WRITING
Writing has been one of my passions since I was a small child. I was an early reader, and now try to frequently submit my work to respected publications. My submissions that have been published are reproduced below.
1947: A Story of Partition
First published by Vagabond Magazine, Brown University on October 29, 2018 (http://vagabondmagazine.org/1947-story-partition/).
August 1947. India has finally triumphed in its 200-year struggle against British rule. People in Delhi rejoice at this new state of being; massive crowds descend upon the streets as Prime Minister Nehru gives his famous midnight address. But India has always been a land of contrast. While people exult in Delhi, it is just the beginning of weeks of heartbreak for the two provinces that have been divided between India and Pakistan – Punjab, and Bengal, where my dida, as the maternal grandmother is called in Bengali, is one among the 62 million inhabitants.
Seventy years later, I sit listening to this tale, clinging on to every word long after it has escaped dida’s lips. She was a little girl at the time of independence, all of ten, when she was uprooted from her home, condemned to make an unknown journey across a land newly divided on religious lines. This home was one tucked away at the corner of a small, quaint village near the city of Dhaka, facing a vast expanse of lush green rice fields. Tall, slender palm trees gracefully arched over quaint houses – thatched roofs sitting atop clay walls. A bamboo bridge offered a pathway over a tranquil creek dotted with a smattering of handcrafted boats. A stone’s throw from the modest house was a pond, that would swell up during the rains, as if an empty glass at a restaurant had just been replenished. Dida smiles tenderly as she recalls the monsoon she learnt to swim, her father thrusting her head into the numbingly cold water of the pond, yelling instructions over the loud splashes of her flailing limbs and her shrill wails.
There are yet more memories – the gently pattering rain outside the window washes them up in dida’s mind. She recounts the one hour walk to school, wading through the water the flooded river had poured onto the dirt path, concocting a delightful mixture of mud to splatter on her friends. Suddenly, she claps her hands, her face lighting up like that of a child opening her dream present under the Christmas tree. She lets out her trademark lilting giggle, and I instinctively draw closer in anticipation of what is to follow. I shortly find myself enthralled by her lively narration of the day she found a small fish swimming beside her, deftly picked it up and promptly threw it at the boys a few paces behind, to be chased all the way home into the arms of her waiting mother. I sit up with a start as I feel drops of water against my own arm, but it’s only the window, slightly ajar. I rise to close it, to keep out the rain.
Dida now proceeds to the main action of her story – the precarious journey across the newly drawn border. She will never forget her father’s face the morning he took the decision, like innumerable others, of abandoning the house he had built brick by brick. There was no time to find a buyer, no time to sell any of the furniture. He must have been at the epicenter of a hurricane of emotions, she says, but not a single muscle flinched on his face. Dida tells me she wanted to hold him tight, for the first time, but her mother was already doing the same to her.
As they bundled together a few belongings and hurriedly moved out – leaving behind countless memories – dida witnessed sights that are forever imprinted in her mind. She has never again seen such a massive congregation of people. The vast sea of humanity expanded for miles on end – children balancing bundles of clothes on their heads, babies placed around the necks of fathers or precariously perched with other siblings in the crowded arms of mothers, men carrying those who had given birth to them and were now too frail to walk. The journey itself was full of so many unknowns; it was not a question of when they would reach their destination, but whether they ever would.
While most who successfully crossed over to India did so on foot, dida says, her father took the brave decision of flying. He didn’t want to risk the loss of another loved one – the premature death of his only brother two years previously from pneumonia, just months before penicillin was available in India, had left a profound impact on him. And so he paid 50 rupees per ticket, enough money to fly from one coast of the US to the other in today’s world, for the relatively safe option of a one-hour flight over the border. This was at a time when he didn’t have the slightest idea about his future financial condition or security. That was dida’s first plane ride, but her overwhelming recollection is of the solitary tear trickling down her father’s cheek – the only time she ever saw him cry.
Once they landed in India, however, the resilience that still characterizes so many Indians, especially in the villages, took over. Dida’s family moved towards suburban Kolkata, the focal point of the influx of refugees from what had just become East Pakistan. Her father took his brother’s old job in a local gun factory. For a while, education drowned in the chaos surrounding dida, but as she tells me with a hint of pride, she made sure to go back to school, and eventually, obtained a master’s degree in botany – a rare feat for women at that time and place. The walk to her new school in many ways felt the same as before, she says. It was, after all, in the same land, differentiated only by human designation.
