Grace is a matter of perception too, right?

Whatever happens in your life,

Is nothing but My wish.

So do sit back,

And do not question My will,

For I always take care of you at the end

This is my divine message for today. And although it feels good to read it on a day that has been trying and tiring and frustrating, I'm oscillating between thanking God for reading the sub-text to my trials, and raging about the fact that He is, more often than not, a high-handed feudal landlord. But as T would say, any conversation is good news, right?

A thing of beauty...

... is a joy forever.

It's true: I've willed it be wrong and false and foolishly romantic and therefore fated to an early death - but it will not escape me.

I remember reading sometime back this article about a woman whose husband is her better (looking, in this case) half, and all the funny and no-so-funny things about this situation. It was an article I instantly connected to - and I read it with relish, imagining all those mean aunties (most of them on the husband's side I bravely admit, and some silent ones on my side as well) who muttered 'wonder what he sees in her'.

I've come back to this situation often. I did not blossom into the proverbial butterfly, I just became more comfortable with what I looked like. I was a typical geek in school - all gangly limbs, braces and glasses, longer-than-long oiled hair with plaits. And I went to a typically trendy convent high-school. And I was put down directly and indirectly about how I looked. And now when I meet ex-classmates, it's the pretty ones who say - oh, you look nice! - like it's an unexpected shock. I'm dramatically different from before - but it's not the difference so much as the adjective they use.

Although I don't subscribe to the theory that things are easier for pretty looking people, why in some case beautiful women are taken to be dumb and it's pretty frustrating for them - but I do know sometimes it is easier for them. A traffic snarl that can be solved with a smile. A crabby fight that just needs a certain look. This feeling of coming home dead tired and feeling better by just seeing someone's perfection. I also know you get immune to beauty when you live with it for too long - but never really immune. Beauty is the best epitaph.

Why am I here, writing this? I just came across someone from my school who I don't really remember, but who used to play Mary in all our Nativity plays. Because she's got glorious skin and is angelic and cherubic. Every year. Who said Mary was beautiful? The subconscious treatment that equates beauty with being above ordinary starts in school. Why don't they have a random straw poll and pick a Mary in schools? Why not the short one or the dark one or the one with the pug nose? It takes no acting talent: she just needs to sit there and smile, so I don't believe talent had anything to do with it. We've conveniently equated beautiful with the divine. Hence anyone else is lesser, mere mortal. Little girls with pink frilly frocks and cherubic cheeks versus little girls with broken hearts wondering why they can't play princess.

Is this the same thing as picking the best speaker for the debate competition? No. Talent can be nurtured, developed, everyone has a shot at it. Beauty? Why that's the one damn thing that's not really in your hands. You can go as far as well-groomed or well-turned-out or well-dressed, but beautiful? Not even under the scalpel.

When I saw her today - Mary from school - and I looked through her photographs from school and I sat bewitched and saw her beauty - and felt very frumpy myself. And sorta felt cheated. And a little hurt that my 'blossoming' never came. And worried how I'd react if I saw my son being held back from something he wanted to do because of how he'd look. And grateful that perhaps he'll have to put up with it lesser because he's a boy. Maybe. Big maybe there.

Ofcourse I do believe that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. I just wish all the beholders were are short-sighted as Nino's Dad.

Top Clicks

I've put up a Top Clicks section on the right-side column of the blog, just below Nino's b'day ticker. So often through the day, I stumble across a story/an incident that just grabs my attention and my soul, and I can't get it out of my system, purely because I believe it needs to be heard more.

I work with a magazine, that like all of them out there, has its own agenda and a soul that is more market-driven than cause-oriented. I can't put these stories there, and so I put them here, hoping you will read it, hoping the word gets spread.

And even though we may not always be in a position to effect a change, I believe no story, no life must go unheard. These are my recommendations. I don't know how often I'll change it, I was looking at once a week, but some stories need to stay on longer.

Like this one about lesbian women in South Africa being subjected to 'corrective rape' by men who believe that freedom of choice is basically a lack of experience in the 'straight fine thing'. The video (linked in the third para of the Top Clicks) section is heartwreching - you've a young man saying that while he wouldn't commit 'such a rape', he's very happy someone else is doing it, because the women need to be taught a lesson. The story itself, as reported in the Guardian, is so heart-breaking, it left me feeling with what I've come to term as 'arm chair vulnerability'. Its so shocking it gives me jitters just thinking of it, forget putting myself in those women's battered and bloodied shoes. Please do read. And remember.

Mr Roncon take a bow

I've never attached a lot of importance to my name. My identity of myself was always very distinct from it, maybe attached and coloured by it at times, but never truly defined by it.

