My husband informed me yesterday that he has to go to Manipur next month. I was thrilled as this means that he is back to normal, or a new normal as they say, after a harrowing battle with lymphoma. My only worry was: what will he eat, as part of his recovery has been a well balanced and near organic diet. Last month he had visited Calcutta many times and after much thought we had zeroed in on fish as the best alternative for him. I know nothing about Manipuri food but what I know is that I am weary and suspicious about him eating food that has travelled miles and miles and food that has been subjected to a cold chain as we in India have still not fathomed the basic tenets of refrigeration and cold storage. I know how difficult is is for me to explain to my staff that one cannot defrost and re-frost with alacrity. Thus I decided to find out, bless be Google, what the locals in Manipur ate, feeling a tad ashamed at my near to nil knowledge of foods of the North East. I am glad this opportunity came by.

If you Google for foods from Manipur you are faced with exotic names you do not recognise: Ngari, Iromba, Chamfoot, Morok! A little further reading reveals what these are: fermented fish and lots of local herbs. Manipuris like their food spicy hot. The staple diet of Manipur consists of rice, large varieties of leafy vegetables (of both aquatic and terrestrial) and fishes. Manipuris typically raise vegetables in a kitchen garden and rear fishes in small ponds around their house. Since the vegetables are either grown at home or obtained from local markets the cuisines are very seasonal, each season having its own special vegetables and preparations. They hardly use any oil and the food is near organic.  It should be cause to celebrate only I do not see my husband eating fish with bones or vegetables that seemed simply boiled with herbs. I wish he did as it would be a perfect diet for him. Must try and find out a way out.

It is sad that we do not know anything about local cuisines around our land as these are the ones that are healthy and nutritious. Globalisation has ensured the slow death of local food. An interesting article in a magazine entitled the culture of eating right, unravels the richness of tribal cuisine in India, where over, hold your breath, 1582 food kinds were on display and 972 of them for uncultivated. Organic in its purest form! How silly we look with our limited grocery bag that looks pathetically the same week after week, month after month. The festival was a celebration of traditional food cultures linked to age-old farming practices that not only provide these tribes nutritional security, but also protects and conserves nature’s bounty.

This is real food security, one that has withstood the test of time and is in sharp contrast with the Food security the Government wants to dole out and that is limited to 5 paltry kilos of rice, wheat or millet. As a tribal rightly said: “We don’t need your food security system, the more ration shops you open in our villages, the more you force us to abandon our own food security system so painstakingly built by our forefathers.” I wish law makers understood this, but they are so high on hubris that they want to be God and Nature at the same time. Sadly it does not work that way. By taking away traditions, we are going against nature in a shameless way.

A single traditional plant has multiples uses and no waste. He is is just one example:  Kusum koli leaves are used for fodder, its fruits eaten raw, the plant is used as firewood and oil is extracted from the seeds. The seed oil serves as a mosquito repellent and also treats certain skin diseases. So you have food for humans and animals, fuel for cooking and medicine. There are hundreds of such examples. If you read the whole article you will understand what true Food security means. How can 5 kilos of rice replace what the forest gives. It is impossible to view food security without a proper understanding of our traditional food systems and feeling a sense of pride in them. The short cut and thoughtless approach aimed at gaining votes has to be abandoned. The fast food frenzy has to be denounced, the dangers of genetically modified food need to be assessed.

We need to imbibe the wonderful knowledge of tribal traditions and embrace them. 1582 kinds of foods cannot be shunned and cast away. We, and I include myself in the we, are quick to adopt and even champion foods coming from ancient traditions of other lands like quinoa and chia seeds and shitake mushrooms and pay exorbitant prices for them but unwilling to look at the foods of our own ancient traditions. What if I were to tell you that Kanglayen, a mushroom found in Manipur is shitake mushroom. I am sure that there is a cornucopia of super foods waiting to be discovered and I intend to do so.

