Ladybug's field notes

I would start this write up with a mail that I had once written to The Telegraph in response to a column by a certain Ms Singh who ridiculed the idea of tribe groups protecting forests. She compared forest dwellers'claiming the land they have been living-in, with Waqf board claiming Taj Mahal. Laughable as it may seem now, for me, who was then working with the groups that were fighting for the passage of Forest Dweller's bill, it was enough to sit down and write a scathing letter to the editor and my boiling blood (which is colder by 10 years now!) made me make two "personal" comments. I said probably the author's limited exposure to the tribal and forest villages had led her to believe forests can not be protected in presence of human inhabitants living there whereas history shows in India, communities were brought-in, to protect forests (Van Tongiys for example). And I made a reference to her privileged upbringing. The editor of the news paper thankfully omitt...

We grew up in an industrial township. My life has been my field of learning (and unlearning) in that way. My father worked as a laborer in a steel factory. No. He was not an officer. He was a steel factory worker. It would not have been so much fun otherwise. Officers had ground floor bungalows, separated from others' bungalows by boundaries. We grew up with other steel factory workers' children. They were our brothers, sisters, friends, love interest and idols. Imagine a whole world made up of steel factory workers and their families! We   all had the same two room flats known as "quarters". We had two rooms; the "inside room" (bhetorer ghar) and the "outside room" (bairer ghar). The household often poured outside these two rooms. Backyard gardens of the ground floor quarters were used to store coal for fuel. Stairs going to the roof used as shoe-racks for two quarters on the second floor. When I fell in love with the boy next door, I used to...