Motherhood that looks and smells good

Bhargavi, when she was about a month old. 

Often, it’s the simple things in life that people don’t understand and miss out on.

Recently, I visited a credit card site in the course of some work and saw an image of a young couple obviously in love. The caption used words to the effect that said that the credit card made it all happen or some such thing. It’s an all-too familiar hook that advertisers use to get up close with the customer, but the problem is that people actually fall for this, and sometimes even without knowing it.

We begin to believe that we need the wherewithal to express love. We begin to believe that everything needs to be templatized in a follow-the-herd spirit. Hence, we ‘equip’ ourselves by buying whatever can be bought in preparation for the roles we must play in life, but when the time comes to actually don that role, we chicken out. Because, reality is much more than money can fathom.

Why I am thinking this way? Just today I heard from a friend how someone she knows was following the motherhood template: she had the posh crib from a pricey shop, a 24-hour ayah in place, and so on, but no time or intention to actually be a mother.

Motherhood is a one-way journey: once a mother, you’ll always be a mother. You can’t go back to the place when you weren’t a mother. You can’t expect that your baby will grow up overnight once your maternity leave ends. Motherhood isn’t always glossy. It’s wet, it stinks, and it’s sleepless. Yet, there can’t be a better feeling in the world than to be a mother. Now that I am a mother I can easily imagine how some mothers must feel when their children become uncaring and turn away from them. That’s truly sad.

What I said about motherhood applies in many respects to other roles in life. After the wooing with diamond rings and what not and the grand wedding, there comes the reality of actually having to live with the person – warts and all – day after day. No holiday from that. How many of us are ready for this?

Really, the most important lessons in life are ones that no one’ll teach you, but you’ll learn nevertheless.
If this post sounds like a lot of meandering, that’s because I am. Sometimes, it just feels nice to speak your mind, rather than collect and compose thoughts. Almost relaxing.

The Black Swan

I saw this movie immediately after watching this clip, which basically warns against falling for narratives or stories. But how do we do that? We are all made up of stories and spew them by the minute. Yet, he (Tyler Cowen) has a point: when we tell a story, we inevitably tell it through our filter. So, any story leaves off something off the 'original' and takes on a little of the teller. A story also becomes in some way 'of' the story-teller.

So, it was in this frame of mind that I watched Black Swan. Saying anything about good vs. evil narratives is quite a self-conscious effort, post-Cowen's clip. But here goes.

The movie The Black Swan is all about white and black; good and pure juxtaposed against evil and sinful/lusty. But only until a point – after which good melts into evil and vice versa.

Nina needs to play both characters – the white swan and the black swan – equally well. She is a natural at playing the white swan, but when it comes to its dark counterpart, her performance pales, freezes. Because, however vulnerable her public, white self may be, it exercises great control over her self-mutilating, repressed side. This side can only come to its own at night, or when she is safe from the prying eyes of her over-protective (and perhaps abusive?) mother.

The role is a challenge to Nina quite simply because in real life, she is the white and black swan. With much difficulty, her white swan-self has kept the black swan out of her public, conscious reality. If she must play the black swan to perfection, she must come dangerously close to her hidden, tucked-away side. And, that’s a risk, and she knows it.

The best stories (hope Mr Cowen is not listening) or at least the ones I fall for are those that leave you with no answers, that meld white and black to an indistinguishable point.

Take Macbeth, for instance. Is Lady Macbeth entirely to blame for her husband’s deeds, or was she just the spark that kindled the murderous rage within Macbeth himself?

It is also a sad commentary on the temporal nature of show business. Youth-beauty-talent-the quest for perfection and eternal fame – and the descent into depressing reality.

Nina, of course, has her cake and eats it too. She delivers a perfect performance – black and white – and then dies – just as the plot requires. She does not live to deliver a lesser performance. Considering the toll that the black and white swans take on her, it’d be perhaps difficult for her to ever play the role again – let alone with perfection. Eternity is perfect, and her role was to remain eternal.

As with most personal, non-work things I write these days (or don't), this too requires much more elaboration than that in this post. But here I must end for lack of time.

Delhi Belly

I watched the movie a month ago but found the time today to blog about it. I enjoyed the movie immensely and was surprised to find people scandalized and shocked by it. So, here's my quick defence of the movie:

Why do you like Delhi Belly?*
Its spontaneity, creative dialogue, and, of course, its celebration of oral sex, especially that rendered to women. Let the tribe of 21st century men grow!

But, DB is full of swear words! How can you like it?
Grow up. And, if you haven't done that yet, don't go to movies labelled 'A'. And please give adults their space, too!

