Bound feet, mutilated genitalia and clipped wings

Women had to fight a long battle to reach the level of swimsuit and the leisure of swimming. Buried under multiple layers of yards of skirts, great-skirts, bonnets and gloves any attempt to lighten the burden was taken as a sign of doubtful morality. During the Victorian era, the swimwear was more cumbersome than what the modern woman wears in sub-zero temperatures. It was not until some decades back that female swimwear became something of a legitimate leisure activity. Mind you, the man had been doing the same since the conceiving of the so called civilization.

The most powerful country in the world, the United States of America, granted voting rights to the contributors of its development only in 1920. The first semblance of democracy dates back to ancient Greece. In England the roots date a good thousand years back. So the voting right came at least 1000 years late.

Men were flying planes for a good 30 years when the first females cracked the hard shell of cockpit glass and broke though rocky minds to set wings to the flight of their dreams.

Education and intellect, the timeless right of the men, let loose its first showers of knowledge and empowerment on women just during the last fifty years. The history of knowledge and its pursuit date back 3500 years. Even now it’s just in infancy in many parts of the world.

Female genital mutilation, removal of some or all of external genitalia, to tame the so called presumed rampant sexual desires in women. The sexual freedom that man enjoyed, taking it a moral act for him and immoral for her. It was his rightful pleasure and her sin. Now  the chains are breaking. A long battle to go for though, because sex for man is natural. For the woman it is still a scandal.   

In China, for one thousand years they bound women’s feet since early infancy with dozens of feet long strips of clothes to check feet growth. It was for the famed four inch feet, the symbol of docility, tameness and civility, of being gloriously feminine. They bent the toes inwards and tied layers of clothes to crush and break the bones slowly and painfully over the years to keep the feet from growing beyond four inches, the limit after which a woman became almost unacceptable and uncivilized and shameful. Women hopped like unassertive, vulnerable creatures. It was the walk of a willow switch swaying to spring breeze to arouse the men. They wore silken embroidered baby shoes over bound feet. Inside flesh rottened and sores festered. The famed Chinese beauty with bound feet of a baby did service to the patriarchy for 1000 years before the practice stopped in 1920s.

In my state of Haryana, we have 7000 village settlements. In my memory of the last 20 years, there have been 5 honor killings in my village. The girls’ crime was just as simple as pursuing--once in a lifetime--a freedom which any men or boy does every day throughout their lives. They fell in love. Nothing wrong with that. Everybody does. The only difference was that they allowed it to blossom. Survival and chastity meant subduing it the moment it sparked. Otherwise it was an unpardonable sin. The punishment death ordained by society and ignored and looked over by the state. Their sin? They went out with a boy, talked to him, went to some eating point with him, and thus brought this shame to the family. The society would expect hit-back from the disgraced family to salvage honor. And of course they did. A quiet strangulation, a still quieter cremation, and a quietest society. Gone. She earned it, everybody seemed to agree. Taking 5 honor killings per settlement during the last 20 years, the traditional society of Haryana has progressed with the killings of at least 35000 honor killings. Now when I see the freedom enjoyed by boys and girls, enjoying innocent pleasures like talking to each other, going for coffee and burgers and movies, I realize it has been a silent revolution. There are unnamed, unseen martyrs. I count them to be 35000 in my state during the last two decades.

The bloody wheels of exploitation are taking women further to the next milestone in their journey.          

As the human juggernaut moves from brawn to brain, there is an inevitable shift in gender roles. The traditional muscle-dominated bastion of males is melting. It’s more about smartness and management now wherein females are better placed to excel given centuries of biological traits sharpened in managing things despite greatest odds.  

All things go in circles. In the beastly fight to survive in the jungles, we started with an all male dominated scenario. Now we are moving towards parity and equality in gender functions in making a society and driving the economy and pulling the technology. On further progression on the path in the circle, the role of women will overtake that of men. And rightly so. They have earned it. It has been a bloody battle for thousands of years.

Harmless hornets, biteless bees and beggar peacock

Large yellow paper wasps, one of the stinging hornets, defended their nests with a single-minded determination. Stinging winged chivalry! Attack! Their primal instinct! Well that was almost three decades back when we ran helter-skelter as the winged yellow striker, twitched its antenna, its dull black points of eyes stared before striking. Children cried with pain. Next day a joker with a swollen face would provide free entertainment.

