Religious Plans Come December

The Indian Express is horrified that Sabarimala, a men-only temple in Kerala, has been polluted by a film actress. I’ve been aware of the Sabarimala restrictions (in a sort of gender-as-caste way) on females of menstruating age for a while, so what I’m actually horrified about is that the Express--reputedly a national, secular rag would get their knicks in such a bunch over this.*


In my non-catholic life i.e. life outside of school hours, the lead up to the month-long Christmas vacation was a strangely contradictory time.


It was peak time for the aforementioned Sabarimala devotees--who took 41-day temporary mendicant oaths in honor of Lord Ayyappa,** wearing handwoven unbleached cotton and swearing off meat, alcohol, sex, cigarettes, and other addictive behaviors.


On the Hindu lunar calendar it was also close to Margazhi the month sacred to Andal who went from adoring Lord Ranganatha** to actually marrying him. South Indian Hindu women of certain classes and generations typically beautify themselves (flowers in freshly washed and oiled hair, turmeric dye on face, lampblack outlining eyes) and sing the Tiruppavai the beautiful collection of sometimes incredibly erotic verses Andal wrote before the Lord materialized.


It’s scary to speculate on how supremely frustrating couplehood in a household with devotees from both camps could be. And of course at school we invented our own secondary myths--if we looked 12 Ayyappa devotees in the eye, anything we wished for would come true; if we said the first verse from the Tirupavvai everyday, our husbands would be as handsome and faithful as Ranganatha himself :).

_______________________________________________
* Acknowledgement that the pun in this sentence is particularly, and horribly, gratuitous.

** “Lord” throughout this post refers to godly rather than feudal entities.

ONE WEEK

They arrive in Mexico that afternoon
And immediately begin colonizing it
Their clothes and gear all over their room
Their tabs mushrooming all about the town
They drape hotel towels like flags over boats, sand,
beach, benches, rocks, snorkels, jeeps, everything.


At the shrine of Ixchel
He scoffs while she offers
A sticky, long-stamened
hibiscus flower at the altar
Then he beckons her back--
’cos you have to crush it
For it to work
When she’s within grabbing distance
He rubs her belly and yells at the empty sky--
Make it quick you lazy Mayan bastards.
Their laughter piles up
in the naked temple
like sudden party guests


Days go by anchored only
By the newness of things
Days go by when she’s locked
by nothing but fistfuls of her hair


And he’s taken to calling himself
“Big Papi”
Which when she’s done looping
her doubly foreign vowels around it
sounds subversively affectionate
“Big Puppy”
Might be what she really says, softly.

Reserving India

The controversies and debates ranging around the reservations (affirmative action amendments) in India rage on.

Excerpt:
Why should caste be used as the only criterion of ‘backwardness’?
Caste is a very useful criterion for several reasons. One, the original discrimination in access to education took place on the basis of caste; the same criterion needs to used for reversing that discrimination. Two, caste is still a very good proxy for various kinds of social and educational disadvantages and the single best predictor of educational opportunities. Three, caste and economic hierarchy tend to fuse at the upper and the lower end: the poor are likely to be ‘lower’ caste and the upper caste likely to be well-to-do. And finally, caste certificates tend to be more reliable than other proofs of disadvantage, especially the notoriously unreliable certificates of income.

Yet all these are not good reasons to treat caste as the only criterion. Sociological evidence shows that we have multi-dimensional inequalities that cannot be reduced to a single factor. Any good scheme to create level playing field in higher education must take into count gender, regional backwardness, urban-rural divide and economic resources, besides caste.
***********************************************************


And the bad press spawned by the reservation policy? Perhaps one could look for answers here: a survey of diversity in the Indian media shows that Hindu upper caste men hold 71 per cent of top jobs and that Muslims account for only three per cent among key decision-makers.

What Happened to Ammini

She lived in a small village that was in the midst of big communal celebration--someone’s wedding perhaps--except she wasn’t actually there (I’ll tell you about that in a bit). There were streamers and palm fronds and mango-leaf garlands strung across the doorways. Conversations and different kinds of music were both set to really loud and it was crowded the way celebrations in India usually are. There were gangs of excited children running around and a giggly, bedecked, beautiful gaggle of young girls processioning from house to house, picking up more members of their crew.


There was Mathangi and Amba and Rajathi and everyone was looking for Ammini--where is Ammini? Where is she? They kept asking, filching jelebis fresh out of the pan and being so adorably giddy that no one had the heart to reprimand them.


