Ladybug's field notes

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...

More than 500 women reached Lucknow either late evening or early in the morning. They were representing exactly 80,346 women from 36 Blocks and over 660 Gram Panchayats of Uttar Pradesh. After working for more than 4 years in their respective villages and blocks, they now had enough "rehearsal of the revolution" as Sanjoy Ganguly of Janasanskriti (www.janasanskriti.org) puts it! They now wanted the new state government to share their dreams. Their dreams of a new society where the basic rights of poor women are fulfilled.  In Kismati's words, " We are quite confident of being able to tackle the issues of non-implementation of MNREGA (100 days' work) and Public Distribution Systems (PDS) till teh district level. Four years of intense engagement has at least gave us that much confidence. But, we have also learnt that many things move from Lucknow and we are here to move those otherwise unmovable wheels". In Uttar Pradesh, the average number of days achie...

"We are poor when elections are here. When it is time to count the BPL (Below Poverty Line) families, we are not poor at all"! added Anarsi with a sarcastic smile. her simple analysis stumped me! She was explaining how the Gram Sabha (open meeting of the village council) meetings take place. Women in the meeting explained how they protested there against the Gram Pradhan and Secretary smoking country cigarettes ( birhi ) and passing time. They actually asked them to stop fooling around and conduct the open meeting of local self governance seriously. Ramratti was quick to add, "The Secretary then told us, had we been so vocal and upbeat about the Gram Sabha processes, there would not have been so many wrong BPL cards! It was I, who said then..", she emphasized, ".. mere bhai (my brother), I was not there for sure but were you also not there? Was it not your work to ensure the deserving ones get the cards?" (Gram Sabha) These are leaders of Pra...

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...