A good bit of blackmail

Blackmail is all about fear and shame. It means that someone can make you do something you don’t want to do because you are ashamed of the consequences. When Gandhi-ji fasted, he persuaded colonial rulers and Indian mill owners to overturn decisions that hurt millions of people.Why didn’t they just let him die?... Mass murder was already happening — directly, like in Jallianwala Bagh, or indirectly, like the Bengal famine. If the government wasn’t ashamed of starving millions, why was it afraid of one old gent starving to death?

I think it’s because when somebody goes on hunger strike, his life is at the mercy of the collective. It is like saying — “I think my life is not worth living under these circumstances. You can choose to do something about it. Will you?”

You can argue. But you cannot deny that a problem exists and must be fixed urgently...

Which brings me to the question of why some fasts are ignored. Hazare’s fast lasted five days and the state blinked. But for 22 days in 2008, Bhopal gas tragedy victims and activists like Sathyu Sarangi were fasting at Jantar Mantar. When they were close to critical, they stopped and another bunch of activists took over. No blink.

Read the whole article here.

Mother India sequel?

Nearly all male actors have joyfully gotten into drag at some point in their careers, while all female actors long to play something meaty and ‘real’. Something like Mother India.Now Mother India is hard to do again. But a Daughter India can still be made. In fact, it could be an international production because the role reprised by Nargis is a global figure. Data suggests that one in five farms is headed by a woman and women farmers produce 50% of the world’s food. They will identify with this kind of film.

I think the script would go something like this. As in the original film, Mother India is abandoned by her husband, and must bring up two boys alone. She scrapes a living off her tiny farm. She also has a baby daughter.

When the two boys grow up, they take over the farm. If Mother didn’t have to shoot Birju for his bad behaviour, and he didn’t want a split of their land, they work together.

Daughter India grows up and has to be married off. The land has to be mortgaged. The interest rates are high. The brothers’ backs are almost broken with the effort of trying to pay off the debt. Their own marriages must be delayed.

Read on.

Not just a nightmare

It took me a while to realise that I wasn’t really dreaming; I was just remembering sketchy details my mind had collected from the newspaper. I hadn’t paid much attention to the report since it was a brief item on the inside pages. Either some girl was killed or her boyfriend was killed by her brother.
There had been another report weeks before that. A 19-year-old went to Kurla (LTT) Terminus to meet her boyfriend. Her brother-in-law took off in hot pursuit and, along with a neighbor, managed to haul her back. On the train ride home, something happened. Either she jumped off or she was pushed. Or else, she fell out accidentally.

One detail from that story continues to haunts me. Her brother-in-law was yelling at her. Perhaps he was shaming her for being so hungry for love, or being ungrateful. Then he began to criticise her slippers.

Read on.

Insane certainties

Kirekegaard has said somewhere that often people treat difficult life questions like naughty schoolboys — they copy the answers from a book instead of working out the solution to the problem. I suspect that most political activists or party ‘workers’ do the same. They don’t want to think. They just want to follow someone’s lead. Then it becomes easy to let go, for example during a bandh.
... This is what happened when pro-Telangana protestors went on the rampage during a bandh in Hyderabad last month. They set fire to the office of SSAAT, an organisation working with the government to ensure proper implementation of the NREGS. 


Read more here.

Not in our backyards

What angers me is the fact that Madhya Pradesh has been considering a nuclear plant in Chutka for over two decades but not with the blessings of the gram panchayat. The Bhopal gas tragedy dampened official ardour somewhat, but only for a while. In 2009, villagers found out through newspapers that a nuclear facility was headed for their backyards.

They sent letters again and again to district and state administrations, asking: Would they be displaced again? How will nuclear waste be disposed? Will the water still be fit for drinking? What will happen to the fish in the river?

It is 2011 now and the state still hasn’t bothered to reassure the people. Read more

Hearing, seeing, believing

Multiplexes have changed my generation forever and I’m not talking about hundred-rupee popcorn. I’m talking about what we see and hear. Ten years ago, I’d go to theatres with a dozen questions: Would I get tickets? Would I have a nasty fellow sitting next to me?

Would he hog the shared arm-rest? Would a bunch of brats make random remarks? Would I have to shout: ‘Shut up yaar!’? Would a large family ‘request’ me to exchange seats?

Nowadays, we take our seats for granted, stand up for the national anthem and go home without talking to strangers. Unless of course, it’s a special screening.


Read the rest here.

What happened was that she learnt to walk

I was asked to do piece on urban women's lives in modern India, and how that has changed over a generation, for the Italian version of Marie Claire. The piece appeared in Italian, of course, so I cannot link to the actual beautifully laid-out pages, but here is an English version:

Fifteen years ago, I lived in a tiny place. The only real event there was a fete where we kids took camel rides and ate chocolate cake. My mother had moved from a capital city to the middle of nowhere to work for a school. This immediately made me unique – none of my classmates’ mothers had jobs, nor did they move anywhere independent of their fathers.

I was one of the only single-parented children I knew. Ma was the only woman who wore sleeveless blouses, chiffon sarees and stilettos. She was the only one who had no time to cook. She was also the only one who insisted that each student learn to paint, dance, sew and cook, boys included.

Ma, however, did not make a conscious choice to be a career woman. She had wanted to devote herself to a family. But life doesn’t pan out like a Bollywood film, even if you wear chiffon sarees and stilettos. For women of her generation, a broken marriage meant that life met you like a fist full on the face. Some women lapsed into poverty or dependence. Some, like Ma, caught that fist in both hands and learnt to walk.

