The Capacity Building Programmes

 

In 2006, I got involved in a program me that was focused on capacity building for women in higher education. This was a brain child of Dr. Armeti Desai who was the UGC Chairperson once upon a time. This programme had two phases. in the first which was called Capacity Building and awareness  rising workshop there was a general training which was imparted. Prof. Uma, Parvathy, Sushila , Padma were all part of this workshop which was held at Dr. Ambedkar Open University. I had attended many workshops and Conferences earlier but this did touch a cord in my heart. It did things very differently and there were a lot of management tools that were used which included role play, discussions, games, exercises and the five days were filled with fun. One made a lot of friends and Dr. Padma really touched our lives. it was a treat to listen to her.  She was in the secretariat when the Status of Women Report , 1984 was commissioned and passed and she shared many highlights with us. She looked so soft and one realized that one did not have to look tough in order to get one’s way. She was an example of being soft and yet firm. I met Anju , Rani, Sneha, Pushpa Chakrapani and many more from  different Colleges in Hyderabad and we developed a very close bond. I definitely felt much more empowered and enlightened. This was followed by the Trainer of Trainees workshop which I attended at NALSAR University.

The Kids and the three dogs

 

Both Somu and the kids have always been very crazy about dogs. i some how never had this kind of likeness for dogs. When we had got married and I went to Almora there would be a dog which would follow Somu. he had named him Moti and very sincerely it would come in the morning and evening. The kids were after me to get them a bycycle and a dog. i kept promising them that I would do this when we shifted to our house in the ground floor. In Vijaya Towers we were living in a flat and it was not possible to have a dog. I still remember that when we shifted to lakshmi Enclave Bittu was in 6th class and Tarun Varun in 1st and the moment our Truck landed with the luggage they kept pestering me when am I going to get a dog and a bicycle. i got them the bike soon but kept resisting the dog for I told them that managing the three was a handful and I did not need a dog to add on to my woes. Soon when the children were going to school they started feeding their Tiffin to a stray dog. Soon this dog started roaming around the house and the children named him a Raju Pande.( RP) I asked the kids if they could not find any other name for in the office i was known as RP.This was a brown colored dog and it would often come to the gate for breakfast and dinner, which the children would gladly feed. I still remember Tarun asking, “ Raju dinner me Kya Khayega” and I would tell him please ask him if he wants butter and cheese or just plain rice. However with in few years this dog was killed by people across the street who had built small huts across the road and since this dog had killed some of their chicken they were very angry with him. The kids felt very sad and Varun cried a lot. However soon they found another stray dog and named it Asara Pande. This dog also stayed for quiet some time till our front door neighbour who shifted newly to the colony became very attached to it. This aunty also took care of Asra and once they shifted to the city she took Asra with her and told varun to take care of another dog. Varun told me we have had Raju, Asra a hindu and a Muslim dog so we will now have a christian do and named the new dog, Smokey  Pande. Now Smokey is very much near the house. I feel happy because I do not have the task of bringing the dog inside the house and I can just feed it.  Earlier I used to get annoyed that I had to make chappatis for him but now I just get rice and boil it and mix it with milk and give it to him. It roams around. But both Somu and the children have kept shampoos with which they give it a bath. Our Milk man who works in the immologicals gives it injections and now Smokey is very much a part of the colony and can be found loitering outside the house in the lawn or sleeping ion the first or the third floor. Though i am no dog lover I cannot help but admire the dog for when ever I go out for the morning walk it just comes running from where ever it is and follows me to the walk. Even when my car enters the colony it comes running to greet me. Though i am not very comfortable with a dog jumping and licking me it shows so much affection. At least now with Smokey i am able to understand why people love dogs and how loyal they can be when you feed them. Being a stray do these dogs are not at all fussy and eat what ever you give them. They never demand any thing.

