India's new mood

On Thursday last, in Ahemdabad, I realised one GREAT advantage of living right above a traffic signal in the city's centre: the fact that I saw, and soon joined, a protest march for a very important cause, the first of its kind I have ever witnessed or heard about in India.

Because everything that happens in the city passes by here.

I was only having my dinner at 8 pm and minding my own business, when we heard loud protests and young people shouting in unison downstairs.
Dreading it was just another Narendar Modi or BJP-related protest (basically something rightwing, and notoriously unjust), I didn't go to check. Then my grandma (I am living with my grandparents here in Ahmedabad) ran towards me saying it was a protest march against the recent gang rape in Delhi.

I abandoned my food, put on shoes without socks, and a jacket, and grabbed a camera and ran to join them. Perhaps in France it is very regular for young people to participate in strikes or watch them go by on a regular basis; this is a first time for me in INDIA.

When I got down 8 floors by running down the stairs, I realised that the whole mob had moved away. I had an idea of the general direction (near Parimal garden, where they would later go on to lay their candles). I jumped into a rickshaw. I told the driver just to "stop ahead" and when he realised I was trying to join in the mob, he took no money from me.

Another rickshaw driver on the way back congratulated and thanked me for being a part of the mob.

Once inside the mob, it was fairly easy to chant what they were chanting.

"WE WANT - JUSTICE" - the most common chant


"RAPISTS KO PHASI DO" (Hang the bloody rapists) - It often got violent.


and sometimes slightly funny how morbid it was: 

" Gutter ke gande keedon ko
Pakad ke maaron saalon ko"
(Let's kill the freaking vermin)

and it even got tender at times:

"Gudiya tum sangharsh karo
Hum tumhare saath hain"
(Little daughter, stand firm
We are with you in spirit.)

I asked some people how this had begun and on a lot of enquiry found out that it was a viral SMS that could not be traced back. One viral SMS - and about 300 college students, mostly boys, protesting the verdict of the rape case. They were demanding, quite controvertially, capital punishment for the criminals.

Since that day, the newspapers are flooded with information about rapes all over the country - and all sorts of victims and victims' families are demanding the same sort of justice that one would only think they deserve. Since then, the news channels have young, very young people chanting angrily and articulating very lucid frustration with the judicial system, political system, the religious biases, the cultural biases, and all the unchecked bullshit in the Indian culture.

It is a very positive change and I urge everyone wanting to understand India, to scrutinise the things that may have caused this semi-revolution, the means the revolution uses to reassert itself, and to critically analyse what it all finally leads to.

I have personally never felt so proud of participating in something in my country. The young here have been pretty much on the verge of losing their hope in their judiciary. I have always held that the educated people of my country have not always been the some of the worst contributors to the country's growth or well-being. And for some reason, I am hoping very much that this belief is changing.

Often enough, the solutions the crowds are professing for these crimes (such as capital punishment) are wrong, but for me, to see the anger finally expressed into some form of action is the start of a long country-wide and billion people-strong discussion. 


(For those who don't know yet, on 16th December, the news of a horrible gangrape in Delhi started making the rounds like wildfire. I'm not sure why the crowds favoured this particular case as opposed to the hundred thousand other rapes that occur in India every single day. Maybe it was because it was inside India's capital, a cosmopolitan city. Maybe it was because this time, the victim was young, highly educated, and because this awful form of valdanlism happened in Delhi, the capital - and also, reputedly, the rape capital - of India. It is of no less help that the victim is brave and continues wanting to live.
Yet, no explanation seems to make perfect sense. Maybe it's just an anger whose time has come.)

Interesting links:

How Bollywood adds to the subconscious culture of rape. (There is a lot to add to this discussion.)

An inside account from the protests all the way up in Delhi.

And this petition.

Cheers!

Thoughts on diwali

Being an Indian, it might be the hardest thing to study India with a beedy eye.

Today, I am going to tell you about something as mundane (or as exotic) as my diwali.

Every year, on Diwali, my parents, who are not particularly or at all religious, say a lot of prayers in the morning. Later, we drive all the way to my father's office (which is a good 20 kilometres south from where we live) to do the prayers over there. We have lunch outside, maybe somewhere expensive, come back home, and in the evening, we go to my grandparents place, which is in the north of Mumbai (another 20 kilometres north of where we stay) and have dinner with them, and sometimes even say more prayers with them.

In total, we travel about 80 kilometres within the same city to:

1. Fulfill a bunch of rituals that make little sense.
2. Eat a tonne of sweets.
3. Have an expensive lunch in-between at maybe a 5 star restaurant.
4. Meet my grandparents. (And get diwali money! - most elders just hand out notes of hundreds all day)
5. Perform rituals/ prayers to a certain "Laxmi mata" who is basically the goddess of money
6. Eat a rich, traditional dinner.

I don't know if that's how all other Indians celebrate their diwali. Clearly they don't. But for me, that is how it goes.

General things to note about diwali:

1."Saying prayers" is a loose term. It would be more accurate to say that we stand in front of a couple of miniature idols with flower petals thrown all around them and then we make a fire on a plate and chant a monotonous chant with a repetitive tune that gets stuck in one'es head, and makes absolutely no sense to anyone's living memory about the greatness of Lakshmi.

2. Wearing appropriate clothes can mean anything from wearing "new" clothes on diwali to wearing a salwar kameez or even a saree. This diwali, the fact that I wore a saree in order to follow a more tradition path, made me stand out quite a lot and subsequently a lot of my relatives thought I was either (a) married, (b) going to be married soon, or (c) fantastically into Indian culture and hence not so "Westernised".

3. On diwali, we do lakshmi pooja. Lakshmi is the goddess of money and abundance. So basically we are praying to money and praying for our own prosperity, which is quite far from selfless. Interestingly, my family bought a new car this diwali, and like all Indians, thought to pray to the car after we bought it on the day of Dhanteras. I still do not understand why Indians do this. In addition to cars, we pray to new houses and sometimes even family desktops when they're newly bought.

4. Overall, I noticed that this year is that advertising has finally bought over diwali, and, like Christmas, it reigns over all sorts of hoardings, radio shows and TV ads more than ever before. In Ahmedabad, one sees a particular ad ubitquitously that says "LOSE YOUR BELLY BEFORE DIWALI". It's been there since the end of September, when I arrived in Ahmedabad.

5. It must be said that sometimes the express purpose of celebrating diwali, or any Indian festival, gets a bit lost in the number of rituals and other demands it makes of us. The bursting of firecrackers, although a comparatively recent addition than diyas to the rituals of diwali, do more harm than good. Besides, I now know of electric diyas. Overall, diwali gets a bit more uneco-friendly every year and that concerns me.

6. In spite of all this, I stills see diwali as a way to take a break from all our lives and spend some time getting to know family. If only there were ways to make the experience more authentic, the connection with people deeper and the spirit of help or togetherness more conscious, there would be a lot more validity to what we do.

As my ending note I'd like to say that I'm interested in "designing" a culture or a thought-process/ attitude around diwali (such as is often enough propagated by the ads and hoardings) that convey a spirit of awareness, helping and consciousness. When you team this with family and the annual vacation, it could to wonders to Indian people and the Indian tussle between Western and Internal identity as a whole. Thoughts?