Ladybug's field notes

A noted lawyer and women's rights' activist visited our office the other day. While leaving she said, "If I would have been a black skinned person from the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s' South Africa and you as a white skinned had told me to be patient about change, almost everyone around the world would have felt I was justified in slapping you hard. But, just because I am a female, you can still hold this unrealistic notion about my level of patience and ask me to wait for the change...forever". I looked down to hide my smile. Here is another impatient one. 20 years my senior and still equally impatient! I have been reminded time and again about this particular virtue. I am quite well known by my characteristic lacking of this one in particular. But then I regularly get data that makes this virtue completely redundant. Lets take the Hindu Succession Act (HSA), 1956   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Succession_Act,_1956 . The Act only recognized m

I feel pretty Hindu at times. More Hindu than most Hindus, who can not tell Surya Mantra from Gayatri Mantra and seven sages from seven ages! Especially when it comes to stories, I feel almost exclusively Hindu. Hindu gods and goddesses and the stories around them fascinate me to no end! I can hear these stories forever and ruminate on them like the holy cow, herself! I hereby proclaim that doubting in my Hindutwa will be doubting the Panchatatwa itself. You don't know Panchatatwa?! Errr..well! Never mind! Lets concentrate on the story. It was the day before yesterday that this god named Bhairav caught my fancy. You can spot a Bhairav temple near the old fort area of Dilli, which is claimed to be from the era of Pandavas of Mahabharata fame. Who is this Bhairav? My driver who is a devotee of this god, could not tell me. My common-sense was saying that this god will be linked to Shiva. Two reasons. Every god with a non-descriptive name is linked to some famous name from the

About 20 km before Baihar we started the real field travel as I had come to understand it by then. We left the all-weather road soon and took all possible form of fair weather roads. Every possible form that you can think of. They presented themselves as two white lines running parallel  with a patch of grass in between, a white serpentine line with thorns and stones on either side on which the jeep's tire had to balance, a white line hell-bent on falling in a ditch and all the other sorts as well. Sun bade me goodbye for the day behind the Baiga houses on a hill-top.  When we started for Harratola, after Chuka-tola it had turned pitch dark . They told that it was about 12-15 km away. By that time of the evening I started realizing that having women NGO workers around does not guarantee sensitive treatment and took a voluntary retirement from looking for it. This bit of the journey that took us an hour could be completed only by Tempo Trax Gama (my dream vehicle) that refuse

Rains make me nostalgic about Odisha. No! Not Mumbai, you snob Mumbaikars! Although you happen to be some of my closest friends, I must say you are way too snob on that and I have taken up this sovereign duty on my shoulders to make sure you learn that there can be non-stop rain in other parts of the country too. And no! "Aala..aala paausaa" is not the only song of its kind.  I spent 4 eventful years in Odisha and learnt names of places that my Odiya friends never heard of . That is among other things I mean. What did you think now?! My work involved travelling to various tribal districts of Odisha which included,  Boudh , Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Rayagada, Nayagarh,   Dhenkanal  and Angul. Dhenkanal is known for its educational institutes and Angul generally reminds people of the big factories including National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) but I saw a different Angul and a very different Dhenkanal. This is a post to share that story. Pallahara Block of Ang

I tried to refer to everyone by their first name. It was my first effort in feudal eastern Uttar Pradesh to challenge the assigned gender-roles and caste ridden social norms. But I could not follow this with R B Palji. His name was Ram Badan Pal. I felt on many occasions that he did not like his name. He never introduced himself with that name. He hence remained, Palji or R B Palji to me whereas everyone else was called by their names. Even the senior most.  When I first met him in a training on "Human Rights and Gender in Development" in 2008, I thought he was a misfit in the group. A well built man in his 40s, he mentioned Pedagogy of the Oppressed within the first few minutes and I said in my mind, "O..o! Here comes a theoretician who would  take the training completely off track!" I admit this today with much shame! But, the situation changed quickly. We stayed in the same campus for 5 days and I got to talk to him. A lot! It helped. And what helped more