So much so for the wild instinct! There were still remaining some traces of wilderness in the countryside. Wild is what? It’s just to be natural. But then having turned the wilderness upside down, trading it with the civilized onslaught, we humans are restlessly marching ahead. There is a stampede and many species are getting trampled in the dust below. The wilderness gone. Most of the species have lost their footing as the terribly over-bloated and glutinous super-species, man and womankind, firmly hold the reins of the chariot of nature. Everything has changed. The wilderness vanishing, so is the mundane ‘wild’ streak in birds, animals and insects. It’s a tamed world in tamed humanized environs.

Coming back to the yellow foe of our childhood. They held their positions, defended their share in nature, struck lips, cheek, nose and forehead to defend their fortifications. The punished swollen face of the linage of Homo sapiens bearing a testimony to the fact that he is not the only claimant to the cakes of Mother Nature. Things have come upside down since then. As the human juggernaut moves on, mowing down the last traces of wilderness, species are losing their primal instincts, just to buy some more time before the inevitable extinction. It’s an acceptance, a sort of death-bed time’s letting go of any signs of further struggle. A final surrender, a soulful resignation.

The yellow hornet doesn’t bite now. Somehow stealing out some niche in the not so impressive corner of the house, where they are not a blot on the household decorum, surviving there like some beggar on the pavement, they simply don’t bite. The sentinels don’t rush at your nose even when you raise a cobweb cleaner in the nest’s direction. The instinct of survival seems to have taught them a lesson that they cannot afford to mess with the bi-pedaled torch-bearer of the onslaught on nature.

I commit the error of still linking honeybees to the notorious chivalry of those comb-defenders we witnessed during childhood. They don’t bite anymore. Forget about flowers, they have to run greedily for the semi-arid shoots of acacia. It’s scorching heat and honeybees buzz around the water bucket. It’s man’s offering. It’s no wild stream bordered with wild flowers where they can lay claim their share of nature and defend their fort. The bucket is man’s creation. So they don’t bite. They sense that it’s man’s beneficence and kindness that they are still surviving. I put my hand among a swarmful of honeybees stuck up around the corners of the bucket. Nostalgia strikes. I still remember those bites and swollen limbs. Well that is history. They just fly away. In a struggle to grab the last survival sips in a world that has no place for them anymore, they have forgotten to strike. The confidence is gone. They don’t have any rights anymore. That’s what happens when you just survive and not live. Only woman and mankind are living, others are just surviving. They will definitely become extinct. Then it will the human’s time to struggle, survive and get extinct. (Before that of course humans will desperately try to artificially replace whatever nature, in combination with countless other species, has bestowed them with. The stage is getting set for the evolution of a new species—some unthinkable woman-machine combination.)

The peacock, a riot of colours, is in double mind. With its cute eyes it stares at me. The wilderness in it is admonishing of a danger. It takes a step back. But where can it to fly back to. It’s a migrant in the village. The countryside is saturated with insectsides and pest control chemicals. So there is nothing for it to feed upon there. I understand its helplessness. So take some more steps forward with chapatti pieces in my hand. I know it’s hungry. It won’t fly away. The peacock has accepted its fate and so have all others. Except humans, of course.

The Old Moon and the Imperiled Landscape

It was very cold and the time was frozen around half an hour before the morning twilight on January 13, the day celebrated as Lohri; a day before Makar Sakranti on the full moon next day. The pallid rays of a pale moon had grown old so soon during the last hour before the morning twilight. The night had been chilly, clear-skied, frosty and fogless: an exceptional January night, not in chill, but in being clear certainly. The moon, just a day away from its fullness, had been exceptionally bright.

Nightlong, almost near the peak of its rounded beauty, it had fulfilled its luminous duty. Its milky beams over-rode the pointed shafts of light from the distant stars. After all it was his world; the stars had their own at mammoth astronomical distances. The moon was thus the brightest, bulbous star, eager to brush out every strain and tainting, shadowy tar. Its beams spread like snows over the sleeping horizons into the sleepy distances and languorous miles.

