A day in the Labour Ward/ Mera Koi Nahin Hai

Kavita – barely 16 yrs though she said she was 20 – a primi – had come with her husband who was barely 25 himself. At most he was 25 that is. She wore a brown coloured salwar, kameez and a cheap yellow dupatta. Had waist-length hair, mangled and dry and evidently without any washing for several days over. Not even 5” in height. Doctor said she might need c-section, her pelvis was not big enough. She was not an unregistered patient though. She came in around 12pm -- I had been standing at a corner of the Labour Ward since 11am...doing non-participant ethnography of the ward...Had strict instructions from the Project protocol -- Never to interact with any patient. This 'story' is of my second failure...The doctor said she had only 2 finger dilation. At 1 pm the hospital lunch came. The husband came in tiptoeing from the corridor outside and tried to mingle with the crowd in the coporation hospital ward...feeding her with his own hands – the maushis who spotted him scolded them both for the pampering. They however did not tell anything to the relatively better off woman who was being hand fed by her sister on the next bed. The husband said in their defence – ‘main nahin khilaya toh who nahin khayegi.’

At 3 pm the doctor came in to do her NST – he also called me to show me how the foetal beats were recorded – my first interaction with Kavita's child was thus through the digital machine. I was told that 110–160 is the desired range. Kavita suddenly clasped my hand and said ‘didi, aap pakdo issko, mujhse nahin hota’, referring to the scope that the doctor asked her to hold in posiion over her distended abdomen. She diligently handed me the scope and freed her right hand. She did not seem apologetic that she did not know me and that I was not "one from her class". I held the scope. She was wriggling – didi, bahut dard ho raha hai…..didi, aap mere paas hi rehna….didi, mera koi nahin hai, aap idhar hi rehna.’ I assured her I would, I put my hand on her forehead. She was saying repeatedly, ‘didi, mera koi nahin hai.’ I had already broken the rule....

I asked her: ‘kyun aisa kahen rahe ho? ‘Woh hai na bahar?’

‘Kaun?’ she asked, ‘mera aadmi?’

‘Hain’, I said. And stopped; i might have added other things, like – Kavita, as far as we are concerned, we believe that men of your class desert their pregnant wives in an almost regular manner; that, we do not expect him to forego a day’s work and thus a day's income and come to get you admitted, and then feed you and then not have lunch himself and then wait the whole day out in the corridor…we do not expect these of your class. In many better off cases, as I saw around me, the husbands had not come at all, during or after delivery. I did not say, ‘Kavita, you are more fortunate than many of our class…tumhara koi hai.’ I kept silent .... I had broken one rule...I did not want to break others...

Her NST showed 2 peaks in 20 minutes. The doctor did a finger test – meconium stain. She asked for water – I noticed that her husband had bought and kept a bottle of mineral water – the cheap, adulterated variety. It was cold. Perspiring bottle. I poured 2 small gulps into her mouth. Dr said foetal distress – they wanted a section immediately. A maushi came with the hospital gown – and called ‘arre, isske sath kaun hai?’ The husband materialized from nowhere and said, ‘Main’.

‘Nahin, aurat kaun hai?’

‘Koi nahin’ – he sounded guilty. The frustrated maushi looked at me.

I said, ‘Layiye, main karti hoon.’

Maushi was relieved. The husband looked burdened with gratitude. I was guilty by his guilt. Kavita would not let go off my hand – I lightly hugged her and asked to be freed so that I could put the gown on her.

Now this was a problem for me – I had never before undressed a lady in public view. Yet no one around me seemed bothered. I tried to pull the mobile screen closer, but it was not of much help. Kavita was in no position to either acquiesce or refuse. I decided on the commonest strategy – I would hold the gown around her neck, loosely, and she could take off the kameeez from within and then I would lower the gown and tie the lace in front. However, that too was problematic since she would not do anything – but go on saying ‘didi, mere pet mein bahut dard ho raha hai, aap idhar hi rehna .... Didi... mera koi nahin hai.’