What can be more organic than a meal of vegetables grown in your backyard and fish from your pond! And look at the picture above, each bowl is a different food. I wonder if the best 5* Michelin chef could conjure such a plate.

To be born in today’s India is no piece of cake. I have been watching with horror and sadness the terrible plight of parents whose are trying to get their children admitted in nursery classes in private schools this year. It is nothing short of a never ending nightmare both for what we may call ‘ordinary’ parents and those from humbler homes who want to avail of the 25% reservation in these classes. I remember when I first heard of this absurd solution to the stipulations of the Right to Education Act, I knew it would be more than a herculean task.

 A new court order has now stayed all procedures till March 24th following yet another petition challenging a previous order! The whole process looks like a play worthy of the best theatre of the absurd, a new version of Waiting for Godot with the protagonists being: an innocent toddler, harried parents and a clueless administration. Lots are drawn, then cancelled, to be drawn again with no one knowing which mother will knock at the courts of justice and break down in court following the results of the next draw. And as this saga goes on, the rule makers get tied in knots and more knots that would soon resemble an Arachnean web impossible to unravel.

One could watch all this with amused aloofness were it not for the thousands of children whose future lies in a little piece of paper in a box with all the odds stacked against it. How can a self respecting state, one who insists on being considered as a world power, not ensure access equitable education to all its children. In any supposedly civilised country a child should be able to get admission to a school it could walk to. That could be a reality if our Government decided once for all to model every school they run to the image of the central schools that are also run by them. The commercialisation of education is not a solution to Education for All. State run schools should be an option for every child, rich or poor. Sadly that is not the situation today and one does not have to be literate or ‘educated’ to understand that a child has a better chance in a school where there are 40 children in a class as compared to one that has 100+!

The 2014 – 2015 version of this absurd saga began in mid January. Guidelines on the (ill)famed 100 points system were issued. The new ‘neighbourhood’ criteria was extended from 6 to 8km! I thought neighbourhood was walking distance, but 8km would give you 70 points. Then there were points for siblings, girls and staff children, staff here being extended from parents to grandparents. 25% of the seats had to be reserved for disadvantaged children. Get the picture. Now in a country like India you can circumvent any issue so people get fake tenancy agreements and fake documents to avail of the 25% category. Slum parents are barely aware of this facility and even if they are, often do not have the documents needed. So it all looks like a joke.

But children cannot be treated with such contempt. Their future cannot be left to a draw of lots where there are 80 seats and 5000 applicants. And why are you disadvantaged if your a an only child, a first born or a boy!

It is time the law makers did something about education. Children cannot wait. With every day lost you jeopardize the future of an innocent child who remains helpless and lost.

Don’t lose faith in India were one of the last words my father said to me.Today I am finding it difficult to keep faith! It is no more a question of not losing faith but of not abandoning India. A quote from Racine’s play Phedra comes to mind: Tout m’afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire, which translated would read: All afflicts and injures me, and conspires to my injury.
Phèdre, act I, scene III and would need to be reworded as: all afflicts and injures me and conspires to my losing faith. Every time you take a deep breath and try and try moving on that not losing faith journey you promised to travel to the very end, something hits you like a tons of brick. And that something flies at you from anywhere and everywhere. And it takes all your will power and effort and remembering the love you have for the one who set you and that journey to take another step and then another one. What you want to do is annihilate the reason, but you are not privy to the way Hydra is destroyed and you battle aimlessly with each head of the serpent as more and more grow relentlessly until the moment you feel that eliminating yourself might be easier, before you suddenly look desperately for a straw to latch on to and carry on.

It is even more frustrating when you know the way but also know that you can only do d**** all! I have given up news channels of late as I cannot bear the screeches and nonsensical bellows of politicians badgering their opponents and blowing their trumpets whilst 3 children die quietly very minute in a deafening silence. They die of malnutrition, poor health care and reasons that each of these aspiring Prime Ministers could solve if they had the heart to. I would not be able to stand in front of thousands and thousands of people I have let down and feed them dreams that never will never come true because no one wants them to.

