Ouch!

What a supremely boring blog this is turning out to be! I resurrected it after a year only to fill it with my rants and raves which noone wants to hear! And it now looks like therealmbeyond (Eeeeeewwww...how cheesy!Whatever made me choose that name??!!) is going to have the dubious distinction of being the most widely (un)read blog in the blogosphere!

A news update from me:

In spite of my best efforts to the contrary, Citigroup is still my workplace. In spite of my utter lack of control over everything in the world (now, now- dont get ideas !), I have been named as a "Control Officer". Hee Haw! In spite of my best efforts to walk about with a long face and act as if I am the latest innocent sacrificial lamb to be sacrificed on the altar of India's Services boom, people still think that being in London is some big deal. In spite of being all alone in a studio apartment for three months, I have still not managed to learn how to make an omelette.In spite of talking to myself and hissing at random people on the Tube to pass time, I have still not been sent to a mental institution. In spite of eating practically nothing, I have still managed to gain 9 kg of weight in the past 11 months. (Random thought: In spite of having eaten practically everything I could lay my hands on, I didnt gain weight for 5 years). In spite of i-flex having given me a Dining Etiquette class, I still dont know how to eat with a knife and fork. In spite of eating 3 Tiramisu's in a row, I still didnt get drunk. In spite of being totally sleepy, I'm still typing this and boring everyone to death. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn...!

NOITAVRESER NO!

This is a mail I wrote to "The Hindu" when the reservation row was at its worst. Quite obviously, they didnt like it. It never saw the light of day- until now.


I have always thought of “The Hindu” as a non-partisan newspaper. That is, until I read your numerous one-sided editorials on the Reservation imbroglio.

Your editorials say that the anti-reservation protests are now totally uncalled for, given the fact that the Government has “promised” to increase the General Category seats and will therefore not affect the protestors adversely. This is a puerile argument, to say the least. The question is not just whether the General Category is going to be affected adversely or not. The issue before us is the basis of the Government’s Reservation policy. Where are the hard facts that support the cause of reservation? Where are the statistics that show to the world how reservation has helped India in the past decades? And how did the magic figure of 49.5 crop up? Does this 49.5 have any other statistical significance with respect to the disadvantaged classes – other than being the closest possible figure to the constitutional ceiling on reservations?

Adopting a “placebo” policy, the Government has simply shrugged off its real responsibilities towards the disadvantaged. What has the Government done at the grassroot level to improve the lot of the disadvantaged and to ensure that they are on a level playing field? In a world of cutthroat competition, will lowering the bar help anyone in the long run? Instead, why doesn’t the Government take steps to raise the disadvantaged sections to meet the existing yardsticks? What is the government doing to increase the quality of education at school level? What plans does it have in place to ensure that every single child in India, whether “forward” or “backward” is in school? Is there anything in this reservation brouhaha that could redeem my faith in the politicians of today?

Is the concept of ‘caste” as a rigid and standalone social and economic delineator still completely valid? Or is it just a foolishly simplistic view of things in an increasingly complex socio-economic situation? Can we generalize to say that all “Forward” caste people in the country are “forward” and all “Backward” caste people are “backward”? And what exactly is our aim through reservation? Are we aiming for a reverse reinforcement of the caste system? Are we aiming to create a vicious endless cycle where the ‘forward’ become the “backward” and vice versa? And are we going to eternally straitjacket the entire political system in India into watertight compartments of “General” and “Reserved”? Is there a proper plan in place to gradually phase out reservations? Should a person who has benefited from reservations at the school and graduate level be further allowed the luxury of a reservation at postgraduate level simply because by a happy coincidence she happened to be born into an upper middle class “backward” family?

“If the US can adopt an Affirmative Action policy, then why can’t India have reservations??”- the favourite refrain of everyone in favour of Reservations.
What an utterly laughable argument.
Reservation is not synonymous with Affirmative action. Reservation is shortsighted and negative in its approach because its basic principle is that of exclusion. Affirmative action, on the other hand is a positive inclusive approach towards ensuring a classless society, at least in the public domain.


