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.

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?

How to Write about Africa

[http://www.granta.com/Magazine/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1]: I owe my finding this article/piece/something-else-that-fits-no-given-box to my friend Zubin. One can view his blog at http://peripheralvision.blogspot.com/

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the 'real Africa', and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people's property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa's most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or 'conservation area', and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa's rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don't mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You'll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

[You are free to keep silent and feel a silent sting...]

Why Crack up our Lives?

Happy Diwali … so people called up to say and SMS me and others too. Perhaps one even passes a benevolent smile to a faintly acquainted-with stranger and murmurs, “happy diwali!’. So much for the spreading of humanitarian gesture and goodwill, all very exemplary in a world where such virtues are increasingly (or decreasingly perhaps) being available and noticed as printed words in Moral Science text books and 'How To Be A good Citizen' picture charts. All the more exemplary in a world laden with Ladens, with phallic structures in a paternal nation crumbling down to ground zero. All very good. And happy diwali once again.

I tried to stand in my 3rd floor balcony and do some meaning-making of the little blasts and flowering lights going on since the past four days now – two days prior to diwali it all started and now that diwali has over for more than 24 hours, it seems relentless in its determination and loyalty to the essence of the festival. And so, I was trying to make meaning —

And think —

Silent crackers shoot up in to the dark space we have named the sky (devoid of any stars in the thick smoke hanging over the city like a loving mother’s blanket since the past 4 days) and flower out into a dazzling and excruciatingly ephemeral nebulae of greens, red, purple and golden stars and dots, only to be sucked into a blackhole of nothingness in less than a matter of seconds. Some flowers are bigger, spread out over a wider dark expanse and are all golden in essence…occasionally a lone red dot shoots up and leaves a trail of burnt gases visible even in the dark, through the thick blanket of smoke. I calculated — each flower gone, a crisp hundred-rupee gone too. At least. The aesthetic and mature silent flowers go up primarily in the sky-spaces above the multi-storied apartments, those with three security guards in front, sitting with Entry/Exit stern registers, those with automatic Otis elevators and grass on the roof. The flowers are observed from the balconies and roof top with muted remarks and teenage innocence. A brief comment on the craftsman’s skill perchance escapes glossed lips. A vodka glass in a male hand and laughter over kebabs. The flowers vanish and the smoke blanket grows an inch thicker.

Those living in houses that have grass traces in front of their doorsteps, resort to crackers that can talk, shout, shriek and screech (the hell out of anybody with functioning auditory structure). These crackers have a language of their own. Thousands of such crackers keep following one another for days on end, determined to establish their identity and ontology even at the cost of causing little inconvenience to certain sections of society – those aged, ill, preparing for exams, writing thesis papers, trying to talk or sleep, etc. After all, one look at the history of all revolutions would reveal a cognition of sacrificing-the-lesser-in-return-of-a-greater-good. In return of instituting an existence.

As rocket after rocket and other quasi-cosmic bodies go up and either tumble down or simply get sucked away into the smoky void, I am reminded of the eternally tumbling money market, the stock market to be exact (after all, there is no place for inexactitude). The U.S global shares have tumbled down like Humpty Dumpty and have been awaiting the King’s horses and men – but the army is not seeming adequate enough. The egg is perhaps awaiting its last option to be taken up as poach — sunny side down. Yet the horses and men are trying to find the right glue, right thread and whatever else.

Irrespective of whether the Obamian government will give a curt smile to Asian (let’s deal with just the Indian. I don’t wish to be meta-patriotic in this abject existence!) BPOs, thereby pushing several youngsters (those with a penchant for shooting up purple-red flowers and drinking diwali with vodka) to non-white-collar jobs (other attractive colours might surely tumble out of the spectrum and adhere to other parts of the shirt, but one can never be too sure), we surely need to stop ourselves from getting more cracked up than ever before!

Thanks to good-old Newton, we know that (most of) what goes up, comes down. We can keep the critics and their exception-laden-charts out of our purview at the moment. Therefore, both crackers and shares will come down. Both have seen abundance of investments, both have evoked irrefutable promise and joy in the investors (as well as in the viewers—those viewing with a gleeful scrutiny, silently making a definite promise to do the same when the next occasion came) when they were charting their upward, heavenly trajectory. Somehow, each investor, each Wall Street, Dalal Street, drinking-diwali-with-vodka and bursting cracker-chains amidst brick stacks, humanbeing, even after repeated, infallible evidence, hopes that this time it will go up higher, stay up longer, dazzle more brightly. Perhaps this time. Just this time. But each time the bull becomes a bear, each time the flower withers away just too soon, each time the dream seems blinded. Blinded by the smoky blanket … by the crashing loss of money, of life and its meaning. Of a healthier environment.