I explained to her that she was expected to change her dress so that she would be taken in and her ‘dard’ would soon vanish. But it was of no use. And I, could not do much – holding the gown, also taking off her kameez and then not letting the gown drop – else all the strategy would go in vain. I was not doing all this as ‘strategy’ though – this all is retrospective descriptions; at that moment it was spontaneous – some 3 male doctors (very young, barely 28 years of age each) were standing just at the other end of the bed and all this came naturally to me. A harried maushi suddenly came up and said ‘arre, kya kar rahi ho? Woh kholo pehle’ referring to the kameez, ‘idhar koi nahin hai.’ ‘Kholo!’ Indicating that she first take off her kameez and then put on the gown -- somehow not realising (as it seemed to me) that in the brief few seconds between these two procedures, Kavita would be bare and without any cover on the upper part of her body for awhile....The maushi's assurance seemed to lay in 'idhar koi nahin hai'

Idhar koi nahin hai.

I vaguely tried to turn my head towards the doctors – ‘arre, woh toh doctors hai!’ I was supposed to understand that ‘doctors’, esp. obstetricians and gynaecs are beyond the male-female divide and that a woman could unabashedly stand naked in front of him. Well, women surely would need to as much 'unashamed' with their 'private parts' with obsetricians and gynaecs as they are expected to be with their husbands....but for me all this was not automatically making sense at that moment...maybe my modern education came in the way?

I tried my best to cover her up as soon as the kameez was out -- reducing the gap between the twp procedures... I am partly sure I could do it successfully – also that the doctors present there – upper-middle class young men who had passed their DGOs from a private college and who practiced in other private more elite hospitals, got to see fuller, riper and whiter breasts. They would definitely not be interested in this pavement-dweller’s anatomy beyond the medical.

The Dr asked me to check if Kavita had been shaved – as I hesitated again to lift a woman’s gown and confirm it, an intern relieved me of this responsibility. She checked and then put in the catheter tube.

When she was taken in to the OT, she was holding onto my arm, asking me to go into the OT with her; the doctor separated us. The maushi took her and her husband’s thumb impression on a blank sheet. Later I asked the doctor and found out that it was consent for a high risk case. They were anticipating some morbidity (if not mortality) but none were explained what they thumb-ed for. I assured her I would wait there till she came out. She had explicitly asked for it -- Tum idhar hi rehna Didi...

Mera koi nahin hai.

Idhar koi nahin hai.

The husband stood guiltily at a corner – I went to him and asked him to wait outside, said I would call him when needed. He looked down and asked, ‘behenji, Kavita ko kuch nahin hoga, ha? Usse kidhar le gaye?’ I was struck. Man, you are so sorrily below the poverty line, you live on the pavement, you don’t have a roof over your head, you are not supposed to have such love and concern for women! You are supposed to beat your wife. That’s what we expect from you. Else, how would we measure our civilized stature, our developed-ness? You should be the demon and thus we be gods! I said yes with my eyes – fearing my voice would be different and he would misread it as foreboding.

I sat there till the section was over; in the interim he tip-toed in twice and each time I gestured with my hand that all was going on fine – of course I was not sure if it was! Finally when the pediatrician left the room, I got to know that the baby was fine, 2.5kgs. I went with the sister to the baby room – a tiny whitish baby was wriggling, mewing under the oxygen cap. She was cleaned with paraffin. Her foot impression taken on the form. The sister asked me to call Kavita’s ‘aadmi’; I went out to the corridor. I called him and he ran to me – again, ‘Behenji, Kavita ko kuch ho gaya?’ I smiled this time, said ‘Woh thhik hai, aap aiye.’ He followed me into the ward and the maushi waited with a bundle – she unwrapped it like a surprise gift until the one part of the little body that mattered was unwrapped – he looked at ‘it’ and said ‘chalega.’

Kya hai? The maushi asked

He sounded nervous – thhik hai

Nahin, kya hai, bolo!

He had to be prompted -- mulgi.

Aur Kavita? He asked the maushi.

