Women bartenders. So what?

The Times of India had reason to cheer this morning. Splashed across the front page was this supposed great news of women being henceforth allowed to work as bartenders . Heralded as a landmark legislation that would provide occupation to close to 50,000 women and break the last male bastion, it is being billed as some sort of reason to celebrate. As always you had the views of the glitterati echoing these sentiments.

Pray tell me what is so great about mixing drinks in front of an inebriated audience and how will it serve to liberate women. There was some judiciousness in the law that forbids women from working in a place that serves liqour as the male populace in our country is not liberated enough to view women with any degree of sanity once they are three or four drinks down.

I fail to understand why women want to defy every law that is formed to protect them in some ill-formed attempt to liberate themselves and get even with the men and then suffer the consequences. I understand not wanting to have restrictions imposed on what one can do but there is also a certain rationale in staying away from tricky situations. There is no bravado in advertising your presence in the jungle when you cannot ward off the advances of a hungry lion. Please understand that I am all for women's liberation but I certainly dont think that it can be achieved by women serving alcohol in bars. The only benefit will be that the bar girls will finally get their jobs back minus the dancing. But thats it. Why glorify the whole damn thing. Maybe it would be cool to see a women bartender at the Oberoi or the Taj but pray how many of those will there be. Instead what you will see is skimpily clad women plying their wares to a drunk audience to solicit business for afterwards.

If we really need to liberate women, get the girls from slums to attend school. Provide better healthcare to the women, ensure better birth rate and more importantly provide free childcare. Give them better options for respectable labor and provide them with the bare essentials at a subsidised rate, if not for free. Protect them from their drunken husbands and sons and give them affordable and clean housing options.

Then you will be talking. Mixing a drink just doesnt have the same punch.

Proud to be an Indian

My husband and I were having our usual late night banter on all possible topics under the sun, when we started talking about secularism and India. Actually it started with my relating to him the anecdotes of one of my colleagues who was born and brought up in Saudi Arabia. He was telling me how strict and intolerant they were in Saudi about religious beliefs and practices. During the month of Ramzan none of the shops and restaurants were open during the day..people would go for prayers leaving their shops unattended..no one was allowed to openly practise their religion..you couldn't celebrate a festival at home by inviting people over..idols couldnt be brought into the country..and other such mind boggling nuggets of information that I found completely horrifying and unpalatable.

That is when we commented on how secular India really is. It is the one place where you can practise and live by your religious beliefs with all indepedence and due right. This is the one country where we have been tolerant to all religions from time immemorial. We have embraced every new faith and given it refuge in this land. People of every faith have found India to be a safe haven where they will not be persecuted on the basis of their religion. More importantly we have absorbed them into our social framework so that they have become a part of our land. This is what makes India special. Never will anybody be told that he cannot worship his God. No God shall be decried, no religious called pagan. Except in certain times in History, never has there been a Hindu conversion drive. Because you cannot become a Hindu, you have to be born one.

I am not religious by nature and do not frequent temples. But that notwithstanding I think as Hindus we should be proud of our religion that is all accepting and tolerant and proscribes no rigid laws on what is right and worng and teaches us to do our duty and go with the flow while keeping an open mind about things.

It is hence with digust that I view the recent acts by supposed Hindu harliners who are transgressing this very essence of Hinduism to further their selfish, political agendas. Let them not do in in the name of this timeless religion that was the forerunner of environmentalism in its reverence for all natural forces and elements, that realised the plurality of religious beliefs and truly understood the omniscience and omnipresence of God.

Finding the answers..but at what cost

The tora-tora spun round and round, faster and faster. The world was spinning with it, distorted and blurred. She liked it this way. It blotted out the unpleasantness and unfairness of reality. The incessant spinning somehow brought her restless mind, constantly seeking the happiness that had always eluded it, the solace that it could not find in the real world. Her everyday turmoil and frustrations were somehow pushed to the back of her mind. She would deal with them tomorrow.

She was living for the moment – this moment filled with the uninhibited screams and laughter of others, probably like her, dealing with their own internal demons. Her parents, disapproving and judgmental, stayed tangled in the spinning trees. Her husband, whose hand she had held in her pursuit of happiness, but who had let her down miserably, was lost in the melee. The thought of him brought tears to her eyes, and these tears of sorrow mingled with the tears brought upon by the breeze, trickled down the tired lines on her face to fall on the plump, dimpled cheeks of her daughter.

