Dredging up the past

-

 You see the sweet, cuddly depiction of Winston Churchill in 'The Crown' and almost forget his role in the Bengal famine of 1943 - a famine that occurred in the year when rain levels were higher that average, when Bengal produced enough to feed the entire region, and a famine that caused close to three million deaths.

 My father tells me stories of the famine. He tells me of the time when poor and hungry people stormed to the Park Hotel where the British and the elite were still wining and dining...but they stopped at the gates. Even under the provocation of fatal hunger, even as a mob, they wouldn't storm into place and claim food because it was not 'their place'. This word 'aukaat' in Hindi - I don't know what the closest word in English is for it - it's not caste or status...it's this unalterable place in life - that no matter what happens, you don't get to move out of your groove. Your children don't. Generations after you don't.

One can't blame Churchill. He was making all kinds of decisions to win the war, against all odds. But I think India and Indians have had issues with boundaries. I also think, not historically or anything, just from what I observe in my own work and in context of those I work with, there is an inverse relationship between your boundaries and your limits. If you have strict boundaries, you can be limitless in what you achieve or create. But if you have lax boundaries, you will erode under the crushing weight of constraints. Then you will necessarily limit what you can accomplish. 

One only needs to look at the schedule for a day and know this to be true.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more