I gall when those who have been in power for decades reel out their achievements without batting an eyelid. Come on do you wear visors when you step out of the comfort of the ivory towers you hide in or does one have to sell one’s soul, eyes, ears and all else to the devil when you don the mantle of politics? You do not have to leave the precinct of your city to see children begging, children working when they should be in school according to a legislation you voted with great fanfare. These kids are also Indians just like yours and have a right to free and quality education or is the street or a dark workshop the schools for children who live on the other side of an invisible but impregnable wall.

How do those who want to ‘rule’ courtesy the votes we give them not shudder at the 11 000 children that go missing every year. Do they not know that these children often become part of the sex trade. But true they are not your children but those of a nether world you only remember when you need a vote or a feel good sop that anyway does not reach anyone.

Parliament is made to legislate. It is not the market place it has been turned to. I wonder if these politicians realise that vulnerable people wait with bated breath of the very legislation that gather dust session after session while they squander tax money in playing to the gallery. The little boys in the picture are still waiting for the Disability Act that would have brought some relief in their lives.

I am sick of vote bank politics that entail aberrations like the (ill)famed kangaroos courts that order and execute death sentences should you dare love or dividing and dividing till there is nothing left to divide.

I would like to hear someone talk about education for all, about breaking the vertical glass barriers that separate us and them. I would someone to realise that it is education and education alone that can transform India and that means quality schools for every child, even the one that knocks at your car window each time you stop at a red light. We need to unite and not divide. We need schools to be level playing fields. We need my child and his child to study side by side.

It is easy to lose faith in India, but  more difficult to keep that faith. Yet one has.There is no option!

 Today is woman’s day. I do not know why we celebrate one day in 365 as woman’s day! Does that mean that all others are man’s day? However I have my own take on this. In India is ranked as the 4th most dangerous country for women. The ranking was done based on six risks:  health threats, sexual violence, non-sexual violence, cultural or religious factors, lack of access to resources and trafficking. Among the G 20 countries, it is the worst. As worshipers of Goddesses this should make our heads hang in shame, but we do not. So at least today, which is woman’s day, let us do just that: hang our heads in shame for every woman in our country who suffers in silence and dignity the horrors she is subjected to.

From the time she is conceived, she is unwanted. Often her life ends in the womb and she is thrown away in some gutter or becomes part of hospital waste. Maybe the ones who go that way are spared the abuses they would be subjected to had they seen the light of day.

Every day we are faced with some terrible statistics regarding women. We seem to have become so inured to them that we barely flinch. You see these statistics do not concern our daughter, sister or friend. They seem to belong to some nether world we are unconcerned with. Maybe today is the day we should at least show concern about these horrifying figures and dare to peep into that nether world.

There was a TV programme yesterday evening on a film yet to be released: Lakshmi. One of the reasons for its delayed release is the concerns by the Indian Censor Board on the film’s subject and the content. You see it deals with human trafficking and child prostitution! Subjects you do not talk about as they disturb everything we want held as true. But trafficking exists. 44 000 children are abducted every year and 11 000 remain untraced. Some fight and survive like the heroine of this film. Today we should salute such women.

During the programme an activist, herself a survivor, made a valid  point however disturbing. It is time we looked at the demand and not the supply of this heinous and abhorrent trade. As she said, it is not enough to save a few, as is done now, but to cut the demand. She revealed that she the youngest girl she had ‘saved’ was three and a half years old. Yes there are men, some maybe even closer than we think, who want three and a half years old. And as long as there is a demand, there must be a supply. As the activist rightly said it is time to name and shame those who indulge in such horrors. But it makes good business sense does it not. I ask you today on this women’s day to make a pledge to go and see this film. Maybe it will open the eyes of your heart.

