We the Facebook farmers...

Some of us are farmers, on Facebook that is. We keep asking each others for nails, horseshoes, logs of wood and other stuff. We sow, reap and harvest and win medals or pats on our backs, and envy and praise from each other. We love farming - thus assumably we love the green, the land, the manure, the grass, the shrubs and the horses and cows on our farmlands.

Do we also love the 'real' farmer? For whom farming is not a 7 minute break between writing proposals or preparing presentations, but a task, which, if neglected, will return to haunt them in the form of debts and starvation? The illiterate, uncouth, lower caste man (and many a times woman - though the image of the farmer is male and farmeress is not yet a valid noun) whose feet are sticky with eternal mud and who can only give a thumb impression? Do we feel a bond of brotherhood/sisterhood with him/her? Did we cry foul when the State took away the fertile acres of land of these farmers? Did we protest when the State put fire to acres of paddyfield so as to obtain the land for building residential complexes (am talking of DLF Rajarhat)? Did we feel one with the man/woman who have nothing to fall back on but the yield and for whom there will never be any compensation because (i) they were landless farmers who never owned the land they cropped; (ii) because they opposed the State, so the State will obviously not take care of them in return!

I am not sure....but I would want to believe we, the group of Facebook farmers, did that ... that we did feel one with the 'real' Indian farmer...

On Roy: the mad woman outside the attic

"If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country …" -- J. L. Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam, 1948

"We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all."
Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong Dam, 1961

In the post-independence era, the Dams were touted as the ‘Temples of Modern India’ that would make India rush up the ladder of development. In the contemporary, India is the world’s 3rd largest dam builder; 46% of all the Big Dams in the world is being built in India. However, one-fifth of the Indian population do not have safe drinking water and two-third lack basic sanitation. However, even though the grand project began as a means to emulate the Mississippi, by the time India was hypnotizedly building dams, the leader – the U.S. – had started demolishing dams on the Mississippi. The fact that big dams do more harm than good is no longer mere conjecture. “They are a government’s way of deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where” (Roy). Do we know that the government of India does not have any official figure of the number of people its dams displaced? How can it then even start rehabilitating them? However, according to a study done by Indian Institute of Public Administration (and Roy halves the number to put all skepticism of intentional anti-state propaganda at bay) 33 million people at least till now – displaced, dispossessed … all for the good of the nation. And they stand outside of this nation one guesses? The unofficial official number is 50 million. And the most interesting bit is that a huge percentage of these patriotic are adivasis (58% in the Narmada case) – “include dalits and the number becomes obscene.” I now quote Roy in toto: “According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about 60%. If you consider that adivasis account for only 8% and dalits another 15% of India’s population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story … India’s poorest are subsidizing the lifestyle of the richest.” World’s biggest democracy???? And this democracy, after displacing millions, does not even have a National Rehabilitation Policy. So much for the socialist Nehruvian dream.

Well, to cut the story short here, suppose this same is done to me, to you. And then it is done to our community. And while we are thrown out with nothing, the rich get richer. They now own the river. And we have to buy our water for drinking. And when we fools one day take up the gun and say that enough is enough, we want our land, our water, our air back – and a crazy writer says she feels for them, we all cry foul. We say we are being wronged. We say the adivasis are the tresspassers, the violators. After all, the writer is one of us…she is rich, could afford to become richer, travel the globe in executive class and attend high-end parties, even write scripts for Bollywood…she ought to be on our side. She cannot grovel with the dirty poor fools….this is betrayal! And we call her mad.

Serves her right for betraying her “class”! Period.

