Aiyya!

The deity is celibate. Women in the reproductive phase (WIRP) of their lives should not enter the temple lest they perturb his celibacy.

Assumptions:

1.    The deity’s ambit is confined to the temple premises. WIRP can roam around outside the temple free from the danger of perturbing his celibacy.
2.      The deity’s commitment to celibacy may not be able to withstand remote sensual input from WIRP, particularly vision, hearing, and smell.
3.      Anyone other than WIRP, e.g., boys, men, prepubertal girls, postmenopausal women, transgender persons, poses no danger to the deity’s celibacy.
4.      Deities in other temples that permit entry by WIRP may be risking their commitment to their consorts, what with WIRP at large on the premises.

Shouldn’t the intervention be on the deity rather than on the devotees? Why not eliminate temptation by blindfolding, and stuffing the ears and nose of the potential temptee rather than curbing the potential temptors?

Chill, it’s just a forward!

Too many people forward more messages – text, image, audio, or video – than they create on their own, many without even the preliminary of attentively reading or watching what they forward. Often the only things people write are ‘good morning’ messages (which some others conveniently and labour-savingly forward as ‘good morning’ images instead). And, the rare images that many people take the trouble to create tend to be selfies. For the rest, electronic exchanges are a seemingly endless torrent of forwards, and emoticons felicitating those forwards, a huge expenditure of bandwidth, time, and effort, with very little edification to show for the trouble. Except perhaps greatly increased tolerance for spam. Sending and receiving forwards for want of something for one’s thumbs to do may seem harmless, but reveals a lack of respect for one’s own time and energy, and certainly those of others. It also suggests acceptance that one cannot come up with anything original that merits transmission.

Forwarding messages can be such an automatic action that some forwarders are surprised to come up against objections to what they’ve forwarded, often disagreement with some fine point: That’s where the lazy injunction “Chill, it’s just a forward!” comes in. This is terrific advice, not for the recipient of these mindless messages, but for the aspirant sender: Chill. It’s just a forward. Don’t send it.

Cows, mothers, and cow-mothers

The cow is not your mother. She doesn’t give you milk; you take her milk (which wasn’t meant for you) away from her forcibly. Although buffaloes do precisely the same job that cows do, and supply a good chunk of the milk consumed by Indians, for some reason, nobody seems to be claiming descent from them. If providing nutrients is the criterion for motherhood, all edible plants, and animals yielding milk, meat, honey, etc., should be your mothers. If it is not nutrients in general, but milk in particular, any mammal should be eligible to be your mother.

 

Is confinement to a shed or a mostly dirty circumscribed area; access to garbage as food; extraction of heavy physical labour; administration of loads of antibiotics (therapeutic or prophylactic); crossing with quite possibly immoral studs, or cutting out the work of the studs altogether, and artificially inseminating repeatedly to stack one pregnancy on another the way to treat mothers? On deeper reflection, maybe this is why people call cows their mothers, confessing in this roundabout way that they mistreat their human associates, or at least treat them as cash cows. Also, 'bovine' is not a complimentary adjective: Try calling a human mother a cow.

 

People who do not eat meat may be going into contortions patting themselves on their backs for their animal-friendly ethos, but killing is not the only cruelty. Daily milking (by anything other than the calf’s mouth); robbing colostrum, honey, etc.; shearing; confining animals to cages, sheds, or dirty, narrow streets; and making them slog pulling loads, all involve inconvenience at best, and torture at worst, of the animals in question. And animal-rearing, particularly cattle-rearing, contributes hugely to global warming, a disservice to more than the animal species in question.

 

If you claim to be against cow-slaughter on grounds of avoiding cruelty, in the first place, you need to be against the slaughter of any species, at least, any species that expresses pain that you can perceive, and in the second, you need to turn totally vegan, since most animal products entail some cruelty in their extraction. Feel free with the urine and dung though – no cruelty there, and no bullshit.

 

Ditch and varied heritage

I went on a heritage walk in the Charminar area. It involved picking my way through filthy streets to avoid litter, garbage, traffic, slush, and shit, and contriving to look up at intervals to glimpse the heritage structures I was there for. It was awful. My sense of belonging in Hyderabad may have seen me through some of the discomfort, but my friend from out of town didn’t have that buoy. I felt a blend of sympathy for her and embarrassment on Hyderabad’s behalf throughout the trip.

How can we get away with interpreting filth as quaint and cultural, and worthy of immersion in to get the true feel of a place? All the while, paradoxically, we get affronted when outsiders call our places filthy. Dirt, as in dust, mud, sand, gravel, may be mildly romantic. What is not is stinky garbage, poor municipal sanitation, thoughtless construction of roads and pavements, and bodily wastes on streets. Roadside eateries where food and beverage spills are wiped up with the same rag as the seats you are ushered into are not confidence-building.