Her daughter looked up and smiled at her.

For an instant all her worries dissipated. This is all that matters – she thought. This child I shall rear and nurture. I shall give her my all – she shall be my vindication, my deliverance from this unfair, unforgiving world. I shall be her shield against all the disappointment, all the tribulations that life throws up – she pledged. She clutched her closer to her heart.

And then the tora-tora suddenly jerked and her hand loosened around her baby. One split second she tried to regain her hold on the child and the next saw her child falling into the void below. Her eyes widened in horror and her reflexes snapped into action. No time for thought or rationale, no time to reach out for her confidante sitting next to her - the man who had promised her a new life in a new city far away from her disappointments, her one ray of hope. No time to discuss or decide – the plunge had to be taken, it was her onus no one else’s. And the mother did the unthinkable.

Unthinkable? She thought. Why, it is the most natural thing for me to do – she reasoned even as she hurtled down to the ground – the dirt streaked grass and the muddy slush closing in on her at breakneck speed. If it is a choice between her life and mine, of what use is my existence if not to protect and save her? A million times shall I lay down my life if it can save her tender existence.

But where is the apple of my eye? Her eyes searched desperately for her child. She hasn’t hit the ground, thank God for that – if there is a God that is. In the instant before her head bludgeoned against the ground she looked up to see her baby safe, ensconced in the hands of a stranger, drenched in her own blood but definitely alive – her traumatized wails bore evidence to that. She smiled her last smile and thanked the living God in words that stayed in her throat – unsaid, unspoken. She had finally seen God. She had finally understood the reason for our living – and why there was still hope for tomorrow. She was finally at peace – her search had ended.

Mother and Child

Which is the more painful of the two I wonder?
For the mother to lose her child or the child to lose its mother

Neither should happen, I suppose you will answer.
But life doesn’t work by the rules of the book
It is governed by something higher and stronger
Merely leaving us to put the pieces together

Impotent and futile are our raves and rants
The power above just doesn’t understand
His sense of humor seems all skewed
His plan like a puzzle that leaves us confused

A childless mother, a plundered womb
A mirthless void, a life of gloom
A knife through the heart won’t pain as much
As the sight of your offspring covered with blood

Anything is better, may death befall
The luckless mother who has to cleave her heart
Forever bound are mother and child
The umbilical cord just never dies

But what of the child who stays alive
To watch his mother kissing life goodbye
There can’t be a life worse than that
Of an orphaned child with no one to care

No mother’s hugs, no kisses on the brow
No nags, no scolding, none of the above
What joy is childhood without the warm touch
The comfort of a mother to hold your hand

No bedtime stories, no tasty savories
No special smiles, no shared giggles
Nobody to stand by you no matter what
Nobody who showers unconditional love

A heartless God it must take to separate
The earthly magic that even He can’t recreate

Maybe India Inc has the answer...

I was sitting in the waiting lounge of a large MNC in the city and since clients have this endearing habit of making you wait for hours before they deign to meet you, I had quite some time on hand with little else to do but twiddle my thumbs and watch the goings on. As I watched people come and go, it struck me that it was amazing the number of people who rub shoulders daily in any one of these MNCs. The variety of people employed here come from every nook and corner of the country and in some cases outside it. Here they meet and converse daily, work together on complex accounts with a common goal in mind. I am sure their background is furthest from their mind. It doesnt matter which caste you are from or what your religion is. At the very most you could be labelled North or south Indian but that is more to do with your fluency with Hindi than anything remotely communal. But with more "south" Indians speaking fluent Hindi (I am one of them) even these walls are gradually disappearing.

Isnt it amazing that it takes a foreign entity to truly unite us. It takes an MNC to bring us together on no other account but our talents and our skill sets and then make us play to our strengths for the common good. Cheers to all the Intels, IBMs, Microsofts etc out there. If nothing else you bring out the Indian in us. You demonstarte that when we come together forgetting our diverse backgrounds and throw ourselves into anything - there is nothing that we cannot achieve. You prove to us that India has what it takes to win - we just have to spread the revolution, the so-called urbanizing to other parts of India as well. We have to recreate Bangalores and Mumbais in other Indian towns. We need to make economic growth and betterment more important that petty issues like where we come from or which caste do we belong to. Then India will be unstoppable.