Visit to Kanpur and Lucknow

Both Somu and I left for Kanpur on 30th of November.  I was feeling a bit low for Bittu was also leaving after a months holiday at home and we left the house at two o, clock and he had to leave by six. The occasion was Mikkis marriage in Kanpur. I was shocked at looking at Kanpur. The town looked like a large slum and every where it was so dirty. The roads looked over crowded and narrow and there was a thick smog surrounding the environment. The whole place looked covered with dust. I could hardly find a clean leaf on any tree. The streets  were also very dirty and it looked very filthy. The only nice thing was the Pulses institute that was very neat and had a beautiful greenery around.  What I really liked about this trip was that I could reconnect with so many old friends some after thirty years and some after eleven years. I met Kommi at the wedding and caught up with the Allahabad University  tit bits.  I could find an old friend Ajai and it was a pleasure meeting him. He looked frail and heavily engrossed in Rekki. He has taken retirement and spends his time in rekki only.   I could also speak to Rakesh who is now settled in US. I got his email and would soon write to him. After this I was with Ashima for two days. Ashima had a lovely house with fantastic plants all around. She is now the Divisional manager in the North Eastern railways. I was meeting her after more than ten years . I also met her lovely daughter Ananya. I also attended a wedding  and a Tilak ceremony with her and it was fun to feel very much close to the culture of North. It brought me back to my University days when through Ashima I could get in touch with Shanti Ghildiyal and old friend and I could also contact Rachana who told me Deepali Singh, Loveleen, Mukesh and Surabhi, all in the Indian Administrative services were also in Delhi. I could also get the mobile number of Rajlakshmi Verma, the daughter of Ram Kumar Verma the famous Hindi poet who was our teacher at the Undergarduate level and since she was in charge of the hostels we did many activities with her. I spoke to her today morning and felt very happy. She had a lot of influence on me as a young girl. She made us think out of the box and wanted us to be very dashing and dynamic. I felt very happy that I could connect to so many people from Allahabad days. I did a lot of Chicken saree shopping and returned back to Hyderabad on 5th December.Leaving North was sad, but nothing like home and the beautiful and clean city of Hyderabad. May be in the past thirty years I have become a pukka Hyderabadi. I may have come from North but today i love Hyderabad and its clean and beautiful environment.

Workshop on Adolescent girls in Bangalore

Manju a dear friend at NIPPCD had organized a workshop related to adolescent girls and this was a review of all kinds of material available on this issue. It was three days of sheer excitement and fun from 6th to 8th October, 2008.  It was amazing to see the kind of material developed by Government, NGO, schools and Colleges related to the issue. However what we found was that most of the material related only to health aspects especially giving information on reproductive health and diseases like AIDS etc. We had a lot of discussions and then pointed out the need to create more materials on different aspects like livelihoods, violence, empowerment etc. The highlight of this workshop was the Yakshagana performed by a group primarily comprising of men on the last day. These men were dressed in beautiful costumes and with a lot of drama, music, song and dance they covered a large number of  women’s issues. Yakshagana  means  " the music of celestials" is a form of a dance drama performed predominantly in South Kanara, Malnad region and certain parts of North Kanara Districts of the State of Karnataka. It is a  400 hundred-year-old tradition. It is a combination of dance, music, spoken word and costume-makeup and stage technique. It is a typical folk form of drama , commonly performed at night on a platform-like stage in the open air with themes based on Hindu Epics like the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and mythological tales from the Puranas. As prescribed in the Natya Shastra, it has the Suthra Dhara (conductor) & the vidushaka (the Jester). here is both mystery and robustness about this form in which singing and drumming merge with dancing, and words with gestural interpretation, and players clad in costumes of striking colour and contours. In all it was a very robust performance and will stay in my mind for a long time.  It really brought home the point that any format which includes a folk format stays for a long time in the minds of the people and it was wonderful to see this group take up the issue of educations, empowerment, health, the right to take decisions for one self.  I also decided to experiment with a lot of folk forms to bring in an awareness on women’s issues.

