Your Family (and Other Animals)

April 24, 2013 Leave a comment

One of the earliest lessons my family taught me was not to exclude people on the basis of *their* families. We were never stopped from befriending the helps’ children (although we were made to give away some of our new toys to them), our poorer neighbours, the much-maligned divorcee’s two daughters, the young Muslim didi who brought scandal and violence upon herself in the form of a Sikh boyfriend, or the white-headed grass-cutter who got mildly drunk every evening and told us tall tales of Jharkhand.

Lately, however, I find myself failing this sterling lesson. It is easy for me not to hold people’s families or friends against them — poor souls, they can’t help being born where they were — but I’m beginning to find it quite hard to be convivial with people who admit their exploitative social entourage’s many flaws, but say they’re helplessly bound to them by ties of affection.

Of course, I don’t delude myself that love is inspired by the loved-person’s merits; I am myself quite attached to several of my defaulting friends and family. But I do not let this affection or a sense of duty towards them morph into my financial or emotional exploitation at their hands. And with age and an inherited sternness, I find I have very little respect for, or patience with, people who do. Of course, people have said to me that standing up for one’s rights or beliefs is not worth it if they cost one the support of one’s loved ones.

I’m too polite to say this to their faces, but if your darling dear ones are holding your relationship ransom to continually undermine your own wishes and make you fulfil theirs, then the time to evaluate your loyalty to them is well ripe.

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Institutions, power violence, Riminess Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Marriage Mill

February 3, 2013 3 Comments

Do you know how, once you noticed something new around you, it keeps popping up everywhere you look? My friend Dhruva Ghosh is the epitome of this phenomenon. Once you’ve met him, he will pop up everywhere you go. Most of the new people you meet will know him, and references to things he did and said will jump at you from conversations.

The same happened to me yesterday, with the matter of gender-equity and the way girls are treated in our society. It began with a few people of my social media friend warmly recommending a video on Facebook. The video was called ‘the Girl Effect‘. It’s a well meaning piece, sweet, but considerably less than impressive.

Informally called ‘The Clock is Ticking’, the video makes the same assumption a recent Hillary Clinton quote on maternal health does. It assumes that people treat women horribly in direct and subtle ways simply because they know no better. Once you tell them how criminalising abortion or raping a poor (as in poverty-struck, not ‘aww, the poor dear’) 12-year old ruins her entire life completely, they will all be terribly contrite and draw their paws back in shame, and swear to rear female children, and treat women all-growed-up with respect and care. And everybody will live happily ever after, under a mango tree with their honey.

Perhaps the project seeks to infuse gender-rights activism with hope, that elixir for existence in the long, dark, dank tunnels of despair. Or perhaps, like so many people in the world today, it prefers to trades the complex enterprise of understanding for the happy-making illusion of efficacy. More power to its intentions. However, it misses the point of gendered deprivation in a very crucial manner.

Overt sexual violence, while alarmingly wide-spread and often debilitating to the victim (and in a different way to those in the victim demography that observe this regularity of violence directed at their kind), is not the worst a poverty-struck pre- or post-pubsescent girl has to face in our society. That distinction goes to the structure of her entire life, which consists chiefly of resource-deprivation, lack of control over her life’s decisions, lack of control over access to her body, lack of control over her fertility, anda lack of security so pervasive that most girls adopt strict self-censorship of movement, clothes and speech as a form of ‘safety’.

The thing about such visceral violence is that it doesn’t do the evil overlord laughter from rooftops. It is normalised; made to seem like the right way of doing things. The only way of doing things, even. This results in, as it were, a self-selection for deprivation. Frequently during lunches at state schools, for example, we’ve observed that if there is a mixed-gender sibling pair studying together, then the girl picks out all the protien and vegetables from her dish and gives it to the boy, and eats just the rice and gravy (or just the rice) herself. In the most recent incident, a girl who said she had last eaten the previous day at school walked over to ther older brother to give him the egg and potatoes from her plate, and returned to her seat to eat the plain rice.

