of mine in the latest issue of Quay Journal. Do read.

I’m not the kind of person who likes participating in marches. Most of the time, I’m not sure what difference they’ll make. But in a country where homosexuality is still illegal, the sheer visibility of the gay pride parade on Sunday made it something worth talking about. (It was Bangalore’s first gay pride parade.) And because sexual freedom is something I feel strongly about, I actually stirred myself (and A) post lunch and made it to JC Road where we joined the parade halfway.

Guesstimates of how many would turn up had ranged from  50 to 1000. The actual number was 500, which most of us agreed was not bad. This consisted of gays, lesbians, hijras, kothis and many straight people who wanted to express solidarity. The mood was an edgy mix of defiance and celebration; lots of colourful flags swished in the breeze; and while some faces were masked, others were joyfully bare. The media had turned up in droves and the police were surprisingly un-troublesome. Here are some snapshots…

Cross posted on UV

The highest compliment in my grandmother’s book was “What a sweet girl! She keeps her mouth stitched up.” Of course, in Bengali, this has a nicer ring to it but it essentially means a girl who keeps quiet, who is silent in the face of adversity (and torture and ill-treatment), who endures. I grew up hearing this and, of course, consequently thought of myself as a very bad girl indeed. For as a child, I was what is commonly called ‘moophat’ in Hindi, loosely meaning brash and thoughtlessly expressive. Over the years, I mellowed (—or was made to?) and recently, I have sometimes found myself unable to speak even when it is urgently, desperately required.

Now, we know this scenario. It’s an old one. Women stop short of many things because they’re scared of being labeled loud, aggressive, and the dreaded ‘bitch’. Never mind that the reason they’re shrill sometimes is so that they won’t be silenced with a gentle slap from the old boy’s network. Between defiance and apologia is a thin line and we’re constantly scared of falling off. In this article, writer Verlyn Klinkenborg talks about a writing class he held where he noticed this:

Midway through lunch one day a young woman asked me if I noticed a difference between the writing of men and the writing of women. The answer is no, but it’s a good question. A writer’s fundamental problem, once her prose is under control, is shaping and understanding her own authority. I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is …” Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?

Hilary Clinton faces a similar problem:

Education researcher Bernice Sandler and linguist Deborah Tannen have shown that women who speak in a conventionally “feminine” manner (soft volume, high pitch, upward inflection) are perceived as less competent, while those who speak in a more decisive (masculine) manner (lower pitch, downward inflection) are perceived as aggressive.

When Hillary conforms to the norms of feminine vocal comportment, she is too careful. When she raises her voice in passion, she is shrill. Lectern-thumping, emotionally charged rhetoric by a female candidate would be dismissed as hysterical. How, then, is a female presidential candidate to speak?

Glamour Magazine gave us advice on how to tackle this conundrum:

“Speak directly to male subordinates. Women tend to shy away from giving a blatant order, but men find the indirect approach manipulative and confusing.” Here women are told to speak directly to men, not because indirectness undermines their authority, but because men find it “manipulative and confusing”.

Firstly, why should we always modulate and modify ourselves? But even if we put that aside for the moment, years of conditioning is hard to break. I catch myself doing it sometimes more often than I’d like–voicing statements as questions, orders as pleas, sounding tentative when I’m not, sounding placatory, apologetic. I’ve noticed other women do it too. We do it because over time we have learned that this ‘manipulative and confusing’ technique is an easier, quicker way to get things done. We have learned to recognize raised hackles and thinly veiled ego bruises. We have learned to pat and smooth and ‘there-there’ our way through boardrooms and bedrooms. Frankly, it’s silly to tell little girls to be polite and sweet and all things nice and then expect them to grow up to be direct-talking, plain-speaking women who state their case without hemming and hawing, and hoping that they will not be labeled terrible things for simply stating their point.

At the same time, I can’t ignore the question and say we shouldn’t care because I’ve seen too often how it affects women in very practical ways. I’ve been privy to decision-making processes where women were excluded from important positions because they were not opinionated enough. Because they would not be able to ‘hold their own’ in a group of men. Because they were doers but not thinkers (in other words, they had not expressed their thoughts forcefully enough on too many occasions). Because they were viewed as terrific second-in-commands but not as leaders.

I went to an all-girls college and I often heard even the strongest, most confident women there say that they liked being in an environment where they could grow without having to compete with men. That they could express themselves better because there were no men around. It is astonishing how many of these really bright people went on to have no career or worklife (maybe out of choice but maybe not). Is it because they had not learned one of the most important aspects of coping with a career—dealing with men? Did they lose their voices when they stepped out of those hallowed pink portals and into grey tube-lit corridors? Or were they like untrained singers thrust onto the stage, unable to find the right pitch?

