Organising for Utopia

I have always loved talking. As I often tell people, I started talking at six months old and haven’t stopped since. To me, words are my ultimate love, my passion, my tools, and my ultimate weapons. They define what and how I think (yes, I definitely do believe thoughts and beliefs are a function of language) and how I engage with the world and its people.

Getting involved in community building and activism enhanced this talk-love. Politicizing myself, clarifying and constantly reexamining the politics, learning more, exchanging so much with so many amazing people – everything is so wonderfully language-rich, so fantastically Adda demanding. And I love smaller, more intimate spaces for these conversations. Safer spaces, with a focus on listening and exchange, rather than a large set-up with listeners and a talker.

Increasingly though, especially in this city, but surely in others as well, I find these spaces privileged and limited. It is the same set of people, with the same or similar backgrounds. We are – most of us – upper caste, mid to upper middle class (social status wise, not in terms of the communist understanding of class), educated – from English medium backgrounds more often than not – up to a certain level, and with access to means of gathering a lot of knowledge, of reading, of acquiring the right political language to articulate our political stands… or even to have one.

A recent conversation with a friend brought this home even more clearly. “But I wonder

How do we get across what we figure to people less inclined to thinking for themselves?” she asked, “Or even say... Less equipped? Someone who does not have access to social media or the internet? The domestic help needs feminism too!” and this is a conversation we often have in these activist/social work (what a horrible phrase!) type spaces. One can’t help but, given everything that we avowedly believe in, from feminism to left leaning politics to caste justice, to blah blah. So, some of us, and I am glad to say the number seems to be increasing, always feel uncomfortable with how much space and visibility and voice we get, simply because of our privileges, simply because of an accident of birth.

When I first started collectivizing, getting (albeit tangentially) into organizing and activism, I was immensely lucky to be around some amazing people who seemed to be so damn sorted out! Totally green and wet behind the gills, all I knew was that I wanted to be around people like me, and that I believed in community support, in creating the alternative safety nets and support structures that most of us didn’t have with family and larger society. All I was looking for was a sense of belonging, some friends, and to help out a few people if I could. What I found instead (and blessed be the reporter who made it possible) were people like Chatura Patil and Vrushali Pendharkar and Shals Mahajan and Chayanika Shah who not only taught me pretty much everything I always wanted to know about identity and rights and activism and politicization, but also about reflexivity.

From the beginning, OLAVA for example, was about inclusivity and community in a much larger sense than just the urban English speaking group of women who got together and started it one summer evening. The process of trying to reach out, include, listen to, not co-opt, not appropriate the opinions and rights and presences and lived experiences of the “other”  was one of the most difficult, yet most rewarding processes of that whole experience.

More recently, when I reengaged with activism after a huge gap, the same issues jumped to the forefront in our planning of the Pride walk. The need to reach out to, include, and value people from rural areas, people who don’t necessarily communicate always in English, people who live in non urban areas, people who don’t have access to the internet – let alone social networking sites – was paramount. In the case of the Pride Walk, the systems were already in place, and community based organizations acted as points of contact and liaisons. However, more could probably have been done. Who knows.

As I begin thinking and working with caste issues, the same concerns raise their heads again. For various reasons, from ease of articulation to access to time, the most regular and vocal members of that group also end up being upper caste, educated, English speaking, urban, middle class people. And most of us are uncomfortable with that. Not having, in most cases, the lived experience of caste oppression, and all its intersectionalities with gender, poverty, location, and more, we feel like imposters at best, and appropriators at worst. What right do we really have to be saying this? And if we don’t, will this conversation not happen? How do we reach out to people with those lived experiences? How do we do that without exoticising, tokenizing or fetishising them? How do we make sure the space is safe enough and friendly enough? How do we step back and make space for their voices to be heard? Is this kind of thinking elitist too? Are we suffering from savior complex as well?