Ammini was in an auto in Bangalore and in the process of running away. Before she did she wanted to collect the diamond earrings her mother had ordered for her at Kashyap Jewellers. Perhaps she wanted to keep the earrings as a memento, perhaps she wanted to be able to sell them if things went badly--I don’t know. The auto-driver sits with his lungi folded in half and his bony knees poking out from beneath the fold. They pass through street after street of closed or closing shops and Ammini asks if Kashyap’s will be open. The driver keeps assuring her that yes, yes, yes--it will, it will indeed.


Ammini is sitting on the ledge of a cliff in Kodaikanal called “The Scottish Seat.” She’s waiting for a bus to take her away to some big city. She looks around warily and sees an old friend called Kamakshi. Hello, she says brightly, I thought you were dead?


Kamakshi tells her that she has wanted to die many times, that in fact once she dreamt that all her friends were sitting on the ledge of The Scottish Seat and she unflinchingly pushed them over. I wanted to be able to touch him, she says. My brother, he is right here, right here, she says, patting the blood-red soil under their feet.


Then she looks at Ammini, it’s ok, you can touch him, she says, he would like you to. Ammini gingerly pats the earth in a soothing gesture to placate Kamakshi. Then her fingers graze a hooked finger, the nail bed encrusted with blood, and the pellets of falling rain reveal the rest of the finger, the hard, grasping hand it is attached to.


You should go and live with him in the earth forever now, says Kamakshi, calmly--I’ll explain to your mother what happened to you.


At this point or shortly before it, I yelped aloud--whereupon Big A who’d been cleaning the study (at 3 a.m., don’t ask) came to check on me and called me “Dorkistani” (though i wasn't really crying that much) and made rude suggestions about my dream that made me giggle.

Who's a "coconut?" What's a "brown sahib?" Find out here:

Go read Amardeep Singh’s most excellent plea for give/forgive and diversity of opinion within minority studies.


Excerpt:

I have two concluding thoughts:

First, can we get over the idea that to establish yourself, you have to go after a brown figure who has become successful before you, and accuse him or her of being a sell-out?

And secondly, people, can we just flat-out stop using "brown sahib"/"uncle tom" as a kind of in-house racial slur? Can we actually accept diversity of opinion within the South Asian/ diasporic intellectual world?

The so-called “Hildabeast” will no longer automatically be a female specimen.

St. Hilda’s, until now Oxford’s only remaining women-only college, has voted to admit men students. Several news reports claim that this will begin allowing male tutors and lecturers into the system as well, but I clearly remember having a male philosophy prof. called Philip who tutored at St. Hilda’s so I don’t know what that’s about--perhaps he was off the books in some way.

Anyway, he relayed this one eccentric discussion about power and knowledge that came out of an undergrad session at St. Hilda’s where a Hildabeast posited that sometimes it’s necessary to fake a lack of knowledge to get ahead. The example issued was: girl pretends that she doesn’t know how to play pool so the bloke she’s picked can put his arms around her on the pretext of teaching her. (Mmmmm, the merits of an Oxonian education…) You’re probably giving the idea an eye roll, but the ensuing debate on who holds the actual power--the faker or the duped--has genuine merits; try it and see.


It makes sense that the majority of students at St. Hilda’s voted against allowing men, after all there’s plenty of evidence that young women are paid more academic attention when there aren’t any rowdy boys around but if you had told me or my friends who were stuck in all-girls catholic schools including during our most boy-crazy years, we would *NOT* have believed you : ).

"A" IS FOR:

Big A
And li’l A
And Chelli A
And AA
(Not that AA
or not yet)
And Archy A
And Amma A
And Ammama A
And wannabe Medium A’s


It’s like my
my life’s filled
with letter-grade excellence
But sometimes I still go:

AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

TRAINED

Looking up at
Happy houses
Short Hills houses
Acres of backyard
Even their detritus
Handsome, ecologically correct
desirable
And at the bottom of their gardens
This tidy silvery stream, on schedule


I’m in that train from New York
Sometimes with you
And if with you
Always pressed close
One of us asleep, the other smiling
We must seem so sparkly
From above--and chartable as a river
Though we’re midpoint and only feel
Like we’re wending our way home

Holy Jelebis!!!

This professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder quoted and cited something I’d written in her latest journal article.

I’m *so* chuffed.

I’ve been referenced by friends and colleagues before but this is a first, and feels so frigging good!

When you write about obscure, interstitial correlations, it's nice to know it was useful to someone :)

Back to work on that dissertation...

