To Margaret and Manthara

(Just put up thoughts on facebook)

I heard a few of my friends chatting the other evening. They were sitting in one of those beautiful little green patches still found in East Bengaluru grumbling as usual about their husbands, children, vegetable vendors, jobs that some of them had and finally they came upon their favourite topic – domestic help.

“They don’t get made like they used to earlier, Tina”, Anu lamented, “these maids want to watch the TV all the time.”

“I remember our maid in Durgapur. She stayed with us for 27 years and did not once ask for a salary hike. She worked even when she was ill. She loved us so much. She cried when we left. God bless her soul, she did not even live too long after that,” Nidhi muttered in reminiscence.

“Those were the days. Mom did not have to do a thing for us. Our maid worked so hard at pleasing us. Never wanted leave. Never asked for extra money every time you asked her to do extra work. Never left also, no matter how much you scolded her. We also had a very young girl, who grew up in our house with me and my sister. My mother got her married off as well. Gave her one big gold chain when she left,” Anandi boasted.

“But what now? They want more money every year. They want leave to go for weddings, funerals, birth ceremonies. They want sick leave when they fall ill. They want bonus for Christmas. I have decided its better to do the work myself,” Tina gave the verdict.

Everybody nodded in agreement and left rather satisfied at having given vent to their domestic help related observations and problems.

Got me thinking that evening. I have often heard snatches of such conversation but never had the opportunity to actually eve’s drop into a meeting like this where the entire problem of “today’s maid servant” gets defined and discussed with such vivid examples. This of course is part of the series of discussions on the problems of “today’s ” mother-in-laws, husband, politicians, school teachers and many such morally degraded beings, I confess.

What got me thinking is the way people in general have changed over the years in India. My mom worked with one hospital for 35 years and my parents stayed in one city, with each other for more than 45. Most of my uncles worked with the government and joined and retired in the same offices. All my relatives have been married once and live with their respective spouses unless in some cases death took its toll. I have seen my mother go to the hospital even when she was ill, simply because she had promised patients she would be there and they would come from collieries far away from town. My dad kept sending money to his relatives even after many humiliations and insults just because they were family and they needed help. Most of my parent’s friends believed in hard work, never asked for a raise themselves from their employer and bought or constructed their first owned houses close to their retirement. My boss still believes in ignoring the short cuts to most things and works late hours so that each document we produce from the institution is a perfect piece of communication.

However, when I compare this picture to the picture created by me and my friends today the differences are many. We work for ourselves and not for organizations so we hop jobs every few years and trade our services to the highest bidder. We don’t go to office if we are ill, and if there is a surprise visitor at home, we request for that extra sick leave. We demand salary hikes at every opportunity and threaten to resign if we know we are good. We marry, we separate, we divorce and re-marry as many times as it takes for us to find the ‘right mix’. Our first apartments are bought in our 30s, upgraded in our 40s and sold for a profit in our 50s to go for a villa or a farm house. We change cars, mobile phones, computers and television sets regularly to keep up with the latest gadget guru talks. We change opinions, attentions, positions and attitudes depending on what suits the general scenario. We are the products of the neo capitalist India making the ‘most’ of our ‘opportunities’.

Loyalty, faithfulness, commitment and responsibility have somewhat lost their relevance.

However, we expect quite different things from our domestic help don’t we? We expect them to remain just as they were; untainted, unadulterated, unique antique pieces of a bygone era. They should have remained untouched by the seductions of opportunity, unclaimable by the greed of prosperity. While we call ourselves upwardly mobile and very proudly add that to marketing jargon in describing ourselves, they should remain stagnant where they are, satisfied with what we give them, unquestioning minions to serve our need.

I am glad domestic help today is more aware of their needs and rights. I am glad they try their best to enjoy what life has to offer, because in any case they have gotten a rather rotten deal compared to us. I am glad they don’t work on Sundays and won’t come to work when they are ill. I am glad they have the sense to get their daughters to school and don’t wait for some do-gooder memsaab to marry them off with a gold chain bestowed on them. I am glad that some of them hope to ‘retire’ when they are 60. The only thing I would actually like is for them to organise themselves into a union so they can demand for their rights and not request for what is due.

