How much would you sell your mother for?

That's a question that Priyanka Borpujari asks in her blog that's detailing her journey through the dark land of Chattisgarh. In a situation that's becoming highly polarised, it's time for all we 'right thinking' folks to peel off the purple shades and see for ourselves what's happening in broad daylight.
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How much would you sell your mother for?

The new love songs

A lot of people hold that the best songs have been written in the sixties, and that by the nineties most of the song writers had probably written every lyric that could have possibly been written, and after that popular music hadn’t really much to offer. In India, the only western music one access over radio comes from All India Radio, if you’re lucky to live in a metro or possess a short wave radio that receives the North eastern services of AIR. AIR remains the best source of easy listening pleasure, and its Western Music programmes are still the best over Indian airspace.

After the untimely death of Worldspace radio, I have taken to consuming music and listen to internet radio, and in recent months have discovered that the music content has evolved to reflect, as it must, present day living.

Love is no longer the syrupy, sweet, forever and ever sentiment. Breakups no longer leave you morose and moony eyed. Post-modern pop is a trip to the psychiatrist’s couch, an exploration, a dissection of emotions that messes with your mind in amazing ways.

Right now I’m listening to Will Young, a very promising young pop artiste. Consider these fragments from ‘Who am I’: ‘Sometimes you know you push me so hard, I don’t know how I see, you almost make me doubt I feel at all…I know that all you’re asking for is a little space in my heart, but I don’t find it easy to give… maybe I got a little selfish sometimes, why shouldn’t I? Who am I to tell you that I would never let you down, that no one else would love you half as much as I do now, Who am I tell to tell you I’ll always catch you when you fall, if I did I wouldn’t be myself at all …’ The song speaks of getting ‘real’.

What’s on my easy listening playlist this week? A mix of music from the fifties to two thousand and ten. Will Young, Adam Lambert, Richard Marx, Cliff Richard, Boney M, Smokey, and Ned Miller.

Shaken n stirred

We sang, “The future’s in the air, can feel it everywhere, it’s blowing with the winds of change.”

 One might say that could be Bihar’s theme of the moment, but after two weeks of being on the road, in the opposite direction of the Bihar Chief Minister’s ‘Chariot of Development’, I am beginning to wonder. Are we really getting excited about the window dressing, while most of the dirt is being hastily swept under the carpet?

True, I’ve been travelling on fairly smooth roads that actually lead somewhere for a change. Travel by road is no longer the nightmare it once was. There have been scores of populist programmes and schemes that have seen the light of day in recent times, but half-baked and hastily implemented schemes don’t hold water in the long run.

I’d like to believe that things are changing for the better, but I’m not so sure. The way the administration and vested interests work in tandem is amazing. I was in the Rohtas and Kaimur area recently, where illegal stone quarrying happens in broad daylight, and where the stone quarrying Mafia murdered an upright forest officer not many years ago. A week before the Chief Minister’s visit in his ‘Chariot of Development’, these illegal mines have been ‘shut down’ by the administration. This was achieved by clearing the area of the poor disposed daily labourers who are practically the slaves of the illegal quarry bosses, and telling the Mafia to put a hold on destroying the hills until the much touted ‘Nitish Chariot’ disappears into the distance. Neat job. The CM will see evil, hear no evil, and of course won’t speak about evil. Neat job.

Sigh. A gin and tonic. Single malt. Bloody Mary. Unlike James Bond’s famous Martini, I’m shaken. And Stirred. Take me to the magic of the moment on the glory night where the children of tomorrow dream away, in the wind of change.

No kitchen boy here

Travelling through Bihar and looking at how our education system actually serves the poorest in India, I wonder whether this ‘Right to Education Act’ will ever get off the ground.

With the caste system still firmly in place in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, crafty headmasters and upper caste Panchayats find ingenious ways to keep the lowest castes out of school.

The lower castes aren’t cute little innocents either. Visit their habitations and if you’re a first time visitor, you’ll be appalled. They’re smelly, unhygienic, indolent, grasping, vulgar, violent, often piss-drunk, and sometimes unfriendly. If you think that the Musahars, Doms, Mesthars, and Nats are the ‘gentle unwashed’, it’s time to lift up your head from the poppy fields forever.

If you have been brought up in the Western tradition, or have had the benefit of good ol’ Christian schooling [and I mean good OLD Christian schooling] that planted stuff like cricket, Old Bailey, and that peculiar notion of fair play in your hyperactive sub-conscious, you’ll say, “Chaps, these poor buggers have been given a raw deal for centuries. All that they’ve been allowed to do is to clean other’s shit, carry corpses, and scavenge. They’ve been social outcastes for a thousand years, and it’s time to be a bit more accommodating. Teach them to clean up, and probably move them from the outhouse to the vegetable garden.