Varun and his Bike

We had been avoiding buying a bike and though Bittu had also asked for a bike we refused and he was satisfied with a Kinetic Honda.  Varun had started pestering us for a bike and I kept postponing it for I was very much afraid of the heavy traffic of Hyderabad  and felt that  an open vehicle was not safe. However there was no way that Varun would relent and he made our lives very miserable and finally we decided to get him a bike. We thought that a bike would be around forty to fifty thousand and this should be sufficient. However this was certainly not what Varun was looking for . He came out of the show rooms thrice and how much ever would be ask him to be reasonable there was no way. Finally he did get his bike but certainly not the one which he

wanted. He had some RL in mind which was costing more than a lakh but with great reluctance he agreed for splendor. Now this red colored bike  is his prized possession though there are two rules which he had promised to follow strictly. One he will never drive with out a helmet and second he will never take three people on his bike.  As of now he really loves the bike and is enjoying the freedom this is giving him He is also maintaining it and keeping it clean, though I am really not sure for how long he will continue this. he was initially a little upset that his bike remains standing in the sun through out the day, though we do have the shade of the mango tree and he was asking us if we could build a shelter with  a cover so that the bike is in shade.

Love for Russian Language

Today I am writing this post about the age which is represented by black and white photographs ie. nearly thirty to thirty five years back. I was eighteen years old and had taken admission into Allahabad University as an Undergraduate student. We were young and had big dreams and a vision to change the world. It was during this time that many of my friends and I joined diploma classes in foreign languages. Ashima had joined French classess and Renu and I joined Russian. The main reason for joining these clasess was the Russian teacher Gopesh Ji. I had heard so much about him and every one praised his love for the language. The classes were held in the evening from six to seven or five to six now I do not remember. But what I remember was that it would get very dark during winters. Dr. Gopesh opened a new world for us. He introduced us not only to the language but the culture and history of Russia. His class was such a lot of fun and one would feel that time just flew and one really wished that this would continue for ever. He had a very sharp wit and what I remember today was the humour that he would bring into the class.One would never be bored in the class. Today as a teacher I always remember him and secretly wish that I am able to influence my students and have the kind of impact he had on his students. He influenced me a lot and I started taking a lot of interest in the Russian language and litearature. It was primarily due to his influence that I slowly started reading and the whole new world of Russian literateurs opend up before my eyes. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of such classics as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Count Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Anton Chekhov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also impressed me a lot especially The first Circle, and One day in the life of Ivan Donisovich. The Russian names were very difficult to pronounce and I developed my own style of pronouncing them in a way which was convenient and then I enjoyed the books. The market price of these books was also cheap and one could easily buy them. I also developed a lot of interest in short stories. It was a shock to all of us when Dr. Gopesh suddenly passed away after teaching us for one year. He was also a writer and a poet if I remember correctly. I still have a photo graph of Dr. Gopesh given to me by his daughter Anita who wrote on this, that he was the bridge that bound us together. Anita was a writer in her own right and tyhough I do not remember any of the titles of her story I can still remeber one of her stories which impressed me a lot. It was related to bigamy and had the male point of view. Russian class were never the same after this though the new teacher was also very good and had a Russian wife. We went to a number of places on picnic with the new teachers but I think the new teacher did have a tough time because each and every student would compare him to Dr. Gopesh. Even today, though so many years have passed I still continue my love for Russian literature and culture and feel very nostalgic when ever I read any novel or story for I am transported back to those days gone by.

In Uganda

I was in uganda at Kampala in Mekerere University for a course on gender and ICT. From 9th August to 16th August, 2008. This was my second trip to Uganda for earlier I had been here to attend the Women’s world Conference in 2005. I found Uganda to be a beautiful country with beautiful landscapes. The houses had red tiled roofs and since the region was in slopes they looked very beautiful spread across the hills. Like India I found a lot of disparity among the people in terms of their riches and wealth. We were put up in in a beautiful hotel called Kabira. The fruits in Uganda were really very tasty and we had lots of pine apples, oranges and apples. We went crazy calculating the prices. There were 1600 shillings to a dollar and we were paying some thing like twenty five to thirty thousand shillings for one dish. I kept wondering how much money would people carry to buy land, house or a car. I think they would need a trunk to carry this money. In the Department where we had the Conference they were selling lap tops and this was costing some thing like sixty lakh shillings.