I think it's an important conversation to have. Amongst ourselves as well as with everyone else we can think of. How to reach more and more people, to acknowledge and give up our privileged spaces and voices to those less privileged, and to bring lived experiences to centre stage. To make visible the invisible experiences and oppressions we glance away from on a daily basis. As my friend said, everyone from the lower middle class downward on the class spectrum, even in urban settings, seems to be invisible to these groups, and it is the caste privileged, class privileged, educated, urban

“activists” who are the most vocal in them. It is very discomfiting how much appropriation we are doing, and yet we seem unsure of how to fix it.

Maybe as of now we can’t really help it too much (although we certainly can make the effort and try to a large extent). These conversations are starting over social media sites or in friends circles after all, and a lot of us, I am ashamed to say, don’t really have that many contacts outside of or beyond a certain circle. But we HAVE to find ways to change that. If we really believe in everything we say we do, we have to build alliances and go to people with lived experiences to let THEM tell us what they want and how to go about getting it. I don’t see the point of being in the position of speaking FOR them, it just doesn’t make sense.

In my opinion, the trick is to do more, try more, to begin working consciously and actively towards that utopia where we no longer have to appropriate, or be center stage, or be the most vocal or easily heard. Where we would, as we should, fade far, far into the background and let the affected tell us the solutions, whether it is issues of caste, class, gender, sexuality, or whatever else we want to stand with.

Me and my pink unicorns!

Of siblings and soulmates – spiritual amputations and lived disconnects

On the first day of 2016, my last surviving grandparent, my father’s mother, had a stroke. For almost a month she lingered with extensive damage and paralysis, almost oblivious to what was going on around her before, finally, breathing her last.

My father, who had already shuffled back and forth to her city a couple of times during this time, decided to fly back there again for the “Shraddha”. This was a little surprising, and a little upsetting to me. For one thing we are both atheists, me having kind of imbibed the basic idea from my dad. As such we definitely do not believe in the soul, last rites, rest in peace, for her Atma’s sake, she is watching kind of stuff.

Secondly, neither one of us has ever cared much about “what people will say”. So, it made no sense to me that he would spend so much time, effort, and energy, and miss work, to go to this religious ceremony. After all, he had already said his goodbyes on the day of the cremation! It could not be to appease gossipy and criticizing neighbours and “larger family” at all.

So, he went, and I wondered. Until I texted him one morning to ask how he was holding up and what was going on. His answer suddenly made something very clear. He was sitting with his four brothers, all five of them together after something like 25 years, and probably for the last time in their lives.

That shook me. I simply hadn’t thought of that! I was thinking religion, social standing, misplaced sense of duty, etc etc, and not once did it occur to me that this need dad felt to be at the funeral rites had nothing to do with all that and everything to do with love for his brothers, a desire to see them all – one more time – and an attempt to relive or recapture happier memories when the five of them had been boys in that city, in that house.

Considering how close I am to my brother, how much he is a part of my thoughts every day in everything I do, it gave me nightmares, this thought. Having gotten to an age when my own mortality is not such a far-off, almost unbelievable, almost untrue entity, it is keeping me awake at night and giving me the heebie jeebies.

I CANNOT imagine never seeing bhai again. Nor can I imagine a situation where we would have been apart long enough and meet infrequently enough for people to forget that we might want to! Sure, for the last 12-15 years, we have managed to be in the same place at the same time something like once every two years, but so far, the intensity of my resultant neglect for the partner and offspring surely drives home the point quite adequately of how much bhai matters to me and how much our shared time is important? To think that someday, life, time, distances, and circumstances can create a situation where this is no longer true is something I don’t know how to handle.

My kid brother is my best pal. One of the few people on this planet that I can be myself with, who knows me, where I need no pretense to be loved and appreciated. More than that, he is, or at least used to be, my sounding board for ideas, my vetter of creative theories, my tuning fork resonating with an equal craziness, my middle of the night coffee partner, my wild imagination story spinning companion.  