Are we a little too tolerant?

I woke up yesterday morning with a start. My entire house was reverberating with some seriously LOUD cacophony that was threatening to burst my ear drums. I jumped up to investigate the source of this din. It turned out to be some celebration or commemoration that some community decided to observe in a vacant plot right behind our house. This auditory rampage comprised of an eclectic mix of Hindi songs of the kind that even the music director cringes when he has to listen to them, live music from the vocal cords of somebody who must be deaf or has been seriously mislead about his vocal skills and some devotional songs that woe betide everybody decided to join in. Mind you I have nothing against celebrations or music. But I fail to understand why it has to be imposed on everyone within earshot. My daughter sprang awake (well that was one good thing that came out of the episode) with a complain on her lips. Why cant we go and stop them, she asked. She even suggested that maybe the police can be involved in stemming this blatant violation of personal space. I chose my words carefully coz frankly she had voiced my very thoughts. But somehow it seemed rather harsh coming form her. So I adviced her to be tolerant as this land was as much theirs as it is ours. She seemed to get it and thankfully didnt come back with an intelligent retort (as happens usualy).
Which brings me to the crux of my rambling. Are we a little too tolerant. Have we been schooled in patience and adjusting to such an extent that we have now been reduced to become mute spectators to most artrocities.
We tolerate people who litter right in front of our door step. We tolerate people who defile our historical monuments with stupid odes to their so called romances or worse still some pornographic doodling. We cringe in silence when we see brats littering the place with beer bottles, empty packets. We tolerate people spitting at will, relieving themselves aginst any wall or tree- sometimes right next to designated places thoughtfully constructed by the government. We turn a blind eye to bribery, incompetence, mediocrity. We never call the advertised numbers to report rash driving for if we started doing so, we would probably do little else all day. We quitely swallow the indignity of people rubbing themselves covertly against our back in buses and trains, we shrug our shoulders in dismay at delayed school vans, we waste our breath with the delivery guys when LPG cylinders dont come to us on time or when they unduly charge us more than stipulated. I could go on and on..
Are we being a little too tolerant. Should we start imposing and more importantly enforcing stringent limits on what is allowed and what will not be tolerated. If we keep cribbing about the state of the traffic, the filth on the roads, the ineffeciency of our government but stay mute everytime a violation happens in front of us, arent we condoning the act and in essence being party to it. If we want to transform our country into a Singapore for example then we need to emulate their stict laws on anti-littering or anti-corruption. We all need to put a stop to "adjusting" and start becoming intolerant to all the small "crimes" that keep pulling India back.

Keeping the faith

For the last couple of weeks I have been reading about communal riots in various parts of India - first in Orissa, followed by UP and then in Mangalore. While communal riots are not uncommon in India what is disturbing is that this time it is between the Hindu and the Christian community which has so far coexisted in harmony over so many decades except for stray incidents in the North east.The entire brouhaha seems to be about the convesrion drive embarked upon by the missionaries through bribery and various other unfair means. The Hindus want to keep their kind in their fold and stem this supposed exodus to another faith.I have a few questions here. First what is religion to us and to what extent does it matter in our day to day lives. When compared to three square meals, clothes on the body and a roof above the head, I think it ranks pretty way down in terms of priority. Consider a typical so called low-caste or tribal individual - he is scorned by his fellows and sees no way out of a life of poverty and exclusion. He then comes upon people who are willing to address his immediate issues - they give his children free education and of the type that is relevant (namely English medium education), provide him with some employment and most importanty dont discriminate or persecute him because of the conditions of his birth. Which person can resist this passport to a dignity. From an unfriendly, apathetic religious fabric he is transported to a very active, close knit network that prays for him, helps him and his family. Believe me, I dont think it matters to him that he needs to bow before a Jesus instead of a Krishna, in order to get this. For him it is a treachery that is pardonable in his eyes.If the Hindus want to retain their brothers in the fold then they need to do more than protest. They need to give them viable options that take care of their day to day needs. They will have to offer these lesser born mortals the feeling of belonging and acceptance, affordable education options, medical help, social security and a social fabric that is responsive and helpful. If that is possible then maybe they will not see the need to convert to another religion and disown the Gods that they were taught to worship since birth.