On Rakhi

The simplest of decisions can be so difficult to execute.

Take rakhi for instance. I’ve been saying it for quite some time now, but this year I firmly decided to stop observing rakhi. A simple decision, one would think, involving no one but me and the sisters concerned. Just a matter of personal choice, of talking it out and being done with it.

If only.

A paternal outburst was expected, but that ‘twould come a full blown storm was the least of my expectations. Bitter accusations and criminations apart though, the incident proved interesting by throwing in sharp relief some of the many values and behavioural patterns which we tend to take for granted and which provide a comforting cushion to everyday existence – that, and the validity of our, or at least mine, questioning of them.

But first things first. Why did I want to stop observing rakhi? Well, simply because I think it’s an antiquated ritual which has lost its symbolic value in the present scenario. Of course, when I say the present scenario I mean my own milieu, the narrow circle I move in and not the world at large. Also, when I talk of the symbolic value of rakhi, I take the meaning understood and inculcated in most of us urban bourgeoisies – that rakhi, as a pan-cultural symbol common not just to the Hindu religion, is an observation and assertion of a brother’s duties to his sisters, to love and protect her from all harm.

Which is what’s problematic. Protect her from all harm? Of course, it’s not written anywhere, but that’s what’s implied, and being so includes almost everything possible, from bees to boyfriends, rats to rapists. I always say I’m a sorry excuse of a mard and that I manage to keep myself alive is enough without being specifically tasked with the protection of any female as a particular duty. If it’s bad, it’s bad for me as well as for the sisters and so it’s unfair to expect me to be a saviour of any sort for anybody. Got enough to fend for myself without bothering being ever-so-old-fashionedly chivalrous.

Sounds valid? That’s what I thought. It’s nice to put an end to these patriarchal, paternalistic rituals, isn’t it? As feminists of some sort of the other that’s what we ought to do too, I suppose. Put an end to patriarchal, paternalistic, phallocentric modes of being.

For what? Ay, for what? For what and what for?

In this specific case, given my narrow, urban, predominantly kayasth bourgeoisie circle, none of that bit about rakhi meaning protection is valid. Nobody expects brothers to protect sisters from harm in that bhaiya mere mode of the 70s; in particular, nobody expects me to bother much. It’s just a ritual shorn completely of its meaning, a collective habit which is just observed. Of course, it’s all very nice and proper to argue that even if the ritual’s meaning is not evoked its symbolism still stands and that to be enmeshed within that too is a sign of ideological indoctrination so that it’s still our responsibility to resist and change, but then, well, even that’s a bit facile, hmm?

How? Well, first and foremost, not only can the ritual not be taken in a particular way, but its symbolism too can change. There isn’t anything particular which can fix a meaning to something in any inherent manner, is there? If rakhi can mean paternalistic protection, it can also be just another bahana for meeting.

Which is what it’s taken as for the most. True, brotherly obligations are still part of the world we live in, but then those values are not in the least thrust upon us as writ in stone to-dos. As family one has certain obligations – and indeed, obligations which, given proper indoctrination, needn’t appear so – towards caring for and feeling, to varying, subjectively determined degrees, responsible for the welfare and well-being of family members and the brother-sister dynamic, if not exaggerated back into the 70s of Hindi cinema, is a legitimate part of them. That scratching the surface does indeed propel quite a few of us back there is also true, yes, but so is the fact that in quite a few cases it doesn’t. Besides, while it’s alright to argue in isolation that families are patriarchal and their idiom and basis phallocentric, one can’t but concede that with a little give and take, with a little adjustment – indoctrination and assimilation if you will – there’s nothing too bad about them. What, indeed, would we do without them? Do we have any alternatives to families? Not families as we know them, families as they have been, but families, groups of humans clustered together with a certain commonality of birth and relation – can we exist without being together?

We can. Not in the same way of course, but then not with the same, or even similar, basis. Humanity can be organised in a zillion other ways I suppose, but then all of those would be conscious efforts, would be structures systematically thought out and rationalised. We can have, with a supreme, well nigh impossible effort, a society structured on the basis of equality and justice – and equality and justice as some of us who bother about them today understand them – but then, well, is that even desirable?