She indicated the form. ‘Idhar sign karo.’ He thumb-ed on the form. I again explained that Kavita had been taken for an operation, that it would take some time before she would come out, that she would lie on that bed, that I would again call him.

When she did come out after another half hour and finally was put on the PNC bed, I called him. He came and baffled by everything, stood there, placing a hand on her forehead. I asked the maushi to give them the baby – which had again been taken to the baby room. I carried the baby. It seemed to be looking at me with all its annoyance. When I placed her on the bed, the husband looked at Kavita and they smiled at each other – that poverty stricken subaltern love did not escape my eyes…

He tentatively touched his daughter – ‘woh itni nazuk hai…darr lagta hai’ his voice trailed off. We – the sister, myself and the husband – tried feeding the baby, but neither would the mother stop shivering nor would the baby suck. It seemed to be really annoyed with everything! He suggested he run home and get another bedsheet – tu kaanp rahin hain, tujhe ek aur chaddar oudh dete hai. But she would not leave his hand. This time she was holding onto his hand – I stood beside her on the other side. My hands free. Nahin, tu nahin jana. Tu idhar hi rahena. Mere paas. I was redundant now....

When I left some time later – promising them I would come back before she was discharged – I had seen a new meaning of love …

Mera koi nahin hain…

On Getting Bored and Boredom in General: a victim’s narrative!!

I met her at a party – she was barely 25, married for just around a year.
When introduced to me, she asked me ‘So, you are here for the vacation?’
‘Vacation?’
‘You are in school, right?’
Well, I do not know if I am supposed to have taken that as a compliment, but the truth is that I was irritated beyond what was right – and thus I began to consider her ethnographically, one of the worse kinds of punishment one can bestow on another.
I was about to suggest that I am almost-30, but couldn’t; someone else came in “Hiiii!! Long time, no see….”
Somehow she continued to retain her interest in me – whatever that means; she sat close enough to me, and started – ‘So, what are you doing here?’ referring to my stay in Mumbai.
‘Working on a project with an NGO.’
‘Oh! Don’t start about projects and all; I don’t want to know!! Projects bore me.’
Well, I really did not know if I had been keen enough to tell her – about a project on obstetrics care!
‘No, I won’t’ I assured her.
Yet she persisted.
‘So, where are you from?’
‘Kolkata’
‘And how long will you be here?’
‘Well, depends – maybe another month or maybe for the next 6 months even. Depends on a few factors’
‘So, you’ll return to Kolkata?’
‘No, not sure either. That too depends’
‘But you came here from Kolkata?’
‘No.’
‘But you said you are from Kolkata!’
‘Yes, I am from Kolkata but I came here from Bangalore; for the past 2 years I had been living in Bangalore.’
‘So, you will return to Bangalore from here?’
‘Very slim chance; chances are more that I might go to Jharkhand from here, or maybe Delhi.’

She gave up on me for sometime to come. But she seemed a very rigorous woman. She returned to me soon.


‘So, Rakhi, what do you do during weekends?’
I tried to keep it easy.
‘I usually catch up on sleep!’ I laughed stupidly.
‘Yes, but other than that?’
‘Well, to be honest, the weekends are when I try to catch up with my own project.’
‘Own project?’
‘Actually I am doing my PhD; so, during the whole week since I am busy with the NGO project work, weekends are the time when I can do my own thing, because I need to keep sending my progress report back to my institution.’ I explained lovingly – I cannot do injustice to the love of my life by truncating her, the PhD that is.
‘Oh. So what is your PhD on? Physics or English?’
Whether I was supposed to have been spoilt for choice, I don’t know; I just managed to be slightly dumbfounded. Guiltily I said, ‘No, it’s in social science.’
Apparently it was not stimulating for her, for she did not touch it even.
‘So, when you are bored, what do you do?’
I was becoming quite nasty and naughty.
‘Umm…I don’t get bored much’
‘You are like always into studies and reading?!’
I smiled. Sadly. I was a non-conformist.
‘Actually, nowadays I cannot give the time I should ideally give to studying and reading; I get tired over the week and spend up mostly sleeping on the weekends. I actually should give more time to my studies and reading.’
‘Oh!’ she looked sympathetically at me.
‘Like discs and all, you’ve never been to?’
I wore an arrogant cap for a moment.
‘Actually, I’ve had my share of it to an extent – for around 2 years I was in the media. I have a fair enough idea of nightclubs, discs and so on. And this shift I made is a deliberate one.’ I smiled. Actually quite like the malicious women who attend such nightclub parties.
‘You don’t watch cinemas?’
‘Rarely.’ I lied.
‘You can come over to my place; we can go…there are some big shopping malls close-by.’


