The soul is healed by being with children

The soul is healed by being with children

by | Mar 26, 2013 | Uncategorized

The soul is healed by being with children wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I for one second that with conviction. The first kid that came into my life was my elder daughter. She turned a spoilt somewhat selfish only child into a mom. Looking at her for the first time I felt a surge of abundant love of the kind I had never felt before. We both grew together one day at a time as I tried to teach about life and she taught me what life was all about. Till today she is my most articulate critic and my most reliable advisor. Even though I sometimes resent her counsel, I know it is in my best interest. The second child that came into my life was my second born. She taught me that I my heart had an overload of love, and that a mom’s heart was so made that it had different compartments for each child. This little one taught me compassion and empathy and the importance of reaching out to those in need. She is the one who made pwhy happen and brought into my existence the smiles of so many children. Boy my soul was healed!
Along the way came two little boys: one that had lost everything and needed me to reassemble his broken life and the other who had it all and made a grandmother and taught me unconditional love.
These two fellows do rule my life in more ways than one and delight me in the most unexpected way.
Skype is a magical invention for nanas whose grandchildren are in far away lands. Wish it existed when my kids were growing up and my parents were still alive. But in those days it was still booked trunk calls with infuriating operators. But now we have Skype and my grandson and I chat every morning and evening. There is an almost 12 hours difference between the two cities so it the morning here and night there and vice versa. My little fellow has a lovely way of explaining the situation. Every evening when the sun sets in St Louis, he sends it to me in Delhi! When we are on line, we play games or I tell him a bedtime story just before my day begins. I must confess that these are very special moments. Time and again he delights me with a new expression. To try and explain me that he had forgotten his Hindi he simply told me: Nani, my Hindi is broken!

My other little fellow is with me only when his boarding school is shut. For the past few months I have watched him surreptitiously building bonds with everyone in the family. It is happening very slowly and one step at a time. One cannot rush this fragile effort. A single slip can take us back and cause irreparable damage. I observe his every move with bated breath: his wanting to sit at the table when he earlier preferred eating in his room, his attempts at conversation with those he never talked to earlier… each step going a long way in building his confidence and filling the huge gaps life threw his way.
I am blessed to have so many children in my life. 
Dear Member of Parliament

Dear Member of Parliament

by | Mar 21, 2013 | Uncategorized

Dear Member of Parliament

I had written an open letter to you some time back urging you to take note of the anguish we, women, felt and help enact a law that would recognise us as equals to you, men. I must admit that I had not much hope of anything happening as your past record and those of your peers is to say the least  dismal.  Yet at that time, for the briefest of moments I had seen a glimmer hope. Maybe I was just swayed by the power of those who had taken to the street. It was the flavour of the day/month for each and everyone. 

 Slowly the streets quietened as everyone went back to their lives. The flavour of the day changed. That is when you and your compeers began to craft an insidious and cunning game meant to fool us all. It all began with you instituting a Commission that for once gave its Report in record time. It was the seduction part of your sly game. We were charmed as the recommendations sounded like the dream we had longed for. It seemed that we were at the threshold of a new dawn, that perhaps we would finally find our place in the sun. You had us all! We yearned for a new law that would be enacted! How gullible we were! 

Soon you began revealing your cards. First came a hurriedly promulgated ordinance where most of what we were hoping for was simply dropped. But you scored your brownie points as you could trumpet high and loud that you were the saviour of women. Ordinances have a brief life, we all know that. We all wondered why you were in such a hurry when Parliament was just a few days away. 

Then Parliament  happened and the ordinance had to become law or else it would lapse. That is when your game was exposed. The draft Bill was modified to suit the demands of a whole gamut of patriarchal interest. The things we needed most were simply obliterated. 

On the day the Bill was presented to the Lower House, there was a huge political crisis and no one was truly interested in the plight of women. Only 35% of the Members of Parliament were present in the house. May I remind you that women form 50% of your electorate, the very electorate you try to seduce every five years. 

I need to know one thing Mister MP. Were you one of the 65% absentees. Did you, like them, feel that women were not to be taken seriously and did not matter. In a way I would prefer you having been absent as in that case I may still give you the benefit of the doubt, something you never give others though. 

