wronging no right

journalistic standards in AP are deplorable.

the other day, the State Commission for Women had conducted a workshop on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005. it was reported in a ‘premier daily of the state’ as – workshop on ‘Preservation of Domestic Violence Act’. ha ha.

on second thoughts, in a state where the learned legislators (obviously all-male) have tried to shield barbaric social practices (obviously anti-women) in form of a Customary Laws Bill, the journalist may have truly believed he was writing no wrong.

doctor doctor

i am a snob – the kind who turns up her nose at anything that is not the Hindu, the Beeb and NDTV (of course, i also regularly junk out on TOI behind my back).

this morning, however, the Star News anchor did something that i haven't seen anyone on NDTV do in the past few weeks. he asked a spokesperson of the anti-reservation protest “how come the patients are having to bear the brunt of the doctors’ ire?”

our good doctor’s brilliant rationalization of the work-shirk was “at least there are qualified doctors today. tomorrow, when the 40% reservation comes into force… the best doctors go abroad in any case. the ones left in the country will be the quacks who came in on reservation”.

so, if your ultimate humanitarian mission is to serve the dying masses of the United States, why bother wasting a heavily subsidized medical seat in India? go there rightaway and leave the wannabe-quack and his fighting chance of a reservation alone. At least, he'll stay back to hold up the tattered bones of the quack healthcare system of a quack third-world democracy.

ya ya, i am an angry and incoherent woman. but at least i had enough empathy for the sick to have chosen NOT to become a doctor - i believe a doctor must be no less than god and i am a lesser being, susceptible to lapses of temper. so, my blood boils when i see these protestors violating every oath by Hippocrates… or has it been renamed Hypocritic's Oath?

fine, our stands on reservation are different. i could live with that. but the fact is that you are refusing to tend to the sick – how can i respect you now? is this the mark of your merit that you couldn't think of any other way of registering your protest but by holding the people to ransom?

oh and while i steam some more and watch Star News, think about this, Mr.I-got-into-AIIMS-on-Merit - who’s the butcher now?

home is...

itanagar - i don't like it. the pity is that i’ve been here forever and still, exit is not a choice – not yet. i continue to lead a parasitic existence and my host parents live and work here.

itanagar is what one may call inorganic.

when the union territory of AP grew out of the North-East Frontier Agency, it was thought necessary to create an urban setting for the ensuing games of power. for reasons that i could never fathom, out of 84,000 stunning square kilometers of blank canvas where a new capital could have been situated, this nondescript valley with no claims to any great physical beauty nor to salubrious climes, got chosen to be the centre.

it’s been more than 30 years since the first roads were cut into the hills, and the first bricks were laid, but this town is yet to take on a personality. if i were to be generous and pretend it does have a personality, it would be that of a boor who got too rich, too soon, too easily.

itanagar’s soul was stillborn but its belly continues to swell with conspicuous consumption. SUVs with their beacons jacketed in false modesty and ugly buildings that spring up in the middle of the night, malicious gossips whispered in paan-splattered corners of government offices where work must always wait – that is how I see my town.

on the other hand, anonymous faces continue to be propelled into the statistics of rural-urban migration by an unsympathetic paradigm of development, that in turn is kept in place by the town’s royalty. pride and dignity are left behind in the villages, men become pimps and women become whores.

As much as I hate this town, I know it’s not its fault. bricks don't make a town. people do.

in honour of a friend who's in a limbo

what you get into when you don't study for your finals.....





...... ek jam.

reader, forgive me

i have a confession to make. the sudden flood of photographs has been triggered by the fact that till this afternoon, i didn't know how to upload pictures. and now i know.

and now you know that i know.

warning: this flood will continue unabated for at least a couple of days. kindly bear with me or you can move on to safer grounds for the duration.

a flower and a window frame

me say a little prayer for you

interpreting religion

i have reservations too

i am a second-generation school-goer and graduate. my father is an engineer who benefited from the reservation mechanism. i am not sure about my mother. both my parents have done their masters and both have been contemplating doing their doctorates. i can safely say i have had a privileged upbringing. i did all my schooling in AP. for the most part, i studied in two hindu missionary schools. i had a bitter one-month dose of the government schooling system too. the teachers tried their best. but there just wasn’t enough infrastructure. and i am only talking about the government school in itanagar, the state capital.

