When I first heard that Siddharth Basu is bringing Moment of Truth to Indian television, I was very curious to see what it would turn out like, when put in the Indian context.

And what I saw, surprised me, pleasantly.

Naah, pleasantly is such a mild word. I love it!

It’s so much fun to see people squirming in their seats – actually, it’s mostly the contestants’ family and friends that are squirming in their seats, while the contestant just goes on and on.

It must be a very strange kind of person who’d go up on TV, on prime time, with all that many people watching the show, not only then, but also later on youtube – and be able to sit there and acknowledge their deepest, darkest truths. I know I’d never do that. And neither would I put someone I love through that. There are people who make someone they know and love go up there and take part in the show. Like, I remember one episode where this woman made her husband go. Strange, no?

Is it the magic of wanting to be on TV? Is it the money you could possibly win? Is just that they want to hear the truth, or tell the truth, badly enough to even want to do it in front of the whole world? Or, are they – and I suspect this is the most correct answer – just crazy people?

I mean, really! WHY would you do that? Or, what would make you do that?!

But I think Star Plus has finally hit upon another winning show.

Siddharth Basu and Ekta Kapoor together probably make up for 90% of the channel’s revenue and TRPs – no?

Really, since after Colours took over as the most-watched Hindi GEC, this show has finally started making people go back to Star Plus.

Of course, though, the most watched Reality Show on Indian television, in the last two years, has been Rakhi ka Swayamvar, which by the way, I LOVED!! But, I digress.

Back to wondering about what makes people do such blatant “khulaasa” (as popular Hindi news channels would say). And I really can’t say what it is. I know why I like watching it, though. And, I actually do like this one more than the American version. I guess because this is in a context and space that’s closer to relate to? Because the American version just seems to hold my attention for a while, but this one makes me not want to change the channel at all. And it’s also because all of us like watching other people’s discomfort on TV – no? And not our fault – they put themselves under the spotlight on their own, crazies that they are!

Oh, and Rajeev Khandelwal, I think started out as a slightly uncomfortable, awkward anchor, but how he’s grown into his role! He’s perfect, I think – the correct mix of being involved and sensitive, and also detached and business-like.

What I find myself doing most often, though, while watching the show, is making up stories in my head about the kind of life the person’s had, or has.

The relationships that are important to them, the circumstances that made them who they are, what’ll happen to those important relationships once the show’s over and done with? Will a man just move on after getting caught out on a question about him having been unfaithful to his wife? Will his wife just move on? Will that be the end of the marriage? How will their family, their friends, their children, their neighbours and colleagues at office react to them from this moment on, for the rest of their lives? Will these memories actually last for the “rest of their lives”, or will it just be forgotten as a TV show?

The woman who said that she still believed that her parents always loved her brother more, and they continue to love her brother’s children more than her own, and then had tears in her eyes while admitting this – would she have got closure after having admitted this on TV, or did this admission bring the whole problem that had been pushed under the carpet for all these years, out in the open for the whole family, to be forced to acknowledge it? How will her parents react now, knowing what they do? How will her brother react? And her brother’s wife, for that matter?

I think one could write many stories. I think I will, actually.

Unmana writes about why she is feminist.

Speaking about clichéd gender roles in books, she says:

You see, in all the books I had read the heroine merely "waited to be rescued" (courtesy Shrek 3), while the hero did all the rescuing and adventuring.

Taking this forward, Nancy Friday’s My Mother My Self has interesting commentary on women being slotted into gender roles.

Society plays us a dirty trick by calling us the loving sex. The flattery is meant to make us proud of our weakness, our inability to be independent, our imperative need to belong to someone. We are limited to need and nurture, leaving erotic love to men. A “lovesick” man makes people uncomfortable because the condition weakens him, jeopardises his manhood, cuts down his productivity. But a woman who can’t think clearly, who dreams over her law books, loses weight, and walks into brick walls arouses warm feelings in everybody. Men and women both know how good it feels to be knocked out by love, but someone has to mind the store. Since women haven’t got anywhere to go anyway, and a needy woman makes a man work harder in order to provide for two, romance itself becomes fuel for the economic mill.

He will make love to us in the moonlight to the sound of violins, but in the morning he will shower, shave, put on his clothes, and go to the office in pursuit of his “real” interests. In almost every novel you read or film you see, love is a disaster for the female protagonist, depriving her of initiative, courage, or sense of order, sending her down into masochism and loss of self.

Studies have shown that the basic nature of a human being is determined by the first five years of her/his life. Nancy Friday talks about the relationship between a woman and her mother being the basis of all dependency vs. independence, the longing for intimacy, and the passivity in the woman’s personality. My Mother My Self deals with the first binding relationship of our life being the model for everything else in our adult lives.

After the first stage of dependency on the mother, a child soon starts wanting separation – to experience all the smells, touch, sights around – as a separate individual. Until now, the mother has been the beginning and the end of all experiences and fulfilment of every need. From here on, what a baby most requires is a “basic sense of trust”.

This need to feel a basic trust of life is essential for both males and females. But because of the inevitable modelling relationship between mother and daughter, we are not just stuck for life with the sense of basic trust she did or didn’t give us. We are also stuck with the image of her as a woman, her sense of basic trust that her mother gave her. A boy will grow up, and following his father’s lead, leave home, support himself, start a family. He may or may not be successful. Much of his success will depend on the basic sense of trust his mother gave him; but he will not identify with his mother. He will not base all his relationships on what he had with her (unless he is a certain kind of homosexual).

