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Karnataka, from the ground up

For the past month and a half, I have been getting to know my neighbouring state a little bit better. With some of my colleagues from the University of Hyderabad's Department of Communication, I've had the opportunity to visit different parts of Karnataka and speak with some of those who are trying to bring public health care to the poorest communities in both rural and urban areas. As part of the wide-ranging public health initiative known as the National Rural Health Mission, the Karnataka State Department of Health and Family Welfare has been attempting to scale up the intensity and range of its activities. The specific project that drew us in was the strengthening of the Department's IEC activities (Information-Education-Communication), particularly, building the capacity of its frontrunners (the block level health education officers) in social and behaviour change communication (known in the profession as SBCC). Supported by UNICEF, this effort involves training the 17

Rediscovering Sunday morning on Abid Road

After months of wanting to get out there on a Sunday morning and scrounge around the street bazaar for more books to stuff into my already bursting-at-the-margins shelves, we finally made it! Three regulars and one newcomer from our three-month old Book Club met on a Sunday morning, bright and early (well...tennish) near St George's Grammar School (remember those grey school tunics?) and set off to stare at the books on the footpath. The first few displays we came across, just past the Taj Mahal hotel (we could already smell the dosas we had promised ourselves), were not very inspiring, despite snazzy titles and lurid pictures of women in sixties' hairdos on the cover. One title in particular caught my eye: "The curse of the singles table: A true story of 1001 nights without sex" by Suzanne Schlossberg. Intriguing, that, and perhaps nothing like Sheherezade's tales spanning a similar period! Gouri was the first to spot something she liked, and before we knew it

Always on

It's close to midnight on the second full day of my winter vacation--or what is supposed to be one. I find that I am sitting here at my laptop catching up on email, listening to rough cuts of the upcoming shows on Bol Hyderabad (the campus community radio station of the University of Hyderabad), reading student work that needs to be commented upon, preparing for a series of workshops I have committed to... in short, it doesn't look like a promising beginning for a vacation! And I thought University life was going to be a picnic compared to the corporate or NGO sectors! Whatever happened to the life of quiet reflection peppered with the occasional ruminative lecture that academics are supposed to be privileged to have? When I switched jobs last year, I thought I was entering a space where there would be time for some amount of purposeless reading, for writing (things other than reports and promotional materials), and for stimulating intellectual debate (unlike the heated argum

More conversations with cabbies

As we travel into town on an uncharacteristically quiet Sunday evening, the Bangalore roads are relatively traffic free, but the driver of the Meru cab decides to take me by the "easy route" where we will drive uninterrupted by traffic lights. He swings off the four lane highway into a quiet side street that seems to go on and on in the darkness, and I am beginning to wonder if I should have insisted on the bright lights of the main road. But just as my anxiety is beginning to take a dangerous turn, he points out to me a looming wall on my left. It is very high, and soon we come to a pair of massive gates that seem to hide something very important inside. "That's YSR's son's house," the driver notes. "Jagan. That's where he stays when he comes to Bangalore. He owns this whole stretch of land." I made suitably amazed-disbelieving-indignant sounding noises. Just enough to make him go on. "I once took a passenger in there, he was a guest

Class struggle

Sometimes, when the students in my writing class toil over their assignment (though toil may be an extreme description of the level of engagement, sometimes!), I decide to take a mental walk with my own words. A couple of weeks ago, this is what resulted: You walk in, the world on your shoulders and in the undependable ink of the whiteboard marker, you're ready to deliver it, spell it out, deconstruct and analyze it, so that they can pick up the pieces and fit them into a jigsaw of their own desires and motivations (parentally fed/denied/rebelled against). There are alternative words for ambition that escape you, as your gaze flits from furrowed brow to glazed eye to drumming fingers and snapping ball point pens. Perhaps that's too strong a description for this pressure-- a heavy, blanketing, blinkering cloak-- they wear to the classroom. The world stays on my shoulder but it feels different, lighter, made less serious by the skeptical minds th

Mapping the contours of grief

They run through your head like a series of faded pictures; a smile here, a laugh there, a couple of sentences spoken in a voice just beginning to become familiar, a few sentences scribbled in haste in a classroom, an unopened email, an image of a young man sitting on the steps or lounging in a chair with his friends, answers given with a bit of nervousness and a lot of motivation during an interview. The feelings and thoughts that populate the room where we sit, remembering Rattan, choke the air, the smiles have disappeared from the faces of a normally boisterous group of students from both years of the MA program. We make our polite speeches that hide more than they reveal, because emotion is something that can only be referred to in a controlled, structured manner in an official forum. But this is necessary too, this acknowledgment that we all share regret at a life cut short all too rudely, that we recognize the irreparable loss that this has forced upon a family and on friends,

Book Club, anyone?

