Oh My Dog!

 

Coffee table discussions in India about a hafu with Indian blood who having won the Ms Universe Japan is having to fight the prejudices of a country that is still, as it seemingly emerges, very proud of its race in all its purity, makes one cringe because India itself is not a land that is free from prejudices, especially of the racial kind. And this could well be because of the colonial rule that it was subjected to. Interestingly, the racial prejudice extends to canines.

Let me talk about the incident that happened just a few days ago, which set my mind thinking at multiple levels.

I used to, in all my humility think of all those people walking their dogs - the beagles, the labs, the pugs, why, I even have a neighbour who owns a pair of Chihuahuas, though I have never quite seen them being walked or even carried around – as pure and simple dog lovers.

My impression of dog-walkers took its first beating when I had, a few years ago, overheard some people discuss keeping a dog not for the merits of the “keeping of a dog” but for the “snob value” that it apparently carried. It was not too difficult for me to unravel this one – it turns out that while a mongrel – the local Indian breed comes free of cost, one would need to pay upwards of a lakh or two for the “right breed”.

However, an off-the-cuff remark made snidely to someone about the “Indian mongrel” that the person owned made my eyes pop out. For the person at whom the jibe was targeted was a genuine dog lover as had been exhibited by the very act of adopting a street dog, a pub – an Indian mongrel of the Pariah variety – as it lay helplessly yelping on a cold winter evening, at the mercy of inclement weather and territorial beasts of its own species that would have mauled it to death, and bringing it home to love and safety.

To the less initiated, the Indian pariah is acknowledged the world over, as being highly intelligent and easy to train – the latter is an obvious fallout of the IQ. Their survival skills as well as adaptability, which is common about any average Indian being I suppose. An interesting fact about the Indian Pariah is that, according to a recent Nat Geo film, it is perhaps one of the first domesticated dog breeds ever. Another interesting fact about the Pariah is that the Bakharwal, an Indian Pariah variant, is perhaps the only known vegetarian dog.

But then, do the merits of a dog really matter when it comes to racial profiling? Indians, however much we may be in denial, but our deep rooted fetish about light-skin, and our instant liking for anything foreign (light-skin) as being God’s boon to mankind,  saying what ‘kismat’ or in this case, ‘dogmat’!!

Equating dogs to status symbol, well that is an altogether different topic and a funny one at that. That you are wont to do what you would when you see someone at the wheels of say an Aston Martin or a Bentley, to someone holding a beagle or a lab – meaning brand the person in your mind as “elitist”, as belonging to the upper echelons of the society or the privileged society – would perhaps make you curl up with laughter.

Up until now my eyes, which used to look at all those people who walked their dogs with something of awe and admiration for the kindness that I thought they bestowed on animals now yearn to look at the quirkiness, which atleast some of them unknowingly exhibit. And my own walks have begun to become quite fun.

Are We All Becoming Less and Less Humane…?

 

Is it that the Kevin Carter syndrome is there in all of us? Are we all in some sense standing mute witness to the injustice, maybe not capturing videos or photographs like some do, and hence those who do, they in so doing, exhibit the syndrome in all its grandeur, while others, suppress theirs.

The apathy building up in the country is increasingly evidenced through incidents as were reported in news channels this week showing the unfortunate incident where a husband had to carry his dead wife’s body for some 10 km because he couldn’t afford a vehicle, and the hospital refused him an ambulance service to ferry the dead body of his wife. This was followed by another shocking video of an old 80-year old’s body, where rigor mortis had set in, was shown being broken into two so that it could be packed into a gunny bag and hung on a bamboo stick so as to be taken afar - just two videos among the many that have almost sort of become a series in itself. And scientists could well probe to see if there is indeed a recessive “Kevin Carter” gene (for lack of a better term) and if it isn’t becoming dominant in all of us.

Apparently these happen all the time in villages and it is only now that these are being captured on videos and being telecast. Apparently, in fact, the Orissa government had recently launched the ambulance scheme precisely to address such issues, which obviously needs much to be done.

The above videos had come up just days after the video showing a man being hit and run by a light vehicle, the driver of which had come out to check if the man was dead, and then was simply seen  driving away, and this didn’t end there. The hit and run case had another twist, the dead man on the road had another beast of a human – this time a rickshaw puller, who stopped his rickshaw in the middle of the road, only to come and steal the dead man’s mobile.