What if children hear such words or see the movie?
I read my first adult fiction when I was perhaps in Class VI. Many of us have peeped into the forbidden adult world way before we were supposed to. It didn't hurt us, I should think. At least, it didn't hurt me. Children are not supposed to see this movie, of course, but if they do so sneakily and they will, there's no stopping them. It's a difficult world to grow up into, no doubt. But before we get too worked up about children learning adult stuff from a movie, what about the endless violence and mind-numbing zombie-like make-believe world celebrated in our movies? That's family entertainment, eh?

Why is the movie in English?
Why shouldn't it be? But DB has a Hindi version, too, which has done much better than the English one.

There's hardly any Delhi in the movie.
Meaning? Did you come to the movie expecting a quick tour of Delhi? Not that they didn't show any Delhi, either. So, cheapskates, get your free Delhi ride yourself!

*These were actual questions I heard discussed on various forms of media.

Time is fiction.

Where do the minutes and hours, rolled up into days go?

What is memory, but traces and hints of these mysterious days?

The bane of memory. If not for it, there’d be no search for the absentee days.

If not for memory, everything’s hearsay. Subject to incredulity. For, beyond belief it all seems.

Why such consciousness of the self? Why not be unburdened by existence?

Why is the past such a comfort sometimes? Even when it is inexplicably lost.

Why does the past seem simpler? Definitely more decipherable, more manageable than that to come.

Why can’t the minutes and hours just mind their business and stay where they are?

Get real: time is but fiction. A tragicomedy at that.

Rajib Das and his death

After a long time of seeing and hearing about killings in Bengal, this one made me really sad, depressed, angry, and restless. Even as I write this, I realize our individual impotencies, my own even. But if all I can do is write out my angst, than so shall I.

Rajib Das, a teenager, died in Barasat, suburban Bengal, sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning, from the injuries he sustained when he was fighting for his sister. He was fighting goons well within the sight and hearing of police constables. None of them helped her, as she wailed and begged. They told her they were on duty protecting the powers-that-be, so they couldn't possibly leave their post to come to the siblings' rescue.

Oh, there's more details to the story than I can bear to fill you in on here, please see the link. This incident is conclusive proof, if you needed any, of systemic failure in Bengal. In fact, now I know what they mean when they say, it is the system.

There is a corruption of morals and minds of the people that has seeped through and through. Forget about elections, people cant take their daily routine lives for granted in Bengal. Newborns can get eaten up by rodents, whole villages can be held at gun-point, lies can be told without batting eyelids... 35 years, and this state is screwed to the core. If you are alive, you should be more than grateful. I usually am not cynical and pessimistic, but this state does surely seem beyond hope.

One night, and it all changed for the Das family. And, people still ask, what is the alternative? I ask them, if this is not chaos, if this is not anarchy, what is?

Bolpur/Santiniketan sights

Trips to Bolpur help me breathe, literally. I have never really been a big-city person, as I realize on trips to smaller cosier towns like Sirsi or Bolpur. I could trade a lot of the easy convenience and razzle-dazzle of the city for lungfuls of fresh air, any time.

The power cuts in Bolpur are exasperating, of course. So, are the mosquito battalions. Here are images from a recent trip to Bolpur when we had the Navanna puja at home (a sort of thanksgiving after the harvest).

I hope to keep adding to this collection, so check back :)

Is sex sexist? And, is something wrong with what women study?

Does heterosexual sex necessarily involve subjugation of women?

Is the feminist movement toothless or even unnecessary today?

If women can’t reach the same professional heights as men, is it because they studied the wrong subjects in school?


These are some of the questions being currently discussed in Germany as a result of a public spat between feminist and author, Alice Schwarzer (left), and the minister for families, pensioners and women, Kristina Schröder.

To me, it seems Schwarzer is looking at how child birth often pushes the woman out of economic production. Because, the value of reproduction, the value of a woman’s time and effort in reproducing a human being is still unaccounted for, taken for granted. Corporations myopically question what they are to gain from the reproductional function of women. But then they are quite adept at conveniently pretending they operate in a social vacuum, when it suits them to do so.

It is only in few countries like Sweden where mothers receive huge support in terms of maternity leave and childcare facilities. Other countries, even developed ones, are still dilly-dallying about what they should be doing for working mothers.

