearest fire exit at the theatre never mind if it involves sitting at the worst seat. An aisle seat on a plane as close as possible to an emergency exit.

Financial documents all sorted out. A will. Insurance. Clear instructions telling those who need to know what's where. One place (file / bag / whatever) which contains all the essentials for me to be able to pick up and run out with in 10 seconds should the need arise.

The thing that doesn't automatically seem to strike many people though is that not all of this is specifically terrorism related advice. Much of it is just common sense and the rest is advice which is applicable to any hostile situation.

In fact, a large chunk of the 'what to do in a crisis' info. coming out now is identical to 'safety from domestic violence' info. which is routinely given to victims. Although few people would ever be willing to equate one with the other, their effects can be startlingly similar on those who are affected by them.

Link:
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/some-tips-from-someone-caught-in-the-mumbai-terror-attacks

The Daring, the Bizarre and the Boring

2008-12-09T15:01:00.000Z

Almost every time I think of Louisa Alcott, I think of books like Little Women and Little Men. The other day, however, I came across a book by her called ‘The Chase’ which was extraordinary. It was a book about obsessive love and although it was nowhere near as explicit as the contemporary author would have probably been, the story was far more ‘daring’ than any I’ve read by a contemporary author.

I was very surprised and I enjoyed reading the book very much. What I particularly liked was the fact that the story wasn’t entirely bizarre.

Another book I read recently, for example, by Marie Corelli – if I’ve spelt the name correctly – was ‘The Soul of Lilly’ which told of how a Middle Eastern gentleman kept a dead woman in some form of comatose state, neither dead to the world but with a body that functioned with the help of something he injected into it, and sent her soul on voyages to other planets to report to him about life on those planets, and to look for such things as hell (which she could not find).

When I initially saw the book, being reminded of ‘Thelma’, I picked it up hoping that I would enjoy reading it but it was so strange in so many places although I could relate to much of what one of the characters, a literary lady, said about how women with minds are treated, I found it difficult read.

I was also rather disappointed by ‘Northbridge Rectory’ by Angela Thirkell. The title reminded me of ‘Northanger Abbey’ for some reason, and although, like Jane Austen, Thirkell doesn’t venture far out of the living room, unlike Jane Austen, reading the book felt like watching paint dry. The first sentence seemed to be in much the same tone of the first sentence of ‘Pride and Prejudice’: ‘As everyone knows Northbridge High Street there is not need to describe it, so we will proceed to do so.’

Two sentences in the book, however, reminded me of an old friend.

“It is quite dreadful,” said Mrs. Villars, putting down her knowing (which was mittens for her younger son in the Royal Air Force), the way some words behave so that you cannot use them. ‘Living’ has almost got out of control.” Mr. Holden nearly said, “ So has ‘sleeping’,” but checked himself, for he felt towards his hostess, who was at least fifteen years his senior and had a son who was a Professor in a provincial University as well as the Wing Commander in the Air Force, a rather sacred respect. There is no accounting for these things.

The book was first published in 1941 and my friend who belonged to that generation once expressed exactly the same feelings to me about the use of the word ‘gay’.

Security Checks at Court

2008-12-09T03:37:00.001Z

The High Court's been putting bags through Xray machines for a while
now. The last time I went to Court though, I had a bit of free time
and noticed that there had been notices put up saying that security
had been tightened and that lawyers shouldn't mind if their bags were
checked. Usually, lawyers can go wherever they want to without their
ID or their bags being checked, which basically means that anyone
willing to spend 10 INR on an Advocate's band has free access to
Courtrooms and, for that matter, almost every other room in the
complex.

For some reason, the notice was so placatory that it came across as
saying: 'We're trying to protect you. Please don't be offended by our
doing so.' And that felt rather strange.

Abortion and Disability

2008-12-08T19:34:00.008Z

The other day, I read an amazing piece on The F Word about choice and disability. Like Indian law, English law allows for selective abortion if a child will be born with with a disability.

What Victoria al Sharqi, the author of the piece, essentially says is that she is not anti-choice but she is against selective abortion because of the ethical issues involved and the message it sends to people with disabilities. 90% of foetuses diagnosed with Down's Syndrome are aborted and that can't possibly convey to people who have it that they are valued members of society.

