There is an English medium school to the back of our house. Same school where they did not give me admission because my family could not affor the admission fees back in those days. They are growing up pretty big, thanks to the increasing donations for admission and funding. Now they have several blocks, dedicated to CBSE & state syllabus and a teacher’s training school. As the school expanded, they needed to have more entrances than the main gate. So they started looking to buy off any available land/house from our street to build new gates to the school. One for kids who came by auto rickshaws, one for kids who walked on the way home and one for those who cycled back home.

The then principal of the school, a young Catholic priest who was later accused of buying vans for the school registered in his name, first approached our neighbor to see if they were willing to sell off their house to the school. They happily obliged and the priest gave them a good price for the house and the land. Later that house was brought down to ashes to make an entrance road to the school. But the road wasn’t wider enough. So they approached my elder brother one day and asked if we were willing to sell our house too. My brother said we wouldn’t. In our street, ours was the oldest and almost-falling-down-to-the-earth house. So the priest could not see any reason for why we poor fellows wouldn’t sell off their house for a very good price which was competent with the market price.

The priest approached my father secretly and asked the same thing. Father said No. When my brother came to know about this, he went straight to the principal priest’s cabin in the school and told him, “We were in this place for the past 60 years. This house was built by my father’s mother. This is our ancestral house and we are not planning to move from here. So stop approaching any one of our family with your price tags“. Priest stopped asking further (though the one who came after him tried another way of compelling us which we dealt with legally), I later took up the land from family, built a new house there and now staying with my family there.

When I look at it again now, it is not the count of years that makes me stay in that very same place. This is a house that my grandmother built with my father and his brothers. They built the entire house with the mud bricks and sandstone powder. My grandmother lived and died there (though I don’t have even a fainted memory of hers). My second brother lived in this house too, before he died at the age of 27 in a road accident and his body was brought into that very same house. This is family. There are emotions attached to this 5 cents of land. No power can ever buy that with their money, unless something real bad happens to our survival.

This is why I love that place. My home, because my family live in there. My street, because that is where our house is at. Our small semi-urban village, because that’s where our street is, my childhood friends are and the local community is with people whom I’ve known since my childhood. Thrissur, the city that I have grown up with it’s nooks and corners. Kerala, because Thrissur is a district in Kerala state. And my country India, because my state is part of this country and the people from our state have contributed significantly to build this country.

But the home town or home state changes to another form when it comes to define the country. It is not just home land, it is Mother land. I don’t understand what that means. Mother land? The country is seen as mother, we are taught. But why? A country is made of pieces of land and what makes us sentimental about it is because it hosts our home. If we were born and lived in America or Africa, that would be our home. When M F Hussain painted India as a nude woman, the fanatics and the so-called educated lot (I call them the qualified lot, because they are never educated in the word’s truest sense) came up in arms against him, asking if he would dare paint his Mother in nude form. Our nationalist blood boiled when we saw this piece of land as a nude woman. But we never raised much voices when girls were raped and killed in the very same mother land, just because they looked Chinese, though they were born in the same country. We had no problem in cutting the womb of a mother in this mother land, or killing the sons and daughters of other mothers in this mother land. Burning them. Raping them. But “insulting” a piece of land? That’s unbearable to us even when those killers and rapists walk among us.

Mother land, mother tongue… mother this… mother that… what do they mean really? What kind of conveniences or excuses do they give us? How are we assigning any meaning to them?

(Image courtesy: Focuswildlife.com)

If the wealth of mineral extraction is funding social welfare spending, The Economist should ask why ordinary rural communities, like those I met in Jharkhand’s Karanpura valley, persist in a six year struggle to keep coal mining companies and thermal power plants from their land. And too why resistance groups like Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee would sooner face imprisonment than capitulate to myths about development. People living in places like the Karanpura valley are not stupid. They have seen their mineral wealth shipped out to benefit others. They understand better than anyone else that local communities must be at the forefront of the decision making process if they are ever to challenge the powerful interests that exploit Jharkhand’s wealth and continue to deny human rights to those who are being forced from their land.

We have heard it before and we keep hearing. And we keep believing all those big talks of how they help in protecting our future or how much they spend on enhancing our lives. Now, head over to see and read this excellent photo essay at Tom Pietrasik’s blog on the reality of mining in India.

