Ladybug's field notes

"You are a slut! Given a chance you will sleep with every man in the whole neighbourhood!"  "When will you die? Can you tell me when will you die? I can then be at peace for some time?"  "You are so ugly..it is so difficult for me to take you anywhere!"  "You will keep losing your jobs! You don't know how to talk to your own, no wonder you would not know how to talk to the world!"  "You will never become anything in life! I at times wonder if you are our own!" These are just some of the things that children from so called "normal" families have heard and that they vividly remember as adults. Not only that they remember but some of these are repeated when they clash with the larger world and face a challenge. Their families repeat these with a "I told you so..." put in for better effect. If you think of these sentences in isolation, without knowing who said these to whom, you would have asked the receiver of these...

My Clinical Psychologist friend and I often chatted for hours on various concepts of psychology that fascinated me to no end. One topic that we often discussed was low self esteem and fragile self-image of adults. And specifically what havoc they create in other's lives. My friend had told me something during these discussions that stayed with me. She said, "Self-concept is developed by the age of three". You heard me right! And I was surprised too. She said that the child picks up self-image clues by then from her/his environment. Good boy. Bad girl. Ganda bachcha! Pretty. Not pretty. Wanted. Loved. Not wanted. Not loved. Another very important thing about the feedback during these years is that they are on things that you probably have no control over. Most of them are ascribed qualities at that time. You can do little about the sex you belong to, whether you are pretty or not, whether you are born with a foot that need surgery! But you are given constant feedback on...

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 looked at Indira with disbelief! I was shocked but she actually managed to take a deep breath, wait for a few seconds to pass and talk in the same calm voice that she had, to begin with. I looked at the men again. I could not believe I was hearing this, “Women? Well! they are good for nothing now-a-days. They are only good at sleeping beneath fans. And what is this excessive laad (love) for one’s own body? They want to bathe with soap every time!” The men were indignant.   This was in Ajmer district of Rajasthan. We were talking to a group of men in the evening near the village temple. Women could not join the meeting. Completely our fault! We organized it at a time when for the womenfolk it was time to cook and feed the whole family. Children were dozing already after a hard day of playing in the mud. The women would also get ready for the work in the fields at night alongside their men or make some extra arrangements of food and tea for workers in the field, which they wo...