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.

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!

Clean? My foot!

A very pragmatic protectiveness of footwear may be at the root of people’s clambering all over train seats and berths without shedding their footwear, regardless of the dirt they are gifting their neighbours and persons who use the seats or berths after them. Many travellers go to the other extreme – walking around barefoot in a train, getting their soles black with dirt before the trip is through. A highly frustrating and uncivic traveller is the parent who lets shod children loose on the train. Are adults under the impression that kids’ shoes are untouched by dirt? Or that dirt transforms into something harmless, even pleasant, by contact with kids’ shoes? That others don’t mind their seats or clothes being stepped on by kids (not their own)? That’s one kind of parent on a train. The other is someone who just suspends all notions of kids’ cleanliness once on a train, letting kids move around barefoot, climb over whatever appears in their arena, and even escorting the barefoot child to the bathroom, a place where extra foot protection would not be out of place! The sight of a 3-year old walking out of a train bathroom barefoot, led by his/her parent in stone-studded sandals ranks very high on my list of disgusting sights.

What of pets’ feet? Many pet owners welcome the frolicking of dogs and cats on their floors, furniture and persons. Many of these pet owners are particular about the cleanliness of their homes, insisting on a distinction between indoor and outdoor footwear, washing their hands at intervals, and wouldn’t dream of strolling around barefoot in their neighbourhoods. Not every one of these pet owners, however, attempts to clean a pet’s feet when it re-enters the house after an outdoor sojourn. And pets’ feet, just like kids’ feet, do not necessarily attract only acceptable kinds of dirt.

Feet are important for Indians, playing vital symbolic roles – we touch feet, or at least dive in the general direction to signify reverence; display photographs of the feet of godmen to stimulate reverence; recount legends of a prince lugging his forest-dwelling sibling’s footwear to the throne in the capital; preserve the footprints of a bride exiting her parental home; embellish toes with rings in elaborate ceremonies; watch with bated breath as a bride tips over a vessel of raw rice to mark her entry to her husband’s home; and so on. We also, particularly if female, make a biggish fuss of the appearance of our feet, colouring the skin and/or nails, ‘curing’ them of calloused skin and cracks, and adorning them with jewellery.

But feet are by no means an exalted part of the body. In fact, that is exactly why we pay attention to the feet of respected persons – as the lowest (fig. and lit.) aspects of their body, and the only ones we would presume to access. Hence, too, our discomfiture when we step on something sacred, or touch someone inadvertently with a portion of our feet, and our speedy amends* thereafter (* touch person/sacred thing and touch own head/heart immediately).

Feet play a starring role in cleaning procedures. From the mundane washing at the courtyard before stepping into the house, and the cursory dousing before sleep, to the ritual scented rinse of the bridegroom’s / guest’s (standing in for God) feet in ceremonies.

Footwear is key in the maintenance of the cleanliness of the feet, and therefore person, and that of the house as well. Thus the traditional insistence on not using footwear indoors. Thus the particularly low status of footwear among garb/accessories amongst Indians. The shedding of footwear, ostensibly the shedding of dirt from the outside world, before embarking on any activity with even a touch of sanctity about it is customary – visiting a temple or even a puja room in a house; taking/bestowing blessings; practising yoga or a traditional dance or martial art form. But, trust people to follow the letter and skirt the spirit of the injunction: Since footwear is not allowed in a temple, people routinely make the entire trip to the temple barefoot, tracking generous amounts of dirt and contributions of spittle, dung etc. into the very place which is meant to be maintained clean and hallowed.

Why this fuss? Is it such a big deal if something from the outdoors enters a living space via feet or footwear? Isn’t the whole of the Western world sailing through life blithely hopping onto sofas, beds and chairs in shod/booted feet to reach a nail on the wall, relax with feet up, or for no particular reason at all? Don’t people routinely pack footwear with their clothes, often without any barrier between the footwear and the garments, when they travel? Aren’t modern Indians who traipse around the house in outdoor shoes and prevent guests from shedding their shoes to be appreciated as free thinkers? Are Indians too stuck up on this matter, like on many other matters? Do we need to get with the times?