I nodded at her benevolent gesture.


And then came –


‘You don’t get bored?’
Ms. Malice I was.
‘No, actually no.’
‘You never get bored!?’
‘Actually I have so much to finish always that I do not get the time to get bored.’
‘Whole weekends…you never feel….?’

Her voice trailed and the waiter came in with juicy kebabs…
She carried a leftover pain in her eyes for me – a person deprived and denied.


Before leaving she suddenly hugged me. Repeated the invitation for window shopping.

I realized, as we drove back in my brother-in-law’s vehicle, the night sea-breeze caressing my oily-tired face: in order to prove that you are not a bore, you should get bored with life, always. If life seems happening enough such that you do not have the time to get bored, you are not a happening enough person!
What an irony Sir Ji!

Once Upon a Time

His body lay on a hard dark jelly
Some flies tried spinning a web of stories on it – unseen
Stories of who he was, and why he lay like that, and how many butterflies he had killed and the colours of his dreams
Dreams that lay pasted onto the dark jelly now
His face was strange, a facial done – mud-blood pack
Applied with passion
Over with its drying-up time
Only that no one was coming to wipe it off.
He lay still. Death cannot be stiller.
His chest broken – within and without. Blood. All in the wrong places…veins and arteries confused

A deep canal made its dark way down from his naval to where his penis had been – once upon a time

Once upon a time there was a penis – gently placed on his scrotum.
It usually lay small and obedient – but for times when he was frightened (and he as frightened very often)
... and when he dreamt of certain women (and he dreamt of certain women often)
... and when he was naked with her, about to enter her (and he entered her a few times)

In the first of the two days, he had been frightened – fright had held his hand, urged him to follow him and had entered his body when he had not been looking;

Like a tapeworm.

And his penis had remained hard – and aloof from his body – enough for them to notice it.

They recognized it at once – they too had them. May be many. More. Stronger.

They liked to play with penises. (They had played with Velutha’s.) They were usually attentive to genitals – both male and female

As long as they came for free.

They liked neither the feminine hole – they filled it up soon
Nor did they like male danglings – they smashed it.

A genitilia-free egalitarian world

He lay with his right arm twisted under his back, his left arm finger-less – three broken off mutely, two chopped with a blade

Gilette

An eye – he had no more – staring back at the living, at those with developing dreams in their own…a mesmerizing hue between red, black, orange and white
One of them had held a cigarette lighter to it
Hey, do eyeballs burn in the same way as skin?
Kya pata, dekhlo
Dekh liya.

The drain would soon be covered in water – the sky would break soon – like the pregnancy sack – and he would drown.

Alas?
At last!

The flies finished weaving their story – it said:

Once upon a time
he had refused to part with his plot of rice-growing land
thus the police had taken him. For interrogation.

Interrogate
Ask
Question
Urge
Coax
Convince
Request
Plead
Touch
.......................... deeper

-----------------------------------------------
Once upon a time there lived a small Indian farmer…

South City and Legality: what of the ethical?

Once upon a time, for Kolkattans, South City meant an undergraduate college space for students of the city to get admitted to and get a bachelor’s degree from. A few years back the equation changed: from academia it moved onto mean real estate – and real estate with elan. The overt connotations were thus – elite, extremely affluent, probably NRIs or people who hold/held sufficiently high positions in the corporate world, filmstars, and so on. If you had a flat there, you were one of Kolkata’s elite. The other covert set of implications were thus: you had servants who would work for you but neither sleep at your place nor shit in your toilet – there were separate servant’s rooms and a separate elevator for the subalterns. One could afford to maintain one’s high caste (financial caste i.e.) without having to touch the untouchable.