The beautiful countryside was lying in sleepy abundance under the chilly, milky blanket with slumberous pride. Everything was open to the celestial torch with nothing to hide. Cold-basking fields were huddled under their croppy sheets. Above was gloating the marvelous moonshine. Wheatlings stood bow-headed in reverence with dewy crowns fine. The marigold flowers were frozen in kissed silence by the milky showers. The flowers happy to surrender their colours to the lover’s mysterious smiles and disrobing powers. White pea flowers boasted their augmented whiteness. Aha, such dolefully beneficent had been the moony brightness. Even the trees did not appear merely dark specters lurking shadowishly over the horizon. They appeared boats of foliage floating in a misty sea.   

In the background of such a brightly lit stage even the sky seemed earth-lorn. Through the milky transparency, its bluish-dusky veil lurked and through it only the brightest stars smiled and showed that there was a world beyond as well. Scattered in the docile swathes of this moon-baked countryside, the villages seemed as mammoth ships silently floating in the white wavy sea of light.

At this moment the moon was well past its prime, as if in shining too bright, to use the full charms of a fog-free night, it had committed a harmless crime. Its setting quarters lay in the north-west, from where it was eager to move for some rest. Its strength and vigour had drastically plummeted down. Paleness eating into the guts of its plump milky brightness. An old, setting moon, away from the youth’s boon. Dislodged of its shiny crown, it ogled with a meek, even irritated, anguished, helpless frown. Its sheen was rapidly fading out. Its yellowish pale rays almost eager for a wailing shout. Glumly it was fading over that reddish-brown sandy undulation carrying fields, furrows and crops on its gently unfolding dome. The shiny fruits born of sweat-drenched hours by the farmers in its sandy loam. Accusingly the moon threw pale, protesting shadows in the south-east. There urbanism, consumerism and crass commercialism blatantly, proudly held its seat commanding metropolitan, capitalist feast.

The area had been earmarked for some development project. It now being defined by a tiny space bound in a map issued under the state government’s gazette notification. A mischief by the developmental hand. Ever eager to bulldoze over the nature and turn it into uncomplaining, lifeless sand where lustrous stones will be built over the nature’s burial. Heartless, wanton and depraved! But the nature has no oratory to baulk the words. It but repays in kind.

This pale, mournful moon was preparing to set soon into the misty gloom of the twilight. A new bright sun of consumerism and commerce will be ascending to its dawning height. And the soft natural delicacies will scamper with fright.

Those reed stalks which swayed to the cold shove of a gentle breeze without any greed appeared to say good-bye to the moon. The latter plummeted down further with a bloated face and a sigh. Its pallid face grimacing with a painful nostalgia. Its fading, setting rays tainted with a peculiar dullness, the death, the demise, the oblivion. Its oblong teary face looking down at the landscape. Sleepy fields, beneficent swathes of wastes and fallow lands.

Mighty lessons were taught here by nature to itself and all. The farmer going to the fields with his gear. Those long, painful and oftentimes fruitless days subsided when the sun’s eager rays looking at the sweaty trove and the shirt’s hoe. Where the long, brooding nights arrived like the deeds accomplished. Where the failures galore but the hard work was never a bore. The failures defined the success as the losses stood just as a testimony to the profits. Where the hopes, aspirations and desires varied with the changing hues of the weather. The farmers pawning everything for the feathers in destiny’s crown. Gold forming immaterially—or minimally at the rate of a dust speck for tons of sweat—in the toiled soil reddish brown.

All this will be gone. The moon was also dying with a moan. This charming mystery of the landscape: why hardest labour fetches minimal returns; why a bit less harder toil results in a soul-satisfying speckful of return that seems the wealthiest load. All these beautiful, aesthetic, curvy, circuiting strings, the mysteries of the landscape, of destiny, of the see-saw battle between happiness and suffering, between pleasure and pain, between penury and sustainable as well as gluttonous gain, between life and death, between a smile and a tear, all will be lost.

Everything will be gone for a direct, straight, materially penetrating needle of surety: the commercial, unflinching and fixed use of the landscape in a concrete form where profits will boomerang in proportion to the short-cuts; where compromised humanity, ideology and conscience will not face any ifs and buts; where there won’t be any sweet scent of labour which will be replaced by mechanical, greasy, muddy panting of merciless competition and mad grab; where concrete blocks and apartments will replace these wondrous solitudes and petalous platitudes basking in unrestrained, free, natural air; where sheaves, stalks, straw and reeds will not sway to the breeze, but blank, rigid, ironed towers will stand mutely, inflexibly to the nature’s cooing calls from increasing distances.