Seriously, is a just and equal society even desirable? I’m all for comparatively just and comparatively equitable, but wholly so? A society where legality and the rhetoric of rationality would keep in check all truant desires, negate the possibility of violence and discrimination by intricate mechanisms of checks and balances and create, enforce, a sense of equality is just way too Orwellian for my comfort. Personal relations and subjectivity would, in such a world, be subsumed under the larger need for objectively defined equality. Men and women would be equal, yes, but what then all those gamut of passions and desires which make inter-sexual dynamics what they are today would no longer be valid. Just as it wouldn’t do to expect your female partner to cook your food (if you were a male i.e.), it would also not do to abuse someone just because they cheated on you. Truths tend to be ossified, but in a social setup guided wholly by rationally determined codes and legality that sort of ossification, backed by appropriate indoctrination, would be complete.

Which, even if it were not for an overwhelming taint of absolutism, would be stifling boring.

Wouldn’t it? I mean, who would want to live a life wholly determined by received notions of rationally acceptable behaviour? To be correct all the time, to always give a damn and never, ever be wrong, who would possibly want that? Of course we need safeguards to make sure we don’t all run amok, but isn’t doing that every now and then part of being human as we know it? Who would want to completely change that, to deny themselves the privilege, even if rare, of not caring – or pretending not to and doing all possible bosh in the guise? To not do as one is expected to but deliberately go against, to feel that sheer, perverse joy of going against and do so knowing, after all, that even though it’s not justified completely it is, given certain received circumcisions, understandable, even pardonable. All said and done, there might be an essence to things – that there needn’t be one, that for all our rationality we needn’t be so all the time, that we may let go and accept, critique that acceptance, nuance it, but let go, let be.

To think of rakhi just as a patriarchal custom and so condemn it is, then, to be naive in a way that that curious creature, the campus feminist, is. Yes, it is patriarchal and heavily consumeristic as a festival, but even as it is, to argue against it just on those grounds, grounds based on the logic of rationality and semantics, is to further deprive our lives of those moments of sparkling irrationality, unthinking-ness if I may, which the larger social framework of post-enlightenment global capital has already made suspect. In many ways one is and must be thankful for that, for the life we live is quite literally a creation of these ideas and ideals; but even so one cannot but be wary of the banishment of irrationality, of craziness and insanity, from life. The world, perhaps, is not half as crazy as it used to be a hundred or so years ago and one must be glad that it’s not, but if it were to wholly be not so – and regardless of the way, good or bad (again, these as understood by most today) – it would be not half as nice a place to live as it is now. Rakhi, as a ritual without meaning, a symbol sans its symbolism, is just one instance of the insanity we are intent on proving obsolete: it might be nice to prove it so and push it out of consciousness, but then whether it’ll be worth the effort is, and will be, open to continual contention.

Which is why, I suppose, it’s so difficult to execute the simplest of decisions.

*

Of course that bloke off Har-ki-paudi was right – in just this one instance, that this would materialise. This, then, to him.

On Being Made a Mama

It’s oddly exciting being made a mama. My sister recently did me the honour. I am now a mama.

Actually, it’s oddly preposterous as well. I mean, me a mama? Of course, I knew it was in the offing these past nine months or so and I was looking forward to it as well, to the prospect of having after a long time a babe in the house, but the morn the news came, the morning the news was suddenly broken upon my unsuspecting, groggy self, it hit me like a tonne of happy bricks. It was expected, of course, but more, I suppose, as a distant possibility, as something that would happen but not so soon, not at least take you unawares and knock the innocence out of you in one fell stroke – or cut, as it was in her case.

Innocence, ay! For though I may not be particularly innocent as I am now, in form at least I could claim some amount of it as a young scion of the generation. I am, after all, one of the younger ones and in any case more in the past than any of us. Memories of that childhood are far from dead and in moments of ponderous solitude the mind’s eye wanders over many a scene of knickered and board game-ed joy. More than that, being young, being, as it were, one of the last in line, one feels a certain license to youth, to the abandon and mindlessness that are the undeniable preserves of youth and the youngest.

