A Sherlock Holmes drugged by his rogue of a lady love, waking up naked with his hands chained to the bed posts and the key festooned to his manliness is believable to me. A man imperfect, susceptible to goof ups, locked for two weeks in his room and drilling bullets in the wall for want of work and willing to plunge into the dark world for answers appeals to me.
I am a 28 year old audience that today’s film director well understands is unimpressed by the precision and the slowly thinning fog of a mystery. I may look prim and proper with my hair parted down the middle but my mind is as active as a beehive. It needs kicks and its needs excitement. A humourless tale of the past that wets the senses with its aesthetics is good on a certain day but me the 28 year old audience, a character as muggy as the Hong Kong skies, needs action, likes her hero to moan and groan, be a faithful friend and covet the friend’s woman as well.
And so as old fashions come back into fashion, we the yuppies of varying degrees are digging out our super heroes from the comic annals and concocting skeletons to make them more real and juicy. We do Freud proud with our anatomy of the id, ego and super ego.
It is Holmes, Batman and Spiderman for now. Watson, Robin, Alfred and Mary Jane may be next.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Ras
As much as I like Hong Kong, the absence of colour in day to day life irks me. I especially miss seeing colours bursting out of flowering trees, gardens buzzing with bees and birds and the effect of seasons on the city foliage. On a trip to Phuket, we stayed at a resort running wild with flowers and every nook was a melange of colours and greenery. Some pictures are bad but all the same I am publishing them.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
A road taken
In spirit of the much kicked wisdom-choices determine realities accordingly-my spur of the moment enrolment for one of the cheapest photography courses brought me in touch with another side of Mumbai life- the young and struggling kind that seventies’ Indian cinematographers panned on to bring in the common man touch!
It was a motley group that gathered 9 am to 4 pm every Sunday, in a green corner of Worli to learn camera tricks.
A girl from Alibaug, just out of school, travelled two hours to and fro in pursuit of her dream to become an ace photographer. The shy young man in bell-bottoms hoped to graduate from a garment shop assistant to a photographer’s apprentice. A not so shy boy who to everyone’s envy had a DSLR and talent. A flower child of the ad world who had condescended to “such type” of course for a “bit of a background” on the nitty-gritty at minimum cost. The “looking for Shangri La” dude who had done it all-salsa, theatre, judo, squash and even a cookery class and was still looking! The glowering Mr T from Allahabad who assisted Mr S who once in a while stole a glance at the lissom Bandra girl. Tara, whom I befriended, thought being a “Mrs” represented plan B when plan A failed.
Often, we all stepped out of the classroom in quest of the perfect frame. Like flies we crowded around the flower bush, chased the white cat, spied on neighbour oldies, harassed kids in the park and took turns to click a tramp that demanded a princely sum of Rs. 50 but settled for Rs. 20. Some days we went to Chowpatty searching for abandoned Ganesh idols and other trivia. I took my first ferry trip to Alibaug with my photography mates. Encouraged by a friend and unable to suppress nature’s call, I jumped a wall to use a college lavatory.
I became a muse and a model for a photo shoot. I discovered the Fort area, camera in hand. Looking for candid shots, I soaked in the sun setting on the Marine Drive. I made friends and earned frowns from people caught unaware. I spent time with myself watching crowds struggle to get in and out of trains. Bhuttas were devoured and many calls made home, as I stumbled upon something new every day. The flower sellers under the bridge outside Dadar station and the wholesale wet market never failed to bring joy. The first glimpse of the sea as the train approached Churchgate never failed to make the heart skip a beat. Wandering into a Shiv mandir, I heard my first recital of Shiva Tandava Stotra.
It brings a smile even now when I think of all the adventures I had practicing my photography skills. I did not become much of a photographer but I learnt a lot more. Like, a road wrongly taken can lead to a road side book stall and it is not the cover but the pages however torn that make a book a book. It seems that it was not chance that I discovered the course ad in TOI but the heavens that conspired to give me a window to look through at the city.
It was a motley group that gathered 9 am to 4 pm every Sunday, in a green corner of Worli to learn camera tricks.
A girl from Alibaug, just out of school, travelled two hours to and fro in pursuit of her dream to become an ace photographer. The shy young man in bell-bottoms hoped to graduate from a garment shop assistant to a photographer’s apprentice. A not so shy boy who to everyone’s envy had a DSLR and talent. A flower child of the ad world who had condescended to “such type” of course for a “bit of a background” on the nitty-gritty at minimum cost. The “looking for Shangri La” dude who had done it all-salsa, theatre, judo, squash and even a cookery class and was still looking! The glowering Mr T from Allahabad who assisted Mr S who once in a while stole a glance at the lissom Bandra girl. Tara, whom I befriended, thought being a “Mrs” represented plan B when plan A failed.
Often, we all stepped out of the classroom in quest of the perfect frame. Like flies we crowded around the flower bush, chased the white cat, spied on neighbour oldies, harassed kids in the park and took turns to click a tramp that demanded a princely sum of Rs. 50 but settled for Rs. 20. Some days we went to Chowpatty searching for abandoned Ganesh idols and other trivia. I took my first ferry trip to Alibaug with my photography mates. Encouraged by a friend and unable to suppress nature’s call, I jumped a wall to use a college lavatory.
I became a muse and a model for a photo shoot. I discovered the Fort area, camera in hand. Looking for candid shots, I soaked in the sun setting on the Marine Drive. I made friends and earned frowns from people caught unaware. I spent time with myself watching crowds struggle to get in and out of trains. Bhuttas were devoured and many calls made home, as I stumbled upon something new every day. The flower sellers under the bridge outside Dadar station and the wholesale wet market never failed to bring joy. The first glimpse of the sea as the train approached Churchgate never failed to make the heart skip a beat. Wandering into a Shiv mandir, I heard my first recital of Shiva Tandava Stotra.
It brings a smile even now when I think of all the adventures I had practicing my photography skills. I did not become much of a photographer but I learnt a lot more. Like, a road wrongly taken can lead to a road side book stall and it is not the cover but the pages however torn that make a book a book. It seems that it was not chance that I discovered the course ad in TOI but the heavens that conspired to give me a window to look through at the city.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Random thoughts
Life is full....with work, madness, squabbles and problems....And amidst all this today it struck me in the shower that my hair is falling less, ...I am cribbing less...and gymming did not work for me because my heart was not into it.
Jostling with the narrow eyed people on train, I remembered a professor who once told me that 3Ws are all that one can chose from-work, women and worship.
My best friend once said..."what you want may not be what you need."
It all came to me at once....ratatatat like the machine gun spewing the bullets ...so strong and consuming that I forgot to have a headache listening to the footsteps of thousands of people running to catch the train.
I should get back to work now...I am ready to take the dive....when I emerge, I will be back to tell you more....
Jostling with the narrow eyed people on train, I remembered a professor who once told me that 3Ws are all that one can chose from-work, women and worship.
My best friend once said..."what you want may not be what you need."
It all came to me at once....ratatatat like the machine gun spewing the bullets ...so strong and consuming that I forgot to have a headache listening to the footsteps of thousands of people running to catch the train.
I should get back to work now...I am ready to take the dive....when I emerge, I will be back to tell you more....
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Abstract
My efforts to click the moon the other night led me back to the night I knighted the moon as my first boyfriend from beneath the pomegranate tree in our wild garden.
I had just begun my tryst with poetry and loved relishing the endless potential of words and what the mind could make an inanimate object into. Neruda was still unknown and as a sixth grader, I was still meandering through Wordsworth, Shakespeare and a handful of Indian poets.
I felt most alive during poetry classes but it dawned upon me only in retrospection. Back then I was still struggling with an identity crisis and loved to escape into an imaginary world, where the moon became a friend and then a boyfriend.
Moon was never a silver-footed woman or a chanda mama to me. He could never be a clumsy uncle in a pajama. He could never be a seductress. He was the perfect knight, elusive yet so close, delicate yet brave.
It was peaceful to look up and feel a secret bond with one who belonged to the whole world. I never vied for attention because I knew he was there for me. All I had to do was to slip out at night and lie under the pomegranate tree and reach out to him.
Over the years as I grew older, I pushed him to the back of my mind. The pomegranate shrub dried up, we changed houses and life grew too murky and complicated to hold on to an early teen fascination.
At the university, I sought him out again during long solitary walks, while sitting hunched on a rock listening to crickets deep into the night or sipping chai on a foggy early morning. He was there, dutifully making a presence.
Many moon nights have passed since then.
Somewhere along, I remember searching the nights for Poes’s menstrual moon, aghast at the comparison yet possessed with the metaphor.
I remember a poornima night at my aunt’s place in Mumbai. From a French window on Marine Drive, I witnessed one of the most perfect visions- a ripe full moon shining on seawater looking a cocktail of silver, grey and the fierce.
The last I remember was spent with my mother watching the HK skyline from a concrete bench next to a fountain. I wish I could have told mom in the most scandalous of words then that the moon reminded me of a Kalidas poem celebrating a woman’s physical beauty.
It had taken me months to understand it but when I did, I laughed at the grossness of its English translation. I remembered a line from it…the lilies of her mounds…. Watching the moon that night in a foreign sky, I remembered the lilies and the mound. For once in so many years I thought of the moon as a lily.
Times bring new perspectives and times change the thought and the gaze. Like a pining lover fulfilled, I have moved on and seek new thrills.
I look back and see nights of whispering secrets to him, I myself did not know and I looked up last night and had nothing to say but yawn about a whirlwind day.
I had just begun my tryst with poetry and loved relishing the endless potential of words and what the mind could make an inanimate object into. Neruda was still unknown and as a sixth grader, I was still meandering through Wordsworth, Shakespeare and a handful of Indian poets.
I felt most alive during poetry classes but it dawned upon me only in retrospection. Back then I was still struggling with an identity crisis and loved to escape into an imaginary world, where the moon became a friend and then a boyfriend.
Moon was never a silver-footed woman or a chanda mama to me. He could never be a clumsy uncle in a pajama. He could never be a seductress. He was the perfect knight, elusive yet so close, delicate yet brave.
It was peaceful to look up and feel a secret bond with one who belonged to the whole world. I never vied for attention because I knew he was there for me. All I had to do was to slip out at night and lie under the pomegranate tree and reach out to him.
Over the years as I grew older, I pushed him to the back of my mind. The pomegranate shrub dried up, we changed houses and life grew too murky and complicated to hold on to an early teen fascination.
At the university, I sought him out again during long solitary walks, while sitting hunched on a rock listening to crickets deep into the night or sipping chai on a foggy early morning. He was there, dutifully making a presence.
Many moon nights have passed since then.
Somewhere along, I remember searching the nights for Poes’s menstrual moon, aghast at the comparison yet possessed with the metaphor.
I remember a poornima night at my aunt’s place in Mumbai. From a French window on Marine Drive, I witnessed one of the most perfect visions- a ripe full moon shining on seawater looking a cocktail of silver, grey and the fierce.
The last I remember was spent with my mother watching the HK skyline from a concrete bench next to a fountain. I wish I could have told mom in the most scandalous of words then that the moon reminded me of a Kalidas poem celebrating a woman’s physical beauty.
It had taken me months to understand it but when I did, I laughed at the grossness of its English translation. I remembered a line from it…the lilies of her mounds…. Watching the moon that night in a foreign sky, I remembered the lilies and the mound. For once in so many years I thought of the moon as a lily.
Times bring new perspectives and times change the thought and the gaze. Like a pining lover fulfilled, I have moved on and seek new thrills.
I look back and see nights of whispering secrets to him, I myself did not know and I looked up last night and had nothing to say but yawn about a whirlwind day.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
In Hong Kong, typhoons are special
Like pakodas on a rainy day, a weekday typhoon always whets the monsoon appetite. T8=holiday.When the mighty and not so mighty typhoons or tropical cyclones descend on HK between May and November, hits on the observatory website go up substantially. The office chatter post lunch is upbeat, telephone traffic peaks and furious speculations on chances of a T8 fly to and fro on chat windows.
A year ago, when we were initiated into the ritual, it was fun to check the typhoon progress every two minutes. P got three days off and when I started work, I managed to sneak out early on two days.
The Hong Kong observatory begins to issue warnings as soon as a typhoon comes within 800 kilometres of Hong Kong. Typhoon signal number one is immediately hoisted outside every shopping complex, office and residential building.
The observatory releases information on the typhoon’s position, intensity, wind speed, movement and expected rainfall.
Typhoon signal three is issued if a typhoon breaches the 800 kilometre distance, sea level wind speed goes up to 41-62 km/hour and gusts blow at or above 110 km/hour.
As the typhoon closes in, wind speed increases to 63-117 km/hour and gusts blow at or above 180 km/hour, typhoon signal eight is hoisted.
Check the link for more information on typhoons-
The baap of signals- Typhoon signal 10 is issued when a cyclone is just 100 kilometres off Hong Kong.
T8 signals on a working day are enough for the sleepy office goers to whoop in joy, do a jig and head back home.
Train and ferry services are usually suspended and you will only venture out if you like battling flying trees (if there are any), signboards or maybe a local considering how light they look.
However, before you let that feeble hope broaden into a smile, remember - the typhoon must make its presence felt early morning and stay put till late noon.
Bosses in HK are notorious for hurrying you to work in the morning and by the time the typhoon empties its bowels, you have nothing to do but work on boss killing charms in a near empty office. If the typhoon goes limp by noon, you will be expected to report for work post lunch.
PS: Usually the wailings of the exhaust fans warn me about the storm ahead. It is amazing to stand at my window and watch the sea changing colours. From a picture perfect blue on a sunny morning to dark grey as a thunderstorm approaches, the sea faithfully mirrors every mood swing of the heavens above.
It is achingly beautiful to watch a raging typhoon from the safety of my apartment when I know that elsewhere people would be fighting lost battles to salvage a bit of their lives being ravaged by a cyclone.
The world right now is an opaque grey. It was a T9 last night and the weather has been rough since then. Last night as I lay awake, I could imagine all stormy nights, I read about in classic novels. I wondered about Catherine of the Wuthering Heights and what it would be like to nurse a broken heart on such a night.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Harry Potter-6
The kids are no more innocent and there is more on their minds than Voldermort! Quidditch has taken a back seat and so has Snape’s deviousness, defence against dark classes, covert visits to Hagrid’s lair and spats between Malfoy and Potter on the Hogwarts train.
Death Eaters are on a rampage and attacking muggles as well. Bellatrix’s witchy laughter rings in the background as they swish about their business. Since the Dark Lord does not make an appearance, the movie's highlight is Dumbledore’s death.
Am I, the Indian moviegoer of the Bollywood gharana happy? Nooooo! How could Dumbledore be struck down by a casual Avada Kedavra?
If you have seen Tulsi kill her evil son in kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahi thi, you would understand my pain at Dumbledore’s fall to death. Miss Kapoor get over Mahabaharat and work your charms on Hollywood.
The movie overall is a good watch but not worth rotten tomatoes. A movie on a story as leviathan as Harry’s can never be satisfactorily made. Nonetheless, I am thankful it is made as I get a chance to hold on to a magical tale as adulthood squeezes the last ounce of innocence out of me.
