White khadi and white Innovas

 

Why are Indian politicians and civil servants provided with imported cars to roam around in for non-emergency situations? Does the adherence to ‘made in India’ go only as far as loud (in signalling, not colour) white khadi clothes, and not even as far as accessories and implements such as footwear, belts, bags, and pens?

Imported automobiles may be more powerful, safe, and reliable than Indian ones, but if an Indian politician or civil servant desires to roam around in one, shouldn’t it be at his/her own expense, not the government’s? I am excluding emergency services, particularly police and ambulances, from this requirement: Clearly if one is to save lives through emergency medical treatment or check crime before or while it is occurring, one needs the best possible equipment, not to be hampered by unsupported notions of patriotism. But what of a routine office-goer or meeting attender – what’s the need for such a person, on such an endeavour, to hog the road vrooming past the populace, at government expense?

I admit that politicians and civil servants are human (at least I don’t dismiss the possibility), and may, in that capacity, experience strong urges to own high-end automobiles and articles manufactured abroad. They are welcome to - in their private lives, at their own expense. The government needs to reconsider these perks. Indian politicians and civil servants, whether in starched white khadi or ahimsa silk, on in any of a range of synthetic fibres, should move around in Tata or Mahindra automobiles driven by reasonable government employees, cribbing at traffic jams (not cleared for them inconveniencing hundreds), not roar past in Innovas with entitled drivers at the wheel.

Kashmir: paradise (being) lost

Four of us longtime friends made a trip ('customised' package tour) to Kashmir with intentions of basking in nature’s pristine lap, eating delicious food, procuring a few artifacts, and chatting endlessly. Nature’s lap was not pristine. The food was rarely good, mostly nondescript, and in one instance very bad (making the two of us who ate it sick for a couple of days). We had no way of getting away with procuring ‘a few artifacts’: We had to fight off hordes of salesmen (they are all men, many of them unselfconsciously goodlooking in our estimation) before, during, and after our many, not few, purchases. We did chat endlessly, so paisa vasool there!

The winding mountain roads and the stretches of highway are frequently beset with traffic congestion and vehicular exhaust that no tourist blurb will prepare you for. Tourists in paradise spend more time and attention on the pragmatic tasks associated with tourism, such as standing in queues for hours and clinging white-knuckled to a horse’s saddle, than taking in the sights that they are in queues or on horseback for. Some of the tourism-related occupations are protected by unions: Most beauty spots do not permit ‘local sightseeing’ in private vehicles or outside cabs. And there is no public transport to speak of. You have per force to use the expensive local cabs to get around, and pay per location on the itinerary, with strict limits on how long you can spend at any location, so that you do not detain the cab driver at a place whose beauty or sales talent you are lost in for an hour or more.

For all the protection of tourist guides and transporters however, the big lacuna in tourism in Kashmir is the lack of attention paid to retaining and nurturing the cleanliness and beauty of the locales. Unlike other areas that see throngs of visitors, and have developed, and to quite an extent enforced, stringent policies on disposables and littering, Kashmir seems to have left this to the inhabitants – locals and tourists – who evidently do not care overmuch. The beauty spots are dotted with plastic litter, horse dung, and slush, and swarming with ‘guides’ and salesmen. To approach anything like the Kashmir in our minds (from the movies of the 60s and 70s), you need to tilt your eyes, and ideally also your head, up by about 30 degrees so as to be able to view only distant vistas of conifers and snow-capped mountains, and miss all the litter. For the haseen vaadiyan, you need to move to ‘faraway look’ mode from the car/lookout spot since tilting your head up will not serve. The streams are delightful (especially from a distance, and with the litter-strewn banks cropped out), as are the sun and moon, and distant patches of green and white on the mountains. Natural beauty spots cannot stay beautiful in the face of thoughtless littering, unless they are active volcanoes (which people generally refrain from littering, so they don’t count).

With the plentiful litter and the rarer burning pile of rubbish, we were naturally hesitant to try the pay-and-use toilets at every tourist location. But to our pleasant surprise, the toilets were clean, if not odourless.