Yet I grew up not thinking much about careers. There was a lot of marriage talk amongst girls my age and we took it for granted that it was a boy’s job to provide. I assumed marriage would not be difficult since I had many of the right qualities – neither fat nor thin, fair skin, English-speaking, soft-spoken, ‘convented’, not overly ambitious. It should have made it easy to take a step back from Ma, to live instead like my grandmother. But I had not contended with my own upbringing. Something more powerful than ambition had been embedded in my soul – knowledge that a woman could make her own money, and the love of freedom.

Independence – of thought, action, bank account – is a drug like no other. Even as a teenager, I was independent. I did not know how to ask anyone for money, nor did I like the idea of sticking with a man only because he took care of my bills. So I finally began to think of a career.

Grandma used to say there were only three and a half respectable professions for girls: 1. doctor, because there is no greater thing than to save lives (and there are nurses take care of the truly messy aspects of the job); 2. teacher, because you seem noble even if you are poor; 3. IAS officer, which means you have power and red tape at your disposal along with a big white car with a flashing red light on top.

And there was half an option called engineering. Now it was a great thing to be an engineer – you built bridges and dams, even invented things but grandma knew it was avoidable for a girl to wander in the sun, getting brown, dealing with shady contractors or recalcitrant labourers. But if you were an engineer who just sits in an office and makes plans, it was alright in her book.

Soon, however, it became clear that I was not going to be a doctor, engineer or IAS officer. Nobody suggested that I become an activist or researcher, or work in film or, worse, theatre – that was just madness. Since the only thing I did well was writing, I stooped to a slightly less respectable profession – journalism.

Even after I had my own income, I had minor conflicts at home about the usual things – traveling alone, being out late, boys, living in another city, living alone. But a decade later, everything has changed. Girl cousins and their friends are marketing executives, sound engineers, filmmakers, and radio jockeys. Many of them work in call centres and return home late at night. Some live alone. Every scrap of freedom that I had to fight for has come to these girls on a platter.

This can partly be traced to the mobile phone revolution. Once we were traceable at all times, our families began to relax. We would call home if there was trouble. They could hear our voice and be reassured. Part of the family's anxiety is also soothed by the fact that India has a tradition of earmarking spaces for working women where men are barred, such as women’s only compartment in metro trains and seats on buses. There are women-only travel groups and in some places, separate queues at ticket booking counters.

Some resistance remains, of course, both on social and education fronts. For instance, a cousin was interested in mechanics and wanted to specialize in marine engineering, but she was persuaded by her family to opt for computer engineering instead. They didn’t want her to end up as the only woman on a ship’s crew.

Still, every year, the envelope gets pushed further. When I was little, I didn’t know it was possible to join the army. By the time I graduated, my friends were taking up short service commissions. Now there is talk of allowing women in combat roles. It isn’t just the armed forces or the police that are a viable career option. All it takes is a long walk in any metropolis and you can see working women and feel the shards of shattered glass ceilings. There are female petrol pump attendants, female security guards at shopping malls. In Delhi, I once met a female auto driver who said she picked a legal battle to be allowed into the all-male auto and taxi union. Newspapers are introducing us to women racing car drivers, hiking experts, wrestlers!

But the fact that women have found new careers in the new millennium is not the real good news; the visibility of women at work is. Women with serious economic muscle are still rare but if they achieve something, they make headlines – being on a list of 100 most influential Indians, being the first woman stockbroker, climbing Mount Everest, creating a bank exclusively for unskilled women, making a fortune out of papads. Such women are a lode star. The rest of us look at them and know that dreaming is not a waste of time.

I still remember the sharp knock of joy I felt as a schoolgirl after athlete PT Usha almost brought home an Olympic medal. It was a heady feeling to know that a woman was not just running to make a career but for the sake of her passion and for the pride of the whole nation. Now girls like Sania Mirza and Saina Nehwal who are regularly in the news for winning tournaments and the fact that they have lucrative careers is not lost upon anyone. At this year’s commonwealth games, women won models in wrestling, athletics, archery, shooting, boxing. Slowly, they are pushing open the heavy doors of our patriarchal hearts. Now it no longer matters so much that sportswomen wear tiny shorts, as long as they bring home great honour.

Successful women change all of us, especially young girls who are struggling to stay in school. For instance, I read recently that a group of teenaged Muslim girls from low income families in Mumbai has taken up semi-professional basketball. For them, sport is a way out of poverty and premature marriage.

Equality is still a distant dream, of course. Even if we do the same work, women don’t always get the same wages. And while it is true that women-only spaces set us free and make us feel safe, most of us think twice before stepping out late at night. Mumbai is considered a safe city for women – thanks to a decent public transport system and crowds that make your head spin at all hours – but most of us constantly worry about being molested on a deserted stretch. In Delhi, still called the ‘rape capital’, women worry unless they drive their own cars or can get someone to drop them home. Things are changing with the introduction of the metro and radio taxis – knowing the identity of the driver beforehand is a relief, and now there are women-only chauffeur services. But we still agonize about safety, about what clothes attract too much attention.

In that respect, one of the most visible changes has been in the way we dress. Most working women have switched to jeans or salwar-kameez, which was once restricted to parts of northern India. Those who claim ‘Indian culture’ is under threat have physically attacked young girls for wearing jeans or skirts (never mind that Indian men have switched to ‘western’ trousers) or for going to pubs. The good news, however, is that many urban working women are starting to go to pubs if they wish to. Attacks are met with howls of protest – quite innovative ones too, such as posting pink panties to the cultural police.

To tell the truth, we would be glad to wear sarees more often if they were easier to handle during commutes. In fact, we look forward to festivals and weddings so we can wear traditional clothes. But perhaps western clothes do mean something more than comfort to the less privileged Indian woman. I used to have a neighbor who said she felt like being clad in nothing but jeans all the way up to her neck! And she would have, if her life was not ruled by a disapproving husband.