No more, no more! In one fell stroke – cut – all gone, all transferred to a wrinkly, animated blob of flesh and bones. At this tender age of fun and games, all the heavy weight of relations and responsibilities, all the onerous burden of acting up for a generation upon me, an uncle!

How, how does one act an uncle? What does it mean to be a mama? Is one supposed to alter one’s attitude to life, one’s behaviour, one’s self because there is now a generation beneath one for whom one is required to set worthy examples? How, too, to behave with the kid when it grows up? Should one be stern and noble and inspire a la Chesterfield visions of an austere and fulfilling life? Or should one open vistas for greater fun and debauchery, be the mama a niece would look up to when in mood for sin? One can’t treat a niece like younger, baby siblings – or can one? After all, like the rest, it is an animated blob of flesh and bones and just because it makes my greys look whiter still doesn’t make it any different per se.

An animated blob of flesh and bones. Not very charitable, I suppose. But it’s nameless as of now. What is one supposed to call it? Her? The Kid? Ku Di’s kid? Without a name, without the jimble-jamble of identities that a name affixes on one, is not one just an animated blob of flesh and bones? Language makes the niece? Or the niece makes language? A quaint baby too: post-colonially post-modern, yet destined to grow up a structuralist enmeshed in deep structures of kinship and good old bourgeois morality. Would a name really matter then? The future’s already laid out, a mish-mash of identities already bestowed: girl child, first born, baniya, Indian, bourgeois, woman...except for the calling, does a name really matter much then? Yet, one can’t but hope it’s something nice, something that would be good to consider and call, for though from the moment the fatal cut was made and thing extracted it has been getting normalised, being made a subject from an object, her from it, a name is a name: a marker, an identity.

An identity that cannot be denied. Oh, a mama – too soon, too soon! The sister can never really be forgiven for this, though hers being arranged the blame falls more on the jija for unmindful haste. Seriously, not even a year and one on the block already! What’s the hurry, one wonders, what in the world! To each their own, of course, but one does wonder why one wouldn’t want to be conjugal and kid free for a while...being as it is, the deed being done and consummated so soon, one would imagine there was some sort of need to prove virility in this off-hand, childish manner. Besides, it does seem too much of a patriarchal conspiracy of sorts, have the woman pregnant and burdened with kids as soon as she’s married and so effectively shut off means for self-determination for the next two decades or so.

Not, of course, that one thinks ‘twas effectively planned so, no – but one can’t but think. A sister pregnant and a generation thrust beneath one, all by a man more or less unknown. One wishes one had a bit more say in these matters. As if the cornucopia of relations and relationships wasn’t enough, to have this, to have you made older and responsible in form without as much as your consent! It is the last straw really, the last nail in the coffin of a childhood already dead and gone, an official confirmation if you will: arise, no longer child, by these wrinkly, sleepy blob, by the freshly cut womb of a sister, by the haste of a jija, a new-made mama!

*

(some time later) The importance of stating that everything that's written is not implied seriously being vehemently pointed, it is thus done so.

Being CR

To Myself,
Bickering & Bitching,
Gratifying my own Vanity…
(…is this surprising? don’t delude yourself!)

I’ve been a good CR (class representative for the uninitiated). Yes, I have been quite an efficient, fair and unbiased CR who’s done his work as conscientiously and honestly as possible. I’ve been democratic and open and have always tried to maintain a balance between the interests of the class, the teachers and myself. Yes, I’ve been a pretty good CR.

