At her blog Alka asked here:
Why Taslima Nasreen shouldn’t be granted political asylum in India? On what ground her plea should be rejected?
There have been many responses to her question at her blog in the comments section. Since I didn’t want to post a big comment there, I’m posting my thoughts here as a blog entry.
I don’t know much about Taslima Nasreen. I only know that she wrote Lajja and got into trouble with the religious zealots of her country. Some have asked why in the first place she has asked India for asylum and not some other country? The question is not why she has asked India for political asylum, the question is, given that she has asked, should she be granted one?
Objectively, no, principally, yes. No, because as it has already been mentioned, we have plenty of our own problems (but then what country doesn’t have problems?). It could be that she creates trouble in her own country, flees from there, asks for asylum, it is granted, and she lands up with a sack full of problems such as fidayeen attacks on her as well as on us. Hornets’ nests and jehadis should better be left untouched.
Yes, because, if she is a good writer, then she adds to our intellectual wealth. Why should the west get all good writers? And after all, Bangladesh was once a part of our country so the language and culture is not totally alien. She could as well have been a Bangla writer.
Another thing, it’s high time we came out of our mentality of “it’s not bad unless it hits us” and acted proactively. Are we such a weak nation that we cannot provide security to a writer who is fighting for her freedom of expression? It is true, as Shirin Ebadi mentioned in an interview, one should fight from within the home turf, but then, sometimes the individual is the flag-bearer of the fight and hence needs to be protected to facilitate the unhindered progression of the fight. If Taslima Nasreen is a crusader against the despotic mullahs of her country, then she deserves full support from all quarters. Our government should rise above petty politics of minority appeasement and grant her the required asylum of nothing else, then just to drive home a point.
When the next meal is uncertain, it sometimes seems a bit insolent to ask the poor parents to send their wards to school, especially when these children can be engaged in work that can bring in some money to the family. But what if education means money?
This post at A Time To Reflect talks about a wonderful scheme aptly named Pardada Pardadi Educational Society. This report here says that every girl child shall be paid Rs. 10 everyday for attending school. The amount is deposited into her account that she can withdraw once she has completed her Xth class. Now, this can be an enormous amount for a poor girl and can pave way for either further education (if the family doesn’t squander away the money) or some small business that can generate employment possibly for the entire family: the possibilities are limitless.
Sam Singh, 65, set up this innovative scheme in 2000. He says along with academic education, the girls also receive skill-based education so that by the time they grow up, they’ll be able to fend for themselves. Such an education also solves dual purpose. It will generate the needed cash. Things manufactured by these girls during their training-cum-education will be sold, and according to Sam Singh, every girl should be able to generate a business of worth Rs. 30 per day. This ensures that they regularly receive their Rs. 10 without incurring great cost to the society. Sam Singh, tussi great ho! 
Yesterday, or some other day, I read about a TV VJ who said she wanted to be “rich and famous.” Although it is not the statement of the millennia, it made me think what I want to be: rich, famous, or both? Most people want to be both. And it is interesting to note that people who often say they want to be rich and famous never mention what they actually want to be. Fame and riches are just by-products of what you are, what you do, and who you are. But that’s another subject.
If Destiny says I can either have money or fame (and never both) I’ll definitely go for money. I’m not interested in getting my name in the annuls of history, or to use another expression, I don’t want to leave my footprints on the sands of time. Who cares down 10 years after my death if people remember me or not? Van Goth blew his head off in extreme poverty and now his paintings fetch millions for their owners. People do PhDs on Kafka and he lived a life of abject dejection. I mean, fame is good as long as it fetches me contentment and comfort in my lifetime, not posthumously. Even if money doesn’t provide me contentment and comfort, at least it empowers me. Money has great power whether people like it or not. Only fools are unhappy on the davenport of wealth and most of the money-related misery is brought upon by the actions of those who cannot handle money or who nurture a guilt for having it.