Death Eaters are on a rampage and attacking muggles as well. Bellatrix’s witchy laughter rings in the background as they swish about their business. Since the Dark Lord does not make an appearance, the movie's highlight is Dumbledore’s death.
Am I, the Indian moviegoer of the Bollywood gharana happy? Nooooo! How could Dumbledore be struck down by a casual Avada Kedavra?
If you have seen Tulsi kill her evil son in kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahi thi, you would understand my pain at Dumbledore’s fall to death. Miss Kapoor get over Mahabaharat and work your charms on Hollywood.
The movie overall is a good watch but not worth rotten tomatoes. A movie on a story as leviathan as Harry’s can never be satisfactorily made. Nonetheless, I am thankful it is made as I get a chance to hold on to a magical tale as adulthood squeezes the last ounce of innocence out of me.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Jhaakam jhaak
The threat to privacy emanates no more from a hidden camera in a changing room or a leering neighbour. The threat now is just a mouse click or a remote button away.
If unconvinced, consider the success of reality shows and the wide range of audience they are managing to target.
While deriding the tamasha that TV is making of an ordinary person’s life is easy, so many of us are going ahead and doing things that add to a market researcher’s understanding- ‘peek a boo’ clicks with all.
If it did not, Big Boss would never have Rahul Mahajan and Monica Bedi on board. If it did not, Miss Sawant could never pass off as a swayamvar worthy bride.
If it did not, people would choose not to twitter minute to minute account of their lives or post orkut, facebook and gmail status messages.
I almost spat my coffee when some girls I was meeting for the first time, casually discussed, what some celebrities were up to according to their twitter updates. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
When orkut became trendy, all it took was an anonymous profile, invisible status, name search and reading through scrapbooks to know the life puran of that girl you had met briefly on the train. When orkut came up with the option to lock scrapbooks, many people were forced to find an alternative pastime.
Facebook like the wordpress came up with more fun options but made privacy sound a bit more like the dodo. I suddenly was receiving emails informing me of what a friend’s friend was doing on her birthday night without even spooking around. Consider this-I have 25 facebook friends. The 25 friends on an average have 60-80 friends. If I post a picture on facebook, atleast 2000 people could be viewing it for no reason but that it popped on their facebook sidepage.
Blogging with its more verbose and graphic style takes voyuerism a step forward.
While I cannot controvert the talent of some of the bloggers, I will maintain that for many of us, blogreading is spicy due to the reams of personal details that bloggers carelessly let out in their posts. (ise kehte hai aa bail mujhe maar strategy!).
I am not against social networking and voyeurism but the lack of control on who can be privy to my information scares me at moments.
The level of hypocrisy it creates, appalls me too. There was a time when friends asked me for my opinion, because they believed it was genuine. Today the number of goody responses to photos and declarations of what one believes in or is doing, has made that ‘touch’ unnecessary’ and unwanted.
If unconvinced, consider the success of reality shows and the wide range of audience they are managing to target.
While deriding the tamasha that TV is making of an ordinary person’s life is easy, so many of us are going ahead and doing things that add to a market researcher’s understanding- ‘peek a boo’ clicks with all.
If it did not, Big Boss would never have Rahul Mahajan and Monica Bedi on board. If it did not, Miss Sawant could never pass off as a swayamvar worthy bride.
If it did not, people would choose not to twitter minute to minute account of their lives or post orkut, facebook and gmail status messages.
I almost spat my coffee when some girls I was meeting for the first time, casually discussed, what some celebrities were up to according to their twitter updates. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
When orkut became trendy, all it took was an anonymous profile, invisible status, name search and reading through scrapbooks to know the life puran of that girl you had met briefly on the train. When orkut came up with the option to lock scrapbooks, many people were forced to find an alternative pastime.
Facebook like the wordpress came up with more fun options but made privacy sound a bit more like the dodo. I suddenly was receiving emails informing me of what a friend’s friend was doing on her birthday night without even spooking around. Consider this-I have 25 facebook friends. The 25 friends on an average have 60-80 friends. If I post a picture on facebook, atleast 2000 people could be viewing it for no reason but that it popped on their facebook sidepage.
Blogging with its more verbose and graphic style takes voyuerism a step forward.
While I cannot controvert the talent of some of the bloggers, I will maintain that for many of us, blogreading is spicy due to the reams of personal details that bloggers carelessly let out in their posts. (ise kehte hai aa bail mujhe maar strategy!).
I am not against social networking and voyeurism but the lack of control on who can be privy to my information scares me at moments.
The level of hypocrisy it creates, appalls me too. There was a time when friends asked me for my opinion, because they believed it was genuine. Today the number of goody responses to photos and declarations of what one believes in or is doing, has made that ‘touch’ unnecessary’ and unwanted.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Does it make a difference?
The public joy over the Delhi High Court’s nod to consensual sex between people of same sex made me stretch beyond my armchair espousal of the cause and see if it will make a real difference to me, my family, friends and my extended acquaintance tree.
I know that no one expects this ruling to bring legitimacy and acceptance of homosexuality as "normal". But beyond the point that it will help a same sex couple to escape jail by shoving the law of the land into the world's face, I do not see much coming out of it.
Apart from the smoke spewing, liberated women in university whom I grudgingly admired for their unabashed assertion of their sexual identity and preferences, I am uncertain if it will bring happiness to the rich builder back home who I heard is getting his son treated for abnormal effeminate behaviour.
I have almost no hope that the senior and not so senior members of my huge family will stop clucking with a sneer, ‘uska beta ya beti gay hai’.
Will it bring a smile to girls in my all girls college who did not know if they were lesbians, bisexuals or in throes of virgin passion when they chose to fall in love and be with a girl. Some of them are married now. Some are worrying about how to deal with it as a closet homosexual and play a happy wife. Some are over it as a hippie stage of their life. Will it help any of them to come out in the open with their preferences?
Small towns have an eerie way of clamping on your sense of freedom. In a UP university where once upon a time only de-feminised looking girls escaped the roving eyes and sometimes fingers of boys unsure of how to deal with their testerone drives, an open display could still be disastrous.
I cannot comment on men and what they go through as I have never been close enough to anyone to know what emotional turmoil they go through trying to wed their reality with the one that the world wants them to adopt. But I can imagine a certain guy who swayed gracefully as he walked down the campus road, swirling in mock contempt at those who laughed at him, taking it all in his stride.
Will it stop a policewallah on the evening beat from not badmouthing a same sex couple cosying in a public garden unable to afford the refuge of an expensive place?
What about all the new senas and dals that will crop up to war with the sins of the mankind and especially the womankind.
I personally am unsure how will I react if I unknowingly love a person who is not straight in the public eye. Pardon my disgusting admission but that is the truth.
I have trembled at the thought of a son wanting to pluck brows or wanting to wear thongs or lusting after a boy in his class or a daughter declaring she hates stilettos and makeup and would prefer to feel J-Lo’s ass than getting one like her. This is an extreme end of my imagination and I am trying to have fun at the cost of the feelings of lots of people out there.
But just like you all deserve to come out I deserve a chance to speak too. That said at the end of the day, I will still stand by what a friend, family or relative chooses to be.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Another kind of journey
Yours truly has been hitting the (yoga) mat with a vengeance over the past one month. By the time my mom left two months back I was back to where I had started a month earlier.
However since I have resumed my yoga practice, the journey has been fruitful.
Results have been wonderful considering I am a dietician’s nightmare and once upon a time was my gym trainer’s badge of shame.
I have not lost weight but my horrible wings have significantly melted. For the first time, I have something called a waist and I have already begun hoping for a 26 inch waist. It is important and essential to aim big and thin if you happen to be living in the land of size zero women.
I did not expect much when I began doing yoga. But now I am willing to kick ass if anyone nods in approval.
For me yoga is one of the best ways to gently initiate the body into losing those extra inches and becoming flexible. When I now look back to all the frustrating days I could not lunge down and touch my feet and count up to five, I smile.
While doing surya namaskar, I still cannot touch my knees with my forehead without cheating a bit but I can do a lot of other acrobatics which gymming would have never helped me do. Despite the aching joints, I have never injured myself.
I am allowed to go on at my own pace and be lazy. I coax myself gently everyday and sit back at the hint of slightest discomfort. I am not lifting weights that sent my body into the distress mode. And yet I see muscles yield and tone up.
My spiritual journey is yet to begin as my yoga practice is solely focused on losing inches.
But I am seeing benefits, which can only come when you are calm, at peace and connecting to your inner self although for a second at a time. My skin has a healthy glow. I no longer slouch and can sit with a straight back effortlessly. I feel less anxious at work. My self worth has gone up and I am more in touch with myself.
Yoga to me is almost feminine. It is not aggressive but artful. It asks you not to confirm but find your unique style. It lets you be awkward and slow but steady on track. It has also showed me a side of myself which I did not know of-determination and focus.
However since I have resumed my yoga practice, the journey has been fruitful.
Results have been wonderful considering I am a dietician’s nightmare and once upon a time was my gym trainer’s badge of shame.
I have not lost weight but my horrible wings have significantly melted. For the first time, I have something called a waist and I have already begun hoping for a 26 inch waist. It is important and essential to aim big and thin if you happen to be living in the land of size zero women.
I did not expect much when I began doing yoga. But now I am willing to kick ass if anyone nods in approval.
For me yoga is one of the best ways to gently initiate the body into losing those extra inches and becoming flexible. When I now look back to all the frustrating days I could not lunge down and touch my feet and count up to five, I smile.
While doing surya namaskar, I still cannot touch my knees with my forehead without cheating a bit but I can do a lot of other acrobatics which gymming would have never helped me do. Despite the aching joints, I have never injured myself.
I am allowed to go on at my own pace and be lazy. I coax myself gently everyday and sit back at the hint of slightest discomfort. I am not lifting weights that sent my body into the distress mode. And yet I see muscles yield and tone up.
My spiritual journey is yet to begin as my yoga practice is solely focused on losing inches.
But I am seeing benefits, which can only come when you are calm, at peace and connecting to your inner self although for a second at a time. My skin has a healthy glow. I no longer slouch and can sit with a straight back effortlessly. I feel less anxious at work. My self worth has gone up and I am more in touch with myself.
Yoga to me is almost feminine. It is not aggressive but artful. It asks you not to confirm but find your unique style. It lets you be awkward and slow but steady on track. It has also showed me a side of myself which I did not know of-determination and focus.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Duplicity ripped
One minute into the movie and I was already on the verge of a heartache watching Julia Robert’s shabby makeup, sagging face and near frumpy dress. I have never been much of a Clive Owens fan and I was unimpressed by the witty tete-a-tete that made their love making (no flesh flash here) inevitable.
But I think that was the strategy-incremental pleasure!
Duplicity is about two espionage aces who decide to cash on the war between two cosmetic giants. The movie takes you back and forth in time lest you lose the thread of events. And what unfolds is an impressive, cerebral drama.
In the dog eats dog game our corporate spies are engaged in, mutual trust is hard to sustain. Mutually suspicious and ever ready with preemptive moves, they are however not above human frailties of insecurity, loneliness and need for love.
Julia though the scheming bitch is jealous and ready to dump the swindle as Clive Owens justifies seducing other women as part of the game.
Keep your ears open each time Julia and Ownes rendezvous. Their dialogues as they steal away private moments are the wittiest.
The leading actors are perfectly matched. Clive Owens looks handsome and Julia older (I am still hung on to the pretty woman).
I do not know if Julia and Owens have chemistry but Owens confrontation with Julia years after their first meeting is high power. It helps that Julia’s makeup gets better after the heart breaking first scene.
An interesting shot in the movie is the scuffle between the two cosmetic company heads. Shot in slow motion, the scene, which plays along with the credits, beautifully captures the expressions and body languages of the warring men as well as the onlookers.
I would have considered my 100 dollars a little better spent if the action scenes (whatever was there of it) had been better executed. The theft of the formula was a cakewalk.
Agreed the movie cannot be attacked for the trite stealing scene, as it fit in its scheme of events but after laughing at all the implied humour, I expected more from ex-CIA and MI6. Haven’t they heard of James Bond or is MI6 Bond sui generis?
A sucker for high adrenaline and dramatic endings, I was however happy with the movie’s end.
The audience is let into the fun much before it dawns upon the leading characters. But then maybe the movie and its characters were antithesis to the Bond genre.
But I think that was the strategy-incremental pleasure!
Duplicity is about two espionage aces who decide to cash on the war between two cosmetic giants. The movie takes you back and forth in time lest you lose the thread of events. And what unfolds is an impressive, cerebral drama.
In the dog eats dog game our corporate spies are engaged in, mutual trust is hard to sustain. Mutually suspicious and ever ready with preemptive moves, they are however not above human frailties of insecurity, loneliness and need for love.
Julia though the scheming bitch is jealous and ready to dump the swindle as Clive Owens justifies seducing other women as part of the game.
Keep your ears open each time Julia and Ownes rendezvous. Their dialogues as they steal away private moments are the wittiest.
The leading actors are perfectly matched. Clive Owens looks handsome and Julia older (I am still hung on to the pretty woman).
I do not know if Julia and Owens have chemistry but Owens confrontation with Julia years after their first meeting is high power. It helps that Julia’s makeup gets better after the heart breaking first scene.
An interesting shot in the movie is the scuffle between the two cosmetic company heads. Shot in slow motion, the scene, which plays along with the credits, beautifully captures the expressions and body languages of the warring men as well as the onlookers.
I would have considered my 100 dollars a little better spent if the action scenes (whatever was there of it) had been better executed. The theft of the formula was a cakewalk.
Agreed the movie cannot be attacked for the trite stealing scene, as it fit in its scheme of events but after laughing at all the implied humour, I expected more from ex-CIA and MI6. Haven’t they heard of James Bond or is MI6 Bond sui generis?
A sucker for high adrenaline and dramatic endings, I was however happy with the movie’s end.
The audience is let into the fun much before it dawns upon the leading characters. But then maybe the movie and its characters were antithesis to the Bond genre.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Today deserves a special mention!
I cooked chicken curry and mushroom paneer matar and if the ratio of gravy to chicken pieces is ignored, the perfectness of the masalas and the look on P’s face made up for the three hours spent sweating in the kitchen and whining over the dough that refused to yield to the belan!
Huh!
The kitchen looked well in control as I successfully dealt with the minor hitch of chicken pieces and the onion/spice paste not letting off water and P was impressed. But his smirk was back in place on his third round as my patience burnt with the rotis.
So how did it turn out?
:) That says it I suppose.
Huh!
The kitchen looked well in control as I successfully dealt with the minor hitch of chicken pieces and the onion/spice paste not letting off water and P was impressed. But his smirk was back in place on his third round as my patience burnt with the rotis.
So how did it turn out?
:) That says it I suppose.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
What I know of Kamla Das
My Grandmother's House
There is a house now far away where once
I received love. That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books.
I was then too young
To read, and, my blood turned cold like the moon.
How often I think of going
There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a broodingDog.
You cannot believe, darling
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved...
I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers' doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?
