Tuesday, December 22, 2015

When Growing Your Own Food is the Way You Protest: Binkana Column in Kannada Prabha

This friend and I, we try to grow a bit of our own food. There is just something so magical about growing your own food, however little. 
I mean to write about our farm, soon, here. 
Until then, in my new Binkana column in Kannada Prabha, I write on how it is the miniscule revolution that you call for when you try to grow your own food.

Published Dec 13, 2015.

ಪ್ರಳಯವೆಂಬಂತೆ ಸುರಿದ ಮದ್ರಾಸ್ ಮಳೆಯ ವಿಷಯವಲ್ಲ ಇದು.

ಅದೇ ಸಮಯದಲ್ಲಿ, ಈ ಊರು ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ಸಹ ಧೋ ಎಂದು ಸುರಿಯುತ್ತಿರುವ ಮಳೆಗೆ - ಮಧ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕವಿತೆ ಕಾದಂಬರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂಡಿಬರುವ ತುಂತುರು, ಹುಡಿ ಮಳೆಯೂ ಇತ್ತಲ್ಲವೇ? - ನಮ್ಮ ಫಾರ್ಮ್ ಸೋತುಹೋದಂತಿದೆ. ಟೊಮೇಟೊ ಗಿಡಗಳು ಅದ್ಯಾವುದೋ ಬಿಳಿ ಪೌಡರ್ ರೋಗದಿಂದ ಒದ್ದಾಡುತ್ತಾ ಇದ್ದರೆ, ಬೆಂಡೇಕಾಯಿ ಬೇಕೋ ಬೇಡವೋ ಅನ್ನುವ ಹಾಗೆ ಕಾಣುತ್ತಿವೆ. ಕುಂಬಳಕಾಯಿಗಳ ಗಿಡಗಳು ಅದೇನೋ ಇರಲಿ ಎಂದು ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತಿದರೆ, ಪಾಲಕ್ ಸೋಪ್ಪಂತೂ ನಾ ಒಲ್ಲೆ ಎಂದೇ ಹೇಳಿ ಕೂತಂತಿವೆ. ವಿದೇಶಿ ಪಾಕದಲ್ಲಿ ಬಳಸುವ ಬೇಸಿಲ್, ತ್ಯಂ, ರೋಜ್ ಮೇರಿ ಸೊಪ್ಪುಗಳು ತೊಂದರೆ ಇಲ್ಲ. ಬಹುಷಃ ಇದೇನೋ ಬೇರೆ ದೇಶದ ಹವೆಯೇ ಹೀಗೆ, ಸ್ವಲ್ಪ ಅಡ್ಜಸ್ಟ್ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳೋಣ ಎಂದು ಅಂದುಕೊಂಡವೊ ಏನೋ. ಬೀನ್ಸ್ ಗಿಡಗಳೊಂದೆ ಹವೆ ಹೇಗೆ ಇರಲಿ, ನಾವು ನಮ್ಮ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡಬೇಕೆಂಬ ಕಾಯಕವೇ ಕೈಲಾಸದ ಸಿದ್ಧಾಂತವನ್ನು ಪಾಲಿಸುತ್ತಿವೆ. ಹೀಗಿದ್ದರು ಒಟ್ಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ ನಮ್ಮ ಫಾರ್ಮ್ ಖುಷಿ ಖುಷಿಯಾಗಿಲ್ಲ, ಎತ್ತರ ಬೆಳೆದ ಹಸಿರಿದ್ದರೂ ಆ ಹಸಿರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದು ರೀತಿಯ ಗೆಲುವು ಕಾಣುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ.

ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಕಮ್ಮಿ ಪ್ರತಿ ದಿನ ಸಂಜೆ ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಕುಳಿತು ಪಕ್ಕದ ಕೆರೆ, ಅದರ ಸುತ್ತ ವಾಕ್ ಹೋಗುವವರನ್ನು ನೋಡಿಕೊಂಡು ಟೀ ಕುಡಿಯುವ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯವನ್ನು ಶುರುಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದೇವೆ. ಆದರೆ ಮೊದಲು ಮಳೆಯಾಯಿತು. ಅದರ ಬೆನ್ನೇರಿ ಬಂದ ಚಳಿಗಾಲ, ಈ ದಿನಗಳಲ್ಲಿನ ಖಾರ ಬಿಸಿಲು ನಮ್ಮ ಫಾರ್ಮ್ ಅನ್ನು ಸಪ್ಪೆ ಮಾಡಿದೆ. ಒಂದೆರಡು ಟೊಮೇಟೊ, ಒಂದು ಹಿಡಿ ಬೀನ್ಸ್ ಸಿಕ್ಕಿದರೂ...

ನಾಲ್ಕು ಅಂಗೈಯಷ್ಟು ಅಗಲ ಫಾರ್ಮ್ ನಮ್ಮದು, ಮನೆಯ ಟೆರೇಸಿನ ಮೇಲೆ. ಹವಾಮಾನದ ಏರು ಪೇರು ಈ ಪುಟ್ಟ 'ಫಾರ್ಮ್'ನ ಮೇಲೆ ಇಷ್ಟು ಪರಿಣಾಮ ಬೀರಿದರೆ ಬೇಸಾಯವನ್ನೇ ನಂಬಿರುವ ರೈತರ ಕಥೆ ಅದೇನು? ಮಾತಾಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತೇವೆ, ನಾವು ಭಾಗ್ಯವಂತರು, ದಿ ಪ್ರಿವಿಲೆಜೆಡ್ ಎಂದು. ಸಾವಯವ ತರಕಾರಿ ಬೆಳೆಸುವುದು, ಅದನೆ ನಂಬಿದ ಜೀವನ ಇಲ್ಲದಿರುವುದು, ಬೇಕಾದಷ್ಟು ನೀರು ಹಾಕಬಲ್ಲ ಸಾಮರ್ತ್ಯ - ಕೃಷಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಇದೊಂದು ರೀತಿಯ ಐಶೊ ಆರಾಮು ಲೈಫ್ ಸ್ಟೈಲ್.

ಈ ಸವಲತ್ತಿನ ಅರಿವು, ಇದರಿಂದ ಬರುವ ಸೌಲಭ್ಯಗಳನ್ನು ಸ್ವೀಕರಿಸುವ ಅಭ್ಯಾಸ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿಯೇ ಆಗಿದೆ. ಫಾರ್ಮಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಕುಳಿತು ಟೀ ಕುಡಿಯುತ್ತಿರುವಾಗ ಈ ವಿಪರ್ಯಾಸವನ್ನು ಗಮನಿಸಿ ಮುಂದೆಹೊಗುವುದುಂಟು. ಆ ಉಳಿದವರಿರುವರಲ್ಲ, ಅವರಿಗೆಲ್ಲಿ ಮೊನ್ಸಂಟೊವನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಸುವ ತಾಳ್ಮೆ, ಸಂಪತ್ತು, ಶಕ್ತಿ ಅದೆಲ್ಲಿ? ನಮಗಿದೆಲ್ಲ ಇದೆ ಎಂಬ ಅಹಂಕಾರ ಖಂಡಿತ ಅಲ್ಲ. ಆದರೆ ಜೀವನ ಭೂಮಿ - ಮಳೆ - ಬೀಜದ ಸೂಕ್ಷ್ಮ ಸಂಕೋಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂದಿಯಾಗಿ ಇಲ್ಲದಿರುವಾಗ ಜಿಎಮ್ ಗೆ, ಮಣ್ಣನ್ನು ಕರಗಿಸುವ ವಿಷಕ್ಕೆ, ಕೃಷಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂಡಾಯಶಾಹಿತ್ವದ ಇನ್ನಿತರ ಗುಣಲಕ್ಷಣಗಳಿಗೆ "ಇಲ್ಲ" "ಬೇಡ" ಎನ್ನುವುದು ಸುಲಭ.

ಜೆನೆಟಿಕಲಿ ಮಾಡಿಫ಼್ಯ್ (ಜಿಎಮ್) ಮಾಡಿದ ಆಹಾರ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯದೋ, ಕೆಟ್ಟದ್ದೋ, ಜನರು ತಿನ್ನಬಹುದ, ತಿಂದರೆ ಅವು ಮನುಷ್ಯರ ಜೆನೆಟಿಕ್ಸ್ ಮೇಲೆ ಏನು ಪರಿಣಾಮ ಬೀರಬಹುದು, ಜಗತ್ತಿನೆಲ್ಲೆಡೆ ಕೃಷಿಯ ಸ್ತಿತಿ ಚಿಂತಾಜನಕವಾಗಿರಬೇಕಾದರೆ, ಕ್ಲೈಮೇಟ್ ಚೇಂಜ್ ಗೆಂದೆ ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರಗಳು ವರ್ಷಕ್ಕೆ ಹತ್ತು ದಿನ ಪ್ರತ್ಯೇಕವಾಗಿ ಮೇಸಲಿಡಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಇದೆಲ್ಲದರ ಮೇಲೆ ಜಿಎಮ್ ಆಹಾರದ ಪರಿಣಾಮವೇನು - ಹೀಗೆ ರೈತ ಸಂಘಟನೆಗಳ, ವಿಜ್ಞಾನಿಗಳ, ಪರಿಸರವಾದಿಗಳ ಮಧ್ಯೆ ಉತ್ತರ-ಪ್ರತ್ಯುತ್ತರದ ಚಕಮಕಿ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತಾ ಬಂದಿದೆ, ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ವರ್ಷಗಳಿಂದ. ಹೊಸದೊಂದೇನೆಂದರೆ, ಜಿಎಮ್ ಬೆಳೆಯಿಂದ ತಯಾರಿಸಿದ ಆಹಾರದ ಪ್ಯಾಕೆಟ್ ಗಳ ಮೇಲೆ ಜಿಎಮ್ ನ ಲೇಬಲ್ ಹಾಕಬೇಕೆ ಎನ್ನುವ ಚರ್ಚೆ ಅಮೇರಿಕಾದಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತಿದೆ.

ಯಾವುದೇ ಒಂದು ಪದಾರ್ಥವನ್ನು 'ಆರ್ಗಾನಿಕ್', 'ನ್ಯಾಚುರಲ್' 'ಹ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ಮೇಡ್' ಎಂದು ಲೇಬಲ್ ಮಾಡುವುದರಿಂದ ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಒಂದು ಪ್ರೀಮಿಯಂ ಬೆಲೆ ಅಂಟಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಮೇರಿಕಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಆಹಾರ ತಯಾರಕರು ಅವರ ಪ್ಯಾಕೆಟ್ ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ 'ಜಿಎಮ್-ರಹಿತ' ಎಂಬ ಲೇಬಲನ್ನು ಹಾಕುತ್ತಿದ್ದು, ಇದರರ್ಥ ಈ ಆಹಾರ ಸಾವಯವ ಎಂದಲ್ಲ ಎಂಬುದು ಸಾವಯವ ರೈತ ಸಂಘಟನೆಗಳ ವಿವಾದ. ಸಾವಯವ ಎಂದರೆ ನಾನ್-ಜಿಎಮ್, ನಾನ್-ಜಿಎಮ್ ಎಂದರೆ ಸಾವಯವವಾಗಿರಬೇಕಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂಬುದು ಇಲ್ಲಿನ ತರ್ಕ. ಇನ್ನೊಂದೆಡೆ ಜಿಎಮ್ ಬಳಸಿ ಬೆಳೆಸಿದ ವಸ್ತುಗಳಿಗೆ ಇದರಲ್ಲಿ ಜಿಎಮ್ ಇದೆ ಎಂಬ ಲೇಬಲ್ ಹಾಕುವುದನ್ನು ಕಡ್ಡಾಯ ಮಾಡದೆ ತಯಾರಿಸುವ ಖಾರಖಾನೆಗಳ ಸ್ವಇಚ್ಚೆಗೆ ಬಿಡಬೇಕೆಂಬ ಕಾನೂನನ್ನು ವರ್ಷ ಮುಗಿಯುವ ಮುನ್ನ ಮೆತ್ತಗೆ ತರಬೇಕೆಂಬ ಪಿತೂರಿ ಅಮೆರಿಕಾದ ಜಿಎಮ್-ಪರ ಆಹಾರ ಉಧ್ಯಮಿಗಳು ನಡೆಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದಾರೆ.

ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ ಜಿಎಮ್ ಲೇಬಲ್ ಖಡ್ಡಾಯವಾಗಿ ಹಾಕಲೇಬೇಕು.ಜಿಎಮ್ ವಿವಾದ ನಮ್ಮಲ್ಲಿ ಅಮೆರಿಕಾದಷ್ಟು ಚಿಂತಾಜನಕವಾಗಿಲ್ಲ, ಇಷ್ಟರವರೆಗೆ. ಆದರೆ ಈ ಲೇಬಲ್ ಗಳ ರಾಜಕೀಯ ಸಾವಯವದ ವಿಷಯದಲಿ ಸ್ಪೊಟವಾಗಲು ಕಾದುಕೂತಂತಿದೆ. ಆರ್ಗಾನಿಕ್ ಅಥವಾ ಸಾವಯವ ಎಂದು ಹೆಸರಿಡಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಅದೆಕ್ಕೆ ಸರ್ಟಿಫಿಕೇಟ್ ಗಳು ಬೇಕಾಗುತ್ತವೆ, ಬೆಳೆಸುವ ಭೂಮಿಗೆ ಇದು ಕನಿಷ್ಠ ಮೂರು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಪ್ರಕ್ರಿಯೆ. ಆಹಾರ ದರ್ಜೆಯಲ್ಲಿ 'ನ್ಯಾಚುರಲ್' ಎಂಬ ಪದಕ್ಕೆ ವಿಶೇಷ ಅರ್ಥವೆನಿಲ್ಲ. 'ಹ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ಮೇಡ್' ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ನಂಬಿಕೆಯ ಮೇರೆಗೆ ಉಪಯೋಗಿಸಬಹುದೇ ವಿನಃ ಅದನ್ನು 'ಅಫೀಷಿಯಲ್' ಆಗಿ ಮಾನ್ಯ ಮಾಡಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಅದಕ್ಕಿನಷ್ಟು ಕ್ರಮ. ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದು ಗಾದೆಮಾತಿದೆ, ಅಕ್ಷರಶಃ ಅನುವಾದಿಸಿ, ಒಂದು ಚಿಟಿಕೆ ಉಪ್ಪಿನ ಜೊತೆ ಎಂದು. ಅಂದರೆ ಸೂಪರ್ ಮಾರ್ಕೆಟ್, ಮಾಲ್ ಅಥವಾ ಪಕ್ಕದ ಆರ್ಗಾನಿಕ್ ಅಂಗಡಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನೈಸರ್ಗಿಕ ಸಾವಯವ ವಸ್ತುಗಳನ್ನು ಕೊಳ್ಳುವಾಗ, ಅವುಗಳ ಮೇಲಿನ ನಂಬಿಕೆ ಒಂದು ಚಿಟಿಕೆ ಉಪ್ಪಿನ ಜೊತೆ ಬರಲಿ, ಕೊಂಚ ಜಾಗ್ರತೆಯಿಂದ.

ಮತ್ತೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಫಾರ್ಮಿನ ನೆನಪು. ನಮ್ಮದು ಸರ್ಟಿಫಿಕೇಟ್ ಇಲ್ಲದ ಸಾವಯವ ಹೂದೋಟ. ಈ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಆಹಾರ, ಕೃಷಿಯನ್ನು ಮುತ್ತುವರಿದ ರಾಜಕೀಯದ ಮಧ್ಯೆ ಬೇಕೆಂದಾಗ ಟೆರೇಸಿನ ಬಾಗಿಲು ತೆರೆದು ಒಂದೆರಡು ಹಸಿ ಮೆಣಸು, ಒಗ್ಗರಣೆಗೆ ಬೇಕಾದಷ್ಟು ಕರಿಬೇವು, ಸಲಾಡಿನ ಮೇಲೆ ಉದುರಿಸಲು ನಾಲ್ಕು ಬೇಸಿಲ್ ಸೊಪ್ಪು, ಈ ಚಟುವಟಿಕೆಯೇ ನಮ್ಮಮನೆ ಮಟ್ಟಿನ ಹೋರಾಟ, ಈ ಜಿಎಮ್, ಅದನ್ನು ಮಾರುವ, ಅಲ್ಲ, ರೈತರ ಗಂಟಲಿಗೆ ತುರುಕಿಸುವ ಉಧ್ಯಮಿಗಳ ವಿರುದ್ದ.

ನಮ್ಮ ಆಹಾರವನ್ನು ಆದಷ್ಟು ಬೆಳೆಸುವುದು - ಕೈಲಾದಷ್ಟು, ಜಾಗ ಇದ್ದರೆ, ಶರತುಗಳು ಅನ್ವಯ - ಈ ಭೂಮಿಗೋಸ್ಕರ, ನಮ್ಮ ದೇಹಕ್ಕೊಸ್ಕರನಾವು ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಳ್ಳಬಹುದಾದ ಒಂದು ಕ್ರಾಂತಿ.