On Dal Lake, one has no hope of being able to sing even one stanza of a boat song undisturbed by a salesboat that will draw up speedily and silently, presenting a pleasant salesman who will draw your attention to the far cheaper goods that he has for sale than you would come across elsewhere in your travels. Everything from so-called saffron to sarees is cheaper on Dal Lake than on land far from Srinagar. One remarkable experience we had on Dal Lake was that although it was bursting with weeds that special clean-up boats were scooping up with lacrosse-racquet like tools, and tons of organic domestic waste and sewage were being contributed by the hundreds of houseboats every minute to the lake, it was not stinky.

Guides in sharp contrast to salesmen are gruff, even rude, and very aggressive about your need for their services without which you supposedly cannot negotiate the terrain – something that is proven wrong in minutes after you engage them when you espy others who didn’t succumb to their haranguing managing quite all right guideless. An astute observation that Posh made (on this, her second trip to Kashmir) was that Kashmir seems to be popular only with Indians (we saw no more than 2-3 non-Indian tourists in all our time there), and that that might be at the root of the non-obsequious/non-unctuous/customer-unfriendly deportment of the ‘guides’. Not that Indians were able to take all the aggressive marketing in their stride – we heard many fruitless gripes about tourists being ‘milked’ and hounded, but that is where it stopped. A far cry from the customer-is-king pampering one sees of prospective and current customers in other tourism-inclined states of India. On my observation that one transporter (horse supplier) seemed impatient and angry (euphemisms for rude), his minion explained that he was neither impatient nor angry, and that this was just how they conversed. A novel argument that we heard from many guides and transporters (horse/sled suppliers) was that we had clearly spent a lot to get to Kashmir (one person even suggested that we had spent lakhs on the trip!), and we shouldn’t hesitate to spend just a few hundred more on whatever they were offering.

Everywhere we went, photographers and their aides showed us albums of tourists dressed in gaudy velvet pherans and colourful scarves with chunky (faux) silver jewellery. We did as directed on the third day of our trip, posing for group photographs and a few singles, but not availing ourselves of opportunities to pose with fluffy lambs, rabbits, or snowy pigeons, or the ubiquitous plastic flowers in baskets and empty waterpots. Maybe we will appear in an album in the future, especially as bait for groups of friends travelling together!

Practically every hotel and restaurant we went to had artificial flowers for decoration, incongruous in a place famed for lovely real flowers, and beautiful embroidered and carved flowers besides. We would appear to have visited Kashmir in a suboptimal season for flowers though – the tulips had just closed shop, the crocuses were months away, and we were not in the right zone for the lavender that we saw posters of right from the airport. What we did get to see in the gardens we visited were masses of pansies, irises, roses, snowballs, asters, and daffodils, and quite a few other brilliantly coloured flowers that we couldn’t catch the names of.

Velvet and wood-carving seem to be popular everywhere – in hotels, all over houseboats, and in shikaras too. Papier-mâché of high levels of artistry is another visual treat and generally affordable. Embroidery can be large and striking, or fine and beautiful, but does not come cheap. We stocked up on walnuts, dried fruit, some seemingly magical Kashmiri rajma (that is said to need only 5 minutes of soaking – not yet verified by us), single garlic cloves that look like apricot kernels, and the ‘sweat of stones’ (shilajit), and of course, saffron. In the non-edibles category, sarees, shawls, stoles, the softest cashmere (sweater), embroidered curtain material, and papier-mâché articles formed all our loot from Kashmir. As dutiful Indians, Kavitha and I bought cricket bats made of Kashmiri willow – one small souvenir-ish one and one usable by adults for a real game – from a factory where they were made. We were also treated (on my request) to the sight and feel of a replica of Sachin Tendulkar’s bat.

The famed Kashmiri cuisine is not easy to come by in many places, and where it is available, there is generally little besides a few mutton dishes. Fresh, local vegetarian dishes and light, everyday foods are off the table. Chilli powder is of a rich colour, but not very pungent; salt is easily in excess for health and taste; and sugar is at a healthy and close to tasteless low. The kahwa is delicious, and the desserts bland. Menus are crammed with the usual pan-Indian Punjabi/Mughlai food.

We had fresh apple juice (how could we exit Kashmir without) just outside an orchard of cute, trimmed trees with bottles of sugar water tied to some branches as artificial pollination promoters. The juice was nice, but the information that we received of ‘at least 10-15 pesticides’ to be applied to the trees, and several other chemicals as fertilisers besides was decidedly not nice.