But a girl who did not get this basic sense of trust, though she may leave her mother’s house, get a job, marry and have children, will never really feel comfortable on her own, in control of her own life. Part of her is still anxiously tied to her mother. She doesn’t trust herself and others. She cannot believe there is another way to be because this is how her mother was. It is also how most other women are. If our mothers are not separate people themselves, we cannot help but take in their anxiety and fear, their need to be symbiosed with someone. If we do not see them involved in their own work, or enjoying something just for themselves, we too do not believe in accomplishment or pleasure outside of a partnership. We denigrate anything that we alone experience; we say, “It’s more fun when there is someone else along.” The fact is we’re afraid to go anyplace alone. How many adult women have you heard joke, “I haven’t decided what I’m going to be when I grow up…”? How many women call their husbands Daddy or Papa, and think of their children as “my daughter”, instead of Betsy or Jane?

Emotionally unseparated from mother, just as afraid as she was, we repeat the process with our own daughter. An unfortunate history, a way of growing up female that our society has amazingly left unchallenged. Being cute and helpless, clinging, clutching, holding on for dear life, becomes our method for survival – and ultimate defeat.

It isn’t only, of course, the relationship with our mothers that dictates the women we become – though it is the most important, probably. Fathers too play an important role in making a child into the kind of woman she becomes. Not just the relationship, as it is, between a man and his daughter – but also the dynamics of that relationship within the family. Actually, also the dynamics of all relationships within the family.

Simone de Beauvoir says, in The Second Sex:

The relative rank, the hierarchy, of the sexes is first brought to her attention in family life; little by little she realizes that if her father’s authority is not that which is most often felt in daily affairs, it is actually supreme; it only takes on more dignity from not being degraded to daily use; and even if it in fact the mother who rules as mistress of the household, she is commonly clever enough to see to it that the father’s wishes come first; in important matters the mother demands, rewards, and punishes in his name and through his authority. The life of the father has a mysterious prestige: the hours he spends at home, the room where he works, the objects he has around him, his pursuits, his hobbies, have a sacred character. He supports the family, and he is the responsible head of the family. As a rule his work takes him outside, and so it is through him that the family communicates with the rest of the world: he incarnates that immense, difficult, and marvellous world of adventure; he personifies transcendence, he is God. This is what the child feels physically in the powerful arms that lift her up, in the strength of his frame against which she nestles. Through him the mother is dethroned as once was Isis by Ra, and the Earth by the Sun.

But here the child’s situation is profoundly altered: she was to become one day a woman like her all-powerful mother – she will never be the sovereign father; the bond attaching her to her mother was an active emulation – from her father she can but passively await an expression of approval. The boy thinks of his father’s superiority with a feeling of rivalry; but the girl has to accept it with impotent admiration. I have already pointed out what Freud calls the Electra complex is not, as he supposes, a sexual desire; it is a full abdication of the subject, consenting to become object in submission and adoration. If her father shows affection for his daughter, she feels that her existence is magnificently justified; she is endowed with all the merits that others have to acquire with difficulty; she is fulfilled and deified. All her life she may longingly seek that lost state of plenitude and peace. If the father’s love is withheld, she may ever after feel herself guilty and condemned; or she may look elsewhere for appreciation of herself and become indifferent to her father or even hostile. Moreover, it is not alone the father who holds the keys to the world: men in general share normally in the prestige of manhood; there is no occasion for regarding them as ‘father substitutes’. It is directly, as men, that grandfathers, older brothers, uncles, playmates, fathers, family friends, teachers, priests, doctors, fascinate the little girl. The emotional concern shown by adult women towards Man would of itself suffice to perch him on a pedestal.

These two books, I feel, together, are the most exhaustive study of feminism and femininity – and have always made perfect sense, not always in my own context maybe, but always in the larger sense of society, and a lot of time in the context of someone or the other I know.

Any more books that add to these, I’d love to read. Suggestions are most welcome.

Please note: The article at the bottom of this post was not written originally by my Dad. It was edited by him and modified to fit the context of the Indian soldiers. This is already mentioned at the bottom of this post. And he’s even linked to the original on his blog. Most people who commented here understood that. Strangely enough, there are other people who cannot scroll to the bottom and read, and instead leave rude comments at other blogs.

If Obelix was here, you know what he’d have done, right? Tapped his head (toc toc toc), and said – “These trolls are crazy!”

…

Long, long time since I wrote. And the number of unpublished posts I have is unbelievable. I’ve tried to start writing and then lost the inclination, or had my mind blanking out, or just not had the time to finish.

The Mumbai Attacks, meanwhile, have left me feeling …or actually, have left me wondering what to feel. Angry? Confused? Outraged? All of the above?

I watched the news for four days straight, with only breaks for sleeping at night – horrified at what was happening, and the implications of all of it. Feeling guilty to even be sleeping. No reason for the guilt, I know. But staying awake and watching the news, and feeling the pain, was the only way to take part in what was happening in a city over 1400 Kms away. Over the next few days, I’ve even found myself putting on radio in the car, on the way back from work, and feeling instantly guilty to be listening to music.

Yes, I realise that this makes very little sense.

I have only been speaking about this with my parents, brother and husband – because I just don’t have it in me to engage in a conversation about this with anyone else who doesn’t feel the outrage that we all have been feeling. It is difficult to put this feeling in words, spoken or written. All of us have sat and watched TV with tears flowing down our faces. My brother’s had a fight with a friend, and my husband’s had an argument with a colleague.