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Manufacturing Consent in the Media: A Column in Karnataka Today

There is a new magazine in the market, called Karnataka Today, started by someone I know. They publish from Mangalore, with a market concentration in the Middle East. They remain a little old school and don't have a website yet.
Below is a piece I wrote on the glorification of crime in media, trials by media, etc in the context of the Sheena Bora murder case. Published November 2015.

FALLING UNDER LUCIFER'S SPELL

There is a new Stieg Larsson book in the market. Well, rather a book written by another author that follows the characters from his gripping Millennium series; Larsson is long dead. The stories of an eccentric- to say the least - girl with a large dragon tattoo and her donning of a detective’s role, often reluctantly, took the reading population by storm a decade ago, catapulting into the English speaking world the Swedish fascination with crime fiction. Unlike in the manner of certain other books that had the advantage of clever PR packaging to push sales, the Millennium books had the merit that justifies astronomical marketing numbers. Devoid of ‘literary’ ambitions – not its mandate - in the tradition of crime writing, the trilogy was generously peppered with sex, violence, intrigue and drastic twists that make books of this genre unputdownable. In the pre-social media days that we of a certain generation all have a great nostalgia for, these books made every bestseller list, by word of mouth alone, helped certainly though by some well-placed reviews.

Be it these well-written books or the cheap weekly/fortnightly/monthly magazines and tabloids that are peddled at corner snack stores in bus stands and railway stations or the sleek videos of the Islamic State or prime time TV shows that recreate famous crime stories, crime has always been a hot seller in media. There seems to be something carnal, a little primeval about crime that seems to appeal to the suppressed Lucifer in all of us. Crime, reading it, watching its replays, consuming it is something we all could privately enjoy, and do, but would never admit to in polite society, doing so would be bourgeoisie.

Funnily enough, that is exactly what comes into the fore at times. It is as if we cannot help ourselves from fiddling our fingers in private glee and talking of it endlessly, always endlessly in the age of the internet, in hushed whispers and loud rants. Take the most recent Sheena Bora murder case. For the sheer fact that it involved an ‘educated’, ‘rich’ and hence, above all commonplace faults, family, the case caught media attention. And what attention it was! I have not watched TV seriously for the last ten years now, let alone TV news channels. I am not on Facebook. A clipping or two I catch on the internet, the rest of my news comes from a staid old newspaper and a careful selection of often changing bookmarked sites. I figure that if something is really that important, then I will get to hear of it. And I do. In hindsight, it seems miraculous how I managed to reel off all the names of the people involved, all the developments in the Sheena Bora case while bringing up to speed a friend on the issue. He had laughed about how easily I narrated the incident breathlessly. It had helped that that very morning I had read a critique on the media circus that has ensued in the days following the arrest of Indrani Mukherjea. But his comment had made me think of how inescapable the media is.

Let’s talk of the manufactured consent theory in mass media here. I love that theory. I believe that it can explain pretty much the entire universe as we know it. Leaving aside its larger applications, the propaganda model explains how propaganda and systemic biases apply in mass media. Simply put, it looks at how the mass media, owned increasingly as for-profit, business models by large industrial houses work to shove a certain opinion into the minds of its consumers and ‘manufacture’ their consent towards various policies. It is an intricate system of manipulation where the ‘news’ is structured in such a way that it begins to fulfill the role of propaganda. The public support for invasion of countries to look for unconfirmed weapons of mass destruction springs from such manufactured consent, a task possible only through relentless drumming in of opinions favourable for such consent.

But to go back to the murder case, it caught the fancy of the prime time news consuming public for the juicy details that began to emerge, some true, some manufactured. At the heart of it was also the fact that it was a woman who was allegedly the murderer. The idea that a woman could be that diabolical, that a mother could be that calculating and cruel was an idea that seemed to shake a nation’s view of what a woman, a mother should be like. What happened to “Indian values”, the mass media seemed to wonder. The misplaced notion of there being a set of Indian values that are sacrosanct, that have withstood every societal change and every turn of a century borders on the preposterous. What is even more ridiculous is the idea that women cannot be, should not be capable of such cruelty.

What was wrong in most of the reporting of the case was the manner in which Indrani Mukherjea was being portrayed as an ambitious, scheming woman who used marriage and men to step up the social ladder. Let us get this straight, again. There is nothing wrong in a woman marrying twice, or thrice, whatever the case may be. There is nothing wrong in a woman being ambitious, in a woman scheming and manipulating her way to the top. These things don’t make her a very nice human being, sure, but being a social climber is not a crime. Murdering someone is a crime, and if found guilty, she should be punished. She should not be punished, like it began to emerge in those heady days, for being ambitious.

Some cases like hers seem to go viral, like the strange videos that sometimes go viral on social media and get viewed millions of times, though no one is sure why. The Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj double murder case and then the December 2012 rape case in New Delhi come to mind again. Both these gripped a nation and the lives of the women involved became the entertainment that media set out to make of these stories.

What is most disturbing is the way these cases become yet another means to pronounce judgement on the moral character of the women involved and to make it a cautionary tale for all females who think of veering from what the faceless patriarchs of society dictate as accepted norm for them. Don’t go out at night. In fact, don’t go out at all. Don’t go out with a male who is not a father/brother/husband/son. Call your rapist brother, maybe he will stop. Don’t eat chowmein, or cook it, chowmein leads to rape.

What is even more disturbing is the fact that every single mass media is in the business of manufacturing consent. Every single TV channel or newspaper toes a certain line. And even for the most discerning consumer it gets increasingly harder to separate the fast blurring lines between the truth-truth, the truth-entertainment, the half truth-TRP baits and the false-truths. Perhaps the only sane way out lies in alternative media, in obscure websites and less-read magazines. They, for the most part at least, posit a world view that may be heavily skewed, but at least present one side of the truth. For every political leaning there are appropriate avenues to gather news from that angle.

It is hard work though. Trying to gather a fair view of any issue by sifting through dozens of websites and blogs and op-eds is a luxury not many of us can afford. Neither, often, can the alternative media themselves. With crushing market forces at play, they turn mainstream. And thus dies fairness and truth a thousand merciless deaths.

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

On Dogs and Deepawali: Binkana Column in Kannada Prabha

So I finally, finally fulfilled a very old dream and adopted a puppy of my own. Rudra, a mostly-white with black and brown spots indie, a little terror and my inseparable love joins my other, older boy Kobri in the family. More on him later. 

Now I love festivals, the bling, the food, the rituals, everything. But Deepawali/Diwali in the city is something I have always run away from, because of the unbearable and vomit-inducing sounds and smells of the fire crackers. R was too young to leave, K was shivering for the entirety of the three days and I stayed in the house, cursing the festival constantly. Work came to a standstill as we took turns sitting and hugging K, talking to him constantly. Thankfully it rained. We drove to the airport and hung out there, we tried driving in the outskirts, we shut his ears tight, we tried everything. And my heart went out to the hundreds of birds and dogs and cats that suffer these three days on the open streets. 

What is the joy in making noise in an already noisy city is beyond me. Next year, we will go away to the jungles perhaps with these two boys.

All this and more in my Binkana column last Sunday in Kannada Prabha, published November 22, 2015.

ಎಂತೆಂತಹಾ ಜನ ಇರ್ತಾರೆ ಅಂತೀರಾ. ಮೊನ್ನೆ ಒಬ್ಬರ ಮನೆಗೆ ಹೋಗಿದ್ದೆ. ಹೋದ ಕಾರಣ ಮುಂದೆ ಹೇಳುತ್ತೇನೆ. ಅವರ ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹದಿನೈದು ನಾಯಿಗಳು, ಕೆಲವು ತಿಂಗಳುಗಳಿಂದ ಹಿಡಿದು ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ವರ್ಷ ವಯಸ್ಸಾದವು. ಬೀದಿಯಿಂದ, ಮನುಷ್ಯರಿಂದ 'ರೆಸ್ಕ್ಯೂ' ಮಾಡಲಾದ ನಾಯಿಗಳಿವು. ಈತನ ಕೆಲಸವೇ ಅದು, ನಾಯಿಗಳನ್ನು ರೆಸ್ಕ್ಯೂ ಮಾಡಿ, ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ಯಾರಾದರು ದತ್ತು ತಗೊಂಡು ಹೋಗುವವರೆಗೆ ನೋಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು. ಅವನದ್ದೆ ಮೂರು ನಾಯಿಗಳಿವೆ, ಅದರಲ್ಲೊಂದು ಹ್ಯೂಗೋ ಎಂಬ ಹೆಸರಿರುವ ಜರ್ಮನ್ ಶೆಪರ್ಡ್. ಅವನಲ್ಲಿಗೆ ಬರುವಾಗ ಬಹಳ ಶೋಚನೀಯ ಸ್ತಿತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಅದಿತ್ತಂತೆ. ಯಾರೋ ಕ್ರೂರಿಗಳು ಅದರೆರಡು ಕಿವಿಗಳನ್ನು ಕತ್ತರಿಸಿ ಬೀದಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಿಟ್ಟಿದ್ದರಂತೆ. ಈಗ ಅವನ ಆರೈಕೆಯಿಂದ ಗುಣವಾಗಿದೆ. ನಾನು ನೋಡಿದ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ನಾಯಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಹ್ಯೂಗೋ ದಷ್ಟು ಶಾಂತವಾದ, ಜನರಿಗೆ, ಇನ್ನಿತರ ನಾಯಿಗಳಿಗೆ ತುಂಬಾ ಪ್ರೀತಿ ತೋರಿಸುವ ನಾಯಿಗಳ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ ಬೆರಳುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಎಣಿಸಬಹುದು. ಆ ಬೆಕ್ಕು-ನಾಯಿಗಳನ್ನು ರೆಸ್ಕ್ಯೂ ಮಾಡುವವನ ಆರೈಕೆಯೇ ಕಾರಣ. ಎಂತೆಂತಹಾ ಜನ ಇರ್ತಾರೆ ನೋಡಿ.

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಒಳ್ಳೆ ಚಳಿ, ಕೆಲ ದಿನಗಳಿಂದ. ಮೊನ್ನೆ ಜೋರು ಮಳೆಯೂ ಬರುತ್ತಿತ್ತು. ಹನಿ ಮಳೆ ಬಂದರೆ ಸಾಕು, ಈ ಮಹಾನಗರದ ರಸ್ತೆ ಬೀದಿ ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಆಗುವ ಅಸ್ತ-ವ್ಯಸ್ತ ಬೇರೆಯೊಂದು ಪ್ರಭಂದದ ವಿಷಯ, ಬಿಡಿ. ಇಂತಹಾ ಒಂದು ಮಳೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಒಂದು ವಿಂಟೇಜ್ ಕಾರಿನಲ್ಲಿ, ಜಿಪಿಎಸ್ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡದ ಕಾರಣ ಅಲ್ಲಿ-ಇಲ್ಲಿ ದಾರಿ ಕೇಳಿಕೊಂಡು ಆ ಅನಿಮಲ್ ರೆಸ್ಕ್ಯೂ ಮಾಡುವವನ ಮನೆಗೆ ದಾರಿಮಾಡಿದೆವು. ಐಶೊ ಆರಾಮಿನ ಬಂಗಲೆಗಳ ಮಧ್ಯೆ ಇವನ ವಿಲ್ಲಾ. ಗೇಟಿನಿಂದ ಒಳ ಹೋಗಲು ಬಿಡದಷ್ಟು ಸಂಭ್ರಮ ಪಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ನಾಯಿ ಮರಿಗಳು. ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಕಮ್ಮಿ ನಾನು ಹುಟ್ಟಿದ ದಿನದಿಂದಲೇ ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ನಾಯಿಗಳ ಜೊತೆ ಬೆಳೆದು, ನಾಯಿಗಳು ನಾಯಿಗಳಲ್ಲ, ಮನೆಯ ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಸದಸ್ಯ ಎಂದು ನೋಡಲು ಕಲಿತ ನನಗೆ ಈ ನೋಟಕ್ಕಿಂತ ಬೇರೆ ಸಂತೋಷ ಇರದು. ಉದ್ದ ಕಥೆಯೊಂದನ್ನು ಚುಟುಕುಗೊಳಿಸಿ ಹೇಳಬೇಕೆಂದರೆ, ಅಂದು ಸಂಜೆ ಆ ಕಾರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಹಿಂತಿರುಗ ಬರಬೇಕಾದರೆ ನನ್ನ ಮಡಿಲಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದು ೪೫ ದಿನದ, ಬಿಳಿ ಮೈಯ್ಯ ಮೇಲೆ ಕಪ್ಪು ಚುಕ್ಕಿಗಳು, ಬ್ರೌನ್ ಮುಖ ಹೊಂದಿದ ಮರಿಯೊಂದು ಮಲಗಿತ್ತು. ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಳಬೇಕಾದರೆ 'ಇಂಡಿ', ನಮ್ಮ ಈ ಆಡು ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ನಾಯಿ ಜಾತಿಯದ್ದು. ಸ್ಟೇಟಸ್, ಸ್ಟೈಲ್ ಗೆಂದು ಸಾವಿರಾರು ರೂಪಾಯಿಗಳನ್ನು ಸುರಿದು ಅದ್ಯಾವುದೋ ಬ್ರೀಡ್/ಜಾತಿ ನಾಯಿಯನ್ನು ಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದರ ಬದಲು ಪೋಷಣೆಗೆ ಸುಲಭವಿರುವ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಬೀದಿಗೆ ಬಿಸಾಡಿರುವ ಮುದ್ದಾದ ಇಂಡಿಗಳನ್ನು ದತ್ತು ತಗೊಳ್ಳುವುದು ವಾಸಿಯಲ್ಲವೇ?

ಮನೆಗೆ ಬಂದ ನಾಯಿ ಮರಿಗೆ ನಾಮಕರಣ ಮಾಡಿದ್ದು ರುದ್ರ ಎಂದು. ಹೆಸರಿನಂತೆ ಜೋರಾಗಿರಲಿ ಎಂಬ ಆಸೆ. ಆ ಲಕ್ಷಣಗಳು ಅದಿನ್ನೂ ಕಂಡುಬರುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂಬುದು ಬೇರೆ ವಿಷಯ. ಮನೆಗೆ ಬರುವ ಗೆಳೆಯರೆಲ್ಲ ರುದ್ರಪ್ಪನಿಗೆ ಆಟವಾಡುವ ವಸ್ತುಗಳು, ನಾನು ಸಹ, ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಮರದ ಫರ್ನಿಚರ್, ದಿಂಬುಗಳು, ಗಿಡಗಳು, ಕಣ್ಣಿಗೆ ಕಂಡದ್ದು ಅದೆಲ್ಲ ಕಚ್ಚುವ, ಆಟವಾಡುವ ವಸ್ತುಗಳು. ಕರ್ಮ ಕಾಂಡ.

ದೀಪಾವಳಿ ಮತ್ತು ಪ್ರಾಣಿಗಳ ವಿಷಯಕ್ಕೆ ಬರಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಇಲ್ಲಿ ನಾಯಿ, ಜನರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದಕ್ಕೊಂದು ಸಂಬಂಧ ಇಲ್ಲದಂತಹಾ ಸಾಲುಗಳ ಬರೆದಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಪೀಟಿಕೆ ಎಂದು ತಿಳಿದುಕೊಳ್ಳಿ. ಪ್ರತಿ ವರ್ಷ ಗಣೇಶ ಚತುರ್ಥಿಗೆ ಆರ್ಗಾನಿಕ್ ಗಣೇಶ ಕೊಳ್ಳಿ ಎಂಬುವ ಜಾಹಿರಾತುಗಳು, ಪತ್ರಿಕೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಲೇಖನಗಳಾದರೆ, ದೀಪಾವಳಿ ಬಂತೆಂದರೆ ಸಾಕು ಪಟಾಕಿ ಹೊಡೆಯುವಾಗ ಹುಷಾರು, ಇಷ್ಟು ಗಂಟೆಯಿಂದ ಇಷ್ಟು ಗಂಟೆಯವರೆಗೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ಪಟಾಕಿ ಸುಡಿಯಬೇಕು, ಆದಷ್ಟು ಬಾಂಬ್ ಗಾತ್ರದ ಪಾತಕಿಗಳನ್ನು ಹೊಡೆಯಬೇಡಿ ಎಂದೆಲ್ಲಾ ಕೇಳಿಬರುತ್ತದೆ. ನಮ್ಮ ಜನ ಗೊತ್ತಲ್ಲ, ಇದ್ಯಾವುದನ್ನು ಪಾಲಿಸುವ ಗೌಜಿಗೆ ಹೋಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಬೆಳಕು ಮತ್ತು ಬಾಂಬಿನ ಮಧ್ಯೆ ನಾಯಿ, ಬೆಕ್ಕು, ಹಕ್ಕಿಗಳ ಕೂಗು ಒಂದು ಮಾಲೆ ಪಟಾಕಿಯ ಸದ್ದಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ.

