Things I’ve learned in Delhi

1. AC is not necessarily a luxury – it can damn well be a necessity

2. Eating alone in restaurants is not the horrific thing I once thought it was.  Its actually one of the things I now enjoy doing most.

3. Drivers are homicidal freaks who WILL run you over so stop playing chicken with them on the roads

4. People think its weird to eat bandakka with rice – so my maid refuses to make it for me

5. Waiters and shopkeepers are so used to being treated with disdain and aggression that a smiling please and thank you can work wonders

6. Auto drivers are not all unscrupulous ass holes. Just most of them.

7. Halloween is bound to catch on in a big way – the “look at me” culture here can only foster it

…. more later

 

Dilli meri Jaan: the seasons are changing

The end of the year is coming and my thoughts are turning homewards. Not that they were not before, but I’d like to think that my thoughts now are rooted in happy comfortable sanity rather than summer heat induced hysteria.

The weather in Delhi has cooled down considerably and for the first time in what feels like years, I’m really enjoying myself. I’m no longer the sad and miserable person I was barely 8 weeks ago, dragging my mattress on to the balcony to vainl attempt to get some semblance of sleep. The heat here is unrelenting. unforgiving. A heat that doesn’t let up in the night is to my mind a heat born of Dantes inferno no less. Add to that heat a persistently bad back and other niggling problems like chest cold and body ache and coughs and what you have is a recipe for depression. The period from June to September I think were the worst months of my life. And when you’re down there baby, there’s no one to lift you out of it. No one wants to hear constant complaining and really all I seemed to be doing was whining. In retrospect I’m hugely surprised that I have any friends left in Delhi at all. Every time I said “I want to go home”, I think they were silently saying “yes… please!”

But the second half of October has changed all that, leaving in the wake of summer a much happier Islander who is slightly convinced that she must be psychotic to let the weather affect her so. Unbearable evenings have been replaced with chilly dusks, perfect for eating outside or for grabbing a drink with some friends. Plans seem much more feasible, people are much more bearable and the city even looks nicer! In fact I found myself staring at a DTC bus with something approaching affection until I caught the thought and sternly asked myself what the hell I was thinking.

I have also discovered the joy of kababs in Nizamudeen (thanks to the fact that Krish has moved there) and Pork curry and Thukpa in Dilli Haat. Momos remain a strong favourite and for some reason I feel that mojito’s round off the equation very nicely thank you.

I’m not so concerned about my savings (or the lack thereof), I’m zen about the job and future prospects (I have made peace with the fact that I have zero ambition – for now, anyway) and I’m going home for christmas!

The thought of the beach, of seeing the much loved and the much missed (you know who you are) and just eating familiar food makes me deliriously happy, while the prospect of a 2 day stop in Madras excites me just as much. All that is some time away, and the wait would ordinarily have me in the throes of torture but for the fact that this interim period is so nice. Many more walks in chilly nippy weather, many more drinks, food while sitting outside…

I’m almost beginning to feel some love for this place.

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1/19 mill > 1.2 bill? (Getting an Indian employment visa)

So I got my visa. Almost two months since I handed in my application for a work visa at the Indian High Commission. Ah – how innocent I was then! Little did I realise the trauma of what would follow. First complication: my application had to be sent to Delhi for verification by the Ministry of External Affairs. ”Should be just a formality” said the visa processing officer smiling at me. I have one word for him. LIAR!

 Start weeks of uncertanity, hoping, waiting, frustration, boredom, borderline depression… in fact pick the mental illness of your choice: I was bordering on it.

First: no news. “call back in two weeks…” “Call back in one week”. It became mechanical.

 Second: partial news. “They can’t find your file”.

Third and last of all: “There is an objection on your visa. They are not convinced that your job cannot be done by an Indian” The Proverbial bombshell.

Now will someone please explain to me, how India can proceed considering employment visa applications on that basis when:

a) it has a population of 1.2 billion.
Statistically speaking then, practically EVERY job in the WORLD has an Indian in India who is qualiified to do it. In which case dispense with the employment visa altogether.

b) To me at least it stinks of hypocrisy – considering how MANY Indians are working overseas including in Sri Lanka and I’m not even talking about all the outsourced jobs they get…

c) How the HELL am I supposed to convince the ministry? My judgement of my abilities are subjective. As is your assesment of the same.