I believe that if Indians are stuck up on this matter, it is a very valid sticking up. We may westernise ourselves, our clothes, food, homes, and language, till we go blue, but the world around us isn’t playing the same game. The spittle, sputum, sewage, sand, dung, urine, grease, guano, garbage, construction dust, and mud that we encounter on a daily basis is not the lot of most people in Western nations. A walk outside followed by a rapid, naked-eye examination of the footwear used should verify this. Exposure to a typical Indian road will yield a lot more to shudder about than a stroll on a Western city or suburban road. That said, even the cleaner appearing shoe doesn’t guarantee the Westerner a clean, non-toxic environment. We do need to get with the times – and understand that there is a lot more chemical dust out in the air, and on the ground, than we are aware of, and certainly much more than we are capable of dealing with physiologically. Here is a situation in which the Westerner would do well to easternise – segregate footwear from clothes and furniture, and avoid using outdoor footwear indoors. As for us, we need to review our attitude towards feet, footwear, and our token adherence to cleanliness.

W(h)ither the lungi?

The good old 2x1.2 sq m daily staple rectangle/cylinder is fast disappearing from the Indian landscape, its place taken by short shorts, bermudas, capris, drawstring pyjamas, track pants, and most ironic of all, lounge pants made of checked (very reminiscent of lungi) fabric. Why?

It is odd that as people’s daily lives have got increasingly sedentary, they have shed lungis/mundus and taken refuge in more secure cloth cases, fastened at the hip/waist, for their lower limbs. Compulsory transit and large crowds of strangers being the rule, no one is surprised at this sartorial segue for professional/daytime wear. But what of sleep? What of lounging at home of a summer evening? Why the switch to grey trackpants with a white or red stripe down the leg from the blue-checked or paisley-printed lungi or the off-white mundu?

Not everyone has the skill to wear a lungi/mundu securely. It needs to be taught/learnt and practised. And not many are bothering these days. This is much like the situation with saris and young Indian women (YIW). Where it differs from the situation with saris and YIW is at important ceremonial occasions – YIW get some expert or the other to get them into saris. Increasing numbers of YIM don’t even attempt this avenue. Too often at a South Indian wedding these days, you will find the bride in a dazzling sari, and the male protagonist in a chudidaar kurta/sherwani, liberally supplied with hooks, zippers and drawstrings, and a gorgeous stole to boot to swathe his body (or lack thereof) in safe layers. Or perhaps he will be in another kind of suit – the dark, pinstriped one which will next appear at a professional conference. No space for a dhoti/mundu, with or without upper garments.

Why are Indian men chickening out of wearing the 2x1.2? Afraid that they will look wimpy? Afraid that they can’t carry off the style? Afraid that they will be seen to be sticking to a sensible tradition? All valid fears. Not everyone looks impressive in a lungi/mundu. Poor posture and lax gait do show clearly in this outfit. Poor physique too, in some styles, e.g., the folded-up-from-the-knee style, particularly when topless. All this makes the good wearer of a lungi/mundu a sought-after exhibit, and now, sadly, increasingly rare.

 

The passport renewal trip (up)

Getting one’s passport renewed ought to be a smooth and quick affair. After all, the issuing authority is already supposed to have examined your credentials thoroughly and found you fit to acknowledge as a citizen. In the past, a trip to the passport office was (i) never just “a” trip, but necessitated repeat trips, with additional scraps of paper (some of them currency), and a photograph that was just so; (ii) nightmarish with long queues and no flow to speak of among different counters in the same office; (iii) rage-inducing with the throng of corrupt officials, agents, and hangers-on. Then, a few years ago, came the Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) - a welcome, welcome change: Appointments that at least gave you a window, however large, in which your application submission would be facilitated; the complete absence of touts; a few chairs; a photocopier that didn’t charge exorbitantly for the precious copies you suddenly discovered you needed; and rather courteous staff. Or so I thought after my experience of the Begumpet PSK a couple of years ago, to get my mother’s passport renewed. Not all PSKs are the same, though.