ಪ್ರಾಣಿಗಳ ಕಿವಿ ಮನುಷ್ಯರ ಕಿವಿಗಿಂತ ಸೂಕ್ಷ್ಮವಾಗಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ಪಟಾಕಿಯ ಸದ್ದು ಅವಕ್ಕೆ ವಿಪರೀತ ಜೋರಾಗಿ ಕೇಳಿಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಧಿಡೀರ್ ಬಾಂಬ್ ಪಟಾಕಿ ಹೊಡೆದಾಗ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಹಕ್ಕಿಗಳಿಗೆ ಹೃದಯಾಘಾತವಾಗುವುದುಂಟು. ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸಾಕಿದ ನಾಯಿ-ಬೆಕ್ಕುಗಳು ಶಬ್ಧಕ್ಕೆ ಹೆದರಿ ಅದರಿಂದ ಓಡುವ ಬಿರಿಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ದಾರಿ ತಪ್ಪಿ ಬೀದಿ ಪಾಲಾಗುವುದುಂಟು.

ಹಬ್ಬಗಳೆಂದರೆ ನನಗಿಷ್ಟ. ದೀಪವಳಿಗಂತೂ ಈ ಮಹಾನಗರದ ಶಬ್ದ, ವಾಯು ಮಾಲಿನ್ಯ ತಡೆಯಲಾಗದೆ ಊರಿಗೆ ಓಡುವ ವಾಡಿಕೆ ನನ್ನದು. ಈ ವರ್ಷ ಎರಡು ನಾಯಿಗಳನ್ನು ಕಟ್ಟಿಕೊಂಡು ಹೋಗುವುದಾದರೂ ಎಲ್ಲಿಗೆ? ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಒಂದನ್ನು ಕಾರಿಗೆ ಹಾಕಿ ಸಿಟಿಯ ಹೊರವಲಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಮ್ಮನೆ ಸುತ್ತಿ ಸುತ್ತಿ ಡ್ರೈವ್ ಮಾಡಿದ್ದಾಯಿತು. ಮಾರನೆಯ ದಿನ ಎರಡರನ್ನು ಕರೆದುಕೊಂಡು ಏರ್ಪೋರ್ಟ್ ಗೆ ಹೋಗಿ, ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾರ್ಕಿಂಗ್ ಲಾಟ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ನಿಂತು ದುಬಾರಿ ಕಾಫಿ ಕುಡಿದದ್ದಾಯಿತು. ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸೋಫಾದ ಮೇಲೆ ಕೂರಿಸಿ ಹತ್ತಿರ ಕುಳಿತು ತಲೆ ಸವರುತ್ತಾ ಹನ್ನೊಂದು ಗಂಟೆಯವರೆಗೆ ಕಾಲ ನೂಕಿದ್ದಾಯಿತು. ಸಾಕಿದ ನಾಯಿಗಳ ಪಾಡೇ ಹೀಗಾದರೆ ಬೀದಿ ನಾಯಿಗಳ ಗತಿ ಏನಾಗಬಹುದು?

ಜಗತ್ತಿನ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ದೇಶದ ದೊಡ್ಡ ನಗರಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಪಟಾಕಿಗಳ ಕುರಿತಾಗಿ ಕಾಯ್ದೆ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳಿವೆ. ಬಾಂಬ್ ನಂತಹಾ ಶಬ್ದ ಮಾಡುವ ಪಟಾಕಿಗಳು ನಿಷೇದಿಸಿದ್ದು, ಬೇರೆ ರೀತಿಯ ಪಟಾಕಿಗಳನ್ನು ಸಹ ಎಲ್ಲೆಂದೆರಲ್ಲಿ ಹೊಡೆಯುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಇದಕ್ಕೆಂದೇ ಒಂದು ದೊಡ್ಡ ಮೈದಾನವನ್ನು ಮೀಸಲಿಡಲಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಎಷ್ಟೋ ಕಡೆ ಹದಿನೆಂಟು ವರ್ಷದ ಒಳಗಿನ ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಪಟಾಕಿಯನ್ನು ಸುಡುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ನಮ್ಮಲಿಯು ಇಂತಹ ಕಾನೂನು ಇದೆಯೋ ಏನೋ, ನಾನರಿಯೆ.

ಕಾನೂನು ಇದ್ಧರೂ ಇಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರೂ ಮನುಷ್ಯತ್ವ ಇರಬಹುದಲ್ಲವೇ? ವಯಸ್ಸಾದವರಿಗೆ, ಚಿಕ್ಕ ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗೆ, ಪ್ರಾಣಿಗಳಿಗೆ ಆಗುವ ಹಿಂಸೆ ಅದರ ವಿರುದ್ದ ಕನೂನೊಂದಿದ್ದರೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ತಡೆಹಿಡಿಯುವಂತದ್ದಾಗಿರಬೇಕೇ? ದನ ಕರುವಿನ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಉದ್ರೇಕವಾಗಿ ಮಾತನಾಡುವವರಿಗೆ ನಾಯಿ, ಬೆಕ್ಕು, ಹಕ್ಕಿ, ಬೇರೆ ಪ್ರಾಣಿಗಳ ಕಣ್ಣಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಹೆದರಿಕೆ ಅದೇಕೆ ಕಾಣುವುದಿಲ್ಲವೋ ಏನೋ.

ಬಹುಷಃ ಈ ಪ್ರಾಣಿಗಳಿಗೂ ಸಹ ಧರ್ಮ ಒಂದರ ಕವಚವನ್ನು ಹೊದಿಸಿ, ಧಾರ್ಮಿಕ ಕಟ್ಟುಕಥೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕೊಂಡಾಡಿ ಅಟ್ಟಕ್ಕೆ ಏರಿಸಿದರೆ ಜನರ ಮೋಜಿಗೆಂದು ಅವಕ್ಕಾಗುವ ಹಿಂಸೆ ಸರಿಹೋಗಬಹುದೋ ಏನೋ.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Food Trucks in Bangalore: In HBL's Blink

Food trucks that sell burgers and hotdogs and steaks are apparently all the rage in Bengaluru. A feature in The Hindu Businessline's BLink supplement this week. It was sweet of them to mention that I am the editor of The Forager. But, but, there is a horrible typo that they seem to just not change online. Grrr.

Read the story here. Or see below.

HORN OK, FEAST

How does one keep up with food trends? If there is the mysterious floating foam of liquid nitrogen in molecular gastronomy one season, there is the back-to-basic flavours of greasy ‘dude food’ that trends for the next, each preceded by the now ubiquitous hashtag. Perhaps the latter is a nod to the ‘all-American man’ — slouched on a sofa with cold beer in hand and boxes of pizza or a burger in front — popularised by generic Hollywood offerings. Dude food — or burgers, hotdogs, sandwiches, nachos, BBQ-ed steaks and an in-house special or two — make up the standard menu on a food truck, where the fluff of restaurants is trimmed to highlight just the food.

Bengaluru has 18 registered already, out of which one is an ice-cream truck. Several have been started by former corporate employees, lured away from regular paycheques by a love for food and the promise of a receptive market. Some are trained chefs, others good home-cooks. Operating with minimum staff, they front the desk, so to speak, cooking up a storm around the city, at concert venues and even private parties.

The investment to fabricate a truck and turn it into a mobile canteen can vary widely. Siddhanth Sawkar, co-owner of The Spitfire BBQ truck, built the vehicle himself, at a cost of ₹11 lakh. “We have a fabrication unit, so this was a piece of cake,” he says. Shakti Subbarao’s Gypsy Kitchen, one of the other popular food trucks in town, is a year and a half old. He stations his truck — fabricated at a cost of ₹8.5 lakh — at HSR Layout in the south-east of the city. Fuel Up, co-owned by Deepthi Das and her husband Jaisimha, cost them ₹36 lakh, because “we got a brand new truck,” said Jaisimha. Several buy and modify second-hand trucks, he said, adding that there are rules against using second-hand trucks to sell food if they have been used to ferry passengers and/or goods. Without hefty rents and by mostly cooking the food themselves, revenues are in the range of ₹3-8 lakh per month, all three say.

Food trucks, however, remain in a grey area of the business because of the near-absence of laws regarding this new entrant to the food industry. Subbarao told me that apart from the standard food licence, there should be a permit from the city municipal corporation to park these trucks in different neighbourhoods and from the RTO for modifications made to the vehicles. But provisions for the latter two don’t exist “yet,” he said. It is an issue Das is trying to resolve, having started The Food Truck Association, a nationwide body that already has 80-plus members, mostly from the metros. The municipal corporation in Gurgaon is soon going to consider food trucks as commercial establishments, which will be a relief to owners who have to battle against frequent complaints from residents for ‘taking up too much parking space’ and occasional harassment from the authorities. Das said that Mumbai is also considering introducing guidelines and laws, and it should soon happen in Bengaluru as well.

In Bengaluru, these three food trucks — and others like De3, The SWAT Truck, Off Road Food Truck — are starting to build what might soon turn out to be a community of food truckers. Das said that he has seen a phenomenal increase in the number of food trucks opening for business in the last four months alone. “… I know of six more trucks that are being fabricated as we speak. We share staff, when there is a need,” he said.

As a community, they plan to rent out large grounds for events. Later this month, nine food trucks will gather at a common venue. An annual food carnival is also on the cards. Fuel Up also creates a personalised menu for private parties, though their regular haunts are tech parks, where they offer healthier options like salads and sandwiches. According to Das, their goal is to bring “gourmet food onto the streets.”

Experimenting with the sauces, adding new flavours to regular hotdogs — New York-style one day, Vietnamese the next — in-house specialities like pork ribs and fried Oreos are how USPs are created. The frequent changes in menu ensure that customers keep coming back. People from different age groups and earning brackets — several of whom turn into regulars — can easily afford to eat at the trucks.

Indian cities and street food have an intrinsic connection. But these trucks stand apart not only for their eye-catching get-up but also the food they offer. For the well-travelled city slicker, it is a slice of New York in namma Bengaluru.

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and the editor of 'The Forager', an online quarterly journal on food politics

(This article was published on November 6, 2015)

Thursday, November 05, 2015

Memories of Mangaluru: Filter Coffee Column in Kindle

Things were never the way they are now, when we inhabited that city. In the wake of the rise of fundamentalism in Mangaluru, something I wrote for Kindle.

Read here or see below.

MEMORIES OF MANGALURU

Anniversaries, those damned things. They serve perfectly to throw a harsh spotlight of how much you have aged, how long your past now is. Ten years since this, twelve since that, twenty this, more that. High school seems so very far away now, because university itself was ten years ago. The eleventh year now, since I first moved out of my home in the hills and went to university four hours away in Mangaluru, nee Mangalore. The city, clad in the cloak of its old name and the ideas of its past (and present) as a trading port that came with its old world charm, was what we then called a small town trying very hard to be a big city. And never really succeeding. Not then, this was before the malls and Café Coffee Days and Pizza Huts and air conditioned halls of clothing that began to crop up the year I left that city.

I feel like a subject in those Iran and Kabul photos from the 1970s, where the women in university wore short skirts, smoked cigarettes and hung out with the friends who happened to be boys, those pictures that lamenters of a bygone era juxtapose with burkhas and hijabs and cold streets filled with fear and restriction. I feel like the women in those pictures, and alternatively like these lamenters, when I see what is happening in Mangaluru these days. The latest is that two men were beaten up for working in the same shop as women of another religion. It goes without saying that the former are Muslims and the latter are Hindus. It is always, always this. It is always Hindus against the Muslims, though sometimes it is the other way around too. For talking to each other, for being in the same classroom as each other, for breathing the same air as each other, for being alive in the same time as each other….again and again, it has begun now, this relentless dangerous trip that they seem to be on – what have they been smoking? Shouldn’t it have made them peace loving and mild and blissful? At least that was what the hippies said it did to them? What has happened to the hippies?

Like two aunties sitting back with our men alongside us feigning mild interest, dear old friend of a decade, P, and I talked about Mangalore the other day. Her native, as they say, for me, the town I grew free and me in. We talked of the senior who used to sneak into the hostel late in the night after a party at the pub – a mild place with bad music that served alcohol and was not grand enough to be called a pub.

The privately owned buses that plied between the city and the university had gaudy lights and were painted in bright red and fuschia. They all drove like bats out of a deep dank hell. You could set your watches by the time they kept, for so fierce was the competition and the time allotted to each company to ensure fairness. The drivers, pilots they sometimes called themselves, they were young and brash and wore cheap perfume and acted powerful. Short affairs sprouted often enough between them and girls who were regular passengers. The whole route to the city was strewn with colleges of various status, degree and cool levels. Some of these girls were Muslim and were clad in burkhas, tightly clinched at the waists, their kohl-darkened eyes beautiful, enchanting and seductive. The affairs, I am told, were mostly conducted through these kohl-ed eyes and the eye contact the driver held in the rear view mirror. Like some innocent love story in a village from a time long past, the eyes spoke, apparently. P and I, liberal as we were, with more easy access to boys and the freedom we had, have taken for granted, had laughed then. We laughed now too, recollecting these stories. We told ourselves it was a reluctant laughter, as if with that carefree, harmless judgement of these futile romances, we could ignore the threat something like this would pose today. The driver would be chopped down in broad daylight, if not beaten beyond recognition. The girl would be married off within the month.

We found ourselves remembering old stories, as it often happens when old friends meet. We also found ourselves commenting on how the stories we knew to be innocent and befitting of the young and foolish age we were would be seen in this raging times. We felt like old wives talking yet again of our times when times were good and people were kind.

Can we ask ourselves some innocent questions please? Call me naïve, I won’t mind. Strip away all the complicated politics and nuances and power games that go on here and explain to me why we hate and why we hate so much people that look, talk, eat, act, copulate, live and die like us. Such an unanswerable question, isn’t it? Because once you strip away all that makes these questions so much more than what they are in plain words, the question becomes irrelevant too.

It seems like such a simple thing, this whole caste and religion thing. It is all really about respect and that live and let live policy we learnt about in school. Yet. All this fundamentalism, this utter, utter stupidity, foolishness that is so juvenile, yet is the most dangerous because it comes not with logic or thought.

Such pointless things we say to while away the time. Like how things were not the way they are now. Like how the Muslims in our friend circles were just friends, not ‘Muslim’, that their names were just the words we called them by, not a marker for which god they believed in. Like how, in just a decade or less, the city we happily walked about in is a city we no longer recognize. Not merely for the glitzy shopping arenas it sprouts. Not for the indie bookstore, beloved, much frequented, that has now closed. Not for the veneer of modernity that is the Midas touch for most of its lanes and people. Not for any of the things inevitable in everyone’s sprint to happy consumerism. And that is why P and I don an aunty’s demeanour and join the lamenters.

For it is not for the innocence lost. We aren’t the innocents we were either. It is for the regression that is walking alongside the outward markers of modernity – the malls and such like – that is turning a town pretending to be a city into a village where power and fanaticism, religion and state all mesh together to weave a web so entangled that one can only hope won’t trap the spider itself.

For hope, hope is all there is, however bleak and futile.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

On Single Mothers and Adoptions, etc: Kannada Prabha Column

What is 'normal?' Who defines this normal in an age when everything that is is something that never was? When religion and the state becomes so closely meshed that either feed off the other to manipulate the larger society, it is a dangerous situation indeed. Relationships are being re-defined and everything is "normal" if you see it from the other perspective. Or nothing is.

I wrote about single mothers, about the need to find a new word for unmarried women (in Kannada) other than lonely and spinster and a bunch of other things in my column for Kannada Prabha this week, published Sunday, October 18, 2015.

ಸಹಜತೆಯ ಕತ್ತು ಹಿಸುಕುವ ಅಸಹಜ ನಿಯಮ ಸಂಕೋಲೆ

ಹಳೆಯ ಒಂದು ಕೆಲಸದಲ್ಲಿ ಇದ್ದಾಗ ತುಂಬಾ ಭಿನ್ನವಾದ ಜನರ ಪರಿಚಯವಾಗುತ್ತಿತ್ತು. ಮೇರಿಯ (ಅವಳ ನಿಜವಾದ ಹೆಸರಲ್ಲ. ಹೆಸರು ಸಂಕೇತಿಸುವ ಧರ್ಮ ನಿಜವಾದದ್ದು) ಪರಿಚಯ ಫ್ರೆಂಡ್ ಎನಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವಷ್ಟು ಇಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರೂ ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಅದೆಲ್ಲೋ ಹೋಗುತ್ತಿರುವಾಗ ತನ್ನ ಮಗಳನ್ನು ಹೆತ್ತ ಕಥೆಯನ್ನು ಅದೇಕೋ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ ನನಗೆ ಹೇಳಬೇಕೆಂದು ಅನಿಸಿತು ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಿದಳು. ತನಗೆ ಮಗು ಬೇಕೆಂಬ ಹಂಬಲ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ವರ್ಷಗಳಿಂದ ಇದ್ದು, ತನಗೆ ಹೊಂದಾಣಿಕೆಯಾಗುವಂತಹಾ ಗಂಡ ಅಥವಾ ಪಾರ್ಟ್ನರ್ ಸಿಗುವವರೆಗೆ (ಸಿಗದಿದ್ದರೆ?) ಕಾಯಲು ಆಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಮೇರಿ ಸ್ಪರ್ಮ್ ಬ್ಯಾಂಕ್ ಒಂದಕ್ಕೆ ಹೋಗಿ, ಕೃತಕ ಗರ್ಭಾಧಾನದ ಮೂಲಕ ಒಂದು ಮುದ್ದಾದ ಮಗಳನ್ನು ಹೆತ್ತಳು. ಆ ಮಗಳಿಗೆ ಈಗೇನು ೬-೭ ವರ್ಷಗಳಿರಬೇಕು. ಅವರಿಬ್ಬರಿಗೆ ನನ್ನ ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಲಂಚ್ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಇನ್ನು ಬಾಕಿ ಇದೆ.