I think I understand what she means but at the risk of being guilty of breathtaking hypocrisy, if choosing to abort a foetus under such circumstances was a choice I had to make, it's one I'm quite certain I would make unless I was extremely financially secure.

Selective abortion may be morally repugnant but if I were being honest, I'd have to admit that while something like Down's Syndrome wouldn't bother me much, I wouldn't want to give birth to a child who, for example, would without a doubt die in a few years and spend those few years in pain. I don't think I would want to stretch limited resources to meet the expenses of that child either.

As I write this, I realise that every parent who decides to undergo sex selective abortion must also have his own rationalizations and I ask myself how they are any different from mine. Part of the answer is that the aren't and that any form of selective abortion is wrong. The other part is that as mundane as life can be for a disabled person, it can also be very painful. And perhaps terminating a pregnancy isn't necessarily a selfish act.

Old Delhi

2008-11-05T12:21:00.005Z

The first time I went down to Old Delhi, I went along with a friend – I didn’t know if it’d be safe to go alone. If not anything else, there are a number of narrow winding lanes and being the kind of person who can get lost on a straight road quite easily, I was anything but enthusiastic about going there alone. It was night. And, as everyone knows, you do not experiment with being alone and on foot anywhere late at night if you can avoid it. Especially if you’re a woman.

The next time I went down to the city, I didn’t take anyone along with me. I went there in broad daylight. I got a bit lost: went a kilometer down a road I hadn’t intended to take and then walked all the way back. Nothing untoward happened. What struck me though was that there were so few women on the streets: it felt as though there was one woman for every fifty men, and the vast majority of women who were visible wore burqas.

I had lunch at a restaurant there. Mutton with a piece of potato and tandoori rotis. Floating in oil but amazing nonetheless. A friend later said that a single woman at that restaurant is rather unusual. But then again, a single woman almost anywhere is an anomaly.

Once I had eaten, I went to the Jama Masjid next door which is India’s largest mosque. It was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan at a cost of one million rupees around 1650 and lies about 500 m away from the Red Fort. Unlike Hindu temples, although they require footwear to be removed, they allow people to carry their shoes into the mosque so there isn’t a massive pile of shoes at the entrance. The red sandstone isn’t unbearably hot even at midday and the marble is cool to walk on.

After leaving the Masjid, I walked down Meena Bazaar which lies between the Masjid and the Red Fort. I bought a ‘hair band’ which I’m in love with because it looks like a ‘gajra’ of fresh jasmine. And I visited the tomb of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

The mosque is a beautiful structure and I’m glad I went there. I don’t think I would want to go there again though. Not alone, at any rate. I was so unnerved by the time I got there that I don’t think I really managed to appreciate it.

There wasn’t anything "strange" which happened to me when I was in Old Delhi.

The lanes are narrow. The by-lanes are not exactly clean. There are shops which sell nothing but rat traps which is hardly reassuring. The buildings make one think that it would be easy to make someone disappear in them: that if one was trapped inside, there would be absolutely no one who would either know, or, for that matter, care.

Women (and children), I discovered, are not allowed to go up the towers of the mosque unless they are accompanied (by a man). And women are not allowed to enter the mosque after Maghrib (Sunset) prayer. The men in the streets overtly stare in that sickeningly lascivious way that only men can. The waiter barely listened to me when I gave him my order. The shopkeepers at the bazaar kept trying to sell me a naqaab.

I don’t remember any of that happening the first time I went to Old Delhi. Do men not publicly leer at women who appear to be attached to another man? Or did I just not see it at night? Either way, if I ever go back of my own volition, it probably won’t be without a man in tow.

Danielle Steel

2008-11-05T09:09:00.000Z

I’ve been reading one Danielle Steel after the other over the last week. And I’m not entirely sure what to make of her books. They’re addictive. Not great literature by any stretch of the imagination. Often, not even particularly mushy. But most of them do have a story worth telling. Even if it’s not always told in what one would consider a remotely literary style. And they’re a quick read: the average one takes me about two and a half hours to get through.