As an applicant for a new/renewed passport, you will hit the passport application website early on – to fill the form, pay the fee, and schedule an appointment. It is a disappointment – a sorry demonstration of TCS’s skill, if TCS is indeed the organisation that created and maintains it. The website, a frustrating one, is designed in a far from intuitive manner. You will waste your time hopping about from tab to tab, and uploading documents that may not make a difference to your application, because you have to lug along photocopies and original documents to the office anyway. You also do not have the options you need to reschedule an appointment if it is not the first one you make with the PSK.

I picked the Tolichowki PSK for my own passport renewal since it is closer than the Begumpet one to my current residence: not a very good choice, as it turned out. At the PSK, everyone needs to go through 3 stages of application submission, through counters labelled (very cleverly) ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. Some people need to meet a passport officer type, in addition. The major design flaw is the way people are funnelled through the stages/counters – a sharp drop in the number of counters from A to B and another slight drop from B to C ensure that you cool your heels a good while in the building.

There are 22 ‘A’ counters, staffed by youngish contract personnel, who do their job fairly quickly and unobtrusively, although the first person I interacted with spent more of his time flirting with a simpering colleague than attending to my admittedly dull application. After this, the applicant needs to be prepared to settle down in the waiting hall. So take a book, and a phone – both are allowed. Take a snack, or money to buy some in the waiting hall, as well.

After an hour or two (no exaggeration) you will get your chance to go to the B stage. There are only 6 ‘B’ counters, and these are staffed by passport office personnel, i.e., graver government employees, who, to give them their due, are also reasonable and reasonably quick with their examination of your documents.

Back to the waiting hall for another long interval and you finally come up before the big-wigs (some of them balding) at one of the 3 or 4 functioning ‘C’ counters. The ‘C’ counters are manned by a pompous set of persons who are not even up-to-date with the policies of the passport office/ministry of external affairs, and have no idea what makes someone a “government servant” or a “private employee” or “other”. The official I came up against (I really mean that word) treated me with aloofness at first, made unnecessarily patronising enquiries about my linguistic roots and location of birth next, and finally latched onto certain theories about my employment category and level of disclosure of facts to the passport authorities. I had an annoying (to me) conversation with him, in which his colleague chimed in without invitation, and without regard to facts. Finally the man gave me an appointment for the next working day at exactly the time that I said I couldn’t make it for I had a meeting in office. He assured me that I could reschedule the appointment online, but that turned out to be a vain hope. The link from the website that invited comments/feedback/requests did not help reschedule either.

If you think that a tweak to your application, in the shape of an additional document or an “explanation letter” or a penalty, after all your documents have been checked and found fit, would not take up any more than a few minutes, you are vastly mistaken. Once you enter the building, you are in the mob waiting for your token number to show up on the monitor on the wall, no different from anyone else applying for the first time, and with completely unexamined documents – if you are “normal”, that is. Tatkal applications move faster, even in the application submission stage, and senior citizens have a separate queue too (which is very good, and uncommonly thoughtful for an outfit like the passport office). If you (if “normal”) have reason to go back to the building for any other little thing, you can set aside 4 or more hours for each visit.

The passport officer type (the head honcho of the PSK Tolichowki) is another unapproachable and rude person, whom I cannot say anything more critical about, since he refused to meet me at all!

The address verification process by the police (Cyberabad Commissionerate, in my case), in contrast, was a very faith-affirming (maybe even faith-engendering) experience. In the first place, I received a text message the day after I finally submitted my application, informing me that the request for police verification had been initiated. Then, nothing for a few days, leading to some uncertainty and hesitation to leave the house for any errand lest I miss the police officer’s visit. And then, the police officer who was to verify my address sent me a text message early in the morning on the day scheduled. This message advised me on what I needed to keep ready for his review (one set of photocopies, and the original documents, and a photograph). He arrived in the window of time that he had indicated in his text message. This text message was a very useful and courteous move, as was his sticking to the time indicated. He conducted the review very promptly, and also did not make any suggestion of a bribe (which is otherwise unfortunately quite common in the police verification process for passport issuance). 