I'm just back from an hour talking about something I find it difficult to stop talking about, with four others who appear to be somewhat similarly inclined. Not a crowd by any standards, but a group that represents a beginning. The idea to start a book club has been brewing for a while now; every time I find myself in conversation with someone about a book I've read, or a friend asks me to recommend reading for a child with a voracious appetite for the printed word, I can feel a certain excitement about words and the ways in which they turn into stories, offering windows into lives of others, worlds that I would never have access to without the channel created by imagination. Oftentimes these conversations have ended with the suggestion that we should start a book club. After many months of prevarication and a bit of a push from a young friend, it finally happened, and that's how I found myself in the brightly painted library of Little People Tree with four others, talking

Poems of a different hue

Last night I listened to a Professor of English and Ethnic Studies, Dr Wilfred Samuels, read (rather, sing) the poetry of a man I had heard of but only vaguely. While I am no stranger to African American literature (Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are among my favorite writers), the poetry I was less familiar with--other than of course Maya Angelou whose " I know why the caged bird sings " has inspired many a high school student to delve further into the poetry that breaks free from centuries of oppression. But I suppose those who know African-American literature would know that you cannot speak of the poetry of Black America without speaking of Langston Hughes. Dr Samuel's, in a deep and resonant voice reminiscent of the negro spiritual, gave the audience a Hughes poem that runs as deep as its title: The Negro Speaks of Rivers Says Hughes, in a refrain that runs through the rendering of the poem like an undercurrent to the river of thought itself, "My soul has

Reading Teachers

Three books, a dozen teachers, two expert voices, and a brightly painted room. The result was an hour of reflection and enjoyment, an escape into a space we had forgotten existed. Our own pleasure in the magic woven by words, the ability to travel into experiences not our own, and the possibility of discovering empathies--if not answers--in these narratives. When we at Teacher Plus were wondering what we could do to make the day special for our own community of teachers, we hit upon the idea of a session where teachers would turn listeners--not for the purpose of taking ideas back into their classrooms but to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to a good story. The books we chose were simple, easy to obtain volumes that told stories that, despite their varied setting, were universal in the themes they addressed: boisterous classrooms, distracted students, difficult teenagers, and the never quite defined aims of education. But these themes were not wrapped in polemic or a

Cut, stir, simmer and serve, spiced with a running train of thought

It's a quarter past five and I walk sleepily into the kitchen, my hand reaches for the medium-sized coffee filter and I not-so-precisely measure five heaping spoons of fresh grounds into it and with the other half of my brain pull out the milk to boil. I put away last night's clean and dry dishes as silently as possible, knowing the early morning stillness magnifies the sound of a tinkling spoon into something resembling cannon fire in the slumbering mind of the still-sleeping household. I watch the milk first slowly and then rapidly rise to a boil thinking of Kanthiamma, my maternal grandmother, tell me it's a good sign if the milk boils over. (Well it's done that several times over and I haven't noticed any unusual good luck coming my way.) I make my coffee and as I lift the tumbler to my lips I wonder whether it will be a "perfect coffee day". My friend Mahrookh visits my wandering mind at that moment, saying in her inimitable Tamil imitation "sari

Found in Translation

As I scanned my bookshelf and ticked off in my mind the books I had finished reading, it struck me that works in translation comprised about 80 percent of my list last year. I don't consciously look for translated work, other than those by writers in Indian languages (being handicapped by my relative inability to fully appreciate the written word in the Indian languages I am familiar with) but it turns out that many of the non-Indian writers I had read last year were also in translation. Allowing works of imagination (and information of course) to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries leads to a wonderful movement of ideas, creating connections in a relatively effortless manner. Of course, I completely appreciate that the act of translation is certainly not without effort, in fact requires a special talent that is able to transfer mood and meaning to an alien language in a way that leaves no sense of a "foreign tongue" in a reader's head. The best translati

Won't you sign my e-book please?

A couple of weeks ago I came home from a book launch with a nice fat hardbound copy of the novel, Amitav Ghosh's "River of Smoke", signed by the author with an inscription to my daughter. This copy joined my set of three of Ghosh's books, each with a signature and a personal note. Then there's the signed copy of Chimamanda Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" alongside Alexander McCall Smith's "No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" with his name scrawled on the fly-leaf. Other authors have scrawled their unrecognizable or distinctive black-ink John Hancocks on other books, from Mark Tully to William Dalrymple to Kaveri Nambisan. Each of the inscriptions brings back a story of a meeting, of a specific context of experiencing the book. And I treasure them all. I know, ten or twenty years from now, when my bibliophile daughter takes over my bookshelves, she will feel the same fondness for those old volumes, maybe a bit yellowed and dog-eared, bu

Remembering Husain saab

Walking down the middle circle of Connaught Place, New Delhi, one does not expect to run into celebrities--it's sort of the back alley to the corporate world, lined with rear entrances to offices and the occasional restaurant kitchen that serves the capital's circular centre. We were on our way to the bus stop after a long day's work, in a rush to reach Jantar Mantar before the 5:45 bus to RK Puram. Approaching us was this tall, slim, black-clad figure...walking barefoot, and instantly recognizable behind his dark glasses. Like the starry-eyed twenty-somethings we were, we stopped him and instantly whipped out any paper we had and demanded an autograph. He stopped, smiled pleasantly, and wished us in his soft Hindustani, and signed. While we stood there gawking and overcome that we had had an exclusive encounter with the country's most celebrated artist in this unlikeliest of places, and away from gheraoing crowds. I have no idea where that signed notepad went--perha

