Whats wrong with us?

It’s too much to expect anything out of us, but it is nothing to expect everything out of others. I am not a model student by any means, I day dream, I don’t take notes, I don’t pay attention in class, (I’m writing my blog post instead), I don’t come to class and often I am openly insolent to my teachers. I am not alone. That’s the rest of my class for you as well. How did we get this way? We got jaded, by teachers who are terrible, who are biased, who know nothing, for whom teaching is the last resort. Agreed, and then for some of us there are the rest of us as well. If our teachers are bad, we are worse. We wallow in self-pity and self-entitlement and refuse to take charge of our lives and our futures. I don’t think we deserve any better than the teachers we bully, dominate, look down upon and deride.
In my three years over here I have compered conferences and numerous lectures, and I am appalled by the Student behaviour at these occasions. Here is an opportunity to learn, to listen to others, to people from across the world who have flown into your measly little town with the thought of sharing some of their knowledge, and all the students can do is sleep (if they’re nice) or gossip loudly, interrupt the speaker, distract her, ignore the jokes and laugh at the wrong times.
So you don’t listen to the lousy teachers because they’re lousy, but why don’t you listen to the eminent scholars? Because they’re good?
Make up your mind or change your reason. Maybe you don’t listen because you don’t give two hoots, because despite what you told (actually yelled and cribbed) your teacher, “that you want to learn, go beyond schoolroom teaching” you don’t care about anything beyond who’s going out with whom or what Blair wore in the last episode of gossip girl. Maybe you don’t listen because the eminent speaker rambles on and is hard to understand. Well didn’t you just tell (read yell and crib) your teacher that he wasn’t capable of moulding your superior minds, well possessor of a superior mind what good is that damn thing if you can’t use it to unravel one simple lecture. Maybe I’m wronging them, maybe they don’t listen and sleep instead because in their dreams they are visited by much more eminent and interesting persons (like Blair or their crush) who are much better suited to mould their magnificent (superior) minds.
You want to be treated like an adult, “no more classroom teaching”, “We’re in college!”, “We’re 20!” “the teachers don’t know a thing” “ the teachers are biased” “I’m jaded” “the teacher needs to be engaging”.
Well what about us? Do we behave like adults? No, my dear young adults, our behaviour in the conference hall would put even kids to shame, we act like babies. Do we truly not want classroom teaching? Of course we do, we want everything handed to us on a platter, the syllabus, the test questions, the model answer, a perfect lecture. The brave teacher that tries an interesting discussion based syllabus gets shot down immediately (yaaar...... We’re adults, with busy adult schedules, we don’t have time for this). The teachers don’t know a thing.......................... and neither do we by the way (because we haven’t listened to a word all semester, we passed because of the one poor kid who listened through our disturbances and painstakingly took down notes which we photocopied). The teachers are biased................................ and we’re cheaters (we get our 8 CGPA by copying those photocopied notes hidden under our table while the kid who took those notes struggles to remember what the teacher had said because the class had been so noisy that day).The teacher needs to be more engaging, and we need to .......? oh yeah, we need to do nothing.
I wanted to be a teacher, I foolishly mentioned it in front of my professor grandparents, aunts and uncles. They made me cry that day. I would still like to be a teacher, I know the pay is lousy but the deal breaker isn’t that the pay isn’t enough to live on, it’s the fact that it doesn’t compensate for the lousy students.

How to.........

Does anyone else feel the need to be witty, sarcastic and self deprecating while blogging? I do, most blogs which are successful have a certain flowing, natural level snark. Without which your blog is apparently doomed to some sort of virtual limbo (is a blog a blog, if no one reads it?).

And it’s not just blogs, this need to be witty is seeping down into our day to day lives, sundry conversations you might have with your dhobi also need to be funny, worthy of repeating for the hearing pleasure of the world at large, blog worthy in fact. The pressure to be witty and acerbic is on! How do you deal with it? If you’re anything like me, you can only think of something witty or biting long after the moment has passed, yet I am considered scary for the things I might say, allow me to let you in on my little secret.

It’s a look, you need to develop a look which combines pain, loathing and sympathy for the vermin (who should be) squirming before you, bite your lip, like you’re trying hard to control what you want to say (though you don’t know the exact words yet), sadly shake your head and turn away, It’s (will be) too horrible, too acerbic, too true! If you say what you want to say (when you actually figure it out) the poor person it’s directed at might not recover, with a heroic sigh refuse to say what you want to say. It works! Your reputation for witty verbal dexterity and scariness will shoot up. This isn’t enough of course, you need to back the look with actual lines or you might end up receiving more constipation medication than you have enemies to poison them with. This is done in two ways the first is rather simple, Hours later when you have thought of something appropriate. Refine it! Work on it, and then try and drop it into conversation casually, “I kept thinking that his head looked like a turnip..... but you know, I couldn’t say it.......anyway as I was saying to my dhobi the other day...”. The second is simpler, when you actually think of something witty on the spot, say it! (Everyone is given a break from their nobler impulses once in a while......)