"We hope to show everyone there's a different way"

Michael Sfard compares this Israeli-Palestinian couple to Romeo and Juliet.

I wonder how they met, what he said to her that made him human and then special, why he didn't just recede as just another speck in Israel's vastness of ethnic otherness...

I wonder how it feels to be married for two years and still have to fight for the right to live together, to wait for the state to respect and recognize your union, to apologize and explain yourself in social situations.

She says, "We hope to show everyone there's a different way." I'd like to say to her, Congratulations. I'd like to say, Yes, thank you for showing us that there is a different way.

In the year that i spent in Jerusalem at the end of the century, to my outsider's eyes, social connections seemed overly polarized--the Jewish friends that i made at Hebrew University had no Palestinian friends and remembered very little to nothing of the Arabic they learned in school; my doctor and the people i shared bus seats with and talked to on the street were Arabic and had extensive familial (and hence mostly ethnically homogenous) relationships as well.

Both sides claimed to be fond of India--the Palestinians because they still remembered Arafat and Indira Gandhi and India's decision, as a newly independent state itself, not to be a signatory to the formation of a zionist Israeli state in 1948; the Israelis enjoyed pointing out India's long history of Jewish non persecution and having recently discovered that they shared common enemies with an India under the BJP were entering into all sorts of trade and military agreements.

And in situations where politics didn't come up, their fondness for India and me by extension was that much less complicated--they just sang songs from Hindi movies to me :).

Birthday presence

Yeah, yeah, yeah--i know i just celebrated my birthday for the 11th time this year already, but i'd really really really like to see the Stratford production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream that's performed in seven Indian languages, one of them being English.

Right here on this side of the pond and also very exciting is John Castro's inaugural work for the Hipgnosis Theater Company--Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. It's on between June 15 - July 2, Thursdays - Sundays, at 8pm at the Flamboyan Theatre at the Clemente Soto Velez Center (107 Suffolk St, between Rivington and Delancey).

For tickets: order via SmartTix over the phone (212-868-4444) or online(http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=MEA0 ).

M4M must easily be the Bard's sexiest play--in the sense that it brings up premarital sex [a.k.a. fornication], pregnancy, sexual blackmail and sexual bribery--all the good stuff, my true love though is Much Ado it's seriously sexy in that supremely crush-like way...

While i'm being all homesick--

Here's my favorite story about homesickness.

Rabindranath Tagore is, for lack of a better word, awesome.

They made a movie of the Kabuliwallah story--and i've never seen it, but this song from the movie was a staple on the radio when i was a kid so that now too far away from home and farther still from childhood, it's guaranteed to make me misty.

Sare Jahaan se Accha

Have to say that I loved the Indian Embassy in NYC (right across the street from the Central Park Zoo) with the Pakistani Embassy just two streets away ‘cos despite our spats we’re all bhai-bhai, right? The first five minutes inside I sat on my plastic chair and beamed--it had an Indian-kitchen smell to it and I could hear at least seven conversations in five different languages--four of which I grew up speaking.

And also, it came to me why Indians are all affronted when there are security searches or rules against carrying food inside administrative buildings--I guess it’s because as a people we tend to be easy-going about things like that--there certainly was no metal detector when I carried my dripping strawberry popsicle into the passport renewal room… the best part was that after I was through with that, I had five offers to share snacks brought from home (masala chips, Krackjack [it's not what you're thinking], Hide n’Seek, idlis, and those Lays potato crisps). Ek dum sweet.

Making Up is Hard to Do

I don't typically sport "makeup." When I have a modeling gig, I get to leave that stuff to the professionals and usually it's such a scramble getting to NYC or some unheard of place in New Jersey or wherever on time and it's so awesome to have someone touching my face that I max out the bliss by sneaking in a li'l shuteye. So I don't know the tricks—left to my own devices, my hair's curly the way I like it only if the weather is just humid enough and my skin's dewy only if I've been hitting the water bottle. Otherwise I look the way I do in my passport pic.

But two cute preschoolers offered me a makeover last week--and since the offer was for imaginary shimmery pink lipstick and lots of mustaches on my eyes, it certainly would seem that my time had come. So I stopped by at the M.A.C. counter today where they didn’t have my exact shade and I ended up having half my face done done in a lighter color and the other half in a darker shade—it was a pretty radical look, but that’s how I looked when I took the train home.

I wish I lived back in the day when all they had was B&W photography…

CONTENT

If that belly was filled with baby
Instead of full of food
Would she feel less guilty
Be in a better mood?


(I just came from www.stephanieklein.com)