Losses

I miss love like the deserts miss the rain. And August is my favourite month in the year that had willed love in my name, once upon a time. Those were the days when social networking was setting foot in India. The days when people of my age burned their money by logging onto Orkut, and getting smitten by the experience of checking out people of the opposite sex.

It was the year 2008, and I was into my first year of masters. I had taken an inkling for poetry considering the fears and tears I had fought for many light years. He had left on a September afternoon selling me sorrow I was trying to barter with poetry. We were old friends who met at the bible school. I remembered his name and the one incident that told me of his dauntlessness. His father had passed away a few days ago and instead of mourning he decided to attend the bible school as we all were supposed to do every year, as young teenagers with parents rigged by religion. I was awed by the grit of this fourteen year old boy who had just lost his father and wasn’t willing to let that truth cow him down.

In my masters days, I was this boring book worm that wiggled through pages and had no hobbies to save my soul. I preferred to sleep when I had nothing else to do otherwise, Orkut would do the trick of keeping me busy, in the absence of boyfriends and even girlfriends.
Hi. Are you the same Amit whose father was in the Indian Air force in the  late nineties and who lived along the streets of the St.Mary’s cathedral, Bandra? 
Apologies if you are the wrong person.
Regards
Rachel.
 One such Wednesday evening, was the day marked for our meeting. I happened to come across his profile through a common friend and everything else is history. It boasted of an Amit Tharakan with the location pointing towards Kochi. I had my dreadful doubts about this being the same Amit I used to hate as a teenager. With fingers that were fearfully tap dancing I typed him an e-mail.
 I waited for his reply repining heavily for my impatience. A week later there came an e-mail and a yes to begin with. Indeed, he was the same confused porcupine head I had admired all these years although I was an unknown stranger to him. Alas, he couldn't recall a single day from those times, and it seemed that I had already spoilt the broth.
Contrary to my perceptions, he started e-mailing me twice a week and used to call me as and when time permitted him. As earth was revolving around the sun, our lives were also heading for a change. Our constant conversations transformed into endless discourses and if not for work and college we could have ended up setting a world record for the longest conversation held between two individuals on the phone.
On the first of January the next year, he proposed without a face to face communion. In a thoughtless moment of time, I retorted with a yes. What followed was a romance straight out of the books of a Shakespearean saga. He came to Delhi in February the following year, and without second thoughts about the world, we took to loving each other. His visits would take us to movies, retail therapy and even book hunting to libraries. Life was a poem that was watching its way to the aisle. His May day calling on my birthday brought us closer. We had taken to walking hand in hand while kissing at places where a thousand heads would turn to catch a glimpse of us. It seemed we had known each other for ages and our coming together was a plan God had inked in our lives.

Sita's Curse by Sreemoyee Piu Kundu

Title: Sita’s Curse
Author: Sreemoyee Piu Kundu
Genre: Feminist Erotic Literature
ISBN: 9789350097809
Publisher: Hachette India
Price: INR 350

Picture Credit: http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/a-womans desire/article5706149.ece



Indian women don't talk of sex. Except in their bedrooms. And with their husbands, and sometimes with their girlfriends. To write a piece of erotica in this part of the planet, needs nerves of steel. Sreemoyee tried to liberate the Indian woman from these shackles imposed on her body, by patriarchy. She has used sex as an instrument to expose the religious and social hypocrisy and questioned the Indian arranged marriages by vividly wording the insatiable desires that were never fulfilled in the protagonist's marriage to Mohan. 
Meera, is in tune with her sensuality and the pristine pleasures the body seeks, right from the time she hits adolescence. She sets out on a journey to find a conduit for these carnal cravings. Her first encounters with her twin brother are venerated in poetic language, most of which didn't go down too well with me. All throughout the story, Kartik her brother is shown as that first person who gave wings to her desires and as her most trusted confidante, but what is disappointing is his portrayal as an empty suit, who is made to die too soon. What also left me flabbergasted was her encounter with Binal that made me wonder. Was Meera a nymphomaniac? And which way was her swing? This rendezvous leaves the reader with a distaste in the mouth.

22nd September 2013/ AIIMS metro station #Vote4Children

It was lazy evening in September. I had boarded the metro from DU North campus to AIIMS. I was tired and my legs were breaking into pieces. I was hurrying up to be at home. The music had filled my ears and I wasn't bothered about the humdrum of events around me. I slowly paced up the elevator and was taking the dirty streets lining the Vardhaman Mahavir college. As I was treading down, I saw a crowd of people. I was expecting an accident there and hurried up to check. 
What I saw after that left me scared witless. A man in his middle age, was slapping a young boy who may have been not more than 11 or 12. The boy I believe was the employee at this man's tea stall. He was dressed in a torn shirt and pants and  very shabby slippers.
What amused me the most was that everyone was watching the show with no one offering a hand of help to the boy. The blows got nastier with the passage of time. And the police people deployed at the other end of the road, were also only by-standers. Sadly for quite sometime, even I was murmuring under my breath, a quiet prayer for the young boy. I was alone and had no one to support, and even if I would have jumped into the scene, I was sure that no one would have braced themselves up to me. All the boy did was cry with folded hands.