Saahil’s friend is doing Hotel Management (so is Saahil), and all he had to say was that he was glad he hadn’t started training in either of these hotels. My brother was incapable of explaining to this boy that it was so not about your own self here. There was so much more.

G’s colleague said that he wished “all these Muslims” would just be sent back to Pakistan.

I’ve felt physical rage at just hearing these two stories from S and G, and do not wish to enter into any conversations myself with people.

I’ve been reading a few blogs off and on. There were people who just reported what had happened, but mostly they were outraged too. Some wondered why the Officers who died had to head these operations themselves, and couldn’t just strategise from the background since they were heads of various teams. Well, maybe because they were “Officers”, and one of the vows they take is to protect their country, their men, and then if they have any life left, themselves – in that order.

I’ve read in many blogs now that it’s sad how the young don’t care. And while I agree that it’s extremely sad that a lot of them don’t, I disagree, mainly because of my 21 year old brother, who does.

I heard people wondering what the big deal was with the Kerala CM not going to Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s home. And, while I agree that it isn’t wrong for the Kerala CM to choose to fly to Karnataka a little late, it is still inexcusable what he said.

But, anyway, while on the topic – this is something that might answer some questions that a lot of people have about why the media is suddenly so full of how important our Army, Navy and Air Force are. Yes, people have been wondering why this incident has led to so much being written about them all over the place, even though these same people do the same job every day in J&K. Why is so much being made of it this time around? No, it isn’t because the “elite” got attacked, and the “aam aadmi” didn’t.

We’re talking about them because this incident was not the same thing as what happens every day in J&K. If there is firing at our borders, it is between the Armies of two countries. It isn’t an illogical, all-out attack on civilians of a country by terrorists.

My family has had many people who’ve served in one of the three Armed Forces. Mom’s father (my Nana) was in the Army, both of my Naani’s brothers were in the Navy, and my Dad’s an ex-fighter pilot from the IAF. This is an artcle that Papa wrote while we were all in the midst of watching the news. Do read.

—

Half Man  Half Boy

The average age of the army man is 23 years. 

He is a short haired, tight-muscled kid who, under normal circumstances is considered by society as half man, half boy. Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer in the capital of his country, but old enough to die for his country.

He’s a recent school or college graduate; he was probably an average student from one of the Kendriya Vidyalayas, pursued some form of sport activities, drives a rickety bicycle, and had a girlfriend that either broke up with him when he left, or swears to be waiting when he returns from half a world away. He listens to rock and roll or hip -hop or bhangra or gazals and a 155mm howitzer.

He is 5 or 7 kilos lighter now than when he was at home because he is working or fighting the insurgents or standing guard on the icy Himalayas from before dawn to well after dusk or he is at Mumbai engaging the terrorists. He has trouble spelling, thus letter writing is a pain for him, but he can field strip a rifle in 30 seconds and reassemble it in less time in the dark. He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively if he must.

He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. 

He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. 

He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. His pride and self-respect, he does not lack.

He is self-sufficient. 

He has two sets of combat dress: he washes one and wears the other. 

He keeps his water bottle full and his feet dry. 

He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cook his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own wounds. 

If you’re thirsty, he’ll share his water with you; if you are hungry, his food. He’ll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low.

He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. 

He can save your life – or take it, because he’s been trained for both.

He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. 

He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. 

He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed to do so.

He feels every note of the Jana Gana Mana vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to ’square-away’ those around him who haven’t bothered to stand, remove their hands from their pockets, or even stop talking. In an odd twist, day in and day out, far from home, he defends their right to be disrespectful. Just as did his Father, Grandfather, and Great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom.

Beardless or not, he is not a boy. 

He is your nation’s Fighting Man that has kept this country free and defended your right to Freedom. He has experienced deprivation and adversity, and has seen his buddies falling to bullets and maimed and blown.

And he smiles at the irony of the IAS babu and politician reducing his status year after year and the unkindest cut of all, even reducing his salary and asking why he should get 24 eggs a week free! And when he silently whispers in protest, the same politician and babu aghast, suggest he’s mutinying!

Wake up citizens of India! Let’s begin discriminating between the saviours of India and the traitors!

- Flt. Lt. Rajiv Tyagi

Edited to add: This article isn’t written entirely by my Dad. It’s just been modified to fit the Indian context. He actually wrote another piece for a newspaper, which I shall post when he sends it to me. (Hurry up, Papa!)

A friend I’d written about earlier wrote this on his blog last night:

The King had a dream, and it has been realized. I could never imagine it would be this soon.

Just 53 years ago a black woman was arrested because she wouldn’t stand up to give a white man her seat on a bus. Today a black man was given the highest seat in the country. 

Can you FATHOM the idea???

NOT to say that possibilities didn’t exist… but were they actually available and real and in the people’s minds? Hell NO!

People turned up and said – you know what.. we don’t care about color SO MUCH that we’ll go out of our way to mess with our country!

That is AWESOME on SO MANY LEVELS!

People CARED about Country!

People wanted to make a DIFFERENCE!

People BELIEVED in their ability to make a change!

People broke THROUGH the barriers of color!!!

Ask a black person what this means to them.

I just feel like so many things are possible! I love this.

A lady who used to live in our building, passed away today. We didn’t know her personally, probably never had even seen her, but when we heard there was a small memorial service in the community hall of our housing society, we decided to go and pay our respects.

So, we walked up to the community hall and entered to see that men sat neatly to one side of the hall, and women sat on the other side. This is something I’ve seen so often – in memorial services such as this one, in wedding ceremonies, havans and poojas – and it surprises me each time.