I read with horror, sadness and pain the record of the debate on the anti rape bill. It was nothing short of humiliating. I have questions for you in case you were one of the 100 odd MPs present. Let me remind you that the bill was about giving women their due and ensuring that they be considered not as second class citizens but at par with the other 50% of the population. Everyone seemed to be interested in passing the Bill, in whatever form, before the 22nd. Never mind if it did not meet the expectations of those who elect you. The bill was moved at 2.15 pm and passed at 7.40 pm. We only deserved 5 hours of your time. Should you have spent it discussing the true essence of what we wanted, I guess 5 hours would have been ample, but what happened in those ill fated 5 hours is nothing short of shameful. Women were ‘raped’ in public by the very ones we entrust our destiny to.

All that transpired in those 5 hours was aimed at protecting you and not us. Now tell me where you the one who blamed western culture for rapes, or the one who felt that stalking is kosher as a means of initiating romance. I would like to ask you a question. Would Priyardarshini Mattoo be still alive had stalking been an offence? She was stalked for 2 years before she was brutally murdered. But then she is not your daughter or sister.

Or were you the one who felt that we need cultural cleansing. Or the one who felt that all should remain within the family. Never mind the wive beaters and child abusers.

Or were you the one who felt that it is what we wear that incites rape. Then tell me how a 6 month old, or a 2 year old dresses sexily. Maybe diapers are the new kid on the western fashion block.

Maybe you sympathised with the person who said: We are men after all! This blame the victim drama makes me physically sick.

It was not a debate on morality, Dear Sir, but a discussion that would make your daughters and sisters in our own country! Maybe you guys had forgotten that.

And when a Member seeks life imprisonment for acid attacks, you shoot it down. Just close your eyes and imagine your loved one being attacked with acid. It is not one simple murder. It is condemning a person to live and die everyday. It is like a series of murders. A fit case for an eye for an eye! And often it comes after stalking, a crime you feel will infringe on your romantic pursuits.

It makes me sick and revolted 

What happened that day was that we were once again taught what our station in life was and would remain. 

I will borrow the words of Shobha De who rightly says that we are just vaginas, and vaginas are meant to be violated. To be born with a vagina is provocation enough!

It is time we get used to this. You will do nothing!

It was a game you played, and we fell for it.







and the rapes go on

and the rapes go on

by | Mar 8, 2013 | Uncategorized

A 3 year old was raped in Kerala. She was sleeping on the pavement next to her mother, a homeless rag picker. She was brutalised with a blunt object. When she was found. she had high fever and ants crawling all over her tiny body.  She will take a long time to recover from her physical injuries. I wonder whether she will ever recover from the scars on her tiny soul. Her mother, almost a child herself sits by her bed. I cannot begin to fathom what goes on in her mind. She has another older child and is carrying her third one. She is part of what Harsh Mander callas the invisible poor. Umpteen questions come to mind. What will happen to the little 3 year old? What is the future of the family? Will someone get moved by their plight and help them?

Two days back a class XII student went to meet a friend at a Mall. Is this not what all kids do today! When it was time to go home she took a shared auto rickshaw. The ride turned out to be a nightmare as she was driven around for 2 hours, raped and robbed before being thrown out of the vehicle. Does this not remind you of the one called braveheart who was raped on a December night? The country was on its feet to demand justice, albeit for a limited time. Had our slumbering consciences awoken for a nano moment.

The state went into damage control mode as it often does when faced with an inevitable situation. When water canons and tear gas shells failed, it constituted a committee to suggest amendments to the existing laws. The committee did surprisingly well and gave us a comprehensive report. The government went in knee jerk mode and promulgated an ordinance knowing very well that it was a short term solution as it needed to be ratified by the Parliament. The proposed bill has now been put on the back burner. The reason: nitpicking over small issues like the lowering of age of consent. If you ask my opinion, I would say that lowering the age of consent has nothing to do with rape! I am one of those who believe that marital rape should also be punished. The state is not a guardian of morality though it often steps into that space. First perhaps, our law makers and enforcers should ensure that no child mariage takes place and the law that states that girls cannot be married before 18 should be implemented. One cannot hide behind social mores and tradition and let people brake laws. Mindsets to need to be changed.

Rapes are a crime, a violation of a women’s body irrespective of her age. We are all too well aware of this fact. Turn on the TV, scan the morning paper and you will have your fill of rapes: 8 months old, 3 years old, 12 years old, 50 years old and so on. From January to mid February 181 rape cases have been reported in our city, that is 4 rapes a day! Seems like the perpetrators know that they rape with impunity. And they are right if we are to believe a report aired of CNN IBN this morning where law enforcers are caught on camera stating aberrations like only 1 to 2 % are real rapes rest are consensual; only women in western clothes are raped and so on. Till this CHANGES no ordinance, law or more of the same can make any difference. And the rapists know that.

