Where the mind is without fear…
This is one of my favourite poems by Tagore. It generates the kind of hope and happiness within you that very few other poems manage to do. This poem came to my mind, unbidden, when I first wanted to change the title of my blog. This is the third title in three years. The first, “A Space of One’s Own” was inspired by Virginia Woolf. The second, “Reflections” was too common. As Sankhya put it, I needed to change it sooner rather than later, because it did not reflect the true nature of my not-so-innocent self. So, after much deliberation and discussion, I have changed it. To it’s current title. Do tell me what you think of this. Lurkers, please come out and comment too. I would love to hear from you!
Taking a break…
…is rejuvenating. At the end of a 16-day “staycation”, I am feeling rejuvenated and energetic enough to go back to work and last in it for another year. This is perhaps the first time I am talking about work in this blog, but better late than never. I don’t know if any other organisation has this concept, (I am assuming they do), but BNP insists that every employee take at least ten days off in a year. This is called compliance leave, and in office parlance, “mandy”: mandatory leave. And yes, I do mean ten working days off in a year. Counting all my weekends, I ended up with a good 16 days of leave. Seeing as I pushed this leave until the last possible minute, I did not have a real vacation planned out. Added to this was the fact that none of my friends were available to join me on a vacation. So, all in all, I ended up with a “staycation” instead of a vacation!
That said, I seem to have gotten a lot of things done in these two weeks. Revamped my blog template, revived a long-dead food blog with a new URL and a brand new WordPress theme, and of course, read a lot of new blogs, commented on them, watched a couple of movies and of course ate and slept until a put on a couple of kilos I could have done without! Having freelanced my way through college, university and later, this is the first time I took a real break. As a freelancer, you always have something in the back of your mind: that translation that needs finishing touches, that new class that needs a brand new lesson plan, the new method that required extensive preparation. This time, it was a real break: a break when I shelved all thoughts of office, except for the occasional reply to an SMS seeking a clarification. Even with the few office friends I did speak to during this break; I spoke of everything but work.
On the whole, this break has been a creative satisfaction. On a very personal level, there can be nothing more satisfying than sitting back to study all that you have managed to accomplish in the three years since this blog started. This started out on a purely experimental basis. But for the impetus given by Sankhya (who promises to open his blog to mere mortals like you and me very soon and has been promising this for almost 8 months now), this would never have seen the light of the day! So, thanks! 🙂 I don’t know if this blog is anywhere close to being what I wanted it to be. I also don’t know if what I say is worthy of being heard. But I will still continue to say it. I can only hope that the momentum I managed to sustain for three years continues over the next few as well.
Children and “traditional values”
I have been meaning to write this since Sunday when I first came across this article in The Hindu via @calamur. Something kept coming up and I kept postponing the post, until I saw this blogpost, which addresses pretty much the same issue. Our children seem to be bombarded every single day with television soaps, cartoons, and even ads that reinforce age-old stereotypes.
Take the first article for instance. Latika Gupta cites three television soaps that reinforce the idea of the docile and obedient bride. I have personally never seen any of the three soaps mentioned, but let me tell you; any soap that reinforces and promotes unconditional and blind obedience is bad. When Latika Gupta talks about the little girl refusing to meet her eye and behaving like a conventional “nayee bahu”, it’s deeply saddening. This might be a one-off incident, certainly. But, it is still distressing to see little girls wrapped up in “ghunghats” and veils, pretending to be coy and docile.
I remember protesting at D calling me innocent. But, you know what’s worse than innocent? Being obedient. Why is obedience such a virtue? IHM mentioned in a comment to an earlier post that she hated the word obedience. I totally get her point. Why are we, living in the 21st Century, teaching our girls to be submissive and docile? Why are we insisting on blind obedience even in this day and age? Would it not be more advisable to teach a girl to think for herself and take the best possible decision, given the circumstances? Would it not be better if we could teach our daughters to be courageous rather than docile? Who knows what challenges lie ahead? Aren’t boldness and courage desirable attributes in a human being, irrespective of gender?
Soaps like “Baalika Vadhu” and “Sajan Ghar Jana Hai” make me want to puke. What values are we teaching our children by not only allowing them to watch soaps that reinforce and perpetrate archaic and completely unacceptable ideals of “Patni Dharma”, but also actively encouraging them to emulate those examples? I simply cannot ignore the gender perspective in this issue. While, as Latika Gupta puts it, little boys grow up wanting to become doctors, engineers, pilots and lawyers, little girls grow up wanting to be nothing more than perfectly traditional, docile, obedient wives? What is wrong with us? Why are approving of this?
Cartoons, aimed specifically at children and playing on channels such as Pogo seem no better than these soaps in television. As Aishwarya says on her blogpost (linked above), the show (Chhota Bheem) has only one major female character in Chutki, who is feminine, docile (useful isn’t it?) and does a lot of art work and housework. Indumati is the second character in the cartoon series that Aishwarya doesn’t mention. It is interesting, and infuriating to read the description of the said characters on the series’ official site. While Chutki is homely, docile, feminine, loves to cook and clean and feed Bheem, Indu is the quintessential damsel in distress. Bheem seems to keep saving her from some danger or the other. What’s worse? Chutki and Indu are rivals in their attempts to win over Bheem’s affections! For goodness’ sake, stop it! The two female characters’ lives revolve around our beloved hero. Whatever happened to their lives? Do they even live it? Or does everything depend on our hero’s approval?