The problem though, is that I can’t seem to remember what it is that I’ve read. There was one about a girl named Arianna, for example, whose father was a banker in war time Berlin and who, because of her father’s disappearing while trying to enable her brother to get out of military service on his fifteenth birthday, wound up in Nazi hands. She was ‘saved’ from becoming a General’s concubine by another Nazi officer whom she eventually married. He died during the fall of Berlin and she wound up as a refugee in America (pregnant with his child) where with the encouragement of a doctor, she married an American man who divorced her after he found out that, among other things, she had lied to him about the child. He remarried and years later, his daughter fell in love with Arianna’s son. And Arianna herself was, at the end of the book, reunited with the brother whom she had not seen for some fifty years.

Melodramatic, yes. But well told. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me remember what the title of the book is.

Also, in some way, all of her books are, well, full of anything but the ordinary. The one I last read: ‘Kaleidoscope’ was about three sisters who were left orphaned because their father killed their mother and later killed himself. The three were separated, had very different lives and were reunited after some thirty years.

“Why did this happen?” [one of the sisters later asked]
“I don’t know that. The turns of fate are not always kind, Mrs. de Morigny.”
“I know.” She spoke softly but she had never seen it quite so clearly. It was like one of the kaleidoscopes she gave to her children, you turned it just a fraction, all of the same pieces fell into a totally different pattern. One moment they were flowers, and the next moment they were demons breathing fire. It seemed so wrong to her that Hillary would have been left to the demons.

One book though which didn’t seem to contain anything in it which was particularly unusual (other than the fact that all the characters were ‘high-flyers’) was ‘The Journey’ about how a woman who got out a marriage where she was physically abused into one where is was emotionally abused although, for years, she didn’t consider herself as being abused primarily because her husband wasn’t physically violent.

I enjoy reading her books but somehow, I don’t see myself ever buying one of them: for some reason, although I seem unable to be able to distinctly remember each of her books which I’ve read, I don’t think that I’d ever want to reread any of them.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

2008-11-04T16:02:00.000Z

Three normal reactions to extreme stress are to flee, fight or to freeze. In nature, the most common reaction is to flee but in humans, socio-cultural and religious conditioning often results in men most often fighting and women freezing.

Freezing is often caused by a combination of fear, disbelief and a sense of powerlessness which even if it does not seem rational in retrospect, makes it rational at the time not to attempt to fight back.

Normal Reactions to Trauma

Reactions to trauma in the first phase which is also sometimes called the acute phase and usually lasts for a few weeks include numbness and a complete inability to make decisions for oneself. Visible reactions, however, vary a great deal with some people expressing their pain (volubly) and others not expressing it aloud at all. They may also continue to feel unsafe and be in physical pain.

Physical pain may be psychosomatic. Also, since many people ‘switch off’ during an attack, they may feel pain in places where they were actually injured but don’t remember being injured.

Other effects of trauma include sleeping and eating disturbances, shame, embarrassment and anger.

The next stage is the adjustment stage where people try to get back to normal. They sometimes do this by blocking out or minimising the trauma. At this stage, they make drastic changes in their lives and often suffer from feelings of general anxiety and fear.

After this is the reorganisation phase where people try to get their lives back to normal. This stage is often characterised by anger, an increasing dependence on other people, attempts to get back in control, possibly by trying to be in control of things which are not even controllable, and depression.

A resolution finally occurs when people are able to integrate traumatic experiences into their everyday lives.

PTSD
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a response to extreme stress which can develop in persons who have been in traumatic situations or those who have been in close contact with them. The events which have been known to cause PTSD include being in war, being violently assaulted, being the victim of an earthquake, flood or other natural disaster, being a witness to a such an event, and being an emergency worker. It has also been known to affect the friends and family of those affected by disasters although they themselves have neither been involved in or witnessed the event(s). Being the victim of a natural disaster is, however, less likely to cause PTSD than being the victim of a human-created one.

The main symptoms of PTSD are re-experiencing the trauma, hypervigilance and avoidance.

Re-experiencing the trauma can take a variety of forms including: flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive memories, feeling extremely distressed and possibly developing physical symptoms such as nausea when faced with anything which even vaguely reminds one of the trauma. Distressing symptoms do not, however, always have an obvious trigger such as a smell, sight or sound associated with the trauma.

