Lamps

Two lamps in our bedroom.

Tatanka

An old Tatanka poster on our almirrah.

It’s turning boring now

Indian bloggers seem to have an insatiable urge to berate The Times of India, which they love to call The Slimes of India. It was a bit amusing in the beginning (years ago, that was) but now it really gets on my nerves. Not that The TOI enjoys a patronage from yours truly — in fact it is shame of a newspaper — but it has become a sort of a fad to mock at it. In this post another blogger takes a swig at a particular coverage. I read the same coverage, I saw the same photo in The Asian Age but nobody seems to have observed it, or if they did, it has been conveniently overlooked.

The worst newspaper according to me is The Hindustan Times. Combine it with The Outlook magazine and they’re the twin mouthpieces of the Congress (i) party.

Talking about social work

There was a time when I was actively involved with various NGOs, and to be frank, at that time my life had no solid direction. All my ideas were in the pipeline of speculation and circumstance. Since my special school too was being run by an NGO (in fact, it is itself an NGO as a whole), many people there suggested that I should join the organization. Even during various workshops and conferences people suggested that I could be a useful “activist” given my enthusiasm and communication skills. At some instances the suggestions seemed very appealing.

But I had some other plans. Sure, I did want to do something meaningful — I do want to do something meaningful — but I was dead against joining this organization or that organization merely because it’s hard for me to work under bureaucratic supervision. NGOs in India are tightly controlled bodies. Some of them ARE doing exceptional work I must say, but most become the ego oils to massage the governing body members. Even small projects take months and even years to take shape because they have to organize tens of meetings even to arrive at trifle decisions. I’ll give a small example.

Most of my former classmates are severely disabled. Once they left the school, their contact with the outside world was totally cut off. Even their families didn’t make much effort to initiate some sort of social activities for them. The situation became so bad that almost all the students who were confined at home developed suicidal tendencies. Me and a few more friends who were living active lives (attending colleges, doing odd jobs) tried to organize periodic meetings. Since none of us was earning much, we could not bear the transport cost even if the school authorities allowed us to use the school premises. No parent came forward, no parents came forward. We repeatedly requested to the school authorities (since it’s an NGO working for the physically challenged) that monthly transport be provided to these ex-students so that they could come and meet each other, but they didn’t agree. Now, the laughable thing is, the same authorities used to organize monthly bhajan sessions (where the congregations sing religious songs and scandalize sundry gods) for whoever wanted to attend and provided free transport to whoever wanted to come. Nobody could explain this aberration to us. Since our principal at that time was deeply religious, they could arrange funds to organize bhajans but not to organize the meetings of the ex-students.

Such things are rampant in various organizations. Projects are not assigned to people who can really execute them but to those who have a good rapport with the decision makers. I’ve lost count of the websites I have made for individuals and companies, and for years I’ve been expressing my desire to build my former school’s website free of cost. The last time I heard of it, the task of developing the website had been assigned to an obscure person in the USA. No domain has been booked, not a single page has been posted. Ok, I’ll try once again :-).

If you put your heart and soul into your work, then it becomes hard to survive in this money-driven world. You can’t earn much if you work for an NGO. We used to joke that only those women work in the NGOs whose husbands or fathers are rich. To an extent it is true. People, whether men or women, who work for NGOs often have to supplement their incomes with on-the-side jobs like doing tuitions or being part-time consultants. I was never made for such a lifestyle. I want to associate with a cause, but I also want to purchase the latest gizmos. Whenever I have kids I want them to have the best of what the world can offer. I don’t want my wife to ever worry for money in case we need it during an unforeseen emergency.

I can never imagine myself living in a one-bedroom flat; sipping tea in 5-star conference, talking to a chiffon-saree clad socialite about how I helped a villager open a telephone booth. That’s why I shrug away from people who remain unemployed while getting involved with various campaigns. I’d rather work on my own. To improve other lives, I must first improve my own life. A lamp cannot light other lamps if it does not have a flame.

The change at my alma mater - I

The only thing constant in this world (or rather, the entire universe) is the occurrence of change. Change always happens, whether we like it or not. A few days ago I visited my old school (a “special school” where people with cerebral palsy studied and got various therapies). Once we were so attached to it that both teachers and children felt that any student could walk in any day, whether he or she were presently studying in the school or not, and fall asleep in any corner of the school, feeling totally at home.

