Random Thoughts!

Lost!

"I am lost!" They say.

How do you know when you are lost? Is it that easy to know when you are? Life is not just a walk where you have to choose between two roads in a jungle.

"Choose the one less traveled..." they say and oh! with so much confidence.

But, the roads have multiplied while the world has become smaller -- a global village. A village, with interdependence and interconnectedness between everyone so much that if someone is to get cold somewhere someone else will be sneezing somewhere else. So much connected...so easy to stay connected.

And yet, it has become more complicated. Everything is so complicated. The roads have multiplied. The life passes in a blur. Everything is so confusing it is hard to know what is genuine and what is not. Everything feels like a part of propaganda and the interconnectedness seems bigger than the life to be able to do anything about it. What to believe in and what not to, that becomes a huge question mark in life. And you are lost.

After you are lost its not that easy to find oneself, as I have realized recently. The search continues, no matter what you do, the roads become wider and muddier and blurred...it's very difficult to have any strong conclusion without having some extremists view points on the process and at the same time if you are not strong enough it's very difficult to know where the ground is, and we are bound to sway with a smallest breeze.

So, the reason behind this blabbering is just trying to calm down the thoughts that are creating havoc on my mind right now. And I am sure it is of no use to anyone nor for me...as I have not felt the relief after this neither head nor a tail expression.

Time is precious. And, right now, I believe it is to everyone's knowledge that I am LOST. Not only just lost but also not able to see any roads to travel. It seems I am a 'gone case' as my friend has politely put it.

Something worth Reading!

Against Discouragement 
By Howard Zinn

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

"I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war -- still another war, war after war -- and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do -- enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That's when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do -- to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Illych." A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me -- the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history -- more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and "democracy," their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext

You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows

Being one of the world's big vampires, 
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. If we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war -- in which children are always the greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this -- that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us -- of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and should cherish one another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted by the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below."

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:

It is true--
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can -- you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life."

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People's History of the United States.

Copyright 2005 Howard Zinn

Eid Mubarak!!!

 




and I bow to you.

ya Allah,

for I am what you make of me.

as I am

the creation of you

you are in me.
and I am in you.

I am blessed

and I bow to you.

One-Sided Love Affair!

(Pulicat Lake, TamilNadu with Shivani Yadav)

You have to know
I was here
I existed.

In these woods
where
birds chirped
and fishermen rested.

I was here
I waited.
Memories to be made
footprints to be shared.

You need to know
I existed.
Existed : longing for you!

Colourful threads --- Linking Memories!!!

Chennai:

It was the way Murugesan's eyes caught the small dust particles on 'thari', the way his expert hands knew how to untangle the colourful threads and the confidence with which he was turning them into beautiful cloth; that reminded me of my mother, back home in Nepal.

For as long as I can remember, I have never once seen my mother without threads. Whether she is taking a break from working in the fields, or on her way to the jungle to get fodder and timber, or babysitting my nieces, or chit-chatting with visitors, she would always be either making threads out of hemp and woolen raw materials or warping and wefting cloth on her 'taan'. She can make almost everything - from bags to blankets. So, I grew up wearing the shawls and sleeping on the sheep-woollen blankets she made. Even on my first day at school I carried an old hemp bag she had made for my elder brothers.

It was not just the confidence and sureness with which Murugesan handled those long, fragile strands that reminded me of my mother and her threads, but also the 'thari' (Tamil name for handloom), which looked similar to the 'taan' my mother uses while weaving. The only difference is the thari is more advanced than taan, with which weaving is slower and more laborious. It is bigger than taan and the cloth made on it is also bigger - both in length and width (19 meter).

The warping process, the first stage of making cloth by distributing the threads in a long vertical way was exactly similar. It has to be wound on to its roller and the threads passed through the lathe and fastened to the cloth beam. Here, because of the size of cloth involved, three men are needed for a job my mother does by herself.

In Vellore, Tamil Nadu, a handloom weaver.

The wefting process, however, was a bit different. The thari, the more advanced loom, consists of four wooden uprights joined at the top and bottom to form a box-like framework. The weaving operation consists of sending the shuttle containing the weft back and forth through the threads of the warp. Then, a device operated by a treadle lifts and lowers alternate threads and a lathe hung from the top of the loom enables the weaver to push each thread of weft up against the cloth already woven.

Therefore, though this process needs manual strength, it was made easier with some help from an advanced tool. It looked like a perfect machine in my eyes. While, in taan, just a few flat wooden plates and different sizes of rods are used as a tool while everything - from sending weft-shuttle back and forth to lifting and lowering alternate warp threads to weft -  is all done by hand.

It is not just the process of weaving that was different- in India, handloom weaving is an industry, not in Nepal. That is why 44 year old Murugesan of K.V.Kuppam has been working as a wage labourer for a decade. It took him two years to master the process of weaving while my mother learned the weaving technique from her mother and grandmother before she was a teenager.