Now if someone would please share their secret to bitchy blogging with me ...............

A New Shade of Green

I’m a museum tripping, fort viewing kinda girl. I like guides (the printed and the breathing), pamphlets, badly written ASI Boards and random pieces of trivia, this is best exemplified by observing my school trips to museums. I will for the sake of brevity (hah!) limit myself to one example, our class 8th trip to the arts and handicrafts museum in Delhi. While the rest of my 200 classmates and companions in their quest for learning and knowledge ran through the museum learning essential life skills such as social networking, physical feats of multitasking like walking talking and eating while dodging the random teacher or two and of course little snippets of actual fact – “I swear I saw them holding hands .....”, I went around trying to learn about the Ikat sarees of Orissa. Solitarily staring at the plastic reproduction of an authentic weaving handloom from the early 1990s, Fascinated by the moth eaten Puppets from Northern Rajasthan and cribbing to anyone who’d listen (mostly myself or the unfortunate teacher who had to trail me) that there wasn’t enough written up about the wonders of tribal peacock fans.

In London the storybook Cottages, the Lush greenery, the clean streets, the big shops and the spell binding stage shows all made me wonder and marvel, but none made me want to move to London. It was only as I wandered through the 13th museum and passed a gaggle of high school students being instructed on the colours in a painting that I realized that a delicate hue had begun to colour my countenance. The Instructor called it Fern Green, I call it museum envy green.

I don’t care for their Castles, we have our forts and they can keep their Princes, I prefer Farhan Akhtar, I don’t need clean public loos while I have my home and the Delhi metro will catch up with the London tube eventually. The promenade by the Thames is tempting but the cold and rainy weather means you can never enjoy it. Their Food is blah and bland after a while and so long as the Big Chill exists I won’t miss their cheesecake either. Who wants green everywhere when we have green, reds and browns and a whole rainbow of colours in our landscape and who wants picture perfect cows on Rolling Meadows when we have our sacred mud and dung caked cows on pot holed roads. If I move to London it will be for the museums. So that I can spend hours roaming those vast magnificent halls, reading every line, hanging onto every word of the nice lady on the audio guide. So that my kids can learn to draw stick figures and tear paper to make kites surrounded by the masters. So that I can learn everything I want to know about mummified cats in front of a genuine Mummified cat. The knowledge, the visuals, the atmosphere, the thrill (I am thrilled by museums, thank you very much) call to me, they beckon to me, come to London they whisper seductively in my head (stop feeling sorry for me, I have fun!). But I think I will wait for the day when these museums will come to India. Until then I will content myself by advising my kids to (like my friends) focus on life skills, physical dexterity and gossip when they visit Indian museums and petitioning The Arts and Craft Museum to correct their Ikat Saree label, Ikat Sarees come from Gujarat.

of Devs, Dads, Dimples and a Deol

I did two things over this weekend, one that I never thought I would do, and one I never should have done.
I never should have gone to see Dev D with my Dad. My dad is pretty chilled out about the movies, he likes arty, serious cinema which my mom does not (my mom can watch only mindless action mixed with humour, or Mindless romance mixed with humour, or Humour, real life is arty and serious enough for her), which is why my dad now looks to his daughters for company if he wants to watch something serious. So I figured, what the hey! Here’s a chance to show him bold new Bollywood, even if he doesn’t care for the story he’d like the technical accomplishments, the songs, the direction, the production values, the acting. Aaaaaaargh! I forgot about the Sex, the drinking, the language and the fact that the protagonist is a self pitying loser who we are supposed to sympathise and cheer for after he has run over and killed an entire slum (by the way, said actions are perfectly acceptable in English Movies). It was awkward to say the least. Perhaps I could have pulled it off better had I not already seen the movie (“the reviews were so good..... but this is ......”). But now my dad thinks I identify with Dev D so much that I want to see it twice! More than that it’s a serious lapse of judgment on my part (my daughter doesn’t know what I’ll like or not like). We drove home in silence. When we got home my mom asked us how we liked it, my dad grinned and said it didn’t pass by him. Maybe it’s ok...... but he is never going to take another movie recommendation from me.
I never thought I would fall in Love (this is not a crush) with someone from the Deol family. Abhay Deol is not John Abraham (my long time crush), in all senses of the word “not”. The guy can act, he can pick movies, he does his own thing, he takes avant-garde art courses in New York (steel welding anyone?) he thought of Dev D (the movie I liked so much, that I had to watch it again, Dad or no Dad), he has dimples (Ok John Abraham has dimples too)! He is smart, a smooth talker (swoon) and utterly cute. I know we are soul-mates, no one loves the movies as much as I do, I like art, I like Dev D, I like dimples and have some vague ones myself. We’d be perfect together. I’d help him pick movies to act in and he’d help me with my job as an art museum curator. We’d talk (about smart things ya’know) and take art courses (Blowing glass in Budapest, Tile glazing in Turkey......) and do other things (smart things ya’know) together. Papparazi shots of the two of us would feature our adorable dimples, awwww........ they could call us Soudeo or Rambhay.
John Abraham (should you ever read this blog), I may crush you to death, but for Abhay I’d gladly Die myself.