Recently, while walking into the premises of the 36 storey towers, I saw a string of flex banners, tied against a wall of the fort, saying “South City Residents will not allow any illegal construction by South City.”
I was amused.

Because SC already had a long (and buried) history of illegality: and I knew it from one of the horse’s mouth. Almost the entire land on which the thousands of flats stand and stands a huge shopping mall where crores pass hands, has been forcibly occupied – with minimum or no compensation to the original inhabitants, the ‘natives’ as it were. It had been a small and successful Tata-like venture. Till now cases are pending and one insane character still refusing to give up his plot despite his life being put at stake. Result = some deplorable slums destroying the pristine beauty of the elite space. Reminds one of colonial time when we had separate colonies and spaces for the white and the natives; when the only lucky natives who could entre the sacred domain of the whites were the scavengers and sweepers. And now, the only subaltern who can walk into the SC premises and take the posh elevator to the 36th floor, and pee in a toilet in there, are the domestic helps. Neo-colonialism?

Coming to the part about illegal construction by South City; perhaps the move was made by some guilt-ridden soul/s residing in the towers. But here was a conceptual problem; the person/s were against illegal constructions. And as far as legality and courtrooms stand, one can well be sure that NK Realtors (the group that built it) had all its papers in line, knowing that papers are papers and can be made against payment, and well, NK does have some little money to get original papers made. And what’s more, we can almost be sure that the slum dwellers never had any ‘papers’ for that matter. Perhaps the question is not of legality but of ethicality; the question might be, even if we had the right papers, could we afford to simply select-all and delete people who had been living there for decades, without providing an alternative? Legality connect us with labyrinthine juridico-political processes, ethics is a matter of belief. And one feels that the question of justice gets trapped between them – and justice does not belong to the domain of the court, only. Justice is an ontological concept too, living and thriving within the ethical, growing in the day-to-day. Is it just to hire contractors at lower than market rates, and then have not adequate safety measures and when several labourers die on site, simply bury them there – while their families keep on waiting for them in far away villages in Bihar and Orissa? The land, let us assume, managed to generate all its ‘original’ papers, and that almost everything is legal now – but was the process just? Fair? Ethical? Should these aspects cease to matter in toto to us?

Temples and temperaments

Temples. Holy.
Temples in India. Holier than thou. Perhaps holier than the deity itself.

The Jagannath Temple in Puri famously disallowed the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to enter its premises, since she had married a non-hindu. Reports/data abound on how the temple guardians forbade people from other religious communities from entering its premises – ones with skull-caps, ones with turbans, with hijaabs or burqahs. And if in case some mischievous human being took up a bet and dressing up in the most hindu-like manner (whatever that is!) entered the temple, prayed before the idol, took prasad, made the holy round around the shrine and later boasted the accomplishment, the holy guards took no time in first resanctifying the entire campus with whatever means and modes they possess and then denouncing the person and the religion s/he came from.

In 1992 we hindus went many steps ahead; we took some axes and shovels and broke down what was a non-hindu structure, since we believed that right underneath lay the temple marking the place our holy god Rama had been born.

Temples are traditional and innocent and pure places for worship – worship by only hindus though.

All hindus? No. no! Only the upper touchable castes!

The few times I have gone to a temple, it has been with the purpose of viewing the structure either historically or architecture-wise. And in the last 4 to 5 years maybe, I have gone to barely 3 temples – the place where original India, traditional India lives (and dies).

I stood in a queue – kept my chappals outside with a low-caste young boy. We pinched and held our own footwear and when he too did the same and it happened to fall from his hand, we shouted at him – can’t you hold it properly? The queue was long and winding, believers wiling in the sun; one by one, in singularity we were given entry – passing through a metal detector and a thorough checking of wallets and purses and another stand for deposition of larger bags etc. When I finally entered, I was already flooded with longing for the multiplex and mall whose memory all these procedures have evoked in me.