But I’ve had my bad points as well. I’ve been too efficient, too caring, too considerate, and in being all of this, I’ve spoilt my class, spoilt the whole blooming lot of them. In telling them each and every thing; in meticulously planning out schedules, carefully arranging classes and religiously sending out messages to every single one of them, I’ve made them complacent, assuming and overbearing…

For example, just because I feel everybody has an equal right to know what is happening shouldn’t make people feel that they have an-equaller-than-thou right to treat me like a bloody (or bloodless!) walking, talking, living timetable! First, they can’t call. No sir, they needs must message you! But do try and understand their situation: poor outstation students from small towns surviving on shoestring budgets, living their miserable life somehow or the other away from their home and family…oh how tragic! How moving! Don’t you see, cruel heart, and still more cruel reader, that they have to save, they have to economise, they have to message? How else will they live their life of utmost drudgery? How else will they survive?

So, they message. And pray, when do they message? At the bewitching hour of 12, at 3 in the morning, at nine in the night! Dinner, lunch, tea, study, do what you will, the messages will follow you like that accursed pug, you and I in this god forsaken world! You might be deep in Indian mythology, you might be going along Chaucer to Canterbury, you might be walking with Socrates, but all in vain! Trrrrrrring-tin-tin! A message out of nowhere, a call back from the twenty-first century, rudely waking you up…

And what do we want to know? “hey!r v hvng d 8:40 cls wth bms tomrrw?”

Bloody hell! First you disturb me, you rudely pull me back to the reality which you poison with your presence and then ask me questions in such a preposterously sickening language! Damn you! You spoil my Romantic/Elizabethan/Medieval/Victorian/Augustan dreams with this! This! THIS!

And what if I reply, which I, out of a sense of duty, always do? What then? Nothing. No sign of gratitude, not a single thank you (or “thanx” as you type it!)!

Then, nobody has any phone etiquette. You call somebody to ask something, your call isn’t taken, you send a message stating your query and expect the person to at least message in reply- after all, we are classmates…

But no. Why the heck should I care? Why should I answer your question? Of course, it doesn’t really matter that I always answer your questions, but then so what? You’re the CR, aren’t you? You’re supposed to answer our questions! You owe it to us, while we, oh, we are divinities on earth, we are answerable to nobody. We’re in a bad mood, and we won’t reply. We sooo hate phone-calls. We suffer from amnesia and forget you even exist…

Forgetfulness was really endemic. You sent a message clearly specifying when which class is going to happen, yet the night before the class some bugger or the other would send a message asking for further clarification. You sent messages asking people to note down and choose any one of the ten presentation topics, yet there will be some chu-chu who will message late in the night before the presentations asking you to message back all ten of the topics. Oh gods, is it so difficult to understand instructions? So difficult to comprehend plain English? Have mercy on me, ye lords of swarga; have more mercy still on these poor dumb animals, these wolf-toothed sheep of your fold!

Well, ok, not really. There were a few well-mannered stalwarts, like Aastha, Ishaan, Prashaste, Abhimanyu, Meenakshi, Mayoura and Kiran, who would nicely thank you whenever their queries would be answered…Jonathon was the only person who really came up to my expectations of phone etiquette, calling back, and not messaging, to enquire why you had called…people like these made you feel the trouble was worth it. Yet, on the whole, the job has been pretty thankless.

Thankless. Yes, thankless. And they expect you to do more and more for them. Just because your system works well, they expect you to tweak it every now and then to suit them. A professor gave essays to be photocopied. You sent a message telling interested people to contact you within a time frame. You got them copied for as many people as approached you with money and gave the essays back to the teacher. But the very next day, you get a message asking you to “gt dem cpied 4 me,& ill pay u later”. Certainly your highness, certainly! As you like it! Ja exzellenz!

Teachers, of course, can also be high and mighty at times. Dramatic. Goddess-like (we anyways have a matriarchy in our Department of English…). At nine-thirty in the night, you’ll get a message announcing, nay, pronouncing, this shattering judgement- “Class is on”. If I fix tomorrow as the deadline for an assignment, then tomorrow it will unchangeably be. My word is law, my will immutable. What I wish, even the stars shall obey, for I am the liberated woman (no, female- we’re all gender-less in Literature!).