Despite our keenness to visit, or at least view, the Hazratbal mosque, we did not. Our driver consistently assigned it low priority on our daily lists of spots we wanted to visit, and showed no enthusiasm to even drive past it, perhaps deciding for us that four Hindu women have no pressing need to view a mosque. We barely managed two of the many gardens in the city, overcoming his reluctance to drive even a few metres beyond his daily quota. We glimpsed a gurudwara on our way one day, and a board indicating the way to a temple. No churches or synagogues. The one holy spot that we well and truly visited was the Shankaracharya temple. For this, we argued with our driver, who would take us no farther than the foot of the hill that the temple was on, then with an auto driver who demanded an exorbitant amount to take us to the gate of the temple, but discharged us a third of the distance away citing a traffic jam on the hill. We then trudged up the hill, and proceeded to labour up the 250 steep steps (it seemed like more). The path to the temple was cleaner than any other place we saw in Kashmir. I cannot be sure that faith can move mountains, but I can certainly confirm that faith can move one up a mountain. I, accomplished in neither the faith nor the fitness departments, made unimpressive progress up the steps, using many of the broad ledges flanking the steps to catch my breath and sip water, giving me all the leisure to observe elderly/out of shape/juvenile/apparently unwell people, and those in uncomfortable footwear forging ahead to worship. Perhaps the strenuous climb kept the devotees disciplined, and they could express their usual selves only at the conclusion of the climb: After they got to the temple premises and shed their footwear, and photographed themselves and companions against the temple or the view of Srinagar laid out all around the base of the hill, some demonstrated an urgency in ascending the last 5-6 steps to the sanctum sanctorum, overtaking others, and sticking on in the sanctum sanctorum, prolonging their communion with the deity, even photographing the Shivalinga (expressly disallowed). When asked about the Sharada peeth in the area, the priest used an unexpected term to indicate its location – Azad Kashmir! An elderly Sikh man was selling holy(ish) Hindu books, and beads and idols at a table along the steps. All the taxi and auto drivers transporting people to and from the temple were Muslim. It was a nice tableau of some of the religious diversity in the place.

It was another story altogether with gender. There were hardly any women or girls to be seen, outdoors or even indoors in shops, hotels, and restaurants. Locals don’t loiter - female locals, that is. This is a huge red flag to me. When I see girls and women using public spaces with confidence and comfort, for gainful employment or aimless occupation, I think highly of the place on this count. When the only females I see on the streets are students hurrying to or from educational institutions, and women escorting children and groceries home, the place falls like a stone in my estimation. Kashmir is a clear non-starter in gender-egalitarianism.

A recommendation to those dreaming of a lovely vacation in Kashmir: Have a stroke of good luck, find a pro-active knowledgeable guide and places to stay and visit in offbeat locations, and use polarised glasses that cull the litter from your vistas. Or gather your friends at home or at a resort (in a non-Kashmir location) and watch a pre-disposable-plastics-era Kapoor movie set in Kashmir instead.

S/o / d/o / w/o; no h/o – Uni-form conformity

Everyone starts out as a s/o or d/o.

What of people who are neither s nor d? Sorry, they can stay on the sidelines and not fill forms, or put in the closer acceptable (to society, if not to themselves) approximation.

Then marriage may occur, taking women to w/o, but not transporting men anywhere certain. This shift in women’s status is not exactly voluntary. There are plenty of authorities, and others with no real authority too, who will insist that a woman, having taken the trouble to acquire a husband, should distinguish herself indicating her w/o status, and relegate her d/o status to the background, perhaps to be resorted to in the event of the dissolution of the marriage.

Just in case you are wondering whose s, d, or w one might be, it is always a man.

What of people who don’t know their father’s names? No doubt there are people who don’t know their mother’s names either, but possibly far fewer. Maternity is far tougher to screen.

What of women who are married to a non-male? Sorry.

Any scope for a husband to declare his wife’s name on a form, as h/o, not as a co-applicant or nominee or the like? Almost none – the Indian passport stands out as an exception.