Already, in the last decade and more, I feel bereaved in many ways. Every time I get super excited about something and want to tell bhai about it, every time I want to sit at home and wail and tell bhai about it, every time I read a new great book, hear a new great track, find something (anything) fascinating, or intriguing, or disgusting, or anger inducing, I want to turn to bhai and say “did you …” and I can't. Hundreds of thousands of miles, years of distance, they take a toll. Busy lives, commitments, responsibilities at both ends, they take a toll. Something as simple as time zones…. When I email/message him, and when he can see it and reply … makes a difference to the ease and comfort of communication.

Even when he visits, or I visit, I find that time simply gets swept away in the seeing and doing and frenetic activity, so that I am left feeling vaguely dissatisfied and craving just ONE good, long, deep conversation in the end. And it feels like an amputation almost. This absence of a part of me that was so vital and integral, and the phantom pains of feeling that it still remains, is by turns painful, depressing, normal, mundane, and simply weird. And I am sure this is just the beginning. Much as one may love family and friends, life does get in the way.

As more years go by, I am sure it will get wider and deeper, this gap, this absence. It is something like what happened to Dad and his brothers, it is something like what happens to most grown up siblings. And yet, I have always imagined (and valued the fact) that bhai and I are so close, so much more really good friends than just brother and sister, that we are so much a part of each other’s lives and minds and opinions and thought processes.

I am sure it will happen. One day it will be like this. Accepting that distances and life and circumstances and responsibilities and the simple process of having a life has inevitably taken something away from the intensity of the sibling bond may become necessary not too far in the future. And I dread that day.

Even the very thought of the slightest possibility of there EVER being a “last time in my lifetime” meeting with him is something that is – frankly – driving me quite insane. 

Being Together Blues – track one

Relationships are hard work. That’s a fact most sensible people have always known, and appreciated. It was in one of my many jaunts around the blogsphere that I ran into another blogger, who goes so far as to ask “can two people really ever live together?”  Although he presumably meant it as a question in the context of adult human romantic relationships, it is worth looking at it from the perspective of all relationships, whether filial or romantic.

Setting aside romantic relationships for the time being, consider families. Kids, parents, siblings, all living under one roof, at least for the first 20 or so years of the lives of the children, at least in India. Unconditional love (that’s what they say it is… although in most cases there are numerous conditions to be fulfilled before approval and love can be won, and both approval and love can be lost in an instant by one misstep), combines with similar upbringing, one common set of parents and values. However, all these great and noble emotions notwithstanding, it is a difficult enough job to live together in peace and harmony with one’s parents and siblings, and most people end up with a lot of baggage of repression, anger, resentments and what not.

This statement, of course, labels me as anti social, against Indian culture, unnatural and whatnot, simply because I dare to question the concept of blind love and loyalty and duty to the family unit and parents. Not that it exists, in my experience. The ones most vehement in shouting the praises of all these are the ones most loudly badmouthing their families behind their backs. The few families I have seen which have genuine personal space, independence, and real respect for each other are the unusual ones. These are the homes and families, like the one I grew up in, where the RULES are not so codified and the emphasis is on working on earning real respect and love rather than insisting on the outer trappings like feet touching.

Most people have a mini heart attack every time they hear me address my man or (shudder shudder!) my parents with the ultra familiar “tui” or “tu” which is reserved for pals and people younger than oneself in India, or for the beings of a much lower social strata, such as the domestic help, or the paper wala. My brother and I, on the other hand, find it most natural to address them this way rather than with the more formal “tumi” or the very formal “apni” because they are our buddies. We have a very open, frank, really close relationship with both parents, and I actually find it amazing that people find it amazing that my folks know everything there is to know about me. To me, that’s the most natural thing in the world! And yes, I hope to be that kind of a best friend to my kids in turn! And no….to answer some critics…. I will not mind or feel insulted AT ALL if my daughter calls me tui….in fact, I would love it!

And yet, in spite of the open atmosphere at home ad the total absence of formalities and codified behavior expectations, it was difficult enough growing up, simply because that’s what growing up is like. And yes, there have been massive arguments, misunderstandings, and resentments, a few of which probably linger on in some way or the other. Any set of people, living under one roof, is a situation rife with the certainty of emotional hassles and ego clashes, personality mismatches and sheer miscommunication. That’s just how we are made. If, to top off the already roiling confusions, you add a thick veneer of FORMALITY and “ADAB”, and you have a recipe for the worst kind of disaster.