Is the kind of lopsided development that reservation will bring in desirable- especially when an alternative approach might well bring in a holistic development that will benefit ALL sections of the society? While our politicians are engaged in meticulous, gleeful hairsplitting over exactly what proportion of their vote bank consists of OBCs, the glorious visions of a classless India powering the global economy of the future die a slow and painful death. Will the caste divide ever be bridged in the true sense of the word, as long as such anachronistic and divisive public policies continue? Implementation of the Reservation policy will spark communal hatred that will dismember the country part by part and accentuate the caste divide like never before. Much more than the venom-spewing saffron netas and hatred-indoctrinating mullahs of the world could ever do.

One last question- this directed to “The Hindu”.
If a fight for equality and the removal of caste identities from the public domain is not a legitimate and “morally defensible” (Get Back to Work, The Hindu,30th May 2006) cause, then what is?

Why????

I was born into a Hindu family.
Both my parents are Hindus.
But I am not a Hindu.
Nor am I a Christian- or a Muslim. I am merely myself.

Why do so many of us feel the necessity to belong to a particular religion?
How can prostrating before a stone deity or wearing a white cap on one’s head make one any more virtuous than a person who does neither of these? Why is the guy who worships a smiling God with blue skin, different from the one who worships a bearded man with a halo over his head?
Is blind acceptance the only way to escape the reality that there is only as much meaning in our lives as we choose to bring into it?
Is the belief in an afterlife the only way to escape the bland truth of non-existence after death?
Is the image of a benevolent and sometimes vengeful God necessary to fool ourselves into believing that our lives and our actions are preordained?
Do we need the constant fear of a gruesome hell to force us to be good?
Can we ever be really free when we chain ourselves to religion?
Can we ever really think beyond what has already been thought as long as we shut out our minds to reason?
Why do we need the label of a religion to render ourselves respectable?
All our religions are the dead religions of the past. Where are the religions of the living present? Where are the religions of the slumbering future?
On the other hand, why do we need them at all?
I don’t need the image of a paradise with orchards, beautiful women and smiling winged creatures to tempt me to be good. Nor do I need the image of an everlasting fire or a horned devil to scare me away from evil. I want to be good when it pleases me. And I want to be evil when it suits me.

If religion is the path to a merciful God, why do I think of wars and blood and beheadings and ruined buildings and burnt sheds and murdered people and raped women and strangled children when I think of it?
Why does religion make me think of a woman with a hunted look in her eyes, that no heaven could ever remove?
Why does it make me think of people blinded by a mad hate and spurred to action by an unbridled fury?
Why does it make me think of walls and of a dismembered world?
Why?

Yet another Poem!

One more of the precocious and majorly verbose NH's poems!! Written in 12th std. Now, what could have depressed me so much back then??!!

Caged

Through these blinded eyes I see,
Those dreams being ripped apart,
Those thoughts becoming frail shadows,
Those heavy mists of concentrated gloom.
It chokes me, my blindness,
I laugh at my own folly,
I realise then that life
Is a game that all must lose...
My dreams torn into shreds,
Their virgin hues desecrated,
Tattered bits floating in the eternal gloom,
I search and search, in the gloom.I
long to hold on to something whole
Something real, something truly mine,
Yet in that dense dark void,
Nothing awaits me-just nothing.
These words are all I have,
Yet, they too have failed me,
No longer are they my willing slaves,
Now they too have a mind of their own.
They now create spirals of stagnation.
I laugh at my own helplessness,
Defeated are my real thoughts
As these stubborn words find their cursed birth.
I write and write-
,These ugly words form sinister shapes
Within the cage, these blinded eyes search,
There is no place to hide, no escape in sight.
My thoughts too are blind, like my eyes,
Half dead, dripping with venomous defeat,
Yet though half dead, they are also half alive
And so yet again, they shall rise-and I shall live.

Then and Now

This is a poem I wrote when I was 16 years old- a confused, suicidal teenager who hated life and everything about it. Things obviously havent changed much since then. The poem is slightly verbose, yes, but somehow it makes me sympathise with that girl- the girl who got out of the mess she was in, only to find herself caught in an even bigger one. Who said life is easy? Sigh.