Taking part in making threads out of goat and sheep wool, or hemp and allo fibre starts as soon as a girl is able to hold a taku (an indigenous tool used to make threads from fibre).  So, she has been weaving garments for more than half a century. But, unlike Murugesan’s, my mother's skill and work is invisible. It is taken for granted as the traditional knowledge of an indigenous woman, not as an income generating occupation.

In Nepal, weaving is more a women’s forte, with men just helping in making threads, cleaning the wool or preparing rods used in weaving. Buying threads is not much of an option so they buy wool if they do not have their own, or gather hemp fibre and make threads out of them, warp and weft those threads and make the garments of their desire. Only cotton is bought from the city - and they hardly buy them - for special occasions to make a special cloth for men called 'ghalek'. They don't have a mechanism to dye the threads so they only have the natural colours: black, ash-gray and white.

In K.V.Kuppam in Vellore, handloom weaving industries get white cotton thread from Gujarat at Rs 700/800 per kg and dye them in 20 different colours which usually cost Rs 150-250. Here, it is also a traditional family business where men and women work together, which is an interesting factor. Earlier it was also a caste or community-based occupation, but not any more.

In Nepal, indigenous communities are the ones who are mostly involved in weaving.

Murugesan is not involved in all the steps of the weaving process such as making threads. On the other hand, my mother does everything from washing the wool, making it into threads, and the warping and wefting. It takes her over a week to finish one garment and sometimes longer, especially when she has to do agricultural work at the same time.

But, there are some things in common that my mother and Murgesan share apart from their weaving skill. Whatever garments that are later sold in the US and the UK through Bishopstop Trading Company are made out of what Murugesan weaved for six days, giving him Rs 100 a day. With that money he is feeding his children and sending them to school. Though whatever my mother made was usually used by the family, she did manage to sell a few garments through which she supported my brothers and me.

Like Murugesan, who makes four meters of garment every day and is surrounded by threads and needles but doesn't have time to sew his torn t-shirt, my memories are of how her cholo (blouse) used to be torn and she hardly could find the time to sew them.

Murugesan and my mother also share a similar fate seeing how this beautiful skill is declining as the new generation is not learning it. As the owner of the handloom family business where Murugesan works, Anbu, says, "Not many people are doing it now.  Every kid goes to school and they are totally uninterested in learning the weaving." There are not many people coming to learn the technique and the ones who do come are all above 35 years old.

Anbu's anxiety resonates with my mother's words that I heard last year when I visited home. "I learned weaving from my mother. I wish I could transfer that to you," she had said wistfully. She had sighed, smiled and added, "But, what would you do by learning. Education is much more important. Of course, it is."  Here too, whoever comes to learn weaving are also women in their 30's, with their children studying in schools.

[During Covering Deprivation tour to Vellore, I met Murugesan, a handloom weaver, and got chance to see the handloom industry which reminded me of my mother, in Rukum. --- two women making threads in Rukum, Nepal. Photo courtesy - www.jvf-nepal.org]

A Journey: Not so Ordinary

Jhumlawang: My village,my destination ^^

Chennai:  Two days of continuous walk from headquarter, Musikot, had taken a toll. I was flushed and my breath was ragged. I could feel my heartbeat hammering against my rib. Both my legs were wobbling like rubber and I was drenched in cold sweat.

The steep up-hill climb looked formidable. I gulped and with all my mighty power took another step. My heart pounded, vision blurred and mouth got drier. I challenged myself to take 10 more paces. I failed; I collapsed before I made up to five. 

My father who was few more minutes ahead noticed the laborious struggle. Like superman, within seconds he was by my side. At 60, he picked me up like I was made of feather and ran in the opposite direction like crazy.

In my misery, I had failed to notice the herd of cattle running downhill, towards us!Only after each cow had passed and he had saved me from being possible victim of a stampede did my father put me down on the ground. He looked in my eyes, smiled and said, "A decade in Kathmandu has made my baby 'a city girl'." I could say nothing; my desire to reach home faster was not shared by my body. I was still struggling to stand on my feet. Looking at my pathetic condition, my father knew I’ll never be able to walk home on my own. So, he hired a man to carry me.

I never felt more embarrassed in my whole life. But the trouble with my swollen legs ended and it passed to the man who was carrying me. At seventeen, weighting 50 kg I was quite 'healthy'. So, when asked I replied with my most sincere voice -- 'just 47 kg'.

The man was all bones, sun-tanned and in his 30s. I sat on the newly made bamboo basket that he carried. He had some trouble keeping his balance and with long sigh said, "Must be at least 50 kg." I pretended not to hear. I was trying to focus on keeping myself sane. "What if he trips?" the question kept repeating in my head. But, after some time, I loved the way the snake like trail looked, the sound of birds chirping and the smell of moist-grassy jungle from the basket. I could feel and understand the rhythm of his walk. His pace differed from deep wooded forest to the sheep pastures and the mustard fields. He seemed at ease while walking through some scattered thatched roof villages on the way.