And that is exactly what I see around me in many families. On the surface, perfect. Never a raised voice (there are many in our house), never a harsh word, and certainly not any disrespectful behavior (the definition of that one is another blog post in the making) ever in those houses. Everyone is invariably polite, nice, and oh so proper with each other. Get them alone, and the story is something else. There is NO communication, NO understanding, and NO empathy among the members of these families. Forget all that, there is no RELATIONSHIP to speak of. They are strangers related by blood who just happen to co-exist in a common physical space. They don’t know each other, have no clue of the others’ dreams, aspirations and emotional needs, and have no channels open to even try to know or explain those things.

So, the children HAVE to do what the parents want, regardless of what their ambitions/ desires are, until they are ready to leave the nest…if ever. While a few have begun now to leave the nests at the beginning of their careers, they never quite manage to detach themselves from the umbilicus which reaches across time and space to exert its authority. Many never leave the nest, unable to be “their own person” until the parents die, at which point they are too old, it’s too late, and they are too set in their ways and demoralized to have a life.

As a result, they study what they don’t like, marry where they don’t love, and where there is no mental emotional match, and exist in a sort of bound and gagged state known by our culture as the respectful and loving family. I am the black sheep for occasionally screaming at my mum to make her see my side of things, but these ideal children would never dream of any such transgression. Instead, they are willing to sit with any sympathetic “other” and use terrible language to describe their angst and name call their “elders” to hell and back. Naturally, resentments deepen, anger turns to a deep seated poisonous vitriol, and all real love and emotion becomes warped into a strange love-hate being which hurts more than it heals.

Add to this the common absence of the concept of compromise or adjustments. Kids will HAVE to do what the parents say…because they are the parents,  and in our culture, they virtually own the kid. They can beat it, torture it, emotionally and physically assault it, restrict its mind, emotions, life, and basically do exactly what they like with it, just by virtue of the fact that they happen to have biologically created it. So, obviously, there is absolutely no concept, or even an imagination of a concept, that a child may want something other than what the parents want “FOR IT” or that he/she may have the right to voice that want. By extension, there is no concept that parents might tone down, or even give up, what they want in favour of what the child wants. The child too is trained to hide and lie. From its earliest years, the kids learn not to tell the truth to their parents, not to bring their friends home, to say they are going to group study rather than announce they are going dancing, and never ever try to explain what they think or feel, never ever to ask questions, and never ever expect communication.

As a result both sets spend their family lives looking at each other with mild scorn (you don’t understand anything), and barely tolerating each other. Hardly the recipe for ideal filial ties (whatever those might be). Hardly the best formula to have a great and happy life together.

Loving words

Arguing about the finer points of meaning and interpretation with a random stranger in a chat room, I suddenly take off on a whole tangent about what things I find most fascinating about language – in learning a language, within languages, and across languages. The original argument, if one can call it that, was about how language limits. Or rather, he claimed that definitions were limiting, and hence unnecessary, and even unwanted, to which I countered that language itself is limiting in many ways, and maybe he should dispense with it. This retort, made in the spirit of fun, obviously didn’t penetrate, and he went on to patronizing descriptions of neotic sciences, pseudo-scientific theories, and so on – at which point the conversation disintegrated into nothingness and I quickly disengaged from it.

However, it did refresh in my mind all the reasons for my enduring fascination with this weird verbal communication medium we call language. Think about it. Growing up, there is no other means of communication open to a child, except crying in different pitches, to signal what it needs or wants. That it succeeds, and survives, is primarily because of how simple a baby’s needs are at this stage – food, warmth, a dry bottom, a cuddle. As one grows, needs become progressively more complicated, and language learning becomes essential to articulate those needs. Clearly, and this is something one sees around one all the time, the more of a language you acquire, the more articulate you become, the more precisely you can express yourself.