About the second question, it reminds of me something that happened in the first year of living in Kolkata. I was looking out of my office window when I saw some CPM cadres march by, shouting “Inquilab Zindabad!” I asked my boss what they were revolting against, what was their agenda, what was the revolution in the 21st century about? My boss, a CPM loyalist, was very offended and said something about keeping the spirit of revolution alive.

A movement loses fizz when its goals are reached or its members get compromised. Have the feminist movement’s goals been reached? Clearly, no. And, when I say no, it’s not only about how even competent women find it difficult to become the CEO of their company, but the ingrained, implicit, and often explicit violence that women are conditioned to bear and even propagate. So, have we women been compromised? Or, been led to believe that all’s well as long as we match up to men.

I sometimes think in terms of the three generations in my family: my grandmother worked shoulder to shoulder with my grandfather in the fields, cooked for him, and raised a family of nine kids.

My mother had to struggle to get through college, not because she could not afford it, but because it was not she who decided things in her life.

In my life, it seems however, that most important decisions are mine. Yet, when I peer at them, I find quite a few of them to be the result of conditioning so strong that I don’t even realise they are not mine.

Yet, the differences between my grandmother’s life and mine are profound. And, both she and my mother have always dinned it into me how important it is to a woman to have her own source of income.

To me, feminism is not about being equal to a man. It is about being recognized and treated as a human being. It is about being able to decide for myself. It is about being able to reach my potential unhindered by my gender. And, I recognize that a lot of these freedoms hinge on who controls the purse strings. Not that an economically independent woman is not exploited, but she can afford to negotiate terms better.

And, about Schroeder’s statement on women’s under-performance being linked to the subjects they studied, I, like Schwarzer, must say that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Durga Puja 2010

More pics here.

Summertime

I shook my head twice when I was reading Summertime. Was I reading a novel by J M Coetzee (in picture) or was this written about someone else? But that couldn’t be: the subject of the book shared the same name as the author.

For some time, I was lost. And one of Coetzee’s purposes was achieved. To puzzle the reader, to leaver her perplexed about his personality – is the novel autobiographical, or even taking from the truth in some places, at least? But then why would anyone want to portray himself as one having no ‘sexual presence’? And this laceration of his sexual self continues throughout the book.

Summertime, a collection of fictionalized interviews about Coetzee, is like Coetzee grabbing the reader by the neck and asking her to stop asking questions about him: what is the author like in real life? What of his sex life? What of the things he believed in? Coetzee seems to say, ‘Find the answers in my text, and not in me.’ What one writes may not necessarily be taken from the author’s life. So, even an attempt to scrutinise the author’s life for what he lets out in his work can, in a sense, let his writing down.

For, when one tells stories, one is trying to communicate with the story as a medium. There’s nothing cardinally wrong about looking for an author’s inspiration in his/her personal life: but, what’s the point? What is this obsession with knowing the source of something? Why should something be because of something, and not just exist?

I know the all-too human obsession behind knowing, of course, but Coetzee wants to snub this voyeuristic urge.

It’s also as if to compete with other descriptions of himself: by creating one himself. And, in doing that, try to dispel the aura of a ‘great writer’. What is a great writer but one who reports best her life experiences, sketches in detail the life-pictures she sees around her? So, how much credit for the ‘great writing’ should be attributed to the people in the writer’s life, to the stories she is witness to?

The book obsessively sniggers at the whole idea of ‘great’ and I do see the point of doing so. Some of our so-called literary persons would do well to read this book.

To remember and let go - Lost Season 6 Finale sums it up!

Lost Season 6 ended yesterday. It kept me awake for pretty long in the night. Apart from the superb cast and gripping plot, there’s something more about Lost that will stay with me for some time, hopefully for ever.

Lost is, after all, about faith, love, seeking, and finding. What stops us from reaching is that we haven’t started yet. What stops from believing is that we think it’s too difficult. Which it might as well be. Yet, we can’t give up trying, for, if we do, we are no longer living.

The struggle to believe, to keep the faith, to love, to heal, to remember, to let go, and to move on informs Lost, as it does life.

Lost was a microcosm of life as we see it all around us, only told through the guise of a story. The island was not just a place where the usual adventures that bring in the TRPs happened, it was also a place for adventures for the soul.

What are we supposed to do, if there’s no one to give instructions? What are we to make of our life?

Where are we supposed to be, where are we supposed to go?

Where, anyway, are we, and who, anyway, are we?

Are we born with our strengths and gifts or do we find them? Are they finite or can we grow them?

These are a few of the important questions that thread through Lost.

I never thought a TV series could touch me so, but it has. And, now I can’t wait for Season 7 (yes, you read it right, SEASON 7!!).