(The poem for some reason reminds me of The Dark Holds No Terror by Shashi Deshpande)
There is a house now far away where once
I received love. That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved
Among books.
I was then too young
To read, and, my blood turned cold like the moon.
How often I think of going
There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a broodingDog.
You cannot believe, darling
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved...
I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers' doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?
(The poem for some reason reminds me of The Dark Holds No Terror by Shashi Deshpande)
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Gag power
On Tiananmen’s twentieth anniversary, it's fear of public angst boiling into active protest in a cauldron of online mobilisation and propaganda that led to an official blockade of many websites.
In popular lingo, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Huffington Post, Microsoft's Live.com, Hotmail, MSN Space blog tool and search engine Bing (Fox News) were GFWd or great fire walled (WSJ) couple of days before the d-day.
You Tube got the axe recently when a super popular spoof video on government censorship led to million plus hits from around the globe.
Google reportedly had to fall in line with sarkari diktats to be unblocked. Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace too have been at the receiving end at some point of time.
Chinese government’s hassles with the Internet arise from the harm it does to its image and legitimacy. It is a crack that lets in too much of light.
Look at the possibilities-
The unknown and undocumented tragedies of hundred flowers campaign, cultural revolution and the long march would had crashed servers if cheenis had online access back then.
The impact of clips and personal experiences from ground zero on six four flashing on millions of computer screens is unimaginable.
While it is easy to clamp on erring and belligerent reporters, editors and newspapers, the Internet presents a unique dilemma for law enforcers. The plethora of social networking websites, online newspapers and blogs has made pursuit of the non-conformist tough, endless and more technology driven.
Luckily for people living in Hong Kong, ‘freedom of speech’ is still not off limits. Though the local media does toe the government stand, delicate issues are still debated and reported in newspapers and discussed unbridled online.
Hong Kong is the only city in China where wide scale demonstrations and gatherings are allowed and tolerated.
It is this rare privilege which enables Hong Kongers and mainlanders to congregate year after year at Victoria Park in Causeway Bay and light candles in reverence and in defiance of government stand on T.
Last night nearly 150,000 people gathered in Victoria Park. It was overwhelming for someone like me who has grown familiar to everyday cribs of local apathy to social issues. If numbers can speak, the event sent across a very powerful message.
Check this SCMP video of yesterday's vigil:
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.d53bd88267636ee6a3e27910cba0a0a0/?ss=News&s=Video&bcpid=1873859731&bclid=1557820190&bctid=25326003001
It is quite ironic that the shrewd tool of economic development, which the government uses to woo people, restricts its own actions when it comes to governing Hong Kong.
PS:
I worried about chances of any violence or police action as I hung on the fringe of the massive crowd. However to the best of my knowledge no one was manhandled or barred from expressing their views.
Policemen acted like efficient cogs ensuring crowds did not block roads and traffic flowed smoothly. Even at the Causeway MTR station, trains waited an extra two minutes to take in more people.
The only thing I wondered about was how many would had turned up if authorities had cracked down. For me it is a defining point in understanding the power of protest. I read somewhere about some Tiannanmen student leaders who are now settled in the US and run businesses that have investments in China. Is that not a tacit giving in or is it affirmation of the fact that youth’s idealism metamorphoses into cynicism and acceptance of the status quo with age.
It also appears that branding the pro democratic protests as a student unrest is a slight misnomer. Participation and deaths of common people is under represented in popular discourse.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/48304,features,the-tiananmen-square-myth-both-china-and-the-west-distorted-the-truth-about-the-massacre-human-rights-amnesty-deng-xiaoping
I also read about the tanker-man who stood, shopping bags in hand before advancing tanks 20 years ago.
In popular lingo, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Huffington Post, Microsoft's Live.com, Hotmail, MSN Space blog tool and search engine Bing (Fox News) were GFWd or great fire walled (WSJ) couple of days before the d-day.
You Tube got the axe recently when a super popular spoof video on government censorship led to million plus hits from around the globe.
Google reportedly had to fall in line with sarkari diktats to be unblocked. Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace too have been at the receiving end at some point of time.
Chinese government’s hassles with the Internet arise from the harm it does to its image and legitimacy. It is a crack that lets in too much of light.
Look at the possibilities-
The unknown and undocumented tragedies of hundred flowers campaign, cultural revolution and the long march would had crashed servers if cheenis had online access back then.
The impact of clips and personal experiences from ground zero on six four flashing on millions of computer screens is unimaginable.
While it is easy to clamp on erring and belligerent reporters, editors and newspapers, the Internet presents a unique dilemma for law enforcers. The plethora of social networking websites, online newspapers and blogs has made pursuit of the non-conformist tough, endless and more technology driven.
Luckily for people living in Hong Kong, ‘freedom of speech’ is still not off limits. Though the local media does toe the government stand, delicate issues are still debated and reported in newspapers and discussed unbridled online.
Hong Kong is the only city in China where wide scale demonstrations and gatherings are allowed and tolerated.
It is this rare privilege which enables Hong Kongers and mainlanders to congregate year after year at Victoria Park in Causeway Bay and light candles in reverence and in defiance of government stand on T.
Last night nearly 150,000 people gathered in Victoria Park. It was overwhelming for someone like me who has grown familiar to everyday cribs of local apathy to social issues. If numbers can speak, the event sent across a very powerful message.
Check this SCMP video of yesterday's vigil:
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.d53bd88267636ee6a3e27910cba0a0a0/?ss=News&s=Video&bcpid=1873859731&bclid=1557820190&bctid=25326003001
It is quite ironic that the shrewd tool of economic development, which the government uses to woo people, restricts its own actions when it comes to governing Hong Kong.
PS:
I worried about chances of any violence or police action as I hung on the fringe of the massive crowd. However to the best of my knowledge no one was manhandled or barred from expressing their views.
Policemen acted like efficient cogs ensuring crowds did not block roads and traffic flowed smoothly. Even at the Causeway MTR station, trains waited an extra two minutes to take in more people.
The only thing I wondered about was how many would had turned up if authorities had cracked down. For me it is a defining point in understanding the power of protest. I read somewhere about some Tiannanmen student leaders who are now settled in the US and run businesses that have investments in China. Is that not a tacit giving in or is it affirmation of the fact that youth’s idealism metamorphoses into cynicism and acceptance of the status quo with age.
It also appears that branding the pro democratic protests as a student unrest is a slight misnomer. Participation and deaths of common people is under represented in popular discourse.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/48304,features,the-tiananmen-square-myth-both-china-and-the-west-distorted-the-truth-about-the-massacre-human-rights-amnesty-deng-xiaoping
I also read about the tanker-man who stood, shopping bags in hand before advancing tanks 20 years ago.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Duan Wu: May 28
Dragon boat festival or Duan Wu is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese year.
According to Chinese lore, on this day, Qu Yuan, a minister in exile drowned himself when a Qin ruler defeated Emperor Huai of the Jin dynasty.
When Yuan’s body could not be found, local people threw rice, eggs and wine into the river to feed fishes, reptiles and water spirits so they would not feed on his corpse.
Another myth traces the festival’s origin to ancestral worshipping of the dragon by Bai Yue people, the first settlers in the Guangzhou area of China according to Britannica.
For me the festival turned out to be much more hectic than anticipated but high on the fun factor. I went along with a bunch of friends to watch the boat race at Discovery Bay, a picture perfect residential area mainly targeted at expats and high-end income local families.
Watching sea waves break silently against the shore and halos of clouds form around hilltops, it was hard to believe that the place existed just 30 minutes rides from the uber life of the HK island.
I am unsure how a more traditional race would look like but in a city so high strung on the Laissez Faire philosophy, it was interesting to watch people unite into teams and compete.
(Found this blog for pics of the race. There are many more capturing the HK life
http://tdmphoto.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-06-02T17%3A56%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=3 )
A quick Wikipedia search on drummers led to this-
PS:
1. If you remember the terracotta army (from the "Tomb of the Dragon Emperor", the latest in The Mummy series) it was built during the reign of Qin Shi Huang (of the Qin dynasty), the first emperor of a unified or imperial China (Wikipedia)
According to Chinese lore, on this day, Qu Yuan, a minister in exile drowned himself when a Qin ruler defeated Emperor Huai of the Jin dynasty.
When Yuan’s body could not be found, local people threw rice, eggs and wine into the river to feed fishes, reptiles and water spirits so they would not feed on his corpse.
Another myth traces the festival’s origin to ancestral worshipping of the dragon by Bai Yue people, the first settlers in the Guangzhou area of China according to Britannica.
For me the festival turned out to be much more hectic than anticipated but high on the fun factor. I went along with a bunch of friends to watch the boat race at Discovery Bay, a picture perfect residential area mainly targeted at expats and high-end income local families.
Watching sea waves break silently against the shore and halos of clouds form around hilltops, it was hard to believe that the place existed just 30 minutes rides from the uber life of the HK island.
I am unsure how a more traditional race would look like but in a city so high strung on the Laissez Faire philosophy, it was interesting to watch people unite into teams and compete.
(Found this blog for pics of the race. There are many more capturing the HK life
http://tdmphoto.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-06-02T17%3A56%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=3 )
Two strong touches of tradition in the competition that were clearly evident to me were the dragon faces and colourful decorations on boat fronts and drummers perched on the boat edge.
A quick Wikipedia search on drummers led to this-
The drummer or caller may be considered the "heartbeat" of the dragon boat, and leads the crew throughout a race with the rhythmic beating of a drum to indicate the timing and frequency of paddling strokes (that is, the cadence, picking up the pace, slowing the rate, etc.) The caller may issue commands to the crew through a combination of hand signals and voice calls, and also generally exhorts the crew to perform at their peak. A caller/drummer is mandatory during racing events, but if he or she is not present during training, it is typical for the sweep to direct the crew.
PS:
1. If you remember the terracotta army (from the "Tomb of the Dragon Emperor", the latest in The Mummy series) it was built during the reign of Qin Shi Huang (of the Qin dynasty), the first emperor of a unified or imperial China (Wikipedia)
2. Click on the link for some more observations on the festival. Unfortunately I could not eat zong zi, apparently a must have on Duan Wu.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Two sides of everyday life
Last two weeks have been back breaking for me. Apart from my usual work woes, I got back to Yoga and ventured on a weekend to Sham Shui Po to check out SOCO and its child mentorship scheme.
Sham Shui Po among other things is known for its poor mainland immigrant population and cage homes. Once a popular trade centre, it faded out when Hong Kong transformed into an Asian financial centre.
My tryst was an eye opener.
As I like to say, I occupy the road between the prosperous, chic Hong Kong and the slightly jaded, cramped bylanes of TST which lend to the view from the Peak without giving a whiff of the poverty and grime within.
If you ask me what Hong Kong without rouge and shimmer would be, I would first turn to the lures of SOHO, the raucous party-goers in LKF on a weekend, the Hollywood road with its exotica and painfully thin women with fake pouts and fake cleavages, swinging in suicidal heels along the jazzy Pottinger, Wyndham and Wellington streets.
Since I am an Indian expat with blinkers on, I will attempt to shed off my limited knowledge and point further to villas, cottages and buildings atop hills in Stanley and Repulse Bay. And then I will shake my head, glare through my kohl eyes and tell you, if this is not what you see, you might stumble upong the answer my friend.
As I was home on Sunday, I chose to travel to Sham Shui Po via the cross over to the red line at Lai King. I could feel a change in the air, the people, their clothing and their attitudes as soon as I stepped out at Lai King (you can call it my expatty short sightedness and snootiness)
I stepped out of the Sham Shui Po MTR on to the Apliu Street and like all my Eureka reactions to street markets, I smiled and smiled.
The first expected olfactory assault came from meat shops along the Kweilin Street where the SOCO office is located.
As it always happens my attempts to open the rusted door below the faded numberplate 117 failed.
After asking for Lai Shan in five different nasal tones on the phone, the Chinese woman cackling on the other side finally called her. She told me that I was not at the right gate.
After five minutes of frantic searching and braving the drilling gaze of two Indians, I finally found the entrance to 117, Kweilin Street.
A few steps up, I had my first glimpse of life shorn of the Hong Kong glitter.
While in Mumbai, close set doors, peeling plaster, leaking pipes, rotting garbage and a pungent feel in a residential building would have been unsurprising, in Hong Kong it seemed incongruent with the vision one has watching the Symphony of Lights show from the Star Ferry deck.
What’s earth shattering about it you ask?
....On the previous day, if you had happened to stretch and moan in Nike pants and Adidas headband in a swnaky yoga gym in LKF, walked down the escalator cursing Donald Tsang for not making the streets air conditioned, stopped at MIX for orange juice, spent ten endless minutes in the MTR, flashed an empty smile at the effusive security guy, took two minutes to whizz up to your flat, walked into a clean apartment and sipped tea watching the day fade, you may get the hang of it.
....A woman from far inside the room that I was suspiciously eyeing waved to me. It was Lai Shan.
Lai Shan sat hunched in a blood red tunic and frayed jeans, yapping in Mandarin with anxious men and women around.
It was a bedlam! Small kids were running around. Toddlers were screaming their hearts out for mothers crowding around Lai Shan. A young boy was engrossed in playing the piano. In another corner a bored teenager sat with his mouth open watching his father getting a hair cut.
I sat in a corner looking at this slice of life that could have been plucked from anywhere in the world except for the culture, language, physical features and eating habits of its people which made it unique.
Last week I returned to Sham Shui Po to begin my stint as a volunteer to help kids with their english homework. There were no niceties and no introductions.
I walked in and got down to help right away. My first student that day was Vivian, a Chinese girl. She was quite good and except for a few mistakes her homework did not need much correction.
While checking her homework was easy, explaining to her why ‘been’ will be used with ‘had’ in a particular sentence was tough.
Lesson of the day-teaching is not a cakewalk but one of the toughest, most challenging and formidable jobs. To be entrusted with 25-30 kids who depend on you for what they learn, understand and take away in the name of school education is one hell of a responsibility.
I could not explain a lot of things to Vivian. She also had difficulty understanding my Indian accent I think.
I also met this cute and very naughty Pakistani kid who wanted to take me home. He would barge in from time to time and demand, I converse with the ladki in cheeni.
When classes ended, a woman came up to me, held my hands and thanked me. She was Vivian’s mother.
I was touched. Like the scholarship I got in my graduate years, her smile is a treasure I would always be fiercely proud of and happy to have earned.
Reading through what I have written, I realise, all of it might not be making sense. But everything written here has come out the way I saw and felt it.
It was a facet of life that I had never met in my day to day life.
PS:
When I am asked if I like Hong Kong, I usually break into a Mumbai vs. Hong Kong monologue.
Hong Kong may be strides ahead when it comes to infrastructure and amenities but in terms of social security and tackling social issues like poverty, I do not see any difference here.
In Mumbai or for that matter anywhere in India, poverty and squalor are in your face.
While it hits you as an unending sea of sequestered thatched and tin settlements when the plane descends at the Mumbai airport, in Hong Kong you have to pull yourself away from the fireworks and walk the less trodden ways to see it.