Prior to this, there were videos that were shown of dogs that were flung to death by to-be doctors – for fun. Around the same time, some 10 year olds had burnt to death little puppies – also for fun. These had given rise to raging debates among animal lovers and understandably disturbed people and people help groups about what was going wrong in the society.  

What was shocking was that all the above mentioned incidents were captured on video, which led one to wonder if whoever was capturing the videos weren’t guilty of exhibiting the Kevin Carter syndrome.

But like all topics of discussion, these too were temporal in nature. With time, new tides of topics washed away the old ones, giving space for new.

Reflective of a deep rot that is setting in. An abysmal lack of apathy in people. We are becoming a part of a growing set of people where compassion is becoming a thing of the past. You hear of increasing number of people say things like, “I don’t have the patience to sit and understand…; I can’t stand emotional melodrama…”

A 2011 article in the American journal, Scientific American had reported that empathy levels had been declining in the last 30 years, with the same journal reporting a ‘steep fall’ in the last decade of the same decline period. Not sure if there are many more studies or valid statistics to fall back on, but what is happening around us seem to be clear warning bell.

Human beings were different from animals because of three virtues – patience, emotion and empathy. All three are being lost. Lost to a world that is increasingly becoming focussed on individual goals.  

Whether it is the society that is to blame or the individual, it doesn’t matter – almost like the proverbial chicken and egg story, what does however matter is that we awaken to the dangers lurking within us and at least awaken the human in us.

Women's Empowerment/ Single Women in 21st Century India – Has Anything Changed?

Although one's experience and discussions with peers and friends, makes one veer towards a conclusion that things have changed for women in the world, in reality, it isn't quite so. In a world which comprises of 49.6 % of women according to a World Bank data, in the century that it has taken for things to change for this gender, this change has not been profound.

Sample this. Country India. First Woman Prime Minister of India – 1966. Country America – 2016. Probable first woman President of America. And the headline was screaming, “Glass ceilings shattered” when she was just being nominated as the presidential candidate by the Democrats!

Sample this. After the headlines of 2014 screamed that the % of women CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies had reached a historic high of 4.8%, - yes 4.8 %,!, sadly, the 2016 list saw this drop to 4.2%.
 

Sample this. I was told by a male American colleague that a single unmarried woman staying with parents beyond the age of 18 or maximum 20, would be the object of ridicule (Is she not mature fully…? Why isn’t she moving out…?etc, etc ...and later, an English colleague would say that things were not much different in England though it was changing as she had heard of local colleagues whose relatives had 'chosen' to continue living with their parents.) This was being said to me, who was over forty, still staying with her aged parents because in India, it is perfectly normal to be doing so. In fact, it would perhaps be regarded as anything but sacrilege for a single or married woman or man, to leave their parents alone - to be left to take care of themselves during their old age. Things re ofcourse changing with an ever changing, ever evolving world and the paces differ - with different groups and sub groups evolving withing the same societies at different levels and different paces.

At this point, I would love everyone who hasn't yet heard  of Chimamanda Ngozi’s “The Danger of a Single Story“, to please do get acquainted with it.

But back to women and their plight – it doesn’t matter which part of the globe they belong to,  regardless of the advancements made, every status of theirs gets questioned. Even in the 21st century.
Depends on which part of the globe you are in. So, you could be questioned or talked about from being "single" to being "divorced" to being "issue-less" to being "married" to being "not married"...and no all of these are work-place discussions.

Or as I was recently enlightened about the US culture of "ambition" in women going against them. Huh. And you thought of US as being progressive?
So women do get weighed heavily not just on the social parameter which includes several social paraphernalia but also cultural biases. 

So yes woman's empowerment is yet a far cry from what it should be in 21st century. In fact, as an Indian, sometimes I think perhaps, women in India fare better.  Due largely to the social set up. A woman staying with parents earns the respect of the society at large for reasons that need not be elaborated. And the liberated, empowered woman of today's India does that of her own free accord. And this comes to mind due to the comments I have heard and that I have shared above. Also, I don't think ambition in workplace among women in India would be looked down upon or in any way denigrated.

Unfortunately for India, in the wake of the infamous and sad gangrape of a young girl in Delhi, who was travelling in a bus and with her boyfriend, there were many articles that were written about the fate of women, particularly single women in India. BBC, whose reports are like the gospels of truth for many, too carried several reports on single women and their plights in India.

Talking about empowerment of women in India, while it has been painfully slow, and will be for years to come, yes, there are empowered women and perhaps it is this empowerment that has seen the rise of single women in India. An indiatimes.com article of 2015 suggested that some 21% of the women’s population above the age of 20 is single. This in itself might not make sense as this obviously includes those who would get married. But what would make eye balls rise is the whopping 40% increase in this population in the last one decade.