So the very basic assumption of the video — that a poor girl in a third-world country around her twelth birthday is a “healthy” child, and merely keeping her out of marriage and in school will ensure flourishing health, safety and independence — is fundamentally flawed. And damning to the entire project, because it pushes the baseline of the very variables it seeks to improve beyond their best possible projected success, making their own contribution superfluous.

It’s really a very simple sentence. “At twelve, a poor girl from the developing world is healthy”. It is also the luxury of a fairy-tale, a happily-ever-after we cannot afford. So hope is all very well, and certainly necessary to keep the camp-fires going. But today, all I feel like is John Stuart Mill’s stern moralising, wonderfully refreshing in its cynicism, stark realism, and cynicism. It certainly does away with false hope, or unfounded good cheer:

…in the existing constitution of things… it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic servant.

To make things extra-right, perhaps they could toss in a lobotomy. Wouldn’t that be peachy?

Sigh. Sometimes, I think, being a unthinking doormat would make life easier for women.

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Development, Divided India, Institutions, Language, power violence Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Knock knock!

January 19, 2013 4 Comments

Insurance agent to me: You speak so well, didi. I think you should have been a professor. *I* certainly would attend every class of yours. I would tell people in the canteen, “That madam is my favourite”.
Me: *polite dimpling*
Insh. aj.: OR you could be a radio jockey. Not only do you speak beautifully didi, you have such a lovely voice. And you’re so funny!
Me: Thank you. You’ve very…
Insh. aj. : But the BEST job for you, didi, would have been in the IAS. You’re warm and funny and very well spoken, but you also have great personality! I am actually quite scared of you. I measure very carefully what I will say to you. No, really didi, you should have been in the central administration.
Me: And yet here I am, attempting to refuse insurance agents on my mother’s behalf. Isn’t that sad?

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To Aunty, From ‘Those Girls’

January 8, 2013 3 Comments

Facebook linked me to this guest-piece on Women’s Web, one of those gendered portals for women in or from India. I thought it worth re-posting. The writing is perhaps a little too earnest in places, and the style far too open-lettery, but the content — despite a certain simplisticity imposed by the style — is spot on. This is indeed how certain older women of our community help destroy the safety of other women and feel righteous safegaurds of ‘our culture’ while at it.

Because of the tedious trend of being offended without the benefit of facts, the writers of the article clarify straight off that this isn’t a blanket attack on older women, because let’s face it, that would be inaccurate and deeply stupid. So in case you were getting ideas about indignantly huffing at the *awful* ageism on display… well, go ahead and spit them out. It’s a free world, after all.

UPDATE: The writer of the article very kindly let me know that I had violated Women’s Web’s copyright policy by reproducing their content here — full attribution notwithstanding — without their express written permission. To remedy this, and in accordance with her request (cf. comments below), I am removing the body-text of the article. But I recommend you read it from the Women’s Web archive, here: http://www.womensweb.in/2012/12/girls-of-these-days/

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Development, Divided India, Institutions, Politics, power violence, Spaces Have Tales Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Servants Can’t Rape’

January 7, 2013 3 Comments

Or so the sentiment appears to me.

My FB buddy Siddharthya posted this tweet from Madhu Purnima Kishwar, who is the director of the Indic Studies Project, housed in the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. In other words, she’s an academic, and a self-proclaimed feminist. This is the tweet:

I feel safer among men of conservative values and villages who establish “didi” “mausi” relationship than among Leftists, westernized males and others who preach equality.

Of course, Kishwar may have been quoted out of context, and indeed this may not have been meant as a denigration of ‘Leftism’, westernisation, or gender equity or urban, ‘modern’ men at all. Neither was it meant as public entertainment, which is sadly what it is (for a given section of the public). We are probably reading it wrong.