I wish there were easy answers to this issue of women’s voice, tone and speech patterns but there aren’t. Here are some of the questions instead:

• If women natively have a different speech pattern, why should they have to change it? What are the advantages that ‘feminine’ speech patterns accord women and society? Why should we not try to preserve them?
• How much of this is genetic and how much is created by environment?

What we say and how we say it is inextricably linked to who we are. While some of it may be biologically defined, a lot of it has to do with how we were brought up and who we were to conditioned to become. It would be useful to remove the gender-based environmental conditioning as far as possible and then see whether men and women do speak all that differently. Parents, families and teachers need to stop placing stress on how (and how much) girls should speak. And it is astonishing how much (consciously and unconsciously) we still perpetrate this sort of conditioning.

Things are changing though and those in their twenties now are bolder, less hesitant and reticent, less worried about being ‘polite’–and hopefully—less bothered about being ‘sweet’. (I mean really, what are we? Stacks of mithai at Kanshiram halwai’s?) Certainly, I don’t hear people talking about ‘keeps her mouth stitched up’ as a virtue anymore.

As for me, my real self is still in there somewhere, kicking away every now and then. And at age thirty, my family’s hold on me relatively weaker, I’m (re)learning to let it out more and more. But having grown up with contradictory messages, finding the right pitch is still a challenge. And yes, the original question still gnaws: why is it always us who must work so bloody hard at it?

So I was reading Mary Oliver again today, after a long time, and thought I’d share. Not because you haven’t read this (you probably have) but because it’s one of those rare ‘happy’ poems. For various reasons, I’ve been on a quest to find these lately and it’s hard! Poets are a gloomy lot ranging from the philosophical-sad to the downright macabre.

It also poses a small difficulty that happy poems often end up sounding like something from a Hallmark card. I’m not sure I don’t feel a slight twinge of that even with this one towards the end. But the beauty of the earlier lines and the fact that you can’t fault the essential truth of the missive redeem it. It’s interesting how “the family of things” here is not neat, gift-wrapped, ribbon-tied. There is the “soft animal of the body” early on and the placidity of “mountains and the rivers” is broken by “wild geese, harsh and exciting”. Because family–of any kind (the universe or otherwise)–is hardly all warm apple pie by the fireside, is it? It is often “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Helix aspersa or garden snail is edible. But since A and I have not got around to eating snails yet (or at least not killing them ourselves and then eating them), it thrives in my garden. Wikipedia tells me it is a chief ingredient in skin creams and gels sold within the Latino community and used for wrinkles, scars, dry skin, and acne. It is also served as escargot. In gender talk, it is a hermaphrodite.

In coastal Andhra Pradesh, I visited a number of villages where the project is doing some work on environmental rehabilitation, specifically mangrove forest restoration. At Polatithippa, we took a boat into the creek to take a closer look at the forest. Our boat was small, wooden but motor-powered unlike some of the others that roam these waters where the strength of arms is all that makes them move.

The larger creek winds off into narrower, more silent subcreeks. By 10 am, the sun beats down ferociously and the heat is damp and sullen in here because the mangroves with their dense roots and thick leaves block out the sea breeze. This is where people from nearby villages come to catch crabs.

Crab catchers mainly catch and sell crabs and do not fish. I found this interesting article that says crab catchers in the Caribbean islands are considered “the lowest of the low on the socio-economic ladder” and therefore, “you have got to be careful how you use that term because on many islands it’s considered an insult.”

Here too, from what I understood, crab catchers are those who own small boats that are not equipped for the sea and they are often from lower castes so even within the creeks, they face trouble from upper caste fishermen.

They did not seem to hold a sense of insult about their profession though and seemed rather proud of their catch.

We traveled through the sub-creeks and the project manager pointed out different varieties of mangroves to me. Mangrove forests in Andhra Pradesh grow in the estuaries of the Krishna and the Godavari. (We were in the Krishna estuary.) The Krishna mangroves were officially declared to be a wild life sanctuary in 1998. I didn’t see any animals but I did see this large mangrove tree, which is quite famous locally. The people here say that this was the tree that saved their village during the 2004 tsunami.

We visited a mangrove nursery that the village people are maintaining with the project’s guidance. What they do is collect seeds from the forest and plant them. When they grow to a certain height, they transplant these to a barren land where they want to grow mangrove forests. The major species that grow here are Rhizophora and Avicinea and the forest provides a rich ecosystem for animals, birds, and crustaceans.

I was fascinated by these little yellow things which at first looked like insects. They are actually a variety of crabs.