An independent income is the first step towards choosing how we dress or live. But it isn’t the last. Single women still find it difficult to rent houses, particularly those who don’t work nine-to-five jobs. Landlords often have strict rules. There are restrictions on male visitors and the ‘cousin-brother’ who comes to visit is an oft-told joke in Delhi. Few women can afford to move out of their homes until their mid-twenties and as long as they stay with the family, there are restrictions on their love life. Even liberal parents usually expect a definite marriage plan, assuming they accept boyfriends in the first place.

On the other hand, I also know many women in their late twenties or thirties who are not married and are refusing to ‘settle’. They focus on their own work and their own pleasure. Besides, once we become independent, we force others to reassess what they can expect from us. This is reflected in the matrimonials (yes, we still have arranged marriages, though now girls often voluntarily join matrimonial websites).

Increasingly, middle and upper class men prefer a career woman as a bride, a qualified professional. Skills like cooking or sewing are not considered essential. This doesn’t translate into gender parity, of course. It is still women who do most of the housework, but most middle class women in India can afford to hire other poorer women to do the harder work. Domestic workers play a big role in setting better educated women free to pursue other professions.

Parents too are changing their attitudes since daughters are taking better care of them. In certain communities, parents would not even eat a meal inside a girls' marital home, and they would never accept money from a daughter. Women of my generation are rejecting this old notion of ‘giving away a daughter’; they don’t stop being daughters when they become wives. Nowadays we even have television advertisements where the daughter is shown driving a family far, or gifting cars to her old parents.

Recently, I had a conversation with an older man who was complaining that modern girls (like me) are not ‘soft’; we are too much like men. I remember thinking at that time that what he really means is that he can no longer talk to us like we’re clueless. He can no longer boast of how hard he fought the outside world, how bravely, while we ‘soft’ women hurry to undo the harsh effects of his big battles.

Sadly for him, I knew all about the big, bad world. And I like a bit of a good fight myself. I too feel the thrill of a new deal or a bonus. I put bread on my own table. I deliver lectures. I report the news and sometimes, I am in the news. Who knows, some day, I might even go wrestling in the mud. Because even though I like my heels to be soft, I like new experiences even more. If I have to choose, I know what I'll pick.

Above all, I like to be my own person, even if it means being tougher, harder, less attractive. And so, I am grateful for a mother who has showed me how to survive as a woman, alone. And it isn't just me who is grateful. Fifteen years later, her ex-students, both girls and boys, call Ma up to tell her that she changed their lives in some way. Perhaps, she did it just by being who she was – a working mom, a beautiful woman, a good teacher who helped them take baby steps towards equality and modernisation.

In other news

I've just started writing a column for DNA. The first piece is about a tree.

There’s a gulmohur tree outside my window, along with a bunch of other flowering plants, most of which I have managed to kill. Each time my mother leaves town, she tells me I must remember to water the plants. Each time, a few plants die. But the gulmohar survived both my negligence and a parasitical attack.

It wasn’t easy keeping that tree alive. My mother fought hard to save its life.

Read the rest here

Our stuff

A piece I did for Femina a few months ago, on women's inheritance rights in India. Read on.

A room, a field, a place of her own.

One little cottage in Ooty – that’s what triggered a sibling tiff in 1965 and over the course of a quarter century, changed the law of the land. The legal battle began in 1984 when Mary Roy (writer Arundhati Roy’s mother) went to court demanding a fair share of the family property, and wasn’t fully resolved until recently when a civil court in Kottayam ordered the implementation of a Kerela High Court order in her favour.

Brief background to the Mary Roy case:

Mary Roy had been living in the cottage with two small children after her marriage fell apart when her brother asked her to vacate the place so he could sell it. She refused and went to court. But the law was stacked against her at the time. Under the provisions of the 1916 Travancore-Kochi Christian Succession Act, in Kerela, a daughter could inherit only one fourth of the share of the sons in her father’s property. In fact, the law stated that ‘a daughter shall receive one-fourths the share of a son or Rs 5,000 whichever is less’.

Mary Roy went to the Supreme Court and in 1986, the apex court ruled that Christian women are entitled to an equal share. Mary then approached the Kerala High Court and secured a judgment in her favour but her brothers raised several objections that delayed the implementation of the court order. All the objections were finally over-ruled in October 2010 when a Sub-court in Kottayam ordered the execution of the verdict.

The Mary Roy dispute has been settled finally but this was just one case – an exceptional case where an angry sister and single mother chose to fight all the way to the Supreme Court and back for her constitutional rights. “By the time I actually started my legal battle I was an independent wage earner. The family and society did not matter,” Mary says. Even so, her community in Kerela, including the Church and the tea and coffee estate owners, have been reluctant to act on the judgment. “Society reacted with joy at first. When they realized that there was a retrospective angle to the Judgement, there was consternation. The Syrian Christian Church encouraged the fathers to write wills which in effect disinherited daughters.”

She adds that subtle changes have been taking place in society. “Educated women with jobs generally don’t get kicked around.”

However, women must still run to court to be acknowledged as equals by their families, colleagues and even the government.

Take the recent court case where a government employee lost her job because she got married! The state has provisions for offering jobs ‘on compassionate grounds’ to the sons or unmarried daughters of government employees who die or retire prematurely. Medha Parkhe from Pune had applied for such a job since her father was a cancer patient and had to retire prematurely and she was placed on the waiting list in 1999. She finally got a clerical position in 2003 but two years later, the Maharashtra government threw her out, saying she was not eligible since she had gotten married in the interim.