But it is an interesting statement nonetheless. Because, y’see, if we agree for the sake of shutting dissenters down that Kishwar did indeed mean what she appears to mean in this tweet, then she is far more in need of a re-acquaintance with ‘leftism’ and ideas of equity than victims of gendered violence are in need of her wisdom. The reason she feels ‘safer’ amongst village-folk who establish didi/mausi [sister/aunt] relationships with her, after all, is because she is an urban upper-middle class ‘connected’ academic, possessed of far greater social capital than them. She bears all the markers of prestige that upwardly-mobile Indians (or Indians who wish they were upwardly mobile) wish for themselves and their children: a degree-enabled education, fluency in English, possession of a ‘government job’ [read: security, pension, allowances, perks, possible path to power], a city address in the nation’s capital. Consequently, provided she doesn’t ruffle feathers too much, she’s less of a generic woman for these men (and women) she mentions, and more of a figure of consolidated power, and a conduit to all those elements of prestige. Why should they then treat her with violence and scare her off?

Of course, had there been no rural-urban divide between them, no socioeconomic gradient, I doubt she’d have felt this cuddled and secure. She would then have been at par with them, and her ‘modernity’ would then no longer have been a distant aspiration for her rural neighbours, but a possible index of her outsider status.

It is this same illusion of safety, born of the belief in the ‘simplicity’ and ‘loyalty’ of the little people that leads people-like-us, for example, to have resident domestic help that they bother to find out very little about. After all,  poor ‘village people’ may be conservative and loud and ‘unsophisticated’, but they’re also sweet and meek and obedient — and hardworking, and not ambitious and lippy and money-grubbing like these urban bustee chaps. When we go to the villages, they just come running out to greet us, ask after our families, do so much of our work for us! When we leave, we give them hundred rupees each, and they’re SO happy with it! Really, to experience pure humanity, you must go to our villages!

Of course, this imagined innocence and confidence doesn’t stop the occasional domestic help from slitting throats, and making off with the cash and kind she or he is surrounded by and made to serve each day, but never allowed to access. A point, I think, that supporters of ‘ye olde Indian culture was cosier than global modernity’ would do well to consider.

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The Art of Hatred

January 6, 2013 6 Comments

My mother informed me over tea this morning that Amartya Sen, speaking at IIT Bombay, has said that for improved performance as a nation, India needs to change the very core of its attitude towards women. A change, he says, that Bangladesh has already achieved, according to its human dev. indicators (and despite the ‘OMG Islamic state!’ stereotype).

The trouble is, when we speak of changing ‘attitudes towards women’, we speak, most of us, about ‘those boys’ — who tease, humiliate and molest women on our streets — or ‘those men’ — who decree that mobile phones, a hairline slit in the niquab or the consumption of ‘foreign’ food like chow mein — causes women to be raped. We demand death and dismemberment for these men and boys, sign online petitions, join and ‘like’ Facebook pages, and go home happy, glowing with the righteous satisfaction of being part of an angry democratic assertion of justice. Power of the people, man! Hang those rapists!

Real hatred for women, however, goes far deeper than that. It’s not even apparent as hatred, because frankly, most men would be deeply uncomfortable actively ‘hating’ the gender of their mothers, lovers, wives, daughters, sisters and friends. They would think it repulsive, unnatural, and alien (and more power to them). The same men, however — and many, many women — would casually indulge in communications and activities every single day that, while apparently ‘normal’, are rooted utterly in misogyny, classism, ethnocentricism or queer-phobia. Yet precisely because they’ve been made ‘normal’ — by the powers of majoritarian normativity — it’s very easy to think of the people objecting to suchlike as whiny, entitled, hysterical, and with no sense of humour.

Yesterday, for example, quite an upstanding young man — a bit of a Facebook wit — posted a joke about friendship. “Friendship is nothing but sharing”, he said, “so can I have your girlfriend?” Now, of course, my humourlessness is well-documented, so I was predictably less than amused at this quip. It’s too bad, I told him, that these girlfriend-types aren’t inanimate little dolls you can trade and barter at will. But I’ll tell you a way around this irksome sitch. Why don’t you slaughter these chicks en mass, have them stuffed, and then, voila! You no longer have to worry about their stewpid consent or *opinions* about being treated as pwetty thingies that their boyfriends can toss about amongst themselves.

The man was shocked. Goodness, are you mad, he said. That’s what you got from my joke???