So I gave up. And then unexpectedly it arrived. The clearance from Delhi. God knows what they were told… how they were convinced. But either way I have the (dubious?) distinction of being identified as someone doing a job that an Indian cannot. In India. Delhi to be precise. It’s ridiculous, it’s hilarious, it’s outrageous and it’s funny. It’s a contradiction.

But then again, so is India. 

( I await Delhi with interest. )

Ciao Chennai

40 degree sweltering heat. Curse inducing humidity. Urine stenched pavements. Unscrupulous auto drivers. konjum munnadi ponga! 
Electric trains. Dazzling gold jewellery. Multi coloured saris. bright yellow sambar. 
Running for stories. Editing till midnight. Hyperlinking till squint.
Peach ice tea at Kodambakkam. Spontaneous drives to Mahabalipuaram. Chatting till midnight. Stealing from Mocha. Weekends at 6B. Some of the best friends I ever had. 
Dreading the end. Accepting the end. Missing the best ten months of my life.

What lengths for alcohol!!!

This is from when Sanjay came to visit me in Chennai. We had gone to Mahabalipuram which is kinda like Hikka.. the video details how we got beer.. even though it was Gandhi Jayanti and officially a dry day…

Getting used to the sexual me: Coming to terms with being female

Again – an assignment I wrote for my gender class….
Growing up in Colombo, one gets used to the blatant eve teasing. Catcalls, hisses, getting followed home, getting felt up in buses, the flashing of vehicle lights, the flashing of penises etc. are all aroutine part of growing up. A social marker as it were, of thetransition from girl-child to woman.

Such incidents are however, notonly ignored but also indulged in by society. The concept of’Kolukama” which roughly translates to “the way young boys are” is a common method of normalising such incidents and events. It is widely
accepted that these behaviours are a normal part of the boy-child’s growing up process, which he will eventually “grow out of.” The girl meanwhile has no choice but to “put up with it”.

The article ‘Sexuality and Pertinence” talks about the manner in which rules and conventions relating to sexuality are normalized and perpetuated in society. “Indeed, it is made to seem instinctual, pre-rational and spontaneous and is often marvellously disengaged and hidden from its own social and historical context.”

And this would to a great extent, explain how Colombo’s society considers it completely normal for the male to react towards the female in a certain way.

he concept of the female body as “object” or “commodity” is one that we all grow up with and eventually internalize. The truth is that the woman is never viewed outside of her identity as “sexual being.” This fact is perhaps most evident when one views popular perceptions of the female body and how it ought to be regulated.

“What was she doing dressing/behaving like that? She was practically asking for it” is a common reaction to news of rape, particularly with regard to women/girls who are perceived as being promiscuous or too outgoing.

On a less sensational level, parents admonish daughters, asking them not to wear certain kinds of clothes when leaving the house. And it doesn’t stop with the clothes you wear. I myself was recently accused of “smiling too much in public” by three well meaning male friends, who insist that doing so is tantamount to making a “come hither” gesture to predatory males (who it seems are everywhere). But what is interesting and almost never questioned is the fact that it is always the female who is always required and expected to cover up her body in a ‘decent’ manner, not walk alone, be careful etc.
And this is necessarily because of the way she is viewed: how the perception of her body has been constructed within a patriarchal society.

“Sexuality and Pertinence” explains that a complete breakaway from this construction requires a conscious and collective effort by both sexes, similar to that advocated in the ‘Self Respect Movement’ by Ambedkar or the Gandhian construct of woman; or else in extraordinary situations such as times of conflict when women are incorporated into military structures.

At all other times, the woman is necessarily defined in terms of her sexuality. The woman unaccompanied by the male does not “belong” to anyone and is therefore available. “Chaste” is a word with positive connotation and a quality to be aspired to. Aloofness is virtuous. And so the list goes on.Transgressions from these “norms”, no matter how minor, are punished – again in sexual terms. Through the jeering, catcalling, flashing etc. ‘Sexuality and Pertinence” speaks of a feminist argument that “Sexual assault was not a crime against chastity or female moral worth; rather it was an expression of male sexual authority.” And this I find, extremely relevant to the experiences that I have had growing up.

“Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” (With apologies to Timothy Leary)

I wrote this post for publication in the website Sidewalk Philosophy. Thought I’d also post it here:

Hallucinations. Visions. Distortions of reality. And those are just SOME of the words you can use to describe the state of main stream media today. And yet it’s all around us. It inundates us with facts. It lures us into believing that we are being given all the information. And due to the sheer mass of information we receive (A study by the Berkley University in 2003 shows that there is 800MB of information for every person on the planet which is growing at an exponential rate of 30% each year) many of us believe that we DO have all the facts. 24 Hour news channels, an increasing number of newspapers and magazines, information documentaries, and news sites on the internet have helped strengthen this perception. But just like in the case of most hallucinatory drugs, this perception is an illusion.

The information we receive, while unimaginable in terms of sheer quantity is controlled to a degree that is also in its own way – unimaginable. Most of the information we see comes to us from very few sources, which are governed mostly in terms of corporate interest. McChesney quotes Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, who calls this phenomenon “the creation of a global oligopoly.”

Corporate control and commercial objectives are increasingly becoming the hallmarks of mainstream media across the globe. News is a commodity – packaged prettily and wholly dependant on market forces.

It’s all about what the public wants to know, what the controlling corporates want the public to know… but certainly not about what the public needs to know. This is why so much happening around us is ignored. And in a world where what we perceive as real is only what is represented to us (the concept is that if it doesn’t happen on Television then it hasn’t happened at all), many voices that need to be heard and issues that need to be aired are being ignored. CEO of the Walt Disney Company Michael Eisner perhaps said it best in an internal memo where he made the following declaration: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

Welcome to vertical integration of the media folks! It has made its mark and it’s all around us. We are being censored and we don’t even know it! Our access and right to information is now OWNED. Let me emphasize this: By a very few people. And we only know what they want us to. To quote a study by Bagdikian (2000):

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. … [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. … [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. … [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. … [In 2000] AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].

Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xx—xxi

This is collaborated by McChesney who points out that in the first half of 2000, the volume of merger deals in global media, Internet, and telecommunications totaled $300 billion, triple the figure for the first six months of 1999, and exponentially higher than the figure from ten years earlier. He states that “the logic guiding media firms in all of this is clear: get very big very quickly, or get swallowed up by someone else.”

As seen by these studies, In the US, most information is controlled by just eight major companies. And before we ask how this can be possibly be relevant to us, think about the fact that it is these very same companies that are controlling global media as well. Murdoch anyone? Murdoch has satellite TV services that run from Asia to Europe to Latin America. His Star TV dominates in Asia with thirty channels in seven languages. News Corporation’s TV service for China, Phoenix TV, in which it has a 45 percent stake, now reaches forty-five million homes there and has had an 80 percent increase in advertising revenues in the past year. And this barely begins to describe News Corporation’s entire portfolio of assets: Twentieth Century Fox films, Fox TV network, HarperCollins publishers, TV stations, cable TV channels, magazines, over 130 newspapers, and professional sport teams. (See McChesney for more details)

The same situation reigns closer to home, among non global players albeit on a much smaller scale. Take India, which has recently seen massive corporate influence on journalism especially over the last few years. Newspapers are sold at insanely low rates, the costs of which circulation and subscription could never cover. The advertisers rule and most alternative news sources cannot hope to compete. So the “Other” voice has effectively been knocked out of the loop and the mainstream media essentially promotes the interests of the advertisers. And this basically sums up the case in Sri Lanka as well. Think about it. Who controls the private media? The Maharajas, the Edirisinghes, the Wijeweera’s. the Wickremesinghe’s… and a lot of what they report is decided in terms of the business they can garner.

This phenomenon is catching on worldwide and can be seen across the various mediums of journalism. The Corporates are controlling us and what is frightening is that we don’t realize that what we are doing is blindly and willingly imbibing ideologies of commercialisation and commodification. It’s the product that matters – and the information deemed relevant is only that which helps to sell it. mcChesney for one, argues that “Economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to promote global markets and to encourage consumer values.”

So here we are… all consumers… a potential market. Therefore news that can damage, news that can shed light on conspiracy, news that makes us stop for that second and say hang on! WHAT? are being sacrificed for the news that is relatively harmless. Oh we are given an illusion of choice. Within this ideology, debate is encouraged… the other voice is heard… but only in terms of its place in relation to and within the larger (and more superior) point of view. And the terrifying truth is that the few commercial establishments that own the news company are in a position to ignore whatever news they deem unsavoury and make it go away. And stuck as we are in the well constructed cocoon that they have woven around us we are none the wiser. We blindly watch what we are shown. Read whatever is written… and believe.

independence – the nation – sick humour – I’m tired.