The case went to the industrial court, which ruled in her favour, but then the state appealed higher. Finally, the Bombay High Court also ruled in her favour. The judge put it best when she ruled that: ‘It is impossible to accept in this day and age that once a woman gets married she will cut off her ties with the family she is born in and will leave it to suffer the vagaries of life in penury.’

It is indeed ridiculous to assume that sons shoulder all financial responsibility in a family. If a married adult man is entitled to a job so he can care for his parents or get on with his own life, there is no reason a married woman should not have the same right. Besides, studies have shown that daughters often spend more time caring for elderly or sick parents than sons. And time is money too.

Unfortunately, despite a constitutional guarantee of equality, it has taken a series of legal battles before Indian laws became a little more equal for women.

The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 came about after decades of discrimination. According to the Lawyers Collective Women’s Rights Initiative, matters began to hot up in the Delhi High Court after a slew of cases wherein the wife was claiming a share in family property. The law commission then set up an inquiry to ensure that daughters are not denied a share in the coparcenary (joint inheritance) property. It consulted judges, lawyers, scholars, NGOs etc. Amongst other recommendations, there was one that suggested that a person’s unrestricted right to will away his/her property should be abolished. Paroma Ray, a research officer at Lawyers Collective, explains, “Usually, sisters are not willing to file cases against their brothers. If they do, they often end up settling out of court.”

However, not all recommendations of the commission were accepted by Parliament. But at any rate, daughters were given equal rights over family land. Bina Agarwal, author of ‘A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia’ was one of those who helped draft the recommendations for the amendment. She says that her work on inheritance of land is rooted in the three decades that she has spent researching livelihood and inequality. Gender was just one part of her work but once she began to study technological change in agriculture, she found that women farmers’ access technology and other inputs was constrained because they didn’t have land titles. Ultimately, her research began to focus on land inheritance and included five nations in the region.

“I mapped patterns,” Bina says. “In Sri Lanka, I found that irrespective of religion, women had strong land rights. In northwest India, there was very little access, but this was closely linked to marriage. In communities where women marry closer home, or within the extended family, their rights to land are greater.”

There is the age-old argument, of course, of dowry. The fact that women take away a huge chunk of family wealth when they get married is used as an excuse to disinherit them. That argument, however, is quite insidious because firstly, dowry itself is illegal. Secondly, dowry wealth is often in the form of consumer items – cars, motorbikes, clothes, electronics – meant to appease the groom and his family, not to secure the daughters’ economic future. Bina, who is currently Director of Institute of Economic Growth, says that immovable property like land or houses cannot be compared to dowry since a daughter is always more vulnerable without fixed assets of her own.

She has recently undertaken a study, along with a colleague in Kerela, that found a link between domestic violence and property ownership. “We found that if a woman owned a house or land, the risk of her facing domestic violence went down. If she owned nothing, the risk went up to 49 percent,” says Bina. She adds that it is a pity that so much work has been done on issues like domestic violence, but so little research or advocacy of women’s property rights in India.

It is a pity indeed. In the last century, Virginia Woolf had famously said that a woman must have a room of her own in order to become a writer. We could safely paraphrase her and say that a woman must have a room, or a bit of land, to call her own in order to be a full citizen.

*

smell the skinny latte, ladeez

"I don't like the jargon "sex workers". We are all sex workers these days, unless we are celibate, as we are all encouraged to pursue lifelong sexiness. Most young women are endlessly groomed to be desirable after all. Yet the men who have sex with young, frightened, addled girls choose to do so. Such sex, we are told, is about power. To have sex in a car with a heroin addict is very cheap indeed. It goes on day in and day out, and of course it makes me wonder about male sexuality. As does the use of rape as a weapon of war. To say these things is not to say all men are rapists. But some are. To not say them does not make it stop.

It is as though feminism had to sex itself up to keep itself interesting. We are not hairy man-haters who bang on about domestic violence and abuse. We are fascinating women interested in fashion, relationships and true intimacy. OK, so we have a few little problems like having it all turning into doing it all, and finding a nice guy to do any of it with at all, but look on the bright side! We have got a few more female MPs, our girls are doing well at school and isn't life grand?

Well no. No it isn't." 

That was Suzanne Moore in the Guardian. And this is my internal countdown to March 8 as I think about womanhood, liberalism and modernism. As Moore says: "Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez?"

Aghast

Everyone who likes to talk about the public distribution system, foodgrains subsidy, tribal unrest etc, should look at the way crime unfolds, as it did recently in Alirajpur.

'the salesman of the public distribution outlet in village Chapria some forty kilometers from Alirajpur took out all the wheat, rice and sugar meant for subsidised distribution to the villagers during the night on 2nd February, 2011 and then lodged a complaint with the Police outpost in Phoolmal village nearby that some unidentified thieves had stolen the foodgrains and sugar. The policemen... made a visit to Chapria village on 9th February in search of a person named Kalia and not finding him caught hold of his wife Vechli and gave her a solid caning on her buttocks and thighs and left her writhing on the ground. When her cries brought the other villagers to her house the policemen threatened them with dire consequences if they did not bring Kalia to the outpost... the villagers next day... came to the office of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (and complained) to the Collector and the Superintendent of Police. The SP, a woman, was aghast at the purple weal marks of the beating on Vechli's body shown in the picture below and immediately ordered her to be taken to hospital ... The media too were given the story and the next day the papers were full of it... the doctor (at the hospital) had said that the wounds were superficial and needed only first aid and no hospitalisation. Shankar had to rush back to the hospital and give the doctor a dressing down to get the woman admitted.'
[Read full post here]

Imagine that you are Vechli, or Kalia. How invested in this thing called 'democracy' are you likely to be? And if some airhead sitting in some urban university decided that the moral of the story is: 'stop foodgrain subsidy for the poor', what would you want to do to him?