Listening intently, I remember the previous summer, visiting the house my great grandfather had built from scratch in that rural suburb. It had been introduced to me simply as our ancestral home, but now I begin to truly appreciate its significance – the clay stove on which lunch had been cooked, the wide veranda where we had sat and eaten the delicious food, the vast, fragrant garden out at the back I had explored while the others were sleeping after the meal. I think of the hard work dida’s father had put in to ensure there was food to cook on the stove, money saved to get the veranda built, and small saplings he could carefully tend to which had now grown into mature trees providing relief from the merciless sun. I feel privileged to have experienced not only such an integral part of my family history, but also a story of remarkable grit.
Soon after she has concluded her vivid recollection, I ask dida whether she has ever gone back to that village of her magical childhood. She looks out the window at the rain, by then pouring down in buckets. Your grandpa had booked bus tickets for us once, around twelve years ago, she replies, a touch indifferently. I seek no further details. I sense that she doesn’t want to talk about it, that she doesn’t want to ruin the painting of her childhood with the jarring stroke of a modern paintbrush.
Why India's Cities Should Vote: Civic Engagement in the World's Largest Democracy
Voting is the first step to ensuring elected representatives behave responsibly.
First published by Qrius (formerly The Indian Economist) on September 20, 2018 (http://qrius.com/why-indias-cities-should-vote-civic-engagement-in-the-worlds-largest-democracy/).
In the 2015 Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) election, voter turnout in Bengaluru was 49%. The 2017 Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election saw 55% of the electorate exercise their franchise, while the corresponding numbers for the 2017 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election and the 2016 Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) election were 54% and 45% respectively. These are indeed disappointing numbers, but most do not realise the extent of their significance.
Crumbling or simply non-existent infrastructure is a commonly heard grouse among residents of India’s big cities, largely among the middle and upper-middle class. But it is precisely these citizens who do not turn out to vote on election day. In fact, elections held on Fridays and Mondays often serve as an excuse for urban professionals to plan weekend getaways. One of the basic principles of a representative democracy is that voters actively choose their elected representatives, and these representatives take decisions in accordance with the voters’ interest. The higher the voter turnout, the better the democracy is considered to be functioning, and this is where India’s cities lag.
Most civic problems that city residents complain about come under the purview of the local councillor (sometimes also called the corporator), who is elected in the municipal elections, not the local member of parliament or member of legislative assembly. These basic improvements cannot be top-down decisions; rather, they must come from the grassroots level, whether the demand is for better roads, adequate streetlights or hygienic waste disposal.
There is indeed invariably much more fanfare that surrounds elections at the state and national level. While party preferences frequently determine which candidate citizens vote for, with the larger aim of seeing the leader of the party assume office as chief minister or prime minister, party leanings should not impair one’s vision in local body elections. At the end of the day, it is about the candidate who is the most competent choice for a specific locality. It is not always easy to make such judgements, but taking a little effort to review every candidate before each local body election may bring five years of committed efforts to improve the standard of living as its reward. And it is now not too hard for one to find out more about the candidates contesting an election. The digital magazine Citizen Matters, which also contains coverage on Chennai and Kolkata, curated detailed profiles for every ward in the run-up to the 2015 BBMP election, while the Bangalore Political Action Committee even went to the extent of endorsing candidates.
It is only logical that we should hold our elected local representatives accountable for their actions. The 227 councillors of Mumbai’s BMC, the country’s richest municipal corporation and among Asia’s wealthiest civic bodies, collectively control a staggering Rs 27, 258 crores (the 2018-19 BMC budget). If the recent Mumbai rains which brought the city to a standstill thanks to potholed, caved in and flooded roads are anything to go by, what is happening with this money is anyone’s guess. One would have expected that after the devastating floods of 2005, the BMC would have learned its lesson with the city’s antiquated drainage system.
Every vote counts
As the wards of municipal corporations and municipalities are smaller than Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies, victory margins in municipal elections are, intuitively, also smaller. In the 2015 BBMP election, the Bellandur ward, which saw the second lowest voter turnout, had 65% of its eligible voters registered, numbering 60,459 citizens in total, according to citizen advocacy group Whitefield Rising. Only 40% of these registered voters turned out to vote, a mere 23,925 voters. Even higher was the number of eligible voters who were unregistered, at 33,271. And the victory margin of the winning candidate was 7,691 votes, just 2.7% of the total eligible voters. This was still much higher than the victory margin in 2010, a mere 374 votes.
If this proves anything it is that every vote does indeed count.