i was thought to be a good student at home. but when it was time to go to college, i didn’t know whether i stood on par with a student, say, from a good school in delhi, who had probably been getting educational advantages all of her life - not to mention the coaching classes she had been attending since ninth grade in preparation for entrance examinations. AP has a joint entrance examination where students compete for a few hundred seats that have been reserved for us at institutions throughout the country. i sat for that examination. i also worked up the courage to appear for the entrance examination of a very respected institute for architecture. of course, i was under-confident. so i registered as an ST candidate.

i got through to the architecture institute, and i was ranked 12th in the general category. meanwhile, i also got through easily to JIPMER and LHMC and many engineering colleges. my choice was easy. one, i wasn’t keen to be a doctor or an engineer. two, i didn’t want to be looked down upon as a quota student. when i went in to fill in my acceptance form for at the architecture institute, and the lady at the desk looked for my name under the ST category, it felt very good to tell her that she better look for it under the general category.

my take on reservation is therefore, retrospective and i can afford to be expansive. do we need reservation? yes, of course. in AP, less than twenty out of a hundred children get even a semblance of quality education. it doesn’t mean that of the rest, at least twenty others don’t have what it takes. i have a lot of friends who went to med schools and engineering schools on quota. they are good doctors and engineers today. on behalf of my friends, i take offence to insinuations that quota students turn out to be butchers. reservation gets you a place into an institution. once you are in, there is no concession and no reservation for passing examinations. on the other hand, i have heard of teachers who are so biased that they go the extra mile to discredit their merit and hard work and fail them out of spite.

there is the other aspect. most of the students who go from these regions come back home and serve the people here. a doctor born and brought up in Delhi has no obligation to come and do time in a godforsaken unelectrified village in the malaria-infested backwoods of AP. for him, it is perhaps more lucrative to go to the US or UK. but for a child from this village, there is a moral obligation and even motivation to come back and be of use to the community. by helping children from these areas to become doctors, one is investing in the healthcare system of the rural areas too.

i agree the quota system is vulnerable to misuse. again and again, children from the privileged sections of the scheduled tribes and castes take unfair advantage of this, and in the process, antagonize many people against the idea of reservation. but such misuse does not make the idea of affirmative action redundant, just like booth-capturing doesn’t nullify our democracy. instead of demanding that reservation be scrapped, we must insist that tighter checks and balances be put in place. let there be more stringent socio-economic specifications, plug the loop-holes and ensure that the wrong guys don’t profit.

even today, there is a general correlation between one’s community and/or region of birth and the degree of one’s educational deprivation. this of course is as true for a child who may be a brahmin by birth but from an economically weaker background. as i see it, reservation is a means of leveling the playing field. it is ridiculous to expect a first-generation educated child to compete with someone whose family tree is crowded with ancestors who went to london for higher studies.

and yes, there is a lot of work to be done on our school systems. but that’s another long story.

reservation does not have to be a sine die situation. but as long as inequalities exist, a humane society cannot deny its possibilities.

takin' her for a ride

i don't have any memory space - i was born without a long term memory, and as for a short term one, ... yeah... umm... so what was i saying?

one of the few precious memories of my childhood that i possess in almost graphic clarity, is that of pillioning behind my mother on her bajaj scooter on a bright sunny morning. we were perhaps coming back from the kindergarten school where she used to teach. and where i was enrolled by default, since i didn't have an ayah to take care of me then, and the school didn't have a creche. (workplaces still don't have creches i think).

she was negotiating the first one of the two steep inclines on the way to our house. as if the almost 45degree slope wasn't bad enough, there was also a sharp curve in the bargain. maybe she was contemplating the complexities of my infant scatology. maybe she was wondering what to cook when we got home. her mind went off the road for a split second and the scooter veered towards the cliff. she braked hard. i crumpled into her and i screamed. and she screamed back at me. we sat there like two unhappy lumps for maybe thirty seconds - i don't know what she was thinking. i was boiling over with resentment for all my two years were worth. then she wheeled the scooter onto the road and we carried on.

cut to the present... i've been riding a bike for two years now. i believe i've become pretty good at it. last evening, my mother asked me to take her on a helmetless evening ride. her request took me by surprise and was very flattering because she's one of the best drivers i've ever ridden with... jhakaas extreme-sports class (actually, if you are driving on AP roads, you can't be any other class, boss).

we hit the road so to say. at a point, i had to cut rightwards into the highway groove from a side road that was at an uncomfortable slope (i told you, we have extreme terrain roads). i looked right and then, left. the coast looked clear. as i proceeded to move in, a biker apparated out of the darkness very close to me from the right and in a belated stab at conscientiousness, he switched on his headlight. my mother grabbed my shoulder in alarm and i braked. she didn't scream. neither did i.

i am twentyfive and my mother is fortythree. in a strange way beyond words, i could empathise with the twentyone year-old young woman who had almost driven off the road into the cliff with her precious cargo, and then screamed in guilt on the wayside.