Fame sometimes brings money too, and I’m not averse to that kind of fame. You see, just as money can foster fame, fame too can open the floodgates of money. For instance, as a famous writer, it’ll be easier for me to get lucrative book deals. If I’m famous, people will be more eager to do business with me, who otherwise won’t be much interested in dealing with a non-entity. Many famous people write miserable books and many famous painters paint awful paintings but still they wallow in obscene amounts of money just because of their fame.
But if there is no choice and I can only have money, I’ll have money and spend the rest of my life in the lap of luxury, smug in the feeling that I and my family are financially secure.
Yesterday I worked the whole night, and in the morning when I opened the outside door, a dim grey, rainy and windy morning welcomed me. It was not like the normal breeze that we usually have on pleasant days, it was squally. Had not there been rains in the recent days, such a wind could have caused a dust storm. Considering the sultry weather we have had for almost a month, this was like heaven pouring down in small droplets. The same weather would seem lugubrious in winter. Oh yes, it’s been raining like hell, at least where we live. My parents called from Abu Dhabi because someone told them Delhi was getting flooded just like Mumbai. The only thing it is being flooded by is the severity with which we have traffic jams. They occur at the drop of a hat. An auto-rickshaw with a burst tyre and lo! there’s an hour long, and a 5-kilometer-long traffic jam. Traffic jams happen, at least in Delhi because people are not only dumb here, they are also terribly selfish — too selfish for their own good. More on this on some other day.
We had to go to NOIDA in the evening to pay an important bill (telephone bills are so damn important!) and drop an important cheque. We decided to take the toll road via Ashram to avoid the perilous potholes on the old Yamuna Bridge. In normal days it takes us around 15 minutes to reach the Ashram crossing. Today it took more than an hour; there was a litany of traffic jams. By the time we reached the toll bridge it was completely dark, it was pouring like bucket loads and Vasu had started crying. I totally forgot for a few minutes why we were going to NOIDA. A casual drive of an hour had grotesquely metamorphosed into an ordeal of three hours or so. I desperately started wishing we were home. On top of that the visibility was nearly zero. The smart Delhi drivers never lower their headlights, so they hit you like nuclear explosions over the misty wind-shield. On our way back we decided to come by the Yamuna Bridge despite the potholes. And of course our cook hadn’t turned up. After leaving Alka and Vasu home I went to fetch some food with the driver. It was again raining heavily and the asperity of the wind had turned a bit alarming.
I waited inside the car while the driver went to fetch food. Before that I had asked him to roll down the windows because I wanted to feel the wind. I had not anticipated that I would feel a storm instead. There were not many people on the road, but the ones who were there seemed to be oblivious of the gusty weather. Two girls were returning home after purchasing something from the Archies shop. A hawker was roasting corns on the other side of the road. There was a group of 3-4 people standing in front of the roadside telephone booth. A very corpulent man in his mid-twenties was standing in the middle of the road waiting for someone, unmindful of the traffic that whiz-passed him from all directions. An executive type stray dog rushed off to some important errand looking prim and stern — all my efforts to attract his attention went vain.
On the left where we had parked there was a tea seller under a giant plastic sheet that was tethered to various lamp posts and tree branches. The impetuous fluttering of the sheet exacerbated my fright further while the tea seller sipped his tea with an astonishing sangfroid. Not only that, two boys came dawdling from somewhere, purchased two steaming cups of tea and sauntered back in the same manner, giving two hoots to the wind and rain that were pummelling the planet around us. Was I the only one unnerved? And sure there was a reason to feel a bit edgy. The wind was so strong that the raindrops were flying almost parallel to the road and that meant they were hitting at the back of the car like tiny bullets and my car had begun to shake ominously.
Amidst all this mayhem a man approached me and very politely asked, “Can you please tell me the way to Nehru Place?” I couldn’t believe my ears when he asked that, I couldn’t believe my mouth when I explained to him the way, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I actually saw him kick-starting his two wheeler and heading in the direction of Nehru Place. Is he mad or something, I thought, at 8:30 pm, in such a storm, he was going to a commercial area where 80% offices are shut for the day?