Twilight Review

Wanted: Male, aged 109 years, with looks of a twenty year old Greek god, raincoat model, for a clumsy, plain girl not good enough for his godlikeness.
Apparently that’s the personal millions of women and teenage girls all over the world want an answer to. How else do you explain the success of twilight? The writing sucks, the characters are characterless and the story is trite.
I daydream a lot, about the books I want to write, about the movies I want to make, and the things I want to do (awww.........hell even about the blog I want to keep). I wanted to write this book, it was buffy inspired and it was going to be brilliant. An ordinary girl falls in love with a vampire, a vampire who while also attracted to her must fight his temptation to suck the blood and life out of her. The girl was going to be kickass, the vampire suave yet tormented, sexual tension would abound, there would be witty repartee. It would not end in the conventionally happy way, the girl would eventually realize that vampires and vampirism (which are obviously subtexts for some deeper gender issues) aren’t for her, but she’d emerge a better, more confident and stronger (emotionally and physically!) person from her experience. I was going to write that book, it was going to be a best seller. My heroine was going to be the heroine to match. Millions of girls all over the globe inspired by said heroine would dump their idiotic boyfriends even before they reached the last page and millions (minus a few) of the dumped boyfriends would wonder what the entire fuss was about, a few sensitive boyfriends would get it and change themselves accordingly, the world would become, all in all, a better place.
Then Twilight happened, apparently Stephanie Meyer a mormon housewife, mother of two in America also had the same dream, and instead of daydreaming about it and writing her booker acceptance speech (they do let you give a speech right?) like I did, actually wrote the damn story and then a sequel and then another one and then another one. So there they were, four gorgeous black books with mysterious symbolic imagery and seductive titles like Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, what could I do? I bought them, all four in one go. Went home curled up in a sofa glad to have an excuse to not put the more feasible of my daydreams into action (if I went ahead now, Stephanie Meyer could sue me) and started to read, tried to read and then ultimately after several pages of descriptions of Edward “looking more like a greek god than anyone should possibly be”, and finally “so beautiful that he looked like a raincoat model standing in the porch in the rain in a raincoat” I gave up, of yeah I was about thirty pages in. Thirty pages of how beautiful Edward is, of how plain Bella is, of how clumsy Bella is and how graceful Edward is, of how dull Bella is and how interesting Edward is. I gave up! The dumb ass heroine was one of those perfectly irritating girls who say they’re skinny and whine about their pallid skin (translation: I am slender and have great porcelain skin, all the “nerdy” boys keep trying to talk to me, and I’m too nice to put them down! Boo hoo poor me). Do Bella and Edward find true love? Yes they do, does Edward display signs of an obsessive abusive possessive husband? Yes he does, are the books a success? Yes they are, and now millions and millions of girls all over the world have dumped their un-godlike boyfriends who are incapable of modelling raincoats. They sit around being perfectly dull just like Bella, waiting for a Vampire who looks like a greek god to come and bite them and control their lives completely! Millions (minus a few) of the dumped boyfriends wonder what the fuss is all about while a few who catch on go from being nice normal blokes to utter jerks a la Edward and his masterful ways . I weep. And wish that I hadn’t been so lazy. If only I had written my version first! Lesson Learnt: fuck up your Ideas before someone does it for you.