Neither the twin towers, nor the sensex, nor the shooting up crackers, stay up long enough. Should we learn a little and henceforth try to, at least believe in its downward trajectory? Perhaps with some less smoke blinding us, less noise deafening us and less shattered dreams, we can do a little better with a life less cracked, a life less glued up, a life less poached, sunny side down. Happy diwali, nonetheless. Whatever the happiness is all about!

Shadows on the Bridge

November 2007
Kolkata

It’s dusk. Early winter and thus the mild (and apologetic) blanket of chill at this hour. You could take the bridge to the left. There were shanties underneath and a rubble filled waterbody. The shadows hovered on the pavement bordering the bridge along both sides. Still shadows and bustling ones. The still ones were voluptuous, in various degrees of undress. Most were dark in complexion with gorgeous make ups – red lips, painted up and untied disheveled manes. The wisps of rough hair floated in the evening wind, escaping…trying to. Only they could not escape…try to. The bustling shadows belonged to young men…their bodies were glistening with a film of sweat – sweat of eagerness and hunger. They were busy showing off the standing-silent shadows to interested ‘parties’. They were haggling over the price – negotiating and compromising. The shadows kept silent. They were not allowed to decide upon their fate. The ‘parties’ took turns to gaze intently at each silent-shadow; scrutinize its every angle, every curve. The painted eyes and blood red lips, the cheap ornaments adorning her wrists and breasts, the mounds of breasts themselves. The curve of the hips and if possible, the shape of the legs. Looking at the often semi-covered breasts gifted them a strange surge of adrenal. They would feel good to touch…and the silent-shadows would not say anything. They had been paid for. Bought. The ‘parties’ selected one and placed the order. The happy moving-busily shadow gave them the receipt. Said he would get her delivered to their address.

Parties came and went.
Orders were taken and the maal delivered.
Right time.
Right place.
Promises kept.

The semi-dressed silent-shadow remained silent…
Perfect body, perfect price.

The semi-dressed silent-shadow remained silent…
Even when she was held by four men at a time
Even when she was carried aloft by four men at a time – two drunk
Even when she was immersed in the Ganga, to the accompaniment of drunken men and deafening dhaak beats…

She was still silent. Till she was no more…

The story of throwing the starfish back...

Many many years...almost when it was once-upon-a-time, I got hold of some Chicken Soup for the Soul books through come circuitous route, the details of which I rather not go into now simply because they are not informing in any way to what I am now going to share. The story of the starfish that I read there is as follows:

A man is walking down the sea beach. Lonely - both the man and the beach. Almost at the other end, at the horizon, walking towards him is the dot that is another man. However, our man gets slightly curious since the other dot-man is apparently walking a few steps, then stooping then standing up and walking a few more steps before again stooping and standing up. This man gets very intrigued, and starts walking faster so as to meet him sooner and find out what he is upto. In sometime they are within visibility range and the first man realizes that the other man is actually stooping down to pick up a starfish or a jellyfish that has been washed ashore by the wave and throwing it back to the sea before it dies. The man laughs, at the gross futility. Soon they are face to face, and our man says: "So, you are throwing back those things? But everyday, across all the beaches in the world, millions of such creatures are thrown on to the sand and they are doomed to die. That's how it is. What difference can you make?" The fish-thrower man says nothing but stoops and picks up a quivering starfish and throws it far back into the sea. He says: "I just made a difference to that one."

The story made me sad, it made it feel touched, it irked me ... for all the starfishes I had never bothered to throw back into the sea. I know that is how things are; that is how most things/beings live. eek, survive. That is what the state also tells us: "erom to kotoyi hoye!" (Such incidents are very common - too common to be bothered by). Some tell us that most villagers are used to living without electricity, so don't bother. Others tell that women are used to getting touched and oogled at on the streets, so just don't bother about these. Some others tell us that the tribals are used to getting nothing from either the state or the people who claim to be fighting for them, so let them die. Don't bother. Anyways, what difference can I make?

One in a multitude ... both yearning for some breath-able air and soaked with helpless rage at the futility ... yet optimism refuses to go away (even if you said it was Western, white and "theirs", I shall not yield) ... writing provides some transient relief...thus selfishly I seek to write ... the blog my emotional garbage-bin...