Perhaps the most distressing aspect of such social conditioning via the media is the fact that most parents seem to approve. They seem to think these serials teach them traditional values, never mind if those values are actually stuck somewhere in the 17th Century. Will this ever change?
A perfect Sunday…
…is when it is pouring outside, and you are warm and dry…relishing the world’s best filter coffee and reading a good book! But wait! Wasn’t I cribbing, just a short while ago, that the worst way to spend one’s vacation is holed up at home, stuck indoors because of the rains?
You see, it’s quite simple. Rain has marked every aspect of my life, and every point. I was named after the raga that supposedly brings rain. But, I share a rather ambivalent relationship with it. On the one hand, I love it. I love the freshness of the air we breathe; I love the wet flowers and leaves. I love seeing the colours of nature become so much greener with every spell of rain. To me, rain has always been a blessing. Every time I do something new, every time I start a new venture, the rains have arrived. My first job, and every subsequent job change, my birthday, my first trip abroad…it rained on each of these occasions; and each of them has been good to me in some way. Rain, therefore, is a benediction. Maybe the fact that I am named Amruthavarshini has something to do with it. Even if I did drop the “Varshini” over the years, to facilitate things; even if I cannot really sing the raga, despite several years of training off and on in Carnatic music.
However, it’s quite irritating when the rains cause massive traffic snarls. It’s even worse when you make plans to go out with friends, go shopping, meet people, or quite simply, spend the day at grandmom’s place. It’s much worse than you can imagine when there is something important happening in office, for which you need to be smartly dressed, but end up getting all wet and looking like a grumpy old lady! It is at such times that I wish there was no rain, that the day was bright and sunny.
But, all said and done…the rains are still like a friend, long-lost, but who will arrive, precisely when you need him most!
Madras…
When I was a kid, Chennai was called Madras. It seems like an eternity since I used the word. I hear so much of Chennai these days that I almost forget how much I resisted the name change when it first came about. The Chennai I remember was a Chennai before the flyover days. These days, all over the city, you either see flyovers, or you see flyovers being constructed. TTK Road, GN Chetty Road, Kathipara…name it, and you have flyovers! What the hell? The beloved city of my childhood is gradually disappearing under a maze of flyovers, grade separators and bridges. So much so that, the original bridges across the Cooum and the Adyar are incidental today!
This morning, fighting morning peak hour traffic on Nelson Manickam Road, childhood memories came flooding back. I remembered how this, now-chaotic, nearly impossible-to-navigate artery was once frequented only by the odd autorikshaw and an occasional 15C. Oh! How can I forget? 15C was a bus route that can only be described as capricious. There was just one bus that plied, back in the early 90s, between Loyola College and Broadway. Yes. You read that right. Exactly one bus. It was supposed to arrive every 3 hours. But, it only arrived when you never needed it. It would arrive, when you were waiting for any bus other than 15C! The driver somehow seemed to have mastered the art of driving a perfectly empty bus even in the most crowded hours of the day. There were days, when tired of waiting for the damned thing, I would take an alternative bus, get off a couple of stops before Mehta Nagar, and walk the length of the road (a good 2 kms) to get home. All this, in the mid-afternoon heat, because school was over at 3, and I was invariably on the road around 3:30.
I remember the days, when armed with a heavy school bag, an empty lunch box and an equally empty water bottle; I would trudge home, wishing I would catch that elusive 15C at least the next day! I remember how taking an autorikshaw back home was such an earth-shattering decision, because using up my weekly dole of 20 rupees would mean I wouldn’t have money to eat samosas in the tiny school canteen! Today, the dilemma I faced over whether or not to take an auto is laughable, to put it mildly.
Snapping back to the present, I suddenly realized that the Madras of old has disappeared as irretrievably as the Amrutha of my childhood. I haven’t stepped into a bus in months, or even years now. The last time I did take a bus from T Nagar, I was so thrilled that it almost felt like I was reliving a part of my childhood. I called practically every close friend to tell them I was taking a bus! Nor do I think or pause before I flag down the nearest auto, at times when my bike is unavailable. There is so much today that I take for granted that I so cherished when I was 11. This reminds me how much people change. How much something can mean to us at one point, and how meaningless it becomes a few years later. That samosas in the canteen, the auto rides, the empty roads, all of them seem like things of the past. It seems today that I lived those times in a dream, or maybe in another lifetime. The city of my birth and childhood has changed beyond recognition.
That said, change is the only thing that’s eternal. I loved Madras then. I love Chennai now. I have lived in a city as beautiful as Paris for two years, and yet, nothing can beat the warmth I feel in Chennai. I don’t know why, but I will probably never be able to get this comfortable with any other city in the world. Maybe because this is home?