I walked, bare foot, footprints and foot stains of varying sizes and shapes and patterns on the semi-muddy floor – a 300-year old floor. However even as I looked intriguingly at the infinite footprints, I knew they were all hindu upper-caste ones – how much consistency and regularity I could possess! I followed the queue to the garba griha, the innermost shrine, and looked at the shining black some 5-feet tall idol, weighed down with gold, lamps burning all around, a dank smell of oil and ghee all around. I looked yearningly at the gold – I had few gold ornaments, and most of Indians don’t. Could I ask the head priest if some gold could be sold and the money given for some non-religious cause – such as opening a school, building a few toilets in villages?
‘You there!’ My trance and scheming broke as I turned to look into the cold eyes of the policeman; now, what was he doing here? They surely had not read my mind! ‘You can’t keep the line waiting for so long. Move on!’ I realized I was blocking the way for others behind me; with the narrow opening to view the idol, it had to be a one-be-one viewing. A one-to-one viewing. God and me. Promises exchanged. I wanted to stand for some more time though; and I tried to bring a more passionate look into my eyes, believing that since the primary aim of temples is to provide a meeting ground for believers and believed, one desiring to spend some more time with the deity would surely be allowed that. I wasn’t. I saw some people squatting on the floor at a distance and praying on their own – victims like me. Passion abrupted. But if we had to go the mind’s eye route to dialogue with god, why brave the sun and the rain and come to the temple?

I was hungry by then and thought of getting some prasad; someone told me a counter was selling a range of it (5 varieties) at 10/- per gram each. I went to the counter. Brushing against oogling policemen – there were so many of them that one would think there had been a theft. But it was only in anticipation. The priest selling the prasad was chatting on his phone. I waited for quite some time before I was granted the desired 10 grams. Sitting on a pavement type structure within the temple, I started my holy meal. A group of men and women (upper-caste hindu transsexuals allowed here? I don’t know) were sitting at some distance on my left, listening to a reading by an old priest who sat on a podium and spoke into a microphone. Two speakers on each side. Suddenly almost fainted! I saw myself eating prasad and scratching my forehead on the faraway wall! God! Miracles in temples!

It was the CCTV and I located the camera just diagonally across me. So, after metal detectors, policemen and coupon system for prasad, CCTVs. Good. It is required to maintain the security of the temple.

People might think I am exaggerating and some internet savvy priest might also get to read this and put me into trouble, but I actually saw a couple of LIC advertisements. Banners pasted across water-coolers and one suspended from a wall. I wondered if some LIC agent too might be lurking in the dark corners of sanctity.

I met none though.

We left the same way – collected our chappals and decided to have some more filling snack from the series of bhajji selling shops around the corner. Smaller idols, black with gold-painted ornaments sold for 20/- each. I bought one. Wanted to lech at the gold – the semblance of it.
I was later told that temples in India – especially those that have so much tangible wealth inside them – necessarily should change according to “the demands of the modern day” and acquire machineries of globalization, of the state and of technology. It was assuring to hear that tradition in India is not static and immutable, that it is flexible and can change according to times.

Maybe it is not yet time to forego other ‘traditional beliefs’ – it will now only be not the priest who would stop the parsi-married woman, the turban-wearing and hijaab dressed people; it will only be the uniform donned police. And he will instantly call up the head priest on his cell phone.

So much for change.

Vaginisation

I entered the body, dark it was
a thin tunnel slimy
and bending @ sudden corners.
The veins throbbed around me … about to stop
anytime
blip blip … thim thim
I was not afraid – there would be no one to be afraid of
and afraidness cannot happen when one is alone
a-lone
not lonely
lone-ly

All revolutions had ended.

