Unsung heroes

I am in Jamshedpur these days, working on a social project as part of the first year requirements of my job. The project is intended to provide us with a feeling of social commitment and an opportunity to see the "real" India, as different from the glitzy view that we get as blue-eyed MBAs working in the big cities.

The "real" India - it has become fashionable to dwell upon the dichotomy of India's progress - commentators have increasingly brought to the fore the "Bharat" that lies in the rural areas as starkly different from the "India" that we educated, urbanites see around ourselves.

We are hardly bothered - too safely ensconced in our smug cocoons to worry about tribals starving to death in Kalahandi or farmers contemplating suicide in the ravaged fields of Telengana. The notion of distance is a huge comforter; we convince ourselves that all such ills are confined to the peripheries, someplace outside our domain of interest. The India that we see, and are comfortable seeing, is the India of brash, confident, educated, youngsters; of fat pay checks and swanky cars; newer and newer multiplexes and foreign brands.

And thus, interaction with the community stakeholders here in Jamshedpur has been so much of an eye-opener. I have been working in the domain of Family Planning and Reproductive Health and it is a vital aspect of health, so often ignored, especially amongst the economically less fortunate groups.

Jharkhand remains a backward state and most of the tribals here, wallow in ignorance and a plethora of vices, that have gripped them in a fatal embrace. HIV-AIDS is spreading and the numbers lie, because most of the cases go unreported or unaccounted for. Female mortality is high; Sexually Transmitted Infections and Diseases are rampant. The moral fabric of the indigenous society is fast crumbling - men are chronic alcoholics and drug users and mistreat their wives; female foeticide is common and the girl child is discriminated against; the average age of marriage settles in the range of 14 for girls and 16 for boys; family planning remains an anathema to most, incest lurks in the shadows amongst most communities, especially those masquerading as conservative on the outside - none of these are unknown to us; as conscientous Indians who read newspapers, we are aware of all of these. Yet, individual stories of pain and suffering hit you hard, when you hear them from the protagonists themselves.

And it is therefore, all the more surprising that individual stories of bravery and defiance rise from these very depths of despair. Of people who are willing to risk the wrath of the majority to stand by certain values that they believe to be true and want to propagate amongst their brethren.

A 22 year old tribal girl from the Tiu community addresses a crowd of 500 people, men and women, from far-flung villages, advocating the cause of contraceptives and condoms, and explaining the advantages of family planning and safe sex.

A young Muslim girl takes up the challenge of making the young girls in her community aware of reproductive health, sexuality and health, HIV-AIDS etc.

Young boys in a community of slag pickers take up cudgels on behalf of their siblings and hapless mothers and decide to rid their fathers of the vices of chronic alcoholism -- and succeed.

They stand up to their community elders and become the voice of their generation. They fights against all odds to strive for their own education, to take major decisions about their own lives in their own hands, to change the mindset of everybody around them.

They are the heroes of our nation - anonymously fighting against all odds and keeping the faith that they will succeed despite frequent setbacks.

Threads of Memories from a distant past

A blanket of stars as a shroud over the dark, night sky - it was as if the lifeless, dark, smoggy scene that I had witnessed forever, had just been a mask hiding some ethereal beauty. It is a scene embedded deep in the recesses of my mind - one that I retrieve in moments of solitude and general unease. And unfailingly, it has eerily becalmed me. In its own unique way, I sense that it somehow makes a man feel a stirring proximity to nature ; a yearning for one's primeval roots. A oneness with nature, a feeling that life is much more than a senseless pursuit of material urges which drives us on relentlessly, day in and day out.

Samastipur is a small town in Bihar and it was there that I looked up at the blanket overhead and felt this stirring. Small towns have that effect on those who have had fleeting romances with such places, but are essentially city-breds. They have that elusive lure - the promise of a laidback, fulfilling life, the one that we willingly left behind to catch our dreams and yet, one, that paradoxically keeps popping up in our minds as some sort of an elixir to the ills that are a part of the city life package.

