Love Story

When I was in school, in our English portion, we had a poetic love story. It was really sweet one and a huge portion of the class was deeply moved by it. After the poem was done, the class discussed stuff about love, relationships, etc. and our teacher, seeing our interest into the subject asked each of us to write an original love story of our own and then read it out to the rest of the class. I too wrote a story. I do not remember the content of the story properly but I’m sure it was sweet because almost all the females in the class (including the teacher) were like “aww” at the end of the story. A class of ~35 and those many stories, and now, 7 years after that, I remember just one which wasn’t mine. Yes, I do not remember mine but I remember somebody else’s maybe because the content was worth remembering. So, here is that story for you:

John is deeply in love with Maria and is desperately looking forward to ask her out some day. Their only common course is biology and he doesn’t really get much time to be around her, get to know her and ofcourse, eventually ask her. So, he bunks his mathematics class just to follow her because Maria kinda runs away after classes and despite trying a lot, John could not manage to meet her outside Biology. So, he catches her, they talk. They talk a lot. About everything, things they like, things they dislike, their cultures and what not. John felt as if he had found the most perfect match and he could make out from Maria’s behavior that she too is deeply into him. He bought her ice cream, they enjoyed it all the way till Maria’s place came. John asked her if she would like to go for a movie with him and she agreed. A couple of days later, he had his date. Voila! He almost couldn’t believe this was happening. He bought her a beautiful bouquet for that day. On the way to the movie, they talked a lot. John felt as if Maria was the only one with whom he would never run out of topics and he could keep talking to her for eternity. Then it was time for the movie. Rather than watching the movie, he kept watching her. Oh, he was so deep in love!Great movie, great time. After they moved out of the theatre, some guy approached Maria and she said, “Hey Aden, meet my new friend John”, “John, this is my boyfriend Aden!” Inside his mind, John was all like, ‘Oh, she has a boyfriend. Oh, crap!’
A week later, John again bunks his mathematics class, to ask out Julie, just in case!


The moral of the story is Keep Moving! :)

Gifted!

Last weekend, when I was making this journey home from college for navratri with my dad, I was feeling quite low, didn’t show any interest in talking and sat sad. Dad, after easily making out that I was unhappy asked me what happened, I replied, “Nothing.”
“Got awful marks in some midsem or quiz?”
“No.”
“Someone said something? Fought with a friend?”
“No.”
“Then, what happened? Everything sounds so perfect!”
“Nothing!”
Then he went on to explain how people of our generation have developed a complex which just prevents us from being happy. We glorify sorrow and like being sad. Irrespective of whether we achieve or we keep struggling, we always whine about our situation, we keep asking for more and complain to God if we do not get everything. We have just forgotten how to thank Him and people around us for whatever we have. We just look at all that we do not have, and never take pleasure in what we have. I tried to understand what he was saying, threw a light smile but couldn’t just feel good. In a few minutes, I dozed off to sleep.

A couple of days later, at home, I went to visit our maid at her home with mom. She was teaching a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. They were mostly watchmen’s or other maids’ kids. Three of them were there. One was scribbling down Gujarati counting, another was recognizing pictures of objects and writing their names in English and the third was trying some basic addition. Except for the one who was recognizing pictures, the rest were 100% correct in their work. I sat down beside the girl who was writing counting and tried to chat with her. She was friendly! :D
She told me that she goes to the municipality school outside the street and her mom is a maid and dad does some job of transferring furniture stuff from a shop to home on his raali. Her school starts at around 11 in the morning, before that, she does the housework along with her sister while her mom leaves early morning to work. She gets back in the evening by 4 or 5 and directly comes to this tuition after which she goes to home, prepares dinner along with her mom. I asked her as to why she needs the tuition (silly of me, how would a kid know that!) and quite much to my surprise, she answered me! She said that her parents aren’t literate beyond doing some hisaab, and she wants to grow up and become great. She wanted to grow up and become a Chartered Accountant just like the daughter of one of her mom’s employers. Amazing and surprising, so much struggle, at this meager age without any complains! She made me go back to my childhood. At around her age, I would go to school, study some shit, get back and mom would keep a check on what I was studying, I never realized whether I needed that check from mom or not, in the evening, I would go out to play with the colony kids, get back, have dinner, watch some TV and go to sleep. Since mom’s chat with the maid almost got over and the kid’s exams were to start in a couple of days, I wished her luck. She thanked me cheerfully (in the gujju accent - thenks).