Anyway, the tea seller and his giant plastic sheet seemed like mocking at me. He kept having tea all the time. I noticed there was another very old, ragamuffin woman sitting with him, similarly sipping the tea. The sheet fluttered with greater intensity and soon the only sound I could hear was that of the wind. The driver came back with the food packet after almost half-an-hour. He was totally dry, given a few drops here and there, and I wondered where he had been standing all that while. On our way home we had to zigzag through various uprooted trees.
Warning: It’s a long post.
An old reminiscence was bestirred from its sleep when I saw Baba Amte’s photograph on the first page of this month’s Reader’s Digest issue.
Although I was in the hub of almost every activity in the school, I always felt alienated by a few teachers. It’s not that all the teachers were like that, but as it happens, I craved for attention from teachers who always ignored me. May be they didn’t like my gregarious nature because they always favoured students that were reticent and not as hard working as I was. Anyway, the point is, this thing, their seemingly orchestrated ignorance of my presence, weighed heavy upon my subconscious, and this heaviness stayed with me as long as I stayed in that school. Later on when I joined another school I realized people actually liked me.
Reverting back to Baba Amte. Once he came to our school and delivered a speech in the assembly room. Four children were selected to say a few words in the honour of the baba. We were supposed to have done some research on him before coming to school that day. My speech was replete with humorous anecdotes and drew maximum applause and laughter during its delivery. The others were formal and clichéd and people clapped just for the sake of ceremony. But they did something that I didn’t do: they touched his feet after their respective speeches. I didn’t, for two reasons: I don’t like this gesture of touching feet, and I didn’t know him so closely as to touch his feet. It doesn’t mean I didn’t respect him. There was no humility in their gesture, they were either just conditioned that way, or they did it just to seem nice. They hadn’t studied about him and whatever they had spoken they had garnered from the teachers and from whatever I had read of him in various magazines and newspapers.
I nurtured great admiration for Baba Amte and for all he had done for the leprosy patients. I considered him very brave and heroic and even idolized him while I was reading about his various feats in the leper ashram. Very few people in the world have the audacity and determination to follow their heart’s call.
He made those three kids sit with him (due to a back problem he could only stand or lie) and chatted with them very affectionately while I stood nearby. Everybody in the assembly room eagerly tried to listen to what he was saying to those kids. This steered bonhomie went on for 5 minutes, and then all the four of us went back to our seats. This incident left an indelible mark of hurt inside me. I have always wondered why he talked to those kids while I stood there quietly.
After a few months there were wide-spread floods in the country. Baba Amte was collecting clothes and other stuff for the submerged villagers and our school too participated in the effort. I collected lots of clothes and bed sheets from home and my neighbours and on a chosen day we all went to his camp near, perhaps the Red Fort — I’m not sure — in the school van with all the collected stuff. Baba Amte laid on a raised platform while a few villagers sat around him. As soon as he saw us, he called those same three kids, by their names. All three of them went running to him, touched his feet and then sat beside him while he chatted with them. Everybody looked at them with great affection and pride. Ironically, those three kids had brought nothing with them. Although I didn’t mind much this time because I had joined a group of villagers who were singing folk songs and I would rather sit with them, a shadow of sadness hovered around me all the time we stayed there.
I detected the same pattern as the one in those teachers and for a while I thought, well, may be there was something very wrong in either the way I looked, or in the manner I conducted myself. Or may be I tried too hard to be what I was, or what I was not. May be I always seemed artificial and it was written all over me and this made me look like a three dimensional specimen of a walking and talking artificiality. So I tried to be what I was, or what I was not, but the pattern of their collective behaviour remained unaltered. Fortunately, I left the school just when I was about to lose the last remaining fragments of self-respect that were left in me.
In the new school I became an instant favorite not because I was “special” but because I did well in my class and helped my classmates in their studies. For the first time I realized that being good and being smart at a few things was not that bad and this didn’t reek of artificiality.