I Think I See a Horse

My mother told me that when you listen to music, and shut your eyes you see the music. When you listen to music you picture it in your head, a song with lyrics unfolds like a movie inside your head, you see lucy in the sky wearing diamonds and you’re able to picture a stairway to heaven. Even plain and pure music can inspire images in your head, Beethovens’ Pastoral, Vivaldis’ Four seasons are literally named after the images the music evokes. Sometimes while listening to plain music you just imagine abstract shapes, and colours, Fantasia the classic Disney movie played on this concept by literally painting and animating western classical music – sometimes as a story (the extinction of dinosaurs, Greek Mythology) sometimes as just patterns and shapes(rolling purple hills turn into green lines which become yellow waves) the dancing mushrooms and hippopotamus ballerinas defy description but I assume they fall in between the two categories above. Music videos – do the same the same – they paint the song.
Music and art have been interlinked for me since the day my mother introduced me to Fantasia and explained the visual power of music. And just like you use art to understand music, you can use music to understand art.
Art is just like music, when you look at art and open your ears, you ought to hear music. Look at a painting of a girl sitting by a piano that’s music with lyrics, look at abstract art it’s like an instrumental piece of music. No one questions that instrumental music brings pleasure, no one complains that they don’t “get” instrumental music. Well, it’s just the same with an abstract painting, what instrumental music is to the ears, abstract painting is to your eyes. A truly wonderful piece of art can inspire music in your head. And just like a piece of instrumental music can sometimes be a story or sometimes just shapes in your head, similarly an abstract painting can sometimes be interpreted and sometimes just appreciated for what it is – a pleasure to behold. Treat art like music and you’ll open a whole new world. Open your eyes, look at the painting, do you like it? Does it make you feel good, happy, sad, excited, dulled? You don’t need to know technique or the interpretation of art, just know what you feel and slowly you’ll pick up the rest. Perhaps Kandinsky my favourite painter shared this theory with me- he named his masterpieces in abstract work after musical terms, he called them compositions.

The F-word Rant

Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, she doesn’t even like them. When asked to speak about them in an English Class years and years (think two) ago all she had to say was that She was not one, that her friend Ramsub is one and that feminists are crazy, out of control women who muddle up their issues by running after dogs in Calcutta. (Another classmate also speaking about his distaste for feminists had compared them to the always overzealous PETA and Sindhu had muddled up the issues by hearing that it was the feminists who were chasing dogs).
So there you have it. Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, Feminists muddle up Issues and lastly I am one. I agree with 2 of the above suggestions and disagree with one. Firstly I agree with the last statement, I am a feminist. I also agree with the fact that Feminists muddle up issues and lastly I do not agree with Sindhu about her status as a feminist.
Perhaps Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist because the definition of a feminist is muddled and confused, but anyway this post isn’t about why Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist but rather about why and how I think I am one and my muddled views on what feminism means to me.
Feminism for me is about correcting the cultural lag. Years and years ago (think hundreds) physical strength was a rather important quality for anyone with ambition or a family to provide for to possess. A job on the battlefield entailed wielding 100kg swords and wearing armour which weighed 200 kg (sourced from Fort guides across India) and at the same time being able to lift your hand and legs to strike and run away respectively. A job on the field also required strength, as anyone who has tried to guide an obstinate 200 kg Bull to plough a field will tell you. But find me someone who has guided an obstinate bull across a field, hah! You can’t! And therein lies the rub. Tractors, technology have made physical strength on the field redundant. Machine guns and tanks have made strength on the battlefield redundant. Technology has progressed and levelled the battle err. Playing field for the sexes, we, humans haven’t progressed quite as much.
Ok farming and battling don’t remain preferred professions anymore, so why are and why were women blocked from the remaining and now more popular professions. You see years and years ago (in the hundreds again) women spent most of the productive part of their lives producing – children, they spent 9 months of a year pregnant and another 3 months breast feeding and trying to cheat the infant mortality rate of that time. This ravage on her body continued from puberty to 27 when in a tragic but routine miscarriage she passes from this hell on earth to better things in heaven (for having fulfilled her duty as a woman on earth so admirably I presume). No wonder women were confined to the house – being a woman was a full time job, it involved being pregnant, facing off day after day with an army of brats, the household chores and to top it all off, they were routinely risking death. It’s no wonder they weren’t allowed to work outside the house, who wants a hormonal pregnant lady looking after their accounts? And which employer wants an employee who might die just as the 50 foot elephant palace commissioned by the Maharjah is about to be completed.
But you know it’s not like this anymore, we have contraception now, there’s a little piece of rubber out there which has done more for civil rights than any other person or thing in the world. Today women in the “quiverfull” (what god gives we will accept – it’s a sin to use contraception) movement make headlines, “Denver woman gives birth to 18th child” and there are debates about what she’s doing to her body, her life, her children and the global food crisis.

