World Blog Action Day 2008-Poverty ...15th Oct, 2008

Today is the World Blog Action Day 2008 and the theme this year is poverty. Thanks to my friend in England I learnt about it and to show my solidarity with the cause I decided I would post this blog before the stroke of midnight.

Poverty needs no introduction to India and Indians. We see it around us all the time, so much so, that we have developed a kind of immunity to it. We cannot help everyone, I understand, and thinking this, shrug our shoulders and move on. I would not go about defining it, its well defined and well understood even by those who are not subjected to living a life of abject poverty. We all employ servants at home (thank god for poverty, we the people of the third world would say) at paltry wages. My maid washes our clothes for Rs.300.00 per month (approximately 7.00 US Dollars), a cost we all know much lesser than operating a washing machine for the period, and mind you, it does not have a fixed load, unlike a washing machine again. This is one of the better salaries that a decent employer would pay. And we are just two people at home, so it is actually an excellent salary because many servants are employed at much lesser the cost for larger families, the average Indian family size is about five people, in a regular metro city. This is an example of cheap labour employment. We are not yet speaking of the expenses of living in a large city. We consistently complain about our ‘meager salaries’ and the large cost of living. We draw a salary of a few lacs per annum and yet are broke (sic) because we cannot afford the expensive luxury wining and dining and designer items we hanker after (sic)! The truth of the matter is, it is a consumerist world and we do not wish to be left behind. How these servants manage to manage their basics is beyond the bother of our fashionable lifestyles and sounds good on the fiery ‘jhola brand’ journalists or khadi flaunting politicians, who also do not bother or care a fig really, as long as they can speak well and enjoy their martinis and wines along it and oh yes please, the kebabs should be well done, that’s how we all like it!. While we speak of ‘inflation most evil’, we would widen our eyes in horror, if these very same servants would ask for a raise. And then get back to complaining of ‘these servants really too much trouble nowadays’ talk.

I am affiliated to the cause of fighting child prostitution through a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) called ‘The Ahwaan Foundation’ through which we try and build awareness of the issue, try and rescue some of the children trapped in its throes from amongst the hundreds and thousands who may never be rescued and several of whom may never reach childhood. Then we have plans to rehabilitate and reintegrate them back in the society. The root cause of child prostitution is nothing but intense and abject poverty, where prostitution, though not easy money, seems a much better and easier avenue to the parents as well as often to the small children as well who are employed in it. Poverty so intense that sexual abuse seems lesser! When you look at the children, some are as young as five years old. I look at the children in my family and shudder, some of us, even as adults are treated like small children and fussed about. The world outside sometimes scares me. Yet we walk through it everyday and could be least bothered as long as bellies are full and desires increase everyday.

Despite the ruined shanties the poor call their homes, it is no less beautiful for them or any less sacred than what our homes are for us. Despite misery, they smile and laugh, even more than us, and show a far stronger belief in God. They have strong community lives which we sadly lack as we are get richer and prosperous, monetarily. The women suffer terrible abuses and still stick with their men, alcoholics who beat them and rape them, yet they are happy together.

The world indeed, is a strange topsy turvy place, and sometime in the moments before I sleep, I am in a reminiscent mood and I wonder with a book on my chest; indeed Gibran is right in his profoundness and beauty of thought!

“How can I lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep on feathers is no more beautiful than the dreams of those who sleep on the earth.”

At least for a day, even when we do not give alms or money or charity, we could be more charitable and kinder to people, who are less privileged than us, for want of money, without being condescending. Let us please, include at least one poor person we see or know in our prayers, at least for a day. God may listen to us for a change.

Fury and love

While love cajoles me on softly in a bright room
Hell’s fury stands on its doors waiting for me to step out of the love’s lair
Unleashed, unburdened, undead, as free in its anger as love in its depths
Deep stirred maelstrom, tornado on its head
As deep as love but a stronger kiss
Goes no one unmarked, it never did miss
To the marked comes love, bathing gently in his pretty hue
Soften it, soothing and smoothing away but could not undo.
Hiss, hiss, hiss….scratch, scratch, scratch
Burns to the quick, gorges out the very core
Takes abode, overtakes the soul,
Punishes unrelentingly, takes on new victims of its roll.

It happens so often that love stands forlorn amidst a razed battlefield
Of charred remains
Fury caught love, raped and abused and bound it in chains
Love proffers slavery, fury accepts with snarls of disdain,
Tireless fury is spent and retires in vain
Love follows him, singing paeans

Artless fury lies quiet now,
His head on the lap of artful love, smiling
Love quelled fury sleeps contented.
Wake not the strange bedfellows!
He is asleep not dead.

more musings....

I sometime feel I live in a morally depraved world where indeed morality is like the trouser, worn to cover our shame and then brought down just as soon, to uncover lewdness. I do not understand this world and perhaps this world would also never understand me. A deep sense of alienation takes me over, and I feel a deep schism between the world and me. Not that I feel that I am not loved or respected, rather I have an abundance of these. It’s a weird kind superiority complex.

on Delhi....