Kya Dilli Kya Lahore- Movie Review

This isn't your commercial pot boiler of a film, that speaks of our barbed borders. It doesn't have a heroine running around the trees with a hero (playing an army man), both of who are eagerly waiting to hear the wedding bells ring. It doesn't have tanks treading around the war paths, or bombs creating a light and sound effect that will bombard your ears with a real time feel of the war rigged borders.


It is a simple story that is told by four characters. The story opens with a thirsty Vishwajeet Pradhan, a pakistani officer begging for a little water and a visibly shaken Vijay Raaz helping him with his bottle of water. As he is forced to hop over the border in search of a file, he comes face to face, with the realities of life. Across the other end, he meets a timid cook, Manu Rishi who is holed in a log cabin, as the other members of his team have been shot dead. All he has for company is a radio, that is dispelling his fears by playing him spirited messages, and a rifle and few bullets, and of course potatoes and wheat for the bloated belly.

Dirt

The railings are the black gallows

that bind me like a prisoner,

I look for the stars

wrote tales about our love
on the skin of the sky.

Once on this dust

I wanted to walk free

with you, melting

in my shadows

once I wanted to

give a name to this land

call it home

Veil

She shelters it under

a shield, that they call

a veil or a wrap

a shroud to silence an eclipse

or her act of apology

for being Eve's daughter

she has no excuse to dump

the drape, sun shade for some

refuge for others,

she swears by that

piece of cloth

to avert the mimicry

of misunderstood metaphors,

Thoughts on Patrilineal Virilocality

A very good friend of mine got married in her early twenties. Her marriage was being forced down her throat, since her mother was retiring and her father wanted to relocate. Although she had no qualms about a quick marriage and that too a forced one.
The first guy she met got along well with her. He was into hotel management and was working in a reputed hotel in Delhi. They both began dating each other until he lost his job. She had started liking him by then but in an Indian arranged marriage, expressing a desire to marry a jobless guy is like throwing the axe on your foot. Even then she was hoping against hope, that he would find a new job and they would end up together someday.
Because she had started planning a future with him. The guy got a job and actually a very good one. But to take it up he had to relocate to Malaysia.
My friend despite bowing to the decisions taken by her father for her marriage, always chose to stand up for her rights. She loved her job and didn't want to leave it. She also always wanted to be in Delhi, since her brother and his family were settled here. And she wanted to stay close to her natal household.
While the guy she was pursuing wanted to be an NRI at any cost. She tried her best to convince him so that he would settle for another job in Delhi. But he didn't budge.
She bowed to the pressure exerted by her family and settled for another guy brought up and settled in Delhi.
This guy was an old acquaintance. What amused me was the quick rebuttal of her earlier decision, since as a person who had closely known her mind, the other guy had made her heart his home.
Even then she decided to marry this other guy and not move out of Delhi. The only assurance in favor of this decision was that she wanted someone's shoulders to cry on, if something ever went amiss.
She wanted to be spared of the dilemma of making new friends and being a foreigner in an alien land.
Despite she settling for a quick arranged marriage I admire her for having not fallen into the trap of "virilocality".
Recently I saw an advertisement in which the intimate conversations of a couple going to get married are being aired.
One of most interesting aspects of the conversation was the guy telling the girl about her re-location to his place of residence. And the girl nodding her head and saying a "yes" with no signs of protest.
That is what most Indian brides have been doing and will continue to do. Virilocality has been etched in the aggressive Indian patriarchal family system.
In an interview held recently for Springer, I was asked the very irritating question pointing towards the change of residence after marriage. After looking at my cv and date of birth they may have expected me to be getting married quickly to avoid a "late marriage" and to not lose out on the good guys. I replied with an affirmative 'no' since marriage is nowhere in my mind. And I wonder why aren't men asked such questions that belong to the stone age?

Amusingly, the interview was for their mumbai location which doesn't house my parents. Then how on earth did they get the idea of me changing places after marriage, if at all. And the possibility that I would find a guy living in mumbai itself was ruled out out-rightly.

When I am told to marry an NRI to brighten my career prospects in research, I only have one question to ask  such people. Why can't I move out to a foreign country on my own? Why am I expected to marry and why is a husband expected to be the "passport" for a foreign country? A career counselor I had consulted six months ago, told me that this was the preferred choice of most Indian women, when it came to going abroad and finding a job or going for a higher degree.

The Nairs and Menons of Kerala practised the matriarchal 'tharavad' system until it was abolished recently. In which the woman stayed at her natal household even after marriage, and the husband stayed back at his place with his sister, if he had any. If he didn't have a female sibling he was expected to move in to the wife's place. Her children stayed in their mother's natal home which was also their home. The woman's brother in this case was the custodian of the woman's wealth and for such people a family meant 'sister and her children'. Although this system didn't project the rights of the Nair woman, since she was pitted as the sister of the Nair man, this didn't fan the fantasies of regressive patriarchy that expected the woman to leave her parents and home and make another person's house her abode.
What finds favor with women like me is the "neolocal residence" in which both the husband and wife stay in a place away from the natal households of both. This type of post-martial residence is widely practised in the west.
For my sisters, who think that there isn't a choice beyond virilocality, think again. Maybe we can start aping the west with this, now that we have started following them in everything we do.
Indian marriages are themselves a very violent institution that is gendered to the core and expects the woman to re-shape her life and choices. Patrilineal virilocality adds fuel to this fire, which is an important aspect that most women aiming for equal rights with men, tend to ignore, but must not overlook.