And to add to all of this, we had the Freshers and the Farewell as well. If the third years were prodigiously kind to direct us with the wisdom of their years for the former, the first years are being (it’s still to happen) extraordinarily generous in refreshing our perspective with their pseudo-suicidal/existential/nihilist tendencies. I’ve had a mood swing, so I won’t complete the work assigned to me. We had a meeting today? Oh, but we have a class and we can’t possibly attend- let’s have it later…What? Could’ve informed you we had a class yesterday evening when you sent the message? Well, I’m a little busy these days you know, and I just couldn’t...

Then, there are people who were so very keen to have the Farewell, people who’ve been thinking about it for a year or so. Sure, I appreciate your spirit, but then why the heck weren’t you ready with your plan? Why are you busy getting your act together now? Why, for blessed heaven’s sake, now, when you had the idea in mind for almost a year? Oh, I know you’ll manage to put up something fair in the remaining week, but then most of your work will be last minute preparation with hectic schedules! Why didn’t you plan in advance, so that we wouldn’t have to work at the eleventh hour? Why make my life difficult!

Of course, there were times when you felt everybody was conspiring to make your life difficult. Having an almost non-existent, embarrassingly invisible Dancing Queen as my fellow CR didn’t-doesn’t-help. People don’t expect her to work anyways, and things would inevitably get messy when she would all of a sudden wake up, realise that she had other responsibilities besides giving audience to all the sundry men of her retinue and assert her right to do as she pleased…this the heavy price we humble mortals pay for having thrice-born Queens amongst us…

Oh, I agree, I’m to blame for all of it. I and my stupid ideas about democracy and equality. “The only precondition will be that we do everything by democratic vote and that all of us be as equals.” Thinking that Athenian democratic ideals (yes, you can laugh- somebody already has, and now I’m more or less impervious) would work with a juvenile bunch of college students. What bosh!

Whatever. Que sera sera. It’s been an awfully great adventure being a good CR. It would be an awfully great one being a bad one…

* * *

Actually, I don’t mean all of it…
(Yes, I know: how disappointingly predictable! Yet, I tried my best!)

* * *

Damnation

To Nisha, Maya and Vishaan
For me, as a reminder

I’d like to burn some crackers. They used to be so much fun, those phooljaris and those chakris, I wish I could burn some of them again...

I was till a few years ago prejudiced against the North-east chinki people. I still find them a bit strange, especially their names…

I think it’s perfectly stupid that girls should put up so much kaajal to give themselves the dark circled, supposedly seductive look. I’m quite sure they would look better without that; in fact, they do look better without that…

I think The Iliad is the most horrible text I’ve ever come across. It’s full of the most disgusting bloodshed and the most gory violence…

I find homosexuals strange, that is to say inexplicable. It’s eerie that they get sexually attracted to people of their own sex…

I’ve had enough of Christianity and I don’t care a damn about it! Those bloody Christians are pretty much responsible for the mess the world is in right now…

I love the songs Why Can’t a Woman be more like a Man and Never let a Woman in your Life from My Fair Lady and I think I am 16, going on 17 from The Sound of Music is cute…

I think the Punjabis are conspiring to take over the world, that Singh is King was the latest in their covert agenda of overthrowing all culture and art. Most Punjabis and Jats I have met are philistines with no trace of sweetness or light or refinement about them…

I think…

I think this much is enough!

Yes, this is pretty much enough. I’m sure that by now I’ve successfully established myself as a sexist, racist, insensitive, communalist, bigoted, ne’er-to-do-well, devil-may-care monster.

You know what’s more?

I don’t give two hoots to what you think because that’s what I am. I am racist, I am sexist, I am insensitive, I am a bigoted monster.

Just as you are.

Ok, perhaps that was a bit too much, eh? Perhaps you’re not such a monster...

Perhaps you’ve never ever guffawed or told a joke ridiculing nagging wives or simple Sardarjis, perhaps those of you who’re not Punjabi have never cribbed about the degenerative influence of the ‘Punjabi culture’, perhaps you’ve never thought that India would’ve been a better place had Muslims been packed off to Pakistan in ’47, perhaps you’ve never wanted to do and have never done things you know are ‘bad’, perhaps…

Perhaps not.