I love Delhi. It has a soul that beckons you and holds you, claims you as its own. Like those who love the mountains, their souls live in the mountains and streams and rocks. And pick any book of a mountain loving person, you realize that they may live anywhere but their souls live in the mountains. And since no one can live without their souls for long, they get their deep urges to revisit the city that haunts them forever.
While when you look at books that glorify and make you fantasize about Mumbai, whether its Rohinton Mistry or Salman Rushdie or for that matter, any other, it’s a city that’s a step out, go between. Before you take the leap from say another city to a poised bigness, you come to Mumbai and move to that place. And those who never manage to leave Mumbai have this urge to go out and away. It pushes you away and far, the city that is.
The saddest fairy tale I ever read was ‘The Little Mermaid’. The Mermaid starts from the sea and ends in the sea, becoming the sea. When I was a child, I could not understand why this tale did not end in ‘and they lived happily ever after’ but rather the sea foam. That’s the soul of the place in which we live and affiliate ourselves to in our lives.

mad musings....

I have some strange mad musings and stranger dreams. I would speak my dreams later. As of now, musings:

Why do pagan goddess worship include fertility rites that are essentially feminine? Are not the men and gods bothered about it? Or do they think they are too virile to bother about it? Why the obsession of women with their fertility? Is the child the fruit for only the mother?

Why does love bring on a greater desire and need to love and be loved? Why is love not about contentment but expansive? Once you have been in a relationship, it would most likely teach you that when this one ends, try other relationships. No matter how miserable you feel, love is mesmerizing. Some people fall in love with being in love itself and these people are the most discontent.

Am I stupid to believe in the beauty and necessity of being good as much as possible all the time? I sometimes feel abused and used but I go on with a faith that when I do good despite pain and angst and deep seething anger, I bring in faith in others. Faith doesn’t mean god or religion. To me, the greatest faith of any being is trust. Even when a dog barks at you, its manifest distrust. When the animal is sure you mean no harm, it would either ignore you and more likely come and play with you. Humans are the most wary of all animals and to win their trust is something precious and peerless.

Why do the women have to lead their entire lives through their bodies?

on reading...

I love reading since I was a little girl. My parents knew that if they found me curled up with a book, I wouldn’t hear anything, and would usually be munching on an apple and would usually be famished as long as I was reading!
Reading was almost like a picnic to me! I would love finding a warm but not hot place with some nice shade of the tree with possibly a hamper containing some water and some sandwiches and an apple. I would lay a mat to lie on, pull a sheet over and settle down reading while lying down. I would be always admonished on that I would ruin my eyes reading a book like that, but of no avail. I loved it that way and would have no other way. When the sun got to me, I would keep the book on my face and take a long leisurely nap! Those days seem so luxurious to me now, no bother to think how the food and the book came from, with time to smell the garden and the summer and the spring, to chase the butterflies, to hear the birds and the bees humming around, to hear the wind, to run till you panted so hard that your chest felt like a bellow, to eat wild berries and leaves till you were sick, to wake when you pleased, to wait till the sounds dimmed and you knew it was time to go back home, to drink the raindrops directly from the sky, to pluck leaves out of your hair which would be so tangled that you would need hours to finally let the comb pass through without getting stuck!
Those years of abandon when we felt all the more better for being admonished are gone.
We are now too full of fears of what others think of us. We lie, we plastic smile, we are simply scared of being us. In fact, we are so scared of ourselves that we keep our beings in some hidden attic. Chained, admonished, shamed, afraid to break away, and more afraid of being alone.
These things stay and come back flitting to me as I read. I don’t run with my hair streaming behind me full of grass and leaves anymore. But I still love reading.
I love reading the books I read as a little girl…..the Enid Blytons, the Famous Five, the Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Secret Seven, the big books of fairytales from the world over. These books are still part of my most treasured library I have built over the years.
With these, stand the books that mark the intellectual adulthood of thoughts that never entered our heads when we were children. Life and death, compassion, soul searching, the reason of our being, the being and nothingness.
Sometimes, when I look at my books , all of which I love with a rare passion, I wonder that why on earth despite the depth and beauty of Gibran it could never match the magic of Enid Blyton. Despite reading minds of intellectuals, I feel that somewhere despite all the erudition and brilliance, they still lack a passion and fervour of childhood.
When my nephew turned 6 I bought him the entire collection of the Amar Chitra Katha comics which I grew up reading myself. Maybe he is too young to understand, but that was the only way I could connect to his childhood. As a child. My sister read him the whole stories as bedtime stories and now he is old enough to read them himself. I wish he loves reading as much as I do.
My niece is now 4 and loves reading. I someday hope to pass on my books to these children as my inheritance.

Are we happy?