This small interaction with this kid made me realize all that dad was trying to communicate through his lecture. I learnt that the education I took for granted for these many years is such a precious and valuable thing for this kid! If we just try to look at things we have been taking for granted as a gift, we realize that we are actually very gifted! Whether struggling or not, if we try to do everything with pleasure, it’ll be done just better! And now, I am reminded of the booklet by Panna Ma’am, which said that irrespective of whether we believe in God or not, in the concept of nirvana, there is one thing certainly common with all beings, we all want to be happy and the more we try to look for this happiness together, the easier we get it. It also taught that this happiness is intrinsic. It lies within oneself, and if you really want to be happy, nothing on earth can prevent you from being so.

Blame game - the psychology behind

So, which blame game am I talking about? Well, not hard to guess! Its about the society blaming the victim for crimes. Particularly victims of sexual violence against women. Let's start with this awesome sarcastic, viral video:

Sparing the ones with modern thoughts, the ones who get and love the above video, there is a huge population in India that firmly believes that somewhere, it must have been the victim's fault. Okay, lets go through this, it must not be hard: Its a normal daily activity that you are pursuing, travelling or just your profession. Most of us have at least one daily activity in which we interact with strangers, travelling is one example. So, on a regular encounter with strangers, you had a male companion but you had no idea that those regular strangers were a bunch of united people with a good level of mutual understanding and ofcourse bad intentions too. The strangers execute what was on their mind and control slips out of your and your male companion's hands in just seconds and once they have the power on you, its even harder to beat that and escape. In all this, do you see any fault of the victim? Probably (hopefully), no. But, there is a huge population of India that sees largely the victim's fault. I am not saying that they say find the criminals correct or good, but before anything else, they'll point out something where, according to them, our victim went wrong. Obviously, its unfair and incorrect of them to call the victim at fault. So, lets go through the psychology behind this.
Its defensive attribution which is at play. Now, what is that? As wikipedia defines it: The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term from the attributional approach referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending the individual from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. In simpler words, we humans have a tendency to believe that this world is a good and fair place to live in. Acknowledging that the world is unfair and that something unfortunate can happen to you based on chance factors would lead to a sense of fear and vulnerability which we would naturally want to avoid. So, whenever we hear of some incident we have a tendency to explain that it was the victim's fault and that if I or someone closely related to me doesn't make that mistake, we'll be absolutely safe. In some sense, that's a coping mechanism to make oneself feel better and less insecure about it.
Well, I learnt all that in my psychology class. Now the next thing that comes to my mind is, why is this blaming trend more in India than in the west. Is there something like the tendency to make defensive attribution is higher in our culture than in theirs? So, let us look at the basic difference in our cultures. Western culture is predominantly individualistic while ours is a collectivistic one. Individualistic culture is one which is oriented around the self, where humans are viewed as independent beings instead of being identified with a community, Whereas, a collectivistic culture is one where there is a higher emphasis on interdependence of beings, where people belong to a particular political, religious or ethnic group and are expected to exhibit behavior that matches the interest and beliefs of the group. A simple way to understand this cultural discussion is to look at an example: If in a group of people that share the same workplace, some guy lives a different kind of lifestyle, wears different kinds of clothes and pursues an indifferent set of hobbies than the usual one. Such a group in India has a tendency to talk about that person behind his back, exclude him out of casual group meetings, and call him a not-normal or not-our-type person. While such a group in the west is more likely to accept this guy's differences, live with it comfortably and even let him be a part of their larger group. 
Now here is my attempt to relate this cultural difference with the blame game: Generally, in a collectivistic culture, if something goes wrong, people have a tendency to blame everyone involved while in an individualistic culture, the fellow at the root cause is solely responsible for what happened. In a crime, both the criminal and victim are deeply involved and hence we have a tendency to put some amount of blame on each given our culture. While the same crime in the west will be viewed more as the criminal's fault than that of the victim's. So, our cultural structure in addition to the normal tendency of defensive attribution leads to a relatively high tendency to blame the victim than the westerners do.
Now is it okay or acceptable on someone's part to blame the victim? Well, no! Although defensive attributions are self-protective, somewhat natural but certainly an irrational strategy that helps us avoid unnerving thoughts and give a feel of our life being in our control. As healthy individuals, we should try to look at things from the perspective of the victim and stop this blaming!
Note: the relation of culture with blaming is completely my view and arguments are most welcome. :)

You :)

Just to have a word with you,
I’ll keep all my work aside

Without that word with you,
my tasks remain shattered, unfulfilled

'coz in everything I say, in my every act
I just reflect the you I carry in myself

Though I have an image of yours in me,
without you yourself, I feel incomplete

And my eyes would shoot open, in the middle of the night
wondering how the day not had a single encounter with you

And I feel as if everything got disturbed,
as if nature ran against its own rules

Then I ask, How could the sun set,
without me talking to you?