And here's another gem about police procedure and the rule of law. This time, from Mumbai.

'1:45am – People start calling their friends and relatives who could get us out of this mess. The 3 star police officer enters and tells us to shut up. When asked why we were brought here and treated like absolute shit, his response was “You were drinking in a bar without a liquor permit.”

“Why the fuck aren’t the bar owners in this room then?” asked someone to which we never got a clean response, ever.

A relative of one of the boys happened to be the leader of the Youth Congress in south Mumbai . He tried to talk the cops out of it by asking them how we were supposed to know about liquor permit. He said “I have been to LP for over 30 years and this has never happened before.” But the cops didn’t budge. They didn’t even do a breath analyzer test or any concrete medical test to even have any evidence to put us behind bars. It turned out that the lifting-shirt-up fiasco was the check for signs of assault.'

Read the whole messy story here.

Tragic and tender and brutal and funny

Those are the words in which this reviewer describes my last book. Am very flattered. Actually, I'm halfway over the moon. And I promise to work hard at my writing so that every book is tragic, tender, brutal and funny.

And for those who possess those things, Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales is also available on Kindle now, which means it will not be so insanely expensive for those who are abroad and gazing longingly at the book cover (insert self-deprecating but still hopeful roll of eyes here) on Amazon.

Triptych from yesterday's paper

Guns: Two groups allegedly affiliated to the Maulana and his opponents openly clashed on the Deoband campus to sounds of booming gunshots.

Wailing: The shop keepers said the women had been lying there for a few days and the wails from the younger one never stopped.

Quiet: The high hunger States are Orissa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Bihar.

Hence, the nausea

There are things one knows about the world. That is can be ugly, for instance. And beautiful. Most things are a little of both, and most people can find it in themselves to see a little of both in and around themselves.

Being able to see both sides of a picture is important to writers like me, writers of non-fiction particularly. It is important to measure intent against action. It is important to balance outrage against insight. And it is important also to recognize that sometimes, a bad approach overshadows all good intentions.

Am still disturbed by news of how a charity is asking us to 'buy' little girls. Because if we don't 'buy' the girl, someone else will. And that someone else will probably sell them into slavery and prostitution.

Yes, yes, I know. The intention is supposed to be good. They are probably only trying to help. They probably want to save little girls from suffering unbearable, untellable traumas. And they are resorting to the tricks of the trade to do so - the language of the bazaar, the gimmicks of advertising.

If I know, why am I so offended?

I have spent the last few days thinking about this article. What exactly is the outrage about?

As the article says, there is something definitely creepy about 'disheveled Indian girl smiling bashfully as an unknown cameraperson pans up and down her body, lingering on her little hands, before finally settling on her face'.

I avoided seeing the actual video on the site for a few days. Just reading the language was off-putting enough. The site uses words like 'Innocent and Available... Experience the sensation of buying a girl'. But I made myself watch. Twice.

Nauseating is the word. I am trying to think of another word that might be more appropriate. And I don't know why. Maybe because we use words so generically these days. From jokes to bad theatrical performances to footage of human rights' abuses - everything is nauseating. Perhaps I should clarify that I did not exactly throw up. But I wanted to. When I saw pictures of distraught little girls with tags of $22 etc against their nervous bodies and the words 'purchased' written boldly, I found myself wanting to physically assault the person who came up with this idea.

Even an already sympathetic, already outraged and pretty tired journalist like me was disgusted by those visuals and those words. They did not help evoke any sympathy for the child - none that would not have been generated by an ordinary photo and an ordinary appeal. Dozens of NGOs have been using photos of children that melt tight fists and unseam the lightest of pockets. They have done so successfully without exhorting us to buy little girls like the one in the video.

Yes, I am afraid for the kid in the video, and all kids who might be sold for any reason whatsoever. And yes, I'd buy a damn pencil box if I was persuaded that it would stop the sale of a child. But I'm damned if I will contribute to an organisation or a campaign that uses, or pretends to use, the methods of child pornography to make an appeal. Who does such a video appeal to anyway? Why would anyone go to a website called The Girl Store? Why would anyone continue to watch visuals after the first few seconds? Who, except child pornography enthusiasts (or those who have been forewarned by outraged feminist magazines)? And does the person who made that website seriously think that people trawling the net for child pornography will suddenly be transformed by the words 'buy her life back'?

And just for the record, especially for the semi-literates who wrote content for that website, girls in India are rarely 'sold' into marriages. Even poor families often 'buy' into marriages. Which means they rarely benefit financially from the girl's wedding, even if they are poor. At best, they abandon the girl to her admittedly rotten fate. At worst, they cough up thousands of rupees to get rid of her in the time-honoured way - marriage. The problem is not so much poverty or illiteracy (girl children are rarely killed, bought or sold within illiterate and extremely poor tribal communities). The problem is the attitude that a little girl (or a boy) is a commodity that can be traded at certain times (of stress, of need). Which is the same idea this idiotic website is actually helping to promote.

Hence, the outrage. Hence, the nausea. Now somebody go shut down that store.

The Winning Poem

Happenings

So often, this sort of thing will happen.
A man will meet a woman and find his voice
is deeper than a well in the sort of village the
Central Ground Water Board has notified ‘dark’, where
you aren’t allowed to dig tube-wells any more, and you need
to be registered with the district authorities
to get a new hand-pump outside the kitchen, and where
you itch all over, after a bath.

Or, a woman will meet a man and will find that her eyes
are flood-prone: low-lying swamps, the sort into which
the rubbish of decades of suburban non-planning has been tossed,
making them look hard when actually, you could just sink
into them. Especially when it rains.