Ask anyone this question and you would almost immediately feel a sudden deep sorrow within them.
All religions address happiness and pain as manifestations of desire. Yet happiness or rather the desire for happiness becomes greater as we are laden with heavier burdens of life and love.
What is desire? It is the manifestation of the flesh over the soul that binds us to the spatio temporal existence of this life. As such, the desire for peace, being a desire, can only bring more pain and bindings to this world and maya.
But how to be happy?
Embrace life as a journey of metamorphosis and changes than a goal and end in itself. Journey could be painful or enjoyable, depending on your mood or perceptions. Embrace changes as the chances to become better. Pain and hurts of our life make us more beautiful and humane. They also signal the coming of joyous times. As the caterpillar reinvents itself as the beautiful butterfly, it has to suffer and endure hardships. If it dies in this attempt, we get silk, if it survives, it becomes a beautiful butterfly. Doesn’t it surprise anyone that since ages in almost all literature, the butterfly is the liet motif of the soul.
When you choose to be happy in happiness, its nothing abnormal…but when you choose to see your moments of pain and hurts as harbingers of greater joy and beauty, why should you be unhappy?

her story of war

a story lived, a story told,
never heard…..
let it unfold, let it be read,
a cry so sad
turned to the fierce call
of the dead.
They do not die,
They are dead…
By what voice spake the undead?
Angst churned the worms,
fear rattled the bones,
yet up it came…
the past that refused to die within,
raked up the cloud
and the dust.
Unsettled the living,
Unearthed the leveled
Violated the peace
Raised a furore,
A bedlam so loud
Nothing was heard,
Only a cloud
Of dust and din
Clattered without.
Battle cries rose,
Swords clanged
Everything revenged,
Nothing avenged,
No honour was saved
No glory won….
When the cloud settled,
Both sides had lost.

A young man was shot dead today, branded a terrorist that killed many beings. We also lost a cop who was instantaneously glorifed as the hero. A marked difference in their deaths. The next day we read about a brother’s tale of grief while he reclaimed the ‘depraved’ terrorist as his brother and came forward to claim his dead body. A story of humanization of terrorism. I felt immeasurably sad. Have we all not somewhere conspired to make this man a terrorist somehow. Uncomfortable truths of society are for the sake of convenience swept under the carpet. Did we not fail to question the methodology of uncovering the crime and criminals by the police only because the young man was a Muslim.
I am a Hindu, not so pro Muslim in general. I admit my own failings in this regard. But for a change, it made me stop and wonder Jihad for what and against what. A friend of mine pointed out to me that we are the kafirs and for the modern Muslim, the holy war has lost its glory of waging a war for the religion to waging a war against all those who refuse to accept the supremacy of our religion. A kind of fight for superiority and imperialism in religion. For the sake of sanity it a crazy war. I am a woman and cannot advocate the sanity of any war. All wars that employ killing and advocate macho societies and theories are crazy. Period. Okay guys, you all can call me a feminist bitch, anti Muslim if you like, anti war too…please add that.
The Muslims waged a war on kafirs and we too all turned around and in reaction gave them tit for tat and proved ourselves as the reasons that they should call us kafir. We did not stop for once and advocate love for hate. We did not shame them to silence, we triggered a much larger war. A war that promotes masculine principles of honour and glory and even virgins in another life! Can it get more crazy?
They are at fault, so are we. When did we introspect that indeed the Muslim communities are indeed the poorest and most backward. Those who advocated reservation for Muslims became a person trying to encash Muslim votes, others who didn’t, did nothing for the cause of backward communities. Unsolvable dilemma.
The solution to me is only that we maybe becoming the most advanced techinically, but we are losing human values completely. We came out of the jungle and are advancing back to it. The solution lies in love, compassion, and kindness. I do not hate the word terrorist. To me it is a person who is misled and lost in their struggle for identity. Our religions today do not provide for unemployment. There is an underlying social evil created by industrialization, unemployment. When Hindu religion provided for the caste system, it did not provide for unemployed people. Where do they fit in? Does it mean that there were possibly no employed people? Most likely. When humans lose their value in a community, it can only undergo despair. Such angst leads to terrorism. Possibly these young men were not unemployed, some may argue. Its true, but the economic meltdown the world over is showing a very high possibility of such. When unemployment and retrenchment becomes the rule of the day, does that mean we have more terrorism to cope with. I think so.
I do not know in my personal capacity what can I do for generating employment. But I can definitely help in a social cause by first extending my condolence to the families of the dead, both the mindlessly blown away as well as the ones who mindlessly blew away, losing their lives too in process. I feel sad. I am not the mother of any child, but I weep for both as a mother would whose one child kills the other and whom the law of the land fetches to punish. I respect the laws but the one wronged is dead, the wrong doer is dying. In a ending like that of King Lear, everyone who can be, is dead. A land of nihilism.
Perhaps somewhere I fail to understand the agony of the families who lost people to terrorist acts or mindlessness. I apologise if I wronged them by my insensitivity.
Perhaps somewhere I also fail to understand the agony of the person who realizes that the little boy who lived with them as the angel of the house was in fact a dreaded hideous monster, a slayer of innocent people. I apologise if I wronged these families too by my lack of sensitivity.
I am an ordinary human trying to understand both sides. Its my first step, if I totter, please help me back to my feet. I will learn to walk.

The tears of the unicorn

the world is a changed place, the unicorn sheds its tears in silence and pain. its tears mark the end of an age of idealism and the start of the age of doing away with everyone for everything. the age of the myth is over, the magic is gone....it chugs out soot from the factories and the sky is grey now. people do not laugh and cry in joy, they do not sing...they muffle up their faces and their tongues.