But of course. When one ribs a male friend by asking if he’d ‘let’ one sleep with his hot wife or girlfriend, one doesn’t really notice that the entire joke is based on the premise that wives or girlfriends are pussy a man owns, and can give, lend or let out at will like all his other dead property. I mean, there’s no need to go that deep, right? It’s just a joke. Come on!

But one might wonder why women seldom make such jokes about their female friend’s male (or female) partners — or if they do, why they’d be SO much less than funny. Such women would sound wannabe and stupid at best, and disgustingly crass at worst. And yet from a heterosexual male, it’s just a funny line.

Sterner folk than I might also wish to point out at this juncture that the treatment of people as properties of other people is technically called slavery, and has been made illegal with extreme prejudice in all parts of the civilised world. I doubt, however, that much attention would be paid to such people. The real trouble with our world is not that we are evil, vicious and maddened by constant bloodlust. It’s that we don’t think, consider, reconsider, and analyse our own realities enough.

Nearly every religion there is asks people to look deep within and evaluate themselves at length. Add looking without and evaluating *that*, and there might be some salvation for religions yet.

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How to be Cool?

December 13, 2012 8 Comments

Oblivious as I frequently am to pop measures of coolth, I didn’t realise that ‘meeting people online’ — which is often a euphemism for dating and for casual encounters of the carnal kind, apart from more vanilla friendships — was the epitome of drab, dreary, left-in-the-ditch geekiness.

Oh deary, deary me. I can rustle up maybe one friend I first met in ‘weal life’ (though intimacy brewed mostly on chat applications, late at night and from the comfort of pyjamas and our own beds). The prettier flowers of my affection, likewise, were plucked from the sides of the information superhighway.

Siiigh. Whatever shall I do? Will madly fangirling Twilight, Justin Bieber and ‘organic’ cosmetic brands on FB lift me back up to ‘normalcy’?

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Institutions, Obligingly Flippant Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Womb Politic

October 29, 2012 5 Comments

The more slow-roasted ones amongst you precious lot might dismiss a recent enterprise of mine as pouring butter into fire — that’s a fancy local way of saying ‘wasting my time’ — but I thoroughly enjoyed the rather novel experience of answering questions about governance, rights and ethical variance  in between India and ‘the West’, posed by American highschoolers of my friend Mandy’s acquittance. These children will be visiting India in March next year — sympathies on cue, everybody! — and Mandy has been given the frankly unenviable but rather enjoyable task, of bringing them up to scratch on this our strange and exotic land.

It’s not surprising, really, that several of the questions after Mandy’s brief lecture was about sex, contraception, abortion, and women’s bodies (these are American children, after all). What seemed to trip them, immersed as they are in an all-consuming religio-political culture dedicated to the potentially fertile womb, was that abortion was encouraged, provided for and completely non-controversial in a country as unabashedly ‘conservative’ as India. What really swept the carpet from under their feet, though, was that despite this completely discordant function of social conservatism (as they know it), the Indian government spends — or is arm-twisted into spending — a great deal of time and money into anti-abortion campaigns… as part of their progressive agenda.

Diversity, eh? It’s a conundrum like no other.

[There was also a very interesting question about the nature of administrative intervention in such ethical/moral issues which some might say were exclusively the domain of personal choice (or of organised religion :-| ), which I addressed at the end of my response. I wonder how many of you would agree]

Here it is, then. My response to the questions outsourced to me about wombs, abortions, law, structural inequity, and why girls are made of frogs and snails, and puppy dogs’ tails:

Those are very interesting questions, actually. Especially since they highlight all the things I’m sure Mandy has spoken to you about — about cultural difference and understanding, and how the same legal ‘rights’ can function very very differently in different societies. What I’m going to add to this is a little bit of an ‘emic’ (or a cultural insider’s) perspective.