It really boils down to just one question. When we don’t want to be like our mothers and fathers why should our domestic help be any different?

Women who make a difference

(A talk at the CII Women Leader's Forum, 2009)

Last week a friend’s Facebook status quoted the title of the previous session, “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus”. I wondered what happened to Earth! Weren’t we meant to be from here – both men and women? Well, as you must have guessed, I don’t believe men and women are born different or have intrinsic virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses that belong solely to their biological identities.

However men and women are both born into this world that has preconceived notions about them binding them to their pre-ascribed roles and destinies. The reasons for these ideas and beliefs are historical and are influenced by economics, psychology, politics and sociology and opening that Pandora’s box would keep us here till the next Women’s day! But it suffices to say, that even today, in most circumstances, a woman is born and grows up in an environment conditioned to see her as the second sex. Whether it is family, society, religion or nation, the eyes narrow at her every act of self assertion. And perhaps this rather powerless beginning makes her aware of the marginalized inside her. And thus, a woman develops an affinity for the marginalized in society and tends to understand the position of the powerless more acutely, more instinctively. Being constantly weighed and found wanting compared to men, the woman empathises with the persecuted and understands what it means to be voiceless. Often, her struggles for the oppressed in society are projections of her own struggle in the world, and her attainments therein, an embodiment of her own declaration of freedom and justice. Perhaps that’s why, women tend to make a difference.

In the last 8 years that I have been with the India Foundation for the Arts, I have traveled across the country to meet some really brave women who are making a difference. When Moina, in Birbhum, challenges her partner with her song “You can be the owner of my body but can you claim my mind”, or Rani Begum in Muzaffarpur says “Marriage destroys an artist”, in the film The Other Song about the lives and music of the tawaifs of Benaras, or Charusheela in Nasik, playing Aai in Sunil Shanbag’s production “Cotton 56, Polyster 89” holds together the lives of the men who have been locked out of their jute mills, or Vasudha in Ahmedabad sits with the girls who are victims of the Gujarat carnage helping them express their grief and anger on canvas – all these women are making a difference. They are making a difference with their utterances, with their stances, with their choices, expressions and assertions. There are stories I find everywhere I travel. But the one story I would like to share with you today, I came by long before I started working, while I was still a student.

Rehana bibi lived in a small town in West Bengal. I got to know her because she would be called home sometimes to make biriyani and kababs. She had a typical story - her husband was a house painter who had no fixed job and whatever little he earned would be washed off with his drink in the evening. Rehana got her regular dose of beatings and curses more so for having given birth to three daughters, worked in three or four houses and lived because that was the only way Rehana knew how to live. And that was how I left her in her small town.

I met her years later when I had gone back to sort out some family issues. This time I met a different Rehana. She had come home but not to cook biriyani. She was raising money for her school that she ran at her home. Rehana, the little woman who now looked visibly taller and stronger, laughed as I poured out the questions. Her story was simple, she said. She had had enough of her husband and daughters and their constant complaints and so a few years ago she ran away, she said, with a much younger man who promised her the ‘promised land’. He ditched her a year later when she refused to sleep with his friends for money but not before she was pregnant, a souvenir of his promised land. She came back to her husband because that’s the only place she could come back to only to realize that he had married again, probably sold off one of her daughters and reduced the other two to being slaves of his new wife. He had given her talaaq, he said.

Rehana took back her two daughters, started hunting for the third one, got an abortion, decided to fight it out for alimony in court and began working in a few houses again. The needs of court kacheri led her to night classes, she said, and soon she was not just able to read and write but started teaching her daughters at home. Then she realized she could earn much more if she started a little school for girls and said goodbye to smirking houseladies who had give her cleaning and washing jobs. The school was difficult to start, but she borrowed some money and in two years she had a running school with 14 students, all from her community, girls who had never been to school before. She coaxed the mothers telling them that while she taught them maths and urdu she would also teach them to cook biriyani.

