Only-slightly discriminated against

Picture taken from http://www.chicagoemploymentlawyer.net/gender.jpg

TISS (we study and work in the area of social sciences (check here))is buzzing and active at all times, something I am much averse to. One hears of certain phrases and words liberally included in high-pitched conversations at the dining hall over tea or at a round-table conference in one of the classrooms amidst the thumping of tables, which are arranged in a manner appropriate to the name of the conference or at the tapri behind college over masala maggi and cutting chai. The more scarier ones are the 'isms', to which my mind frankly shuts down and which comprise in their scariest form "neo-liberalism", "post-modernism" and numerous other such "discourses" (I do not even understand what the last means).

One also hears of things like "do not have a voice", or "uneducated" or "disadvantaged" or "socially excluded" in reference to the under-dogs.

Then there is me. I am an average person from an average background and with an average understanding of the matters of the world (which in TISS translates to condescending half-smiles subtly-disapproving head-shakes). I do have a voice and it is especially audible when there is a need for an auto-rickshaw. I have received education- quite a bit of it and nothing that is connected to a rational career-pattern, if you ask my father; I am disadvantaged only to the extent of the company of pretty people I keep that tends to highlight my highly unflattering physical form and I am socially very much included in everything, most of all gossip that is of the derogatory kind, owing to my Punjabi genes.

So I am part of the urban, empowered youth that is living in a cosmopolitan metropolitan amidst other urban, empowered people. Caste, religion, gender and other parameters of the conservative society are not of any relevance here and when I study about problems like gender inequality and patriarchy, I am supposed to think of a time from my small-town life that qualified "because you are a girl" as a satisfactory response and that I have left far behind me.

Or so I thought. As the lease for my current accommodation draws to an end, I have started looking for another place to move in and I see how I have been living in a bubble of equality and freedom. As a tenant, I have a checklist of things I am looking for, in the house I rent. So I want it at least semi-furnished and I want it well-ventilated with those big, sliding windows and I want it close to a market place or at the least, to a vegetable vendor's stall.

Apparently, the house-owner too has a checklist. And it reads like this- should not be a Muslim, should not be from a strange community of one of those North-East places, should not be working in one of those call-centers, should not be too modern and yes, should not be a female.

I have never realized truly how wrong I have been in thinking that the problems of gender, race, community and religion belonged to the more conservative small-towns and rural areas.

When I am asked what community I belong to, I feel threatened, even if I belong from one of your "acceptable" communities. When you ask me if I am a vegetarian or if I eat meat, I feel uncomfortable. When you ask me details of my work and raise an eyebrow at my flexible working hours, I feel insulted. And when you say you cannot give me your premises simply because I am female, I feel very discriminated against.

The absence of a window would give me some breathing trouble so I believe it is a logical expectation from a home but how the absence of a penis would be undesirable when you rent out your property sounds absurd, even to me and I am not the brightest things out there.

We are all talking about reservation bills for women in politics, facilities in schools to encourage the girl child to study, financial schemes to promote women entrepreneurs and others. Then there is something like the issue I just tried to put forth, though I am not quite sure I was successful at it, given my habit of meandering to other topics. But coming back, this is a very urban problem and one that, I am afraid would be labelled to the "middle-class" (that BTW, is a phrase so overused that it is frayed) habit of cribbing. The standard response I can foresee is similar to the response of the English teacher, Mr. Morgan from the movie "10 things I hate about you' when he says

"I know how difficult it must be for you to overcome all those years of upper middle-class suburban oppression. Must be tough!"

So I say, sometimes being middle-class and only-slightly discriminated against is a real pain.

The Punjabi Landlady

She is a cannon-ball, she is a torch ablaze; she is a hawk with her talons sharpened just now and her piercing, lazer-beam eyes evolved to spot anything remotely shady...
SHE IS THE PUNJABI LANDLADY!!

I had intended to write the whole post as a poem but my rather in-adept rhyming skills were killing the emotions oozing out, as pus does from a bad wound.

To be brutally honest, one of the reasons for my moving away from my Punjbai-centered North Indian hometowns was to get some breathing space away from my culture. Don’t get me wrong. I am a Punjbai to the core but our loud temperaments that only add fire to our mean, sarcastic hearts to everybody (yes, even people who are not family)gets tiresome sometimes.