Hypervigilance often manifests itself not only as constantly being on guard but also as such other things as outbursts of anger and irritability.

Avoidance can take the obvious form of trying not to think of the traumatic event at all. It can also manifest itself as minimising the enormity of the trauma or denying the intensity of one’s emotions in response to the trauma. There may be an inability to remember parts of the trauma and a feeling of dissociation from events and people.

In addition to this, there are a number of physical symptoms linked to PTSD including headaches, stomach aches and chest pain. Persons who have PTSD may also have depression, anxiety disorders and problems related to substance abuse.

(Nothing in this post should be construed as medical advice. It comprises information which has been gleaned from a number or articles online and it may not be accurate.)

Anonymity

2008-10-23T06:41:00.001Z

The thing about blogs is that every and absolutely any person you’ve ever known has access to them whether you like it or not. If you have illusions of privacy online, you’re nuts.
If you think that people you know for some reason won’t know what you’ve written because, hey, they don’t read blogs, you’re hugely mistaken. Somehow, someone you know will come across your blog and tell even those people who don’t ordinarily go anywhere near computers all about it.
If you think that people don’t care enough about you to read what you’ve written, be sure that the moment you write something even mildly indiscreet, it’s going to be cut and pasted in an eMail and sent to precisely those people who you would least want to read it.
There is a simple solution though: don’t ever write anything which you wouldn’t be comfortable saying to anyone at any point of time.

Religion

2008-10-20T09:49:00.000Z

I just deleted a subscription to a blog I used to read because of a not entirely respectful discussion of a story about the possibility of Barack Obama being a Hanuman devotee.

I'm not a pious Hindu. I know next to nothing about the rites and rituals of the religion and have no particular desire to learn. And it helps that I belong to a sect which in one of the first verses of its scripture says: "Though God dwells in the hearts of those who believe in rituals, he stays very far away from them."

जो कर्मकांडो में विश्वास करते है, भगवान उनके ह्रदय में रहते हुए भी उनसे दूर, बहुत दूर रहते है । ।

That being said, it really annoys me when I read or hear (Christians, in particular) saying nasty things about Hinduism.

A few years ago, I got to know a Seventh Day Adventist couple very well. They were the kind of people who never missed going to Church on Saturday, and who had very little other than that to recommend them. I went to church with them on a few Saturdays and by and large, I found it embarrassing. I ultimately stopped after some pastor decided to preach about why Christianity is the best religion. He didn't say a single good thing about the religion. What he did was talk about everything he thought was wrong with other religions. Muslims have four wives, Hindus worship idols, Zoroastrians worship fire and the list went on. Never mind that all Muslims don't have four wives and not all Hindus either worship or believe in worshipping idols. Ultimately, the only religion left standing was Christianity.

I cannot imagine attacking Christianity by stooping that low -- there are a lot of things I'm not thrilled about when it comes to the religion but those things focus around fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. Some of those interpretations I saw at the Seven Day Adventists' but, never once, did I see them at the convent I went to which is why I think I despite coming across some prime time idiots, I don't feel even remotely negatively against Christianity.

What I do have very strong feelings about is not being treating dismissively just because I don't believe in Jesus being my saviour or anything else along those lines.

That's one of the things which I liked about the convent I just mentioned: they never tried to shove Christianity down their students' throats. I don't know if that had something to do with political expedience or respect for other faiths but I do remember that they went out of their way to make God as religion-neutral as possible. For example, in the hymns printed in their diaries, there was not one which mentioned Jesus apart from the one which was the (rarely sung) 'anthem' of their congregation which was fair enough.

At the individual level, the dismissiveness and lack of respect for other faiths which I've often seen, I think, comes more from people who barely know what they're talking about. They certainly don't read the Bible as a text which was written in any socio-cultural context. And often, they barely know what it says.

I remember one occasion when the woman in the couple I spoke of earlier made some really nasty comments about Jeptha with reference to Handel's oratorio. Just some pagan cruelty, you know. This is why Christianity is important. Now, I've never claimed to be nice, or religious, or good, or anything else along those lines. And pointing out to her the verses in the Old Testament which speak of him left me gleeful.