Wastes have changed – in quality and quantity. People’s ways of dealing with them haven’t. The result is hillocks and streams of unsightly, and dangerous, garbage all over, particularly in celebrated places bursting with “culture”, unless the place has been taken under the wing of a foundation that cleans it up, restores it, and charges a fee to keep it visitable.

It is too easy to blame people for littering. But it doesn’t come naturally not to litter. The environment — physical, and socio-political — plays a vital initiating and maintaining role in such practices. If there aren’t user-friendly urban infrastructure designs; good urban sanitation policies, facilities and enforcement of rules; handy receptacles for wastes of different sorts; reminders at points-of-decision while the new behaviour is learned; and inspiration from role-models, not to mention pride in one’s home and surroundings, it is too much to expect people to keep their neighbourhoods clean, particularly when they have spent years adapting new wastes to old styles of disposal, e.g., flicking a plastic wrapper away like they used to flick the leaf and blade of grass that held snacks together in the old days.

This is a failure of intersectoral collaboration, preceded, unfortunately, by failures of each sector’s work. The tourism department puts its resources into organising visitor-friendly guided routes and schedules to showcase the architectural beauties of a place, and gets dismally let down by a set of other government departments, e.g., the local governance, traffic police, roads and buildings. Some more thought and concerted action are needed to make places habitable, visitable, and worthy of their attractive tags. 

The plight of the favourite

I know someone who dislikes her boss (true, that’s at least half the world), but is favoured by him. She receives due acknowledgement for her work, opportunities for more productive work, and some aid in negotiating administrative hurdles in her professional life. She didn’t seek this special attention, and doesn’t really revel in it, although the availability of opportunities and the absence of hurdles are not unwelcome. What’s unwelcome, and not entirely fair, is the inexorable envy of her colleagues.

I know someone who through chance events (X-Y pairing, and originating in the family of a particular person) became the favoured grandchild of a certain grandfather who held a good deal of sway. The grandfather, despite being well-supplied with grandchildren of either sex, chose to demonstrate his adoration of this child flagrantly, with visible gifts and special privileges, in full view of the other grandchildren. The favoured one is reputed (by his irate cousins) to have had his head turned by this coddling, which, even if true, lays the blame at the parents’ and grandparents’ feet rather than the child’s. In any case, he earned a great deal of bullying in his childhood, which turned to private scoffing and aloofness as maturity intervened.

I know someone who is a decent, insightful, intelligent, responsible and fun person, deserving of most of the popularity he enjoys. In addition, he is a light-complexioned Indian male, of a fairly privileged community, and holds the positions of son-in-law, brother-in-law, etc., which grant him special status more or less automatically. He has to contend with the annoyance of his less-advantaged peers, of either sex, who cannot dismiss all the adulation he gets as unjustified, but chafe, all the same, at the moiety of the adulation that is (unjustified by his character, skills, or work).

Persons in power – relatives, friends, bosses – often pick one or a few of their ‘subjects’ to favour, and to unabashedly and insensitively shower with attention, gifts, and opportunities. The ones bypassed are rightfully aggrieved, and often demonstrate their displeasure in resentful silence, plentiful gossip, complaints through ‘proper channels’, if any, or all too often, in mistreatment of the favourites. This last is an unfortunate, and seldom justified, recourse.

Not all favourites are sycophants, diligently sucking up to the authorities to ensure a smooth and undeserved ride for themselves. Some certainly are, and this is not about them, the *$#@&%! Others are simple souls, wending their way through life in all rectitude, neither seeking nor enjoying the glare of the authorities’ attention. That they do not shun the opportunities that come their way does not automatically make them undeserving. And the fact that some of them merit at least some of the favour they enjoy, making it tough for a fair observer to summarily dismiss their popularity and detest them whole-heartedly, is not their fault. This is more or less a ‘poor little rich boy’ situation. Many favourites even experience a measure of self-doubt at intervals, when contemplating the smooth path that stretches out before and behind them. It can be tough to negotiate the intricacies of these social associations, various combinations of fair and pleasant.

Not having had (or at least, not admitting to) first-hand experience of such favour, but having observed representatives of both the favoured and the envious subgroups, I speak from a point of detachment and empathy!

How come you’re in a sari?