There are so many strangers there that I no longer feel like visiting the place. Every second eye-to-eye contact seems to be asking, “Who are you, why are you here?”

And this is the place that holds, among many bricks, a brick in its foundation that I had laid. The feeling is overwhelming sometimes.

The place brims with new, strange (but bright) faces, and very few old people are left. When I say old, I mean people who had been there for a few years when I left the school in 1986. As the old receded into their time warps, an emergent breed of the new took over the reigns and brought about many changes. The biggest change was perhaps, decentralization of the rehabilitation process.

We all thrived in a protective environment when I was there. There was minimal interaction with the outside reality which is harsh and competitive. At all stages we were protected, we were lead, we were given directions, we were constantly advised (to the extent of being looked down upon) and it was constantly fed into our minds that we’d always need a protective environment, a special environment, to be able to survive in this world. We were the lesser ones, and the feel was so overwhelming that you can still perceive it in the school’s environment. The result: most of my classmates are still spending their lives at home, totally isolated, totally obfuscated.

In the new scheme of things, students, at their early ages, are encouraged to join the “normal” (it’s so difficult to define what’s normal) schools so that they can grow up in a competitive environment and learn to not only survive, but thrive. Even the main building is being used to run a primary school that is open to students with all kinds of abilities and disabilities. More stress is put upon the community based rehabilitation because this is where eventually an individual ends up and lives his or her life. One cannot remain in the school or in an institution forever. Awareness campaigns are being run amidst the normal schools and lots of policy changes, both at the institutional levels and the government levels are being initiated to encourage schools to accommodate students with different or extra needs. The good news is, many schools are readily taking in students with special needs.

As it happens with every change, there are some people, mainly the older ones, who don’t like the changes, and who lament, perhaps rightly, that the environment has grown too impersonal. An old acquaintance who works there rued, “The place is not like the way it used to be at our time. People don’t care for each other now.”

I met the old Nepali guard, Bahadur, who came to our school when we were kids. Now he’s being retired. He doesn’t want to leave and go back to his village in Nepal where he has no work. Besides, he has given the better, the stronger part of his life to this school, and now when all his children are married; he wants to spend his days here, in the school. He looks healthy, and he loves the place. I think he should be allotted a permanent room (many people use the school property, after all) where he can spend his days comfortably even when he cannot actively be a guard. He’s spent almost 23 years in the school and this is the least the new school administration can do for him. I’m sure he would have stayed had there been some older people in the administration. Similarly, a few months ago I met an old maid who had been given a very unfair deal by the school. Being professional and all is fine, but these people have really worked hard here and loved us when we were small.

I’ll continue…

Our Atta trip

Alka had to go to the hospital for her regular check-up so we thought, why not go to Atta (a market in NOIDA, UP) after that, from where Alka needed to buy a few homeopathic medicines and I wanted to buy a USB mouse for my laptop. Here are a few pictures I took while Alka shopped around and I waited in the car.

This picture I took while Alka had gone to buy the medicines. It is full of wires.

This is the second picture at the same place but without the wires.

Since there was no parking place there, we ended up parking the car at a random place, and while fiddling with the camera, I noticed this board :-). I constantly looked around for a tow-away crane but fortunately it didn’t appear.

This baby banyan tree was in front of the complex where Alka went to purchase my USB mouse. Banyan trees grow to massive proportions so I wonder how the congested complex will accommodate it after a few years.

This time we parked at a safe parking place.

An afternoon - 1

I‘ll be publishing a series of afternoon photographs I’ll be clicking when everybody in the house sleeps. This is my favorite summer time…quiet afternoons.

I heard a few sparrows chirping and squirrels squeaking so I went outside with the camera. The best time to click them is in the mornings when they come to feed on Alka’s bajra and small pieces of left-over fruits that she leaves for them amidst the plants. They disappeared by the time I settled myself with the camera.