Some unnecessary thoughts on Environment Day and the Nuclear Bomb

On June 5 the newspaper told us that Myanmar is building the N-bomb. I quote from the report: “‘Burma is trying to build pieces of a nuclear programme, specifically a nuclear reactor to make plutonium and a uranium enrichment programme,’ said the report’s co-author, Robert Kelley, an ex-director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ‘The information brought suggests Burma is mining uranium, converting it to uranium compounds ... and is trying to build a reactor and/or an enrichment plant that could only be useful for a bomb.’” The point here is not to go for a validity check of the news item – my gut feeling says it’s more or less true. That is, the described extent of the progress might be exaggerated or mollified, but the fact of the matter is true. June 5 was also World Environment Day. The day we remember to pledge our sanity, our love, our concern and our little sacrifices for the planet – mother earth as we then lovingly call it. The planet cares little about whether we celebrate her greenery and her blue-ery, whether we dedicate a whole 24 hours to talk about her and take out peace march and write placards “Save the Green”, whether a series of NGOs are set up and are funded well enough to ‘care’ for it, whether we double the carbon emissions and size of footprints every year or halve it…. It is spinning around the sun and it will probably continue to do so even without us mortals making merry on its surface (unless of course we blow it to bits by our lovingly made bombs). It really cares not. In the huge universe, it is itself a tiny speck that is simply following laws of astrophysics – whether or not even the unified field theory is formulated and Nobel Prizes won for it, it is least bothered. This fragment of the sun. Revolving around it in some eternal oedipal love.

However, it matters a world to us – the mortals who populate this globe made of some metals, non-metals, gases and so on. So, given that whether or not the greenery and the blue-ery remain, whether or not the temperatures continue soaring like dream-sensex figures, whether or not birds and tigers grow extinct, matter like life and death to us; we better start becoming slightly more cautious. And this nuclear ramp will do none of its two bits towards aiding it. The ramp has long been made – strutting down it came the United States and then there was a mountain of speculation whether Germany might have worn the label earlier; soon others came in tow and we also had Mother India celebrating the grand “potent” moment in Pokhran and then Pakistan “our immortal enemy” – and now Myanmar …

All governments have inevitably put forward the argument that they are only building an arsenal as a self defense measure against future attacks by enemy states. And our India was fortunate enough to have been gifted a permanent enemy state by the British as a parting gift. Both of us said that we built the bomb so as to drop in on the other’s territory if they dare trespass us. But, will it ever be that easy? The Pakistani Lahore and the Indian Amritsar are barely 30 miles apart; we share land, skies and air – “where radioactive fallout will land on any given day depends entirely on the direction of the wind and the rain … If we bomb Lahore, Punjab will burn. If we bomb Karachi, then Gujarat and Rajasthan and perhaps even Bombay will burn.” In the article “The End of Imagination” Roy – the confused crazy Maoist sympathizer – writes and I quote her: “Soon every country will want to have its own bomb. And why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs … the only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea man has ever had. On the day of reckoning you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be undiscriminating” … “Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire … when everything there is to burn has burnt, the smoke will rise and shut out the sun … there will be no day. Only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in.” What shall we do then, those of us who might manage to stay alive? Proud Indians or Americans maybe? “Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous carcasses of our children in our arms?” Say that we have had superior technology? That we are the victors?

If you are god-believing, then remember that this bomb is man’s challenge to God – We’ve the power to destroy everything you created.

If you are not (god-believing), then look at it this way: this world of ours that we desperately need to be in one piece for our very selfish needs, is 4,600 million years old. It could end in one afternoon.

What if we had bargained for the more powerful and infinitely ethical position? What if we had said, we have the technology, we can make nuclear bombs if we want to, but we won’t. We don’t believe in them? Very unmanly I guess … and if this is the face of manhood, of coveted potency, then perhaps the death and cold of the nuclear winter awaits us rightly enough!

Happy World Environment Day to all…

[I acknowledge the insanity and irrationality that is Arundhati Roy.]

Politics that is not political

In yesterday's paper (TOI) veteran journalist Dhananjay Mahapatra made his dissatisfaction with Roy manifest; he precisely dwelt on the 'fact' that Roy has been generally inconsistent. Roy has stood by the cause of the Maoists. She has also proclaimed her position as an anti-violence one. How can then she reconcile these two? And she has also said that she is unafraid to invest her support with the Maoist, and that the state, if it wants to, may suffice to put her behind bars. Mahapatra says with a masculine sting that Roy had said as much even when Supreme Court gave its verdict on the Narmada Bachao mega-event, that is, she had dared to make her dissatisfaction with the verdict too explicit (unbecoming of the true citizen-subject!).

So our assumption (and unwavering belief) is that the Supreme Court is bound to remain beyond all doubts, questions. That it can never make a mistake, it cannot go wrong, it cannot be bribed and it cannot have vested interests! Well, we do address the judge as "My Lord", but have we really begun to take that this literally!