Bolly songs of 90s :D

I am a 90s kid. So, I was brought up with these. The typical bollywood songs of the 90s. Infact, the first imagery of my ideal boy I had in mind resembled a typical hero depicted in these song videos - the one who would take me (yes, literally take, against my wish! :P) to a picturesque location and sing and dance with me. Fortunately, this imagery doesn't exist anymore. :P
To give you the feel of what kind of bolly songs I am talking about, consider the following for reference: chalo ishq ladaye, ankhiyan tu mila ley raja, chori chori sapno me, dholna, jangal hai aadhi raat hai, chunari chunari, sona kitna sona hai, kudi kuwari, and many more. A couple of videos:

The pattern of all songs is exceptionally similar. The same template, still they were always entertaining! Most of the typical ones are filmed at some location in Europe or some exceptionally green lands, etc. The song is lively and full of beats. The hero and heroine appear in 2-3 different clothes throughout the song. The design of the female's clothes is particularly new while the hero is wearing particularly bright and colorful bottoms and shirts. The bottoms are a bit too tight in case of Govinda. The hero and heroine have a good practice of doing the dance steps in sync and their steps are weirdly symmetric too. The characters get rhythmically romantic while doing these steps. I have seen some song videos where the heroine blushes with the beats!
However illogical stuff they contain, they entertained me a lot back in the 90s and continue to do so. Here, I choose to stay a bolly fan. :)

The anger is justified - Delhi gang rape case

Anybody who is well aware of the culture in this country (in fact the world) knows that above all things, be it law, opposition, God or whatever, there is one thing everyone including the government and the criminals (I am not calling them the same) should be scared of, and that one thing is mob anger. If you suppress the mob anger for now, it will come up later, with double the force and will hence render you double helpless.

There are protests all over the country demanding immediate hanging for the culprits in the case. Well, this protest is not precisely over the gang rape, etc. It’s over the regular abuses a girl wanting to stand on her own legs faces in her everyday life. Everyone who is participating in the rallies have either experienced some trauma or seen it happen. And just because of this, we need to give a strict punishment in order to tell them that its not easy to rape someone and escape with a life. Our government or the court fails to understand this very trauma. Is it because these bodies are composed of largely men? Maybe yes. Most of the men do not know what it is like to be scared when you are on the verge of losing the shreds of your dignity. The way our culture goes, I guess its difficult for men to even understand what dignity I am talking about, ‘coz they are never assumed to possess such dignity. Yes, our culture is like that. If a guy sleeps with another girl who is not his wife, then he doesn’t lose anything. It’s the girl who loses her dignity, etc. We feel a girl is insulted if she is raped, not the guy. He has his desires. And that is so justified! We have rapists and abusers around and amidst this, we demand for virgin wives.

Many people have expressed how the hue and cry over the Delhi gang rape is useless and a waste of time. If our best justices feel that a step towards better securing our women is useless, etc, then I am scared and paranoid of living here. Female folk is supposedly the half of our population. Given our sex ratio, women in this country, in the least exaggerated sense, are a minority. And for the government, securing the minority is nothing more than a duty. I recently got from the news that our home minister Susheel Kumar Shinde declared the forming of a council to ensure the safety of women. Recognizing the routes where women safety is better so that women can take up those routes while travelling is also one of the roles of this council. Well, what?? Let’s mark certain roads with a red sign saying “its unsafe for you to travel by this route, lady!”. 
A good number of people expert in law have also told that the max they can be punished is lifetime imprisonment. Well, by law, this is true. But wait, are we joking here? We all know really well that law has been tweaked to suit our requirements. Okay, lets talk of law. Law is to make our life easy and comfortable. It stands to protect us and not to make us more vulnerable. So, law! Law doesn’t even recognize inserting foreign objects into the female’s body as rape. Law dictates the same punishment for rape and murder. In the eyes of law, rape is equivalent to gang rape. Definitely, for the victim, it is not. And none other than the victim herself knows the gravity of the pain. Our law anyways doesn’t treat rape as that heinous a crime. The list of capital crimes (crimes that can lead one to death sentence) does not include attempt for murder by sexual methods, or rape. It’s strictly for the “rarest of rare cases” . Probably, a girl getting gang raped and attempted to be killed by pathetic sexual methods in a bus moving on the roads of the capital of the country crossing three check posts is too usual or too not rare to be imposed this sentence on. Maybe yes. Our newspapers are full of incidents of sexual abuses, rapes, etc. Even if 50% of these are fake (talking on the assumption that every victim files a police complaint), the rest are sufficient to assure you that you are insecure here. And our government unwilling to treat such a pathetic crime as a rare one assures you further. As Sheila Dixit quoted, “It is the most painful incident that has taken place since I became chief minister of Delhi”, I guess pain is a rare thing for any country. Isn’t it? I wonder what impression of our government’s efficiency does this give to the other big democracies of the world. At a moment, I would even question, do we have a government? We can’t call it a government if it is bereft public confidence.