The workshop was inaugurated by Ms. Lukiya Isanga, the Minister for Gender in Uganda. I was very happy to note that Uganda had a gender policy, which we still did not have in India. I got a copy of this policy and only hpoed that one day India would also have a gender policy. The participants were all very mature and were from different fields of computer science, Banks , managements, gender studies and we became very friendly with them and shared many happy moments. We had a great time with Theo, and Nicole from Radboud University , Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Joan and Rouf from South Africa. It was great fun to introduce Rouf to Indian food and since he was young he enjoyed every moment of this when we gave him some of our namkeens and kurkure to eat. In the breakfast we introduced him to pooris and allos.We had a memorable time in the African village and were wonder struck with the way the dancers moved their hips. The women had so much grace in their movements and it was fun to be a part of their celebrations. We went around and did shopping for some art objects and the Kiyondi the African bag which I love. It was a memorable trip and visiting the source of the Nile will always remain fresh in my memory. We always associate Nile with Egypt but it was nice to know that the source of Nile was in Uganda.

Meeting Amol Palekar in a Conference

I had gone to a Conference in Poona University and I found that I was sharing the space with Amol Palekar. I was a great fan of his,. i think all our generation was. In the 70, and 80's he represented the common man and the boy next door. In this era when the hero's looked out of this world he has a charm of the ordinary man to whom one could relate. he was also involved in the theater and later on went to direct some women based films. Introduced by Basu Chatterjee in Rajanigandha, he went on to act in many of the films which we friends Renu, Niharika , Mohini and Ashima had enjoyed talking about and seeing together. Gol-Maal, Gharonda, Baaton Baaton Mein, Choti see Baat were our all time favourites. Renu was very fond of the dialogue which she would repaeta ad nauseum from Ghronda, I think it was some thing like this, Yaha log Kandha nahi dete hai marne ka intejar karte hai or some such thing.I asked him about his films like Admi Aurat and Kari which i would like to use in class but was disappointed to know that none of these were available in India and were found only in the USA. We also discussed Tarre jameen pe. It was a nice meeting which transported me back to my youth in Allhabad when we were not great movie buffs. We friends were more into reading and theater but definitely we were great fans of Amol Palekar and Shyam Benegal. I think I drove every one crazy by discussing Manthan so many times. I was so fascinated by this film. I am not sure how I would react to this now. Bhumika also impressed me a lot.

In Goa, Conference about Siddis

In January, 2006 from 9th to 11th January, I attended an International Conference about Siddis.This was a very interesting gatering because I met scholars and activists from different parts of the world who were interested in the issue of Siddis. Siddis are the African Diaspora in India and some of them have converted to Islam, some are Hindus and others are Christians. When I was in Maulana Azad National Urdu University, we had done a Project on Siddi women and had developed some good rapport with the Siddis of Hyderabad. Like the others the Hyderabad Siddi’s are also descendants of Africans from North-East and East Africa who were brought to India as slaves, soldiers or servants. As from the past most of them are stationed in A.C Guards since the time of Nizam Mahboob Khan. Some say Raja of Wanaparthty ,who ruled Mahboobnagar dist of Hyderabad had 25 African body guards who were hardworking, enduring and loyal soldiers and he presented them to the Nizam who stationed them in A.C Guards ( African Cavalry Guards). Today also this areas can be traced back to more than 100 years and many roofs of houses have British titles and workmanship. Their music, song and dance are the only links with their African past. Their ethnic identity is enshrined in daff-the small hand drum, which is their main cultural element. It is the Siddi linkage to their ancestral past and heritage. Historically daff is linked to royalty and aristocracy and they were known to have performed in Nizam’s palace during festivals and in marriages. But today it is a poor man’s musical instrument and they play it in marriages but the daff is facing challenge due to modernization and globalization and the changing taste of the people towards more techno music. Today also they have two groups of daff players, the sherri baja group- and the Daff party group. Some Sidis are keenly aware of their past, and a few remain in touch with relatives in Africa. But by and large they have lost touch with their roots and have got amalgamated to the local culture. They know for sure that their forbears came from Africa. But they have lost any knowledge of African languages, and don't know where exactly their ancestors came from or why they settled in India.They have remained on the fringes of society ever since courtesy the bigotry ingrained in India by the Varna (colour) based Case System of India. While a few Siddis are know for their sporting exploits, the vast majority barely manage exist on the outer fringes on Indian society.
Theirs is a patriarchal society with male based superiority. Majority of the Siddis in Hyderabad are Muslims and speak Urdu and Telugu. They seem to have integrated to the local culture adopting many of their ritual and practices but the local culture has really not assimilated them completely. Due to the dark skin there is a lot of discrimination among girls and there are problems in getting them married . Even the Siddi boys prefer to marry Dakhani girls who are fair skinned when compared to the Siddis. Dowry is rampant. The Siddis practice purdah very strictly and there are a lot of curbs on the mobility of the girls. Due to lack of education many of these girls are not working outside the house and spend their time at home in helping with the household work and watching T.V.