I intended this post to be a thought provoking comment on independence, what it means, the role of the nation state (with oblique reference to Benedict Anderson and the imagined community) and nationalism. But somehow I can’t seem to gather my thoughts enough to write in the lucid and structured style that a post of that nature deserves. To be honest I’m a bit overwhelmed, more than a little disillusioned and honestly in some sense I feel I have too much to say – but not enough. Everyone knows about the abductions, the bombings, the violence and the almost complete descent into anarchy that make the celebration of 60 years of independence of the democratic socialist republic of Sri Lanka seem like someone’s idea of a very sick joke. But that is not what gets to me – what really gets to me is the almost hopeless cheerfulness of the people at home that to me exemplifies the tragedy of everything that’s WRONG with everything I intended to write about. That is, independence, what it means, the role of the nation state (with oblique reference to Benedict Anderson and the imagined community) and nationalism. “you should be here – it’s like Iraq” laughed my brother when I called him yesterday. “Anyway how are you doing???”

And thats how it is. For many of us. The bombs, the explosions, the check points, the knowledge that everytime you step out of the house it may be the last time you do it. And this knowledge has become such a big part of our lives that on some level its not the over arching, all dominating, life changing factor that you would expect it to be. It lurks in the background, hides in the sub conscious and manifests itself in the strangest ways: crude jokes, an almost desperate attempt to have fun, and a level of apathy that can come across as nothing short of callous and insensitive to people outside of the situation. (such as a lot of my Indian friends who have stared at me incredulously as I almost tiredly dismiss their sincerely concerned questions that usually border on “Is your family ok in Colombo?” which I quite frankly don’t know how to respond to)

And the thing is, for WHAT goddammit? Why do we have to be in this situation at all? Why all this blood shed over a portion of 65,525 square km which most of us have never visited and probably never will? Why this obsession with territorial integrity, Sinhala (or Tamil) nationalism and everything all our independence day celebrations represent? That is the march past. The fiery political speeches. The little flags that come free with every issue of every newspaper. The supplements. the tributes to our forefathers (ironically in the language of the colonizer). The flags waving from houses and cars. what does it all represent in the end?

And this is not even a lament – its just an extension of apathy in a sense. Who screwed with our minds this way and why do we have to suffer for it? Call me an idealist. Call me anti nationalist. Accuse me of buying into treacherous ideology. Tell me I have no right to say any of this. Tell me whatever. In a lot of ways I’m just tired.

Of inane times that end too fast

Unni. You are my inspiration for this post. And no, this is not one of those weepy and cute blog posts that will make him (and the people around him) go all teary eyed and say awwwww… how cute! What a wonderful friendship! I want a friend just like Ayeshea who will write blog posts inspired by me! (That would be the other people not him) Not that all this is not true in abstract – its just not relevant here. Unni inspired me because he was sitting at the second cornermost computer near the door and writing a blog entry. And I thought “gosh and heck.. if he must do it then so must I”.
We’re sitting here – Manamee, Unni, and I – and we’re waiting to go to this little shop that sells chillie beef and parata for dinner along with Sudeep, as per the unspoken arrangement that we have to end the day together. Nikhil’s playing his “arty” music in the background, having recently become the proud owner of a ten ruble coin from the Soviet Union. In due acknowledgment of the great event, we are tolerating the music. It is one of those completely inane and nothing moments – but somehow I know its one of those absolutely blissful ‘nothing’ times that I know I will remember once ACJ is over and done with and nothing but a reminiscence to friends who really wont give a rats ass about what I did or who played what music, ate where or did what. It’s these moments that are the great ones – where the people around you are the ones you are most comfortable with and you are just completely happy though not in a particularly active way. And you dont even realize that you are, until you either remember it, or recount it, like I’m doing now.
I’m glad I have this moment – this time here – in lab 3 on the computer next to Unni who is writing about some band (in turn sitting next to Manamee who is engrossed in a book and hopefully over the fact that I didn’t come to Fab India to pick a present for Arpita’s birthday tomorrow) And now in a while we’ll go have our Chillie beef and go home – and not properly interact with each other till around dinner time tomorrow – and it will be another day less in which we have to do it.
( sigh)