Yet, language does limit expression in many ways. This becomes so much more apparent when dealing with various “isms” and ideologies, as one has to do in order to engage in any kind of discourse or activism. It becomes essential then to learn the correct terminology, the right “language”, to be able to not only communicate, but even to understand the concepts and ideas. So, obviously you need language to even think about certain things, not just to talk about them. Subtle nuances, fine shades of meaning, little differences in expressing, these are things that cannot be expressed very well without the possession of adequate language.

The same thing, in another way, presents itself every time I sit down to translate something.  Every new language I learn adds finer shades to my ability to express things, things I think and feel and perceive and imagine, as long as I do so in a multilingual mish-mash my daughter calls my “khichuri” language. This patois, of sorts, is getting more and more complicated as I find more and more that certain concepts, certain shades, certain words, phrases, meanings, just DON’T translate well across tongues. Whether the handicap is attributable to cultural differences, or geographical ones, or what, is a matter for a whole thesis in itself.

What it means, is that I often end up speaking in a cobbled together jumble of three or four languages in an attempt to more precisely convey the ABSOLUTELY EXACT sense of what I am trying to say. After all, how do I translate some thing like sharm or haya for example? It’s a complicated emotion, and certainly not even close to explained with a word like shame. Even in the original Hindi and Urdu, the words mean different things in different contexts and in different combinations. “Mujhe sharm/haya ati hai” is so totally different from “tumhe sharm ani chahiye”, is so totally not the same as “bade besharm ho”. And that’s probably the smallest example. There are so many other words, phrases, expressions that cannot be translated – at least not without writing a 40 page explanation of cultural differences, social mores, and verbose explanations of the nuances.

And that’s precisely what drives me to learn more languages, and to acquire as much fluency as I can in each, simply because I find that as I do that, as I get more and into more and more languages, I begin to be able to have more thoughts, express or think of subtler nuances, and talk about so many more kinds of ideas. 

Epistolary adventures

When I was about fifteen or sixteen, my man and I used to write to each other three or four times a week. Each letter was fourteen or fifteen fullscap sheets, about thirty pages. Living as we did, one in Dehradun and one in Chennai, the only means of communication really open to us was letters. Telephone calls, especially interstate, were prohibitively expensive, and mobiles in every kid’s hand was not even a remote concept. Back in those dark ages, we had not become used to the idea of personal computers, and the internet was still a US Government and NSA fiefdom. Snailmail, as we know it today, was the only way two sundered hearts could keep in touch over 2000 kilometers.

The excitement of receiving each letter is still so fresh in my mind I can virtually taste it! This was “first love!” This was my “boyfriend” writing to me! Just that would have been enough to give anyone the total thrills. Consider the age. Fifteen years old and in love for the first time, we were living so faraway from each other. Distance denied us all those little intimacies and pleasures that people in love take for granted. No little looks, no shared laughs, no “how was your day”, no handholding, no stolen kisses were possible for us. From acknowledgement of feelings to sharing our lives, letters had to perform the functions of all the senses.

I can never forget, or recapture, the wild, heart thumping, pulse beating, palm sweating suspense of seeing that letter, with that “oh so familiar” handwriting on it, on the dining table as i came home from school. Pretending to be nonchalant about it, leaving it there for just a little longer while I changed and had something to eat, so as not to seem overeager, added to the high. After what seemed like a safe amount of time (and felt like hours and hours), I would get up the courage to pick it up from the table, and escape to my room with it. Oh heaven! Oh hell! I still had to open it and actually read what D had to say!!!!

Trembling hands tore open the envelope and picked out the pages. Hmmmm… only 11? My last one was 18 pages … huh! I knew it! He loves me less than I love him! Every little thing was a matter of life and death almost. From counting the pages to weighing the words, and the tone, of every page, it was all more important than any of those paltry national security matters. The first reading went like a flash. In my eagerness to see what he writes next, I would just completely miss the line I was reading. It was like some intense, hopped up, speed reading session where nothing penetrated the consciousness.