Of course, I don’t follow the segregation and sit anywhere. My whole family doesn’t subscribe to it either. Like, G sat with me today, and not in the men’s side of the hall. In fact, both of us sat almost in the middle of the two sides, towards the back. My father or my brother would’ve done the same too.

What surprises me though is how diligently this is followed. I saw one elderly man come in with a woman – maybe his wife, or maybe a daughter-in-law. She was looking towards the front of the hall as she walked in, so maybe hadn’t noticed the segregation, and where she was “supposed to” sit. The man she was with sat down in the men’s side, and as she was following him, he very properly and dismissively pointed out where she was supposed to go sit. And so she went and sat in the women’s side, of course.

Why the segregation, is my question. And, does it happen all over the country? Does it happen in other countries as well? It obviously started from the segregation of “one” sex, from “the other”. Simone de Beauvoir points out in her book The Second Sex that the male has traditionally been “the one”, and so by default, the woman is “the other” or the second sex. It’s amazing how such segregation becomes such a part of our everyday culture/life, and how it seeps so deep in, that it isn’t even questioned.

Met the same classmate from school on Gtalk again today. I’d seen pictures of her engagement in her Orkut album, and thought I’d congratulate her.

me: you’re getting married!

This was just random thinking. Don’t bother. I would like to hear what you think though.

People may remember my earlier rant against TOI and sensational journalism…

Yesterday’s Times of India had the following picture on the front page:

The caption read: Next Stop, Lhasa?

Just wondering…

Isn’t the picture and the caption completely against what the Dalai Lama stands for? Isn’t this completely against what he’s been working so hard for? Isn’t it also maybe a little insulting? Doesn’t it go against the peaceful struggle of the Tibetan people?

…

Jug Suraiya though had this to tell:

Don’t speak to anyone, warned Tenzin, our English-speaking guide. Four years ago a friend of his who had been spotted talking to some foreign tourists had ‘disappeared’ and never been seen again. But it was hard to heed the warning. Inside the monastery, the monks swarmed around us. They want to know if you have ever seen His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Tenzin explained. We shook our heads regretfully. They’re asking if you have any pictures of His Holiness, said Tenzin. Again we had to indicate we hadn’t. They’re asking if you can give them some Indian money, some notes, said Tenzin. It seemed a curious request, as Indian currency could hardly be legal tender in Chinese Tibet. But i took out my wallet and proffered a 100-rupee note. The monks shook their heads vigorously. No, no, said Tenzin. That’s too big; they want small notes, one rupee, two rupees. I found one- and two-rupee notes in my wallet. The monks passed them around with murmurs of awe and reverence. They’ll worship the notes, pray to them, said Tenzin. Because it’s possible that, maybe, sometime, His Holiness has touched one of the notes. That’s why they wanted small notes, which circulate more, so the chances of their having been touched by His Holiness are greater, he added. I looked at the remaining notes in my wallet, thumbed through them thoughtfully. Who knew? He just might have touched one of them. I was discovering what the Chinese have found out. That faith is an infection easy to catch, impossible to stamp out. Even in non-believers like me.

Faith really is easy to catch. No?

Don’t we take Republic Day for granted? I am ashamed to say that I do too.

Independence Day is important because that day we earned the right to rule ourselves. Republic Day is as important, if not more, because today, 58 years ago, we gave ourselves the right to speech, the right to life and liberty, the freedom to live as we want – each one an equal.

Isn’t that what we live for? Isn’t that what our Constitution gives us?

I once heard a sex worker on G.B. Road tell someone that when, years ago, the Republic Day Parade used to pass through that part of town, that used to be the one day in the year that they too felt like a part of the country, and not like the ostracized lot that they are. And then, someone decided that the exalted Parade couldn’t, shouldn’t go through that part of town – and it stopped.

Makes me think of these lines from this poem by K. Satchidanandan:

Dear child, say without shame
that I am your mother
and this city is your father.
Go, tell the chaste wives,
I teach their men how to love.

I offered myself
in place of a thousand women,
and became a saint.

A very Happy Republic Day to all.

I read this post, and then this, and this – and I don’t know what to say.

Like I said, I’m not a parent. But, I hope to be one, one day. I look forward to it. I, to be true, have been looking forward to it since I was 16 maybe.

I don’t ‘know’ what it feels like to be a parent, but I can imagine. And, I know that I can imagine because I’m genetically coded to be able to do so. I see people around me being all ‘intellectual’ about very basic human needs – food, safety and sex. And I don’t get how we think we are above other people who very obviously are not suppressing these needs.

Not having children – or more specifically, not wanting to have children – is absolutely fine, if that’s your decision. But, to think that people who do, are any lesser, is absolutely ridiculous.

The whole deal about being attracted to someone, falling in love, getting married – it’s all just chemicals, isn’t it? We, being humans, believe that we’re above the rest of the animal kingdom because we can ‘think’. We go through the process of getting to know someone, and then we may or may not fall in love with her/him. We like someone, but think he/she might feel we’re too needy if we call too often. We are able to hold ourselves back from calling. Yes, being human gives us the ability to do that. But still, isn’t it just chemicals that’s making us feel like calling?

A girl might find a guy funny and kind and successful and attractive – and fall in love with him, decide to marry him – because the chemicals in her body tell her that she and this guy may be compatible, and that they may have a chance at a long term relationship, which would lead to being able to give their children a safe and secure home. Because that always is the basis of why we’re attracted to someone – to be able to further the species. I know this sounds dry and practical – but reading people being so ridiculously against babies makes me want to say all this.