And few have ventured to know the truth behind the NBA and now, behind this Green-Hunt. Roy remains one of the few actually concerned beings - more concerned than the sate, the democratic state that promises to treat all citizens as equals and give them safety, education, health and sanitation to begin with. An almost-obscure report of a talk Roy delivered at Mumbai a few days back was published in TOI itself: Roy is unambiguous in saying "Maoists do not have a revolutionary vision ... their mining policy is not very different from that of the state. They too would mine the bauxite instead of leaving it in the hills, which is what the people they are fighting for, want." Well, it is actually too clear that Roy is for the tribals - the people who have been existentially and physically mauled and raped ever since we waved the midnight tricolour and since earlier. When these squashed people are taking up the gun, she 'understands' their cause, feels the intense pain that led to this extreme - however, the moment the once-marginalised are tasting the momentary freedom and authority the gun begets. are often taking to wear the same shoes of domination, atrocity and violence (and thereby in a way talking the language of the state), Roy knows better than to play blind when the turnabout happens. She says: "We need an idea that's neither Right nor Left." She realizes that the range of available 'solutions' is a sham - ministers don't bother to even visit the ravaged families but are continuing to sell the tribal land to further more industries.

Roy understands the magic and menace of money slightly too closely; had she been really in dire need of name and fame (as most media persons explain her 'dramatic' stand offs as a means to fulfill this 'need) she might well have continued her cosy life in plush apartments and globe-trotting days and vying for the next Booker or Pulitzer. Not many Booker Awardees give up the life of glitz and sit by the river for days on end and fight for the rights of the nun-human species called tribals. But if they do ever manage to get back their land, we sceptics might want to see if Roy actually had been eyeing that all along, and if she would now start paddy cultivation on a plot?

However, as I said, she understands the magic and menace of money slightly too closely; she knows that there exists a gap between the tribal and the Naxal, despite their overlapping moments of origin and deprivation. Perhaps it's all the magic of the gun ... perhaps the wait for a politics that will be political will continue for a long time to come...

[One might venture to read the following article by two of my teachers: http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/131/1/]

To Cast or Not to Cast

Election has an ‘alchemy’ … it singularizes each citizen, responsible for his vote (his choice), at the same time as it unifies the ‘moral’ body of the citizens: Balibar; Citizen-Subject

I had gone over for some work to the neighbour’s place. When I was sipping a cup of mandatory tea and saying every five minutes that I needed to leave, and politely dodged curious questions, their domestic help Sabita walked in. Mrs Madam suddenly turned furious – apparently Sabita, a woman in her late 30s had not come in the earlier day and that too without prior notice. Sabita nonchalantly replied that she had gone to cast her vote and after she returned she had a bad enough headache and so could neither inform nor come. I stood half-apologetic myself, expecting Mrs Madam to lambast Mrs Subaltern as to why she still did not at least go to the nearest booth and make a call etc. But what madam said was this: “Eeeshh! Uni gecchen vote dite! Aami-e jayi na, ar toder vote na dite parle hochhe na, na?” [Rough translation = Oh! She grandly goes to cast her vote! I do not go myself and you people can’t afford to stay back from voting?]. While a paper can be written on this one line, I shall afford to hold myself back and speak only a few words.

Too many currents are playing themselves out here; what immediately struck me was this – while I generally echo many others that in as much as the nation-state claims itself to be a democracy, one that runs on regular representative elections, it is this very democratic principle that one might deploy to abstain from casting the vote. I myself have not cast a vote ever – primarily because I have never been at the place where my identity card was issued from at a time when elections were taking place. Of course the experience of the polling booth and the determining button that all leaders asked to be pressed on their behalf is something I have badly missed, but then, whenever I tried to think who I would cast the vote for, I almost never came up with an answer. Unlike Dhorai I have never stood inside the booth wondering at the long term magic my vote would create – that’s what we have been taught to believe. That’s the belief that helps the democratic machinery run smoothly. That somewhere someone will be informed by my vote. S/he will never see me, know me, touch me, feel me, love me or go for a coffee, but I can make a difference…and that little difference in turn will make my life better. Another difference. Thus, betting all hopes on this chain of differences we go to case the vote. Unknown to each other. “The vote is the great anonymous performance of citizenship” (Partha Chatterjee)