Knowing English matters a lot in a government school, and my vocabulary was far better than our English teacher’s vocabulary had remained stuck for many years in the contents of our English text books. Instead of resenting my grasp he would often praise me. My other skills, that had been hitherto suppressed in the old school just so that the other kids wouldn’t fell “less able”, blossomed too. I started singing in the school functions, I helped them prepare their dance performances (I cannot dance but I have a sense of what looks good on the stage) and I worked on drama scripts. The same happened in the college. I was so much liked there that in the second year there was some talk going around that I would take part in the college elections, which was of course no where in my mind.
It’s been a long time now. For the discussion’s sake, I’ll just mention those three kids who were the darlings of the teachers who ignored me and who earned a special place in Baba Amte’s heart by touching his feet. If there was ever a circle for them, life for them has come back full circle, and they are still there where they were when they were kids, even after studying in elite schools and colleges (of course, thanks to those teachers). I never bore a grudge against them and in the school we were all friends, and it hurts me to say that all three of them are still at home, without friends, without jobs, without siblings (all the siblings got married), without a social life, without a passion, without any future plans, and without those teachers. They live boxed lives, totally dependent on their phobic, dictatorial parents without whose permission they can’t even step outside their houses, forget about go somewhere and meet someone. Their lives are in an interminable limbo.
On the other hand, for me, life couldn’t be better. I just became the proud father of a beautiful baby girl. Alka and I are perpetually in love — despite our myriad ideological differences our love grows with every passing day. I have a stable career as a web content writer that fetches me more than good income. I have some great, lifelong friends. I get so much adoration from people around me that it sometimes becomes overwhelming. My work and my future plans keep me busy all the time and it is hard for me to go to bed at night just thinking of all the things that need to be done the next day. I wanted to write and now I earn a living writing. I wanted to learn singing and now I have a great guru (oh yes, he is nagging sometimes) who teaches me Hindustani classical music. I always wanted to have a family of my own and now I have the greatest family in the world. There are so many things I want to do, there are so many things I want to achieve, and I’m happy to claim that I feel empowered to pursue my goals. What more can I ask for? Ok, a lot, but that’s another story.
Somewhere I feel, the attitudes I was confronted with, somewhere, even if at a micro level, made me what I am today. Again and again I had to prove my worth, and there was never a thing called a free lunch. For even small things I had to wage big wars. This made me self-reliant and instilled in me a sense of struggle and without realizing it became a habit. So in a sense, I’m indebted to those who purposely or inadvertently ignored me or prevented me from attaining my potential in the early days of my youth. By constantly making me feel as if I was at a wrong place among wrong people, they were paving the way for a brighter future for me. Thanks to all of them! Really.
Where there are raindrops it got to be wet.
This Skype News caption betrays the reality, but there is one correction needed here. Given the might of the USA, he could be the worst disaster to hit the world, given his fanatic closeness to the oil industry.
The best sunset that I ever shared with someone was my friend Ananth. Now he lives in Bangalore with his wife. We were over the Safdarjung flyover heading towards Lodhi Colony when he stopped the car and pointed towards the setting sun. It was beautiful.
The best rains of course I have shared with my wife, Alka. I remember one night (I have written about it previously) at 1 o’ clock when it was raining hard, we decided to go out and stand in the rain. It was totally dark. Small remnants of light fell on the glistening leaves that were mercilessly being bombarded with big raindrops create an overwhelming, rainy sound. We stood there quietly in close proximity, without uttering a single word.
The best awake nights, again I have spent with Alka, both working, fighting (they were not spiritually uplifting, but they were great things in terms of learning to understand each other). I remember when we had set up a new hosting business. The whole night we’d discuss various things, organize client list, design advertisements and formulate promotional messages. We shut down the business after incurring a loss, but those nights were really blessed and I’ll always cherish their memories.
The best mornings I have spent with my sister, Dolly. We developed this habit of watching cartoon films in the morning while having breakfast. Soon it’ll result in both of us bunking our classes — she her school and me my college. If it were not a cartoon film, we would put on some old children’s’ film and watch it. She loved making elaborate breakfast and we having it in front of the TV.