So you can imagine the excessively-rude shock I got when I move into this incredibly beautiful place and open the door to the first person in my first every home and find out it’s my landlady, who adding injury to insult is a Punjabi.

I can still remember that day as if it were my last night’s nightmare. One would think that years of living in Maharashtra would have eroded the biting edge off the features that I will compile hereunder, but no Sir.

Your average Punjabi landlady will expect you to keep the house as clean and beautiful as if it were your own while at the same time expecting you to forget not in your deepest sleep that the mattress you are sprawled on is not your own.

She will make it so you see her face looming in front of you, teeth bared in-what she assumes is a smile- the moment you spill a drop of something as harmless as water; and the parched lips of the imaginary-bobbing head mouthing the words “it may be cold-drink or God-forbid chicken-curry the next time”. [shivers]

She has a knack of knowing, which would be the most ill-suited of times and will announce her presence then with the demand for biscuits or something that you do not have in your kitchen preceding her prodding feet. She will examine, during said visits, every inch of her precious house and pass rude comments on the bad choice of your bed-linen. Hey, everybody wants Egyptian cotton but it isn't your fault if, with your ungenerous pay the only place you can afford to purchase your bed-sheets from comprises a faded bed-sheet on a street-side topped haphazardly with other, faded bed-sheets in all colours and prints that wouldn’t want to wade through a drain in.

But enough crib. (Don't say it, I know)

Next. If you live in a society, do not be nice to the security guards or exchange trivial words with them for they are the harbingers of your daily routine, visitors you entertain and content of grocery-packets, to the landlady when she comes a’callin’. So if she asks you when you returned home last night, make not the foolish error of telling her anytime but the exact minute and second of the hour of your return for she knows. SHE ALREADY KNOWS.

Life, my children, is tough. And after my first experience in a rented house, why we would want to shove it down even more deplorable pits by living in the cursed home of a Punjabi is beyond my below-human-average-intelligence. A word of advice: go for the seepage in the Parsi’s house. Leave the large windows and marble-flooring in the Punjabi’s house.

Slaves of technology

At 8:25 p.m. tonight I was thinking of the work I had done and the work I still had to do before I could call it a day (or more likely, a midnight). My flatmate was reading the newspaper and thinking of the amount of studying she had left for the last day before her examination. We were both sending text messages all over the country simultaneously while I tap-tap-tapped data into my computer and she flipped channels on the television in between reading the latest mess-ups by the world's who's who in the political arena.

Then suddenly she puts down the newspaper on the bed and says "Damn, today was Earth night where we had to switch off the lights between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. and I was going to do that". I said "well, lets". So we switch off all the lights and fans. But this is Mumbai and it it hot. So we draw the curtains and open the windows. There is a beautiful, cool breeze that flows in and surprises me. It is very pretty at night from my window and I wonder why I did not notice it before.

"But we are not doing it right", my flatmate mumbled. "How is that?" I ask. She points at my laptop- that, with its rotten cracked monitor, which obscures about 50% of the screen- was humming tunelessly on my desk. "But my work", I say, suddenly not so sure if I wanted to be the good Samaritan anymore. But on my flatmate's persistent nagging I reluctantly powered the ancient machine off, while calculating the extra hours I would have to put into my already over-burdened job to complete the day's target.

I turn around and my hostile expression changes to one of sadistic pleasure as I point to the television and emit a victorious "Aha!". "No way, I can't miss this episode of Brothers and Sisters", my room-mate wails but had to switch it off in the end, along with our mobile phones.

So there we were, twiddling our thumbs and wondering what to do now that there was darkness and more importantly, nothing to strain our eyes on.

But it turned out all right. There was left-over pulses and gobhi-aloo-matar from lunch that was heated by the light a candle and eaten with slices of bread, there was good conversation about families and dreams and regrets, sprinkled with a fair amount of bitching. There was the soft breeze coming in through the windows and the glow of the street-lights and the noise from the traffic on the roads and it seemed to me that we had thrown out our schedules, worries, television soaps, laptops and mobile phones across the it too.

The hour passed too soon but I felt happy and at peace. It was not just about saving the climate and the Earth... for me, it turned out to be about unearthing my buried faith in the beauty of little moments and simple things.