Sham Shui Po among other things is known for its poor mainland immigrant population and cage homes. Once a popular trade centre, it faded out when Hong Kong transformed into an Asian financial centre.
My tryst was an eye opener.
As I like to say, I occupy the road between the prosperous, chic Hong Kong and the slightly jaded, cramped bylanes of TST which lend to the view from the Peak without giving a whiff of the poverty and grime within.
If you ask me what Hong Kong without rouge and shimmer would be, I would first turn to the lures of SOHO, the raucous party-goers in LKF on a weekend, the Hollywood road with its exotica and painfully thin women with fake pouts and fake cleavages, swinging in suicidal heels along the jazzy Pottinger, Wyndham and Wellington streets.
Since I am an Indian expat with blinkers on, I will attempt to shed off my limited knowledge and point further to villas, cottages and buildings atop hills in Stanley and Repulse Bay. And then I will shake my head, glare through my kohl eyes and tell you, if this is not what you see, you might stumble upong the answer my friend.
As I was home on Sunday, I chose to travel to Sham Shui Po via the cross over to the red line at Lai King. I could feel a change in the air, the people, their clothing and their attitudes as soon as I stepped out at Lai King (you can call it my expatty short sightedness and snootiness)
I stepped out of the Sham Shui Po MTR on to the Apliu Street and like all my Eureka reactions to street markets, I smiled and smiled.
The first expected olfactory assault came from meat shops along the Kweilin Street where the SOCO office is located.
As it always happens my attempts to open the rusted door below the faded numberplate 117 failed.
After asking for Lai Shan in five different nasal tones on the phone, the Chinese woman cackling on the other side finally called her. She told me that I was not at the right gate.
After five minutes of frantic searching and braving the drilling gaze of two Indians, I finally found the entrance to 117, Kweilin Street.
A few steps up, I had my first glimpse of life shorn of the Hong Kong glitter.
While in Mumbai, close set doors, peeling plaster, leaking pipes, rotting garbage and a pungent feel in a residential building would have been unsurprising, in Hong Kong it seemed incongruent with the vision one has watching the Symphony of Lights show from the Star Ferry deck.
What’s earth shattering about it you ask?
....On the previous day, if you had happened to stretch and moan in Nike pants and Adidas headband in a swnaky yoga gym in LKF, walked down the escalator cursing Donald Tsang for not making the streets air conditioned, stopped at MIX for orange juice, spent ten endless minutes in the MTR, flashed an empty smile at the effusive security guy, took two minutes to whizz up to your flat, walked into a clean apartment and sipped tea watching the day fade, you may get the hang of it.
....A woman from far inside the room that I was suspiciously eyeing waved to me. It was Lai Shan.
Lai Shan sat hunched in a blood red tunic and frayed jeans, yapping in Mandarin with anxious men and women around.
It was a bedlam! Small kids were running around. Toddlers were screaming their hearts out for mothers crowding around Lai Shan. A young boy was engrossed in playing the piano. In another corner a bored teenager sat with his mouth open watching his father getting a hair cut.
I sat in a corner looking at this slice of life that could have been plucked from anywhere in the world except for the culture, language, physical features and eating habits of its people which made it unique.
Last week I returned to Sham Shui Po to begin my stint as a volunteer to help kids with their english homework. There were no niceties and no introductions.
I walked in and got down to help right away. My first student that day was Vivian, a Chinese girl. She was quite good and except for a few mistakes her homework did not need much correction.
While checking her homework was easy, explaining to her why ‘been’ will be used with ‘had’ in a particular sentence was tough.
Lesson of the day-teaching is not a cakewalk but one of the toughest, most challenging and formidable jobs. To be entrusted with 25-30 kids who depend on you for what they learn, understand and take away in the name of school education is one hell of a responsibility.
I could not explain a lot of things to Vivian. She also had difficulty understanding my Indian accent I think.
I also met this cute and very naughty Pakistani kid who wanted to take me home. He would barge in from time to time and demand, I converse with the ladki in cheeni.
When classes ended, a woman came up to me, held my hands and thanked me. She was Vivian’s mother.
I was touched. Like the scholarship I got in my graduate years, her smile is a treasure I would always be fiercely proud of and happy to have earned.
Reading through what I have written, I realise, all of it might not be making sense. But everything written here has come out the way I saw and felt it.
It was a facet of life that I had never met in my day to day life.
PS:
When I am asked if I like Hong Kong, I usually break into a Mumbai vs. Hong Kong monologue.
Hong Kong may be strides ahead when it comes to infrastructure and amenities but in terms of social security and tackling social issues like poverty, I do not see any difference here.
In Mumbai or for that matter anywhere in India, poverty and squalor are in your face.
While it hits you as an unending sea of sequestered thatched and tin settlements when the plane descends at the Mumbai airport, in Hong Kong you have to pull yourself away from the fireworks and walk the less trodden ways to see it.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Rambling
As much as I appreciate Tehelka, this article smacks of sycophancy
http://tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ne300509patience_in.asp
"....In March 2008 — as Mayawati, fresh on the wings of victory, journeyed away from the common man towards rarer and rarer worlds of luxury — he, fresh out of failure, hit the dusty road, meeting small groups of people behind closed doors, out of the eye of the media, asking questions. Tribals, farmers, schoolchildren, fisherfolk, dalits. He went to Orissa and Chhattisgarh, to Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, to UP and Karnataka. Once again, the media mocked him, sneering at his ‘Discover India’ trips, booing his desire for research. (TEHELKA, on the other hand, put Rahul on its cover, calling him “The Long Distance Gambler” exactly a year ago)..."
Please note the last line!
http://tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ne300509patience_in.asp
"....In March 2008 — as Mayawati, fresh on the wings of victory, journeyed away from the common man towards rarer and rarer worlds of luxury — he, fresh out of failure, hit the dusty road, meeting small groups of people behind closed doors, out of the eye of the media, asking questions. Tribals, farmers, schoolchildren, fisherfolk, dalits. He went to Orissa and Chhattisgarh, to Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, to UP and Karnataka. Once again, the media mocked him, sneering at his ‘Discover India’ trips, booing his desire for research. (TEHELKA, on the other hand, put Rahul on its cover, calling him “The Long Distance Gambler” exactly a year ago)..."
Please note the last line!
Monday, May 25, 2009
Some post election oft repeated musings
In the nineties when Mayawati became the UP chief minister, everyone said, big and small criminals are fleeing from the state. It was awesome that a woman could inspire such panic among the underworld glitterati.
It turns out that the state head demanded a significant portion of every pie being cooked by hook or crook in the state. She believed in equality and in sparing no one.
In 2007 a famous Mumbai based business man who started a chain of fresh vegetable stores had to close shop after stubborn refusal to pay hafta to madame led to protests and demonstrations by farmers across UP.
It was inexplicable why farmers would let go such an opportunity. The business chain would have sooner or later sourced its supply from the state’s farmers. Apparently during a bumper crop season, much of the produce rots or has to be sold off dirt-cheap. It would have been a win-win situation if middle men could have been dispensed with.
The same year Madame M paid 15 crores in advance tax. Source of income was reported as liberal donations from party supporters. It was while extorting money to keep the donations flowing that a government official lost his life at the hands of BSP party workers in 2008. The incident caused many ripples in the tepid Gomti but it all faded with time like the Taj heritage corridor controversy.
It was all muted with the help of money, political leverage and muscle power.
Dalit ki beti fuelled by the power of lower caste vote bank was living up to the maxim-power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Politically she had engineered an unbelievable feat but as a leader she had gone berserk.
If you look at the government-sponsored mutilation of Lucknow in the last three to four years, you will understand why calling her berserk may not be off the mark.
Reportedly many long standing buildings were demolished in the Mall Avenue area in Lucknow last year to make way for Mayawati’s visionary projects.
Madame also unhappy with the gargantuan Ambedkar smarak, decided to raze it down and re build it from scratch in name of Dalit upliftment. The cost of its reconstruction has been thousands of crores of public money and destruction of one of the most beautiful and green belts adjoining the Gomti.
It was a pleasure once to drive down the ring road flanked by the river and the white and serene Taj hotel. Taj gardens adjoining the hotel were one of the best places for morning walks and a breath full of nature.
A part of the garden was severed off to make way for a state guesthouse. Nowadays one has to drive or walk through a grimy, stone littered and broken road to reach the gardens.
The latest turn of Madame’s imagination that led to fresh mutilation was her wish to adorn every prominent nook in the city with her and Kanshiram’s life sized statues. It has become a lore how she ordered her earlier statues to be removed as they projected her meeker and less powerful than Kanshiram.
According to telephone gossip, in the initial installations, her statues had been placed a step or two behind Kanshiram. The gross negligence that pierced Madame’s mega ego was corrected in no time. Her statues now battle the summer heat, bird droppings and passer by jokes shoulder to shoulder with Kanshiram.
This is modernisation and this is Lucknow-symbol of the politically awakened millions of downtrodden.
Every year when I go back, I see another road dug out. While people die through heat and cold waved, road to the Amausi airport is being frilled up with granite. My father says roads have improved. True, but it is akin to plastering a broken leg without setting the bone right.
A fly over being constructed near my home collapsed last year, killing many people who sought shelter from the heat and came to the makeshift bus stand to catch buses to adjoining towns.
It hurts when tragedy makes a close call. My sister used to take a rickshaw home from near that very bridge every day...
Such waiting-to-happen tragedies are minor for well read and educated young men and women who compare Mayawati to Obama with elan. WTF!
The fascination comes from the fact that a woman from the downtrodden ranks rose to rule a state that sends the maximum number of MPs to Lok Sabha. And to add spice her strike man happens to be a Pandit.
It was such admiration and unbridled power that led the UP chief minister to believe she can conquer New Delhi too. That explains why BSP contested 500 out of 543 seats this election.
The outcome has for the time being squashed her dreams to rule from the Race Course.
And I am so glad that those who voted for her earlier chose not to support her this time and all those who never voted chose to vote ensuring that those against Mayawati outnumbered those who supported her.
I have nothing against caste and religion politics. Although divisive, I would rant less if it fulfils its promises of development (they cause damage either ways).
From the days when seniors did their best to instil Hindutva and caste based hysteria into me till today when I watch politicians and activists abusing political power in name of justice, religion, right and wrong, I have heard nothing beyond propaganda. Post public display of outrage, it leads to nothing.
I would not be surprised if the current election verdict proves to be an aberration and Madame is back in business after five years.
To ensure that warring parties never war so far that divided voters rush back bawling to Madame, I pray that let there be no peace in the hearts of ambitious politicians, let none fall weak to behen ji’s charms and may all Laloos find a Nitish to wrestle.
May the middle finger (with the blue ink) prevail!
It turns out that the state head demanded a significant portion of every pie being cooked by hook or crook in the state. She believed in equality and in sparing no one.
In 2007 a famous Mumbai based business man who started a chain of fresh vegetable stores had to close shop after stubborn refusal to pay hafta to madame led to protests and demonstrations by farmers across UP.
It was inexplicable why farmers would let go such an opportunity. The business chain would have sooner or later sourced its supply from the state’s farmers. Apparently during a bumper crop season, much of the produce rots or has to be sold off dirt-cheap. It would have been a win-win situation if middle men could have been dispensed with.
The same year Madame M paid 15 crores in advance tax. Source of income was reported as liberal donations from party supporters. It was while extorting money to keep the donations flowing that a government official lost his life at the hands of BSP party workers in 2008. The incident caused many ripples in the tepid Gomti but it all faded with time like the Taj heritage corridor controversy.
It was all muted with the help of money, political leverage and muscle power.
Dalit ki beti fuelled by the power of lower caste vote bank was living up to the maxim-power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Politically she had engineered an unbelievable feat but as a leader she had gone berserk.
If you look at the government-sponsored mutilation of Lucknow in the last three to four years, you will understand why calling her berserk may not be off the mark.
Reportedly many long standing buildings were demolished in the Mall Avenue area in Lucknow last year to make way for Mayawati’s visionary projects.
Madame also unhappy with the gargantuan Ambedkar smarak, decided to raze it down and re build it from scratch in name of Dalit upliftment. The cost of its reconstruction has been thousands of crores of public money and destruction of one of the most beautiful and green belts adjoining the Gomti.
It was a pleasure once to drive down the ring road flanked by the river and the white and serene Taj hotel. Taj gardens adjoining the hotel were one of the best places for morning walks and a breath full of nature.
A part of the garden was severed off to make way for a state guesthouse. Nowadays one has to drive or walk through a grimy, stone littered and broken road to reach the gardens.
The latest turn of Madame’s imagination that led to fresh mutilation was her wish to adorn every prominent nook in the city with her and Kanshiram’s life sized statues. It has become a lore how she ordered her earlier statues to be removed as they projected her meeker and less powerful than Kanshiram.
According to telephone gossip, in the initial installations, her statues had been placed a step or two behind Kanshiram. The gross negligence that pierced Madame’s mega ego was corrected in no time. Her statues now battle the summer heat, bird droppings and passer by jokes shoulder to shoulder with Kanshiram.
This is modernisation and this is Lucknow-symbol of the politically awakened millions of downtrodden.
Every year when I go back, I see another road dug out. While people die through heat and cold waved, road to the Amausi airport is being frilled up with granite. My father says roads have improved. True, but it is akin to plastering a broken leg without setting the bone right.
A fly over being constructed near my home collapsed last year, killing many people who sought shelter from the heat and came to the makeshift bus stand to catch buses to adjoining towns.
It hurts when tragedy makes a close call. My sister used to take a rickshaw home from near that very bridge every day...
Such waiting-to-happen tragedies are minor for well read and educated young men and women who compare Mayawati to Obama with elan. WTF!
The fascination comes from the fact that a woman from the downtrodden ranks rose to rule a state that sends the maximum number of MPs to Lok Sabha. And to add spice her strike man happens to be a Pandit.
It was such admiration and unbridled power that led the UP chief minister to believe she can conquer New Delhi too. That explains why BSP contested 500 out of 543 seats this election.
The outcome has for the time being squashed her dreams to rule from the Race Course.
And I am so glad that those who voted for her earlier chose not to support her this time and all those who never voted chose to vote ensuring that those against Mayawati outnumbered those who supported her.
I have nothing against caste and religion politics. Although divisive, I would rant less if it fulfils its promises of development (they cause damage either ways).
From the days when seniors did their best to instil Hindutva and caste based hysteria into me till today when I watch politicians and activists abusing political power in name of justice, religion, right and wrong, I have heard nothing beyond propaganda. Post public display of outrage, it leads to nothing.
I would not be surprised if the current election verdict proves to be an aberration and Madame is back in business after five years.
To ensure that warring parties never war so far that divided voters rush back bawling to Madame, I pray that let there be no peace in the hearts of ambitious politicians, let none fall weak to behen ji’s charms and may all Laloos find a Nitish to wrestle.
May the middle finger (with the blue ink) prevail!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
That thing about Mommmmyyyyyyy…………
I cannot live with her and I can’t live without her. Mom leaves this weekend and despite my resolve to not pour out my personal feelings on the blog, I can think of no where else to relieve myself of the grief that is building inside.