Now the sorrowfully yellowing death rattle of the setting time was arriving with a finishing chime. There on the opposite horizon, the day opened a window to sneak a peek at the imperiled room of the night. Wispily, there was the twilight with its mixed day-night delight. In its mysterious lap, the old moon met a slightly premature death, slumped as it feebly, freely into the silvery sea of the mist hung over the tree-line. Slithered it into the sea of death and plunged into invisibility.

The twilight mischievously winked with its unfaithful, teasing look, asking favours both from the night and the day. The old moon was gone with its last ray. And the soon-to-be-doomed panorama, unmindful of the fatality in wait, came out of its dewy slumber. A crane’s clarion call cree…ked over its yawning bosom. The sun prepared to cast its first ray. The fields got up for another hard farming day.

White blood and soldiers of peace

Please read this with a smile on your lips.

You may be in bad mood having argued with your husband or boyfriend. You may have been struggling to find the dress you are looking for in your messed up wardrobe. You might even be running around the house to meet multiple assignments to manage children and your presentation still not finalized. Wait, please do all this with a smile! It won’t disturb your schedule in any way. It’s a humble request like I ask you to take a harmless sip of water even if you don’t feel thirsty at the moment. A reasonless smile can be taken as simply as you merely take a sip of water.

Did it? Now please be honest and tell the relief it got you. A smile to the self, without any calculation, without any reason, without any expectance of results and rewards, miraculously makes you feel better. Instantly! Isn’t it wonderful? Do it and you know instantly what I mean. It’s like a corner of dark cloud on an overcast, freezing day parts and a life-soaked shaft of light falls over you, transporting you to blanketfuls of warmth and solace.         

Laughter is the best medicine, they say. Laugh to the capacity of your guts, but please don’t underestimate a smile. In strange ways it’s is therapeutic to the ever-wheezing, fretting and fuming brain machinery. It simply, without any exuberance and pretentions, releases tension and stress from the whirring machine that your brain is. It’s a coolant like you have in your car engine to stop it from burning red with fury.

Hush away your neutral face expression. Being expressionless is as good as bearing a wooden head. You can smile even when you don’t have to. It is contagious. Other cells in the body cascade down the message of well-being. It’s such a positive force. Smile is not just a cute expression around the lips of a cool person. It carries a healthy dose of happiness. Just curve your lips wherever you are right now, be it driving, walking back home after a stressful day in office, sitting alone in a cafeteria over a mug of coffee, jostling in a crowded metro, tucked in your bed, watching your favorite programme  on TV or talking to somebody. And you instantly get your medicine to be better. For free, girls! Grab it.

Quite wonderfully, you need not have a reason to smile. As the muscles around the corners of your lips get into an imperceptible crease taking your cheeks for a delicate contortion to make you look still better, you immediately feel a release of anxiety and stress from the heated chamber that our brain is. Simple fact is: when you smile, even when just doing it out of simple aloofness like somebody told you to have one more sip of water even if you aren’t thirsty, you let loose a healthy trail of endorphins into your blood. This chemical is a carrier of happiness. It’s as much potent, happy and healthy you feel while running.

If you carry the molecules of smile around your lips, it sends out positive vibes about your personality, that you are happy and firmly in saddle and in control of your life. It helps in interpersonal relations. It oils your professional pursuits. There are too many rivals in this unsparing competitive world. With a face inclined to smile, you will have some less rivals head-butting you in the game that life is. More importantly, every face in the world is incomplete without a smile. Even the most beautiful face can still go a notch higher with a smile.  

Ok, accepted that you are darn attractive and you take good care of yourself. You wear stylish clothes, have matte foundation, lip gloss and eye liner in the safest reach to support your charm. Wait, there is something freely available that can instantly take you to be the most adorable princess around. Just elongate your lips horizontally, very softly, allowing your cute cheeks to delicately undulate. It’s a smile lady! It’s the best tool on your dressing table. No beauty is perfect without a smile.

Apart from the glowing star that you become with a smile, the symbolic derivates are even more important. You look caring, empathetic, trustworthy, better leader, dependable companion and easy going. Apart from the glorious take-aways mentioned above, a smile increases white blood cells which make you stronger. Hidden inside your soft, considerate and caring persona topped with a smile, you become a strong and confident persona inside. A smile just digs the foundations of your firmness physically and mentally. It goes deeper and deeper.