This business of anchoring one’s identity in one’s male relatives is not new, and is going nowhere very fast. The names of most communities across the world reflect this bias - father’s name, replaced, if female and married, by husband’s name for most of humanity. The few communities with matrilineal nomenclature, and the few women who stick to their birth names, undeterred by marriage, are generally looked upon as quaint, sometimes eccentric. The ways of mainstream society, many of which we accept unquestioningly, prioritise males as persons of action and decision for families. This has such extreme and disappointing fall-outs as girls in a family having to forego higher education so that the family’s constrained finances can support the higher education of their brothers instead; and teachers and administrators in professional colleges resenting female students for taking up space that would have been better justified by male students who would go on to do something useful with their training.

Matters that wedding guests are agog to determine and duty-bound to report are what the groom does, and how the bride looks. A groom’s good looks, and a bride’s achievements are bonus, not basic information. In school and college, and, in fact, beyond, you are often asked where your father works. Not many enquire about your mother. A woman is quite likely to be asked if she works somewhere. A man will be asked where it is that he works, without a thought for the many men who need to be asked if they work somewhere, so that they can answer no, and close that line of enquiry. One’s children are settled when sons have jobs and daughters are married. A man is expected to justify his existence in society by his work, whereas a woman can get by without much trouble as long as her family has something to say for itself, such as being possessed of a male member or more.

After centuries of ignoring facts and finding to our chagrin that this doesn’t make them go away, we have grudgingly accepted that there is more than a dichotomy of genders. We have also acknowledged that there are varied sexual orientations. But the simple steps of assimilating these facts into our societal interactions are nowhere near undertaken. Our forms continue to lean towards two genders (consonant with sexes, of course), and one sexual orientation, marriage to one man, and knowledge of father’s name. The many who diverge from this path can struggle and modify fields in forms with explanations that may or may not be accepted, or modify facts to conform.

Work life balance - an unbalancing thought

 

Work life balance – the term raises some disquieting thoughts.

1.      If work is distinct from life, are they mutually exclusive?

If yes, what a pass we have come to! “Life” is what we enjoy doing, and aspire to do, and “work” possibly a means to keep us alive and facilitate the execution of “life”.

Isn’t it ideal for us to love our work, such that it is integral to life (what we enjoy doing, etc.)?

Or is this a matter of balance between a subset (work) and the superset (life)?

2.    Is it work’s role to be tedious, or at least grim, such that if it isn’t, you say, “This is fun. It doesn’t feel like work at all!”?

3.    Or do we abide by “work is worship”, in which case it is to be solemn and approached with spirituality, or at least tedious and grim, so that it isn’t confused with fun?

These life questions may require some working out, not guaranteed to be fun.

Si(gh)lent airports

Of all the places to keep silent – airports?!

     Are ‘silent’ airports truly silent? The hubbub of conversations, food service, transactions at shops, and translocation to gates eliminates that possibility. The only silent aspect of silent airports is the absence of amplified announcements, which ironically are the only essential sound in an airport. 
     Announcements need to be made regardless of the best-laid plans to avoid them, as gate-changes, final calls, and boarding order need to be communicated to passengers. So, after many months of airline staff hollering flight destinations and inviting stragglers to the correct gates, surely missing many passengers in the ‘silence’, silent airports have come up with portable, self-contained microphone sets that airline staff attach to their outfits and use for announcements. This is better than the hollering, but only just, and the main benefits are for the vocal cords of the announcers. Since these announcements take place at the gate, they only reach people who are already in the vicinity, unlike the old-fashioned announcements in non-silent airports that could convene passengers scattered in many zones of the airport.
     What is the need for airports to be silent? People had better not doze off and miss their flights. If announcements annoy some, they can make arrangements to damp the input using earplugs or noise-cancelling technology. As long as additional cacophony in the form of music, movies, or TV shows that may not be universally appreciated is not introduced, the natural level of noise or silence in an airport should be fine, and left alone. Airports should focus on other aspects of pollution (e.g., the use of strong chemical cleaners, fragrances, and material for interior décor; and the massive waste – food and disposables - generated in food service) and not overdo this noise-pollution reduction strategy.