I should tell you, though, that Mandy is one of those rare smart, perceptive people who figure out the ‘emic’ views of a foreign culture very very quickly indeed. She’s got nearly everything abortion-related neatly packed in her answer above. As she points out, the pro/anti abortion debate does not exist in India. Abortion or contraception aren’t issues at all at any political level (though certain religious leaders from different communities do occasionally mention that it is people’s duty to be fruitful and multiply). Indeed, free public distribution of contraception and providing free tubal ligation/tubectomy and vasectomy for the people has long been on India’s public health agenda. There are political debates around this, but it’s centred around the fear that these programmes might be used to stop poor people or the minorities from procreating as freely as the rich majorities, not around the ‘ethics’ of contraception or abortion.

Let us first look at why women support female foeticide, or agree to female infanticide.

There was, for many years, a belief that ‘only the illiterate poor people from villages’, or ‘the barbaric tribal/native people’ follow such customs. The 2011 Census of India, however, showed very clearly what activists and researchers already knew, that female foeticide/infanticide is actually almost exclusively a middle-class and above phenomenon. It exists only in those poor areas where people try to be ‘respectable’ by copying middle-class standards, or are too socially conservative to allow women to work. The tribal-majority areas in India, in fact, had a male:female ratio closest to the ratio that would occur ‘naturally’, and those are communities with almost 100% female participation in paid work.

So, if parents can afford to raise a girl, why do they not want her?

It’s a question of culture and resources. A girl born into a poor family is an asset as long as she’s strong enough to work. A girl born into a conservative rich family, however, is a liability. It will hurt her family’s ‘honour’ to have a woman go out and earn money, because in a conservative household, women only work for pay when the men do not make enough for the whole family. In other words, a working woman is a sign that the men of the family are failures. It is a matter of shame not just for the men, but also for the women, because the whole community or neighbourhood will now see them as the mother/wife/daughter/sister/niece/grandchild of a ‘loser’. So, if a girl cannot be raised to be financially independent, what is she raised to do?

She’s raised to become a domestic person, ideally a wife and a mother. To find partners for your children is almost a social imperative in India — people believe that to be happy and fulfilled, both men and women need a spouse, and so it is the duty of their extended families to find them suitable matches (‘love’ is somewhat underrated in India, even now. There is a very firm belief that two well-matched ‘good’ people, living together, will find ‘true’ love with each other fairly soon). Thing is, how would you convince people to marry your daughter, if you’re discounting love? Well. You have to educate her and endow her with as many domestic skills as you can, and then sweeten the pot with large gifts/presents or dowries. Basically, what this dynamic boils down to is this: raising girls cost money, culminating in an expensive wedding and a huge dowry. Raising boys also cost money, but you can recoup the costs when he gets married, plus interest, and add a young woman’s domestic capabilites to your household.

What happens when the families actually don’t mind having working women? That’s even more interesting. See, the thing with traditions is that they start for a specific reason, but they soon assume a life of their own. People started eating turkey on holidays because they were easily available and cheap, but a few years down, eating turkey on those holidays have become a tradition, irrespective of its availability and price. American expats sometimes pay rather steep prices for it, because to them, it is a part of their identity. This is why in India, we hear of tenured professors paying for a gender-id on their daughters-in-law’s foetus, and insisting on abortions if it is a girl. The original context of why men are more valuable than women have ceased to matter for these people, but the now-deeply held belief that somehow, intrinsically, women are less valuable than men has remained. This is also why mothers want to abort their female foetus — they know they will be shamed and devalued as women who gave birth to a child of the unwanted gender.

There is another reason for women choosing gender-specific abortions, or even infanticide. “I saved her from a life of shame, dependence, domestic drudgery and constant threat of sexual exploitative”, a woman who had escorted her daughter-in-law to the abortion clinic told me. “In poor families like ours, she will be overworked, undereducated, cursed and beaten by her frustrated family — maybe even us — whenever we think of the cost of her impending marriage. And once she reaches puberty there will be the constant worry of keeping her safe — our village is very backward, no one will marry her if word got around that she’d loved or slept with men before her marriage. And what will a girl do if she doesn’t get married?” This is actually a painfully frequent reason for certain women choosing not to have daughters. It’s almost, they say, an act of love.