And, no – I don’t mean to make human beings sound like a group of cells at the mercy of chemicals. I think the human body is an awesome miracle. The fact that the human brain can suppress natural urges, or the fact that our mating ritual is so, so complicated. The fact that a baby inside the womb starts to take in amniotic fluid and excreting it, in order to develop its digestive and excretory systems – that’s just fantastic, and – well, so planned. The heart, the hormones that the body secretes, the respiratory process, how joints work so efficiently – everything.

But, to over-intellectualise very basic things is pointless.

Through school and college – even now, actually – I saw my friends falling for a girl or a guy, but holding back, for I-have-no-idea-what-reason. Why is it so difficult for us to just give in? Is it because we don’t trust so easily? Or is that too genetically coded? If something makes one happy, even if one’s intellect (or society) tells one it’s wrong – why do we hold ourselves back, all the time? My point is – if it makes you happy to call him, please call. If it makes you happy to open the door for her, please do. Don’t fall prey to what society tells you. Don’t not call because magazines tell you that a woman who calls too often comes across as needy. Don’t not open the door for her because you think it might offend her, or that you might not come across as the feminist that you are.

And there are so many more things of the kind that I can think of. Don’t not have children because you make yourself believe that there’s nothing that you’re missing by not having a child – and there’s nothing in your life that only having a child will complete. I’m not against people who decide not to. But, don’t let that be the reason. You will be incomplete without a child in your life. Not because your life isn’t good enough already. But because it will only be better then. Again, not because you’ll be falling back on, what some people refer to as, “regressive societal dictats” – but, because that’s what your body is naturally meant to do.

Did I sound preachy? Didn’t mean to.

Edited to add: Talking about children and parents, this is one of my favourite photos…

That’s me with Papa.

I really think this picture says a lot about what being a parent adds to your life – love, tenderness, and passing on something of yourself to a part of the future.

The Mad Momma wrote about the recent shootings in a school in Gurgaon. A fourteen-year old was shot, five times, by two other fourteen-year olds. The reason: This boy would bully the other two. He would push them in the corridor, poke them from behind, maybe he made fun of them some time. That’s what it took for these two kids to shoot him.

All news channels and newspapers reported this as a planned murder. HT had a headline that said, something to the effect of, these two kids being cold-blooded murderers. I’m sure all these newspapers sold a lot of copies. Everyone talked a lot about what kids today have become. Some people also talked about “that lot of people” who keep guns at home, and how “these people” feel it’s a status thing to have a weapon at home. I heard something about “haryaanvis” and “chaudharys” and the like.

[On a side note, I love the new newspaper from the Today group. It's called Mail Today. All subscribers of India Today are getting the paper free for three months. Great marketing idea too. And, very good articles. Well written, well researched, and without sensational headlines.]

Mail Today was the only paper that I read that was talking about what we really need to talk about.

These kids killed another child. They sat in the police station, on a bench, for nine hours – chatting with each other, wondering why prisoners were looking out of their cells at them so curiously, chatting with each other, having tea and biscuits that the cops go them, maybe even wondering where their parents were – and looking like they felt no remorse. Did they actually feel no remorse? Or was it that the innocent eyes looked so innocent because they had no idea what it was that they’d done?

Last weekend, maybe they went to a friend’s house who’d just got the new X-Box. Maybe a friend came over to their place to play with new X-Box that their parents got them. So, they played this game where they shot down a lot of people. The friend won. But, so what – they shot a lot of bad guys too. There was a burst of gunfire. There was blood. And the bad guy fell.

At school, this boy was the bad guy who troubled them. One of the boys’ dads had just bought a new gun. The boy remembered dad showing it to him and to mom. It was just like it is in the movies.

So, the class bully was shot and killed. Was it because these other two fourteen-year olds were cold-blooded enough to plan this?

I think it was because they are growing up in an age where shooting someone is as easy as clicking a button on the X-Box. They’re growing up in an age where it isn’t “cool” to feel remorse. It isn’t cool to let something affect you enough to feel anything. Remorse, excitement, sadness, regret. Nothing.

The policemen said that they got the shivers when the two kids told them everything they’d done during questioning. Hardened criminals break down and confess during such questioning. But these kids didn’t “confess” – they just said everything they’d done, and why they did it. Because that boy pushed them, poked them, made fun of them.

More than schools across Delhi heeding a wake-up call, I think we – as a society, as a developing nation, as a soon-to-be-Superpower – need to rethink how we bring up our children, and the examples we set.

Don’t you think?

“Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life”

But did Simone de Beauvoir’s scandalous open ‘marriage’ to Sartre make her happy, asks Lisa Appignanesi

Friday June 10, 2005
The Guardian

The Bogart and Bacall of existentialism … De Beauvoir and Sartre in 1946.

‘Women, you owe her everything!” So read the headline announcing Simone de Beauvoir’s death in April 1986. It was a phrase repeated over and over at her funeral, where some 5,000 mourners gathered to pay tribute to the writer many consider the greatest French woman of the 20th century, author of The Second Sex, mother of the modern women’s movement. De Beauvoir’s ashes duly found their place next to those of Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner in life, though never in marriage. He had died six years almost to the hour before her, and her last book, Farewell to Sartre, was the only one he had never read prior to publication.

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There is something mysterious in De Beauvoir’s insistence. Given Sartre’s other liaisons, and that this was the height of the women’s movement, it seems to fly in the face of common sense. Yet the Simone who had flouted convention in the 20s by entering into an open liaison with an ugly, charismatic young unknown was not about to conform to expectations.