It would be a real miracle if you’ve never ever done this, or any other politically incorrect, blasphemous thing. Perfection in imperfection is the only perfectly human trait- all of us do, have at some point done, or, at the very least, have thought of various stupid, illogical, unspeakable, ‘bad’ things. All of us are, therefore, monsters.

Bah, you would say. Never! We might’ve thought of, or considered privately something of this sort, but we’ve never actually done anything. No siree, never! How dare you, you, you insolent, battameez brat! Innocent till proven guilty, blotless till party to the act!

And that’s the point. You’re right, one really is blameless till one actually commits the crime, one really cannot be called names till one has actually done something unacceptable…

I really am not a monster.

I know burning crackers is bad for the environment and I know I won’t burn them, even if I want to for a while.

People have the unassailable freedom to dress as they like: I dress as I choose and I definitely don’t like others to question my dress sense. I may comment on others, but I seldom do so vocally.

The Iliad is gory, but that’s one of its points- to fully highlight the horrendousness of war, as also its futility.

I do think homosexuals are weird, but that doesn’t stop me from accepting them.

Anybody studying Literature in English in Delhi University will agree that we have too much of Christianity. I know why, but then there is an excess, and an illogical, temporary repulsion against an excess is a very natural reaction.

I’ll stand for Henry Higgins in any pulpit, just as I would for feminists.

I do despise-sometimes hate-the Punjabis, but that has till now not blinded me to their good points. My oldest friend is a Punjabi, my favourite teacher in high school was a Punjabi, the girl on whom I first had a crush was a Punjabi, my current second-best friend is a Punjabi, my most regular correspondent and pen friend too is a Punjabi. So much so that the semi-academic paper I started with the intention of lampooning the Punjabis and blasting them to smithereens ended up, for lack of rationally justifiable arguments, praising them.

In short, I do not, like you, usually let my subjectivity adversely influence my objectivity. I may believe in something illogical and may want to do or say something stupid, but I usually don’t do or say that.

I think this is what matters.

Jane Eyre thought her rustic pupils below her, and saw her placement as their school-mistress a degradation, a move down the social ladder. Yet, by all accounts, she never let that affect her pedagogy with them- she strove to not just teach them as a schoolmistress but also train them in the Graces as a mentor.

Just so, I, for example, like some deeply misogynist songs, but I also champion women’s empowerment. I enjoy Henry Higgins cribbing about women as exasperating creatures- which man wouldn’t? I’m sure every woman would enjoy listening to a song about men in the same vein- a poem my Punjabi pen friend recently wrote lampooning men was greatly appreciated by all women who read it. These things are enjoyed in good humour, without any real intention of offence…

Which is to say that you don’t let your subjectivity, of liking a song as chauvinistic as I am 16, affect your objectivity as an analyst- instead, if possible, i.e. depending upon the case, you use the former to reach to a deeper understanding of the subject matter so as to enhance the latter. You enjoy the song, but also realise that women were looked down upon as dependants and so get a multiple perspective on the matter, something which goes along with you when you assess the situation today. You are horrified by Homer, and so get one of his main points. You wish to burn firecrackers, but don’t, for you know it’s harmful and so become a bit more understanding and a bit less judgemental because now you know how hard it is to actually resist temptation as compared to preaching.

Of course, you have to be politically correct. You can’t go around saying what you feel, wherever you feel. Yet, it’s important not to forget that you aren’t really all that politically correct, that you may feel like doing or saying something illogical or bad, but you don’t precisely because you know it’s not done, that it’s a bad thing and really not as you think it to be. That is how you improve yourself, by reminding yourself of your follies and, if not fully correcting them, then at least striving to not let them overpower you. Your subjectivity and objectivity should overlap, but only till its constructive and beneficial. It’s a very difficult task, but that's the only way to survive, for always being politically correct means, to put it as Charles Osgood did, “always having to say you’re sorry.”

Which, caring more than a damn about what you’d think, I am not.