While the increasing cases of young brides refusing their grooms on grounds of illiteracy, improper household arrangements in their in-laws’ houses etc being reported bring to light the seemingly empowered women – and here I use the term “seemingly empowered women” because this again is a complex social issue – the whole scenario of “arranged marriages” where a bride or a groom being rejected on grounds of “illiteracy” would probably need a deeper understanding of what went wrong in the education system, where the constitution of India guarantees free education for every child – but then, that would go beyond the realm of this article.

While I am not a proponent of a person rejecting another on the basis of socio-economic factors, which to my eyes are mere ephemerals, the fact that Indian women are feeling liberated and empowered enough to say no to a situation, where they are marred for life by being tied to a man who might turn out to be scum (it could be vice-versa too but fortunately man today has the liberty to say no).

One could write reams and reams on empowerment, the real empowerment at least in what I see around me, comes through education, through parental love, the upbringing that they’ve had and through the society that they’ve been lucky to be part of, enabling them to carry on their jobs without being reactive to the various jibes, talks, discussions and that they could be subjected to.

 
So yes, things will change. There are so many who remark about single women “Oh she can afford do that, she has no family.” or “Oh, one should have been like her - nothing to worry about, no work to do”. Really? So, had anyone stopped you from pursuing this path? The single woman too is often heard saying, “I have my boyfriend waiting for me outside” when actually she is going to get into her car and zoom off to meet her girlfriends, not because she is a lesbo but because she hasn’t found the right guy yet. She doesn't want to be the topic of discussion among her peers. That she is “still” single. And so for fear of being the topic of discussions, has learnt the art of fibbing. Not because she minds being single but she minds being discussed.

Just like Indira Nooyi, Chanda Kochar, and Chtra Ramakrishna made it to the top almost at the same time as the rest of the women from across the globe, similarly the single women in India would gain freedom from biases in almost the same time as those from across the globe. In time.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Aligarh movie not playing in Aligarh...some random thoughts

Barely 12 hours after I ended my piece on the movie Aligarh with the note that people watching the movie would perhaps get sensitized to the plight of the gay and the lesbians, I read the article in the Sunday edition of  TOI - that the movie was not releasing in Aligarh. A BJP MP reportedly felt that Aligarh would be thought of as being a hub of homosexuals. And someone actually succumbed to this argument. The defending lawyer in the movie Aligarh nails it as he explains the subjectivity of morality. Shown as an exponent of free-thought, he says, and quite rightly so, what is moral for one could be totally immoral for another.

Let us take the case of mind-controlling parasites who make the hosts dance to their tunes. This is not some sci-fi movie. It is a reality in the animal world. Something that came to light only after knowledge about it came to the fore. Awareness of things that exist in nature that may be contrary to what is generally known, could be an outcome of the forage of a hungry mind or could simply be some accidental knowledge-gain. Either way, awareness makes one realise that there is so much more to know than what one already knows. Even the great philosopher Socrates had said, "I know I know nothing"!

When homosexuality gets discussed as paving the way for moral degradation, it is a reflection of a bigger malaise - that of a deep-seated rot in the way we think - a thinking that could be a result of the outcome of narrowness in thoughts. And narrowness in thoughts arise where there is no knowledge force to widen the thought channels. To prevent a mid from rotting, it is important to let knowledge grow as that can keep the mind fertile as no other. In fact, it is laughable when people strive to protect knowledge like those who try to protect race - lest the race gets defiled or impure. Just as it is said for travel - that the more one travels, the more liberating it is, the same could be said for interaction - the more one interacts and debates, the more liberating it can be - liberation from both narrow opinionated thoughts and disinformation that may have been gathered as a result of little knowledge about facts and issues.

It has to be understood that gaining knowledge is liberating. It had the potential to moult thoughts - where fresh knowledge-gain could lead to the shedding off of previously-held thoughts, replacing them with newer thoughts.

Building mind walls to protect the supposed purity of knowledge is not only detrimental to one's own growth but to the growth of the society at large. If one were to think of what one knew as the be all and end all of knowledge, it would be akin to the proverbial case of a frog in a well. Even as a huge expanse of universe exists outside of the well, the frog would be totally oblivious to it.

There are no absolutes. There can never be. Knowledge has always proven this to be true, and will continue to prove it to be so. It is only this that can help to build an inclusive society.