Whether we agree with her own startling assessment or not, it’s clear that De Beauvoir was neither lying nor, as some misogynist commentators have argued, simply writing herself into a life more important than her own. After all, for 51 years, whether they were living close to one another or apart, she edited and, as Sartre himself put it, “filtered” his work, which he dedicated to her (some have ventured that, on occasion, she wrote it too). For 51 years, the conversations between them created ideas, books, and a bond which other passions enraged or enriched, but never altogether ruptured. It was, for De Beauvoir, an experiment in loving of which “existentialism” was the child.

When I was growing up in the 60s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were a model couple, already legendary creatures, rebels with a great many causes, and leaders of what could be called the first postwar youth movement: existentialism – a philosophy that rejected all absolutes and talked of freedom, authenticity, and difficult choices. It had its own music and garb of sophisticated black which looked wonderful against a cafe backdrop. Sartre and De Beauvoir were its Bogart and Bacall, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between jazz club, cafe and writing desk, with forays on to the platforms and streets of protest. Despite being indissolubly united and bound by ideas, they remained unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of relationships. This radical departure from convention seemed breathtaking at the time.

De Beauvoir wrote about this in the autobiography she began to publish in the late 50s, after the scandalous success of her exposé of being female, The Second Sex, and her Goncourt prize-winning novel, The Mandarins, where she chronicles, among much else, her postwar affair with the American novelist Nelson Algren, whom she left in order to return to Sartre, abandoning passion for public responsibility.

De Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying for the aggregation in philosophy, the elite French graduate degree. De Beauvoir came second to Sartre’s first, though the examiners agreed she was strictly the better philosopher and at the age of 21 the youngest person ever to have sat the exam. But Sartre, the future author of Being and Nothingness, was bold, ingenious, exuberant in his youthful excess, the satirical rebel who shouted, “Thus pissed Zarathustra” as he hurled water bombs out of classroom windows.

Sartre was the pampered son of a widowed mother. Educated in French and German by his pedagogue grandfather, the young Sartre, diminutive, wall-eyed, was corresponding in alexandrines by the age of 10 and something of an outcast at his provincial school. By the time he returned to Paris, he had learned to make up for his physical lacks by the sheer force of his personality. De Beauvoir was captivated by the intensity with which he also listened.

The young Sartre already saw himself as a Don Juan, a seducer who ruptured outworn convention, and whose presence revealed things in their fundamental light. Seduction and writing, he believed, had their source in the same intellectual process.

Late in life, he admitted that he had fantasised a succession of women for himself, each one meaning everything for a given moment. De Beauvoir had astonished him by agreeing to the experiment he had outlined. She accepted the freedom he insisted on and became its custodian.

“What we have,” he said early on to De Beauvoir, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” Recording Sartre’s proposal, De Beauvoir writes: “We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.”

It is difficult to underestimate the sheer adventurousness of this pact forged in 1929. Particularly on De Beauvoir’s side, the break from accepted norms was monumental, as was the social stigma. For De Beauvoir, Sartre seemed only to be repeating what, from her father’s example and bourgeois practice, she understood as a male prerogative. What was different about their relationships was that she, the woman, would be equally free to engage in other affairs. Then, too, there was Sartre’s important dictum of “transparency” – the vow that they would never lie to each other the way married couples did. They would tell each other everything, share feelings, work, projects.

Yet in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. She wanted to keep the image of a model life intact. There were no children. They never shared a house and their sexual relations were more or less over by the end of the war, though for much of their life and certainly at the last, they saw each other daily.

With the posthumous publication in 1988 of her letters to Sartre, a good proportion of them written during the war years when he was at the front and then a prisoner, gaps that were left out of the autobiography are filled in. What the letters express is not only De Beauvoir’s overarching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her “dear little being” and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the mundanity of De Beauvoir’s early accommodation to his wishes, her acceptance of what many women would reject as demeaning, her dependence.

But this dependence is hardly simple or passive. It is a shared attachment from which power also comes – as De Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, shows it does for all women. From early on, Notre-Dame-de-Sartre, as the wits dubbed her, organises the comings and goings of Sartre’s “contingent” women; she encourages, consoles, manipulates, and continues to do so until the very end for that loose grouping of friends and exes they called their “family”. With a few exceptions, she performs whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair.

The voyeuristic narration of the details of sexual passion for the other’s entertainment, the ups and downs and seamy manoeuvres of these relationships give Sartre and De Beauvoir the aura of a latter-day Valmont and Merteuil, planning and reporting on their dangerous liaisons, analysing assaults and retreats, and deliberating over the propaganda which is to surround them. On top of all this are De Beauvoir’s lesbian pursuits and her sharing of Sartre’s partners. Bluestocking she might have been, but De Beauvoir was never averse to taking hers off, and then letting Sartre know.

It would be easy to condemn Sartre and De Beauvoir, to dismiss their sex lives as squalid and find therein reason to undermine their intellectual or political projects. This would be to miss the great edifice that De Beauvoir constructed out of their mutual experiment in living; the often gruelling honesty they both brought to bear on each other; and the ways in which the living and changing organism that was their partnership shaped both their philosophical writings and their fiction. It was clear to De Beauvoir that Sartre was a great thinker: thought needed tending. Happiness, that state she claimed she had a talent for, was not the point.