Dear Mr. Husain

I have great respect to artists. Especially to those like you who have set your own mark in the field of art, though I don’t understand (and can’t appreciate) certain forms of art due to the lack of my knowledge in the field of art. But as far as the freedom of expression goes, I am fully with you Sir. That nobody holds the right to tell an artist how he/she should express through their art. And an artist need not consider what his/her audience asks what to do with their artistic medium because that will kill the sole purpose of his/her work. Art is born when an artiste feels that he/she cannot live without doing it.

But you should also consider, Mr. Husain, that people are free to protest. Peacefully, yes. They can file complaints in the court and as long as the laws of the country see it fit, the court can ask you to be present and give an explanation by the law. No sir, I am not supporting the Sangh Family here. Those goons will have this or any other reason just to flare up the communal sentiments and get people into the street to get them killed. On one hand they proclaim they are a civilized society unlike the Fatwa issuing communities and on the other they issue their own Fatwas – like offering Rs. 51 crores to behead you, 1 KG of Gold to gouge your eyes and 20000 Euros to chop off your hands. But except for their blind and foolish supporters, nobody has thought a bit highly of them, so let us leave it at that.

Now coming to the matter at hand, shouldn’t you accept the end results of your work with the same courage that you took to do your creative work? Shouldn’t you face the court, like many brave souls did, to stand tall and firm for the artistic cause you had? Have you ever thought of what kind of an impression it leaves upon the supporters of freedom of expression when you go hiding in another country and fly around in your Ferrarri while you put all the blame on your old homeland? I do understand, that any man can get afraid of getting caged at this age, after having been revered as one of the great artists of our time. So if you just simply said that you don’t prefer to live in India fearing the court case, that would make more sense. But by putting blame on India, that it did not protect you or there were not enough sane and supportive voices, you are insulting the sensitivity of the majority of the people here in India, who have always supported the freedom of expression, unlike a few goons from the saffron brigade.

Were you running away fearing for your life? But even then, what makes you think you are more secure in Qatar? Fundamentalists are everywhere and if you are running away from them, you will have to run away from the whole world. So what is the kind of example that you are setting here?

You say a painter is a world citizen. But why just the painter, Sir? We are all citizens of this world, not just you. We all know that countries, states and borders are all illusions drawn by some people to stay firm to powerful places, but it is our convenience and sentiments that makes us stay where we are. Why don’t you just accept and admit that simple fact?

PS: I am also curious as to why you mentioned you had a friend, who was a “Brahmin”. What and how does that matter in proving your tolerance to religions?

Related post: I am an Indian

Raped Dalit girl kills self as cops let-off the accused – The girl was raped by an upper caste youth on February 12 in their village.

The above news item shows up in the front page of IBN website. Whenever such news come up, there is not much rage in Twitter or blogs like it happens when Indians are attacked in Australia. Not many are condemning Casteism, like they condemned Racism. Not many concerns of security and the criminals being left unpunished because this is just another day and just another news item in India.

When Australians attack Indians, it is seen as a racist attack. When Indians attack Indians, people insist that it should be seen purely based on the crime aspect that caste and class have nothing to do with it.

Such is our time.

Then it all went slow motion, everything slow motion
First came the flash of lights, then the sound of explosion
And we’re still in slow motion, we’re still in slow motion

Now it’s all gone slow motion, everything slow motion
The lights gone out – I feel no more emotion
I’m all out of emotion, I’m out of emotion…

From the song, Days of Fire
[Album: London Underground]

(Image courtesy: BBC)

A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal by Suketu Mehta in New York Times is the best article that I read so far about Bhopal tragedy.

All over India, when misfortune strikes — when a child is ill, for example — people burn chilies to drive away the evil eye. The gas smelled like chilies burning, and people said to one another, it must be a powerfully evil eye that’s being driven away, the stench is so strong.

Fleeing the gas, the Bhopalis clutched their children. Some babies fell, gasping, and their parents had to choose which ones to carry on their shoulders. One image still comes up over and over in their dreams: in the stampede, a thousand people are stepping on their child’s body.

Read it in full here.