Calming down enough to read through again, and understand this time, wasn’t easy, especially since we had a “no closed doors” rule at home. Pesky bro would choose just these moments to get on my nerves more than he did (and oh! How he did get on my nerves sometimes!), going into his “dikha na dikha na” mode. Mum or dad or both would be in and out of the room on some routine errand or another, and I would have to pretend it was just another letter from just another childhood friend….nothing special y’know. (Of course, I realize now that there was no need for all that pretence and tension. The folks knew, and had no problems with a little natural, innocent romance. But at the time it was an added thrill, I guess, to think of myself as one of those misunderstood and persecuted Hindi filmy heroines).

Once I had read the missive twice, thrice, a couple of dozen times, and practically knew every word by heart, it was time to compose a reply. Another massive undertaking. Every word had to be analysed, for tone, emotional intent, and all kinds of subtext. Then a fitting retort, response, reply had to be drafted. Always failed at this though. Being the emotional creature I was, I always got too carried away by what was happening in my life, and my own emotional responses to his words, to make too much headway in the who writes better letters game. My man tells me that was the fun part of getting my letters – knowing that there would be tear stains and angry rants, and other nonsense.

There were others I wrote to as well; pen friends in Edmonton, Canada, in Germany, and elsewhere; other childhood friends in Dehradun and Delhi; the occasional cousin; and so on. Each letter was a labour of love. A thought intensive communication that took hours, if not days, to plan and write. And I saved all the replies. They were pieces of that person, to me, little fragments of someone I loved, that I wanted to hold on to for all time.

Then, came the internet. I got my first PC in 1995, and now these machines are like an extra limb. I began to write on the desktop, finding that words flowed more easily when I saw then ALIVE in black and white, on the screen. Editing poems was easier with a backspace or delete key than with run-throughs on a page. By the time the internet, and email, became a household phenomenon in India, I was already an old hand at both. My man and I broke up, and lost touch, and all the other friends of the plume and the epistle fell by the wayside. People still in touch switched to technology, as email became part of the “cool quotient” and phone calls became simpler and cheaper.

Last week, my mother wished me to mail something for her, ‘the old fashioned way’. A huge civil war erupted, and everyone came in for a lot of flack when none of us could remember seeing a post box anywhere close by. All kinds of theories were advanced, ridiculed, and discarded, including ‘there are no post boxes now other than at post offices’. Lambasted, yelled at, and made fun of, I finally went on a post office hunt, found one in the back of beyond, and posted the damn letters! It still didn’t strike me! This morning, on my way to pick baby up from school, I finally spotted a red postbox in an alley close by (probably noticed it because of the recent hullabaloo).

It was while I was laughing at myself for having missed it before that I realised I can’t remember the last time I WROTE to someone! In fact, when I was about to mail those letters for mom, I realized I had no idea what amount of postage was necessary. Dad, on the great post box hunt with me, suggested that a rupees two stamp was probably the minimum now. Turns out, those days are long gone! The minimum postage is apparently five rupees these days! And I had no clue!

I email people, sure, all the time; I text frequently; I call often; but cannot, for the life of me, recall the last time I put pen to paper for anything, much less to communicate with someone. My work gets done on word and php, my writing on blogs and wordfiles. The only things I use paper for anymore is to make shopping lists or draw pictures for my four year old! It’s amazing what technology has done! Not entirely sure if it’s all good though. Sure it’s a lot more convenient, and definitely cheaper, at these prices. However, I have a horrible feeling that the excitement of getting letters is lost forever.

The avalanche of technology has changed the way we communicate forever, and though I love the scraps, walls, glitter, and cartoons, I miss the hand drawn caricatures my man used to draw of himself. Maybe its just nostalgia. I am, after all, hitting the age when people begin to say things like “humare zamaane mein” and “aajkal ke bacche”; when everything old seems golden and everything new seems like trash. And although I love technology, use it extensively, live it, and earn my bread from it, I can’t help but breathe that tiny little sigh of regret for those “pehele pyaar ki peheli chitthis” that I will no longer be able to hoard for posterity.