But she realized that the myriad problems of muslim women like her lay in their lack of education, exposure and understanding of the ways of the world. She started training with an NGO to be a counselor. Very soon she was a mix of a family welfare counselor cum human rights activist cum fixer of family problems and the aunt everyone went to, to sort out teenage issues. All this with the court case slugging on and the school running with more students every year. Rehana narrated her story in a rather nonchalant manner while I gaped on, 23, still a student, living off my parents and Rehana not much older than that having lived through many lifetimes already. I was wondering how I should react? What should be my response? Empathy, awe, sympathy, amazement? And then she cleared it all saying, and I am translating here from Bengali, “Didi, good that fellow beat me every night. You have to heat the iron and beat it hard to make steel, no?” How could she understand so simply what we struggled with in the graduation classes of political science and sociology? How could she say it so unassumingly? Rehana is making a difference because she has felt the heat herself and seen her voicelessness projected in the women she goes out to help everyday. She has not found her other daughter nor is the court case over but the women in the mohalla adore her, respect her and love her. As do I. She took the donation and as she was leaving I ask her, So Rehana don’t you wear the burkha anymore?” Rehana shrugged, “Didi, they said it would protect me from harm. Look how far that has got me. So I threw it away.” Rehana is my hero.

The reason I share this story is not just because it inspires me so, but also because sometimes I am filled with a sense of foreboding when I think of the future that lies in front of us, women.

There is a phrase in Bangla “Je jai Lonkai shei hoi Rabon” which loosely translated means “Whoever sits on the throne of Lanka becomes another Ravan”.

I sometimes wonder at the swiftly shifting power balance between men and women today. The economics and politics are changing the social fabric at an accelerating rate and with it the lives of millions of men and women bringing them closer to each other in terms of financial equality, social standing and individual freedom. Will this rapidly closing gap between the power structures of men and women change the essential marginalized nature of women and with it change their perspectives? When the powerless become powerful do they become worse oppressors? One will have to scrutinise the examples of Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration, India Gandhi during Emergency and the recent travesties of Mayawati. I am reminded of Jane Addams who said “I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done, but then we must also remember that we have not had the chance. “

Could it then be quite this way – that it is not really about men and women but about the masculinity and femininity that is there is each one of us men or women? Masculinity being the aggressive, power loving contoller and femininity being the nurturing cohabiter. This is what has happened over time. Women have found their definition of success and fulfillment in either performing the roles of traditional femininity, where the nurturer has remained at home as the mother and wife, thus living up to its patriarchal roles. Or as she has stepped out of her home she has chucked her femininity deeming it useless in the big bad world and taken on her masculinity to define her role outside of her home as head of organisations and nations. Thereby the modern working woman has adopted the very definitions and manifestations of power which were identified with her oppressors.

Will we not be able to define a future for ourselves outside this paradigm, where femininity and its values will construct for us the roles of leaders and change-makers? Will we, for example, be able to define success as cohabitation and not victory over another, or triumph - a tool for forgiveness and not for revenge or power as a facilitating force and not a dominating one? Will we, who have lived with boundaries all our lives and know how loathsome they are, be able to erase political borders drawn by the opportunists and connect nations and people who actually belong together? Sounds, I know, a bit like John Lennon, but I am not the only one dreaming here. I have the aspirations of millions of my sisters with me and I believe if Rehana could do it, so can we. And if we can, then I think women will continue to make a difference.

Wither Chanakya?

(Published in the 1st Anniversary Issue of FHM in India, 2009)

In a country that has produced political geniuses like Chanakya and Gandhi there remains much to be desired today from the Indian ‘Man in Politics’. While you find them in all sizes and shapes and shades of colour (even the reds come in shades from the very pale pink to the darkest blood red, competing with the latest Asian paints shade card!) the characteristics they portray are sometimes hilarious and often shameful. However, whether these peculiarities are intrinsic to their Indian-ness, their manhood or a requirement of being in politics is a debate that could raise storms in many cocktail glasses.