Finally, the matter of support groups. The idea of support groups is still fairly alien, even in urban, metropolitan India. Despite western ideas of privacy and individuality coming in for years now, we’re still a very community and family-centric culture. When people feel the need to talk, they talk to their families or friends. The idea of sharing troubles with complete strangers feels ‘wrong’, because we think that to understand our problem properly, people will first have to understand us and understand where we are in our lives at the moment. A therapist might patiently listen if we tell him or her, but why bring an outsider and a stranger up to speed when we have so many people close by who know us (and our lives) intimately?

The aim in India, therefore, has always been community awareness rather than focus groups or support groups. Make people aware of the problems in their cultural ideas, so that they can be more supportive of their families and friends — that has been the model followed here in most such matters. Of course, this isn’t to say considerable legal measures haven’t been taken — determining the sex of the foetus is illegal, for example, and there are special branches of the IPC which deal with sex-selective abortions, whether or not the pregnant woman chose it for herself. But, our government also works on the principle that if a whole society is complicit in a certain act, then no amount of law-making will stop it. The idea, therefore, is to change the way some parts of India think. And this cannot be done by ordering people to stop thinking, or else. It has to be done on the long term, by activists, government health workers and other people deeply rooted in the community, whom people trust, respect and listen to. So I suppose, if we speak of support groups, these are the people who function as such.

Thank you for letting me speak to you. I spoke an awful lot, I know, but it has been a pleasure :-)

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The Time of the Goddess: Singing Praises

October 23, 2012 7 Comments

[This was first written in 2009, on my second pujo away from home. Now that I am back, and the Pujas are upon us again, I find I feel largely the same way. Familiarity with Bengali required for some parts]

What does one miss about the vibrant, vivacious, dazzling, crowd-clogged, loud, sumptuous autumn festivities? Well, *I* miss complaining about them. They say in Bengali that one doesn’t appreciate one’s teeth while one still has them, and this might well apply to the pujas… for some. But not me. The first time I got away from them — and I left town a week or so before Mohaloya last year — I had the distinct feeling of a narrow escape, fortunately accomplished. One does not appreciate being woken up by the dhaak at four-thirty in the morning after being dragged around town and through an ocean of sweaty, elbowy, loud people on the pretext of ‘thakur dekha’ till three bloody AM. And one certainly does not appreciate the nasal delights of Reshammiya or high-pitched pleasures Kumar Shanu blaring from the mikes at all hours.

Actually, about the music, I’m being unfair. There’s been a cultural revival of sorts in the city recently (although, like most populist revivals, a very poorly-informed one). For the last four or so years, our parar pujo has chosen to play music one wants to hear (especially if one were a Bengali One, brought up in the subcontinent in the last four decades): Hindi film classics from the sixties and seventies — lots of Asha, Mukhesh, Rafi, Kishore — in the evenings, and plenty of Hemonto, Shyamol Mitro, Sholil De, Srikanto Acharjo, Orghyo Sen, Konika Bannerjee in the mornings. A lovely blend of robindroshongeet, and what is still called ‘adhunik’ despite its now-classic status. I never quit understand why people leave Debobroto out of their playlists, incidentally. His renditions of Tagore’s songs are often my favourites. But anyway, even with tiny lapses of taste, we have these sterling mixed-tapes being played for our aural gratification all day, and I would have been pleased. Except.

1. The same songs are repeated ad infinitum on a tedious loop, which, no matter how much one loves listening to Kishore singing Gulzar’s lyrics to RD’s music, is very, very painful.

2. The next locality usually generously strings up two mikes facing our locality, so that Rafi is often superimposed on Alka Yagnik, and Shyamol Mitro on DJ Hot’s “KaaNta Lagaa!“.