Today is International Women’s Day. I would suggest you read Shobha De’s article. In our land Vaginas are for violating.

Hunger Games

Hunger Games

by | Mar 6, 2013 | Uncategorized

I have just started reading Ash in the Belly by Harsh Mander. A few pages down it is my belly that is knotted and and on fire. The last time this happened to me was when I read Bitter Chocolate, Pinki Virani’s shocking and disquieting account of child sexual abuse in India. The first pages of Mander’s book brought to life the spectre of hunger and malnutrition I have often written about in this blog. How many times  have I not spouted statistics hoping against hope that they would awaken our far too numbed consciences. I speak of you and I who have so often stood with an empty plate in front of a lavish if not gross display of food at upmarket weddings, wondering what to put on our plate? Will it be Italian or Kashmiri? Thai or French? The sight of so much food can even give you visual indigestion and let us not forget that this happens after we have gorged ourselves with snacks and glasses of bubbly! And then, armed with our over laden plates, half of which we will ultimately throw, we have sat at a table with our peers chatting about the Foreign University our child is or will be attending, or the latest outrageously priced bag just come in at a luxury store? I guess many of us would have experienced some shade of the above.

Maybe we think we belong to the slightly more intellectual variety and would be discussing the latest film or best seller. Perhaps the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins which does give a rather believable scenario of what might happen to humanity in times to come.

Today I am going to talk to you about real Hunger Games played by real people who are our brethren. The First Chapter of Ash in the Belly is entitled: Living with Hunger. Women in a small village of Uttar Pradesh talk about their lives and about the lessons they have to teach their children. Unlike us they do not teach alphabets, numbers or colour recognition. The one and only terrifying lesson their children have to learn is: how to sleep hungry! To avoid their children having to sleep hungry they do the unimaginable. Brace yourself before reading what I write now. It is from page 6 of Ash in the Belly: On days where there is no food in the house the whole family sets out to find food. They scour the harvested fields of the landlords with brooms to garner the gleaning of the stray grains of wheat and paddy… they follow field rats to their burrows and are skilled in scrapping out the grains stolen and stored underground by the rodents…after each weekly market ends, they collect in their sari edges, grain  spilled inadvertently by traders or rotting waste vegetable… they even sift through cow dung for undigested grain. (Ash in the Belly page 6). The grain thus collected is cooked with water, salt and turmeric to quell the hunger pangs of their children. And if there is still no food then the little ones are given cannabis or cheap tobacco to soothe them to sleep.

I do not know how you feel after reading these lines, but I felt ashamed and guilt ridden for every grain I would have wasted in the six decades of my life. Go to your rubbish bin now and just look at the all the things that could have allowed children to not sleep hungry. But as Mander says in his book that the poor do not matter anymore. They have disappeared from our lives: from our films, our songs, our poetry, our literature. They have become invisible. They are assassinated everyday because of our indifference.

People are starving across the length and breadth of India. Unlike us who ponder about what kind of food we will eat today, these people’s menu is restricted to ‘delicacies’ that never appear on the lavish and vulgar display we are used to. Have you tasted basi (fermented rice water) laced with leaves gathered from the forest; have you eaten a paste made of young bamboo or kaddi a poisonous wild plant immersed in the river water to get rid of some of the poison and then laced with jaggery to mask its bitterness? And yet this is what millions of people in our country eat to survive.

The book has revealing chapters: living with hunger, hunger amidst plenty, ways of coping. I have not read them yet but know that each will reveal another tragic aspect of a reality we refuse to acknowledge. The data given in the book is frightening: 230 million men, women and children go to sleep hungry every night; 76% of India’s household are calorie deficient; 42% of the world’s underweight children live in India. Need I say more.

The book also gives us a list of schemes launched by the Government to supposedly tackle this problem. I counted 12 with fancy acronyms using a wide range of letters from the alphabet. Each sounds fancy and a panacea to all problems ailing the poor. Some go back to 1975. But nothing has changed. These fancy schemes with huge allocations seem to benefit everyone except the stated beneficiaries. We who have a voice and could ensure that things worked as they should keep mute as always. It is not our kids who have to sleep hungry. At most we grumble because such schemes affect our taxes.

We have time and again heard about the humongous quantities of grain rotting in different parts of the country. Have we ever raised our voices? Why should we? We all suffer from a syndrome called indifference.

Next time you throw or waste food, think of the child who has sleep hungry? Will you?