I was born in Bhagalpur and memories of my early childhood there are ones that I often turn to, when I feel this urge to run away from the life, I am used to, in the cities. Carefree walks down rustic roads, oblivious of the lesser forms of traffic that haunt such places; the ritual of saying a 'hello' to every 2nd person that you meet on the road, because you know them through 'so and so' and having the luxury of exchanging more than the usual, mundane pleasantries with them; the feeling that dusk actually harks the beginning of another phase in one's daily routine and is not just a mere lack of natural light that you can easily shrug off under the glare of a thousand city lights; waking up to see the sunlight pouring in through windows that offer a view of the sky rather than the concrete jungle all around; listening to the familiar sounds of the neighbourhood milkman or newspaper boy, going around on his usual rounds; being used to one's near and dear ones coming back from work when the sun has set, rather than in unearthly hours ; simple pleasures derived from a 'mela' in some part of the town that can easily outdo the gaudy frolic that the slickest of city malls can provide; playing with a cackle of boys in some forgotten by-lane amidst quaint houses that could easily afford to have vast gardens, the types even the super-rich in the cities can only wish for .. a whole list of images flash by.

Perhaps, in a world where success is achieved only through an abject thraldom to Mammon, the urge seems to be a refuge of the broken and disenchanted. But for those, who have had a taste of that life, it is difficult not to think of it with fond memories, every now and then.

The Enduring Legend of the HMS Bounty

Last weekend, I finally managed to lay my hands on a movie that I had been intending to watch for quite some time. A movie on perhaps the most famous mutiny in naval history - Fletcher Christian and his men revolting against the supposedly tyrannical rule of Captain William Bligh on board the HMS Bounty.

"Mutiny on the Bounty" happened to be one of the stories I had been fascinated, with since a very early age - my father had watched the 1962 Marlon Brando version and my grand-father had watched the 1935 Clark Gable version. The fact that the story holds such perennial charms to have given rise to 5 cinematic adaptations is a testimony to the adventurous streak that abounds in all of us. In a way, I completed a family tradition when I watched the Clark Gable version last week.

And it is a story that would warm the cockles of many an adventurer's heart. A young, well-educated man, driven by fate, to a life at sea, decided to take fate in his own hands, by leading a mutiny on one of His Majesty's ship. Fletcher Christian would always be associated with mutiny and it can be seen as an act of courage or improper rebellion, depending on where your sympathies lie. But irrespective of your stand, I guess it was the sheer adventurism of leading a new life on a forgotten island that really held me spellbound.

Is it simply a submission to the lure of something different from the mundane? Does it simply seem alluring because life is inherently, so staid and drab? Perhaps.

Lure of the Blog

Anonymity is the perfect refuge of the the hesitant and the "not-so-sure" ones. And yet, the urge to vent one's feelings and ideas is, I think, universal. And perhaps, lurking, undeniably, somewhere down there in each man's heart, is the desire to get acknowledgment from the world at large. A perfect concoction, therefore, to write a blog. A cozy little forgotten nook, where you can simply pen your own unique vision of the world. Every new post is a concrete achievement in itself, and you are the sole arbiter of its worthwhileness.

New Year and New Cheer

Euphoria on the arrival of yet another New Year is perhaps one of the biggest expositions of that eternal human feeling - hope. We renew old pledges for this year's New Year resolutions, make up some new, hoping to better one's track records in keeping them; we entertain friends and relatives alike in the hope that the streak of merriment such unleashed, will continue through the year unabated. We feel confident that a lot of the worries that plagued us would solve themselves somehow, lot of the rewards that should have come our way, would now be able to reach their rightful claimants. We look up the newspaper pages and the infectious streak of optimism is there too - hi-tech gizmos that will liven up the New Year; the films of the Bollywood and Hollywood biggies that are sure to rule the roost; how Chidambaram, Montek, Manmohan and many others of their ilk are going to make India an epitome of 3rd world reaching 1st world; Bihar gets its messiah and a hopeful deliverance from years of being the butt of national snide remarks; a new captain and coach are hoping to cement their pedestals in cricket history in our neighbouring country etc etc.

It won't take a geeky statistician to tell you that the probability of all the good things to happen in a single year are the same as Sania Mirza winning a Grand Slam this year (I believe I am not being too pessimistic here :)). But hope must burn bright in the hearts to ensure that we are able to shrug off the many failures and raise a toast to the few successes that would definitely happen this year.

And it is indeed a miracle that every once in a while, something happens to ensure that we do not completely lose our streaks of optimism. A terrible natural disaster like the tsunami that engendered destruction and death, vicariously lead to peace in Aceh in Indonesia, thus sparing thousands of gruesome deaths in the future. A woman was apparently pulled out of rubble in the Pakistani Kashmir after two months of being under that.