Everytime I meet my mom, I realise how far I have come from being my mommy’s girl. From that day when I would sulk over her choice of ankle length skirts for me to last weekend when she fished out a knee length skirt from the shop rack and said, "now try this" we girls have weathered a lot of stormy nights and clash of egos.
The simmering angst of the teenage days no longer causes us to cross swords. It is easy to talk to her about frustrations, personal problems, crack jokes and sometimes I almost see her less as a mom and more of a friend.
Cooking is no more a sacrosanct ritual. I no more look wide-eyed as she churns dishes after dishes instead I protest and sulk when she pours all her love in tablespoons of oil and chilli powder.
But I am sure the patience which she shows when I chose to act adult will evaporate and all my pink tinted feelings will be squashed if we decide to live under the same roof.
She is there smiling as I have always known her to when I come back from work.
And it reminds me of the day when I decided to act very grown up and go out with friends without telling her. When I came back quite late she was there peeping from behind the plants in the balcony, carving another wrinkle of worry on her forehead.
And yet with all that we have gained as a mother and daughter, I see the anguish in her eyes of letting me go. Of no more being able to hold my hand and walk on.
She cries very easily now. And I can feel the frailties of old age setting in. Yet she does all she can to smoothen out my life a bit.
I will miss her madly when she goes back.
And I will think again about the wisdom of worldly success at the cost of separation from parents.
Watching her strengthens my intention to return to India.
My husband may earn many thousands less, we may miss out on phoren life, our children might not grow up in a foreign land and get instant access to ivy education but I hope that they get the most important thing in life-love
Everytime I meet my mom, I realise how far I have come from being my mommy’s girl. From that day when I would sulk over her choice of ankle length skirts for me to last weekend when she fished out a knee length skirt from the shop rack and said, "now try this" we girls have weathered a lot of stormy nights and clash of egos.
The simmering angst of the teenage days no longer causes us to cross swords. It is easy to talk to her about frustrations, personal problems, crack jokes and sometimes I almost see her less as a mom and more of a friend.
Cooking is no more a sacrosanct ritual. I no more look wide-eyed as she churns dishes after dishes instead I protest and sulk when she pours all her love in tablespoons of oil and chilli powder.
But I am sure the patience which she shows when I chose to act adult will evaporate and all my pink tinted feelings will be squashed if we decide to live under the same roof.
She is there smiling as I have always known her to when I come back from work.
And it reminds me of the day when I decided to act very grown up and go out with friends without telling her. When I came back quite late she was there peeping from behind the plants in the balcony, carving another wrinkle of worry on her forehead.
And yet with all that we have gained as a mother and daughter, I see the anguish in her eyes of letting me go. Of no more being able to hold my hand and walk on.
She cries very easily now. And I can feel the frailties of old age setting in. Yet she does all she can to smoothen out my life a bit.
I will miss her madly when she goes back.
And I will think again about the wisdom of worldly success at the cost of separation from parents.
Watching her strengthens my intention to return to India.
My husband may earn many thousands less, we may miss out on phoren life, our children might not grow up in a foreign land and get instant access to ivy education but I hope that they get the most important thing in life-love
Monday, April 20, 2009
Red politics
China will up its aid to Nepal by 50 per cent. That is whopping and snooty considering Nepal was once under India’s sphere of influence.
I say ‘once’ because I do not know if Indians call the shots anymore now that the red brigade has taken over in Nepal.
India found itself in a fix when Maoists won a majority in Nepal. Common sense read foreign policy concerns, dictate that dear Surd and Aunty Sonia should have extended the olive branch at once. Not that there was a dearth of people to send feelers. If the royals could have acted as state messengers in the past, Congress party’s biggest asset was the CPI (M).
Though Yechury was quite active as a member of the coalition government on bridging the gap with Nepal Maoists, I do not recall much on the Indian government being able to adopt a clear and concrete stand on Nepal and Maoists.
My point is, if the Congress had no qualms to accept the commies’ support to form a government what was the hesitation to talk to Prachanda in Nepal.
Think about it.
If ideologies poses no bar in forging domestic alliances why do they create a barrier on the international front.
India supported the status quo in Nepal and was against royals being plucked out of the Nepalese social fabric. But the truth is they were and it was time to do business with Maoists. Is it not dealing with the Myanmar Junta despite its paeans on democracy?
When it comes to India vs. China, it is more about who paws the maximum space in least time. Chinese wooed Burma while Indians struggled to strike an optimal stand on the Junta government.
Africa fell head over heels for China’s overtures, India watched from the fringes. India turned West but Iran was tough to tackle. Chinese had already made inroads in Central Asia.
Coming back to the issue, why has the presence of the Left in the Centre not been used to woo the Maoists in Nepal or to resolve the domestic Naxalite problem for that matter?
(Ok, Naxalites are CPI (ML) but there are there no umbilical connections despite ideological dissimilarities)
Why has the Left in India not been proactive to counter the Chinese carrots to Nepal?
Without getting into the rut of Indian communist allegiance to China, why have the brilliant comrades not been vocal on anything except the nuclear issue?
Indian politics has seen some of the weirdest strategic combinations. However the shrewdness is lacking when it comes to foreign policy and critical domestic issues.
Nepal is too close a punch. Wake up!
I say ‘once’ because I do not know if Indians call the shots anymore now that the red brigade has taken over in Nepal.
India found itself in a fix when Maoists won a majority in Nepal. Common sense read foreign policy concerns, dictate that dear Surd and Aunty Sonia should have extended the olive branch at once. Not that there was a dearth of people to send feelers. If the royals could have acted as state messengers in the past, Congress party’s biggest asset was the CPI (M).
Though Yechury was quite active as a member of the coalition government on bridging the gap with Nepal Maoists, I do not recall much on the Indian government being able to adopt a clear and concrete stand on Nepal and Maoists.
My point is, if the Congress had no qualms to accept the commies’ support to form a government what was the hesitation to talk to Prachanda in Nepal.
Think about it.
If ideologies poses no bar in forging domestic alliances why do they create a barrier on the international front.
India supported the status quo in Nepal and was against royals being plucked out of the Nepalese social fabric. But the truth is they were and it was time to do business with Maoists. Is it not dealing with the Myanmar Junta despite its paeans on democracy?
When it comes to India vs. China, it is more about who paws the maximum space in least time. Chinese wooed Burma while Indians struggled to strike an optimal stand on the Junta government.
Africa fell head over heels for China’s overtures, India watched from the fringes. India turned West but Iran was tough to tackle. Chinese had already made inroads in Central Asia.
Coming back to the issue, why has the presence of the Left in the Centre not been used to woo the Maoists in Nepal or to resolve the domestic Naxalite problem for that matter?
(Ok, Naxalites are CPI (ML) but there are there no umbilical connections despite ideological dissimilarities)
Why has the Left in India not been proactive to counter the Chinese carrots to Nepal?
Without getting into the rut of Indian communist allegiance to China, why have the brilliant comrades not been vocal on anything except the nuclear issue?
Indian politics has seen some of the weirdest strategic combinations. However the shrewdness is lacking when it comes to foreign policy and critical domestic issues.
Nepal is too close a punch. Wake up!
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Politics of assitance
Two pieces of news that caught my attention:
First, Friends of Pakistan have pledged (Japan and the US have promised US$ one billion each, Saudi Arabia-US$700 million, the EU -$640 million) financial assistance to Pakistan to help it deal with its financial crisis and tackle the worsening Islamic militancy problem.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993772553428271.html
Mr Zardari recently agreed to let the SWAT valley confirm to Taliban diktats in a bid to ensure peace on Pakistan’s western front. Does Mrs Benazir Bhutto ever think if Talibans had decided to mete special treatment to Pakistan 20 years earlier, he and his wife may never have been at the helm of PPP politics?
I understand that an economically failed Pakistan is more lethal but Mr Obama what is the wisdom here? Seems we may have to wait for Hillary Clinton to pen down her memoirs for an insight into the faustian deals stuck under the table.
Second, Chinese delegates have blocked an Asian Development Bank proposal to lend US$ 60 million to India for development in Arunachal Pradesh.
http://www.visitchn.com/2009/04/china-blocks-adb-india-loan-plan.html
Ye intehaan ki ghadi hai, ek taraf desh prem doosri taraf namak ka karz. Mai chup rahungi!
PS: The financial crisis has given a golden opportunity to China to legitimise its stake to super power status (I am unsure if militarily China is a superpower)
It has also added to the hurdles, India will have to overcome before it can claim a similar clout on the world stage.
First, Friends of Pakistan have pledged (Japan and the US have promised US$ one billion each, Saudi Arabia-US$700 million, the EU -$640 million) financial assistance to Pakistan to help it deal with its financial crisis and tackle the worsening Islamic militancy problem.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993772553428271.html
Mr Zardari recently agreed to let the SWAT valley confirm to Taliban diktats in a bid to ensure peace on Pakistan’s western front. Does Mrs Benazir Bhutto ever think if Talibans had decided to mete special treatment to Pakistan 20 years earlier, he and his wife may never have been at the helm of PPP politics?
I understand that an economically failed Pakistan is more lethal but Mr Obama what is the wisdom here? Seems we may have to wait for Hillary Clinton to pen down her memoirs for an insight into the faustian deals stuck under the table.
Second, Chinese delegates have blocked an Asian Development Bank proposal to lend US$ 60 million to India for development in Arunachal Pradesh.
http://www.visitchn.com/2009/04/china-blocks-adb-india-loan-plan.html
Ye intehaan ki ghadi hai, ek taraf desh prem doosri taraf namak ka karz. Mai chup rahungi!
PS: The financial crisis has given a golden opportunity to China to legitimise its stake to super power status (I am unsure if militarily China is a superpower)
It has also added to the hurdles, India will have to overcome before it can claim a similar clout on the world stage.
Friday, April 3, 2009
An account of an alleged female suicide bomber
I have a good or bad habit of googling names of people I knew. Reading the NewYorker, I came across a name, Bashrat Peer whom I remember vaguely from the university days. I never knew him as a friend but knew that he was a Kashmiri and a journalist. The article mentioned, he has written a book on Kashmir. I googled his name and came across a story he had written about an alleged female suicide bomber who died when bombs strapped to her body got triggered off accidentally-
The bride with a bomb
Yasmeena Akhter is claimed by Kashmir militants as a suicide bomber and a martyr. But was she? Basharat Peer pieces together the story of a young militant and her dangerous love affair
Basharat Peer
The Guardian, Saturday 5 August 2006
Five days after the earthquake struck Kashmir in October last year, Ghulam Nabi sat in his shop in the south Kashmir town of Avantipura looking out at the highway that connects the Kashmir Valley to the Indian plains. Today, as every day, he saw hundreds of Indian military vehicles drive past. A hundred metres or so from his shop stands the local headquarters of the anti-insurgency wing of the Kashmir Police, and beyond that an Indian army camp.
Some of the most lethal attacks on Indian troops in the past few years have happened on this highway. It is an area dense with military and militants. That morning Nabi noticed even more soldiers and armed policemen on patrol than usual. An inspector general was visiting the police HQ and he wondered if a militant attack was expected. But, mostly, Nabi's thoughts were with the earthquake victims on both sides of the Line of Control, the temporary border dividing Kashmir into parts controlled by India and Pakistan.
Political discontent has simmered in the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir since partition in 1947 - the more so in latter years as Kashmiri rights and autonomy were eroded. Wars, several insurgencies, and countless political manoeuvres have failed to settle the issue of the "ownership" of Kashmir, and since the mid-1990s the rebellion has taken on a more jihadi, pro-Pakistan aspect; secular Kashmiri separatist groups that have laid down their arms have been overshadowed. Peace talks between India and Pakistan have made little progress and death remains a constant visitor.
At about 10.30am, Nabi heard a deafening explosion and saw a dark cloud of smoke rising. He pulled down the shop's iron shutters and lay on the floor. He expected gunfire - instead he heard a crowd outside. Scores of policemen, soldiers and civilians were rushing towards the house behind his shop. The explosion had shattered the windows of the house and a boundary wall. The vegetable garden in front of the house was covered with shards of glass and blood.
The crowd talked about a fidayeen, or suicide bomber, who had accidentally triggered off the explosives before the attack. "I saw parts of legs torn from the knees, shredded intestines and then I saw a part of the skull and a long braid of black hair. It was hard to believe. But it was a girl." Nabi's face contorted in horror as we talked in his shop eight months later.
After the blast, a spokesperson of the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed - which is believed to have carried out the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 - phoned the BBC's office in Srinagar and claimed responsibility. The caller told the BBC that the dead woman was Yasmeena Akhter, a member of Jaish's Banaat-e-Ayesha (Daughters of Ayesha, the wife of Prophet Mohammed) regiment. He claimed that she was their first female suicide bomber, that she had attacked an Indian army convoy and had killed six soldiers.
Militant groups routinely claim responsibility for attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir and give exaggerated accounts of casualties. In fact, Yasmeena was the only casualty of the explosion. By the mid-June afternoon when I met Nabi and other townspeople in Avantipura, the 22-year-old Yasmeena and her last moments had already become myth. Some said that she had been begging in the marketplace and planned to enter the police and paramilitary camp as a beggar woman. Others told me that she saw a group of soldiers frisking men and women on the highway, escaped into the lane, and a few seconds later the bomb exploded. It went off outside the house of Ghulam Mohammed, a retired government officer: he told me he'd been asleep at the time and thought the earthquake had struck again. His son pointed towards a poplar rising over the rebuilt boundary wall - it was still covered with a thick layer of soot.
I walked to the police and paramilitary HQ, ringed with razor wire and heavily guarded. Some officers believe their camp was Yasmeena's target and the explosives went off accidentally. At the blast site they had found three live hand grenades and pieces of a torn combat pouch - a belt with big pockets, that's tied around the chest. "A person wearing a body belt tends to itch and adjust it frequently," said Mumtaz Ahmad, a police superintendent, by way of explanation.
At the district court in Pulwama, 20 miles away, a clerk showed me the records of the investigation and pictures of the explosion. The file describes Yasmeena as a girl who "wore explosives on her body for the purpose of a terrorist suicide attack aimed at hurting the security forces and the police. She killed herself when the explosives went off accidentally near the Avantipura police headquarters." I looked at the pictures: a dust-covered shoe on a leg torn away at the thigh; lifeless eyes staring out of the partial remains of the face; remnants of her body placed in a white cotton shroud.
Women combatants are not part of Kashmiri tradition. Reporting on Kashmir, I have met several women who have suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Indian troops and police officers, as well as the Kashmiri and Pakistani militants fighting them. The latest of such brutalities came to public attention in May this year when it was revealed that scores of teenage girls and young women had been blackmailed into becoming "comfort women" for politicians, police and bureaucrats.
The girls had been lured by interviews for government jobs; they were raped after being given sedatives with tea and filmed. Following determined protests by Kashmiris, the Indian government ordered an investigation and many leading figures in the administration were arrested. But no female victim has chosen violent means to seek revenge; instead, they have tried, with resignation, to rebuild their lives.