In the rain

We, Varun and I had gone to Haldwani during summer holidays and it was very
warm. There is a lot of power cuts there and this adds to the woes. Suddenly one
day when it started raining Varun had the time of his life by playing in the rain.
Naniji kept shouting at him to come in for he would fall sick but he refused to
listen and had a whale of a time. He was also joined by Avani for some time but
she had the sense to come back inside soon and dry her self up, but Varun kept playing
in the rain. It reminded me of earlier days when as children we would also love
to play in the rain. India has such a harsh summer that any rain after this is welcome
and it brings to life every thing around it and nature looks so clean and green. <>

Having a bath

Getting Tarun Varun ready was a real task. All the three kids loved water and even today swimming is agreat sport with them. Once inside the bathroom for a shower it was difficult to drag them out. They would keep singing, fighting, playing and making a mess of the whole bathroom. I still remember when we were in Zambia Bittu would be the first one to get into the pool and the last one to come out. The same was true of Tarun Varun also who would refuse to come out of aswimming pool be it in ICRISAT or any where else.

A Handfull

Bringing up twins has its own joys and pains. I still remember that the day I discovered that I had twins , in the third month of my pregnancy and I had started crying on the diagnostic table only.It was after a gap of seven years that i was having a ked and two on top of that. My university was twenty five km. from where I was staying. I did not have a full time servant and the due date that the doctor had given was toward the beginning of June. I think i kept crying most of the time and Mrs Rizwi who was staying at Vijaya Towers was a great comfort.However things turned out to be really well planned. In the month of February a couple who was looking for a job came to our flats. They were a Nepali couple and since Somu could speak in Nepali, the wife started working for us and the husband got a job as a cowkidar in the flats. They stayed in our garage downstairs and I really owe a lot to Lakshmi who managed my house for four years. She was really God send. My kids were born on 4th April and I got summer holidays for two months and I could join my duties in JUly. I could attend all my Conferences and Lakshmi really managed the house and kept it spick and span. She even trained Tarun Varun and it was such a pleasure to see them in the evening. They would be dressed in different combinations, the hair styles done differently each day and with a liberal amount of Johnson Baby Talc they would smell very good. The twins soon became a favorite of the whole complex and found many new Uncles and Auntys, to spoli them and pamper them. Particularly important were Mrs. Shorey, who was teaching in Nasr School and and is now its Principle at Kondapur and Mrs. Reddy, who would spoil them with giving so many things to eat. Bringing up the kids made me realsie how important a househol;d support it for a working mother. I had a tough time for my elder son Bittu who was brought up in creches , which were really not much in the 80's. I have through out my career realized the importance of support to women who are working outside the house and staying in nuclear families. Unless the children are taken care of a woman cannot give in her full attention to the work. We blame many women for not concentrating on their jobs at the lower level but one has to really talk to them and see how they manage their kids and family responsibilities with their work.