For me it was a nightmare, of course. When villagers saw the 'healthy' looking girl being carried in the basket, elders looked with concern, youths observed with curiosity and children pointed out and asked questions. It was too embarrassing to meet their eyes and hear my father explain. So, I slept in the basket like I used to do when I was a toddler.

After being carried in the basket for 5 hours we were about to reach home. I didn't want others to know about my embarrassing moments so before my village Jhumlawang was in sight, I started walking. After 15 minutes of walking, I was in my mother's arms. As we had reached the gate she had ran to me, eyes filled with tears. She had caught me in her tight bear hug. I felt her shoulder shake time and again.

"Don't cry, mom. I am home," I said.

Her shoulders started shaking more violently and all of a sudden she burst out in a fit of laughter. I guess, my hope of keeping this a secret was already burst. The news of me being carried in a basket had already spread like wild fire.

But, as Maya Angelou says "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned," I pine for my home. No matter, how many times people ask if I will need any 'assistance or basket' before I plan my trip home, the ache for visiting home remains unabated. 

[Note: when my professor asked me to write about important event in my life, i thought of this and laughed at myself. but, this is one of the most important memories i have with my dad...^^]

Diwali at Home: Memories!

Offerings for my brothers in Chennai hostel!

Chennai:

The smell of burning deeyo, houses colorfully lit, the sound of madal, youths singing bhaileri, firecrackers lighting the sky and sight of my brother's forehead covered in tika with marigold garlands hanging on his neck: these are the precious moments I will miss most this Tihar (Diwali).

The festival of lights – Dipawali, Tihar or Panchak Yama -- is celebrated for five days at home in Nepal. It is considered the second most important festival in the former Hindu kingdom. A festival when the crow, dog, cow and ox are worshipped on each day and in that order, making it an occasion to celebrate the animal. The festival concludes with sisters worshipping their brothers on the fifth day. 

Tika ^^

This year, the festival starts on Sunday when everyone will offer delicacies to the crow, the 'messenger'.  On this day we offer it selroti, meethai and rice on a leaf-plate. Unlike the crows here in Chennai, the ones back home are scared of human beings. So, we keep the plates on the terraces, the food often being eaten away by pigeons if the crows show up late. 

Preparations and offerings: though i ended up
eating all of them myself..:D

The second day is dedicated to man's best friend: dog. Even street dogs, usually kicked and swore upon, are worshipped.  We have a pet dog, Thople, and I never had to go looking for one in the streets. I will miss putting the red tika and garland on my rather reluctant Thople. Though he doesn't have a problem with the tika, he particularly seems to hate the garland.

The third day is all about the cow, called gaai tihar. 

By noon on this day, every cow roaming the  the streets of Kathmandu will be covered in different colours and garlands. The day is usually hectic for women. They have to clean the house and decorate it with flowers. The women make candles and deeyas ready while cooking delicacies for bhaileries and deuseries (group of people who go from home to home dancing and singing). Bhaileries and deuseries get food with money and gifts in return from families.

Yellow colorful caterpillars???
Nope.
They are tika offered to my brothers. ^^

Why all the trouble on this day? Well, you see money matters and this particular evening is believed to be the night when the goddess of wealth, Laxmi, enters the house. The evening starts with singing and dancing, lighting of firecrackers and burning candles.

From this day, bhaileries and deuseries never know if it's two in the morning or five in the evening; they are always there entertaining the families and neighborhood while drinking and feasting on offered delicacies. And, before leaving, they get their 'dakshina' from the family.

For an agrarian country, ox is important to a Nepali's livelihood. In the villages, if you do not own an ox, you are considered poor - which could be the reason why each of us tries to have at least one ox in the house! So, on the fourth day we worship the ox by painting their horns and body with different natural colours and offer them food. This day in fact goes fast. Deuseries and bhaileries are always on the door and family celebrations see no end. 

The fifth day is special when we offer worship to our brothers for their long life, success and happiness. It is believed that sisters are able to prolong their brother's life from the god of death, Yama Raja, if they worship them on this day with tika and garlands. Brothers in turn give sisters gifts of presents and money.

This time, however, I won't be able to worship my brothers. The first time when there will be no one to eat my home-made delicacies (gravy chicken, aaloo ko achar, salad, selroti, chilleroti, mixed curries) with curd and sweets. I guess I won't be making any either.

                                  *********************************

  

[Note: I wrote this article for college paper---to share how differently we celebrate Tihar in Nepal than in Chennai, India. 

It was very difficult to even think of celebrating cherished festival while being far away from my brothers.
A very lonely experience, indeed. I missed my brothers the most on bhaitika unlike any other years.
But, it was one of a kind experience.
Specially, trying to find the ingredients to perform bhaitika in their name. The funniest was to look for walnuts all around the city for hours without success. Then, as an represent, just got some another nuts...:D, there was no way of getting makhmali phul nor sayapatri so just bought with some yellow flower I found in flower market..:P
then, got all the fruits and sweets I like as at the end I was the one to eat anyway...hihi..]