To encapsulate my suggestions:

1.    Fill the form on the website. Don’t rack your brains over the documents to upload. Just upload 4 moderately related documents.

2.    Pick a good PSK. I recommend Begumpet, and not Tolichowki. I have no idea about the others. By the way, there is parking space in the basement of the PSK Tolichowki building – you don’t have to keep someone waiting outside in an illegal parking spot.

3.    If you have no choice but to go to a painful PSK, take a book, phone, food, money, and patience.

4.    Take some extra money, a pen and some paper too, just in case you need to pay a penalty, or write an “explanation letter” for something, and are lucky enough to be in time to catch the passport officer type before he leaves for the day (presumably for an early tea and afternoon nap) while you and your co-sufferers are cooling your heels and hotting up simultaneously in the waiting hall.

5.    Keep a photograph and photocopies of the documents you submitted, as well as the originals themselves, ready for police verification.

6.    Also, keep any other proof, such as a receipt from a service provider or a government outfit (e.g., property tax payment) in the name of anyone from the household, from about a year ago to demonstrate that you have been living in the house you claim to have lived in for about the time you’ve lived in it.

 

 

 

 

Nominal matters: Issue 4

Witness protection?
– on married Maharashtrian women’s names

Madhuri Charudutta Joshi potters about the neighbourhood, goes to school and college, wins championships in sports and arts, interns and works in government/quasi- government/private organisations, hoards certificates and documents, collects friends and foes over the years, and then, one presumably happy day, disappears! Her place is instantly taken by Asavari Dileep Deshpande, and no one bats an eyelid.

Maharashtrian women take this business of moving from one phase of life to another, of becoming another person and making a new start, very, very seriously. Starting with GivenName-Father’sName-FamilyName and hopping to NameGivenByHusband-Husband’sName-Husband’sFamilyName. This tradition gives some boys (when men) the opportunity to realise a nominal fantasy by naming their newly acquired wives. Perhaps it also allows some women to finally get a name of their choosing, via advice to the husband. But mostly this complete erase-and-redo just confuses everyone. [And so would be a great opportunity for someone to commit a crime and change her identity altogether. What better time to eliminate your enemies than the verge of your wedding and the beginning of a ‘new life’?]

Confuses because, often, the name-change is only ‘official’ – what is inscribed in the rice in a post-wedding ceremony is then inscribed on certain documents (e.g., bank passbook), and then put aside except for the rare use in official documentation (official mail addressed to the woman, or mostly on wedding invitations issued by the woman). So it is that you may discover that rather than the aunt you have been calling Madhuri Maami for over two decades, an Asavari Deshpande is suddenly, in collaboration with your Dileep Maama, inviting people to your cousin’s wedding.

Also to be seen in email addresses and on social networking sites is a pragmatic compromise, mainly for personal and social communication. E.g., Madhuri Deshpande, who, notwithstanding her new-found Asavarihood, continues to be Madhuri in daily life (even called so by her husband and his family), and is now a member of the Deshpande household.

Two trends in Maharashtrian women’s names are gaining ground: (i) the NameGivenByFamilyOfOrigin is regiven by the husband, so Madhuri C. Joshi may become Madhuri D. Deshpande, following the highway that thousands of her non-Maharashtrian sisters use. (ii) Both the families – of origin and of marriage – are acknowledged, without declaring the men representing them, viz. the father and the husband. Thus, Madhuri C. Joshi now calls herself Madhuri Joshi Deshpande. What the next generation will do with these compound surnames would be fascinating to observe: Will Girl Joshi Deshpande marry Boy Kulkarni Tendulkar, and powerlift all those surnames thereafter – X Joshi Deshpande Kulkarni Tendulkar? Won’t future generations sound like telephone directories, and develop cramps from filling forms?

Perhaps Harry S Truman will show the way.

Note: Thanks, Shashank, for the comment: “It’s like witness protection”.