However democracy by definition allows for choice, for freedom. And thus anonymous or not, we remain free to not cast the vote, to not dream about differences and changes. Though we keep on hearing occasionally that voting will be made mandatory, since percentage of willing voters are dropping like population rate in Japan. But then, the interesting point that struck me is this: while intellectuals, academicians, even some politically inclined people and social scientists claim they will not cast that vote, that they did not go to the booth this time, we are either proud or awe-struck at their strength – strength to speak the truth that no party is worth voting for, that this democracy is a sham, and that democracy should thus be rethought, redefined. They do not say these in as many words though. We understand, we assume. When the same one-liner is said by some obscure housewife, we pity her, we realize she is so “pre-modern”. Are we being inconsistent here? Or are we being guided by some pre-given set of notions – under what circumstances should one be allowed to abstain from voting. The circumstances include an intimate awareness of the political and social scenario around us, a sincere political investment, a somewhere transcendental idealism and love for the nation-state beyond democratic dramas…?

That’s one question I was left with that day. Moving to the next problematization, we know, we have read that it is the civil society that is organized, is partaking of state benefits and often operates within the bound serialities made possible government functionings like census and the vote. All these and so on, as opposed to the political society that accesses entitlements not rights, that is unorganized and slipping away before being serially contained. And the implicit assumption is that the civil society-political society divide will more or less map onto an urban-rural divide, an elite-subaltern divide. And this made my calculations messed up: the decked up, eyebrow-plucked and speaking-english-at-home-with-children Mrs Madam, the symbol of the urban elite and thus a member of the civil society, was not only showing off the fact that she did not go to cast her vote, but also inquiring why her domestic help – the rural, barely literate, subaltern member of the political society – did. I felt this was an abject understanding of social activities/responsibilities/what-you-will, only and only in terms of what the elite/urban/capital-wielding-agents do and think right to be done; that it was reading, validating and justifying the world from their privileged standpoint. If I did not go, I being the knowledgeable, affluent, with more social power being, how dare you, the illiterate, ignorant, poor and powerless, go to cast the vote? I was also bemused at the interesting subversion (or mere reversal maybe?) of my own trained expectations! I was intrigued, such that I did not say anything. I silently admired Sabita as she casually turned to say “Aha, tumi jaoni bole ki aamio jabona?” [Since you did not go, I too should stay back?], and vanished into the kitchen to attend to the pile of unwashed utensils.

Am I ‘single’? – some reflections on ‘single’-hood

Somebody asked me recently, “Are you single?”

The question triggered off a chain of thoughts, further questions, dilemmas, uncertainties and more in me. I tried to get the exact import of the question. For me, a woman almost 29 years old, what does this question imply? Or, to put it more generally, what does this question imply for women like me? What does it imply in general, to any female? Or maybe to even men? (And the third gender? Would anyone ever bother to ask her) (I also increasingly felt surer that only the age was not the determining factor. What then?)

‘Single’ for a girl of 16 means having no boyfriend – no young male friend to go out on a date with, read poetry to, whisper over the phone late into the nights and at times dream about ‘settling down’ with …

‘Single’ for a woman of 25, especially if she is out of studies and not into any ‘career’, means not-yet-married …

For the ‘career’ woman though, ‘single’ at 25 would perhaps still imply no ‘commitment’ of future ‘settling down’ with any man …

But the moment she is close to 30, ‘single’ would start to imply not-yet-married …

And the legally married woman who perhaps stays away from home and family for a livelihood? Month after month, is she not ‘single’?

And the woman who has decided not to marry ever and stays by herself but is into a ‘steady’ relationship? Would she be considered ‘single’?

And the woman who supposedly had boyfriends at the right age, got married at the right age, but later broke out and then stays on her own? Single?

The widow?

The divorced woman?

The divorced woman into a relationship?

And the woman, who believes that notwithstanding all her social-legal relationships, she is emotionally single at the end of the day? Would we not grant her single-hood?

But then, I realized, this was not the neatly-charted-out-all-accommodating list; it could never be. The definitions of ‘single’-hood vary according to social and economic class, religion and region – there are surely more factors that would continue to inform it; however, I am yet to concretely figure those out at the moment.

We go 70 km away from the city and the figures start getting shuffled; the not-yet-married criterion probably already becomes valid by the time the subject is 22, irrespective of her ‘working’ status, only because she is bound to work, because working is not an option for her – else her family fails to manage to make the ends meet.