Often, a man will meet a woman and find that his gut
is a sort of womb: a space in which something grows
from seed to obsession, where his roots curl into the certainty of failure.
An instinctive sort of space that swells and contracts and
even bursts. Like a second, misplaced heart.

Or, a woman will meet a man and will find
her arms are collapsible, like a set of folding chairs
creaking in the sort of balcony that gets swept once
a week by a servant who has turned into a domestic cry
for help: a servant with fifty layers of lard dimpling
her elbows and a lumpy belly, who stares off into space
leaving the chairs out in the rain, rusting.

Often, a man will meet a woman and find
a mountain on his back: a dusty hump at the base of his neck,
floating low like brown fog, and things are uphill
or downhill from here on. But there is no stopping
from here on.

Or, a woman will meet a man and find the distance from
highway to home triples overnight, and that some nights
are three times as long as others: when bad news
has crawled back all the way from the city center, riding
between sheets of the morning paper, which arrived two hours after
he left the house, six rotis wrapped in the torn aanchal of her oldest saree.
The sort of night that cannot bear to end.

So often, this sort of thing happens, that a man and a woman find
a word buried behind the balls of their eyes, and they dig all around.
They will speak of fish, the price of things, the temperature outside.
They will bite into the word held as a cube of ice in their throats.
They have seen mountains fold up in despair, but they swear
they will beat another year out of this one: hauling home a cutting wind
or boiling river, or a flower. They will kidnap oasis noons to string a sagging cot.
They will not say it, but they will sit, dumb. Defiant of what may come.

(C) Annie Zaidi

This poem was chosen for the first prize at this year's Prakriti poetry contest. Money and reassurance. What more does a writer want?

Dear Crossword

You and I have a long and fruitful relationship. As a schoolgirl, I was stuck in a place that was, effectively, rural. There were no bookshops for miles and miles. Perhaps there were some in the nearest town, but they did not have what I considered real books - novels, stories, plays, poetry etc.

My mother stocked up on books in the summer vacations and carted them back in large, bulky cartons for the school library. When we began to visit Mumbai in the summer, her major stops were Danai and Crossword.

And look at me now! I'm grown up and sitting on your shelves! True, usually on the wrong shelf. But never mind. It's been a long journey. Almost destined, eh? (And I am quite pleased to see that I'm a generously discounted title on your website)

But remember that first store near Mahalakshmi, where your staff actually knew their books? They seemed interested in books. Or else, they did a good job of pretending for they seemed keen to help you find what you might be looking for. But then you opened another outlet, and then another. Now there are probably a dozen (or more?) Crosswords spread across different cities. Which would have been nice, if only your employees were better suited to their jobs.

I'm not complaining as a writer. Although it is strange that a book clearly marked 'Non-Fiction' should be so insistently placed among 'Fiction' (in five different Crossword outlets) and it is not nice having to point this out all the time. In one store, I did complain, only to have a frightened-looking youth repeatedly say: 'Excuse me, ma'am?' and 'Sorry, ma'am!'

I guessed the poor fellow had no clue what 'Non-Fiction' means. But my book being mis-classified is not such a big deal. It's relatively new and nobody's heard of me. But why was Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West lying under 'Indian Fiction'? You may not agree with our views, but that is no reason to insult our reportage and memories.

Jokes aside, it is a huge waste of time trying to find a book buried in the wrong section. I'm complaining as a customer, dear Crossword.

I've been pretty faithful. I keep coming back, despite being disappointed, despite knowing that Landmark is better stocked (Oxford is worse, however. Their staff is so laconic, so disinterested in books, they have told me they didn't have a certain book when in fact, I did manage to locate it on their shelves - in the wrong section, of course. And the fact that the home page of their website bears the cover image of a fashion magazine rather than a book is seriously off-putting).

I keep returning to you, Crossword, for the sake of nostalgia. Or perhaps it is because you offer yourself up for literary events and support local literature in other ways - through prizes and (what used to be Sriram's great) recommendations. I respect that. I want you to do more of that.

But I am annoyed by the fact that you seem to have room for every new, half-literate book but not the ones that deserve to stay on the shelves. Why, for instance, would you not stock Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold in all your outlets? Why would you not stock P. Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought, or Pinki Virani's Bitter Chocolate? These books are great, and have done well over the years and there is no reason to not keep them in circulation.

I understand that you are a business and must cater to all kinds of reading tastes. But if you can stock five different types of books about henna designs, surely you can stock Nagarkar...

Oh, speaking of henna, can you please explain to me what a book called 'Mehendi Design' is doing in the 'Women's Studies' section at your Bangalore branch?

Yes, I know mehendi is usually by and for women, but a little political correctness never killed anyone. If it was just one book, I'd have understood - human error etc. But here are a few choice titles from the Women's Studies shelf in Crossword, Bangalore:

Eat, Love, Pray (everything written by a woman does not qualify as Women's Studies. You do know that, don't you?)

Koffee with Karan (he's not a woman and he does not interview only women)

Mirza Ghalib - K C Kanda (neither is a woman, and while Ghalib's poetry might refer to women now and then, the themes aren't quite feminine)

A marriage made in heaven (I didn't bother to look at the author or sub-genre)

Arrange Your Love Marriage (Clearly, you seem to think women are only interested in marriage)

Perfect Parties (or parties)

Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex (or bedding men)

Masti Fictions - Katha (Masti is the name of the author, not a sexual reference, and it says 'fictions' on the cover, for god's sake!)

The Meaning of Sunglasses (!!! Why did you even bother?)