I wondered what motivated Yasmeena. Was she really a suicide bomber? I drove to Samboora, her native village half an hour from Avantipura, to find her mother and the people who had known her when she was growing up. The village, a cluster of old mud brick dwellings and new baked brick and concrete houses, stretches between a plateau of saffron and paddy fields. Rows of women and men were planting paddy seedlings in the fields and singing traditional love songs. On the verandah of an austere brick house near the fields, a woman pruned vegetables in a wicker basket. This was Mughli, Yasmeena's mother. Yasmeena was the third of her four daughters. She and her husband Yusuf farmed and, after the agricultural season, Yusuf worked as a carpenter. When the armed rebellion against Indian rule began in 1990, their austere but contented lives began to change.
Separatist militants had a big presence in Samboora village - Yusuf became enamoured and joined them, Mughli told me. In 1993, he was arrested by Indian troops and taken away. Mughli supported her daughters, working as a daily-wage labourer in the village fields and spinning wool. Yasmeena was 10 and her sister, Roheena, 12. During the three years Yusuf was in prison, the Indian army began funding a group of counter-insurgent militants called Ikhwanis, who murdered anyone they suspected of being sympathetic to the separatist militants.
One of the most notorious, Papa Kishtwari, operated in the Samboora area. "He sent a letter to Yusuf ordering him to work in his house as a carpenter," Mughli recalled. Yusuf complied and in return Kishtwari escorted Yusuf to the local sufi shrine, the social centre of the village, where they would be sure to be seen together. Villagers and militants from the biggest Kashmiri group, Hizbul Mujahideen, began seeing Yusuf as a collaborator. Young men with guns began lurking near their house, and when Mughli saw them off with an axe, letters containing death threats followed. And so did raids by Indian troops and counter-insurgency police, who routinely pursue militants released from prison and keep the pressure on them to provide information about their militant associates.
The family lived an uneasy, anxiety-filled life. Yasmeena and Roheena dropped out of school in the late 1990s. In early 2002, Yusuf was abducted by unknown gunmen and found tortured and bleeding almost to death in the saffron fields near his village. Yasmeena and Mughli carried him to a Srinagar hospital and spent the next few months nursing him.
On his return from hospital, Yusuf looked to the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, for help. A commander of the group, Abu Hafiz, and his bodyguard, Adnan, offered Yusuf protection if he built an underground hideout in his house where they could live. Yusuf agreed to the barter, and the two moved in.
"Hafiz was against any romantic involvement with the women of the family sheltering them, but Adnan was attracted to Yasmeena," said a senior Kashmir police officer, who followed the family for years. Around a year later, Hafiz was killed in a gun battle with Indian troops. Adnan stayed on in the hideout. His romance with Yasmeena continued and they married in September 2004. "A secret marriage was performed without any social ceremony. Our informers saw Yasmeena and Adnan together at various places. She began helping him with transporting explosives and weapons," said the officer, whom Mughli had described as a "decent" man.
Still a target for the authorities, Yusuf left home and began living as a fugitive with Pakistani militants. "Mother and I would be scared but Yasmeena looked the soldiers and policemen in the eye and shouted that we did not know where Father was," said Roheena, now aged 24. In December 2004, a few months after Yasmeena and Adnan married, a joint team of the Indian army and a police special operations group raided her house. The underground hideout was discovered; explosives and ammunition recovered. "They broke the window panes, pulled apart the doors and dug up the house. They abused and beat us up and interrogated Yasmeena throughout the day. That evening she left home and never returned," said Roheena.
Roheena was suspicious and fearful of the repercussions of what she might say - the conflict has made Kashmir a paranoid valley - but she did add: "Yasmeena was afraid that the army and the police would come again. We realised that she had joined the militants."
"She just left and never came back," said Mughli, breaking down and crying inconsolably. There was no search, no contacting of relatives - they knew she must be with her husband Adnan.
Mughli and Roheena clammed up when I mentioned Yasmeena's marriage. Many villagers had mentioned the humiliation of the family after rumours and gossip about Yasmeena's affair with a militant. How could a girl marry a man who was bound to be killed or arrested sooner or later?
She was not the first. I thought of Asiya Andrabi, who had married a militant commander, now in prison. She founded and heads the puritanical Islamist women's group Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Muslim Community), that supports the armed militancy and ran a failed campaign to make Kashmiri women wear veils in 1990. Andrabi resurfaced in the public sphere in the summer of 2004, when she and her activists harassed young couples catching a few moments of intimacy in the claustrophobic cabins of internet cafes or sharing lunch in dimly-lit restaurants.
In newspaper photographs, Andrabi looked like a female Zorro, a veiled woman raising fists covered in white gloves. She had become a born-again Muslim in 1986, a time when she'd been feeling depressed and thwarted because her family forbade her from pursuing postgraduate studies in biochemistry in the distant Indian city of Pune. I met her in her Srinagar house in mid-June; she was barely four and a half feet tall and covered in her signature veil from head to toe. Andrabi was not surprised by Yasmeena's decision to marry an Islamic militant from Pakistan, and considered it an honour for any Kashmiri woman to do so.
I was sceptical whether Yasmeena would have shared Andrabi's viewpoint. Yasmeena's mother Mughli and sister Roheena didn't wear a veil or seem to espouse Andrabi's zealous attitude towards Islam. When I first visited, the family invited me for tea inside their tiny kitchen-cum-living room. I was struck by a framed picture hanging above their television set. "It is the only picture of Yasmeena left with us," said Roheena. A girl with stern black eyes stared from the brightly tinted collage, a thick lock of hair falling on her right cheek, in the style of a Bollywood actress.
On my way back I met Inspector Manzoor Lone, the police officer heading the counter-insurgency operations around Yasmeena's village. He had just returned to his fortess-like office in Pampore town after a gun battle in which two militants were killed. On a chart pasted on a wall in his office, the names of the slain militants are crossed out in red ink. Lone had raided Yasmeena's house on various occasions. "I don't think she was an ideologically motivated militant. It was simply a love story," he said.
Even Asiya Andrabi opposed the involvement of women in militancy. She argued that Islam did not allow women to be combatants, especially suicide bombers. "It is against the dignity of a Muslim woman that the parts of her body be strewn in a public place. If a combatant or a suicide bomber is a woman, her dead body is bound to fall or be scattered in a place full of men," she told me. She supported suicide bombing by men; her objection to suicide attacks by women seemed to rest on the notion that a woman's modesty must be preserved even in death.
Andrabi was critical of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed for allowing Yasmeena to play an active role. "They use girls as couriers for explosives because girls can easily pass through check posts. I think Yasmeena was a courier and the explosives went off accidentally. Later, they glorified her death and claimed her as a suicide bomber. It was shocking for me," she said. Strangely, some senior officers in the counter-insurgency police agreed with her assessment. In another rare accord, both Jaish-e-Mohammed and police records in the district court described Yasmeena as a suicide bomber. Who was right? Was an explosion planned or was Yasmeena a courier so desperate to avoid detection that she had strapped the lethal cargo to her chest?
I went back to the police officers who had followed the tragic journey of her fa~mily.
Some months after the December 2004 raid on Yasmeena's house, her husband Adnan had been arrested by police in the Indian capital, New Delhi. "He was in Delhi to receive cash for his group from a contact. The contact had already been arrested by the Delhi police and had called Adnan at their behest. After Adnan was tortured, he provided us with information about his militant group.
With his help, we were able to arrest and kill a number of militants in southern Kashmir, where he used to operate," said a senior officer. How would a 21-year-old girl, who had married a militant, joined his organisation, and lived the life of a fugitive, react to her husband's arrest and the prospect of him spending an unknown number of years in some Indian prison, or a brief report describing his death under police fire while trying to "escape"?
In the overworked Psychiatric Diseases Hospital of Srinagar, I met Mushtaq Margoob, the foremost psychiatrist of Kashmir, who has spent the past 16 years - all the years of Kashmir's armed conflict - treating people with post-traumatic stress. In his research on post-conflict suicide, he found that the age group most inclined towards suicide was 20-25. "Leaving home and working as a militant, Yasmeena would have lived with the constant fear of a raid by troops.
She and her husband and others of the group would have constantly changed hideouts. It's bound to lead to severe adjustment problems," he said. Yasmeena's father had been in prison when she was an adolescent, and she had married a militant at 20. "A girl like Yasmeena, who lacked paternal love, would have had a strong emotional attachment to her husband. And if he was arrested and she continued to be a militant without any emotional support or security, she was bound to become suicidal," Margoob added.
Was being a suicide bomber or a courier of explosives (which also exposes one to the risk of certain death at the smallest mistake), the only way out for Yasmeena? Could she not have surrendered, spent some time in jail, and returned to lead a "normal" life in her village?
I recalled Firdausa, a girl from the south Kashmir town of Shopian, who loved and secretly married a Pakistani militant. They tried leaving for Pakistan after securing fake Indian passports, but were arrested by the police in January 2006 after the news of their marriage spread. Firdausa was released after a month and returned to live with her parents in Shopian town, around 50km south of Srinagar. Most people I met in Shopian advised me against meeting her. "Militants still visit her place and you never know when the army raids," said Rashid, an elderly teacher. He was uncomfortable with a Kashmiri girl marrying a Pakistani militant who might have chosen to call Kashmir his war but was not accepted as part of Kashmiri society.
The younger men I met were harsher. "If a Pakistani militant dies in a battle with Indian troops, we would give him a Muslim burial, but he is not one of us. Firdausa has come back to live with her parents, but our town sees her as a wayward woman, a prostitute. No man here will be ready to marry her," said Manzoor Ahmad, a young student. Firdausa's town, Shopian, and Yasmeena's village, Samboora, are an hour apart and alike in all respects. It seemed unlikely that Yasmeena would have been able to return to a normal life.
I revisited Yasmeena's family to inquire whether she had talked about being a militant. This time I met her mother Mughli and Yasmeena's eldest sister, who is married and lives in a distant village. "She never visited me at my in-laws' place as we live near an army camp," the sister said. I was struck when she told me her husband was a soldier in the Indian army, which is rare among Kashmiris. It seemed all the stranger considering two family members, father and daughter, were militants. "Her husband joined the army because that was the only job available, and we got them married because he is my brother's son," Mughli explained.
I asked her whether Yasmeena talked about martyrdom after the troops raided their house, when her father was in prison or when he was forced to work for counter-insurgents. "No! Never! She did the household chores and worked in the fields. She loved eating, attended all marriages we were invited to, and sang marriage songs. She never spoke about wanting to fight or being a martyr." Mughli held my arm and broke down. "I will tell you why she died like that," she said, pausing between sobs. "A martyr's death was the only honourable option for my daughter. Thousands came here to congratulate me on her martyrdom." Then she fell silent and sobbed.
I walked to the local graveyard on the main road, where around 20 people killed in the conflict were buried. The marble tombstones had names of the dead, dates of their deaths, and verses expressing longing for independence from India, calligraphed in different styles. In a corner I found Yasmeena's grave; someone had showered rose petals around it. I was struck by the verse on her tombstone:
This generous soil sheltered me
After the suspicions of a heartless world
The lament against the censure of a conservative rural society spoke of the despair of a young woman whose tragic family history and reckless heart had pushed her into dangerous militant terrain, and further. Standing beside her grave I watched a torrent of young girls rush out of the school adjacent to the graveyard and head home along the dusty road. Seven years back Yasmeena had been one of them. I hoped that none of them ever has a life like hers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/05/pakistan.weekend7
The bride with a bomb
Yasmeena Akhter is claimed by Kashmir militants as a suicide bomber and a martyr. But was she? Basharat Peer pieces together the story of a young militant and her dangerous love affair
Basharat Peer
The Guardian, Saturday 5 August 2006
Five days after the earthquake struck Kashmir in October last year, Ghulam Nabi sat in his shop in the south Kashmir town of Avantipura looking out at the highway that connects the Kashmir Valley to the Indian plains. Today, as every day, he saw hundreds of Indian military vehicles drive past. A hundred metres or so from his shop stands the local headquarters of the anti-insurgency wing of the Kashmir Police, and beyond that an Indian army camp.
Some of the most lethal attacks on Indian troops in the past few years have happened on this highway. It is an area dense with military and militants. That morning Nabi noticed even more soldiers and armed policemen on patrol than usual. An inspector general was visiting the police HQ and he wondered if a militant attack was expected. But, mostly, Nabi's thoughts were with the earthquake victims on both sides of the Line of Control, the temporary border dividing Kashmir into parts controlled by India and Pakistan.
Political discontent has simmered in the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir since partition in 1947 - the more so in latter years as Kashmiri rights and autonomy were eroded. Wars, several insurgencies, and countless political manoeuvres have failed to settle the issue of the "ownership" of Kashmir, and since the mid-1990s the rebellion has taken on a more jihadi, pro-Pakistan aspect; secular Kashmiri separatist groups that have laid down their arms have been overshadowed. Peace talks between India and Pakistan have made little progress and death remains a constant visitor.
At about 10.30am, Nabi heard a deafening explosion and saw a dark cloud of smoke rising. He pulled down the shop's iron shutters and lay on the floor. He expected gunfire - instead he heard a crowd outside. Scores of policemen, soldiers and civilians were rushing towards the house behind his shop. The explosion had shattered the windows of the house and a boundary wall. The vegetable garden in front of the house was covered with shards of glass and blood.
The crowd talked about a fidayeen, or suicide bomber, who had accidentally triggered off the explosives before the attack. "I saw parts of legs torn from the knees, shredded intestines and then I saw a part of the skull and a long braid of black hair. It was hard to believe. But it was a girl." Nabi's face contorted in horror as we talked in his shop eight months later.
After the blast, a spokesperson of the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed - which is believed to have carried out the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 - phoned the BBC's office in Srinagar and claimed responsibility. The caller told the BBC that the dead woman was Yasmeena Akhter, a member of Jaish's Banaat-e-Ayesha (Daughters of Ayesha, the wife of Prophet Mohammed) regiment. He claimed that she was their first female suicide bomber, that she had attacked an Indian army convoy and had killed six soldiers.
Militant groups routinely claim responsibility for attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir and give exaggerated accounts of casualties. In fact, Yasmeena was the only casualty of the explosion. By the mid-June afternoon when I met Nabi and other townspeople in Avantipura, the 22-year-old Yasmeena and her last moments had already become myth. Some said that she had been begging in the marketplace and planned to enter the police and paramilitary camp as a beggar woman. Others told me that she saw a group of soldiers frisking men and women on the highway, escaped into the lane, and a few seconds later the bomb exploded. It went off outside the house of Ghulam Mohammed, a retired government officer: he told me he'd been asleep at the time and thought the earthquake had struck again. His son pointed towards a poplar rising over the rebuilt boundary wall - it was still covered with a thick layer of soot.
I walked to the police and paramilitary HQ, ringed with razor wire and heavily guarded. Some officers believe their camp was Yasmeena's target and the explosives went off accidentally. At the blast site they had found three live hand grenades and pieces of a torn combat pouch - a belt with big pockets, that's tied around the chest. "A person wearing a body belt tends to itch and adjust it frequently," said Mumtaz Ahmad, a police superintendent, by way of explanation.