I for one intend to keep on raising this issue in my writing with the hope that perhaps one person will hear the cries of the invisible millions.

I am now bracing myself to read the next pages.

Papa did you not earn enough money today!

Papa did you not earn enough money today!

by | Mar 5, 2013 | Uncategorized

Of late, I hold my breath each time I go to Greater Kailash 1 M Block Market. Wonder why? Well it is because I shudder to think which shop will have pulled down its shutters and closed and whether it will yet again be replaced by a new jewelery shop. Over the past years we have seen this happen time and again. I have lost count of how many gold and silver shops there are in this market. I would not be surprised if the market score a century in the very near future. Last week I wanted to buy a pair of jeans from the Levis store and to my utter dismay I found the shutter down! I can bet we will have a new gold and diamond store. Once upon a very long time GK M block was your regular market where you found all your needs. We had meat shops, grocery shops, pastry shops, Indian sweet shops, a haberdasher, paint shops, book shops and so on. All of these have disappeared. I was also saddened that my favourite coffe and tea shop is now closed. I have heard we are on the way to getting a Starbucks.

The reason for all this change is of course the exponential rise of rents. The rents are so high that simply selling a couple of pair of shoes or branded clothes cannot meet the rent and running costs. The only ones who are still there are those who won their premises and have judiciously managed to rent part of the space at an astronomical amount and tucked themselves away in a corner. Others have preferred renting the entire building and living a more than comfortable early retirement. For me, GK Market has become and extremely restricted space with only a few of the old hands with whom I find myself reminiscing about the good old days.
For quite some time now I have been buying my ‘foreign’ groceries from a shop in another so called up market market. The place is run by a father and son duo whom I have got to know over the years. I like going there as it is not only a pleasant and personalised shopping experience but also the occasion of having a chat. Last time I went, I was surprised to see a lot of construction and remodelling. You see the basement had once been rented and the upper floor were used for storage. I asked the son what was happening and we answered that they had decided to redo the store and use the whole building. A brave move in the times of super markets and malls but I am confident that they will succeed. The son however told me that his father had toyed with the idea of renting the entire space and the option of a lucrative retirement. The son however felt that he did not want an easy life but one with challenges and hard work. This was because he felt, and I totally agreed, that it was important to set the right example to  one’s children. A father that ambles and wastes his time is no role model to his child. And yet this is what is happening among the rich and richer. 
The son recounted and incident that happened in his shop a few days back. A father brought his son to the store and the child demanded a candy that was quite expensive. The father resisted and chided the child. After some negotiation the son quipped: Papa did you not earn enough money today! The shop owner was shocked and just retained himself from reacting, noblesse oblige! Needless to say, the father buckled under. Sadly this is the rule, not the exception. On a lighter note, my grand son, all of four
An old doctor friend from the rich and famous tribe was recently in Goa. He came across a group of lads busy gambling. The combined loss of the rich father’s progeny was 1 crore or 10 Million rupees. But they laughed it off by saying that anyway it was papa’s money and papa will give more.

This is nothing short of frightening! A whole generation of supposedly educated children who will never learn the importance of hard work and the pleasure of its rewards. I can never forget how my attitude to money changed when I got my first pay packet. In spite of having been brought up in extreme luxury and overabundant love, my parents were the first ones to push me to start earning soon after my 18th birthday. being proficient in French, I found casual employment at the French Section of All India Radio. The broadcast was from 12.20 am to 1 am. I had to reach by 9pm to translate the news and then read it past midnight. With the rather lackadaisical running of the AIR transport system I was fetched around 8pm and then driven around the city and dropped back around 2 am after another session of Delhi by night! The next morning I had to be at JNU at 8 am for my MA classes. For each news bulletin translated we got the princely sum of 50 rupees. I must admit that after this I never took money from my parents, something I so easily did earlier. In the western world that we so like to emulate, children leave their parental homes after they are 18. I can never forget the ‘philosophy’ of very dear friends of my parents who were very rich and have their children all they wanted. But come 18, you had to leave home and learn to fend for yourself. Any money you needed was lent to you with interest. If you did decide to stay home longer, then you paid for your stay. Even children of the richest families abroad babysit, clean homes, work at petrol stations and so on. I guess for rich Indian parents it would be infradig to have their kids do such menial tasks. We are prisoners to too many hand up and social taboos. So we are bringing up overgrown kids we feel we have to pamper and cosset for heaven knows how long. And they squander our money with impunity.

It is time things changed.