The best quiet moments, with my dog Suzy. She’s dead now. For hours we both would sit outside, in the back garden of our house. Occasionally she would snarl or bark at the passers-by or wag her tail at the birds, but otherwise we always had this tranquil atmosphere that we both didn’t like to disturb. Sometimes I whispered to her and she would roll her eyes towards me, with her entire body — from chin to tail — flat on the ground. I have never been able to talk to anybody the way I used to talk to her.
The best arrivals used to be that of my sister and her two bubbly kids. Since our father has been working abroad for more than 30 years, me, my two sisters, and our mother were very close to each other. So when my elder sister got married and left the house, all three of us used to miss her. Her arrivals were always long awaited. And then came her kids and they became a natural, integral part of our circle of warmth. They would arrive like tiny droplets of joy, ringing the doorbell excitedly, saying things to each other while waiting for the door to open, peering inside from over the main gate.
The best afternoons, so far, I guess were with my mother. No, not exactly with her; I have very fond memories of those silent summer afternoons when she slept while I read a book or browsed through a magazine, waiting for her to wake up. There were long periods when only the two of us were present in the house. The buzz of the fan, Suzy licking her emptied bowl, sparrows chirping outside, occasional automobile horns, white aura of the sunshine coming through the curtains and filling the room with a chimerical glow, it is all etched in my mind as fresh as yesterday’s memories.
The best drives were the ones when I used to go to see Alka before marriage. She used to live in NOIDA. She used to give home tuitions. For a whole month, almost everyday I used to pick her up from various places, or from her own rented apartment. The drive to NOIDA was full of anticipation, and from NOIDA, a sense of contended happiness that a person who loves you so much is right there with you and life ahead seems so joyful.
I’ll write more.
According to this new revelation the book Oliver Twist was inspired by the story of a real boy named Robert Blincoe, who
at the turn of the 19th century spent four grim years in the workhouse before he was packed off to a cotton mill - with more abuse, regular beatings and hours of back-breaking work.
So far the Dickens scholars have been thinking that Oliver was an imagined character. I haven’t read the book but have heard a lot about it. It is somewhere in the house and I’ll read it soon, as I intend not to leave any of Charles Dickens’ books unread.
Oh yes, I have, at long last, finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. I’ll soon post a blog on this book. Currently I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Misreadings which is an anthology of his works published in magazines or newspapers. Most stories/essays are humorous and satirical. For instance, the first story, Granita is a caricature of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita that I read a couple of years ago, and will read it again to be able to write a blog post on it. Contrary to professor Humbert’s obsession with young nornettes, the character in Granita is erotically obsessed with octogenarian, salivating, toothless grannies (hence the title, Granita). I kept reading many passages to Alka amidst her disgusted protestations complimented with abundant laughter. The book has been gathering dust on the shelves for years. When I first started reading it, I had to stop because the language was too tough for me. I’ll write more about it upon completion.
The person here has made $16 million, and is currently making $4 million using some Amazing Secret Information. He or she says that if you too want to be a millionaire in just 15 minutes, then discover the formula that he is selling for $29.95. Just imagine, a person almost on the verge of making a cool 20 million is selling a $29.95 e-book, to make money? I don’t know. Why isn’t he or she offering this information free of cost? It’s fascinating, for, this person has advertised through Google’s AdWords program — I clicked on it while reading my Gmail. Why would a person making millions already do such a business on the Internet? To earn more money?
I know you can say, “Why not?” Earning millions doesn’t mean one cannot sell the formula for $29.95, especially if you want more people to become millionaires and if you don’t want to give the information for free. But this is not the only case. On the Internet you often come across such schemes that promise to make a millionaire out of you while the promoters themselves are already making millions; especially selling the killer reports that you can download as PDF files. Such reports are available for $39.95, $19.95, $21.95, $29.95, etc. (these guys have some obsession with .95). It may be possible to become a millionaire selling these reports, but for that you need to be really successful, and quite famous.
So do I want to be a millionaire in just 3 minutes as this page suggests? Not using this report, at least. I want to be a millionaire, definitely, but I want to earn those millions using my knowledge, my skill, or my art, not by purchasing a $29.95 report of an amazing formula.
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