All in all, I was quite happy to fly the nest before this year’s Decibel Assault was launched. But in doing so, I was also withdrawing all claim on the pleasanter sounds of pujo — the call to awnjoli on awshtomi mornings, the montropaath interspersed by ghonta bajano during shondhipujo, dhakir naach, dhunuchi naach [tiny video of just the first moves], the broken snatches of private conversations picked up by the microphone, people rushing around overseeing the serving of communal lunches on oshtomi and dinners on nobomi (“Bannerjee kaku ke luchi diyechho toh? Uni kintu chaichhilen.”, “Ei ektu dekh toh Uma mashi khete boshlo kina, shokal theke mondope kaaj korchhen. Ei fol-mishtita diye aaye ontoto”). I even like the dhaak at more reasonable hours. In fact, provided I have managed the requisite eight hours (or even three), I quite cherish being woken up by the slightly intoxicating rhythm that gets under one’s skin, and whispers to the blood. It gives the peaceful glow of a crisp autumn daybreak a primal undertone of excitement — pujo eshe gaechhe! The goddess is coming home!

There’s also perhaps a sensual undertone to the association of the dhaak with the worship of the mother goddess. Feel free to treat this as a pop theory popped out by an amateur (I certainly do), but our goddesses are not pristine submissive vestal virgins in white, spending their days in seclusion. Or, for that matter, virgin goddesses reknowned for their intellect, but lined firmly with patriarchy. Our goddesses are far more sweat-and-blood, far more raw power that smites, far more protective love tempered by firm disciplinarianism. And although we in our pseudo-Victorian way shy away from it, far more powerfully, sensually, playfully sexual. Despite the ridiculously fake blindfold of ‘Indian culture’ that we wear voluntarily, perhaps this subterranean association seeps into the romantic overtones to pujo celebrations. And not just the sweetly romantic, neither.

While the pujo pandals are a favourite first-meeting type place for potential sweethearts in Bengali films and novels, pujos are also the time when, slipping away from the performances like this, lovers go off to… do what lovers are always sneaking off to do. You couldn’t ask for a better background score. And if someone raised an eyebrow you could always say you were embodying Shiv and Shakti, and enacting their reunion post-bijoya doshomi :-) (not that I’ve ever heard anyone use that excuse in weal life, but I would love to.)

And perhaps that is why the only piece of commercial pujo “music” I’m missing is an ancient Thums Up! commercial. It’s not on Youtube or Google videos. Does anyone remember it? “Shoptomi te prothom dekha, oshtomi te haashi… nobomi te bolte chaoa, tomaye bhalobashi. Doshomite hothat kaeno aakul holo praan… praan protima tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan?”

Praan protima, tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan? Our goddess, who resides these few days in clay idols and our hearts… is it time already for you to return, and leave us empty and bereft?

Filed under Anecdata, Calcutta Notebook, Culture, Institutions, Obligingly Flippant, Riminess, Spaces Have Tales Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Whispering Death (of Cricket)

September 23, 2012 24 Comments

This picture and caption is from my Facebook notifications this afternoon.

[This is] Michael Holding. Actually, Brian Close’s chest, after a Michael Holding delivery crashed into it at Old Trafford, 1976. Holding was called ‘[The] Whispering Death’ as the umpires kept looking over their shoulders to see if he was coming – they couldn’t hear him, he was so fast, so liquid. Fast bowling is on the decline, thanks to TV and betting – the mob would rather see (and bet on) a six from a tailender than a fast bowler running through a team. And quickies need 5 days to display the depth of their powers, not 20 overs. RIP.

There are two things about this picture that I must say.

One, Brian Close was in his forties when he faced the terrifying Holding and the rest of the 70′s Windies pace-attack. ‘Forbidding’ doesn’t begin to describe them. Holding his own against them despite a steady battering, is both brave and remarkable, especially for a batsman of Close’s limited capability.

Second, images and videos from that era, till about the end of the last decade, appear to me to be subtextual eulogies to the game of cricket, as it was. Those happy days of skill and glory, I am fairly certain, will never be here again, despite higher delivery speeds in a few contemporary fast bowlers. Never, that is, unless one holds the BCCI down by the scruff of its neck, and forces a structure that demands transparency, descipline, technique and talent back into both international and national formats of the game.

In other words, and to repeat myself, happy days will never be here again.

Sour-grapes Grinchiness?