The amazing women in my life--Part 2/Lessons in living and loving

How does one talk about one’s parents without falling into the usual traps of sentimentality or its opposite? Without recourse to familiar narratives of support, opposition, nurturing or its absence? There is the temptation to qualify every statement I make with a disclaimer, a sign of embarrassment perhaps, so I shall do this all at once before I begin. Everyone has stories to tell about their parents. Each one of these stories is unique, touching, formative. Every parent-child relationship forms and grows within specific circumstances which render it special. Within every nurturing relationship there is the possibility of its absence, its distortion, its corruption. Laughter, love, anger, sadness, conflict, confusion...these and other emotions/states of mind are the building blocks of all relationships, and the claim of their presence in one acknowledges both the unique and the universal nature of the relationship being described. And the list could go on. But I suppose I shoul

Monkey mayhem!

This morning my friend and colleague Sushma texted me to say she would be coming in late to the office. Given that we all deal with such things as children's exams, admissions, dropping them off some place and picking them up at another, I did not think much of it, and did not ask why. But when she did come in, with a somewhat harassed expression, we just had to sit down and listen to why. The corridor outside her house, a green space of potted plants and a bird's nest, a sort of oasis in her urban high-rise, had been totally trashed by rampaging monkeys! Thinking the abundant greenery housed more than just pretty leaves, a gang of four hefty monkeys tore through the vines, pulled down cables that interfered with their search, and finally broke some pots in anger, not having found any fruit or other comestibles. When they finally ran away, Sushma and her husband were faced with a disaster coloured in terracotta and spotted green--bits of broken pots, scattered mud, leaves an

Summer arrives in Hyderabad, with Haiku

The trees along the road, overlooking people's compound walls, peeping over the crumbling walls of historic sites, and of course, the view from my balcony...all have together given me some great moments the past few weeks. And so the Haiku emerges, distracting me, of course, from the traffic, but also bringing a smile to my lips as I navigate the rushing hours of the day.  The very amateurish photos are grabbed by me as I rush through the day.  Please read this as a work in progress...as new images and words come together, they will find their way here. And I must mention the debt of gratitude I owe my friend Sadhana, whose enthusiasm for the wonders of nature is infectious!  26/3 Quotidian joys: the purple jacaranda against the blue sky 27/3 Copper pods burst into flame, blazing a bold yellow along the highway 30/3 Silver oaks witness Traffic’s mad, rude rowdy rush To distant nowheres 1/4 The rain trees' branches  spread their generous arms like waiting grandfathers 2/4

The Power of the Fast, the Power of Poetry

For the past few days, one of the "last men standing" in the name of Gandhi has been fasting in Delhi. His protest has captured the minds and hearts of millions of people across this country, sparking rallies in support and signature campaigns to add power to the very simple demand he is making: to enable a mechanism to fight corruption in politics and other public institutions. Civil society groups in most parts of the country are organizing their own protest events, going on relay fasts and drumming up support via every possible medium from Facebook to Twitter to plain old text messaging to get people into public spaces to silently and sensibly express their anger and frustration with the system and support the demand for one sort of a clean-up mechanism. In Delhi, where Anna Hazare is confronting the government with his fast-unto-death (or fast unto the death of corruption), hundreds are people are thronging Jantar Mantar and the Boat Club lawns, carrying candles and placa

The view from my balcony

This is something I do fairly often, but this morning I just stopped to enjoy the moment a little longer, and I realized that it made all the difference. Almost every morning, I open the wire mesh door to our little balcony and look down at the greenery and think to myself (apologies to Mr Armstrong) it's a wonderful world....well yes, there is the devastation in Japan, the people's struggles that turn violent in the face of oppressive state mechanisms, hunger and deprivation, repressive dictatorships in North Korea, Libya and smaller pockets around the globe....but still there is my tiny patch of a garden, with its blooming lilies and alamander, the hardy bougainvillea, the hibiscus that strains toward the sun from under the branching mango tree, and the beautiful bilwa (Bael) that stands by the front gate. And how could I forget the double jasmine, its plump, thickly packed petals holding in their scent until just the right moment touches them open, and then they can't st

Bread and roses, a hundred years on...

There was a time when I was called upon to write a story about International Women's Day for the local feature supplement, and each year (I think it was three or four years in a row) I had to search my mind to see if there were new issues to write about. Balancing different roles, women and security, support groups, perceptions and stereotypes, etc. etc....I can see your eyes glaze over as you think, "same old, same old". That's true. But then, think about it, in 100 years, the issues are no different. Equal wages for equal work. The right to self-determination. The right to personhood on equal terms. The right to property. The right to not be treated as an object or possession. The same list. Year after year. So this year I found myself wondering, are the speakers this year going to say anything different> The newspaper stories are the same. What's different is that people now think it is a day to "celebrate" and not "agitate". So there