So you see the technology is in place, yet the attitudes haven’t changed, that’s your cultural lag. Technology has freed women from the house, given them time (both within their lifetime and by extending their lifetime) and they have nothing to do, can’t they be allowed to work outside the house? Technology has blurred the lines between the genders, and yet age old thoughts, stereotypes and functions of gender continue to apply.
It’s no answer to say that giving birth is a divine right or the divine function of women, and that women are acting on their basest jealous natures by coveting what is rightfully the men’s domain. To that you need to refer to the bible, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, they were both given punishments, Adams was to toil and Eves was to give birth. Men have helped alleviate women’s punishment, it’s only fair that women return the favour and help alleviate some of men’s burden.
Feminism to me is about allowing men and women to do what they want – stay at home, go out and work, enjoy random sex, enjoy a secure marriage. It’s about helping them to do what they want - Men supporting wives who want to work, changing the laws for a more egalitarian society, raising awareness. It’s not about raising girls like boys but about raising Boys and Girls alike, by teaching both daughters and sons the same values and skills and valuing them the same. It’s about women enjoying the same freedoms as men and men being subjected to the same standards as women. It sounds like equality talk and is equality for the most part, but feminism for me is also about recognizing how far we are from the above utopia, it’s about being aware as a woman woman of the problems I might face, learning to be independent and proud of my gender. Occasionally it even means acknowledging my weakness as a woman and need for help and sometimes it means revelling in my superiority as a woman.

My identity as a feminist was born when I was 10 when my mom gave me “the talk” about sex. Not the Physical act of making love or procreation but the more insidious, the much more delicate one – of sex as a stereotype, as a mental block, as a societal imposition. Bred and raised on Enid Blytons’ (Betsy may to the Five Find Outers) I thought I had grown up on a steady diet of boys and girls having adventures, but that wasn’t so. My mother casually pointed out certain glaring gender stereotypes (too many to enumerate, but the gist that comes out is that Girly things – bad and boyish things – good, only girls who want to be boys have adventures or do things, the rest stay home and hold hands). My whole world came crashing down and I had to rethink my identity as a girl, this grew into awareness about gender stereotyping, restrictions, and finally my identity as a feminist.

Being a feminist is something intensely personal to me, I have never read any feminist manifesto or books or even Wikipedia articles. I don’t know of the history of feminism or the various brands of feminism, My feminism is guided by me, what I see around me, what I hear around me and what is happening around me. It’s guided by my gut, the discussions I have with others and the occasional editorial or blog I might read.
The Enid Blyton episode showed me how the books I read and the movies I watch can influence me and others around me, so I started critically analysing gender roles in them and forming my own opinions. It means that I wait eagerly for the next Tamora Pierce Novel and pull my hair out at the success of Stephanie Meyers inane Twilight series. It meant that I began to notice the 2 sisters , (several aborted sisters) and 1 much younger brother pattern, realized that as a family of three sisters we were rather unique in India and wondered what my paternal grandmother thought of it (she came around to it eventually). I supported abortion and was thrown for a toss when I realized that a beautiful poem that was my mother’s favourite was actually anti-abortion, female foeticide began to trouble me and I became passionately pro-life. Today the right to abortion, contraception and washing machines are the most important rights a woman can have in my opinion (my mothers’ poem was reinterpreted). I am inspired by women all over the world, and saddened by their mistreatment. My grandmother, my aunts all serve as examples I want to follow and when I have daughters (adopted of course!) I’ll point out the strong women in my (and their) family, just as my mother did for me so that they too have close examples to follow. I agree that there is misuse of the dowry acts but I still want them to exist so that that one woman who wants to use it rightly can. I object to stereotypes and got infuriated (and slightly hysterical) when a classmate told me that girls shouldn’t swear but it’s Ok for boys. The quiverfull movements give me bad dreams, the Taliban, LDS in Utah, The Ram Sene and VHP give me nightmares. The men over at saveindianfamily make me laugh with their Rama-Sita-Ravana analogies. The Ramayana enthralled me at age 9 (story!), infuriated me at 13 (agni pareeksha!), and leaves me wondering at age 20 (Sita refused to come back to Rama, Rama had only one wife!). Lastly I get upset when girls say they aren’t feminists, there are so many definitions of feminism out there (all muddled up as Sindhu Shankar would say) that every woman with self respect, dignity, independence, or striving for it, is a feminist. When a girl says that she is not a feminist or doesn’t like feminism, to me it means that, that girl has no identity as a woman, it means she is ignorant or indifferent to the problems that women face, it means she is content and willing to conform with the stereotypes that exist. I think Sindhu Shankar is a feminist.