In my view, and in the view of a large fraction of the country, death penalty to these rapists is justified. But the government doesn’t seem to agree with this. All we need is a good lawyer/justice to stand up for this cause. Do we, the women of this country have a supporter?

In the pink ghetto

“Pink ghetto”, this term is basically originated from the term “pink collar” mostly used to associate the pink collar jobs, the jobs meant for women, the ones with the flexibility to suite working moms and the housekeepers. Obviously, on the very assumption that the sole responsibility of household lies on the woman.

Though we (Indians) are still in a stage where women development level is way behind where it is in the rest of the world or where it should have been right now, I’ll choose to talk of the urban female folk which is far more developed than the rest of the country.

The male dominion in our culture is kind of inherited. The idea of a female taking the lead position of a project or team is still a little unacceptable. While the world saw Marissa Mayer being hired as Yahoo! CEO while she was pregnant, we think extra for even employing a married woman or mother. Even in one of the most urbanized cities like Mumbai, getting hired while you are pregnant is not even a question.
Well, the problem is clear, we lack female leaders and female professionals leading to the mentality that a woman can't be skilled at this. Not actually society's fault in thinking so. Tracking down this problem, we realize that these leadership and professional skills are not developed in girls, like since childhood. We pamper our daughters with all cute, nice and delicate stuff. In most of the urban families, even their choices are also not theirs. When up till teenage, parents or brothers take most of her decisions, all she learns is, taking support. Going by the way we bring them up, being strong, independent and decisive is not their part. That's called being a man. And we choose to teach that to our sons.
And the women who take the other path, choose to be independent are treated as superpowers and even their vicinyl society (family members) looks at them with little sympathy. If they choose to write their own destiny, obviously, in a setting like India's, this would require utter amount of strength to be able to face the society and its million questions and hence they are treated as heartless beings. The independent woman is expected to be exceptionally self consistent, especially emotionally. A friend of mine recently shared this cartoon strip on Facebook: 

Precisely here, I fail to relate being strong and independent with wanting some love and pampering. We all as humans have an emotional quotient and want to be loved (in addition to being ready to love). If the working husband, the sole bread winner of the family, upset from his day or something else, wants to cuddle in his wife's lap, takes pleasure in some pampering, its fine. It doesn't contradict his being independent and strong. But it does when its a woman. Sad.

Even today, we come across people who feel that the right place of a woman is within the four-walls of the house. This reminds me of a PhD friend of mine at insti who wondered why do women want to study so much when they are from well off families and can really easily find themselves a husband who is rich and loving. And yes, there are females who want to settle as housewives in their lives. I hope for most, like me at times, its just out of laziness. 

Another friend of mine equated being a housewife to being a good housekeeper. The term "housekeeper" did hurt me at first. How does a silly binary characteristic "gender" entitle the responsibility of housekeeping to one particular person? Why can't all members of the family put equal shares in housekeeping? Unfortunately, if a man wants to sit at home as a househusband, our society shall taunt him till death. In the case where the family accepts the working lady, she is just overdone with responsibility. She is expected to cook or to look after all the servants in the case where the family can afford them, to take care of the elders (mostly in-laws), to ensure her kids' homework, well bringing up, etc. A silent obvious compensation of her wanting to pursue her own dreams. And if you raise the matter of gender equality to such families, they would say with pride, we have a working wife, we obviously understand and implement equal status to females.

We fail to understand even the meaning of gender equality. Implementing it seems too far off. Poor females, perhaps born and destined to die in their pink ghettos. Its time that we as society realize this and grant our women actual equality.