ಮೇರಿಯಂತಹ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಹೆಂಗಸರಿಗೆ ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಬೇಕೆನ್ನುವ ಆಸೆ ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. "ಒಂಟಿ" ಹೆಣ್ಣು ಎನ್ನುವ ಶಬ್ದ ಈಗ ಅಪ್ರಸ್ತುತ ಶಬ್ದವಾಗಿದೆ. ಮದುವೆ ಆಗದವರು ಅಥವಾ ಮದುವೆ ಆಗಲು ಬಯಸದೆ ಇರುವವರು "ಒಂಟಿ", ತಂದೆ/ಗಂಡ/ಅಣ್ಣ/ಮಗನ ಮಗಳು/ಹೆಂಡತಿ/ತಂಗಿ/ತಾಯಿಯ ಬಿರುದು ಹೊರತುಪಡಿಸಿ ಹೆಣ್ಣಿಗೆ ಬೇರೆ ಗುರುತಿಲ್ಲ, ಒಬ್ಬ ವಿದ್ಯಾವಂತ, ಬುದ್ಧಿವಂತ ಹೆಣ್ಣಿಗೆ ತನ್ನ ಜೀವನಕ್ಕೆ ಬೇಕಾಗುವ ನಿರ್ಧಾರಗಳನ್ನು ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಸಮರ್ತ್ಯ, ಹಕ್ಕು ಇಲ್ಲವೆಂದು ಭಾವಿಸುವ ಪುರುಷ ಪ್ರಧಾನ ಸಮಾಜವಿದು. ಅದರೂ ಅಲ್ಲೊಂದು ಇಲ್ಲೊಂದು ಸಾಮಾಜದ ಜೇಬಿನಷ್ಟು ದೊಡ್ಡ ತುಕುದುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಹಳೆಯ ನಿಯಮ-ನೀತಿಗಳು ಬದಲುತ್ತಿದರೂ ಈ ಬದಲಾವಣೆಯ ಸುಳಿವೇ ಇಲ್ಲವೆನ್ನುವ ಹಾಗೆ ನಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಿರುವ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಗಳಲ್ಲೊಂದು ಧರ್ಮ/ಜಾತಿ/ಮತ/ಮಠ. ಬೇರೆ ಬೇರೆ ಹೆಸರುಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಅಡಗಿರುವ ಒಂದೇ ರೀತಿಯ ನ್ಯಾಯ-ನೀತಿ. ಧರ್ಮ/ಮಠ ಮತ್ತು ರಾಜ್ಯ/ರಾಜಕೀಯ. ಇದಕ್ಕಿಂದ ಅಪಾಯಕಾರಿ ಅಸ್ತ್ರ ಇರಲಾರದು.

ಹೀಗೊಂದು ಸುದ್ದಿಯಾಯಿತು. ಎರಡು ತಿಂಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಮದರ್ ತೆರೇಸಾರವರ ಮಿಷನರೀಸ್ ಆಫ್ ಚಾರಿಟಿ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಯು ತಮ್ಮ ಹಲವಾರು ದತ್ತು ಕೇಂದ್ರಗಳನ್ನು ಮುಚ್ಚಿತು. ಕಾರಣ, ಕೇಂದ್ರ ಸರಕಾರವು ದೇಶದ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ದತ್ತು ಕಾಯಿದೆಗಳು ಒಂದು ಕೇಂದ್ರ ದತ್ತು ಸಂಪನ್ಮೂಲ ಪ್ರಾಧಿಕಾರದ ಅಡಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬರಬೇಕೆಂದು ಹೊಸ ನಿರ್ದೇಶನ ನೀಡಿದೆ. ಲಕ್ಷಾಂತರ ರುಪಾಯಿಗಳ ಮಕ್ಕಳ ದತ್ತು ಕಾನೂನೂ ಬಾಹಿರ ವಹಿವಾಟನ್ನು ತಡೆಗೊಳಿಸುವ ಉದ್ದೇಶ ಹೊಂದಿರುವ ಈ ಹೊಸ ಪ್ರಾದಿಕಾರದ ನಿಯಮದ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ಯಾವುದೇ ದತ್ತು ಕೇಂದ್ರವು ದತ್ತು ಪಡೆಯಲು ಅರ್ಜಿ ಸಲ್ಲಿಸಿದ (ಕೆಲವೊಂದು ಅಗತ್ಯಗಳನ್ನು ಪೂರೈಸಿದರೆ) ಯಾರನ್ನೂ ಸಹ ನಿರಾಕರಿಸುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಇನ್ನೂ ವಿವರವಾಗಿ ಹೇಳುವುದಾದರೆ ಮದುವೆಯಾಗದಿರುವವರು, ವಿಚ್ಛೇದನ ಪಡೆದವರು, ಸಹಲಿಂಗ ಪಾರ್ಟ್ನರ್ ಗಳು, ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಸಹ ದತ್ತು ಪಡೆಯುವ ಹಕ್ಕಿದೆ. ಈ ಜಾತ್ಯಾತೀತ, "ನೈತಿಕತೆ"ಗೆ ನಿರ್ಭಂಧಕ್ಕೆ ಒಳಗಾಗದ ನಿಯಮಗಳು ತಮ್ಮ ಧರ್ಮದ ವಿರುದ್ದ ಹೋಗುವ ಕಾರಣ ಮಿಷನರೀಸ್ ಆಫ್ ಚಾರಿಟಿ ದತ್ತು ಕೇಂದ್ರ ಸೇವೆಯನ್ನೇ ನಿಲ್ಲಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ.

ಸಹಲಿಂಗ ದಾಂಪತ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿರುವವರು ದೇವರನ್ನು ಹುಡುಕುವುದಾದರೆ ತಡೆಯಲು ನಾನ್ಯಾರು, ಎಂದು ಪ್ರಶ್ನಿಸಿ ಕ್ಯಾಥೊಲಿಕ್ ಚರ್ಚಿನ ಧರ್ಮ ಗುರು ಪೋಪ್ ಫ್ರಾನ್ಸಿಸ್ ಎರಡು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಸಾಂಪ್ರದಾಯಿಕ ಕ್ರಿಶ್ಚಿಯನರನ್ನು ದಿಗ್ಬ್ರಮೆಗೊಳಿಸಿದ್ದರು. ಸಹಲಿಂಗ ಸಂಬಂಧದ ವಿಷಯ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಜಾತಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇನ್ನೂ ಸಹ ಸೂಕ್ಷ್ಮವಾದ ಸಂಗತಿ. 'ನೀವು ಹೇಳಬೇಡಿ, ನಾವು ಕೇಳುವುದಿಲ್ಲ' ಎಂಬುವ ಅಭ್ಯಾಸ ಇನ್ನು ಮುಂದುವರಿಯುತ್ತಿರುವುದನ್ನು ಕಾಣಬಹುದು. ಇದು ಯಾವುದೇ ಒಂದು ಧರ್ಮದ ನಿಂದನೆಯೆಲ್ಲ. ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ವಿಷಯಗಳಲ್ಲಿ, ಕಟ್ಟು ನಿಟ್ಟುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಧರ್ಮದ ನಿಲಿವು ಒಂದೇ.

ಧರ್ಮ, ಜಾತಿ ಎಂಬುವ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಗಳು ಸರ್ವವ್ಯಾಪಿಯಾದ ಈ ದೇಶದಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾವುದೇ ಸಾಮಾಜಿಕ ವಿಷಯವನ್ನು ಧರ್ಮವನ್ನು ತೆಗೆದಿಟ್ಟು ಮಾತನಾಡುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಸಹಲಿಂಗ ಸಂಬಂಧಗಳ ವಿಷಯ ಅದಿನ್ನೊಂದು ಅಂಕಣಕ್ಕಿರಲಿ. ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಹೊಸ ಶತಮಾನಗಳು ಕಳೆದರು, ಇನ್ನು ಸಹ ಹೆಣ್ಣನ್ನು ಒಂದು ಯಥಾರ್ಥವಾದ ಚೌಕಟ್ಟಿನ ಒಳಗೇ ಇರಿಸುವ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ ಮುಂದುವರಿಯುತ್ತಲಿದೆ. ಹೆಣ್ಣಿನ ಪಾತ್ರಗಳು ಹೀಗಿರಬೇಕು, ಕುಟುಂಬ ಎಂಬ ಘಟಕ ಇಂತಹಾ ಒಂದು ಪರಿಮಿತಿಯ ಒಳಗೆ ಇರಬೇಕು, ತಂದೆ-ತಾಯಿ ಇಬ್ಬರ ಆರೈಕೆ ಇದ್ದರೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ಮಗು ಸಮಾಜಕ್ಕೆ ಒಪ್ಪುವ ನಾಗರೀಕನಾಗಿ ಬೆಳೆಯಬಹುದು ಎಂಬೆಲ್ಲಾ ಗೊಡ್ಡು ನಂಬಿಕೆಗಳನ್ನು ಮುಂದುವರಿಸುವುದರಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂಲವಾಗಿ ಧರ್ಮವಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರು ಧರ್ಮಗುರುಗಳ ಪಾತ್ರವನ್ನು, ಧರ್ಮದ ಕಾಲಸಂದ ನೀತಿಗಳನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮ ಅನುಕೂಲಕ್ಕೆಂದು ಬಳಸುವ ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿಗಳನ್ನು, ಇಂತಹಾ ಅಭ್ಯಾಸಗಳ ಪ್ರಭಾವವನ್ನು ಆಲಕ್ಷಿಸುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಇಂತಹಾ ಅಭ್ಯಾಸಗಳಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಅಪಾಯವನ್ನು ಅಸಡ್ಡೆ ಮಾಡುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ.

ಈ ಧರ್ಮ/ಮಠದ ನಿಯಮ, ಕಟ್ಟುಪಾಡುಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಸರ್ಕಾರ, ಅಥವಾ ಸಮಾಜ ಶಾಸ್ತ್ರದಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಳುವ ಹಾಗೆ 'ರಾಜ್ಯ' ಹೊಲಿದ ರೇಖೆಯೇ ಕಾಣದಂತೆ ಸೇರಿಕೊಂಡಾಗ ಅವಾಂತರ ತಪ್ಪಿದಲ್ಲ. ಇನ್ನು ಸಮಾಜದಲ್ಲಿ ಆಗುತ್ತಿರುವ ಬದಲಾವಣೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಸರಿಯಾಗಿ ಸ್ಪಂದಿಸುವ ಮಾತೆಲ್ಲಿ?

ಬದಲಾವಣೆ ಸಹಜವಾದದ್ದು. ಅನಿವಾರ್ಯವಾದುದ್ದು. ಇಂತಹಾ ಬದಲಾವಣೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಸ್ಪಂದಿಸದ ಧರ್ಮ, ರಾಜಕಾರಣ ಪ್ರಸ್ತುತತೆಯನ್ನು ಕಳೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತದೆ. ನಾಸ್ತಿಕದತ್ತ ದಾರಿ ಹಿಡಿಯುವವರು, ಹೊಸ ಕಲ್ಟ್ ಗಳತ್ತ ಆಕರ್ಷಿತಗೊಳ್ಳುವವರು, ಇನ್ನ್ಯಾವುದೋ ಧರ್ಮದ ಸೆಳೆತಕ್ಕೆ ಓ ಎನ್ನುವವರು...ಅಥವಾ ಮೇರಿಯಂತಹಾ 'ವಿಚಿತ್ರ' 'ಅಸಹಜ' ಅಸಾಧಾರಣ' ವಲ್ಲದವರ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ ಕೋಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಇಲ್ಲವೇನೋ. ಆದರೆ ಅಲ್ಪಸಂಖ್ಯೆಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದರೆ ನಿರ್ಲಕ್ಷಿಸಬೇಕೆ?

ಧರ್ಮ, 'ಮಾರಲ್ ಪೋಲಿಸ್' ಅದೇನೇ ಹೇಳಿದರು ಒಂದಿಷ್ಟು ಜನರು ತಮ್ಮ ಹೊಸ 'ನಾರ್ಮಲ್' ಅನ್ನು ನಿರ್ಮಿಸುತ್ತಲೇ ಇರುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಹೇಗೆ ಕೆಲವರಿಗೆ ಸಾಂಪ್ರದಾಯಿಕ ಕುಟುಂಬ, ಸಂಸಾರದ ಚೌಕಟ್ಟು ಸಹಜ ಎಂದೆನಿಸುತ್ತದೋ ಅದೇ ರೀತಿ ಮೇರಿ ಅಥವಾ ಇನ್ನಾರೋ ಒಬ್ಬರೇ ಮಗುವನ್ನು ಬೆಳೆಸುತ್ತೇವೆ ಎಂದು ನಿರ್ಧಾರ ತಗೊಂಡವರು ನಾರ್ಮಲ್ ಆಗುತ್ತಾರೆ, ಅವರದ್ದೇ ವಲಯದಲ್ಲಿ. ಈ ವಲಯವನ್ನು ವಿಸ್ತರಿಸಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ವೇದಿಕೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ಸಹಜ, ನಾರ್ಮಲ್ ಎಂದೆನಿಸುವ ಹಾಗೆ ಮಾಡುವ ಜವಾಬ್ದಾರಿ ಸಾಮಾಜಿಕ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಗಲಿಗಿದೆ - ಧರ್ಮವಿರಬಹುದು, ರಾಜಕೀಯವಿರಬಹುದು. ಇಂತಹಾ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಗಳನ್ನು ಮುಂದುವರಿಸುವವರು ನನ್ನ ನಿಮ್ಮಂತವರು, ಅಲ್ಲವೇ?

ಯಾವುದು ನಾರ್ಮಲ್, ಯಾವುದು ಸಹಜ, ಯಾವುದು ನೈತಿಕ ಎಂಬುದು ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿಗತವಾದ ವಿಷಯಗಳು. ಇಂತಹಾ ಸರಳ ಮಾತೊಂದನ್ನು ಅರ್ಥೈಸಿಕೊಂಡು, ನೆನಪಿನಲ್ಲಿಟ್ಟುಕೊಂಡು ಅದರ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ನಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು ಕೋಟ್ಯಾಂತರ ವರ್ಷಗಳಿಂದ ವಿಕಸನಗೊಂಡು ಇಲ್ಲಿಯವರೆಗೆ ಬೆಳೆದುಬಂದ ನಮಗೆ ಅಷ್ಟೊಂದು ಕಷ್ಟವೇ?

Monday, October 12, 2015

Sarita Mandanna's Good Hope Road: A Review

I had loved Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills, though it reeked of overly poetic passages more often than was necessary and came shaded with accusations of plagiarism. I was excited about her new book, Good Hope Road. When it came, I was surprised that it was on a theme as different as possible from her debut. The language is so unlike the previous book as well. Without the benefit of the author's name on the cover, I wouldn't have been able to tell it is the same writer who wrote both the novels. Though she continues with the sugary poetic phrases and passages in this one too. I am not at all sure this evident lack of a style is a good thing at all.

Anyway, here is a review of the book. The New Indian Express has conveniently removed the last two paragraphs of the review, making it seem now read lazy and half hearted. I am not linking the piece here. Below is the full review.

SARITA MANDANNA'S GOOD HOPE ROAD
Aleph, 400 pages
Rs 595

What do pretty words do? A lyrical line, a clever turn of phrase, a poetic piece of prose in a book, a page, a passage: what it does is that it gives you a line to note down in a journal of favourite such lines from there and elsewhere. What these words and phrases do is make you remark privately on the poetry in the writer’s prose, applaud her imagination in stringing smart metaphors together, the sorts that make you pause your reading and say ‘ah’. But there is something like too much of a good thing. We have known that for long. And it is this too much of a good thing that threatens to tarnish the gleam in Sarita Mandanna’s Good Hope Road.

Mandanna is a good writer, undoubtedly. Some of her metaphors are very well thought of indeed. “…petrol-over-water colours”, “the sheen of a fin upstream” and such like draw a picturesque scene in the readers’ minds, like something at the edges of a detailed postcard. They lend themselves delightfully to a reading aloud, the lyricism as pleasing to the ears as to the mind that recreates every scene in a story as you go along. But the pitfall – and I imagine it is a hard one to avoid falling into – is that the story itself gets clouded by the pretty décor that is sprinkled on every page like sparkly confetti. Which is too often the case with Good Hope Road.