As I was saying, Mr. BoNacci…

fibonacci’s numbers – 0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on – enchanting as they are in themselves, they are also the secret ingredients of another magical being - a perfect spiral.

in the maori weltanschauung (there, I finally got that word out of my system), the tender curl of the koru, the black fern, is a symbol of life, of beginnings and continuity. to the first people of mexico, the caracole - the spiralled shell of the snail - provides passage to the divine breath that gives life and consciousness.

spirals are alluring. in themselves, they are complete, yet they hold out the promise of forever growth. they may not possess the simple symmetry of a circle or a square, but they are not boring and predictable. unlike the hyperbolic paraboloids, they don't have to work hard at being twisted. they just are.

one end rooted in nothingness, and another swelling towards eternity. they encircle and embrace.

if i were to be reborn as a character of geometry, i would want to be a spiral.

more gyaan

the instant connection over a shared gulp of oxygen is...



...yawn sambandh.

look what i found!!

this is my first (the only) post from the aborted blog...

"For beginners, AP is Arunachal Pradesh. A quiet state of India. One might confuse it with Andhra Pradesh, a more famous and newsworthier part of the nation. But that's okay because the definitive guide to Arunachal Pradesh, henceforth AP, is here.

You would locate AP at the top of the Indian territory on the right which is attached to the mainland by a very thin strip of land. This territory, lumped together in the media as the North-East, or N-E, comprises of many small tribes of the Mongoloid stock - with only our snub noses in common. More on this later.

Coming back to AP, as with the name that was given to us by a dead Prime Minister, much of what we are, has not been of our choosing. We didn't choose to be part of India (not that we would have exercised our choice, given an option), we didn't choose to be isolated for many years after the independence of India, and we also didn't choose the rapid pace of development that followed this quarantine. As we finally come into our own, lots of wrong turns have already been taken. Even now, our choices are mostly uneducated and mad.

The next couple of decades are going to be crucial to our existence and identity. For me, muddled as my personal identity is (Indian? Arunachali? Chinky? Tribal? Non-Christian? Non-Hindu? Beef-eater? Exotica? Curio? Suspect no.1?), the future of AP - growth or disintegration, is object of both cold interest and desperate prayers. This blog is my attempt to understand what’s going on, what’s going wrong, what can be salvaged, and what needs to be trashed. Let’s say, I’m formulating the Grand Plan of Change.

I invite everyone, who have dropped by for whatever reasons, to join me in my own tilt at the windmills."

...not my first...

this is, in fact, my second stab at blogging.

in the autumn of 2003 (or was it 2004?), i had leaped into the deep end with a very ambitious ‘the definitive guide to AP’. the blog died alone and unmourned for. i figured que sera and all that and blogging is not my medium so thank you.

however, this march, something happened that i just couldn’t bounce off my friends without appearing like a self-indulgent hyperventilater. i had to write. instead of picking up a pen and paper, i typed. and that turned into a blog. by may, i figured it was easier to blog things out than victimize friends with the non-events of my lovelife.

now, this is difficult to admit, but blogging is actually turning out to be fun. part narcissistic-part voyeuristic - i am enjoying baring myself to my gaze, and admiring my being etched out in impersonal regular sans-serif letters.

i’m still not decided about sharing my blog with friends. the promise of anonymity allows me to let myself be vulnerable/invincible and bare my claws even if they aren't manicured.

what if i get lonely? i'd never know, because i don't admit to that, even to myself.

urdu gyaan

auto-eroticism is...




khhud-khhushi

ahem…ahem… mike-testing….

the music of arunachal that emerged in the 60s and the 70s was groundbreaking. the musicians – both lyricists and composers – were young idealists impatient to create a new world out of the ferment in the society around them. they drew their poetry and music from the traditional, and recast it into a new genre of music of the hills. this process was aided by the patronage provided by the AIR.

in the recent years, as technologies have been democratized, making and accessing music have become very easy. however, in the ensuing deluge of the ‘latest’ cassettes of dubious musical quality, the classics in the AIR repertoire are fast becoming just memories in the minds of the generations that used to listen to the radio. this is no less than cultural deprivation for the young people of arunachal.