One of the first things I had noticed about young men involved with politics in colleges in Kolkata (where almost everyone is college ‘does politics’ one way or the other) was the ‘female consort syndrome’. Every man who held some political view, or was part of some student political body, or held some post in the college union expected every woman in the college to a) agree with their point of view b) worship them and finally c) join the group they professed they belonged to. Some tribes calculate the man’s worth counting the number of cows they have and here a man’s worth was calculated by the number of women he could initiate into his political group. It used to get extremely funny since there would often be shows of rather distressing competitiveness among men in college politics over the ownership of the new women who joined the college and many union rooms are silent witnesses to these skirmishes. I guess this streak in men continue and grow as they graduate from college politics to state, regional and national ones. And by then their being in positions of control wields a certain power over the worlds they inhabit which I guess a lot of women find attractive. (Power in any form, be in academic, financial, religious or political has always been what youngsters these days would loosely call ‘chick-magnet’ic!)

Having grown up in an environment of immense political consciousness in Bengal fed regularly with radical left ideas (Naxalbari and its aftermath was still raw in every Bengali home and literary page) one was rather disillusioned seeing the men in politics so far away from anything remotely recognizable as ideology. The man of politics is a man-opportunistic. He interchanges words like ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’ often enough in his oratory brilliance to make the most of the options he has. He uses, abuses and then refuses to accept blame for anything.

Like the mythical Cerberus, a man in politics has many faces which he uses to deceive and manipulate the media and his constituency. An entire lifetime goes by without really knowing what the man is actually about. He probably never uses a mirror. Like a chameleon he morphs into the colour of the background that suits him. And like a chameleon it is often difficult to pin him down. He changes his stances so often and so promptly that it becomes a riddle whether he shifts his principles for his party or the party for his principles. As the political merry go round heightens post every election with auctions placed for the highest bidder, the media screams hoarse about making pre-election tie ups mandatory and the voters sigh at the inevitable.

A man in politics is also an acclaimed performer. He beats Bollywood actors hands down on his pretences of empathy, sympathy and compassion for his electorate. No wonder sons of politicians choose filmdom as their natural habitat. He uses everything in the book and some cleverly innovated ones to make sure we are entertained, or at least engaged in the black humour drama he unfolds. Like a showbiz star a man in politics in India seizes to be a man and assumes supermanhood. He is exempt from scrutiny, criticism, judgement and punishment. He is also exempt from standing in queues at any counters be it airport or the nearest shop, traffic lights when they turn red on our roads and income tax raids. His priviledges include first rows in auditoriums which he does not pay for, arriving late for his speeches and making the audience wait, making obnoxious remarks which he is never sorry for and generally giving the nation a long haul course in the merits of patience. A man in politics will certainly win the Golden Raspberry Award if introduced in India with a ‘professions’ category.

During the last elections there was a huge hue and cry about citizens wanting ‘real change’ in our political systems and processes. Independents stood and lost, English language national dailies ran campaigns to find the ‘leader’ among the masses, tea companies encouraged us to wake up and technology reigned across polling booths and central controls. Politics saw the arrival of the metro-sexual man adequately dimpled, gel haired and designer kurta-ed spewing profusely the goodness of wholesome Indian values. Princes spent nights at huts of the landless as Rolex watches dazzled against kulhars of chai sipped at roadside dhabas. Everybody kept their promises significantly vague and ‘youngistan’ sounded utterly devoted, proclaiming (as if they had discovered the words), “India needs change”. Media assumed that true democracy had arrived or at least, they said, is about to, right down the upcoming turn on the road. It’s been a while now. The new wine has settled itself in old bottles and nothing really has changed. A liquor brand got it right, Men will be men.

If the reader by now is thinking I have something against men in politics, well I certainly do. Not very different from what would show up in google as the top reasons why women find men unworthy. Breaking promises, not cleaning up after them and not asking for directions when they are obviously on the wrong track. However, mind you, this is all about ‘the man in politics’ and not about ‘the political man’ who I believe India produces by the hundreds. I admire the men who are writers, artists, film makers, not for profit professionals and activists who are influencing with their politics, the combined consciousness of this nation. With their utterances, positions, stances and actions they are making a difference. One has witnessed many a Gandhi in their midst. And probably many a Chanakya too! How I wish one could interchange their places with the career politicians. How I wish the editor asked me to write about them instead.