If you’re someone who wears saris on and off, you’ve almost certainly heard that question. And chances are, you’ve answered it quickly with a ‘good reason’, e.g., I’ve to attend a wedding. / There’s a puja in my cousin’s house. / It’s sari-day in office. / I have a lecture to deliver. / There’s a meeting with some (stuffy?) bigwigs. Or the latest legit one – for the #100sareepact. Some people, sometimes, say, “No particular reason. I just felt like wearing one. Just like that.” And get puzzled reactions.

You’ve also surely come across women (perhaps you are one of them yourself!) who make urgent pre-event enquiries among friends about who all will wear saris, in fact, if anyone is going to wear a sari or not, to ensure that they aren’t alone or in a minority as sari-wearers.

It would seem that the women of today are sweeping saris off to the sides of their wardrobes and their lives, lest people get the impression that they may actually wear them for pleasure, and be at ease in them. Things seem to have reached a point where a woman who chooses to wear a sari, and doesn’t declare it a chore to some degree, opens the door to suspicion as not very independent/not very modern.

Saris have become something of a symbol of the oppression of women, and true enough, they may impose certain limits on movement, and may be heavier to bear than some other garments. A few questions leap to mind: How many of us are engaging in the full range of motion even in non-sari attire? Don’t pencil skirts, stilettos, or tight tops restrict range of movement? Don’t many carry off (literally) heavy jackets, boots and leather garments without breaking a sweat?

The widely accepted explanation for the hesitation to wear saris is that they are not comfortable. At least not as much as tight jeans and synthetic tops on a hot day, or narrow high-heeled footwear, apparently. And draping them needs skill, and/or practice, hence the legitimacy of the excuse ‘I’m not used to them’. We undertake several learning activities, such as driving, which take a lot of ‘getting used to’ with attendant (ideally reducing) risks during the process. Sari-draping is unlikely to pose as many risks, or even need as much attention for as long.

We are fast becoming (if we haven’t already become) a society that curbs recourse to traditional ways for people with professions to progressive thinking. You are exercising choice if you wear skinny jeans, or hot pants, or palazzos, or kurtis, or spaghetti-strapped tops, or Pakistani-style parallel pants trimmed with lace, but not if you pick a sari and an un‘worked’ blouse to go with it.

The lives that women lead today call for multiple roles, skills, and naturally, a variety of outfits for a variety of activities. No single type of outfit could do for everything, even putting aside the certainty that the wearer and viewers alike would get bored out of their skulls with one type of outfit forever. So, a wide range of outfits it is, or should be. And that range could easily include saris, without any hesitation or apology.

Isn’t one of the greatest advantages of being an (unoppressed) Indian the easy access to the wealth of fabric and sartorial styles that the place has nurtured over the centuries? And isn’t the sari a star player in that wealth? Why not embrace that huge variety, try a few saris, ‘get used to it’, and evaluate them then rather than a priori based on received notions of comfort and choice?

To do:

Observers: Ditch the question ‘How come you’re in a sari?’, and replace it with remarks (if compliments) on the outfit or the wearer.

Sari-wearers: If you’re asked this question, either don’t bother to answer it, or inform the asker that you prefer it to going nude in public.

My word... bahut lamba hai!

Many seem to follow this policy: If a word meets your needs, overdo it. To illustrate,

(i)           “Weddings in Kerala are known to be simplistic.”

(ii)          “I did badly in the half-yearly exams, and decided to improvise myself by the time the finals rolled around.”

(iii)        “I’ve collected the ingredients. Now, please guide me on the methodology of making mirchi ka saalan.”

By and large, longer words go with greater scholarship. But merely lengthening a word doesn’t enhance your erudition. Some words may stay unchanged, very slightly modified or intensify with the addition of a few more letters, e.g., apt-appropriate. Others transform into different entities altogether, e.g., beside-besides.

‘Why use a long word when a short one would do as well, or better?’: That’s a question often asked, but not by me! I am not against the use of long, polysyllabic words: Quite the opposite, actually. I love exploring the intricacies of complex words. The horde against sesquipedalianism does not include me. Getting one’s meaning across quickly is not the only purpose of language. Neither is language always a means to transmit one’s message to a huge number of people. Sometimes, words are strung together for the sheer beauty in the configurations, and some messages are meant for smaller, specialised audiences. The shortest, quickest, easiest-to-pronounce word is not always the best word.

Interesting and entertaining convolutions find me a willing audience. Not words getting mauled and becoming ridiculous and unfit for their purpose, though. How do we guard against this? A simple (not simplistic) method (not methodology) to follow: Improve (not improvise) your understanding of the meaning of the words you are considering for use. Then use them carefully and lovingly. An ill-used long word leads to a more ill-used reader than does an ill-used short word!