None of the abuses a woman has to suffer can happen without the help and connivance of other women. I am not just talking about the Madames of the prostitution dens. In every home women are abused by other women in some way or the other: the mother who prefers her son to her daughter, the mother-in-law who makes the life of her daughter-in-law hell, the women who gang up in the name of some misplaced sense of honour and shield a perpetrator with impunity while a child suffers in total bewilderment. To these women I simply ask: what if the victim was born out of your womb? Today I ask all women to stand up for women against the men who abuse them and to give up the code of silence they abide by.

And is it not time to scream out loud and clear that a woman is not responsible for the gender of the child, that the seed – be it male or female – comes from the man, and thus put a stop to the pain suffered by all women who cannot bear sons. How can they. God did not give them that role.

We need to stop thinking of women as a commodity and accept them being so treated.

Please make it a point to go and see Lakshmi to honour all the invisible women that suffer because of our deafening silence.

So elections have been announced. Come to think of it we have been in election mode for quite some time. In the past weeks every time you switch on the idiot box, particularly in the day, you are likely to stumble upon some leader or the other addressing a rally in some part of the other of our country. The speeches, often delivered in screeching and strident voices courtesy I guess poor quality sound equipment are a cocktail of the same ingredients: bashing the adversary, enumerating one’s so called achievements, and wooing some section of society, normally the poor or some target group, though never quite spelling what they would do barring grandiose promises that one has heard ad nauseum.

I do not know what choices one really has. It seems that politics in India follow a similar cacophony no matter what your supposed ideologies are. Sleeping with the erstwhile enemy is common place. Pre election there is a torrid pre election alliance time which may or may not result in the sought marriage or engagement. The probability of a post election alliance does however remain on the back burner. And the alliances are of all shades and hues and follow now ideology whatsoever. The only common denominator is power!

Mudslinging, name calling and hitting below the belt is run-of-the-mill. It is all a game of oneupmanship. Blowing one’ s own bugle and badgering your opponent is the rule of the game. Then comes wooing the voter that includes a variety of gestures such as touching the feet of a poor elder, hugging or patting a child. Walking streets with a retinue of people hired at a daily wage, and a fanfare or drums playing forcefully while the candidate smiles with folded hands that unfold to wave at no one in particular is also an age long ‘tradition’. What is amusing is the sending of an advance party who hands out garlands to all and sundry so that they can ‘garland’ the candidate. It reminds you of yore days of kings and court jesters. Wonder if it cuts any ice with an electorate that is getting tired of these jaded ways.

Last time we voted for change, what we though was real change. But then the power bug I guess reared its ugly head and we as a city felt abandoned as our new heroes left us for greener pastures. Today we see them looking too much like the ones we were fed up with.

Yet we have to make a choice and to do sift the chaff from the wheat, if wheat there is. It is not easy to find one’s way under the din and clamour and work out what is best for us. It seems that creating the loudest vociferation is every one’s way of shielding their shortcomings and forcing us to lose our way. The recent happenings in Gujarat and the subsequent street fights are a good example of what I am trying to say. One party states it is trying to expose the claims of uber-development brandished by another. A member of the said party tries to explain the situation that ensued as best he can.

I do not know how many of us read an article by Mallika Sarabhai who in a quiet way gives us telling statistics about the development in this state that tell the real story.  She ends her article with these words:  But his model of development is Darwinian; the government will only support the fittest. Let the others perish. So, will the readers of this column see through this model of lies only if they belong to the 950 million poor, weak, unjustly treated? Is this the model for India?

What is happening is that we are all losing track of real issues and getting swayed by who shouts the loudest, who mesmerises the best, who dazzles the most, who promises the best sops. The real issues are forgotten and brushed under the carpet. The questions that need to be asked are lost in translation.  In a recent interview Delhi’s 49 days Chief Minister did make some very crucial points which again seemed to have been lost under his two coloured socks. He stressed that only quality education for all can usher the change we so want, and that it can only happen when all state run schools across the land impart equal and quality education. Unless that happens, nothing will change.

This is what the likes of me have been shouting forever.