Vestiges lay around me in the form of dead centres. Decentered and deadened.
Scattered; like cowries. No exchange-value. Neither aesthetic.
I arrived at the famous station
looked at the bag like thing
books called it ‘pear-shaped’.
It had carried babies. Millions of them
interspersed with tumours and cysts – all dead now. Some rotting.
It lay lifeless in front of me.
A stench was oozing out
I touched myself – my skin
It seemed like an other…I had not touched it for so long
It was slimy too…slimy with dead vagina juices
... tired
I saw the shells of some wayward second and third sperms
who had lost the race
there were so many around me…tiny
looked plaintively at me with misty eyes
hundreds of dead gaze – male
hundreds of male-gaze – dead…
The opening to the pear was loose and I walked in. Only stooped a little. Like a low hut-door
I continued to walk through cobwebs of pain – and memories of excruciating maternity

The walk continued until the pear began to close in on me…
...
Slowly.
Surely.

And I became the millionth foetus…waiting in dark and fear
waiting to be born…

Foucault, the Individual and Midnight Madness

Since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. The new political structure, as everyone knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of totality, or, should I say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That’s quite true. But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think in the history of human societies – even in the Old Chinese society – has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.

[Foucault, Subject and Power: 13]

Power then works through the individual – it gets consolidated on and through the ‘class’ or ‘group among citizens’ or ‘population’. However, there is never any given or pre-existing population; population always comes after the individual. So when power needs to govern the population, it has to inevitably work its way up through its smaller units, namely the individual, then the family, then the community. This leads to the following situation: the state concentrates on its totalizing procedures and is thus focused on the larger group, the population. The sterilization drives, immunization programes, literacy mission, NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), NRHM (National Rural Health Mission), RCH (Reproductive and Child Health) policies, dai training programmes and so on – all focused on the ‘total’ – the total over-reproducing group to be sterilized, the total under-5 group of Indian children to be immunized, total mass of illiterate people to be educated, total BPL group to be provided work, total rural mothers to be given diet supplementation, total number of untrained dais to be clinically trained, and so on.

However, each of the initiatives must necessarily work through the individual, else there is no group, no total outside of her/him. Yet, the paradox is the attention is not on the individual – the state is not bothered if one dai remain untrained, if one woman remain illiterate, if one infant dies too soon, if one woman does not get the 100 day job (barring perhaps the vaccination drive, especially the one to eradicate small pox and polio, and that too probably because of the potential of the left-behind child to contaminate others, something that would not happen so directly in other instances of education of 100 day work). This then becomes the strange phenomenon when the individual is focused on but not attended to – she is only a conduit for the state to pass knowledge and at the end consolidate a mission. The mission is never to attend to the individual but to make the power/knowledge pass through her. The state needs a human body, a citizen-subject body, a willing body and this body is not the material body but a symbolic agentic body that willing to lie under the scanner and let the knowledge pass through her. The materiality of the body is required only when it comes to injecting her with contraceptives or vaccinating her. At most other times it is a different fragment of her biological body – the capacity to learn to sign when it comes to adult literacy missions, the willingness to go to the polling booth and cast the vote, the workability of the hands and feet necessary to toil for 100-days, the womb that can be sterilized.

This is a wonderful predicament for the modern subject of the state; she is there and is also invisible. Even in genocides and major calamities (like the Bhopal Gas Drama) the bodies are counted and enumerated; the individuals are kept as a list for relatives to claim. The state comes closest to the dead individual when it comes to providing compensation, to prepare the cheque. But at the end it is again a narrative of the population, the population of deads – 152 killed and 1 lakh per dead.

And even now, with the “internal threat” menacing our trains and train lines every passing hour, the state is possessed with ‘Maoists’ – again a collective category…we are still not bothered to reach the individual, to talk, to listen, to try to settle scores. And we are still saying, “tribals are getting caught inbetween”. And the tribals, the natives of free-secular-democratic-India are still not individual humans beings to us, individuals who are living the life of deads, who are living under the threat of death – from the state (police) or the Maoist – every single minute (even as I am happily typing this on my gadget, knowing only too well that neither the state nor the naxal will barge into my room and rape me and shoot me down). They are still a vague collective for us, who are either all with the Maoists and thereby eligible for encounter deaths or poor souls whom we shall pity for and then displace en bloc as we build the 100th mine on their homelands...