Shadows of a forgotten past,
Dark shrouds of strangulating thought,
Winding labyrinths of spiralling time,
Hazy visions of days that are no more,
An entrapped rationality, forced and unreal,
A liquid dream woven in nothingness,
Colours that fade, worn out hopes,
A life that lives but in the throes of death.
The invisible horizon delineated by thought,
And the stagnating pools of joy beyond..
Anger floods in, knocking down thought,
As the raging thunderstorms-
Of an enforced existence hold sway,
And the shadows drift past, yet again

Boredom

I thought I'd never blog again- but boredom has driven me to do it.. I'm now in London- stuck on the 23rd floor of a huge modern building-Citigroup Centre. My seat faces the glass walls of the building and in between my work, I stare down at the ground below. Sometimes the ground seems strangely tantalising. It's not just the utter loneliness I feel now that makes me feel so- beneath the mindnumbing fear that the height generates, there is also a strange urge to just let go and fall. I wish it were that simple.

Sometimes I wonder if there really is anything that could make me happy with my life. What is it that I really really want?

I stay all alone in a studio apartment of my own. I do not have a television. Nor do I have a music system. Nor do I have any friends here. But somehow, time seems to fly past. Before I even knew it, days have melted away into weeks, and weeks into months. I seem to think that postponing the inevitable is the only option I have now. And I also know deep down inside me, that that's wrong.

I'm sure that this post does not make any sense to anyone who reads it. But then, who said I have to make sense?

Yet another impotent rant..

It's been a long time...but I'm back..(Ouch! That sounds rather Terminatoresque!)
I had written quite a bit on this blog when I suddenly felt that I didnt particularly like wearing my heart on my sleeve.
So I did the unthinkable...I deleted all my posts( that too, without having saved any of them elsewhere)..
But days of monotony have forced me to rethink..Why cant I write about things in general rather than about my life in particular?
I'll give this a shot and see how things work out...Anyway it's not as if I have a horde of visitors to my blog..

Today I read about the verdict of life imprisonment given to the ward-boy who raped a nurse and gouged out her eye.
How innocuous sounding a word is RAPE when compared to its damning connotations..How much a euphemism for all the barbarity associated with it..
Beyond all the brutality and the physical violation of rape, it is the attitude toward the victim that confounds me. For the crime done on her, it is the victim who receives the more frightening punishment. The perpetrator gets at most a decade of languishing in a jail. And the victim? A lifetime of social ostracism. The more "forward-thinking" members of society view her with condescension..basking in the knowledge that they have done a favour to her by not shunning her.
Before the verdict was pronounced on the rape case and after he had been convicted, the rapist cunningly offered to marry the victim. Shocking, eh?You havent heard the entire story yet. The court actually asked the victim and her parents to consider his request and inform it of their decision. Archaic? It stinks of the worst sort of stink. The unbearable stench of reality. Someone told me that the court cannot be blamed in this regard because it merely holds a mirror up to the face of society. But is that a court's function? If we were all to be bitten by a homicidal bug, would the courts then condone murder simply because society does?
Indeed, the accused must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt. And he must therefore be given an opportunity to present himself in a better light before the verdict is announced. But why is it that our judiciary is hopelessly tilted toward the rapist rather than the victim? Why is the humaneness reserved for the rapist? And in this case, what kind of precedent would the court's attitude set for other similar cases?

At the root of it all, lies the question- Does marriage sanction rape? Does it absolve the rapist of his crime? The answer seems to be yes from the way society reacts to such cases. A win-win situation for all the potential rapists in our country. Rape a woman and be rewarded with marriage- and for the woman in question, a lifetime of violation in return for the semi-erasure of the stigma attached to her.
Look up the statistics on Rape and you'll be shell shocked. Official records state that every hour, two women are raped somewhere in India. And Also for every case that's reported, 68 go unreported. That makes it 126 women sentenced for life every hour. That's more than two women every minute of the day.
I still had some faith in humanity and its essential goodness. Until I heard my college principal state on stage during his annual Women's Day Speech (please do take note of the opportune occasion!) two years ago."Rapes are generally because of the provocative dressing of women". What a convenient generalisation.
Mr. Principal, could you kindly explain to me how a two year old child would manage to make herself provocative? Could you explain to me about the lengths to which a teenager walking back home would have gone to, in order to provoke the policeman who unfortunately, was forced to rape her?
And this from the mouth of an educated man who is supposed to guide future generations of youth.
I rest my case.

DISCLAIMER: The author vehemently denies being a feminist in any sense of the word. She hates crazed feminists as much as she hates MCPs. :)