At the institutional level though, I'm not sure why preachers etc. would make derogatory remarks about other faiths. It happens in churches and from what I understand, it also happens at Hindu meetings -- thankfully, there are no sermons in general at temples. Some Christians speak against everyone, as do Muslims if the sermons telecast are anything to go by while Hindus focus on Muslims, Christians and religious conversions which have been widely reported to often be forced.

I don't know what happens in the Jewish or Parsi communities though.

Ethical Jewellery

2008-10-12T06:47:00.001Z

I love the idea of ethical jewellery (which is environment-friendly). As the Purple Label website says: “Jewellery has an intrinsically magical and mysterious quality in the public’s mind, but we don’t feel that this need extend to an ignorance about the damage caused to people and the environment with its manufacture.”
I’m quite sure that a large chunk of the jewellery made in India is handmade and does as little damage to the environment as it is possible to do since traditional methods are used. And usually being locally handmade means that there are no major transporation issues which result in pollution being caused by vehicles used for the purpose.
It seems rather strange to me though that while in India, it’s machine-made products which have the most snob value, in the West, it’s handmade products which are far more sought after. Labour is very undervalued in India and the lack of a flawless finish which handmade goods are guaranteed to have aren’t considered to have anything to do with ‘warmth‘ or a ‘human touch‘ — they’re just flaws, nothing more, nothing less. In most of the developed world though, it’s precisely the other way around — labour is expensive and mechanisation is taken for granted. Perhaps that’s what helps to make handmade jewellery prized.

Amitav Ghosh

2008-10-05T14:55:00.000Z

Every time I read an Amitav Ghosh, I get the feeling that his books should each be divided into two parts: one a text book and the other a novel. I like his writing. But the truth is that I’d have been much happier, if, for instance, I’d have learnt from a history book about the Sir Daniel Hamilton or from a book on wildlife about Gangetic Dolphins.

Somehow, I always get the feeling that he doesn’t do a particularly good job of blending the academic portions of his books with the stories and that they hinder the telling of the story. Not to mention that I sometimes find it extremely annoying that he treats his readers as being daft.

Consider this exchange from ‘The Hungry Tide’:

‘I’m a cetologist,’ she said. ‘That means – ’ She was beginning, almost apologetically, to expand on this when he sharply interrupted her.
‘I know what it means,’ he said sharply. ‘You don’t need to explain. It means you study marine mammals. Right?’

And if it wasn’t enough for the author to assume that his readers wouldn’t know what cetologists do, the conversation continues:

‘Yes,’ she said nodding. ‘You’re very well informed. Marine mammals are what I study – dolphins, whales, dugongs and so on. …’

Because, of course, even the very well informed reader who knows what cetology is can’t be trusted to know what a marine mammal is.

Poison Girls

2008-09-26T06:40:00.001Z

Legend has it -- and I never argue with legend -- that Vish Kanyas were used by ancient Indian kings as spies and as assassins. They were apparently very beautiful and were given poison in increasingly large doses right from infancy so that by the time they matured, (if they survived) their kiss alone could cause death.
I presume that there is some amount of truth somewhere in the legend although I don't know if it's actually possible to develop such a high level of tolerance poison. A few sources I read talked about snake venom being used and one mentioned strychnine, an alkaloid molecule found in the seeds of strychnos nux vomica, a plant which is native to India and a few other places.
I can't help but wonder how much truth there is in the legend.

Russell Connor

2008-09-23T06:49:00.001Z

I just came across the paintings of an artist called Russell Connor a short while ago. He juxtaposes well-known works by other artists (many of them long dead). Some of his paintings are interesting while others make little sense to me -- for example, a Renoir couple dancing in the street depicted in Gustave Caillebotte's Umbrellas. Many of his works include Suzanne from the Bar at the Folies Bergère, Manet's 1882 masterpiece and one of my favourite paintings.I most liked The Opening II and The Liberation of the Harem. In the former, Suzanne from the Bar the Folies Bergère 'is standing in front of Manet's last masterpiece, in which she herself is posed in front of a mirror while her oddly off-center reflection leans over to serve a mysterious customer' while in the latter, Ingres' two nudes replace the foreground of Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading the People' in, as the author says, "a worthy, feminist 'Let My People Go' cause."