The story’s scope is ambitious and is spread over many decades and a couple of generations, spanning the First World War and ending just at the beginning of the Second. The narrative goes back and forth, shifting between the years and stories and incidents, jerky in some places, but mostly retaining a decent pace. There is Major James Stonebridge, a Yankee from New England and Obadaiah Nelson, a Louisiana native who find themselves at the warfront in Paris. Idealistic, brave, loyal and hungry for adventure, as most young men were, they form a deep, and unlikely, friendship. A decade and half later, Stonebridge is a recluse, back home, but lost somewhere still in France’s old war zones. A mirror that he is content to stare into stares back at him an image of a man broken and burdened by a war that changed his generation and the histories of many nations. His anger, his moods are most felt by his son Jim, whose first understanding of his father’s life comes when pretty and privileged Madeleine enters their lives. She won’t let the Major stew in his black mood, drawing him slowly out of his shell.

Then there is the Bonus March that is sweeping the nation... a reference uncannily, coincidentally similar to the protests sweeping this nation, for pensions and dues. Mandanna picks up on a little known protest by veterans demanding that the US Government give them the bonuses due to them and explores poignantly the way nations ignore their returning soldiers. It is in that sense a story of every nation that has ever been at war. While young men are sent off to the front with fanfare and hailed as heroes, or martyrs, the ones that return are often ignored. Their assimilation into a society that has never seen bombs or been in trenches is an exercise undertaken only reluctantly, half-heartedly, if at all. Good Hope Road addresses this theme with sensitivity, highlighting the trauma, the depression and lack of a sense of purpose that plagues war heroes. It is not limb or life alone that is affected, but the hidden scars that run dark and deep that Mandanna seeks to shine a torch on. And for all the gloss, the book does do that rather well.

Her attention to detail makes for fascinating reading as well. Skimming over the technical details of war positions and strategies, she cuts right through to the lives of the soldiers, strangers thrown together by patriotism, adventure or something else. Their camaraderie, the little sharing of a song or a letter, small conversations, these are places where the book offers lovely insight into the human-ness of those that fight a nation’s wars.

While the present is told in the words of Jim, the son, the war is brought to life largely through the eyes of Obadaiah, speaking in a Louisiana accent. Though the use of the dialect lends a measure of authenticity, Mandanna cannot seem to help but give Obadaiah pretty phrases to mouth as well. In doing so, she jarringly makes the reader aware that it is her, not him, telling this story.

A novelist’s job is best done when he or she sits back and creates a language for each of their characters to speak, without letting in their writing prowess interfere. Mandanna cannot seem to help herself from making her characters wax poetic, even when it goes against the rest of their language. In constantly doing so, Mandanna sure reminds how imaginative a writer she is, but it is done at the cost of what would otherwise have been a very good story.

Monday, October 05, 2015

On Dr M M Kalburgi, Freedom of Speech, Self Censorship, etc (Again): In Filter Coffee Column

How often must we write about these attacks on writers and intellectuals?
Everyday.
Not when and just after they happen.
But then, they happen everyday too.

Kindle magazine has lots of great articles on the future of intellectualism this month. I think it is the responsibility of each of us, those of us seeking to continue to be free, to think and act and speak freely, to read these kind of articles. It is fast becoming a dangerously unsafe country. Please read, please react. Just don't be silent.

Read what I wrote on Dr M M Kalburgi, Dr M M Basheer, freedom of speech and the power of the pen, here on the magazine website. Or see below.
HARMLESS PENS. HARMFUL PENS

I was gifted a Pelikan fountain pen some time ago, a beloved gift from someone beloved. It is yellow, like sunshine. I need to fix ink cartridges into it, a relief, for I get the joy of writing with a fountain pen with the convenience of a refill ball point. Puritans be damned. By no measure is my favourite yellow pen a dangerous weapon. Or perhaps it is. I can imagine how it must morph into a six foot long urmi - the most deadly flexible sword in Kalaripayattu, the one they say can decapitate your own head if wielded un-rightly - in the minds of those that fear your words, your opinions. Harmless pens.

Harmful pens.

The Kannada literary tradition that I grew up around, though not as a participant, has had a long list of the 'radicals', the 'liberals', the 'rebels', 'kafirs', all dangerous words, words that you don't want used to describe you anymore. P Lankesh, Shivarama Karanth, Kuvempu, Poornachandra Tejaswi, U R Ananthamurthy, Devanooru Mahadeva,...wait, name me any writer and I will tell you what a 'rebel' he or she is/was. Karanth tried to bring in a ballet tradition into Yakshagana, the folk theatre form of Karnataka. His books were not in the realm of controversy, but were in traditions unusual in Kannada writing. Poornachandra Tejaswi, son of the illustrious father, was just as radical, weaving expertly his concerns for the environment with humour. Ananthamurthy....dear old Prof URA, from the time he admitted to have urinated on idols, to prove it wouldn't incur any curse, to saying he would leave the country if Modi came to power, he was always the dear old rebel we would count on for a juicy quote.

Leaving aside Kannada, every writer in every language is somewhere a rebel from the moment there sparks in him/her the desire to wield a dangerous pen and write those words that may/may not get them killed. Salma, the Tamil writer, has fought all her life for the freedom to write. Her poems are fiery, explicit in places, celebrating the woman, her body and the freedom to do with this body as she pleases. Salma is not her real name.

M M Basheer is a respected Malayalee writer and critic. He was writing a few articles on the Ramayana for a daily newspaper. Some Sene repeatedly called him and asked him how dare he write on Rama, being a Muslim. He stopped. There is an entire tradition of Mapilla Ramayana, where Rama is a sultan, Valmiki becomes the long bearded auli. Dr Basheer is not a writer who is wet behind the ears. Dr Basheer is his real name. He is no longer picking up calls from unknown numbers, I hear.

Perumal Murugan has stopped writing, at least publically. I don't know if he has been persuaded otherwise. One Part Woman, an old book that suddenly became dangerous, is not a particularly fantastic book. It is good, nothing earth shattering, tame even, for it does not deliberately provoke. Yet it is a book burned and unofficially banned.

Not many incidents in other parts of the country have reached us below the Vindhyas here.

It seems exhausting documenting these and many, many other transgressions into a writer's freedom of expression. But constantly write we must. That is the only way. The individual writer and his/her claims to purported notoriety is not the question here. Every writer is a rebel, for the very nature of the act of writing is such. Those of us who work with the metaphorical pen shape our thoughts with the medium of these words, bringing into existence opinions, words, more words, many more words. On the face of it, it seems silly to wonder if words, mere words, could really do anyone any harm. But then you suppose that it is not the word by itself, but the things it makes you say, the other words that it sparks in you that makes anything written or spoken so utterly dangerous.

Dr M M Kalburgi died for the things from history he had the gall to research on and write about. It did not adhere to the views of a certain few of how a narrative should be. It is also a certain few. A few days ago K S Bhagawan, another writer and critic who received death threats in the wake of Dr Kalburgi's murder, was conferred with a lifetime achievement award by the Karnataka Sahitya Academy. Predictably, it was followed by the Academy receiving several threatening calls, a priest who decided Bhagawan's writings would sow discord in a community had made them. He was arrested. The KSA chairperson was forced to distant herself from Bhagawan’s statements, clarifying that the award was for his meritorious contributions to the field of literature.

What is appalling is the way one needs to defend a belief in something. What is more appalling is the immunity to these incidents that is building up. In the era of breaking news, when every minute detail is repeated endlessly, making you blind and deaf and often, mute, the increase in these incidents is increasingly less shocking. The normalisation of these incidents when they will turn one day into just another piece of news is when the society, everything we hold dear, everything that makes us free, begins to disintegrate.

I write a column in Kannada, on current affairs and such like. My last one was about the same topic as this. Along the way, I wrote about Mapilla Ramayana, a version of the Ramayana I had never heard of. I wrote about how culture is not any religion's right, that the collective culture belongs to everyone, to all the citizens. Everyone has a share, everyone has a right. Somewhere in the words of a language I am not as adept as, not as familiar with, as English, I remember stumbling. May my words mean more than they do? The thought sprung from the fact that writing in Kannada perhaps makes me more vulnerable, for the "certain few" read perhaps that paper than the words I write here. My parents read it, the rest of the family read it, townspeople read it. The shameless lot that burst crackers in jubilation when Prof URA died, they read it. And so I got a dear friend to check it for potential firebrandness. Perhaps I was overestimating the power of my words. But the sense of hypocrisy did not, does not escape me. I was surreptitiously censoring my words and while I hated doing so, I had a fair inkling into why writers say they will stop writing. It isn't just about you and your words. Like in the movies where the heroine gets kidnapped by the villain to get to the hero, these certain few, they go after your families too. They always find a way to hit where it hurts. Somewhere you begin to weigh in the worthiness of words versus what it can do. It is easy to say what you will choose when you place yourself on the outside looking in.

You understand, you acknowledge. Yet you hope. Hope that there will still be writers who will discard all this fear and be the public intellectuals they have a mandate in themselves to be. When they don't, you rave and rant and pretend to understand. Watching their words scroll across a book or screen, when you hope they will write more and more, and raise the hackles of those stupid, irrational few, you attempt not to acknowledge the selfishness behind that hope. And therein lies the hypocrisy of this, and every society.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Mapilla Ramayana, Freedom of Speech, etc: Kannada Prabha Column

In the aftermath of Dr M M Kalburgi's murder, threats to Dr M M Basheer and the dozens of unreported attacks on freedom of speech, I wrote about these, and Mapilla Ramayana and other things in Binkana, my Kannada Prabha column this week.

ವಾಕ್ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯದ ಸತ್ಯ 
ನಮ್ಮ ನಡುವಿನ ಮಿಥ್ಯೆ 


ಹಿತ್ಲು ಮನೆಯ ಕಥೆಯಿದು. ಕರ್ಕ್ಕಟಕಂ ಮಾಸ ಕೆಲ ದಿನಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಮುಗಿದು ಈಗ ಚಿಂಗಂ ಮಾಸ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತಿದೆ, ಕೇರಳದಲ್ಲಿ. ನಮ್ಮೊರ ಕಡೆ ಕರ್ಕ್ಕಟಕಂ ಅನ್ನು ಕಕ್ಕಡ ಮಾಸ ಎಂದು ಕರೆಯುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಧೋ ಎಂದು ಮಳೆ ಸುರಿಯುವ ಆಟಿ ಮಾಸ. ಕಕ್ಕಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಆಟಿ ಸೊಪ್ಪಿನ ಪಾಯಸ - ನೇರಳೆ ಬಣ್ಣದ್ದು - ಮಾಡುವ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯ, ಇದು ನಾಲಿಗೆಯನ್ನು ಸ್ವಚ್ಚ ಮಾಡುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬ ನಂಬಿಕೆಯಿದೆ. ಕೇರಳದ ಸಾಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಕ, ಬೌಧಿಕ ವಲಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕರ್ಕ್ಕಟಕಂ ಮಾಸವನ್ನು ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಮಾಸವೆಂದೂ ಸಹ ಕರೆಯುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಈ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಮಾಸದಲ್ಲಿ ಮೊನ್ನೆ ಒಂದು ವಿಷಯ ನಡೆಯಿತು.

ಈ ಒಂದು ತಿಂಗಳಿನ ಕಾಲ ಪತ್ರಿಕೆಗಳು, ಮ್ಯಾಗಜಿನ್ ಗಳು ಲೇಖಕರಿಂದ, ವಿದ್ವಾಂಸರಿಂದ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅಂಕಣಗಳನ್ನು ಬರೆಸುವ ವಾಡಿಕೆ ಇದೆ. ಕೇರಳದ ದಿನಪತ್ರಿಕೆಯೊಂದು ಎಂ ಎಂ ಬಷೀರ್ ಅವರನ್ನು ವಾಲ್ಮೀಕಿ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಆರು ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಬರೆಯಲು ಆಹ್ವಾನಿಸಿತು. ಕಳೆದ ವರ್ಷವೂ ಇವರು ಇಂತಹಾ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಬರೆದಿದ್ದರು. ಎಪ್ಪತೈದು ವರ್ಷದ ಬಷೀರ್ ಅವರು ಪ್ರಸಿದ್ಧ ವಿಮರ್ಶಕರು, ಅಧ್ಯಾಪಕರು, ಮತ್ತು ಮಲಯಾಳಂ ನವ್ಯ ಸಾಹಿತಿಗಳ ಸಾಲಿನಲ್ಲಿ ದಿಗ್ಗಜರು. ಕುರಾನ್ ಬಗ್ಗೆಯೂ ಸಹ ವಿಮರ್ಶಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ ಎನ್ನುವ ಅಗತ್ಯ ಇಲ್ಲಿದೆ.

ಮೊನೆ ಕಳೆದ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಮಾಸದಲ್ಲಿ ಅವರ ಐದು ಲೇಖನಗಳು ಹೊರಬಂದವು. ಆರನೇಯದನ್ನು ಬರೆಯುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಿ ನಿಲ್ಲಿಸಿದರು. ಕಾರಣ, ಕೇರಳದಲ್ಲಿ ಹೆಚ್ಚಾಗಿ ಯಾರೂ ಹೆಸರು ಕೇಳದ, ಕೇವಲ ೫೦-೬೦ ಮಂದಿ ಸದಸ್ಯರಿರುವ ಸೇನೆಯೊಂದು ಅವರಿಗೆ ಬೆದರಿಕೆ ಕರೆಗಳನ್ನು ಮಾಡಿ ಕಿರುಕುಳ ಕೊಟ್ಟಿತ್ತು. ಒಬ್ಬ ಹಾಜಿ, ಒಬ್ಬ ಮುಸ್ಲಿಂಗೆ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ರಾಮನ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಬರೆಯುವ ಹಕ್ಕೇನಿದೆ ಎಂಬುದು ಈ ಸೇನೆಯ ವಾದ. ಬಷೀರ್ ಅವರು ತಮ್ಮ ಲೇಖನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ವಾಲ್ಮೀಕಿಯ ಶಬ್ಧಗಳನ್ನು ಉದ್ಧರಣಾ ಚಿನ್ನೆಗಳ ಒಳಗಿಟ್ಟೇ ಉಲ್ಲೇಖಿಸಿದರು ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ಸೇನೆಯ ಸಿಪಾಹಿಗಳು ಅಲಕ್ಷಿಸಿದ್ದರು. ಈ ವಯಸ್ಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ತನ್ನ ಇಡೀ ವಿದ್ವತನ್ನು ಕೇವಲ ತನ್ನ ಜಾತಿಗೆ ಕುಗ್ಗಿಸಿದ್ದನ್ನು ತಡೆಯಲಾಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಬಷೀರ್ ಅವರು ಹೇಳಿ ಆ ಆರನೇ ಲೇಖನವನ್ನು ಬರೆಯಲಿಲ್ಲ.

ಈ ವರ್ಷದ ಆದಿ ಭಾಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಪೆರುಮಾಳ್ ಮುರುಗನ್ ಎಂಬ ತಮಿಳು ಲೇಖಕರು ತಮ್ಮ ಪೆನ್ನನ್ನು ಕೈಯಿಂದ ಬಿಟ್ಟರು, ಪೆರುಮಾಳ್ ಮುರುಗನ್ ಎಂಬ ಲೇಖಕ ಇನ್ನು ಬದುಕಿ ಉಳಿದಿಲ್ಲ, ಕೇವಲ ಪಿ ಮುರುಗನ್ ಇನ್ನುಮುಂದೆ ಬದುಕಿರುತ್ತಾನೆ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಿದ್ದರು. ಅದಕ್ಕೂ ಕಾರಣ ಯಾವುದೋ ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಸೇನೆ. ಅವರು ಬರೆದ ಕಾದಂಬರಿಯೊಂದರಲ್ಲಿ ತಿರುಚೆಂಗೊಡುವಿನಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆಯುವ ದೇವಸ್ಥಾನ ಜಾತ್ರೆಗೆ ಸಂಬಂದಪಟ್ಟ ಒಂದು ಸಂದಿಗ್ಧವಾದ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯದ ಸುತ್ತ ಕಥೆ ಸುತ್ತುವರಿಯುತ್ತದೆ. ಅದು ಶಿವನನ್ನು, ಹೆಂಗಸರನ್ನು, ಧರ್ಮವನ್ನು, ಇನ್ನೇನೆನ್ನನೋ ಟೀಕಿಸುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂದು ಕೆಲ ಗುಂಪುಗಳ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯ. ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಕಿರುಕುಳಕ್ಕೆ ಒಳಗಾದ ಮುರುಗನ್ ಅವರು ಇನ್ನೆಂದೂ, ಇನ್ನೇನನ್ನೂ ಬರೆಯುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಿಕೆ ಕೊಟ್ಟರು.

ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಇಂತಹಾ ಘಟನೆಗಳು ರಾಷ್ಟೀಯ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮದ ಗಮನ ಸೆಳೆಯಲಾಗದೆ ಎಲ್ಲೋ ಮರೆಯಾಗಿ ಹೋಗುತ್ತಿವೆ. ವಾಕ್ ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯದ ಇಂತಹಾ ದಾಳಿಗಳ ಹಿಂದಿರುವ ರಾಜಕೀಯ ಪಟ್ಟಭದ್ರ ಹಿತಾಸಕ್ತಿಗಳ ಚರ್ಚೆ ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಬೇಡ. ಇಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಸಾಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಕ ಇತಿಹಾಸ ಮತ್ತು ಅದರ ಪಾಲುದಾರರದ್ದು. ರಾಮಾಯಣದಂತಹಾ ಒಂದು ಮಹಾಕಾವ್ಯವನ್ನು ಪರಿಶೀಲಿಸಿದರೆ ಅದು ಒಂದು ಧರ್ಮ, ಜಾತಿಗೆ ಮೀರಿದ್ದು ಎಂದು ಸ್ಪಷ್ಟವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಆ ಕಾವ್ಯದ ಮೌಲ್ಯಗಳು, ಕಥೆ - ಸಾಂಧರ್ಭಿಕ ಪ್ರಸ್ತಾಪಗಳು ದೇಶದ ಸಾಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಕ ವಲಯದ ಹಲವು ರಂದ್ರಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಪಸರಿಸಿವೆ - ಆಡು ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಜನಪದದಲ್ಲಿ, ಕಲಾ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯದಲ್ಲಿ. ಒಂದು ಧರ್ಮದ ಸ್ವತ್ತು ಎಂದೆನಿಸಿಕೊಂಡರೂ ದೇಶದ ಸಾಮೂಹಿಕ ಪ್ರಜ್ಞೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಇಂತಹಾ ಸಾಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಕ ಸಂಪ್ರಯಾಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲು, ಅದರ ಮೇಲೆ ಹಕ್ಕಿದೆ. ಮಹಾಕಾವ್ಯವೊಂದೇ ಅಲ್ಲ, ಇದು ಎಲ್ಲಾ 'ಜಾತಿ'ಗಳಿಗೆ ಸೇರಿರುವ ಸ್ಥಳ ಪುರಾಣ, ಹಾಡು-ನೃತ್ಯ, ಇನ್ನುಳಿದ ವಾಚಿಕ ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯಕ್ಕೂ ಅನ್ವಯಿಸುತ್ತದೆ.

ಮಹಾಕಾವ್ಯದ ವಿಷಯವನ್ನೇ ಮುಂದುವರಿಸುವುದಾದರೆ, ಪ್ರಸಿದ್ಧ ವಿಮರ್ಶಕ ಏ ಕೆ ರಾಮಾನುಜನ್ ಹೇಳುವ ಹಾಗೆ ಮುನ್ನೂರು ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯಗಳಿವೆ. ಕೆಲವೊಂದರಲ್ಲಿ ರಾಮ- ಸೀತೆ ಅಣ್ಣ ತಂಗಿಯಾಗಿರುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಈ ಮುನೂರು ರಾಮಾಯಣಗಳು ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯ ದಾಖಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದರೆ ಇನ್ನದೆಷ್ಟೋ ದೇಶದೆಲ್ಲೆಡೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಸಾರ್ವಜನಿಕವಾಗದೆ ಉಳಿದಿವೆ. ಆ ಪಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಮಾಪಿಳ್ಳೆ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಸೇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತನೇ ಶತಮಾನದ ಆದಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಜನಪ್ರಿಯಗೊಂಡ ಈ ಆವೃತ್ತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ರಾಮ 'ಲಾಮ'ನಾಗುತ್ತಾನೆ. ಉದ್ದ ದಾಡಿಯ ಔಲಿಯೊಬ್ಬ ಹೇಳುವ 'ಲಾಮಾಯಣ'ದಲ್ಲಿ ಲಾಮನೊಬ್ಬ ಸುಲ್ತಾನ. ಮಾಪಿಳ್ಳೆ-ಪಾಟ್ ಎಂಬ ಜನಪದ ಶೈಲಿಯ ಹಾಡಿನ ಮೂಲಕ ಈ ಲಾಮಾಯಣದ ಸಾಲುಗಳನ್ನು ಹಾಡಿದ ಹಸ್ಸನ್ ಕುಟ್ಟಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದಿಷ್ಟು ವಿಮರ್ಶೆ ನಡೆದಿದೆ. ದುರ್ದೈವವಶಾತ್ ಈ ಲಾಮಾಯಣದ ಐದರಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದು ಭಾಗವಷ್ಟೇ ಉಳಿದುಕೊಂಡಿದೆ.

ಮೊನ್ನೆ ಕೇರಳದ ಸ್ನೇಹಿತನೊಂದಿಗೆ ಈ ಲಾಮಾಯಣದ ಹಾಡನ್ನು ಕೇಳುತ್ತಾ ಇದ್ದೆ. ತಲೆಯಲ್ಲೇ ಉಳಿಯುವಂತಹಾ ರಾಗ, ಮಜವಾದ ಸಾಲುಗಳು, ಮಲಬಾರ್ ಪ್ರಾಂತದಲ್ಲಿ ತೀರಾ ಸ್ಥಳೀಯವಾಗಿ ಬಳಸುವ ಮಲಯಾಳಂ ಶಬ್ದಗಳು. ಸೂರ್ಪಣಕೆ ರಾಮನನ್ನು ಒಲಿಸಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದಾಗ ರಾಮ ಶರಿಯತ್ ಕಾನೂನನ್ನು ಉಲ್ಲೇಖಿಸುತ್ತಾನೆ. ಇದು ಆ ಧರ್ಮದ ಗ್ರಂಥವೆಂದು ನೋಡಲು ಬರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ವಾಕ್ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯದ ಒಂದು ಪ್ರಮುಖ ಅಂಶವೇನೆಂದರೆ ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಂದು ಕಥೆಯನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮದಾಗಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು, ಆ ಆ ಪ್ರಾಂತ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಚಲಿತವಿರುವ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಗೆ ಕಥೆ-ಕಾವ್ಯ-ಹಾಡನ್ನು ಅಳವಡಿಸುವುದು. ಇಂತಹಾ ಉಲ್ಲೇಖನಗಳಿಗೆಲ್ಲಾ ಧರ್ಮ, ಜಾತಿಯ ಬಣ್ಣ ನೀಡಿದರೆ ಈ ದೇಶದ, ಯಾಕೆ, ಈ ಜಗತ್ತಿನ ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಂದು ವಾಕ್ ಸಂಪ್ರದಾಯದ ನಿಜತ್ವವನ್ನು ಪ್ರಶ್ನಿಸಬೇಕಾಗುತ್ತದೆ.

ಒಂದು ದೇಶದ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿ ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತಾ ಬಂದ ಪರಿಸರ. ಅದು ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತಲೇ ಇರುವಂತದ್ದು. ಇದನ್ನು ಬೆಳೆಸುವ, ನಿರಂತರವಾಗಿ ಬದಲಿಸುವ ವಾಸ್ತುಶಿಲ್ಪಿಗಳು - ಅದರ ಸಮಾನ ಹಕ್ಕುದಾರರು - ಪ್ರಮುಖವಾಗಿ ದಿನನಿತ್ಯವೂ ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ಬದುಕುವವರು. ಬರಹಗಾರ, ಲೇಖಕ, ಕಲಾವಿದ ಎಂದೂ ಸಹ ಕರೆಯಲ್ಪಡುವವರು. ದಬ್ಬಾಳಿಕೆಯನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಸಿದಾಗ ಅದರ ವಿರೋಧ ಮಾಡುವುದು ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಯ ಭಾಗವೊಂದನ್ನು ಸೃಷ್ಟಿಸುವವನ ಸಹಜ ಪ್ರತಿಕ್ರಿಯೆ. ಲೇಖಕನಿರಬಹುದು, ಅಲೆಮಾರಿ ಔಲಿಯಾಗಿರಬಹುದು. ರಾಜಕೀಯ, ಇನ್ನಿತರ ಬಣ್ಣಹೊಂದ ಸಂಕುಚಿತ ಮನೋಭಾವದಿಂದ ಎಲ್ಲವನ್ನು ನೋಡುವ ಈ ನಿರ್ಭಂದಿತ ವಾತಾವರಣ ಹರಡುತ್ತಿರಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಈ ನಮ್ಮ ಸಾಮೂಹಿಕ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಯೆಂಬುದು ಬೆಳೆಯುವುದಿರಲಿ, ನಿಂತ ನೀರಾಗಿಬಿಡುತ್ತದೆ.

ಜಗತ್ತಿನ ಯಾವ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಯೂ ಜಡವಲ್ಲ.
   

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Bhaskar Ghose's Parricide: A Review in The New Indian Express

It had been a while since I read a racy, pulp fiction-ish novel. And then this came along for review. It had been a while since I finished any book in one sitting. That is of course not to say that this book was that good. Anyway, here is a review of it in The New Indian Express. Or see a slightly unedited version below.

BHASKAR GHOSE'S PARRICIDE

At that time, in the arts organisation where I worked, everyone was talking about Fifty Shades of Grey. For a laugh, I downloaded a copy and started to read it, but gave up on perhaps the 12th page when Anastasia's blush was compared to the colour of the communist manifesto. By then she had already blushed an average of three times per page. The tedious repetition of a sentiment, or verb, in this case, and its uselessness in doing anything to develop either the character or the storyline of Fifty Shades of Grey unwittingly came to my mind while reading Bhaskar Ghose's Parricide. The book is rife with the sentiment of melancholy, our hero Ravi 'is melancholy' too often. A lot. The comparison is grossly unfair though. Parricide is a far better book than that other apology for an erotic novel. That is not to say that it might not have been even better if some corners had been trimmed, if the melancholy had been reined in a little.

Parricide follows the story of Ravi, good looking in an effeminate way, a heartthrob, and his relationship with this father, a tyrant who made Ravi's childhood miserable. In the early pages of the book the father Satyendra Kumar dies and thereupon begins Ravi's understanding of old secrets, secrets that will help him reconcile and even empathise with the way his father was. There are relationships along the way, flashbacks from the past and the mistakes of the now. Throw into the mix a best friend with great insights into the workings of Ravi's mind, a colleague who hand holds him through his bouts of depression, an uncle who is more a father than the biological father, some parties and social events and doses of pop psychology and what you get is a novel that aspires to be a film. Unintentional as it may be, the screenplay feel never goes away in the details, be it the make of someone's car or while setting the scene, "...a rather unkempt park in front of the houses, partly lit by street lights."

The storyline tackles the difficult condition of depression, albeit lightly, in keeping with the general breezy-ness of the story. Why do we feel the way we feel? The strangeness of certain emotions that spring up and catch you by surprise, when you aren't entirely sure where you are or why you feel this way or not, these commonplace things that are increasingly an inescapable part of a fast, frenzied modern life are worked well into the story. Ravi feels them, feels a void, he doesn't know why. Even in the few odd times that he suspects why he might be sucked into a deep, black void, he refuses to acknowledge that it could be because of his father, the father he hated all his life, the father he rejected wholly. Along the way, he makes his friends worry. It gets worse before it gets better. But he does of course get better, thanks to a girl, a job well done, best friends and resulting realizations in due course of time.

Parricide runs through with a rather predictable storyline. But I suspect it did not have grand literary ambitions to begin with. What pulls you along is a gentle narrative, peppered generously with lives that any city dweller might relate to, and a small towner would aspire for, simple language that isn't taxing or complicated. Fans of a certain other very popular author whose books are turned into glossy movies will find much that is enjoyable in Parricide.

Monday, September 07, 2015

A Long Drive: Travel Story in TNIE

Long drives with the super chilled out parents have been a thing for years. This one, from a most lovely week spent at home in Madikeri was particularly nice. I wrote about it for The New Indian Express here. Or see a slightly unedited version below.

RIDER IN THE STORM

A collection of picture postcards must not be joy to browse through, every day. I could imagine how it can get, tedium with the constant presence of everything that adheres to the accepted ideas of landscape beauty. So it is for me, having lived a lot of my life in the verdant excesses of Kodagu (Coorg, if a travel agent tells you this story), and having family that always did long drives, picnics, treks and other outdoorsy things, come hail or storm. The storm part, quite literally. This past week or so, back home on a little break to soak in what was left of the monsoon, all that I was going to do was read and watch the rains, my dog Vira at my feet wondering if I would let him eat my phone, a tall mug of coffee at the window sill…that sort of picture perfect holiday. What could be that great about another drive? Sure, dad promised it was through forests and stuff, but I have seen enough of those. Being home on a break means to vegetate, I protest.

But the drive still happened. Some vignettes:

Madikeri is well soaked that day in lazy mist, the kind that floats in, curious, if you open the bedroom window and sits next to you, peering into your book and cooling your coffee naughtily. Grey clouds above, a powdery rain, the weather of my childhood. From Madikeri we take the Talacauvery – Bhagamandala route, the latter being the birth place of River Cauvery. Big pilgrimage spot and everything, it is. The route is as I remember it, lush, flanked on either side by coffee estates, fields and villages with two shops and many jeeps. We pass by a Coffee Bar, set up years ago by a women’s cooperative. The coffee they served was without chicory, I like mine with; so I hadn’t liked their brew. Two other shacks have come up next to it now. Everyone sells blingy packaged chips and local biscuits these days. The air gets cooler, these parts get a lot more rain than my town.

***
We don’t enter temple town. Just before, there is a turn right that takes you to a village called Karike, through Talacauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, a sanctuary I never knew existed. This is when I begin to gasp and become wide eyed at every corner and turn. The road is narrow, but fairly well maintained. It is a shorter route for people travelling from North Kerala to say, Mysore, so several KL registered cars pass us by. It is the tail end of the monsoon, so rains are infrequent elsewhere, not here though. Not torrential, but a rain that can’t seem to make up its mind between a drizzle and a shower joins us along the route. On the right are several dozen waterfalls, some tiny and cute, like something you want to coochie-coo at. Others are taller. Still polite though, the menace with which Ma says they drenched our car, this one time, must have ended with the heavy rains of July. We stop often to admire the bigger ones. To the left are deep, very deep valleys. Like an umbrella, are very tall trees, the kind that have to look up higher because the sun cannot get to their roots, the firewall of branches and canopies are just too thick. A bare headed mountain at a distance gets a hint of a sun ray though, and seems to feel happy and smile.

***
Just before the gates of Karike, we stop at a tea stall. The bakery biscuits are fresh, mildly sweet. The tea is too sweet. Karike is just another village. Then the road rises up and up. And we head to Panathur, State of Kerala. The landscape still looks familiar, though a few laterite stones here and there, sudden warmth tells me we are nearing the plains. At Panathur, we buy kappa (tapioca) and pappadams, the Kerala kinds we don’t find at home. I get to use the very little Malayalam I know.

***
Over a big bridge and then along we go, this road in one state, that one in the other. Just a turn later, literally after a turn, like magic, it is the landscape of the plains. Drier, hotter. Alongside emerald fields and beneath a sudden downpour on narrow, ill roads later we reach Sullia, firmly in South Canara. A familiar town that marks, for me, the beginning of the plains, down the ghats from Kodagu. Kannada like the sorts in written books, formal, too polite.

***
A quick, bad lunch and we start climbing up again. While away at university, the bus ride from Sullia to Madikeri used to be a favourite, for the way the landscape changed, for the winding roads, for the first glimpse of the mountains. Beloved Madikeri remains cold and wet when we arrive. Vira is sulking because we left him behind. Later, I reach for my book again.

***
It feels like a wholesome package tour in 140 kms. Cold – rain – dry – plains – heat – wet – rain again. In those things familiar it is that you find the best surprises, I tell myself. Remind me never to take home for granted.

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Thoughts on Dr M M Kalburgi's Murder: In Kindle Magazine

Dr M M Kalburgi was murdered, for having an opinion and voicing it. That his comments were backed by solid research seems to not matter, for those killers of free speech and independent thought. Here is a comment I wrote for Kindle on the murder. Or see below.

SILENCED BY THE LAMBS

I started to write of how so much like a witch hunt of Pennsylvania this feels like. To be hunted down and murdered, to be burned at the stakes, albeit in more modern ways with a weapon, for something as (ir)relevant as an opinion. But a witch hunt seemed an anachronism to compare this murder to. It seems unfair to try to find recourse in ancient hysteria, in misplaced perceptions. Anything but full focus on what happened, to be unwavering in its full condemnation, total in the shock it generates seems unfair. Even that does not seem enough.

Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi was murdered Sunday morning at about 8.40 am. Aged 77, the writer, critic, intellectual, thinker, rationalist – people now assign many names – was shot at point blank range by two men who claimed they were fans of his books and research papers. The facts are all already a day old now. There are other things of national importance that are taking over already.

I knew him by association, I could say. We share a birth date, 45 years apart in years. A beloved uncle, a writer, critic, intellectual himself and his late wife, an aunt I get my writing, and the shape of my nose from, were close associates of Dr Kalburgi. Uncle tells me this morning that he was like to a dear teacher, taking pride in the career path and research fields uncle took (controversial, anti-Hindu in his own way), encouraging, supporting, “like family.” They went to each other’s houses, knew of each other’s works, that sort of thing.