I’m currently using Sony’s handycam that my father brought last Diwali. I’m planning to buy my own digital camera that would be a 4-5 mega pixel piece. This current one is not that sharp. I have a camera in my mobile phone but that too is something I don’t feel satisfied with. But until I buy my own digicam, I’ll be clicking a few shots with these two available devices.

This is the beehive I talked about when I wrote about a bee dying in the mud while I sat outside feeling a bit sad. It’s a big hive. The honey-collectors have knocked at our doors many times but we always refuse to let them destroy the hive and squeeze out the honey.

This is a very old chair we’re about to dispose off. Actually it should have been taken away and I wondered why it was still lying there.

These are the recently blossomed branches of a tree near our house.

Somehow the handycam was clicking three times for one shot, and hence, was capturing three images each time. There were some other photographs already on the memory stick, so I couldn’t click more. Next time.

About Gandhi

Note: I had planned to post this on the sixth but somehow got mixed up with the dates.

Sometimes I receive a letter from an incessant Gandhi hater. Some points that he makes do make sense because I believe no matter what level of genius a person attains, no human is perfect on this planet. Gandhi had negative aspects, but his positive aspects overshadowed his negative aspects by a massive margin.

Take for instance the Dandi March (the Salt Satyagrah) that Gandhi organized to protest against the absurd salt law that prohibited the Indians to make salt on their own land. This was really stupid, and a typically colonial law that Gandhi used as a tool against the British authorities. Defying the salt law was just a metaphor. It did something that the gun-wielding revolutionaries couldn’t do — it brought the entire country under one banner, it united people. It was one of the cleverest political moves the world has ever witnessed. It was an anti-establishment PR exercise of the greatest calibre. The international media covered it and got to witness the brutality of the colonial rule and that was perhaps the objective behind the whole exercise — to show the citizens of the country and to the rest of the world how crude the colonial rule had become. The Satyagrah set in motion a chain of events that eventually lead to the ouster of the British.

Gandhi is not relevant today, they say these days. Some even go to the extent of saying “Majboori ka naam Mahatma Gandhi,” (the other name for helplessness and meekness is Mahatma Gandhi) because of his non-violent ways. I think some philosophies are ageless, and they are always relevant. The policy of non-violence is more important today with increasing terrorism and wayward powers like the USA. After all what does violence achieve? An ability to inflict more violence? Where does it end then? If we live according to the ideology of “an eye for an eye” then soon the whole world will be blind, according to Gandhi. And non-violence doesn’t mean meekly submitting to violence. It means standing up to it and facing it. Non-violence means not using violence to satisfy your own needs and greed. There is a very beautiful line of poetry written by Guru Gobind Singh (the tenth Sikh Guru) that says:

Jo lade deen ke het
Sura sohi

that translates to, The one who fights for the oppressed is the brave one.

We live in materialistic and display-oriented times: if you have wealth, show it; if you have power, show it; if you have knowledge, show it. Wisdom is lacking, and so is patience. That’s why non-violence simply means to today’s people, a lack of power, a paucity of valour — it is either kitsch or uncool for them.

Non-violence doesn’t mean a feeling opposite to war and destruction. Gandhi stressed more on eliminating the inner violence, the violence within that torments our souls and makes us hate or judge our fellow human beings and animals harshly. Our inner violence turns us into demons. Gandhi propagated thoughts of non-violence against that violence.

Ethics of doing business

Today I saw in the newspaper a photograph with a caption: Cruel colors of Benetton. It was accompanied by a news regarding how Benetton gets sheep wool from Australian farmers who treat their sheep cruelly. Since I come across many businesses and collaborators, I constantly need to think whether I should be doing business with these individuals or not. I don’t have very strict guidelines for myself — currently I’m working on a website whose webmaster plans to sell porn CDs from there. But I have strong issues with people who maltreat animals. A few months ago I severed my business ties with a person who had gone on a hunting safari (I couldn’t care less if hunting is legal in his country).

We were chatting and he boasted, “During my recent hunting vacation I killed 3 deers.”

I was disgusted and my hands froze. Although we were discussing a big website project (website for a diamond mine in Africa) and the deal could have meant lots of money, I couldn’t have done it at the cost of my self-respect. It would have been below my dignity to collaborate with a person who kills animals for leisure or fun.

I have never regretted that decision and a few more decisions like that.