Then, too, there may be another very good reason why De Beauvoir thought her relationship was her greatest achievement. The Second Sex is her encyclopaedic and shocking account of woman’s condition as “other” in a world where the norm, with all its overarching and defining power, was male. The book analyses how women have been made over in a world of male descriptions, the contortions performed in order to draw something from the secondary role, the mutilation, the pain. In the experiment of her relationship with Sartre, De Beauvoir took over the power of description. She writes him in and through her life. Maybe that was partly what she meant by her greatest achievement – alongside a generous love, respect and abiding loyalty.

· Lisa Appignanesi’s biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir is published by Haus on June 21, price £9.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875, or go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

Went home after 2 months this time. And, it was wonderful…and, dare I say, (at the risk of sounding like one of those Gucci-bag-toting aunties) “therapeutic”.

Today’s Rakhi a.k.a. Raksha Bandhan. Traditionally, a festival where sisters tie a thread on their brother(’s/s’) wrist, the idea being that she will always stand by him, and he will always protect her. Nice thought. But, why do people (other than my family…and possibly a few other families…hopefully a lot of other families) not think of this the other way around as well? Saahil has always tied a rakhi on my wrist, like I have on his. Well, why not? I’m older anyway. How in the world would it’ve worked if I’d needed protecting when he was just a year old?! I could protect him better for sure. And, why’s this still interpreted as big-strong-brother protecting small-weak-sister?! I mean…hellooo! Why can’t any festival…every festival…be understood and interpreted in a nicer, more progressive way? I’ve always loved Diwali for the lights and the dressing up, Christmas for the well…the Christmassy feeling, the red and green, the holly, the mistletoe, the Christmas trees, Santa, the stockings, the reindeers and the elves…the works…Eid for the luverly food…Easter for the nice chocolate Easter eggs…Dusshera for going to Ram Lila Maidan and seeing Ravan burn, and buying a Hanuman mask…and actually wearing it, and embarassing my brother…Holi…well, not one that I like..havent’ played in years…Rakhi for the tradition…for the thought behind it…you tie it to everyone you love…Papa, Mom, Saahil…the dogs (well, they protect you, don’t they?!)…everyone who you’d want rallying around you when you needed protecting…
All this makes the whole year so wonderful. It does. There’s always some nice holiday coming up. Of course, they’re all just leading up to the biggest holiday of the year…my birthday!!! (Another 4 months, 2 days to go!)

Festivals aren’t about religion. They’re about having fun, being together, dressing up, eating good food, drinking lots…and they’re about the thought behind them.

Ayodhya attack: Six terrorists killed
Tuesday, July 5, 2005 (Ayodhya):

Six terrorists today made an abortive attempt to storm the high-security Ram Janmabhoomi complex in Ayodhya.All six of them were shot dead in a one and a-half hour encounter with the security forces guarding the complex.

There has been no damage to the make-shift shrine at the religious site.

The attackers had hired a taxi on the pretext of doing sight seeing around Ayodhya. Once in the car, they forced the driver away from the wheel and took control.

Breaching the wall

The driver, hired by the terrorists, is alive and has been arrested. He told the police that the terrorists had claimed to be tourists and even prayed at a temple before the attack.

On reaching the temple complex, one of the terrorists drove an explosives-laden jeep to the outer fence and blew up the jeep and himself. The other five then ran in firing their guns and setting off grenades.

They stopped by the security personnel at the Sita Rasoi, outside the periphery of the disputed site. The CRPF engaged the militants in a gunbattle, at the end of which all six militants were killed.

“After the blast, there was an opening through which the terrorists entered. That is when the CRPF got alert and retaliated,” said Jyoti Kumar Sinha, director general, CRPF.

One unidentified person was killed in the crossfire while three security personnel were injured.

The terrorists were carrying AK 47s and grenades. The bomb-disposal squads called in to comb the area found rocket launchers as well. The CRPF, which led the operation, says one of the dead militants was a human bomb.

Late in the evening, police found another jeep hired by the terrorists to travel from Akbarpur to Faizabad. The driver has been arrested.

Cabinet meet

Later the Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil briefed the Union Cabinet on the terrorist attack in Ayodhya.

Intelligence reports so far indicate that Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) could be behind the attack.

In view of the incident, a red alert has been sounded in state capitals across the country.

This is the first terrorist attack on the disputed complex, since the makeshift temple came up after the demolition of Babri masjid in December 1992.

Locals calm

However, the real eye opener after today’s attack was the attitude of the people of Ayodhya, where not one communal clash was reported.

Shops and small businesses were open as usual – a sign perhaps that the people of the town can be more level-headed than many of our political parties.

So said today’s news…

So, the locals are calm. Why then would the BJP want to call a “nation-wide protest against the terrorist attack”?! Political motivations I understand…but not an IOTA of integrity either? What the hell are they thinking?!! WHY in the world would they get the whole country into something that’s thankfully (for once!) not been made into a queston of religion…yet?!! Why can’t these men, of the RSS and the BJP, think of the country…just for once?!!

bol ke lab aazaad hai.n tere
bol zabaa.N ab tak terii hai
teraa sutawaa.N jism hai teraa
bol ki jaa.N ab tak terii hai
dekh ke aaha.ngar kii dukaa.N me.n
tu.nd hai.n shole surKh hai aahan
khulane lage quffalo.n ke dahaane
phailaa har ek zanjiir kaa daaman
bol ye tho.Daa waqt bahot hai
jism-o-zabaa.N kii maut se pahale
bol ki sach zi.ndaa hai abb tak
bol jo kuchh kahane hai kah le

[sutawaa.N=well built; aaha.ngar=blacksmith; tu.nd=sharp (here it means bright);]
[aaha.ngar=black-smith; quffalo.n ke dahaane=keyhole]

Back after a short break. And, I’m posting from home this time. Just got my internet connection done. And it’s just SO FAST!! Woohoo!! Yippee!! …and all the rest of it…!