Vachana sahitya was his area of research, Dr Kalburgi’s, the literature of the likes of 12th century philosopher Basavanna. His comments on the wives and sister of Basavanna, revered by the politically powerful Lingayat community, did not go down well. No criticism of religion ever goes down well in this country, or elsewhere. Such a culture of taking offense we have developed. As a leading authority in the origins of the Lingayat movement and the vast literature it gave birth to, his research findings did what no religion likes to find itself having to face – rational criticism, a level headed look into the human-ness of its founders and by extension into their faults and mistakes. He explored the origins of Hakka-Bukka, the founders of the prestigious Vijayanagara dynasty, placing them in a tribal setting, again, bringing them down from a pedestal of faultless hero-hood to give them more practical human personas.

Five volumes of Margas, collections of his research papers, brought him national recognition by way of a Kendra Sahitya Akademi award. Along with this voice to influence came threats, condemnation and immense pressure to denounce his findings and retract his statements. Which he did, reluctantly, in an infamous episode from 1989. But it was to prove to be just a minor step back. Dr Kalburgi neither stopped his work, nor did he stop talking about the things, nearly always controversial, that he was coming across.

His works on the beginnings of Kannada literature in the 9th century is something my uncle remembers. All his lectures and writings were marked by fearlessness, a telling of something as it is, I am told. What could possibly go wrong when you spoke of a few ancient things in some obscure academic papers? Well.

Prof U R Ananthamurthy, the other outspoken intellectual who was often up in arms with the saffron brigade, wrote a much quoted essay in the 1980s, against the practice of nude worship by women in the town of Yellapura in Karnataka. The annual ritual, many decades old, was banned after one year, infamously, journalists and policemen were stripped and paraded naked by an angry mob. Dr Kalburgi raked up an anecdote in this old essay last year. In the criticism of idol worship, URA had written how, as a young boy rebelling against religion and its idiosyncrasies, he had urinated on some idols to prove that idol worship was a mere superstition, that no stone could curse. Dr Kalburgi’s quote brought criticism from many and URA himself, for raking up an old, old idea that he had written many decades ago. By then URA had begun to play a little safe, though never failing to admit that his views on religion and much else was a work in progress, always maintaining that he had changed his mind several times about several things.

At the heart of the matter is the politics that surround the Lingayat community. A much sought after vote bank, they are regularly appeased by different parties. Any liberal voices are quickly silenced. It pays to maintain a certain status quo for many sections. In this narrative, Dr Kalburgi’s story is a familiar one. He does some research and is not afraid to talk about it, even after he knows a lot of people don’t like it. One morning he gets killed for it, when they realize that he hasn’t learn the lessons they tried teaching him, that he would never learn.

You would think that communities are generally a little more tolerant of those among themselves that raise awkward questions. It did not matter that he was a Lingayat himself. He was still not forgiven. It does not matter that no religion, however widespread or ancient or strong or important, will collapse overnight under the weight of a criticism, however much that criticism might shake the very foundations of said religion. No religion is that weak, no faith is that fragile. No religion, no faith is based wholly on logic, to begin with. That does not matter of course, in the narrative of a section that deems it fit to witch hunt when it suits them so.

While chatting with an old journalist friend from university earlier today and discussing this, he named a name that is doing the rounds, that of a powerful person who is said to have ordered this hit. It is not for us to speculate or turn our heads towards some very obvious suspects. It is not for us to do anything but condemn, condemn, condemn. And to be brave in the quiet speeches we make, in the conversations we have, in the things we read and write and see and make. Religion, and every other institution in this wide world, can stand that. Should stand that.

“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire.

It is as very simple as that. It is as very difficult as that.

RIP Dr.

Evoking that abused idea of collective conscious in this degenerate dystopia we inhabit, I hang my head in shame today for the way we have become.

Porn, The Dirty Word: In Kindle Magazine

Kindle magazine has some very interesting articles on porn this time, in the wake of the Government's ridiculous ban on porn sites. I wrote about the word porn itself and how it is being normalized by assigning it to food, yoga, etc, at the same time how this is sexualizing everything in an already sexualized society. Read here or see below.

THE DIRTY WORD
Deepa Bhasthi explores the implications of the ubiquity of the word ‘porn’.


Sex sells. It is a truth as old as the waves of time. Advertisers knew that then and now. So did the women standing on the corners of L-shaped streets. Strange though, the politics of words. Words – those to which I as a writer shall say, “let’s play” when I begin a day’s work – how political and feministic, or not, how utterly political they are. Sex is a mere act, devoid of the pleasantness and acceptance of making love. Naked is raw, nude is artistic, poetic. ‘Yajamana’ in Kannada is husband, but literally means the one who owns you. The less aggressive title of ‘ganda’ is rare. In the mouthing of the former is a hidden reiteration of where your place is, at the man’s feet, born to do his bidding. Words are the weapons of the passive violent to cut into your soul and show you the place they assign you to occupy.

Then there is porn. What a dirty word it is. You round your mouth around it, like a sex act and then withdraw, hesitant, unsure towards the tail end of its pronunciation, like it were illegal, illicit, too dirty for the drawing room. In its illicit meaning there lies hidden the special appeal that oils its money spinning machinery.

Porn. Here is one word that straddles its illegitimacy and its universality with much aplomb these days. It’s everywhere. And I don’t mean in the thousands upon thousands of websites that exist, several free, for every kind of fetish in your possession – old on young, old on old, sugar daddy, cougar, milf and just so, so much more. Porn is in every pretty thing you see, seems like.

The other day one of the yoga websites I read, for occasional inspiration to get on my yoga mat had an article about yoga porn. The writer wrote about how photos of scantily clad, white, thin, pretty girls practicing extremely hard asanas against picture postcard perfect locations amounted to porn and that it led to low esteem, furthered damaging body images among the young while quietly hammering onto popular consciousness a certain stereotype of who could practice yoga. Such images are dime a dozen on Instagram and elsewhere. The article, very predictably, created a furore, mostly from thin, white, very bendy yoga practitioners who argued that there was nothing wrong in these images and that they motivated people to start practicing yoga. What was lost in all the noise that was generated, as is wont in case of all internet arguments these days, was that the writer of the original article had also said that yoga, the true essence of yoga was all about letting go of the ego, being mindful of the body and seeing within. The yoga selfies and gorgeous yoga shoots were narcissistic and pandered to the ego, to the materialistic and sexualized the practice. The heated debates continue.

Meanwhile. My interest was in the use of the word porn in the context. Yoga is only the latest to fetch itself this suffix. Food has long suffered the dubious honour, perhaps from the time Instagram settled into popular culture. In the summer months of 2014 when I and some friends were conceiving The Forager, the quarterly online journal of food politics that I edit, food porn was the first thing we unceremoniously dismissed. We were clear we wanted to steer away from the porn culture, from the pretty pictures that sexualized everything we put into our mouths. This of course did not mean that we failed to recognize the potency of a dish to be sensual. Most of us cook, and the aphrodisiacal qualities of a well put together meal for a partner was something we knew very well about. But the blatant sexualizing of every morsel was something we decided to head in the opposite direction of.

Then just this morning, a beautiful photo I saw somewhere, a long shot of a beach with people silhouetted against a fading blue sky was hash-tagged as earthporn. Seriously! Then my personal favourite - bookporn. The last time I checked, there was still an active Tumblr account under that name, featuring some truly amazing photographs of libraries from around the world.

Everything is a hashtag. Everything is porn these days. Some days I am like the old grandma grumbling for the days of our youth when things were simpler and porn was porn, forbidden, bad, and for all those delicious reasons, just as attractive. On other days I let my mind play with the notion that perhaps this is the people power taking back the word porn, reclaiming it, ‘normalizing’ it, making it just another word. Just another word like sex, not wholly approved of, but grudgingly tolerated for being so commonplace. But then I think that this reclaiming – a concept I find a tad pretentious and wholly dubious for its ineffectiveness – is restricted to the hash-taggers, to the very small minority of the country people who have access to words like hash tags and porn that is not the porn they know of. Is there a point to this reclaiming, the cynic in me wonders.

Then of course despair sets in at how this careless, flippant use of the word sexualizes all that is already just about the physical, the body. The society is highly sexualized, the one we live in today. That is common knowledge. With no sign of a turnaround, although how that could even be possible, I don’t know, it is only getting more and more sexualized. In the way we dress, speak, communicate, entertain, every damn little thing. Even in the way we make love, touched by books, internet, films, everything that tells us to behave a certain way.

What if the word porn, in its innocuous avatar, began to be used in more contexts? What if a child was its prefix? Or a moral perhaps? If everything pretty and pleasant became porn, then need we reapply, reexamine the idea of beauty itself?

Some questions are not easily answered. Actually, when you boil it down to proper scrutiny, a lot of questions cannot be easily answered. Porn has moved on from its rather linear meanings on to much more complicated narratives. The word is no longer a word. And therein lies the dilemma.

Speaking of words, there is something called word porn as well. Pretty words, quotable quotes, inspiring lines, sloppy phrases, that kind of thing. When a word itself becomes porn what of the word porn then? I wonder.

On Bollywood: In The Moscow Times

In the 1950s, and for a few decades thereafter, Bollywood was extremely popular in the erstwhile USSR states. Thanks to India's soft diplomacy, Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Mithun Chakraborty, Rekha and stars later on were just as popular as they were in India.

I wrote an essay about the Bollywood and USSR connection for The Calvert Journal here.

This was re-published by The Moscow Times here. Do read the article. There are some lovely, old videos too in the article.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Preoccupations With Death, Etc: Kannada Prabha Column

There were many reports on assisted dying that I was reading. Then there was the hanging of Yakub Memom. Then Cecil the Lion was killed. My grandmother had passed away some months ago. Death and various questions around it, religious, ethical, political, even economical kept cropping up. So I wrote about it in this week's Binkana column in Kannada Prabha.

Read a slightly unedited version below.

ನಿಜವಾಗಿಯೂ ವ್ರದ್ದಾಪ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಜವಿದೆಯೇ?

ಎಪ್ಪತೈದು ವರ್ಷದ ಜಿಲ್ ಫಾರೋ ಎಂಬುವ ನರ್ಸ್ ಕಳೆದ ತಿಂಗಳು ಸ್ವಿಜರ್ಲ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ನ ಒಂದು ಕ್ಲಿನಿಕ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ನಿಧನರಾದರು. ತಮ್ಮ ಜೀವನವಿಡೀ ಹಿರಿಯರ ಆರೈಕೆ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದ ಲಂಡನ್ ನಿವಾಸಿ ಜಿಲ್ ಅವರಿಗೆ ವೃದ್ದಾಪ್ಯದ ಭಯವಿತ್ತು. ತನಗೆ ಪಾರ್ಶ್ವವಾಯುವಿನ ಹೊಡೆತ ಅಥವಾ ಇನ್ನ್ಯಾವುದೋ ರೋಗದಿಂದ ಮಲಗಿದಲ್ಲೇ ಆಗಿ ತನ್ನ ಪರಿವಾರದವರಿಗೆ ಹೊರೆಯಾಗಬಾರದು ಎಂದು, ಒಂದೆರಡು ವಯಸ್ಸಿಗೆ ಸಂಬಂದಪಟ್ಟ ತೊಂದರೆಗಳನ್ನು ಬಿಟ್ಟರೆ ಬಹುಪಾಲು ಆರೋಗ್ಯವಂತರಾಗಿದ್ದ ಜಿಲ್ ಬಾಸೆಲ್ ನ ಲೈಫ್ ಸರ್ಕಲ್ ಎಂಬ 'ಸಹಾಯ ಮರಣ' ಕ್ಲಿನಿಕಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಜುಲೈ ೨೧ರಂದು ಆತ್ಮಹತ್ಯೆ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡರು. ಜಿಲ್ ಬರೆದ ಒಂದು ಕೊನೆ ಲೇಖನದಲ್ಲಿ "ವೃದ್ದಾಪ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಜವಿದೆ ಎಂದು ನನಗನಿಸುವುದಿಲ್ಲ," ತಾನು ಮೊದಲು ಇಷ್ಟ ಪಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ಹೂದೊಟಗಾರಿಕೆ, ಡಿನ್ನರ್ ಪಾರ್ಟೀಸ್, ಇತ್ತ್ಯದಿ ಈಗ ತನಗೆ ಆ ಮೊದಲಿನಂತೆ ಸಂತೋಷ ನೀಡುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಬರೆದಿದ್ದರು. ಕಳೆದ ವರ್ಷ ಆನ್ ಎಂಬ ಅದ್ಯಾಪಕಿ ೨೧ನೇ ಶತಮಾನದ ಇಮೇಲ್, ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್, ಮಾರುಕಟ್ಟೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಗುವ ರೆಡಿ ಮೇಡ್ ಊಟ, ಇತ್ಯಾದಿಗಳ ಜೊತೆ ಹೊಂದಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ತನಗಾಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂದು ಸ್ವಿಜರ್ಲ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ನ ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಆತ್ಮಹತ್ಯೆ ಕ್ಲಿನಿಕಿನಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಪ್ರಾಣ ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಂಡರು. ಈ ಅಂಕಣ ಬರೆಯುತ್ತಿರಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಬ್ರಿಟನಿನ ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ನಿವಾಸಿ ಬಾಬ್ ಕೋಲ್ ಚಿಕಿತ್ಸೆ ಮಾಡಲಾಗದಂತಹಾ ರೋಗ ಇರುವುದರಿಂದ ಸ್ವಿಜರ್ಲ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ಗೆ ಪ್ರಯಾಣ ಮಾಡಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಪ್ರಾಣ ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳಲಿದ್ದಾರೆ ಎಂದು ಓದಿದೆ. 

ಬ್ರಿಟನಿನಲ್ಲಿ, ಜಗತ್ತಿನ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಕಮ್ಮಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ದೇಶಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇದ್ದಂತೆ, ಈ ಸಹಾಯಕ ಮರಣ, ಆತ್ಮಹತ್ಯೆ, ಯುತನೀಶಿಯದಂತೆ ಕಾನೂನು ಬಾಹಿರ. ಸ್ವಿಜರ್ಲ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ಬೇರೆ ಇನ್ನೆರಡು ದೇಶಗಳನ್ನು ಸೇರುತ್ತದೆ, ಇಂತಹಾ ದಯಾ ಮರಣವನ್ನು ಶಾಸನಕ್ಕೆ ತರುವುದರಲ್ಲಿ. ಈ ಸುಯಿಸೈಡ್ ಕ್ಲಿನಿಕ್ ಗಳ ಸೇವೆಯನ್ನು ಪಡೆಯಲು ಸ್ವಿಸ್ ನಗರೀಕರಾಗಿರಬೇಕಿಲ್ಲ, ಇತ್ತೀಚಿಗೆ ಗುನವಾಗದಂತಹಾ ರೋಗವನ್ನು ಸಹ ಹೊಂದಿರಬೇಕಿಲ್ಲ. ಯಾವ ಕಾನೂನನೂ ಸಹ ಕುಶಲತೆಯಿಂದ ತಿರುಗಿಸಬಹುದಲ್ಲವೇ?

ವೃದ್ದಾಪ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಜವಿದೆ ಎಂದು ನನಗನಿಸುವುದಿಲ್ಲ ಎಂಬ ಜಿಲ್ ಬರೆದ ಒಂದು ವಾಕ್ಯದಿಂದಾಗಿ ಜೀವನದ ಪರ ಮತ್ತು ವಿರುದ್ದವಿರುವ ಗುಂಪುಗಳ ಮಧ್ಯೆಯಿನ ಚರ್ಚೆ ಪುನಃ ತಲೆಯೆತ್ತಿದೆ. ಈ ಯುತನೀಶಿಯ ಆಗಲಿ, ಸಹಾಯಕ ಮರಣವಾಗಲಿ, ಕಪ್ಪು ಅಥವಾ ಬಿಳಿ, ಸರಿ ಅಥವಾ ತಪ್ಪು ಎಂದು ಅಚ್ಚುಕಟ್ಟಾಗಿ ವಿಂಗಡಿಸುವಷ್ಟು ಸುಲಭವಲ್ಲ. ಇದರಲ್ಲಿರುವ ನೈತಿಕ, ಸಾಮಾಜಿಕ, ಕಾನೂನಿನ, ವ್ಯದ್ಯಕೀಯ, ಧಾರ್ಮಿಕ, ರಾಜಕೀಯ ಮತ್ತು ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳು ವಿಪರೀತ ಗೊಂದಲಗಳನ್ನು ಉಂಟು ಮಾಡುತ್ತವೆ. ಸಾವು ಎಂಬುದೇ ಹೀಗೆ, ಒಂದು ರೀತಿಯ ಅನಾನುಕೂಲತೆ.