and i am hoping to profit out of this gap in the market.

the lazy shall recycle

i'm a zombie. at least for this week, i am. it's too hot in the hills this year and i can't get myself to write a decent post. so i'm going to recycle some old writings.

in the autumn of 2003, there had been a shameful episode of rioting against the biharis in assam. this had ignited a vigorous political discussion on our class page, which usually is witness to nothing more violent than jestful name-calling. i of course, added my two-bit and this two-bit almost led to my expulsion from the republic of india. ladies and gentlemen, here is that explosive piece of secession - unedited - never seen in the public domain before -

"what happened in bihar and assam must have made every thinking being like us, cringe. something like godhra, this time the war flag being language and not religion. one could blame it on the simpler things - we are prejudiced, we are territorial. yes we are a biased lot but that’s not what fuelled the riots.

the reason was not that we are prejudiced. as long as we are human, we will be. we like to slot things- everything, every person must have a name, a label… the community must have an identification tag even though with individuals, we may become friends, even fall in love. education just helps us, most of us at least, to hide it better. come on, WE do it. bongs are miserly, surdies ke barah bajte hai, maddus are smelly, biharis are in a class of their own, chinky girls are easy to bed…. sounds familiar, doesn’t it? sometimes, just in jest, sometimes earnestly. fact of life.

neither is territorialism the reason. it goes with self-interest. as long as there’s more than enough to go around, one can be expansive and generous. when survival becomes a question, then one turns xenophobic. one must protect one’s own. out with the outsider. this is as true of usa and europe as much as of assam and maharastra. that’s human. an unpleasant fact, but another fact of life.

the honest reason for the incidents is that a situation has been created where people have to scrounge and scavenge for jobs in order to make a better life. the confrontation was artificial and avoidable. that of course is theoretically speaking and good governance being the X-factor. had laloo not misruled bihar for a decade, the biharis wouldn’t have sought existence away from home (not that i’m advocating bihar for biharis and assam for assamese or maharastra for marathis. but this is another thread). and suppose assam had visionaries at helm, the assamese wouldn’t have been crazed about petty government jobs (ever heard of private enterprise? Or tilling the land?). the leaders are not guilty of playing the divide-and-rule card. i don’t think they have the brains for that. they are just playing around and misgoverning because we let them. nobody asks them uncomfortable questions.(how many of us are going to queue up the polling booth and vote in the coming elections?) they are part of the problem as much as the people who let them.

to me, the scariest fact about those few days is how easily it comes to people to rape, humiliate, kill, loot, burn. It’s as if we are a nation of rioters. violence seems to be the only outlet for angst and despair. if a yellow-skinned person slaps you, maim, kick, slap all yellow-skinned people, parade their women naked.

or vice versa.

that may not improve things in the long run, but god, does it make me feel macho or what? We are not problem-solvers. we do not seek to make things better. we only want to express our hatred and anger with brute force and stones and sticks. definitely not a civilized society, are we?

as the wise ones say, if you want to do something about it, go ahead. or else, hold your peace. at the moment, i’m wondering if we could just annihilate bihar and assam. and in the bargain, maybe uttar pradesh, and gujarat, and maharastra.

how much would a couple of nuclear warheads cost?"

"how do i love... "

i used to fancy myself as a poet once. i would make up verses – syllables carefully arranged, meters counted out, or sometimes deliberately avoid rhythms, just because – but, only when my heart would get broken. writing poems seemed the most dignified and creative way of getting back at the heartless men who didn’t know my worth. i haven’t kept those poems. i don’t believe they were worth keeping. the poems were basically angst-ridden, emotion-infested post-adolescence ramblings that wouldn’t have gotten me a Nobel or even a Booker nomination (i’m not sure if they give you Bookers for poetry).

in another phase, i used to be a conscientious keeper of journals. now when i flip through them, they seem to be overcrowded with men like a Blue-line bus bullying its way on a jam-packed Delhi road. It’s not easy to resist setting a match to these journals. to be less harsh on myself, the pages do have smatterings of my concerns for the health of the world and its underprivileged and how i could be the messiah and fix things.

however, on an average my ‘literary’ output seems to be proportionate to the intensity of the emotional shit in my life at that point. if i am not writing, that means i’m cruising along. since i haven’t been regularly updating my journal, that probably means life’s been treating me well for the past few months. or maybe, i’ve just grown up. and grown boring.