Was out on a shoot yesterday, so didn’t post anything. Getting quite used to writing here. Almost start getting withdrawal symptoms the day I don’t. Have realised that writing a blog is strangely fulfilling.

Went to the Italian Cultural Centre yesterday. I was there for a shoot, and there was a really good film on – Padre Padrone. Called Anvita for the film as well. We didn’t watch too much of the film though. Saw about half an hour of it, i.e. – until my hunger overtook our desire to watch kids having sex with chickens, sheep and donkeys. So, we went to the horrendously expensive cafe at the Italian Cultural Centre and sat there and talked (while I ate a horrendously expensive pizza!).

We talked about what Padmini, Anvita and I were talking about the night that they stayed over after the house warming party. That, about 90% of all people are plain stupid, and one should get around their stupidities and get one’s own work done. This, I think, is the premise everyone should live by.

Now, I’m not saying that 90% of all people ARE stupid. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But, let’s just assume they are…for the betterment of ourselves and for our peace of mind. How, you ask?

Well, I’ve seen this work, that’s how. Believing this proposition makes life easier. And better. And healthier. Healthier beacause you don’t lose your temper, don’t get impatient, don’t suddenly start thinking about HOW and WHY so-and-so can be that stupid! By believing this proposition, you start out by thinking – ok, so this person’s stupid. Let me give her/him a chance, otherwise I’ll do it myself. Isn’t this better? You completely bypass the hours, or maybe even days, of frustration and anxiety…and anger.

My peace of mind is very important to me. That’s why I like to believe that – “about 90% of all people are plain stupid, and one should get around their stupidities and get one’s own work done.”

I wonder how many people have even heard of Tenzin Tsundue. I wonder how many people care about what he stands for.

Tenzin Tsundue is a restless young Tibetan, who after graduating from Madras, braved snowstorms and treacherous mountains, broke all rules and restrictions, crossed the Himalayas on foot and went into forbidden Tibet! The purpose? To see the situation under Chinese occupation for himself and find out if he could lend a hand or two in the freedom struggle. He was arrested by the Chinese border police, and after cooling his feet in prison in Lhasa for three months, was finally pushed back to India.

Born to a Tibetan refugee family who laboured on India’s border roads around Manali, during the chaotic era of Tibetan refugee resettlement in the early seventies, Tenzin Tsundue is a writer-activist, a rare blend in the Tibetan community in exile.

I think he writes beautifully, and with so much passion that you can actually see it. Here are some poems he’s written:

BETRAYAL

My father died

defending our home,

our village, our country.

I too wanted to fight.

But we are Buddhist.

People say we should be

Peaceful and Non-Violent.

So I forgive our enemy.

But sometimes I feel

I betrayed my father.

TIBETANNESS

Thirty-nine years in exile.

Yet no nation supports us.

Not a single bloody nation!

We are refugees here.

People of a lost country.

Citizen to no nation.

Tibetans: the world’s sympathy stock.

Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists;

one lakh and several thousand odd,

nicely mixed, steeped

in various assimilating cultural hegemonies.

At every check-post and office,

I am an “Indian-Tibetan”.

My Registration Certificate,

I renew every year, with a salaam.

A foreigner born in India.

I am more of an Indian.

Except for my Chinky Tibetan face.

“Nepali?” “Thai?” “Japanese?”

“Chinese?” “Naga?” “Manipuri?”

but never the question – “Tibetan?”

I am Tibetan.

But I am not from Tibet.

Never been there.

Yet I dream of dying there.

A PERSONAL RECONNAISSANCE

From Ladakh

Tibet is just a gaze away.

They said:

from that black knoll at Dumtse,

it’s Tibet.

For the first time, I saw

my country Tibet.

In a hurried hidden trip,

I was there, at the mound.

I sniffed the soil,

scratched the ground,

listened to the dry wind

and the wild old cranes.

I didn’t see the border,

I swear there wasn’t anything

different, there.

I didn’t know,

if I was there or here.

I didn’t know,

if I was here or there.

They say the kyangs

come here every winter.

They say the kyangs

go there every summer.

We stay engrossed in our tiny daily problems. Someone failed us, broke a promise, things didn’t turn out the way we’d wanted…

What could be a bigger problem than having no identity?

I am an Indian. And, I’m very proud of being an Indian. But, more than the so-called “Indian Pride”, isn’t the thing that I’m truly proud of the identity I get from being an Indian? I have a home. No – not the four walls and a roof. I mean, a place – a nation – to call my own. To belong to. To be a part of. There are days when I don’t feel specially patriotic. There are also days when I don’t even give a thought to the place I belong to. But, what if such a place didn’t exist at all? What if I was living on borrowed land? What if I’d been shown the imaginary pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I was never able to find it? What if promises had been made, and promises had been broken, and I still didn’t have an identity? What if no one had ever supported my claim for a place to call my own? My claim for the promised land? What if…?

Can’t think of much else to write. Didn’t sleep much last night. And then, a certain person’s alarm for 6:30 a.m. woke me up!

To all the people who came over last night – Thanks!

If anyone would like to read more about Tenzin Tsundue, you could go to: http://www.friendsoftibet.org/tenzin/index.html