Bellandur is an ideal example as the ward is home to a sizeable village and a number of Bengaluru’s upscale residential communities, representing the extreme income inequality seen in many of India’s large cities. In 2015, the 26% of eligible voters who were registered and voted were likely largely from the village, as candidates would find it much easier to pander to their concerns. Judging by the worsening quality of major roads, development work has taken place only in the village, if at all. When candidates know that the big apartment complexes and gated communities will not turn out to vote, it is understandable that they do not allot funds to satisfy the needs of these citizens. The irony is that just a few of these communities have the potential to swing the election in the ward with their collective votes.
Concurrently, it is true that there are many who wish to vote but cannot due to the technicalities involved. A move from one ward to another or to a new address within the ward itself, and misspelt names on voter rolls are common hindrances. Perhaps spending some time on the National Voters’ Services Portal website would be helpful in this scenario. The website includes instructions for new voters as well as provisions to correct entries in the electoral roll and search for election booths and booth level officers, among other features. Relevant forms can be filled out online, after which individual applications can be tracked. Urban residents often take the easy route and voice grievances about their localities with friends and family and on social media, but actually registering to vote and ensuring your name is in the voter list takes some amount of effort, which is the minimum cost one should be able to bear for performing one’s civic duty.
Many, of course, find our politicians to be severely lacking. Indeed, recent election campaigns have seen no mention of pressing issues such as the need to protect the environment, the education of children and the safety of women. However, using these discouraging trends as justification to stay disengaged is no excuse. Civic apathy is a flawed attitude, and will not solve any of our problems. It is, in a way, the citizens’ responsibility as well to make political leaders care for them. Engaged voters will result in engaged political leaders, at least to an extent.
Getting the vote
In its paper on governance and development, the UN System Task Team on the post-2015 UN Development Agenda referred to democratic governance as “a process of creating and sustaining an environment for inclusive and responsive political processes and settlements”. The adjectives “inclusive” and “responsive” are crucial here; only if they hold completely true can India move towards having accountable institutions of governance. This will not only increase efficiency in governance, but will also further levels of social capital, which, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out back in 1986, can lead to crucial economic gains. Exercising one’s democratic right is in everyone’s favour. Not only is it important for material development, but citizen participation also contributes to overall nation building and progress towards an inclusive society.
Naturally, simply getting all citizens of India’s cities to vote will not miraculously solve our problems. There are a countless number of well-known and widely documented issues with the system, from excessive bureaucracy to corruption. There is no one-step solution to ensure that elected representatives behave responsibly. Voting is only the first step, but it is a step in the right direction. We should not underestimate its ability to make a positive difference. Increasing voter participation has been shown to have a positive relationship with Human Development Index scores in India. Democracy is undoubtedly flawed, but what there is no doubt about is the fact that a significant amount of power lies with the people.
As the American magazine editor and theatre critic George Jean Nathan said, “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote”. For the benefit of the country, one can only urge the voters play their part.
A conflicted mind
Growing up, and letting the forest of his mind consume him
First published in The Hindu on April 29, 2018 (https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/a-conflicted-mind/article23710009.ece).
Lately, he has begun to sit at the front of the school bus, with the younger students, in favour of the decrepit back seat and his garrulous seniors. Conversing with these children, he cannot help but think: it was only a few years ago that his eighth-grade class was in this phase of life – like tender buds, eager to bloom, each with its own brilliant colour. How can some wilt away, overwhelmed, while others struggle to bloom, desperately trying to shine in different shades of the same colour? It makes no sense, yet this is the way society has crafted lives for many years now.
He starts to question his own identity. The thought suddenly begins to gnaw him that he is known by most in his neighbourhood courtesy his younger brother’s exploits. One morning, as he is rushing to catch the bus, a little girl’s mom stops him and asks if he could please look after her daughter on the ride to school. She’s not feeling very well. He quickly nods in affirmation, yet there is a problem. The girl’s mother has addressed him not by his name, but by his brother’s. It is probably just a slip of the tongue; however, he cannot bring himself to accept this.
Ms. Chimney no longer baffles him nowadays. Ms. Chimney is the middle-aged woman who lives just opposite his house. She acquires her peculiar title from her unflinching daily night-time routine — at the stroke of midnight, she surreptitiously opens her front door, lights a cigarette, and walks a few paces to her car. She then leans back, gently puffing out rings of smoke into the black sky, her white car gleaming against her body. This is the only time she is seen outdoors. He used to find this woman quite aberrant, sticking out from the rest in her solitude and loneliness. She seems perfectly normal to him now, leading her life just like any other human being.
Once again, that fleeting thought enters his mind. It wasn’t always like this. He wasn’t this kind of a person. He had previously maintained a perceptible identity, right from his days as a chubby, temperamental three-year-old. To this day he vividly remembers imploring his parents to gift him a dollhouse for Christmas, while most other boys his age were zealously pursuing the latest car set. His mom tells him that the week before Christmas he gave their old sofa such a beating with his obstreperous jumps, it was forced into premature retirement.