Now I am upset both as a customer and as a woman. Also, I could not help noticing that there were no titles by Zubaan, which actually does publish a lot of books that are academic, non-fiction, feminist and even fiction that would qualify to be on YOUR Women's Studies shelf.[Follow the link and you will find a long list to choose from].

I also find it deeply disturbing to discover 'How to make your man behave in 21 days or less using the secrets of professional dog trainers' in the Poetry section. That there were about two dozen Tagores and almost no other Indian poets (English or Hindi) on that shelf is another matter of smaller concern.

Please, dear Crossword , fix this problem. I know that it is hard to find good sales staff who also read books, but can you at least hire fully literate people in the stores, and give them a crash course in book arrangement and broad literary/academic sub-genres?

Every year should bring some improvement, some small change. So here's a request - let's have a wee bit more poetry. Something that isn't Tagore, or Neruda or Ted Hughes priced at 900 insane rupees. Eh? Maybe even the odd performance or screening of poetry if there's enough content and willing providers?

There are all kinds of stores out there. Some are just businesses, who may as well be selling soap or candy. Some invest a little more in books, readers and authors. I trust you belong to the latter category. Which is why I'd like you to change for better, not worse. So dear Crossword, here's wishing you a happy new year. I have your yellow-silver card and I'm probably going to see you soon. I hope it will mean mutual, undiluted pleasure.

The asli, the nakli, and the biases

Had a conversation with a young man selling a bunch of pirated books at a traffic signal.

I asked how much he makes per sale. He said Rs 50-75, depending on how hard people like us haggle. Pestered me to buy one. I said I don't buy 'nakli' (fake/pirated) books.

He said he too has to survive.

I told him I am a writer myself but am not making even Rs 2 on the kind of books he sells, why would I buy from him?

He paused, then said 'But you couldn't have written ALL these books. Buy one book which you have not written.'

Couldn't argue with that logic. So I laughed and shook my head. Then I said I will buy when you sell 'asli maal' (original/real stuff).

The traffic light changed to green. As our taxi sped away, he called out 'When people like me sell them at traffic signals, even asli books will look nakli to you'.

Still chewing on that one. Chewing hard and finding the truth of it stuck in my graw.

An interesting aside - 6 out of 8 'international bestsellers' being pirated and sold by these boys are non-fiction. That's another thing to chew on, eh?

'An open letter addressed to Spring

Because I could not resist doing this one too. Another poem from Sarveshwardayal Saxena's 'Garm Hawayein', once again hurriedly translated. This one is called 'Vasant ke naam ek khula patr'.

'An open letter addressed to Spring'

Now you must stop ambushing me.
Look carefully –
Near that row of yellow flowers
On the sprawling green grass
I have just murdered a sentiment;
It is a separate matter that
Instead of red blood spreading there is
A blue circle.

To grow sick of yourself
Is a sharp knife
I carry around in a crowd
Waiting to run into myself.

I recognise that image of myself –
I have often seen him slipping away
In the dark hiding his face,
Or with you
Chatting away, head lowered,
At the slightest sound
Disappearing into a mob of flowers
Or following some tiny bird
Into dusty desolate lanes.

I know him very well –
Wherever a deck of cards is being shuffled
He sits there, quiet,
Morning to evening
At every raid after the gamblers vanish
He gets arrested
And then gets abused
By friends for being dumb.

I know him so well –
And I know too
He has learnt all this from you.
You have ruined him by making him wander
Pointlessly in forests and along waterfalls.
By way of work
All he has ever done is dry out clothes
That you chose to colour.
I have often seen him with you
Grabbing one end of a yellow footpath
Standing in a field against a strong wind.

I know him well
Like a hot iron rod,
He has been thrust into my head and heart
I cannot rest until I am free of him.
That is why I’m saying
Now you must stop ambushing me.
He has begun to see
There is a vast world between
Stomach and bread;
He decorates everything before ripping it apart
He plays the flute before sex.

I am going to kill him –
I have seen him make statues of dry twigs
And use dry leaves to make patterns on the floor,
He extends this world to another world beyond
He knocks down mountains
To extend homes into courtyards.
He has made the world larger
And life harder,
I am counting down
To his last day.
That is why I say
Now you must stop ambushing me
I have blood on my mind
I am lying in wait for him
Tomorrow is his last weekend.

You cannot hold me back any longer
Nor can you surround me and try to explain
That the thirst for beauty and the thirst for life is the same.
You’ve been saying this to him all these days
And making hard work of an easy life.
He peers into empty wells
And throws down pebbles
As if the soul is still asleep
And can be forced awake.

Those for whom he ruins himself
They go about tomtomming
His failures;
He doesn’t have a single friend
He mimics nightingales
He wanders in deserted streets
He suffers stones and abuse from everyone.

Meaning, meaning –
In his quest to lend meaning to life
He has become worthless
Sweeping out temples
And laying mats in meeting halls
He has become unsuitable for all careers.
He lends a shoulder to every bier
He wipes everyone’s tears
And yet, is called idle.

Meaning, meaning –
There is no meaning to anything any more
Nobody wants to look for meaning
The world has lost its senses.
Those who are not sick of sorrow
Are sick of joy
Mountains are drowning in cupfuls of water.
The higher our buildings
The smaller our hearts,
Nothing is true or false.
But he is not willing to accept this
No way is he willing to change
His ways.
Before he can
Die a dog’s death in his beloved world
I am going to kill him.

Now you must stop ambushing me.
Look carefully –
On the green grass near yellow flowers
I have murdered a sentiment
That linked me to him.
I know
The death of that sentiment is my own,
But I am not going to return
To the place where his body lies,
And you too get this straight
Don’t go there to offer flowers.