My name today carries my maiden and Nino's Dad's surname. That's how Nino, who is currently in the phase where he refers to everyone in their 'full name', no doubt inspired by roll calls at school, calls me. Why? Perhaps because my father's name represented the culture I'd come to be familiar with while the husband's stood for a culture I was willing to accept. It's a odd thought coming from a person who has survived mix-breed parentage, because the fact that you grow up on the borders of two totally diverse cultures should be a life-long reminder that tags hurt, tags type-cast and tags build barriers.

My name now often attracts two distinct sets of attention: there are those, including the husband's sisters who 'appreciate' it and then there are those who seek to define it in terms that are usually enough to get any sane person's heart-rate high. Surprisingly, the husband and I have no take on it. Neither on the fact that I use my maiden-name passport or bank under two identities. There is so much more to me and my opinions than the name that you use to refer to me, that it honestly does not matter if I'm Acme, you know? As women, we tend to understand this more. The roles we play, sometimes define our existence and frame of mind so completely at times, that our multi-faceted personality is at peace with the one facet that is visible at that time.

I've seen fiercely independent and identity conscious friends simply change names after marriage and I've seen friends add in their maiden name years after having carried their husband's name. What sets them apart, is that either ways, it was a decision of choice, not a social/cultural/family diktat.

Which is why Sanjay Dutt's quote that 'girls who become part of a new family after marriage must assume their new surname and all the responsibilities that come with it', really ticked me off. This is what this man had to say about his sister, who still carries her maiden name, a fact, the actor says, 'maybe fashionable these days, but is dis-respectful to the person she married.'

Stopping short of calling Priya Dutt a fame hanger-on who uses her father's famous surname for her own benefits, Sanjay, who has recently entered the political fray, also manages to rubbish her identity - as someone's daughter, as a wife, a politician and a mother. It's alright that Sanjay uses his nomenclature heritage: his father's goodwill has managed to save him from conviction even.

What gives a son the right to use a particular name, while the same is denied to a daughter? This reformed junkie/gun-loving social deviant believes there's only one Mr and Mrs Dutt, and that's him and his latest wife Manyata, someone who carries as many dubious distinctions to her credit, as her latest husband. Not considering that she has changed names several times over to suit her divorce statuses and starry aspirations.

With his regressive views and criminal background, Sanjay seems the likely choice for Amar Singh and his party. And as for Priya's husband Owen Rancon, may his I-don't-give-a-damn-what-my-wife's-ration-card-says tribe increase.

Civic rage

I'm seething with rage - the trembling-body, tears-threatening-to-spill-out kind of rage.

We moved to these flats that we currently live in a year back, uprooting ourselves from what was home and familiar to a new place where we're yet to make acquaintances, forget friends.

This morning, as I walked into the compound after my morning workout at 7, I saw a bunch of men mercilessly beating a young boy, who was surprisingly not wearing any pants. I enquired and nobody bothered to answer. So I walked ahead and saw a few women standing, silent spectators to the on-goings. What happened, I asked them. Two gutter covers (sort of like a manhole covering) - those non-descript dark grey metal rectangles that we drive/walk over without a second thought - had gone missing. It was the first time something has been stolen in our flats in 15 years, the lady said, stressing 15 years. This young kid was on duty as the security guard the previous night. And because of this, he was stripped, and beaten repeatedly.

I walked on to home and getting Nino ready for school, that young boy's face like a silent intrusion that crept in everytime I gave up my guard of routine. Eventually, routine gave way, and anger started to build up, at that particular bunch of men - most of whom are semi-retired, who sit on the benches in the compound gossiping, with whom Nino's Dad and I have individually had a few run-ins about those mundane issues that are the small print of living in a flat - lift etiquette, leaking water pipes, unaccounted for maintenance money, etc.

I walked back down purposefully from my 10th floor home - the security guards having stopped the lift till the flat's committee members apologized for the beating - and walked down to see one particularly rude man who'd been involved in the beating, bellowing. Next to him stood the police, hands on their hips, their expressions plainly stating that they'd seen this before, and couldn't wait to get it over and done with. The kid - now clothed - was crying, and was eventually manhandled into the waiting police jeep. 'Wait', I said. 'You do know that he was mercilessly beaten, right? That he was stripped and robbed of his dignity? That people here took the law into their own hands?' Everyone froze, and then, the cop nonchalantly stepped into the jeep and drove away. The same group of men who had participated in the beating stood around, watching me. 'Savages,' I said, breaking my resolve to use foul language. 'He was a kid'. A committee member came up to me and asked me to calm down. 'I'm a journalist,' I said. 'I'll have you hauled up for beating up that kid black and blue.' I asked them what police station the kid had been taken to - and I received silence as an answer. 'You're not the only ones who know how to beat up people,' I said, willing my words to shame them, willing them to try me.