Eventually, his obstinacy prevailed. Every Tuesday for the next few months, he would gulp down his dinner, not let his mom finish hers, and drag her to the car, so they could drive down to the local toy store and choose the next piece of furniture for his house. Not to forget his favourite colour, purple.
This atypical choice of his had triggered countless debates with his friends, him insisting that there was nothing wrong with boys liking purple, while periodically pushing up his purple glasses and clutching his purple teddy bear against his chest. He rarely finds that zest and passion with which he made that primitive yet progressive argument in him today.
As he mulls over it further, this mental conflict begins to consume a part of him. He lies wide awake in bed at night, blankly staring at the rotating blades of the fan above. The blades of the fan move on and on, however, he can’t seem to do so. His mind wanders back to the days in elementary school, when sleep was his closest companion. When his dad would have to literally lift him out of bed, haul him to the bathroom, place him on a stool and brush his teeth for him.
He hasn’t shaved in weeks. His sister tells him it looks as though he’s lost in a forest. She’s right. He has allowed the forest of his mind to consume him. He stares at his painful reflection in the mirror, and that day in seventh grade flashes before his eyes — when he bizarrely spent a full ten minutes laughing at the first signs of his adolescent moustache.
He turns to look at his sister, as she adds the final touches to her painting. A bright purple kite flies into the sky, into the heaven of freedom. In that moment, he decides to make sure that the string will never snap. In the awakening of one soul lies the rebirth of another, he hopes.
More than just a pretty face
A phenomenon called Emma Watson at UN Women
First published in The Hindu on October 29, 2017 (https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/more-than-just-a-pretty-face/article19940055.ece).
September 2017 marked the third anniversary of Emma Watson’s now-famous HeForShe speech at UN Women. Delivered on September 20, 2014, her powerful oration will hold relevance for years.
Ms. Watson began her speech by coming straight to the point. She sought to project a sense of inclusion through her frequent use of pronouns such as ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘your’. This created involvement among and engagement with the audience right from the outset.
Personal anecdotes were effectively deployed, as she recounted events from her childhood. In fact, her subsequent mention of the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing was a reiteration of the fact that no significant progress has been made in the sphere of gender equality for more than 20 years. We saw Ms. Watson bring out global problems with respect to gender equality through her personal experience. Through these references, she put across universal issues. The anecdote ended ideally, as she mentioned her male friends, ‘unable to express their feelings’. This was the first mention of the problems men face, and laid the foundation for her later elaboration on the subject.
Ms. Watson gave a detailed definition of feminism. Relevant statistics, sometimes chilling, were periodically included. This caused the audience to reflect on both the past and the future. Certain fields that were mentioned, such as secondary education, are very much pertinent to the United Nations. While her discourse was passionate, Ms. Watson established a strong, logical base for all that she said.
Another effective feature of the speech was her use of anaphora. She repeated ‘I think’, ‘If men’ and ‘Both men’ in different sections. These were always followed by one of the important ideas she was putting across — the fact that ‘no country in the world’ can claim gender equality, that men also do not have ‘the benefits of equality’, and that we must ‘perceive gender on a spectrum’. This was a particularly impactful aspect of her speech, ensuring that her key ideas stayed with the audience.
The instances where Ms. Watson directly addressed men — for instance in ‘Men, I would like to take this opportunity’ — also served to persuade. Her measured pauses were immaculately timed, allowing her points to sink in, while her impeccable enunciation played no less a role. The lucidity of the language used enabled the speech to reach out to all sections of society.
An unanticipated change in tone was seen when Ms. Watson brought up her fame as ‘this Harry Potter girl’. As she said, ‘All I know is that I care about this problem’, she equated herself with so many others across the world. She stressed on the need for a burning desire within us all if we must impart change.
Throughout the speech, Ms. Watson potently summarised crucial ideas. Perhaps the most impactful line was the one that encompassed the key idea of the campaign: ‘How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?’
Similarly, ‘It’s about freedom’ was short in length, but massive in impact. She ended her speech with a motivational tone reiterating previously stated points — even ‘inadvertent feminists’ can ‘change the world’. Instead of making the task seem daunting, she stressed on how a change in mindset and attitude can go long way. Having so wonderfully used questions throughout her speech, it was only fitting that she ended with another open-ended one, urging the audience to look within.
In today’s world of social media, there are precious few who possess this art of rhetoric, of persuasion. There is something to learn for all of us here, an invitation to tread upon a new unexplored path in life.