- Sareshwar Dayal Saxena

Last time, many of you had requested the original poem in Hindi. Am sorry but I don't have that much time, nor am I used to handling Hindi fonts on my keyboard, so it takes quite a bit of time to type out the original text. Do go out and get a copy of his book. It is published by Vani.

And to save you from disappointment, here is another poem I really liked, for which I did find the text online.

Trouble

Trouble on the streets is always new, no matter how often you've spotted it, smacked it back, run from it. Trouble will always creep up on you in new ways, just when you thought you had its number.

Trouble walks behind you, just a silent step and a half behind your back and you don't know. One of these nights, you are humming. Some old, sweet song because the night is oddly clear for a city sky and the evening star is hard and yellow and the air feels like rain. Not trouble, no. You cannot smell trouble in the air this night although you crossed a big, open meadow full of lounging homeless vendors of peanuts and the last few cricket fanatics of the day, and you remembered to wear your straitjacket of caution - a purposeful walk, quick steps, alert eyes that saw everything but rested on nothing.

Then you crossed a busy road and then a narrow lane full of eating joints shutting down for the night. No, you did not smell trouble that night. You only smelt the city's night. You did not hear a footstep echoing yours. You only heard a light silence that made you want to hum an old film song. And so you began to hum.

You were a hundred steps from one of the city's largest, busiest train stations. It was nearly nine at night and the worst of the fury of daily commute was over. You look forward to quiet train rides in half-empty compartments. And then you heard a voice behind you.

But a voice is just a voice. The city is full of voices and these days, even when people are out alone, they talk. It seems as if they talk to themselves, but they are perhaps on the phone. Or perhaps they are insane. There are enough of those voices too at train stations. The wise thing is to let them be. They may not mean trouble.

But then you hear the voice beside you. It is saying something like: Mera mann to dekh, kitna badaa hai. It seems to have been spoken to you.

And you - you who have forgotten all about trouble today - are taken aback. Someone is saying he has a big heart. Perhaps he is talking on the phone. Surely, he means it metaphorically.

You glance sideways, puzzled, for the owner of this voice is walking beside you. Not looking at you. Just walking beside you, except that when he walks, his arms don't swing.

It is then that you actually notice what he is doing. His *ahem* thing is out. He is holding and what he is actually saying (*ahem* excuse language, gentle readers) is: Mera lund dekh, kitna badaa hai.

You stop walking. So trouble has been tailing you, after all.

The train station is across the road, less than twenty steps away. There are crowds over there and perhaps you should just break into a run now. Or turn and walk back towards the petrol pump and see if the man will follow.

But the man has paused too. He is looking at you now. And though you can see him, you are blinded by a strange kind of anger that doesn't let you truly see (you will forget his face, his colour and features in a few second). You can run, yes. But you will not run. Not from this exposed little creature who thinks you are alone and scared.

This is not the first time trouble has stalked you in this shape and form. Last time, you ran. You crossed the road. You squealed in fear and disgust.

This time, you look at the man and open your mouth. You don't want to scream. You want to say something. Anything! Something that will tell him what you think of him. But only one word will come out of your mouth is: Police!

You stand there, then, shouting that one word over and over at the man: Police! Police! Police!

You wish you had one of those neat whistles you'd been given in Delhi. But you don't really need it now. The man ran the moment you said the first 'Police!', quickly putting away his *ahem* thing away as he runs.

You shout out a few more 'Police! Police!'s at his back. Just for effect. You turn and walk further. A building watchman is staring at you as if you are crazy. He has not got up from his chair though. He sits there and watches you go past. You glare at him, though it isn't entirely his fault.

And you cross the road and go into the station. The night is still clear. The air still feels like rain. But even though you are more bewildered than anxious, you will turn once, twice, to look over your shoulder. Trouble is like that. It returns, and you never know how soon.

dheere dheere aati hai bas maut

Excited about discovering another Hindi poet I like and once again feeling absolutely compelled to share his work with those of you who don’t have access to the language.

So here’s my very crude, hurried translation of Sarveshwardayal Saxena’s ‘Dheere-Dheere’, from the collection Garm Hawayein.

'Slowly'

Like an empty glass
near full bottles
I have been left here.

Slowly the dark
will come staggering up
and will sit down beside me.
It will not say anything
It will fill me, over and over
and then empty me,
fill me-empty me,
and in the end
like an empty glass
near empty bottles
leave me.

Friends!
You don’t know death
be it man’s or
a nation’s
be it time’s or
a form.

Everything happens slowly
Slowly bottles are opened,
the glass is filled
Yes, slowly
the soul empties
man dies.

What shall I do with the nation
that slowly staggered up
and has sat down next to me?

Friends!
You don’t know death
Slowly everything is sucked into
the belly of dark,
then nothing is past
Nothing remains to pass
Like an empty glass
near empty bottles everything lies –
nation near flag
man near name
time near love
form near price,
It all lies
like an empty glass
near empty bottles.

‘Slowly’ –
I hate
this word.
Slowly the weevil grows
Wheat dies,
Slowly termites eat everything
Courage runs scared.
Slowly faith is lost
Resolve goes to bed.

Friends!
What shall I do with a nation
that is slowly
slowly emptying
Like an empty glass near full bottles
It lies there.

Now I don’t want to know god
slowly,
Now I don’t want heaven
slowly
Now I want nothing
slowly
Not hate, not love.

Friends!
Nothing happens slowly
Only death,
Nothing comes slowly,
Only death,
Nothing is won slowly,
Only death,
Death –
Like an empty glass
near empty bottles.

Listen,
The drum beat is fading
slowly the procession of revolution
is turning into a funeral procession.
The smell of rot is spreading –
on the map of the nation
and in the eyes of love
borders are fading
and like rats, we are watching.
- Sarveshwardayal Saxena.