Ladybug's field notes

In India, the current favourite line is that we need to stick to our roots and take lessons from our past. Our women are becoming too westernised. They want to choose their life-partners and all hell break loose. What can be more "western" than women trying to take the matters of their own sexuality in their own hands! Let's try to go back then. Although I surely realise these are dangerous times to write on these issues, but like Brecht said, what do we sing about if not the dark times, in the dark times. Well! He did not exactly say that. He asked us to keep singing. Here is my song bereft of the apparent music but who knows you may hear Bismillah playing Shehnai for I will talk of weddings (well! sort of) and the rules that guide it in these times.   But let me start from Mahabharata and that too at the very beginning. The Adiparwa when Pandu is talking to Kunti to convince her to get other men to beget children: He says, “In the olden days, we hear,” he begins, “...

Today after a long time I was thinking about our time in Banaras Hindu University (BHU). We had studied there in the mid 1990s. BHU has a large number of hostels for students which made it one of the most sought after university of our times. A time when Kolkata did not have many residential colleges and hence BHU received horde of students. I do not know how it is now. BHU or Varanasi was our first encounter with North India and its culture. In our cities we had faced taunts on the road, catcalls, comments on how we looked etc which was called "eve teasing" in common parlance. I have a problem with this term. It probably does not describe the grave impact it can have on a girl's life. I am relieved to note that others are also finding that expression strange. It is being called sexual harassment. and the #askingforit campaign by Breakthrough  http://www.breakthrough.tv/  has been launched to show the falacy of the term. Coming back to BHU, however, what we faced the...

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 ...

"Untouchability is almost not there in the village now a days. It has really changed! They even let us use the grinding machine at the village to grind our grains too!" Nalita said. I was a bit surprised to hear this from a member of a Hadi* Community in a coastal district of Odisha! Can this be true? Can it be that all the Dalit rights organisations of this state are basically 'focusing only on celebrating victim-hood  and over-emphasizing the “they all oppress us and no one follows the law” psyche', as some colleague mentioned the other day? I decided to probe further. "You are saying that they let you grind your cereals whenever you go?" Binod was almost irritated at this silly question. He said, "No! How can they? We go on Monday before 12 pm. Then they get some time to wash the machine and dry it, so that the others can grind their grains." Who are they? What if it's not a Monday? What if it's beyond 12 PM? I don't have to conv...

Nari sangh, that’s what they call their CBO or sangathan. Each nari Sangh has a separate name and the fascination is evident from the names they selected “ chingari ” (spark), “ bijli ” (thunder), “ sankalp ” (mission) along with names of myriad locally known female deities. Nari Sanghs started forming in villages of eastern UP early 2008. It was a time when the local organizations felt the need of going beyond working with elected women representatives and readying a ground for women’s leadership to emerge in a region now largely bereft of men. Men from this region migrate leaving behind their women to “man” the house and do more. But the social norms expected these women to remain hidden while shouldering these responsibilities. In their families they were to provide food to the hungry mouths and fetch water for the thirsty souls. But they were not to talk about the irregularities in the Public Distribution System (PDS) or for that matter had any say in deciding where the tube-wel...

--> A population of 1.45 million, 598 Gram Panchayats, 9 Blocks and only 3 Block Development Officers (BDOs), one of whom I met recovering from a tell-tale sign of a hangover and lying in his courtyard on a sunny winter afternoon. We reached his office and was quite taken aback by finding him on his cot in the backyard of government quarter instead of the office. I was in Uttar Pradesh  trying to satisfy my curiosity regarding what keeps UP at the bottom in NREGA implementation. Now don’t tell me you do not know NREGA. You will be hanged, drawn and quartered in the present government’s raj if you don’t. After all the current political party in power has beaten and keeps beating every willing and reluctant drum available to announce the program that at Rs 390,000 million has the single largest chunk of allocation and is second only to defense. If you are part of the middle class paying tax diligently like me (just because the tax norms are becoming tighter a...