At the district court in Pulwama, 20 miles away, a clerk showed me the records of the investigation and pictures of the explosion. The file describes Yasmeena as a girl who "wore explosives on her body for the purpose of a terrorist suicide attack aimed at hurting the security forces and the police. She killed herself when the explosives went off accidentally near the Avantipura police headquarters." I looked at the pictures: a dust-covered shoe on a leg torn away at the thigh; lifeless eyes staring out of the partial remains of the face; remnants of her body placed in a white cotton shroud.
Women combatants are not part of Kashmiri tradition. Reporting on Kashmir, I have met several women who have suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Indian troops and police officers, as well as the Kashmiri and Pakistani militants fighting them. The latest of such brutalities came to public attention in May this year when it was revealed that scores of teenage girls and young women had been blackmailed into becoming "comfort women" for politicians, police and bureaucrats.
The girls had been lured by interviews for government jobs; they were raped after being given sedatives with tea and filmed. Following determined protests by Kashmiris, the Indian government ordered an investigation and many leading figures in the administration were arrested. But no female victim has chosen violent means to seek revenge; instead, they have tried, with resignation, to rebuild their lives.
I wondered what motivated Yasmeena. Was she really a suicide bomber? I drove to Samboora, her native village half an hour from Avantipura, to find her mother and the people who had known her when she was growing up. The village, a cluster of old mud brick dwellings and new baked brick and concrete houses, stretches between a plateau of saffron and paddy fields. Rows of women and men were planting paddy seedlings in the fields and singing traditional love songs. On the verandah of an austere brick house near the fields, a woman pruned vegetables in a wicker basket. This was Mughli, Yasmeena's mother. Yasmeena was the third of her four daughters. She and her husband Yusuf farmed and, after the agricultural season, Yusuf worked as a carpenter. When the armed rebellion against Indian rule began in 1990, their austere but contented lives began to change.
Separatist militants had a big presence in Samboora village - Yusuf became enamoured and joined them, Mughli told me. In 1993, he was arrested by Indian troops and taken away. Mughli supported her daughters, working as a daily-wage labourer in the village fields and spinning wool. Yasmeena was 10 and her sister, Roheena, 12. During the three years Yusuf was in prison, the Indian army began funding a group of counter-insurgent militants called Ikhwanis, who murdered anyone they suspected of being sympathetic to the separatist militants.
One of the most notorious, Papa Kishtwari, operated in the Samboora area. "He sent a letter to Yusuf ordering him to work in his house as a carpenter," Mughli recalled. Yusuf complied and in return Kishtwari escorted Yusuf to the local sufi shrine, the social centre of the village, where they would be sure to be seen together. Villagers and militants from the biggest Kashmiri group, Hizbul Mujahideen, began seeing Yusuf as a collaborator. Young men with guns began lurking near their house, and when Mughli saw them off with an axe, letters containing death threats followed. And so did raids by Indian troops and counter-insurgency police, who routinely pursue militants released from prison and keep the pressure on them to provide information about their militant associates.
The family lived an uneasy, anxiety-filled life. Yasmeena and Roheena dropped out of school in the late 1990s. In early 2002, Yusuf was abducted by unknown gunmen and found tortured and bleeding almost to death in the saffron fields near his village. Yasmeena and Mughli carried him to a Srinagar hospital and spent the next few months nursing him.
On his return from hospital, Yusuf looked to the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, for help. A commander of the group, Abu Hafiz, and his bodyguard, Adnan, offered Yusuf protection if he built an underground hideout in his house where they could live. Yusuf agreed to the barter, and the two moved in.
"Hafiz was against any romantic involvement with the women of the family sheltering them, but Adnan was attracted to Yasmeena," said a senior Kashmir police officer, who followed the family for years. Around a year later, Hafiz was killed in a gun battle with Indian troops. Adnan stayed on in the hideout. His romance with Yasmeena continued and they married in September 2004. "A secret marriage was performed without any social ceremony. Our informers saw Yasmeena and Adnan together at various places. She began helping him with transporting explosives and weapons," said the officer, whom Mughli had described as a "decent" man.
Still a target for the authorities, Yusuf left home and began living as a fugitive with Pakistani militants. "Mother and I would be scared but Yasmeena looked the soldiers and policemen in the eye and shouted that we did not know where Father was," said Roheena, now aged 24. In December 2004, a few months after Yasmeena and Adnan married, a joint team of the Indian army and a police special operations group raided her house. The underground hideout was discovered; explosives and ammunition recovered. "They broke the window panes, pulled apart the doors and dug up the house. They abused and beat us up and interrogated Yasmeena throughout the day. That evening she left home and never returned," said Roheena.
Roheena was suspicious and fearful of the repercussions of what she might say - the conflict has made Kashmir a paranoid valley - but she did add: "Yasmeena was afraid that the army and the police would come again. We realised that she had joined the militants."
"She just left and never came back," said Mughli, breaking down and crying inconsolably. There was no search, no contacting of relatives - they knew she must be with her husband Adnan.
Mughli and Roheena clammed up when I mentioned Yasmeena's marriage. Many villagers had mentioned the humiliation of the family after rumours and gossip about Yasmeena's affair with a militant. How could a girl marry a man who was bound to be killed or arrested sooner or later?
She was not the first. I thought of Asiya Andrabi, who had married a militant commander, now in prison. She founded and heads the puritanical Islamist women's group Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Muslim Community), that supports the armed militancy and ran a failed campaign to make Kashmiri women wear veils in 1990. Andrabi resurfaced in the public sphere in the summer of 2004, when she and her activists harassed young couples catching a few moments of intimacy in the claustrophobic cabins of internet cafes or sharing lunch in dimly-lit restaurants.
In newspaper photographs, Andrabi looked like a female Zorro, a veiled woman raising fists covered in white gloves. She had become a born-again Muslim in 1986, a time when she'd been feeling depressed and thwarted because her family forbade her from pursuing postgraduate studies in biochemistry in the distant Indian city of Pune. I met her in her Srinagar house in mid-June; she was barely four and a half feet tall and covered in her signature veil from head to toe. Andrabi was not surprised by Yasmeena's decision to marry an Islamic militant from Pakistan, and considered it an honour for any Kashmiri woman to do so.
I was sceptical whether Yasmeena would have shared Andrabi's viewpoint. Yasmeena's mother Mughli and sister Roheena didn't wear a veil or seem to espouse Andrabi's zealous attitude towards Islam. When I first visited, the family invited me for tea inside their tiny kitchen-cum-living room. I was struck by a framed picture hanging above their television set. "It is the only picture of Yasmeena left with us," said Roheena. A girl with stern black eyes stared from the brightly tinted collage, a thick lock of hair falling on her right cheek, in the style of a Bollywood actress.
On my way back I met Inspector Manzoor Lone, the police officer heading the counter-insurgency operations around Yasmeena's village. He had just returned to his fortess-like office in Pampore town after a gun battle in which two militants were killed. On a chart pasted on a wall in his office, the names of the slain militants are crossed out in red ink. Lone had raided Yasmeena's house on various occasions. "I don't think she was an ideologically motivated militant. It was simply a love story," he said.
Even Asiya Andrabi opposed the involvement of women in militancy. She argued that Islam did not allow women to be combatants, especially suicide bombers. "It is against the dignity of a Muslim woman that the parts of her body be strewn in a public place. If a combatant or a suicide bomber is a woman, her dead body is bound to fall or be scattered in a place full of men," she told me. She supported suicide bombing by men; her objection to suicide attacks by women seemed to rest on the notion that a woman's modesty must be preserved even in death.
Andrabi was critical of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed for allowing Yasmeena to play an active role. "They use girls as couriers for explosives because girls can easily pass through check posts. I think Yasmeena was a courier and the explosives went off accidentally. Later, they glorified her death and claimed her as a suicide bomber. It was shocking for me," she said. Strangely, some senior officers in the counter-insurgency police agreed with her assessment. In another rare accord, both Jaish-e-Mohammed and police records in the district court described Yasmeena as a suicide bomber. Who was right? Was an explosion planned or was Yasmeena a courier so desperate to avoid detection that she had strapped the lethal cargo to her chest?
I went back to the police officers who had followed the tragic journey of her fa~mily.
Some months after the December 2004 raid on Yasmeena's house, her husband Adnan had been arrested by police in the Indian capital, New Delhi. "He was in Delhi to receive cash for his group from a contact. The contact had already been arrested by the Delhi police and had called Adnan at their behest. After Adnan was tortured, he provided us with information about his militant group.
With his help, we were able to arrest and kill a number of militants in southern Kashmir, where he used to operate," said a senior officer. How would a 21-year-old girl, who had married a militant, joined his organisation, and lived the life of a fugitive, react to her husband's arrest and the prospect of him spending an unknown number of years in some Indian prison, or a brief report describing his death under police fire while trying to "escape"?
In the overworked Psychiatric Diseases Hospital of Srinagar, I met Mushtaq Margoob, the foremost psychiatrist of Kashmir, who has spent the past 16 years - all the years of Kashmir's armed conflict - treating people with post-traumatic stress. In his research on post-conflict suicide, he found that the age group most inclined towards suicide was 20-25. "Leaving home and working as a militant, Yasmeena would have lived with the constant fear of a raid by troops.
She and her husband and others of the group would have constantly changed hideouts. It's bound to lead to severe adjustment problems," he said. Yasmeena's father had been in prison when she was an adolescent, and she had married a militant at 20. "A girl like Yasmeena, who lacked paternal love, would have had a strong emotional attachment to her husband. And if he was arrested and she continued to be a militant without any emotional support or security, she was bound to become suicidal," Margoob added.
Was being a suicide bomber or a courier of explosives (which also exposes one to the risk of certain death at the smallest mistake), the only way out for Yasmeena? Could she not have surrendered, spent some time in jail, and returned to lead a "normal" life in her village?
I recalled Firdausa, a girl from the south Kashmir town of Shopian, who loved and secretly married a Pakistani militant. They tried leaving for Pakistan after securing fake Indian passports, but were arrested by the police in January 2006 after the news of their marriage spread. Firdausa was released after a month and returned to live with her parents in Shopian town, around 50km south of Srinagar. Most people I met in Shopian advised me against meeting her. "Militants still visit her place and you never know when the army raids," said Rashid, an elderly teacher. He was uncomfortable with a Kashmiri girl marrying a Pakistani militant who might have chosen to call Kashmir his war but was not accepted as part of Kashmiri society.
The younger men I met were harsher. "If a Pakistani militant dies in a battle with Indian troops, we would give him a Muslim burial, but he is not one of us. Firdausa has come back to live with her parents, but our town sees her as a wayward woman, a prostitute. No man here will be ready to marry her," said Manzoor Ahmad, a young student. Firdausa's town, Shopian, and Yasmeena's village, Samboora, are an hour apart and alike in all respects. It seemed unlikely that Yasmeena would have been able to return to a normal life.
I revisited Yasmeena's family to inquire whether she had talked about being a militant. This time I met her mother Mughli and Yasmeena's eldest sister, who is married and lives in a distant village. "She never visited me at my in-laws' place as we live near an army camp," the sister said. I was struck when she told me her husband was a soldier in the Indian army, which is rare among Kashmiris. It seemed all the stranger considering two family members, father and daughter, were militants. "Her husband joined the army because that was the only job available, and we got them married because he is my brother's son," Mughli explained.
I asked her whether Yasmeena talked about martyrdom after the troops raided their house, when her father was in prison or when he was forced to work for counter-insurgents. "No! Never! She did the household chores and worked in the fields. She loved eating, attended all marriages we were invited to, and sang marriage songs. She never spoke about wanting to fight or being a martyr." Mughli held my arm and broke down. "I will tell you why she died like that," she said, pausing between sobs. "A martyr's death was the only honourable option for my daughter. Thousands came here to congratulate me on her martyrdom." Then she fell silent and sobbed.
I walked to the local graveyard on the main road, where around 20 people killed in the conflict were buried. The marble tombstones had names of the dead, dates of their deaths, and verses expressing longing for independence from India, calligraphed in different styles. In a corner I found Yasmeena's grave; someone had showered rose petals around it. I was struck by the verse on her tombstone:
This generous soil sheltered me
After the suspicions of a heartless world
The lament against the censure of a conservative rural society spoke of the despair of a young woman whose tragic family history and reckless heart had pushed her into dangerous militant terrain, and further. Standing beside her grave I watched a torrent of young girls rush out of the school adjacent to the graveyard and head home along the dusty road. Seven years back Yasmeena had been one of them. I hoped that none of them ever has a life like hers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/05/pakistan.weekend7
Monday, March 30, 2009
filmstars and politics
There is a picture of Salman Khan (he is a Bollywood actor, notorious for beating up his girlfriends including Ms World Aishwarya Rai, hunting animals and mowing down people sleeping on footpaths) talking to Congress party’s Unnao candidate in today’s Indian Express.
It repulses me on two accounts.
First, having failed to do much for the state of Uttar Pradesh (where Unnao is), Congress has to fall back on a film star with such maligned credentials. Second, politics in India has become so convoluted that we are compensating our need for leaders and statesmen with filmstars. It is a pathetic irony that ‘real’ social workers for all their flaws go unnoticed while the hits and flops of Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood hog attention.
The only thing respectable about the pony-sporting picture of Sallu miya is he has not switched to a khadi pajama kurta avtaar.
The IE article mentions that Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Govinda and Naghma will also be canvassing for the Congress.
What is Naghma’s claim to fame? If I stretch my memory, I can only recollect a rain song from Yalgaar where she moans and cavorts in Sanjay Dutt’s arms to a sexually explicit song (it happens to be one of my favourites by the way) and ofcourse Ganguly.
Priety Zinta besides doing feel good movies, co-owns an IPL team and is the girl friend of the Wadia scion. Shahrukh Khan is simply King Khan.
Will I vote for Congress just because Shahrukh knocks at my door tomorrow and says pppplsss vote for Congress. Why should I?
Why should I vote for any MLA or MP who has a film star to show off for his or hers five years of work in the constituency?
Congress is not alone in parading film stars at election rallies. The Bachhan family is the star attraction at SP (Samajwadi Party) rallies. As mascots, campaigners and candidates, they have always been exploited for their mass appeal.
Sanjay Dutt , SP’s MP candidate from Lucknow (capital of Uttar Pradesh) is the party’s latest trump card. The man was booked under TADA, has served a considerable jail sentence. If I am not mistaken, he had never set foot in Lucknow earlier.
At the risk of sounding elitist, has an average Indian voter become so dumb that filmstars can be dangled as carrots for votes?
(I read recently that as a sitting Member of Parliament, Govinda did not ask a single question during his tenure as a Congress MP. It is another matter that nor did Mamta di)
You ask me if mafias and criminals can contest why not Sanjay Dutt? Let me give you the stalest of all arguments-for the very reason mafias and gangsters should not.
Why is a clean image and solid credentials no more a criteria for being elected to central and state legislatures in India?