'darkmoon'

the net is a big bad world. those from the dark side can crack into your mail account, send solicitations for penis enlargements or dark-latina porn videos, or worse, send viruses to treasured friends, and sully your credibility forever and more. In face of these dire possibilities, the password, though just a few letters and/or numbers strung together, is a powerful talisman.

the first password i ever made up was 'darkmoon'.

'darkmoon' was an inevitable outcome of my reason for plunging into the cyberia. i had just started dating my the-then boyfriend, who happened to be from very far-far-away. the summer vacation was upon us even before we had finished confessing our true love for each other. i was unsure how my parents would take to frequent phonecalls from a guy who spoke an English that held the alien smell of southern seas and fish curries. so, my lover, more techno-savvy than i was, suggested the yahoo messenger. and for love, i made my late entry into the 2nd world.

through that summer, the 2pm online dates were the highlights of my day. i would wait anxiously and uneasily for that hour, hoping that he had not been caught up for lunch or tea with one of his many relatives. and when i'd log on and if he was late by even a few minutes, i would start imagining worst-case scenarios, that would get more gruesome by the minute. i learnt slowly that my guy had been born without a gene and this had disabled his inner chronometer. so there were numerous times i spent grieving over my own grief, in front of my mind's eyes, his body lying crushed under an imaginary truck carrying coconuts. i also started getting insanely jealous of old english teachers and aunties with warts and ex-schoolmates who kept him away from our rendezvous. but the moment the smiley next to his name would light up, my heart would leap into my mouth. and with a few customary verbal slaps for his tardiness, i'd happily sit back and soak in the words of love beamed through that bright screen.

and, the emoticons, those sunny little circles that grin, cry, pout, wonder, tease and blow kisses... they became the conduits of lavish sentiments that led me to believe that my inexpressive lover was actually a light-hearted flirt who could make funny faces and wink at me. after the summer, it took me a while to realize that he did not know how to wink actually. i spent two more summers trying to teach him to wink, and another two summers to teach myself that i had to live with a non-winking boyfriend. and another two summers to realize that what i really wanted was the winking-kind, so i must let him go. hmm... yeah, it was the fault of those smileys.

oh yes, the passwords - 'darkmoon' was my saccharine-soaked 'poetic' take on his name. (some years later, i came across a poem by a friend of mine where 'darkmoon' appeared again. obviously, my 'literariness' had not been very unique. but my stupid taste in men had been substantiated.)

since then, i have moved onto 'happyday' and 'rhapsodies' and beyond. these have absolutely no references to any man or boy whatsoever. they are just words that are long enough so that no one can crack them, but also simple enough for instant recall. besides, they are words that refer to a state of mind that one may aspire to. everyday, when i log on to find out what my friends have to share with me, as i tap in my password, i hope that the magic of the word may make its way through the keypad, through my fingertips and upto my reluctant brain.

in another world, passwords can actually take you to a happy place. the next one should be 'opensesame', don't you think?

for my grandchildren

what can a woman do when she meets a man who promises to be many things she only dare wish for? of course, there’s a catch. he’s a traveller and he’s only passing through her life. blink, gone. in another month’s time, she will not remember how the uneven lines cut across his palms and what they said about him. The only sure thing that they told her was that his future would be lived on the other side of the world.

so, what she does is she refuses to look him in the eye even a moment longer than what politeness demands, scared that the words she’s trying to swallow back would be said through her eyes. she says ‘goodnight’ and turns her face away although she wants to hold him back and kiss that bright smile off his beautiful mouth. because he’s not real. At least, soon, he’d cease to be real. tomorrow, she must drop him off at the bus-stop and say good-bye with a grin and a hug.

…actually bad timing is not my only excuse. i also happen to be a sucker for love stories that never go beyond ‘once upon a time’. unrequited love is how my good and brutal friend more aptly describes my little passions. i like to insist i am like Lancelot of the Round Table fame – the courtly lover…uhm, that’s not completely true either. the truest truth is that i am a coward who refuses to take a chance.

i give my heart a little to each wonderful man i meet. but i never love enough to let it be known. i am beginning to regret it. i want to be a woman who has tales of grand passions to tell her grandchildren, or at least a past that has enough hot stuff to make the copies of her autobiography fly off the bookshelves. i would definitely invest half of that money for my grandchildren. the other half would buy me some good whiskey and the affection of some hunky young man to warm my rickety bones in my old age.

the heart lub-dubs. in other words, the clock ticks.