ಇತ್ತೀಚಿಗೆ ನನ್ನ ಬೇರೆ ಹಲವಾರು ಬರವಣಿಗೆಗಳು, ಚಿಂತನೆಗಳು ಸಾವಿನ ಕುರಿತಾಗಿ, ದೇಹದ ಕುರಿತಾಗಿ ಜರುಗುತ್ತಿವೆ. ಉದ್ದೇಶಪೂರ್ವಕವಾಗಿ ಖಂಡಿತವಾಗಿಯೂ ಅಲ್ಲ. ಆಕಸ್ಮಿಕ ಆಸಕ್ತಿಯಷ್ಟೇ. ಕೆಲ ತಿಂಗಳುಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ನಾನು ಚಿಕ್ಕವಳಾಗಿದ್ದಾಗ ದಿನಕ್ಕೆ ಕಡ್ಡಾಯವಾಗಿ ಎರಡು ಮೂರು ಕಥೆಗಳನ್ನು ಹೇಳಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಿದ, ನಮ್ಮೊಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಇದ್ದ ಅಜ್ಜಿ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ತಿಂಗಳು ಮಲಗಿದಲ್ಲೇ ಆಗಿ ತೀರಿಹೋದರು. ಬಹುಷಃ ಸಾವಿನ ಬಗ್ಗೆಗಿನ ಈ ವಿಮರ್ಶೆ ಅಲ್ಲಿಂದ ಶುರುವಾಯಿತೋ ಏನೋ, ಸರಿಯಾಗಿ ಹೇಳಲಾರೆ. ಈ ಅಂತರದ ಹಲವಾರು ತಿಂಗಳುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಅವಿರೂಕ್ ಸೇನ್ ನ ಅದ್ಭುತವಾಗಿ ಸಂಶೋಧಿಸಿ ಬರೆದ 'ಆರುಷಿ' ಪುಸ್ತಕವನ್ನು ಓದಿದೆ. ದೇಶವನ್ನೇ ಮೋಡಿಮಾಡಿಸಿ ಹಿಡಿದಿಟ್ಟ ಆರುಷಿ ತಲ್ವಾರ್ ಮತ್ತು ಹೇಮರಾಜ್ ಹತ್ಯೆಯ ನಂತರ ವರ್ಷಾನುಗಟ್ಟಲೆ ನಡೆದ ಕೇಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಬಿಐನ ಸಂಶೋಧನಾ ತಂಡ ಮಾಡಿದ ಘೋರ ತಪ್ಪುಗಳನ್ನು ಸೇರಿದಂತೆ ಇಡೀ ವಿಚಾರಣೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಏನೇನು ನಡೆಯಿತು, ಸಾಕ್ಷಿಗಳನ್ನು ಹೇಗೆ ಬದಲಾಯಿಸಲಾಯಿತು ಎಂಬ ವಿವರಣೆ ಇದರಲ್ಲಿದೆ. ತುಂಬಾ ಗೊಂದಲವನ್ನು ಉಂಟುಮಾಡುವ ಪುಸ್ತಕ. ಅದನ್ನು ಓದುತ್ತಿದಂತೆ ಕೇಳಿದ ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಸುದ್ದಿ, ಅಮೇರಿಕಾದ ಒಬ್ಬ ದಂತ ವೈದ್ಯ ಐವತ್ತು ಸಾವಿರ ಡಾಲರ್ ಕೊಟ್ಟು ಬೇಟೆಯಾಡುವ ಲೈಸೆನ್ಸ್ ಖರೀದಿಸಿ ಸೆಸಿಲ್ ಎಂಬ ಬಹಳ ಜನಪ್ರಿಯವಾದ ಗಂಡು ಸಿಂಹವನ್ನು ಜಿಂಬಾಬ್ವೆ ನಲ್ಲಿ ವಿನೋದಕ್ಕೆಂದು ಬಿಲ್ಲು ಬಾಣದಿಂದ ಕೊಂದುಹಾಕಿದ ಎಂಬುದು. ಮತ್ತದೋ ರಿಯಾಲಿಟಿ ಟೀವಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಸೀಸನ್ ಸ್ಪೆಷಲ್ ಎಂಬುವ ಹಾಗೆ ಉದ್ರೇಕವಾಗಿ ಯಾಕುಬ್ ಮೆಮೊನಿನ ಮರಣದಂಡನೆಯ ವರದಿಗಳು. ದಾರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಪ್ರಸಂಗಗಳಷ್ಟು ವಿವಾದಕ್ಕೊಳಗಾಗದ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಬೇರೆ ಘಟನೆಗಳು.

ಈ ಎಲ್ಲಾ, ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಳದ ಮತಷ್ಟು ಸಾವುಗಳ ಸುತ್ತ ಸುಳಿದಾಡುವ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ದೇಹದ್ದು. ನಮ್ಮೆಲರ ಈ ದೇಹ ನಮಗೆ ಸೇರಿದ್ದಾ ಅಥವಾ...ಉತ್ತರ ಕಪ್ಪು-ಬಿಳುಪಿನಷ್ಟು ಸುಲಭವಲ್ಲ. ಹೆಣ್ಣೆಂಬ ಪ್ರಾಣಿಯ ದೇಹ ಒಂದು ರಾಜಕೀಯ ಭೂ ವ್ಯವಸ್ತೆಯಾಗಿ ಆ ಅಗೋಚರ, ವ್ಯಕ್ಯಾನಿಸಲಾಗದಂತಹಾ ಸಮಾಜ, ಅದೊಬ್ಬ ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿ, ಫ್ಯಾಷನ್ ನಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಅದ್ಯಾವುದೋ ಸ್ವಾಮಿ/ಬಾಬಾ, ಗಂಡ/ಹೆಂಡತಿ, ಪಾರ್ಟ್ನರ್, ಕುಟುಂಬದ ಒಂದಿಷ್ಟು ಜನಮಂದಿಯ ಸ್ವತ್ತು ಎಂದೆನಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಅದೇ ಹೆಣ್ಣು ತಂತನವನ್ನು ಹಿಂದೆ ಬಾಚಿಕೊಂಡರೆ ಅವಳ ಹೆಸರು ಬೇರೆಯೇ ಕರೆಯಲ್ಪಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಕಾಡಿನಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಪ್ರಾಣಿಯ ದೇಹದ ಮೇಲಿರುವ ಹಕ್ಕು ಹರಾಜಿನಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಕೊಟ್ಯಾದಿಪತಿಗೆ ಸೇರುತ್ತದೆ.

ದೇಹ ನಮ್ಮದಾದರೆ ಏನನ್ನೂ ಅದರೊಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಮಾಡಬಹುದೆ? ಅಲ್ಲವಾದಲ್ಲಿ ನಮ್ಮ ದೇಹದ ಮೇಲಿನ ಹಕ್ಕು ಎಷ್ಟರ ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ನಮ್ಮದು? ದಿನದಿಂದ ದಿನಕ್ಕೆ ಈ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗೆ ಕಲ್ಪಿಸುವ ನಿರಂತರ ಉತ್ತರಗಳಿಂದಲೇ ದಿನಚರಿಯನ್ನು ವ್ಯವಹರಿಸಬೇಕಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಹದಿನೆಂಟನೆ ಶತಮಾನದ ಜಾನ್ ಲಾಕ್ ಎಂಬುವ ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ತತ್ವಜ್ಞಾನಿ ಲಾ ಆಫ್ ನ್ಯಾಚುರಲ್ ರೈಟ್ಸ್ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಹೇಳುತ್ತಾ, ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಂದು ಮನುಷ್ಯನಿಗೂ ಜೀವ, ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ ಮತ್ತು ಸ್ವತ್ತಿನ ಮೇಲೆ ಸಹಜವಾದ ಹಕ್ಕಿದೆ ಎನ್ನುತ್ತಾನೆ. ಆದರೆ, ಅವನ ಪ್ರಕಾರ, ಇಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಒಂದೇ ಒಂದು ನಿರ್ಭಂದವೇನೆಂದರೆ ಈ ಸಹಜ ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳನ್ನು ನಾವು ಬಿಟ್ಟುಕೊಡುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ, ಮತ್ತು ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ಬೇರೆಯವರಿಂದ ಕಿತ್ತುಕೊಳ್ಳುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಕ್ಲಾಸಿಕಲ್ ಲಿಬರಲಿಸಂನ ತಂದೆಯೆಂದು ಕರೆಲ್ಪಡುವ ಲಾಕ್ ದುಡಿಮೆ, ಅದರಿಂದ ಬರುವ ಸ್ವತ್ತು ಇತ್ತ್ಯದಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಬೇರೆ ಅದೆಷ್ಟೋ ಹೇಳುತ್ತಾನೆ. ತಿಳಿದಂತಹಾ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಧರ್ಮಗಳು ಜೀವ -ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ- ಸ್ವತ್ತಿನ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯವನ್ನು ಹೊಂದಿರುತ್ತವೆ. ರಾಜಕೀಯದ ವಿವಿಧ ವ್ಯವಸ್ತೆಗಳೂ ಅಷ್ಟೇ.

ಒಂದು ಜೀವ/ದೇಹ ಮತ್ತು ಅದನ್ನು ಸುತ್ತುವರಿಯುವ ರಾಜತತ್ವವನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಟ್ಟು ನೋಡಿದಾಗ ಬರುವ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರ ಕೊಡಬೇಕಾದವರ್ಯ್ಯರು? ನಮ್ಮ ದೇಹ ನಮ್ಮ ಜೀವನ ನಮ್ಮದಾದರೆ ಸಹಾಯಕ ಮರಣದ ವಿರುದ್ದ ಗುಂಗೀರಿಸಬೇಕಾದ ಅವಶ್ಯಕತೆ ಏನಿದೆ? ದೇಹ/ಜೀವನ ಕೇವಲ ತುಂಡುಗಳಲ್ಲಷ್ಟೇ ನಮ್ಮದಾದರೆ ಸರ್ಕಾರದ್ದು ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲಿದೆಯೇ? ಇಲ್ಲವಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಅದನ್ನು ಕಿತ್ತುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಹಕ್ಕು ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ನೀಡಿದವರಾರು?

ಅಹಿತವಾದ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಹುಡುಕುವ ಉತ್ತರ ಕಪ್ಪು-ಬಿಳುಪಿನಷ್ಟು ಸುಲಭವಲ್ಲ.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Bollywood - USSR connection: An Essay in The Calvert Journal

In another lifetime, I had two pen pals from Russia, their addresses circled in ink in some old issue of the delightful children's magazine Misha. Years later I realized how significant their letters asking for photos of film stars were. Raj Kapoor was of the yesteryears, Mithun Chakraborty was not amongst the top guys, Aamir Khan was yet to become a favourite for me. The story, once I began to read up on it, was fascinating. There was this whole cultural diplomacy that existed between the USSR and India that those of us from my generation didn't know much about. Something similar is perhaps being attempted with the other popular export these days: yoga.

My story on the influence of Hindi films in the former Soviet Union was published in The Calvert Journal here. Or see below. Actually read the story there, on the website. It is so much nicer there.

I love that they illustrated the story with so many old videos. 

BOLLYWOOD AFFAIR: HOW INDIAN CINEMA ARRIVED IN THE USSR

Bollywood films became available across the Soviet Union in the 1950s as an alternative to western cinema. Deepa Bhasthi looks back at the Hindi movies that enthralled eastern Europe, and asks why they were so popular


Marina U., born in the January of 1977 was 16 years old in 1993, when she wrote to me from a little town deep in Russia. She wrote the names of her pets and listed her favourite actors in the letter, blue ink on checkered paper, that came to my little town deep down in South India. Asking for photos seemed to have been a rage then, for she had asked me to send mine, promising to send hers the next time. We never did exchange photographs. I was 10. Circling nearly generic details under names I couldn't quite pronounce, found in the pages of Misha, the children's magazine from the Soviet Union that dad had procured back issues of for me from the old paper mart, I had started corresponding with two girls in Russia. I have all the four letters that they sent me, including one from a younger sister who got passed my letters when the older went away to study. I cannot remember if more letters were exchanged. Neither do I recollect now why we didn't continue being in touch. 

Every one of these letters talk of how much these girls loved Bollywood movies. Their most favourite actors were listed out. It read: Shah Rukh Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Aamir Khan, Juhi Chawla, Rati Agnihotri, Govinda, Rekha, Sridevi, etc., a veritable who's who of popular cinema of those days. I hadn't thought much about their strange interest in Bollywood until a few weeks ago when one of those random thoughts that spring up, catching you unawares, out of the blue, in the middle of the road, struck me. A cursory scratching on the surface of Google-dom threw up virtual realms on the cultural diplomacy of the early 1950s that India, freshly recovering from gaining independence, practiced with the then USSR.

I was a Johnny-come-lately to this matter, it turns out. The late 1980s and early 1990s were years when the Soviet states were on their last legs of unity and India was similarly poised for new beginnings, opening its markets to the years of Coke and capitalism that would follow. By then, the grip that Bollywood held over the cultural landscape of the Soviet states had already loosened significantly. The era of sustained cultural diplomacy, via films from India to the USSR and via books in English and most Indian languages in the other direction was on a steady wane. The peak was in the 1950s and 60s when Raj Kapoor especially, and Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar to a certain extent elicited fan frenzy that can only be compared to the madness that followed the Liverpool boys, The Beatles on the other side of the world.

Bollywood is a sweeping all-encompassing term that denotes the Hindi film industry. To be more specific, it refers to the films that are made, to a large extent in Mumbai, the business heartland of India, and are instantly recognized worldwide by virtue of their basic characteristics - song and dance routines, varying degrees of melodrama and much else. The term Bollywood, a nomenclature loathed by some of its most widely recognized ambassadors for seeming to be a perceived mimicry of its Western counterpart Hollywood, is convenient to segregate these formula films from the rest of the films made in Hindi. In the same league as cricket, Bollywood brings my country together, be it when marveling at the insane money made by some of these films, or with the songs, both the ones with poetry and the ones crass, that are hummed across the country. It is as good as religion, given its influence. Everyday life is rife with references from a colourful factory that both manufactures, and nourishes, the escapist aspirations of a country.

This virtue of granting escapism to its consumers was what made Bollywood films so popular in the Soviet of the 1950s. Mine was the generation of Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan movies. But growing up, having parents who were great fans of old Hindi songs - film songs, India's alternative for pop songs - had made me familiar with the poetry in their lyrics, even though I didn't care much for the films themselves. They were too slow, silly and old fashioned for my teen tastes. Raj Kapoor and Nargis, among the others were thus very familiar. This couple had taken the Soviet by storm, starting with Awaara in 1954. Alexander Lipkov's thorough paper, ‘India's Bollywood in Russia’, lists Nimai Ghosh's Chhinnamul as the first film that was released in the USSR. But it was the Chaplinesque roles of Raj Kapoor that struck a chord.

Eight hundred prints each of Dev Anand's Rahi and Awaara were released in all the languages of the 15 Soviet republics, I read somewhere. Kapoor, a slightly goofy smile in place, with a comical walk and trousers that didn't go beyond the ankles, was a symbol of optimism. His roles saw him as an innocent do-gooder, impractically romantic but beloved nevertheless. Storylines that predictably swirled around the themes of sympathy for the oppressed, socialist egalitarianism and the triumph of good over evil resonated with Russians whose only other option at the cinema was propaganda movies. When Kapoor, and his later counterparts, romanced their heroines, they did so surrounded by Swiss Alps and pretty flowers, in a manner that was depicted as wholly sustainable, even essential, in the pursuit of true love. It allowed a sweet path to escapism for a population otherwise fed on the state's idea of love for the motherland, ideas that were relentlessly driven down by propaganda movies that showed only what the people saw on the streets, at work and lived in their homes anyway.

Just after India's independence in 1947 when, after much deliberation, the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to side up with USSR, Bollywood movies began to be either dubbed for a Soviet audience or subtitled. As pure escapism, a duty commercial movies continue to steadfastly fulfill, these movies ran to full houses for weeks at best, or to fairly full houses, at their worst. Indian films, always Hindi, not those in other languages, were encouraged because they were seen as a protection for the Russian film market from Hollywood films. Though Hindi was never officially a 'national language' in India, the film industry in that language was the biggest in those years. Not surprisingly, art films, those of Satyajit Ray and others of his ilk, failed miserably at the box offices. These showed real life, tackled poverty and issues that affected real lives. Lipkov talks of how there were many instances of audiences walking out of movie halls when these 'real' movies were being screened.

It perhaps helped that in the 1950s both India and Russia were in similar situations, the former, newly free, the latter, reeling under losses from WWII. It helped to be able to sit in a dark hall for up to four hours and laugh and cry and escape from the drudgery of life that was outside. With the collapse of USSR, the mighty distribution machinery of American films began to churn louder and louder. The quality of Bollywood was on the decline as well. The extensive cultural influences naturally began to ebb as both economies opened their doors to global vagaries and cultural diplomacy was no longer given its due currency.

India TV, the only Russian channel that broadcasts Indian movies and programs, is said to be rather popular. Their website says that they regularly show films, both classic Kapoor and newer titles. I imagine it caters to a section that is nostalgic for the good ol' days. Nostalgia is but another means of escapism from the present, from what lies above the TV screens. Nostalgia is big business too.