Have a frown on your face and see the results. Even the liftman won’t salute with enthusiasm. Well before it oils someone’s insecurity, it harms your own system by increasing the toxics which generate stress and anxiety. With a smile you are more approachable and sociable. And opportunities have this tendency, like water has of flowing down to the lower levels, to rush after such persons.

The people in the world might be banging and clattering to beat and surpass each other for self aggrandizement. But still a cute soldier shielding his face with a smile instead of the iron mask of fretting rigidity and grimace is more welcome. This world will still be competitive but it won’t be a bloody fight and broken teeth and broken bonds. It will be a pleasant game. It will be beyond winning and losing. It will just be. Try this in office, at home, in trains. Just smile to yourself. Simple! It’s a cozy, comfortable bulb that you light up. After dispelling the gloom from some corner of your soul, it will spread into the shady zones into the beings of those around you. And they need it. This tiny flicker emanating from you can become a beacon of hope for someone who needs it.  

Forget the awkwardness and tension that strikes you due to the challenges thrown by situations. You might be waiting for your interview, your heart beating violently. You might be terribly inclined to lose it because the queue in bank isn’t moving. A frown will not make things go easy for you. But a smile can. Try this now. You will feel the effect.

For a change do something without any logic. Just smile!

Be a superwoman and world beater in your own ways

Don’t do everything just for money, rewards, recognition, name and fame. As we feel, most of our doings are just blind pursuits for something more important expected at the end of the doing. Doing thus becomes secondary, the outcome. The reward takes the centre stage, and everything before that turns a stale, perspiring, frustrating struggle. The process of doing becomes traumatic. By subjugating the process of doing to the unknown outcome in the future, we pawn the happiness and intrinsic satisfaction, which simply doing could have been, against the shifting, blinding mirage on the hot sands in future. Try to make doing primary. It’s like casting the chains away and lightens your burden. Not only it will light up your soul, the outcomes, whether you care about them or not, will just follow with a bang. If you do something just for some specific outcomes, it’s not doing, rather it’s some barter against the drops of your sweat. It’s labour, a menial work, mere slogging. You are not the master. Just try to do a few things without caring for the material and social rewards. You will know that you own the act of doing. It becomes pure and unadulterated. You own it and you are the master of it. Once you master something, given the potential human soul has, the byproducts will drop like sweat autumn windfalls, ripe, without any effort. That is the cascading effect pure doing does. There are hundreds of posts on this blog. I write not for viewership stats or adsense money. My reward is the numerous trophies I gather while simply writing. I write because I love doing it. There is no bigger reward than being able to do something you really love and like doing. A very small publisher trusts me and publishes my books. He likes my writing and invests some money to publish my books. I help him to the little extent that I don’t take any royalties. My books sell in just hundreds of copies, rarely touching the four figure mark. And even for that I don’t expect any royalty. Still I write for months to complete a book. Simple thing is I just love doing it. As I work on my books, without any restraints on publisher- and commerce-ordained limitations, I feel like flying in an open sky. It’s like being a painter having a completely empty canvas and possessing all the options to experiment with colours and shapes. This is what you get, the rewards, your breath of freedom, your space and your happiness. Every moment is like holding a big trophy. And believe me, if you immerse in doing something just for the sake of doing it to the core, you warp space-time continuum to the tune and frequency of your doing, and rewards follow, whether you accept these or not is another matter. Most importantly, the doings that bring instant soul-sweetening sense rarely give you money and material rewards. Helping a stranger, who has lost her wallet on a crowded platform, with a hundred rupee bill that can help her save hell lot of trouble; stopping to take an old hand and help him to cross the road; taking a stranded stray puppy out of the drain; a smile from an unknown face just because you did only this much to keep the elevator door open, helping her to catch onto the precious moment, etc., etc. The feeling you get instantly is sufficient to overpower any vanity of earning millions and getting gold medals. Most importantly, such small, small doings help you hone the humanity in you. Just like you pump iron in gym to harden your muscles, such little, little acts of just doing without expecting any rewards will hone the muscles of your conscience. Goodness can be practiced. It can be made a habit. Begin with such small things where your egoistic, self-driven work flow won’t revolt to begin with. Very soon you will turn out to be the best of a human being. And who is a good human being? Well, basically she is happy.