Perhaps the state will never attend to individuals, we shall always remain a conduit for democracy and the good-citizenship stories to flow through…

Perhaps it’s only the individuals who can be of some help to the other…

Perhaps it’s time the Self met the Other… perhaps there’s some promise in it after all…

Of Scientists and Birds

Richard Feynman said: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” While the wit and humor is well-taken, one realizes (with some degree of pain too) that that precisely is the problem dear Watson!

My mother used to read out selected editorials to me when I was lingering between don’t-yet-find-the-newspaper-appealing-enough-to-take-it-up and sufficiently-infatuated-by-certain-forms-and-genres-of-information that came out in the vernacular newspaper that we take at home. It was from one such piece that I first heard the name of this Nobel winner physicist and his autobiography (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) and the anecdote of how, while sitting under a starry sky, he had looked up and muttered to his ladylove that the stars twinkle for all humanity underneath but only he knows precisely why they twinkle. At that young impressionable age, when I was half in love with almost any man who would take the trouble of looking up at the sky and sigh out loud, I found this piece of muttering fascinating (what conviction!) – and yet a subtle, almost hidden within some corner of my mind, nagging feeling remained (did the words contain some sort of arrogance?). I could never be sure.

And now, confronted with the former expostulation of the great 20th century scientist, I was almost sure that it was the latter, even if one were to give him some passage on account of his sense of (masculine) humour. But for a few like George Canguilhem, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Sundar Sarukkai, Donna Haraway, C. K. Raju, most scientists have indeed thought of HPS (History and Philosophy of Science) and HSS (History and Sociology of Science) as almost meaningless and a substantial waste of time, almost as relevant to them as astronomy is for the existence of the stars, or the knowledge of cellular biology for the cells. The point is that they have continued considering themselves as faraway stars and flying high birds and nondescript and invisible cells. Well, if their work and they themselves were indeed thus – tiny, minute, microscopic, invisible and somewhat inconsequential – we (that is, we who consider HPS and HSS important and relevant enough) might have granted them their whim and their witty quotations. But the problem is that they crack the “mystery of life” – the genome – and plan to clone human beings, us, and crack the “mystery of death” (am referring to E. F. Keller’s essay) by coming up with the fundamentals of atomic fission and then they decide to experimentally drop the “baby” (their code for the A-bomb) on two Japanese towns (I say experimentally because by then Japan had surrendered to Russia and it was decided between the three great powers that it would still drop the bomb since millions had gone into its construction – so why not check the workability? And actually the two sites had been not targeted in anyway whatsoever during the war, since Oppenheimer’s strict instructions were that they needed to see and measure the exact impact the “baby” would have on a fresh site! Taking away a lady’s virginity and measuring the exact degree of shame and pain? Well, so much for science.

Smaller cases: Dams are built on rivers and inevitably only the farmers, the adivasis and the dalits are displaced. Contraceptions are devised and inevitably the subaltern and working class women are targeted. When mines are built and minerals appropriated by big companies and the state, it is inevitably the tribals whose homelands are evacuated. Yet no 'design'?

History is not a leveler... it shores up power gradients and guilt and anger...

Class, caste, economy, history and sex …. They exist and no one scientist on this planet till now has been born who was not born into few of these affiliative categories…and these categories precisely exist to perpetrate and perpetuate difference. And to do just science, ethical science, one is bound to be bothered. It needs to be taken as the Hippocrates’ Oath. It should matter more than ornithology does to birds, because the scientists is not the transient bird, the little bird that can come and go without altering basic human life in anyway (and that too we know, it does…it does lie in a netted relationship with human species). But, granting the scientists their male egos, if they want the Nobel unlike the sparrow or the duck, or want patents unlike the crow or the robin, or want to be immortalized unlike the ostrich or the cuckoo, they had better take both ornithology and history of science a little more seriously.

The bird at best will shit on our expensive dress and we can shoot it down with an air-gun and fry it for dinner … red wine…

They might press a button and the world might go up in nuclear smoke … we’ll all be dead long before we can put them to trial …

So, it’s best they realize, and we remember it.