Have we become so inert in our responses that we cannot rise beyond group allegiance and keep such people off our executive institutions? If empowering masses means Dutt, Sallu, Govinda and their ilk stepping up the political ladder then the idea of the people, by the people and by the people needs re-examination.
PS: http://entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/features/2009/cine-stars-elections-230309.html
Check this link to know film stars who would be contesting in the elections this time.
It repulses me on two accounts.
First, having failed to do much for the state of Uttar Pradesh (where Unnao is), Congress has to fall back on a film star with such maligned credentials. Second, politics in India has become so convoluted that we are compensating our need for leaders and statesmen with filmstars. It is a pathetic irony that ‘real’ social workers for all their flaws go unnoticed while the hits and flops of Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood hog attention.
The only thing respectable about the pony-sporting picture of Sallu miya is he has not switched to a khadi pajama kurta avtaar.
The IE article mentions that Shahrukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Govinda and Naghma will also be canvassing for the Congress.
What is Naghma’s claim to fame? If I stretch my memory, I can only recollect a rain song from Yalgaar where she moans and cavorts in Sanjay Dutt’s arms to a sexually explicit song (it happens to be one of my favourites by the way) and ofcourse Ganguly.
Priety Zinta besides doing feel good movies, co-owns an IPL team and is the girl friend of the Wadia scion. Shahrukh Khan is simply King Khan.
Will I vote for Congress just because Shahrukh knocks at my door tomorrow and says pppplsss vote for Congress. Why should I?
Why should I vote for any MLA or MP who has a film star to show off for his or hers five years of work in the constituency?
Congress is not alone in parading film stars at election rallies. The Bachhan family is the star attraction at SP (Samajwadi Party) rallies. As mascots, campaigners and candidates, they have always been exploited for their mass appeal.
Sanjay Dutt , SP’s MP candidate from Lucknow (capital of Uttar Pradesh) is the party’s latest trump card. The man was booked under TADA, has served a considerable jail sentence. If I am not mistaken, he had never set foot in Lucknow earlier.
At the risk of sounding elitist, has an average Indian voter become so dumb that filmstars can be dangled as carrots for votes?
(I read recently that as a sitting Member of Parliament, Govinda did not ask a single question during his tenure as a Congress MP. It is another matter that nor did Mamta di)
You ask me if mafias and criminals can contest why not Sanjay Dutt? Let me give you the stalest of all arguments-for the very reason mafias and gangsters should not.
Why is a clean image and solid credentials no more a criteria for being elected to central and state legislatures in India?
Have we become so inert in our responses that we cannot rise beyond group allegiance and keep such people off our executive institutions? If empowering masses means Dutt, Sallu, Govinda and their ilk stepping up the political ladder then the idea of the people, by the people and by the people needs re-examination.
PS: http://entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/features/2009/cine-stars-elections-230309.html
Check this link to know film stars who would be contesting in the elections this time.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Auto ki sawari
Everyday life in India is a series of mini struggles. On a daily basis you work your way through errant maids, leering men, horn mad traffic, jostling crowds, office gossip and if you happen to live in Mumbai or Delhi then auto rickshaw walas.
Boarding a train or a bus and getting down in one piece may test your athleticism but wrangling over the fare before you get into an auto in Delhi or fuming within as you see a tampered metre push up the fare both in Delhi and Mumbai tests your mettle.
I limit myself to the two cities because I have had a chance to experience auto woes anywhere else.
If you choose to pay by the metre in Delhi you are doomed. All geared to haggle over the kiraya (fare), you harden your expressions, look straight at bhaiya’s face and let out a deep, authoritative, "kitne me chaloge?" Bhaiya will quote triple or even five times more than the price. Mostly he will agree to a lower fare. However if it is a group of autos rickshaws waiting for passengers then they are difficult to bring round.
I ended up paying Rs. 45 from Munirka to my campus for an auto ride that by the metre would not had come to more than Rs. 15 back in 2002.
On my first day in Delhi, auto rickshaw drivers asked for Rs. 180-200 for a trip from the New Delhi railway station to my university campus. When I thrust forward the prepaid slip most of them slinked away. In case you are really desperate to cut a cheap deal then get ready to wait while they look for a passenger who would be willing to share the auto rickshaw.
It was always better if one was travelling in a group. Boys especially could outmatch the autowallah in the duel of vocals and rain a few abuses when the latter refused to budge from the exaggerated fare.
A bigger problem in Delhi was that if you are a girl you could never relax in an auto. If you did not end up being fleeced or robbed or even kidnapped in some cases, you are certain to be showered with abuses if you protest against the fare. I cannot generalise or call it every day but living in Delhi you are unlikely to escape it.
Autowallahs in Mumbai on the other hand do not have to be asked "how much?" You bark out the destination, watch the metre, the traffic jam, which route the auto takes, sit back and resign yourself to paying the number that flashes on the metre.
There you do not need to argue over the rates or say where you want to go before you climb in. Autorickshaw community in Mumbai is supposed to be most civil, complying and at your service. However, if you are new to the city and habitually ask, "Andheri station chaloge kya?" then the autowallah might shake his head slightly and speed off. Auto drivers sometimes refuse to go to nearby destinations and do not stop even if you wave to them. And if it is raining, you will realise that money can buy a lot of things but not convince an auto guy to stop for you. Overall Mumbai auto rickshaw drivers are much easier to deal with than their Dilli cousins.
It is a love hate relation. Public transport system in India is so inadequate to handle the sea of humanity that auto rickshaws are a necessity. If fare metres could be made tamper proof, travelling could be much easier and uneventful.
Boarding a train or a bus and getting down in one piece may test your athleticism but wrangling over the fare before you get into an auto in Delhi or fuming within as you see a tampered metre push up the fare both in Delhi and Mumbai tests your mettle.
I limit myself to the two cities because I have had a chance to experience auto woes anywhere else.
If you choose to pay by the metre in Delhi you are doomed. All geared to haggle over the kiraya (fare), you harden your expressions, look straight at bhaiya’s face and let out a deep, authoritative, "kitne me chaloge?" Bhaiya will quote triple or even five times more than the price. Mostly he will agree to a lower fare. However if it is a group of autos rickshaws waiting for passengers then they are difficult to bring round.
I ended up paying Rs. 45 from Munirka to my campus for an auto ride that by the metre would not had come to more than Rs. 15 back in 2002.
On my first day in Delhi, auto rickshaw drivers asked for Rs. 180-200 for a trip from the New Delhi railway station to my university campus. When I thrust forward the prepaid slip most of them slinked away. In case you are really desperate to cut a cheap deal then get ready to wait while they look for a passenger who would be willing to share the auto rickshaw.
It was always better if one was travelling in a group. Boys especially could outmatch the autowallah in the duel of vocals and rain a few abuses when the latter refused to budge from the exaggerated fare.
A bigger problem in Delhi was that if you are a girl you could never relax in an auto. If you did not end up being fleeced or robbed or even kidnapped in some cases, you are certain to be showered with abuses if you protest against the fare. I cannot generalise or call it every day but living in Delhi you are unlikely to escape it.
Autowallahs in Mumbai on the other hand do not have to be asked "how much?" You bark out the destination, watch the metre, the traffic jam, which route the auto takes, sit back and resign yourself to paying the number that flashes on the metre.
There you do not need to argue over the rates or say where you want to go before you climb in. Autorickshaw community in Mumbai is supposed to be most civil, complying and at your service. However, if you are new to the city and habitually ask, "Andheri station chaloge kya?" then the autowallah might shake his head slightly and speed off. Auto drivers sometimes refuse to go to nearby destinations and do not stop even if you wave to them. And if it is raining, you will realise that money can buy a lot of things but not convince an auto guy to stop for you. Overall Mumbai auto rickshaw drivers are much easier to deal with than their Dilli cousins.
It is a love hate relation. Public transport system in India is so inadequate to handle the sea of humanity that auto rickshaws are a necessity. If fare metres could be made tamper proof, travelling could be much easier and uneventful.
PS: There has been a massive influx of North Indians especially from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar into Mumbai. The Shiv Sena’s and lately Raj Thackeray’s tirade against North Indians for spoiling Mumbai culture has partial roots in the changing face of auto rickshaw community in the city. It is alleged by many (and sometime I agree) that bhaiyas have brought in brusqueness to Mumbai’s Maharashtrian fabric (please don’t bay for my blood) In spite of the headaches they cause, true blooded Mumbaikars (if that is a credible term) cannot do without them.
Photo courtsey: www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=107102
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Kissa IPL ka
BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) is a powerful entity I am given to understand. It is made powerful by the money it earns when millions of cricket crazy men (women and children) turn on their television sets.
(So if the Aussies dare to nudge back another BCCI chief, hell would have no fury like the Indian board)
BCCI hit on another golden goose with the brilliant (still not sure) concept of Twenty-Twenty matches that had even not-interested ones like me hooked.
Rewind back to 2008...
Twenty-Twenty cricket turned out to be as much of a potboiler as a game.
Like following the antics of Big Boss inmates, one watched with curiosity if sparks flied between Ganguly and Ponting. The idea of national teams pitted against each other got messed up totally. I was glued at times not to the game but facial expressions and body languages of Dhoni, Harbhajan and Sehwag who sweated it out like warring family members in an Ekta Kapoor serial. Sreesanth and Harbhajan added chutzpah to the gentlemen’s game. For all his on-field bashing of Indian batsmen, one could not but fall for Shane Warne. My heart went all out to Adam Gilchrist as Deccan Chargers kept on losing.
Fast forward to 2009...
IPL has been shifted to South Africa. Its coincidence with general elections in India has heightened the security threat perception. Following the Mumbai attacks and SriLankan cricket team’s tryst with death in Pakistan, few would be willing to take chances. And why not?
If India’s past records are anything to go by, it is clear that security and intelligence agencies despite all their love for the nation, fail when it comes to detecting young men in jeans and t-shirts running across city roads with kilos of ammunition in their backpacks.
Mumbai attacks are nearly passe. Except Kasab and dangling proof at Pakistan, the Indian government has not delivered much in terms of answers, counter-action and preemption measures. Atleast that is what a laywoman like me thinks.
Two key improvisations were expected in the modus operandi of India’s security forces after they were caught unawares in Kargil and Mumbai. Training in high mountain counter-insurgency operations was realised to be essential for the Indian army after Kargil. (I recently read on a blog that terrorists/insurgents in Kashmir have better night vision gear that the Indian soldiers)
Mumbai attacks bared the need for better training and coordination among paramilitary forces responsible for internal security. (Did you read about the Kashmir police under cover cop who was arrested for supplying sim cards used by the gunmen in Mumbai? It was a blunder that blew off months of hard work by the Kashmir police to infiltrate a militant group)
Coming back to the IPL, many of my brethren and behens back home are losing sleep over why the event has been shifted out of the country. The issue almost snowballed into a political seesaw between the two bigwigs of Indian politics.
Though Lalit Modi may seem to be on a personal vendetta, his decision appears to be wise. If a single bullet is fired or a noise heard during any of the matches, foreign cricketers will pack off immediately. India will be branded as dangerous and cricket teams would tick off South Asia from their itineraries for a long time.
Could the BCCI afford this?
In India, terrorism and terrorists have become as ‘every-day’ as robberies, murders and kaccha-baniyan groups in smaller cities.
You may not die of cancer or be hit by a car but you might step on a listless tiffin box and be blown to so many pieces that your family may only manage to find your little finger to cremate.
Few years ago, on the day when a bomb exploded in the Sarojini Nagar market in New Delhi, I happened to have deferred my morning visit to the market and decided to go in the evening instead. I have had brushes with death but then I could see it coming and sparing me by millimetres and degrees. But being blown off in the middle of a sentence, a transaction or while gulping down a puchka?
If a country cannot handle two mega events simultaneously (I wonder how will they ever bid for the Olympics) it is good that IPL moves to foreign shores. It spares all of us some more anxiety, fear and grief.
(So if the Aussies dare to nudge back another BCCI chief, hell would have no fury like the Indian board)
BCCI hit on another golden goose with the brilliant (still not sure) concept of Twenty-Twenty matches that had even not-interested ones like me hooked.
Rewind back to 2008...
Twenty-Twenty cricket turned out to be as much of a potboiler as a game.
Like following the antics of Big Boss inmates, one watched with curiosity if sparks flied between Ganguly and Ponting. The idea of national teams pitted against each other got messed up totally. I was glued at times not to the game but facial expressions and body languages of Dhoni, Harbhajan and Sehwag who sweated it out like warring family members in an Ekta Kapoor serial. Sreesanth and Harbhajan added chutzpah to the gentlemen’s game. For all his on-field bashing of Indian batsmen, one could not but fall for Shane Warne. My heart went all out to Adam Gilchrist as Deccan Chargers kept on losing.
Fast forward to 2009...
IPL has been shifted to South Africa. Its coincidence with general elections in India has heightened the security threat perception. Following the Mumbai attacks and SriLankan cricket team’s tryst with death in Pakistan, few would be willing to take chances. And why not?
If India’s past records are anything to go by, it is clear that security and intelligence agencies despite all their love for the nation, fail when it comes to detecting young men in jeans and t-shirts running across city roads with kilos of ammunition in their backpacks.
Mumbai attacks are nearly passe. Except Kasab and dangling proof at Pakistan, the Indian government has not delivered much in terms of answers, counter-action and preemption measures. Atleast that is what a laywoman like me thinks.
Two key improvisations were expected in the modus operandi of India’s security forces after they were caught unawares in Kargil and Mumbai. Training in high mountain counter-insurgency operations was realised to be essential for the Indian army after Kargil. (I recently read on a blog that terrorists/insurgents in Kashmir have better night vision gear that the Indian soldiers)
Mumbai attacks bared the need for better training and coordination among paramilitary forces responsible for internal security. (Did you read about the Kashmir police under cover cop who was arrested for supplying sim cards used by the gunmen in Mumbai? It was a blunder that blew off months of hard work by the Kashmir police to infiltrate a militant group)
Coming back to the IPL, many of my brethren and behens back home are losing sleep over why the event has been shifted out of the country. The issue almost snowballed into a political seesaw between the two bigwigs of Indian politics.
Though Lalit Modi may seem to be on a personal vendetta, his decision appears to be wise. If a single bullet is fired or a noise heard during any of the matches, foreign cricketers will pack off immediately. India will be branded as dangerous and cricket teams would tick off South Asia from their itineraries for a long time.
Could the BCCI afford this?
In India, terrorism and terrorists have become as ‘every-day’ as robberies, murders and kaccha-baniyan groups in smaller cities.
You may not die of cancer or be hit by a car but you might step on a listless tiffin box and be blown to so many pieces that your family may only manage to find your little finger to cremate.
Few years ago, on the day when a bomb exploded in the Sarojini Nagar market in New Delhi, I happened to have deferred my morning visit to the market and decided to go in the evening instead. I have had brushes with death but then I could see it coming and sparing me by millimetres and degrees. But being blown off in the middle of a sentence, a transaction or while gulping down a puchka?
If a country cannot handle two mega events simultaneously (I wonder how will they ever bid for the Olympics) it is good that IPL moves to foreign shores. It spares all of us some more anxiety, fear and grief.
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