Let us not forget…

• A company that still refuses to take legal responsibility of the disaster, and to provide enough health damages (Rs. 25000 for life-long suffering?) and clean up the disaster site
• Our politicians (planning to secure $1bn of investment from Dow) who want us to believe that the place is now safe, when the private institutional studies reports that the place is still highly contaminated by dangerous toxins
• A company CEO who has fled India and was declared “untraceable” by Indian authorities although his address in a New York suburb is publicly listed
• Generations of people, including many kids like the one in the picture above (I have excluded some very disturbing pics of the kids, go to bhopal.org to see them),  continue to suffer because of the disaster

Guardian article
Amnesty USA’s article
Riding the Elephant

(Image courtesy: Bhopal.org)

I don’t know if it is because you guys are past your age of “getting jiggy with it” or worried about the rising number of young people in India and taking your old-vs-young revenge on them, but what the local news papers have been reporting about the thing you have done with the IT amendment act is quite horrible. I mean, how fair is it to arrest somebody even without a warrant for browsing porn online? Considering that Internet is the best possible medium available for youth to please themselves, this new rule is mostly going to affect the youngsters. If you curb the youth’s virtual sexual adventures like that, wouldn’t they get even more curious to sneak into the lives of the real people and seek real sex out of them? Or is it your way of telling the youth to “go out, have some real sex, time to stop the single tennis game“? But even then, you guys haven’t yet legalized prostitution here and the sexual abuse/crime rates are increasing in the country! I mean, the law enforcement is most of the times silent about those old politicians, top officials who are accused of raping minors using their flesh trade connections but you can arrest an ordinary person for just browsing porn online without causing anyone any harm?! WTF is that?

It is quite normal of businesses to have different strategies for different regions but there are some things which should not be hurt just because of the business interests. And I think it is a pity that somebody has to remind a company like Google about that.

Google Maps, in it’s English version, has marked India’s borders with China as disputed area. However, Google Ditu, the Chinese localized version of Google Maps, has portrayed Arunachal Pradesh and other parts of India as part of China. Google Ditu also shows Taiwan and the South China Sea Islands as part of China. This is quite a big insult to the Indian nation and it’s people and I think there has to be a wide spread protest against this.

Google Maps screenshot

Google Ditu screenshot

(Thanks to Aravind for the info)

Yesterday on TEDIndia, Hans Rosling predicted that the average Indian would match up to the average American on 27th July, 2048 (yes, he’s even got the date). The Twitter stream was overflowed with Tweets rejoicing in the prediction. I am not sure if this is because of the TED organizers believing that “Indians are feel-gooders anyway, so let us just give them such feel-good statistics“, but I think Mr. Rosling has got a point there. We are matching up with America of the early days on many fronts. We are fast discriminating and ignoring some sections of people in our society. We are almost on the tip of a civil war. The central Government (with support from other political parties and corporations) has declared war on Naxalism which is sure to take the lives of it’s own people, including the innocent tribal people. I do understand the need for a military action against militant forces that threats the existence of a country, but it is going to be a mere exercise as a solution because the Government is doing almost nothing to root out the root problem – Though the Prime Minister himself has identified that very root problem.

There has been a systemic failure in giving tribals a stake in the modern economic process that inexorably intrude into their living places. The alienation built over decades is now taking a dangerous turn. The systematic exploitation and social and economic abuse of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated.

That is what our PM has said some weeks back. And what is being done to solve that issue?

As Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian and the only human rights activist on ground zero in faraway Dantewada where Operation Green Hunt is to be launched, says, “We can all be agreed on the premise that Naxalism is a problem, but why are these poor people attracted to a politics that will end in death? Have we created such a heinous system that death is more attractive than the deprivations and humiliations this system doles out? If that is so, why should I defend this system? All that these people want is food, health care, school, clothes and their legitimate right over their land. Yet, instead of weaning them away by strengthening the democratic process, if we are going to run our democracy only on the strength of weapons, I fear we are entering a dangerous and irrepairable state. We are headed for civil war.” Men like Himanshu should know. For 17 years, he has functioned like an ICU on the edges of a wounded society, providing education and health care, painstakingly drawing tribals into the electoral and constitutional process. The government, loath to undertake the trouble, has been happy to outsource its functions to him. Yet now, it is deaf to his wisdoms. Worse, it hasn’t even consulted him. [via]

And yesterday the Headlines India tweeted that “The government today more than doubled the budget for the 2010 Commonwealth Games from Rs.767 crore to Rs.1,620 crore“. Commonwealth seems to be more important than Common Good in this country. Such is our time.