Single-use soft plastics – an ever-lasting and hard problem

     The prospect of a national ban, or at least discouragement, of single-use plastics is welcome. The obvious targets are disposable shopping bags, utensils (containers and cutlery), and disposable water bottles. But single-use plastics have made their insidious way into our lives in other goods where they are not so obvious. Wrappers of virtually everything ready-to-eat, not-yet-ready-to eat, and never-to-be-eaten are composed of single-use plastic. Manufacturers, distributors, vendors, and buyers of most retail products have a huge shift to make in their thinking and practice if they are to successfully eliminate plastic wrapping. Another arena that uses single-use plastic to signal hygiene is the restaurant/fast food industry that generates hillocks of transparent gloves and caps in food service. The ‘flex’ banners that people print and put up to announce everything from the birthdays of their idols to directions to the toilets at a conference are mostly unusable for another occasion.

     The examples here are all of plastics that are best avoided, but still find a few voices to defend them in that they can, in theory, be recycled, although the majority of them are not, in practice. ‘In theory’ because even after people carefully segregate their waste at home or in offices, they often come up short against recyclers or scrap-dealers who do not accept soft plastics, as their trade is not very lucrative. As for the unsegregated waste dumped in public places, waste-pickers choose among the recyclables to collect the most lucrative categories of waste, and soft plastics clearly do not make much economic sense for them to toil over. This leaves the big bulk of soft plastics to make their adverse journey to water bodies, or animal bodies, or end up in unhealthy fires. The big question before us on this is how, when the trajectory of used plastic is not assuredly environment-sensitive, and is on the contrary, practically guaranteed to be environment-degrading, governments can let the production and circulation of soft plastics go on.

     But, in addition to these products that are clearly single-use plastic for all to see are some products that incorporate single-use plastic so seamlessly into a multicomponent object that they may not be perceived as single-use plastics - a case in point is the typical commercially produced menstrual absorbent pad. This is a product that places convenience (not necessarily comfort) above all else, certainly above ecological health, and in most cases, over economic health too. Its greatest attraction is that it doesn’t need to be assembled before use, and disassembled or cleaned after use either. But the price for this convenience is paid by the environment.

     Unlike in some of the pads in the past where the plastic shield could be removed after use, and the plant-based absorbent disposed of in household garbage or sewage, the pads of today are not amenable to disassembling and disposal via composting, and reuse or recycling. This means that by virtue of being part of a pad, plastic that could have been recycled, and absorbent material that could have been composted do not take those routes, but contribute together to garbage dumps, mass for open burning or incineration, and landfills, and also, often, to the detriment of wildlife through ingestion or inhalation. This is undoubtedly too steep a price to pay for the convenience of peeling off and dumping a pad after use. This holds true for diapers too, the difference being in the composition of the material contained (menstrual discharge/urine/stool), and also in the compactness of the product (diapers being bulkier than menstrual pads).

     A concerted effort is called for to put an end to this dangerous practice:

• ·     policies need review and reformulation –- for waste segregation at source; clear and economically sound pathways for the recycling of all waste that cannot be composted; and composting of all compostable waste to annihilate garbage dumps and landfills –- to fully realise the intent of the ban on single-use plastic;
• ·       manufacturers of one-time use pads and diapers need to develop more environment-sensitive and user-friendly products, and guide users on post-use treatment; and
• ·       users need to contemplate the ramifications of their choices of product and post-use treatment processes, and resolve to follow less ecologically profligate ways.

Ssshhh!

If something is said to you in confidence, the expectation is that you keep the secret, i.e.,  do not divulge it to anyone – at all, and, possibly, ever.

It is not your prerogative to interpret the level of confidentiality as you please, e.g., it is okay to tell first degree family members – parents, siblings, and children; or okay to tell your spouse or partner of the day; or okay to tell someone whom the secret-generator is unlikely to ever meet.

The keeping of the secret should not be based on your judgement of the need (or lack thereof) for secrecy either. (“What’s so secret about having a crush? Let me tell people about A’s crush.”) Thus, if you think the matter doesn’t need protection from publication, it is not okay to distribute it freely - the generator of the information thinks otherwise, and that is paramount.

The secret is also not a weapon to be deployed in making a case for or against the secret-generator. (“You say this because you don’t know that A has been doing XYZ for years.”)

If all this seems like too much of a fuss to you, and you are of the opinion that once a piece of information has been imparted to you, the imparter yields control over it to you, at least have the goodness to declare this before any sensitive information is given to you. People are suffering enough dealing with enemies, they don’t need loose-tongued friends to contend with, in addition.