Stand closer; it's not as long as you think!

The title is from an interesting sticker I saw at Kurian Jacob's guest bathroom. Not sure men do really think ‘its’ long enough as they aim, but inevitably end up messing the flap of closets – a frequent sight in flight toilets. Next time it’s a favour done to the next in line female reliever, if the flap is lifted before the performance or may be just sit and perform; because the female anatomy is simply challenged for a ‘stand and relieve’, which compels them to practise the ‘Aramandalam’ posture above a filthy flap. I keep reminding my daughter to cover the flap with tissues. It worries me that she has to sit on an unhygienic flap. 

Sanitary hygiene is a very personal (literally) issue in India. Homes are kept clean but not public spaces. Public rest rooms are an assault to the senses. Men usually manage, as their physicality allows them to relieve free of contact of the nauseating closets and wall urinals. But then it's only an epilogue to the psyche of a nation where sanitation is shrugged off with a NIMBY syndrome - not in my backyard!

Sanitation, bogging the head lines these days is a case of a vexed maze, where delayed policies stumble on social taboos in a country where ‘have-nots’ defecate in the open and the ‘haves’ ‘flush-and-forget’ in cities that simply don’t have a sewerage system. So where does the tonnes of shit, soap, shampoo, detergents go? – into our remaining lakes, rivers, rivulets and the seas; the same waters that find their way back into the underground pipes that criss-cross our streets and hang precariously under bridges, often leaking, making their way back to households to quench our thirst. 

It would be naive to believe all that we pump out of our porcelain toilets just vanish somewhere and our water sources remain pristine.  It won’t, until a sewerage system is also part of our city development, unlike Delhi and Bombay where 50% of the dwellings just do not have sewerage.

It was interesting to read that hundreds of toilets built in villages remain unused and the target population still defecate in the open owing to tradition – one cannot live and defecate under the same roof! Looks like a long road to travel before everyone relieves in the confines of a toilet. 

Efforts to sanitise the nation has been announced from the ramparts of power. Hopefully efforts are also made for a billion plus population not to relieve and wash into its strangled rivers and to use public toilets responsibly. 

Kerala – No land for liquor

It’s a state that sprang up from the sea-bed as a repentance of the killings of Parasuram. It’s said the blood from the dead were enough to fill 5 rivers. When Parasuram handed over the strip of land to Brahmins to rule, he would never had imagined a time, when the liquor that flows in the veins of its population would be surplus to fill the backwaters of a state that sell scenic pictures to the world labelling it – Gods own country.

If you grew up in a Christian household, you would notice that wine and alcohol was not a taboo but a pervasive liquid state that made its presence felt in family gatherings – be it birth, marriage or death and even in the church altar, when the priest sips the wine during the holy mass. Alcohol was part of our healing too - a burping aunt would be offered a few sips of brandy and for a fermented ‘Appam’ dough, there was always a few ounces of fresh toddy.

There was enough for everyone to drink - Arrack, Toddy, Rum, Brandy and imported whisky from Persia from the early migrants who boarded ships to the coast of the Arabia; they came back with trunks filled with rolls of polyester, Brute perfumes, Quality Street chocolates, Rothmans cigarettes and bottles of liquor.

So see, it was not a bad situation we were in then. Somewhere down the years people got bored and found more reasons to booze. More and more factories closed down and more men flew to the Arabian cities, in budget and not so budget carriers that fleeced them for filling up their seats so easily. Bandhs (banned now) and Harthals (upgraded to what a Bandh stood for), offered plentiful holidays but restricted to stay at home. With higher wages for manual jobs, money flowing to NRI bank accounts, a humid and hot weather and a slow paced life in an otherwise ‘nothing else to do’ state, boozing might have been an attractive proposition. We now top the list of boozers in the country and it also supports the state exchequer to the tune of $1.2 billion.

A ban on liquor consumption seems to unsettle queues that are visible every 2 kilometres along the state highway. The serious question is, what will replace liquor to mourn a death, to raise a toast and to kill time in a harthal?

Troubled mountains of the Yezidis, Gazans, Tibetans and Kashmiri Pandits

It was the year 1984 and the sleepy school town of Tangasseri woke up to a murmur, that Mother Theresa had arrived in the Missionaries of Charity home in Tangasseri. It was ten minutes before the morning assembly bell to go from the flat metal disc hung next to the principle’s office, at Infant Jesus Anglo Indian High School; yet hundreds of children ran out of their class rooms, crossed the road that choked mostly of cycle rickshaws, fewer cars and bicycles loaded with students and school bags. 

They rushed into a small furniture-less room of the charity home known to distribute milk powder, wheat and medicines to the needy (generally argued as incentives for conversion). There she stood in the middle of the room wrinkled as ever, her hands busy being kissed by children of different faiths – all of them who chorused ‘Our Father in Heaven’ and ‘Hail Mary’ at the end of the school assembly, something which might be blasphemous now.

Today is World Humanitarian Day and Mother Theresa still remains the most recognisable icon of6 humanity, a virtue that is no longer taken for granted in a world of misplaced priorities and blinded greed for land, religious hegemony and power.  For some time now the mountains around the globe have been wailing.

The world is anguished at the gruesome accounts of murder in Gaza and at the ruthless genocide of the Yezidis.  The sheer violence and the pace of wiping out of a heritage in the arid mountains of northern Iraq has outshone the plight of the Tibetans and the Kashmiri Pandits who have been for long subjected to a gradual extinction of a rich cultural heritage over decades and with no signs of  rescue from a hegemonistic china or an apathetic India to its indigenous Pandits respectively. 

For now Dalai Lama stares helplessly beyond the Himalayan ranges for the dragon to let go and the Pandits look up, from their relief tents and borrowed homes across the country, to a Modi who wears a saffron turban at heart.

Fighting insurgencies and racial-religious intolerance seems deadly and tedious than rescuing poor and the bedridden from the sickness haunted streets of then Calcutta. Humanity is being celebrated as another ‘World Day’ in a long list of days earmarked to represent a cause and not an innate human gesture; as a reminder, as its no longer part of the gated communities and free markets we aspire for.

Whose Independence its anyway?

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Independence Day meant to be a day to remember the contributions of freedom fighters that otherwise remained within the four walls of our history classes, walking the parade in Ashram maidan in the scorching sun (with a feeling of churning of the tummies that precedes spinning of the head) and ultimately a holiday.

Over the years there's lot to cheer and weep for a country that saw the Nehruvian social development marked by the public sector white elephants that still slow down the economy with its unique work culture of apathy, Stoic Indira rule, Age of nepotism under Rajiv that also ushered in the computer-literacy revolution, the liberalisation of the 90s that devalued the rupee over years from Rs3 to a dollar in the 1970s to Rs 40 in the 1990s, but boosted exports; created jobs, millionaires and more poor; and the rise of religious intolerance and moral policing in life and arts (read books and movies) and a tunnel-visioned foreign policy that alienated all of our neighbours.

India leads in space technology, Global exports of goods/services and soft power. But we do also export maids, drivers and labourers (when there is shortage for them domestically) and risking self respect. I am yet to see a Lebanese maid or a Jordanian labourer in the Middle East. Doesn't mean all is well with these countries; yet there is an inherent self respect in the polity.

There is more nationalism visible now. FB/Twitter profile pics are painted in tri-colour, people do actually wish each other on social media and RJs and TV anchors fill up their script for the day. School children are still asked to join rallies and some may still feel dizzy under a monsoon free sun; but the nauseating chillness of the ruling class that is free of accountability and ethics, and immune to the laws of the land celebrates the real independence.