"You turned out just like us" Fahmida Riaz's poem does the round in my head at regular intervals. She is a poet from Pakistan and took refuge in India at the time of the rule of General Zia Ul Haq as she stood against the fascist nature of the state. However, in the wake of rightist politics in India that emphasized ancient Indian supremacy she became disillusioned and wrote;  Tum bilkul hum jaisey nikley/ Voh moorkhta, voh ghaamarpan/ Aakhir pahunchi dwaar tumhaarey ( You turned out to be just like us/Similarly stupid, wallowing in the past/You'v reached the same doorstep atlast.) Now I make some changes in the lines..... Pret paise ka naach rahaa hai/ Saarey ultey karya karogay/ Tum bhee baithey karogey sochaa Kaun hai donor, kaun naheen hai/ Ek jaap saa kartey jao/ Sabse badhiya kaam hamara.. ( Your demon [of] money dances like a clown/Whatever you do will be upside down/You too will sit deep in thought,/Who is the donor, who is not/Keep repea

I received a phone call a few days back. The caller described how he has taken a new house on rent in the city he has shifted to. How the preparations were in full swing in the house for arrival of his wife and their only child. How he look forward to the reunion! All normal conversation between two erstwhile neighbors. Only this time it was raising my heart-beat. It was worrying me to no end that the "wife" in question would have to go and stay with this man. The man who was bragging about reunion of family, is a violent man. He called to boast that all my efforts to ensure peace for his wife fell flat. This man who verbally and physically abuses his wife and quite unabashed about it, scares the hell out of me too. Yes. I get scared. The one who is generally referred to as "the tigress" of the family and the neighborhood gets actually scared in the heart of heart. I become scared because I know how low these men can stoop and I also know that I am no match in that

Have you heard this buzz of citizens' responsibility recently in the development sector? Take a careful look at who are ones who talk about them. Who are these people? Which strata of the society they come from? And you may be left wondering why these well-paid, well-fed ( and in my true foot in mouth style, not necessarily well bred, in terms of social manners) people who demolish rights at every opportune/inopportune moment love to talk about responsibility! I grew up in Bengal in the 1980s. Group Theater movement was still very strong at that time. It was actually stronger in suburban areas and industrial townships than in the sahar Kolkata (Calcutta that time). A group named Smarak from Durgapur steel township  was fortunate enough to be mentored by an extremely talented play-write and director named Gopal Das. One of his critically acclaimed play was named, Rakkhos (The demon). In this play, troopers of a circus sang a song "jader roj roj table e sajano thake asto m

After a long and arduous battle to establish that human rights interventions can actually translate into long term quantifiable economic benefits to the community along with larger impact on thought processes ( what-is-empowerment ),   now the new question was whether there should be a community based institution to sustain the empowerment and the efforts towards poverty reduction. A well regarded development sector consultant suggested in the Empowering Rural Women (ERW) program ( setting-it-right-for-generations-to-come ), the natural progression should be towards formation of SHG federations in order to sustain the collectives that were bringing economic benefits to the participating women and their families.I knew, understanding how it worked in the current environment of donor support, he was trying  to save the program the only way he could.  But wait a minute! Were we working towards poverty reduction in the strictest economic terms in the Empowering Rural Women (ERW)

All through the past 14 years of work in the sector, I saw Fellowship Programs (FP) very closely. I remained a staunch supporter of Fellowship Programs both as an insider that is when I worked in an organisation that provided fellowship as well as an outsider that is as part of a donor organisation. I would not go into the details of why we need FPs as there are umpteen discussions around it. If any of my readers want to pick my brain on the subject, I am game! But here in this piece, I would rather focus on fellowships to develop people's organisations. Now here I am taking the proverbial big leap of faith (if you would like) and actually saying that  people's organisations are important to sustain empowerment. And yes I am saying that people's collectives are the long term answers to the "white elephants in their old age" called NGOs. Let me not get carried away here. Lets talk about Fellowship Programs. In this write up I will focus on sangathans (people&#