One of my favourite Black poets, Langston Hughes, spoke about a beautiful black boy being relegated to the kitchen and not being allowed to the dining room. These four kinds of Dalits would never be allowed anywhere near a staunch Brahmin’s kitchen, for Crispen’s sake. Before you call me racist, take a walk to the centre of a Musahar Tola in any of Bihar’s rural districts, and surrounded by the sights and sounds of destitution and degradation, amidst the shit and piss and snorting pigs, stark naked kids, unwashed men smelling of cheap arrack unashamedly scratching their crotches and toothless women with lice-filled hair scratching their emaciated rumps, drink from a pitcher of water offered to you by one of the inhabitants. Let me tell you, if you drink the water, you either have great faith, or great foolishness.

I probably get by because my patron saint is Francis of Assisi.

Earth Day, 2010

Offshore oil drills making oil spills mucking up the ocean blue

Poisoning the living waters, oily, thick and smelly goo
While I buy that brand new sedan, one for wife and junior too.
Who cares if a million fishes, squids and crabs and pelicans die?
All the while their rotting corpses, call for vengeance to the Sky.

Here we smash through virgin forests, excavating coal below

Making birds and squirrels homeless, filthy-ing the H two O

Air and water, jungle dwellers, are worth less than iron ore

And so the mercury keeps rising, there’s no shade to stem the sun

So we’ll deny there’s global warming, and silence dissent with the gun!

But lo! Look at our ashen faces, the grounded aircraft, ruined plan

Business losses, frazzled bosses, newscasters looking so wan

When volcano spits out fire, pride is punctured, puny man.

As we chase Almighty dollar, hanker after vanity

Ma Earth gets hot under collar, you’re gonna lose your sanity

When human greed strips human need, it’s the beginning of the end

No more to say, on this earth day, June 5, two thousand ten.

- Verse [or worse] by Frank Krishner

Kaimur visited

[That's me in front of Bhabua's impressive administrative centre]

The heat wave rolls on in the southern reaches of the Republic of Bihar. In Bhabua, the district headquarters of Kaimur, named for a hilly range, one gets to see a spanking new District Collectorate, very impressive, with all the important departments within a stone’s throw of each other. It was clean, with a well tended garden, and no litter in sight. Let’s hope it stays that way.

[Roads have brought improvement in communication and markets, but we want more]

Roads in Bihar hadn’t existed five years ago. Roads linking the towns of Bihar were riddled with potholes and strewn with the carcasses of damaged vehicles of all breeds. Today, brand new roads make for smooth rides. Nitish Kumar, like Obama promised change when he came to power five years ago. In just five years, at least he has shown Bihar the ‘roads’ to development. What we got from 15 years of RJD was the bitumen scam.

[Are we teaching our children well by example, or are we perpetuating discrimination and corruption?]

Of course, in the past five things have become smoother and shinier on the surface. Poverty and caste-based discrimination remain stolid and unmoved. Corruption is the noxious weed that continues to strangle the life out of the system, and it appears to have become a way of life in Bihar. Pilferage and embezzlement appear to be the order of the day. The officials from the Bihar Pradesh Service Commission appear to be uncouth, loudmouthed, rustic louts, who wear their lack of social graces as a badge of honour. It’s appalling to see and hear the way government teachers, block education officers, and even district superintendents of education behave and speak. They’re rude to their subordinates, butt-lick their superiors, and don’t seem to have any ethics at all. The small minority of government teachers who cling to the tradition of honesty and integrity are harassed, abused, and actually implicated in trumped up cases that take years to fight, and when they are finally acquitted by the courts, they are too old or beaten to give a damn about the system.

Rohtas Rant

[dalit kids at the local Utthan kendra- tuition facilities]

Sitting down early in the morning after a night that’s been particularly difficult – power cuts, hot stillness at 46 degrees Celsius, mosquitoes – that’s what Sasaram, the district headquarters of Rohtas has to offer to its ordinary citizens. I’m housed in the comparatively better quarters. The guest rooms at the local parish which has a Catholic church, a social work centre, and three enterprising Jesuits who are part of a team that has brought immense positive change to the poor. More about this later.

[No longer in a mood to take things lying down, three men shot from my moving vehicle]

I’m continuing my study of the impact of the Bihar Government’s ‘Utthan’ programme, and the first day at Rohtas has been a let down. The Bihar Education Project Council office appears to be the epicenter of utter chaos. A defective filing system, missing records, lower officials in a constant state of being shuffled around, and a distinctive aura that indicates that the ancient caste diktats of Manu run in the veins of the local Rajput population.

[Social attitudes don't change as dalits continue to live in squalor]

This is the place where the confrontation between the Reds [the ‘Maoist’ combine that presumably protects the lower castes] and the Private Upper caste ‘armies’ [funded by contractors many of whom belong to the illegal stone quarrying mafia] is continual. Ergo, the efforts of the Nitish Kumar government to provide special educational inputs to the Dalits is seen as a betrayal of sorts, and the local Rajputs in the teaching cadre, while paying lip service to the programme, are ideologically opposed to it. Hence, one comes across chaos.

A District programme officer whose helpless because the financial and logistic records are a mess. A school where the headmaster refused to allow the low caste children into the school. Some of the high caste teachers with political connections openly ridicule the idea of elevating the labouring castes.

Such is life in the dry hills of Rohtas.