It's the first time in my seven years as a journalist that I've used the press as a threat. And while it seemed like a great idea when we horsed around about wielding the power of the pen, it dint work in real life. There was no fear of me or my opinions - the bullies won in the end. I've no illusions about must have happened at the police station - the kid must have been beaten some more, the cops and the flat guys must have sat together and talked about how 'outsiders' are ruining Gujarat's 'safe state' image - most of the security guards in Ahmedabad are migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, sometimes Rajasthan - and the actual perpetrators of the violence must have driven back home, feeling all ballsy about their adventure-for-the-day.

Was it that I thought the beating was undeserved considering the petty nature of the alleged crime? Maybe. I remember watching a friend beat up another teenager - this time a lift boy - because he had fondled his four-year-old daughter and kissed her on the lips. At that time I felt none of these feelings. How different am I then from the bunch I condemn?

What is it that prompts us to resort to physical violence? Are we merely frustrated individuals, passing the rage on, like some psychological variant of Darwin's chain of evolution? What satisfaction does whacking someone, repeatedly, give - there must be something to it, so many people seem to enjoy indulging in it these days. And are we, who watch, sometimes speak, but give it up after venting a few emotions, any different? A perpetrator is one who indulges physically in the act of terror, as also the one who has the power to stop it, but doesn't. And also the one who may not have the power to stop it, but refuses to speak up, attempt to stop the crime. What deserves to be addressed with violence - and what does not?

Fists have become a language everywhere in my once-secular city - from traffic snarls to sectarian issues. Are we angrier as a city/state/country? Half a dozen people have been greviously injured or murdered in the city in the last year, in arguments over parking-lots.

I now no longer come from Gandhi's non-violent Gujarat, and instead hail from a state that, to use a friend's words, annihilated its own. I wrote on generalisations attached to a region sometime back - does this now mean that instead of Gujaratis being entrepreneurial but docile banias, our future generations will be referred to as a violent race whose rage boils over periodically? Historical monuments have disappeared overnight here - their cultural significance diminished in face of religious sentiment. We're the new Mahmud of Ghazni - a historical figure who children in the state have come to abhor after countless folktales about how he repeatedly plundered and butchered the state and its people. It's like the Crusades all over again - just that this time we're fighting for and against a bunch of self-perpetuated misconceptions instead of a single one.

I sit here, typing this, tears pooling on my chin, ashamed of myself. Of my inability to having taken up the cudgels for this kid. This is not what my parents, righteous government servants who seemed like a misfit in a world that worked on the power of money, raised me for. This is not what my son will look up to me for. This is not what you, my unseen friends, have to come to read me for.

The story of choice

I apply the montessori philosophy of the power of choice to raising Nino, albeit in small ways. He's encouraged to choose his clothes, the books we read, or the crafts we do, for example. Usually its a simple choice - he preferrs some over the others. Sometimes, he likes to bring two choices into one decision. White tee and red night shorts.

I've been trying to achieve something like that in my life as well. I'm a working parent with long hours (eight to nine hours) and being prone to guilt as with most of my gender, I've been facing a very difficult situation: to work or to quit. I need the job to make ends meet, but I hate spending so much time away from Nino - who is well cared for in my absence by his caregiver and grand parents. He's not particularly scarred with my absence - my mother has worked all her life and I've turned out pretty secure. It's me. I don't want to be away for that long. Nino's Dad doesn't agree - he's looking at the fianances - and we've just had an awful fight during the drive to work. I've been thinking working part time will be like bringing two choices into one decision. Unfortunately for me, neither the husband nor the boss seem to like the idea. As I sobbed this morning, in a fleeting moment of self pity, it occured to me, that I've not really ever 'enjoyed' the power of choice when it comes to Nino. When I got pregnant, I did not want to be a mother. Now that I want to be one - a hands-on one, desperately, I can't afford to.

I wonder what my mother would say if she read this - she'd remind me of all the things I've to be grateful for - but you know, sometimes, choice becomes the opportunity cost of gratitude. I'm grateful, but am I happy? Or is happiness too an urban legend, something that we've conveniently labelled as a 'state of mind'. sure. whatever situation I'm in, it depends on me to be happy. something like that. so not only does the onus of happiness lie on you, the guilt of not finding it lies on you too. I used to think happiness is simple - in the old days it was a good warm meal and a good book. Does it mean the same things today? no. I'm a different person with different needs. It's in watching Nino laugh/play/create. And it's in watching him without guilt or without being grateful.

edited to add-
One of my favourite quotes ever is one by Albus Dumbledore, that fantastic, thought-provoking teacher and champion of the brave, who also happens to be gay, and by the way, fictional. Not that it matters when it comes to this kind of wisdom:
'It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.'

Just stumbled upon it again, after making the decision to stick to the job instead of opting out. Does it make it any easier? No.