It’s not that I love the hit-and-miss days of inadequate protective gear and killing pitches without reservation. I’ve never been one for the thrill of the killing fields. Neither am I the mealy-mouthed grinch who wants young cricketers to be deprived of obscenely high remunerations (although I do have a few sharp things to say when public funds are redirected to congratulatory gifts for them). But as someone that money is eventually being made off, I would like to get some bang for my buck. You know? Some actual cricket in my matches. If that isn’t too much to ask for. Tests, I may literally no longer have time for, but I certainly miss the pleasure of watching clever field placements, well-thought-out bowling attacks, and shrewdly-amassed innings that even a decent fifty-overs’ match offers.

Twenty20s, on the other hand, are primarily a great deal of flash and jump at the fringes of the actual game. It is also the most obscene spectacle of blatant flesh-trading I’ve ever seen, and I speak as one who has watched post-election MP-trading in India for years.

Had this hobson-jobsoning amounted to something worthwhile for the audience, I’d have kept shut. Hell, more power to players who can make teams run after them with bundles of cash and incentives, by sheer dint of performance (and a great agent). But the prime function of the Twenty20s, sportswise, appears to be squishing talent and skill out of the young pool, by de-incentivising actual performance over mere inclusion or on-field appearance. And that’s to speak nothing of the betting and fixing.

The Popularity Myth

Supporters of the format, however, keep telling me not to be such a stick in the mud, because Twenty20 has done the near-impossible. It has brought popularity back to the game. It has made cricket fashionable again.

Which is a lovely warm plate of dee-licious tripe.

First, as I’ve verbosely underlined above, I’m actively discouraged from considering this form of the game ‘real’ cricket at all, by virtue of its practice of rewarding parody-like playing skills. But one might dismiss this as a subjective opinion. Very well then. Second, despite the IPL being one of the most valuable sporting franchise in the world, I haven’t noticed global interest in the game spike noticeably since it kicked off. Have you? Weren’t Japan, Spain, Uzbekistan, and China pitching teams for a World Championship event last April? No? Oh ahh, I must be thinking of figure skating. [In the ICC World Cup last April, 14 teams qualified. In the 2011 World Figure Skating Championships last April, disrupted by the Tokyo quakes and shifted to Moscow at the last minute, 44 countries competed. And this is a game whose spread is limited by the availability of ice.]

I rest my case. Or no, hang on, I don’t.

Esprit de Corps [or, the Cricket-Zombie]

The whole thing about cricket being a gentleman’s game has taken quite a beating since postcol. times, since the conflation of ‘gentleman’ with ‘white man of birth and means’ (or simply ‘white man’ in the settle colonies like Australia and New Zealand) was challenged by teams from the subcontinent and the West Indies. But there was still a certain code to the game, overt racism and Bodylines notwithstanding. The definition of masculinity was somewhat different. There also wasn’t this degree of access to disposable income and the power of celebrity — and yes, I do keep in mind the feminine personal effects thrown at the 70′s and 80′s stars sometimes, possibly by women (and some men) who hadn’t watched a full day’s match in their lives.

Lately, however, manipulating media and the commodities market to let popularity for the game be centred completely on personas and not their cricketing abilities has, to my mind, given rise to rather a dangerous culture of entitled little boys with their own clean-up crews, eager to piss on hoi-polloi who give them so much and demand so little in return. Largely because they can. Although I’m told it’s a rigorous game in it’s own way, the reason I can’t bring myself to like American football, for instance, is because to someone standing outside the culture, it looks exactly like contemporary T20 cricket will look like in half a decade’s time: a bullies coterie of spoilt little boys, hiding behind masses of padding just to play rough rugby on field, and swanning about like frat boys with a party-pass to the whole world beyond it.

Quite apart from the ridiculous immaturity and insecurity it radiates, the layers of physical and legal protection, coupled with artificially-pumped adrenalin and testosterone levels around this new culture of games, take the sporstman spirit right out of it, and makes it a diminished-responsibility chest-thumping arena for mentally lazy shows of arrogance and shallow aggression.

It isn’t a pretty picture. And it’s got claws.

Filed under Culture, Development, Divided India, Institutions, Photography, Politics, power violence, Spaces Have Tales Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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