A Happy New Year and a salute to the spirit of hope and optimism amongst us !!

A personal bow to Dada

I had been trying to avoid getting into this with people - the issue seems everywhere like an all-pervading hydra. But alas, your roots and Bong roots at that, don't always take too kindly to being denied an outlet.

Sourav Ganguly in many ways, re-defined sports in Bengal. We had traditionally been a soccer-loving state with a heritage of producing hardly a handful of cricketers at international level and save, Pankaj Roy, hardly a home-grown talent. Of course, we had been great at attributing all kinds of manipulative theories to this phenomenon (and not all of them unfounded) and thus, it was with disbelieving glee that a lot of us watched his ascent to the helm of Indian cricket.

Disgraced at the young age of 18, when a lot many, outside Bengal too, considered him a worthy young talent, 'Dada' miraculously returned after a 4 year long wilderness; ironically when many had written him off as an addition to the long list of discards that populate the lower echelons of cricket here. And a return, it was, of the grandest scale. A century at the Mecca of cricket and Sourav had started off on a long innings that would see him tagged as the most successful Indian captain. Indeed, for a long period, Sourav was a treat to watch whenever he would get going - Dravid's tribute to his off-side prowess, perhaps, the most panegyric that a player could expect. Mind you, he was never the possessor of perfect technique and his on-side foibles always well-documented, but grit and gumtion, he posessed in plenty and it served him well as he led India on to a path of unprecedented glory.

And yet, like many before him, Sourav Ganguly failed to see the early ominous signs of his own downfall. His form was the first to desert him; his luck next and finally, unfortunately for him and for Indian cricket, his reasoning and humility. Arrogance had served him well in the early years - the whole mass of Indian humanity and media had admired his bold decision to make the great Steve Waugh wait at the time of toss - "Sourav gives it back to the Aussies" - some had proclaimed. And yet, this was his undoing once his halcyon days were over. Shorn of runs and form, Ganguly exhibited the enduring human trait of defensive stubbornness and refused to stand down. Admirable trait - not giving up - but unfortunately, he stood in the way of candidates, who by then, had acquired greater credentials for the job. Indian cricket had to suffer.

Surely, our Dada was treated unfairly during the Sri Lanka series. It was a humiliation that would have rankled even the supporters of minor mortals like Wasim Jaffer. That it was meted out to a successful former captain, only exposes our fickle allegiance to immediate architects of success.

As I write this, I have just received news of his inclusion for the Pakistan trip. To me, it has the undertones of an elegy. The best that even his die-hard fans can think of, is perhaps, a last hurrah - a reminder of his once glory days. Pluck is the only companion that has stayed loyal to him and perhaps, that itself, will lead him to a few last heroic exploits on Paki soil.

When the dusts of time and controversies have settled, perhaps, we will be able to look back at his days with neutral eyes. To me, as a cricket afficionado and an Indian supporter, Sourav Ganguly has brought immense joy on countless occasions. My thanks to him for all that and I hope that he indeed manages to make this trip to Pakistan - a last hurrah.

As Kurt Cobain once said - "It is better to burn out than to fade away."

Read it at your own peril

I had to do it to start it off - some kind of a preamble to myself.
It has been a fairly long innings and though quite mundane superficially, it has had its fair share of the exciting and unprecedented. Born in one of the forgotten small towns of India and have spent most of my life in the megapolises of Kolkata and Mumbai and yet, it is the small towns that I associate myself. Am yet to find out what exactly I was meant to do in the laps of Gaia and have hence chosen to flow with the supposedly correct career choices and moves in life. But, we are digressing. "Who am I" was not the essence of what I set out to answer here - rather it is "What symbolizes me" - a few of them then:

In love with books, read anything under the sun, Bong in quite many ways, not so 'Bongish' in a lot more ways; obsessed with soccer (that is a visible Bong streak), a Liverpool fan in a sea of new-found Indian love for fancier teams like Chelsea; an Engineer and a MBA (isn't everyone this, these days?); elusive writer of imaginary stories, curious spectator to the many hues of life - a vagrant to the core, driven by wanderlust; constrained only by the practicalities of life.