If one travels further away from the urban elite space and goes to the tribal villages that struggle to exist in the face of the grand developmental symbols we are thrusting on them, there are again revisions – and I am ashamed to say I do not know exactly how. But there are. Actually, the very notion of ‘single’-hood might not exist in certain registers after all. The notion itself arises from the socially ubiquitous and accepted expectation that ‘marriage’ (and a marriage that is to stay till death do them part) is a must, necessary and required part of life. Just make marriage optional, and the pressure of ‘single’-hood will dissipate to a large extent.

And for yet again the humbly middle-class or lower-middle-class woman who has lost her father, and who has more unmarried sisters in queue after her, and whose mother survives on the deceased husband’s meager pension, starts to surprise people by her ‘single’-hood if she is still unmarried at 24. Or maybe even while she is hoping to enroll for the masters degree.

But if her father has passed on a fortune to them before his death, nobody would think she was ‘single’ till she had crossed 28.

So then, I am not only the 29-year-old woman who is asked the question. There is more here than mere biological age. I am here floating between Ben Anderson’s "unbound serialities" – I occupy multiple subject-positions, a plurality of identities. I am female, come from a middle-class background, was born and brought up in a suburban town, convent educated (whatever that means), higher education took place in the city and then into got a decent job, father is still alive but has no fortune to pass on, mother a housewife who contributes to the family income by teaching at home, now am into academics, etc. And of course, all these descriptions are fluid and many are contingent too. Instance: the town was once-upon-a-time suburban and had large areas covered with dense forests. It is now shedding its greenery fast and factories and colleges and management institutes are coming up like grass shoots during the monsoons. My father is still alive but no man is immortal. I have had three jobs till now, but there always has been decent job-less gaps between each. And I have never been able to figure out for good if I am an elite or a subaltern.

In fact I have started feeling that since this dichotomous rendition of society as elite and subaltern began as a politico-historical project, it perhaps should be allowed to stay at that; extending it beyond that, to the domains of culture, the existential, the everyday for that matter, is reductive – it clearly leaves out a vast number of people and becomes a subaltern rendition of the old two-valued logic. If the subalterns are only those living in the state identified rural spaces or pockets of the rural within cities, then I am not a subaltern. I lived in rented houses and later in an office flat my father obtained. Right now I live in a rented 250 sq feet one room-one kitchen place. I have never lived in shanties. However, I have visited one quite a few times, in order to meet some of my relatives who lived there. If subaltern people cannot afford going to convent schools, I am not a subaltern. I studied in an English-medium convent school. I was also punished a few times when teachers caught me talking in Bangla. Yet again, this convent school is not in any remote way akin to the convents located in contemporary city spaces – it was quite humble – children of municipal sweepers and low-end government employees attended it, as did daughters of general managers of private companies – and its humility at times accounted for its bursts of authoritarian domination. If again subaltern means yearning to join the elite brigade, I am not a subaltern. If elites are those whose lives are informed according to the logic of capital, who are singularly bothered about obtaining and retaining hegemonic power, I am not an elite. If elitism is about refusing to grant the subaltern their status, I am not an elite. If elite means economic affluence, I never grew up in an elite family – I still remember the time when my mother used to light the unoon (mud stove) before cooking each meal separately (no gas oven, no refrigerator), and at times it used to take up to half an hour to light it up. Yet, they never complained if it came to spending for our education or health. Either I am neither-subaltern-nor- elite, or I am both – floating in and out like the möebius strip. Fluid subjectivites and mobile identities. Affiliations and filiations are to different registers and at times they lie in mutual contradiction.

Coming back to the question of ‘single’-ness, how does such a fluid subject confidently say a 'yes' or a 'no' to the posed query? How can she know that even the answer is not shifting? It’s a question of how I see things, how I view life, how I have tried to design my life for me, what are my priorities, who am I, how should I live? Moments vary and so do emotions. Yes, as far as I am a subject of the nation-state, certain identities are to remain fixed, immutable – my sex, my date of birth, my Permanent Account Number, my Unique Identity code, my place of birth, my religion (it can be changed of course, but once it’s been changed it gets fixed again), names of my parents, date of matriculation, of graduation, my thesis registration number, my legal marital status, my legal divorce date, the date of birth of my children, my date of death …

The more fixed and unambiguous these data are, the better a citizen I am. But caught within these webs of data, statistics and details of government information, I failed to answer if I am single …

Socrates began it … it till continues …
The search …

Who am I?