On the way back, we saw people fishing in the larger creek. This girl should have been in school but she wasn’t.

And neither were these boys.

Recently, I traveled on work to the villages around Machilipatnam in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. I usually enjoy driving through the countryside and this trip involved plenty of that (about three hours back and forth from my hotel in Vijaywada to the villages). Perhaps, the landscape failed to move me because I found the relentless paddy fields (muddy yellow in harvest rather than the fabled gold) dreary, or thought the thin clusters of palm trees rising up at intervals like many-handed gods had something grim about them. Perhaps, my visits to the villages and the relentless stories of poverty, AIDS, domestic violence left me tired. Perhaps, the grey miles of ruined aquaculture farms hardened me. Or maybe, I was just having a bad week. I don’t know what it is but somehow, this particular part of coastal Andhra left a memory of bleakness.

Yet, there were some pleasant moments — pristine white heron speckling the fields, interesting birds near the shrimp farms, cotton trees in bloom, brilliant sunsets and sudden rain. Much of this was witnessed en route and I couldn’t bear to stop Rambhav, the driver, to take pictures every time. Here are some I did manage.

A duck farmer out with his brood — This is not a common occupation in these parts where people mostly survive on inland fishing, agricultural wage labour and aquaculture farming so this was presumably a rare sighting. The ducks had come out to ‘pasture’. The man got quite excited when he saw my camera. Between his Telugu and my sign language, I gathered that he wanted to pose with his ducks. So he stepped into the water and called them. And they came.

I took a picture of this shed built in the traditional style (mud walls and thatched roof) because it was prettier than the houses and didn’t have piles of vessels on the ground outside. Many houses are still made like this but increasingly, people are being able to build pucca houses. The government has also introduced housing schemes in some villages. While these old-style houses look more ‘quaint’ and charming, they are dreadfully uncomfortable, prone to leakage and flooding, and easily destructible. With no windows, they also lack ventilation and tend to trap smells. The pucca houses, in contrast, are ugly, square things but obviously far more functional.

Machilipatnam is famous for Kalamkari textiles. I visited a small production unit in Polavaram, which is one of the important centers of production. The owner explained the process to me in great detail. I will not get into that here but it involves many soakings in various chemicals and washing and drying the cloth multiple times. Also, bleaching the cloth with cowdung. I valiantly repressed squeamish urges. The dyes are created using various seeds, herbs and roots. He mentioned that the biggest difficulty they face is in getting hold of the forest products required to create the dyes.

Different dyes are applied in each layer.

The dyes are stored in large vats in a dark, little room. It smells evil as boiled mixtures of odd substances are likely to. In fact, the whole place stinks a bit and I did not envy the artisans as they tirelessly bent over their work that is both meticulous and monotonous.

Unlike in Srikalahasti where the work is done with a pen, the Machilipatnam form uses printing blocks. In this production unit, a separate room houses the blocks which lie about in careless disarray in heaps on the floor and overflow from cupboards. Is there a method in this madness? I’m sure there must be. On the other hand, the people here seem a little unaware of just how fascinating their art is considered by outsiders.

A close-up of some of the blocks.

They get more complicated.

I found it interesting that the cloth is used for bedcovers, lungis, pyjama suits and nighties in these parts but it’s very difficult to buy a Kalamkari sari or salwar kameez material because this is a concept that had become fashionable only in the big cities. I was told that there are only two shops selling Kalamkari products in Machilipatnam and neither of these sell saris or material.

I’m drowning in Plath right now — again — because I have to write a paper on her and I had forgotten how exhausting and entrancing she can be at the same time. It’s like a fix. You know too much is bad for you; it’s going to leave you fatigued with your head aching and a hollowness in the pit of your stomach. But you still want just one more. She’s one of those poets I tend to read obsessively so I avoid her a lot of the time because it would leave me with no time to read anyone else.

There’s a lot of talk about performance poetry these days and Plath was one of those who believed that her poetry was meant to be heard, not read. I find her own reading of her poems interesting because she has a quiet, controlled voice that contrasts with the furious energy of the words. Which is, of course, true of a lot of people with inner violence; they don’t necessarily reveal it in tone or manner.

In related thoughts, I saw Keats Was A Tuber by Poile Sengupta (also mil, but that’s beside the point) the other day. The central concern of the play is language, specifically English — how it informs our consciousness (or doesn’t) and how it’s hard for a colonised people to voice their sensibilities in an alien language. Reminds me of what Sabine Ulibarri said: “Language is people. We cannot conceive of a people without a language, or a language without a people. The two are one and the same. To know one is to know the other.”

This is especially true for writers and poets. A friend and fellow writer once told me that he tends to think of alpine forests while writing of forests, even though he has lived here all his life, surrounded by tropical foliage and never actually seen an alpine forest. I catch myself writing poems with images borrowed from books or movies and have to guard against it. The danger of a borrowed reality is that after a point, it feels like it’s your own. There’s always this tricky line to be carefully trod between writing in an alien language and reflecting an alien sensibility.

The other problem is that one’s experiences sometimes refuse to fit into the framework provided by one’s education or reading. For example, while I find resonance for rage and madness in Plath and loneliness in Eliot, Dickinson’s brand of sap leaves me cold. Before I read Tamil Sangam poetry and Akka Mahadevi, I believed that I hated love poetry. Then I realised I just hadn’t been reading the right kind.

Which makes me sad that I’m not better with languages and can’t actually read poetry written in Bengali or Tamil or Kannada. But this is an angst that has been wept dry and the challenge remains to shape our tongues around this language which we have made our own — even while knowing that we can never really claim ownership of it. Or can we?

Published in The Hindu today.

“I am fascinated by the relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet,” says Anurupa Roy, founder of Kat Katha and director of About Ram, a new media theatre presentation that had the audience spellbound when it played recently as part of the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) New Performance Festival. Produced by Kat Katha in collaboration with Vishal Dar, About Ram germinated three years ago when Roy watched a Balinese Ramayan. “Watching the Balinese version made me realise that the story changes as it travels,” she explains. “As it travels, it takes on different nuances. I started studying different versions of the Ramayana and came across Bhavabhuti’s Ramayana, which looks at it as the ultimate, tragic love story. It revolves around the theme of universal loneliness—that each human being is ultimately alone. So when Ram chooses kingdom over Sita, the last lines of the poem say ‘he ruled for ten thousand years—alone’.”

It is this palpable sense of loneliness that Roy and her troupe managed to convey very effectively in About Ram. The central character of Ram, played by a two-and-a-half feet puppet made of styrofoam, thermocol, wood and paper mache, assumed a distinctive personality, a remarkable humanness. The credit goes to the puppeteers who pulled his strings. The style of puppetry in the show is an adapted version of Bunraku, the traditional puppet theatre of Japan, in which the puppet is manipulated by three different puppeteers and—unlike in many traditional forms—they are not hidden away but an integral part of the performance. “Having three puppeteers increases the possibilities,” Roy says. “You can move that many more limbs. The puppeteers also supply a lot of the emotion because they have a rapport with the Ram puppet. They are actually acting on stage, not overtly, but for example when Ram is remembering something sad, they look sad as well.”

About Ram is based on the Uttararamacharita by Bhavabhuti and deals with Ram’s later life. For the show, Roy and Dar decided to focus on the inner workings of Ram’s mind. This would have proved challenging for any art form; for puppetry, even more so because as Roy points out, “there are no facial expressions.” The directors relied on a skilful combination of animation, dance and music to add layered meaning to the show. For example, the fight sequence between Hanuman (Ram’s alter ego in this interpretation) and Ravana is played out between the puppet and a masked puppeteer through a Kathakali dance sequence. In the final battle between Ram and Ravana, the action transitions from the puppet to one of the puppeteers and is heavily influenced by the Chau dance form of Seraikella. The transitions are smooth and dance adds vigor and a larger-than-life quality to these scenes. Choreography—for the puppets as well as the humans—is clearly important to the show, and closely linked to this is the music. It took the troupe one and half years to produce the show, six months of which were devoted just to getting the moves and music right.

About Ram is also the first show in which Kat Katha used animation. Roy is emphatic about the close relationship between the two arts. “Puppetry and animation are first cousins because you give birth to something that does not live and that you have to breathe life into. Animators use a flat surface and we use three-dimensional objects. Not enough collaborative work is being done because not enough people know of each other. I think that’s a problem with the performing arts in general. We all operate in our niches.”

Kat Katha was established in 1998 and since then, it has performed several shows with themes as disparate as Shakespearean comedy (Almost Twelfth Night), HIV/AIDS (Virus Ka Tamashaa) and Indian mythology (Durga, About Ram). “For the last five years, we have working in the area of community health, especially HIV,” Roy says. “As a puppet company, all our work is about addressing stereotype at some level. HIV brings an entire gamut of stereotypes to the fore. We’re trying to figure out how to give puppetry as a tool to a community that they can then use it for awareness creation.”

Asked about pet themes, she laughs: “I am just in love with the medium. Our work is very whimsical. We are working on a show entirely made of plastic; the idea was to explore this new material. But I like anything that shakes people up a little bit. We like to use content that is thought-provoking, that makes people go ‘maybe, things are not exactly what I thought they were’.”