Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Meetu's wedding at Jaipur

 
     
     

Meetu , my neice decided to marry a Sindhi boy Jitesh from Jaipur, whom she had met in Melbourne where she was working with him and we all landed up in Jaipur for the wedding. It was in the midst of winter and after all the commotion of trying to find the hotel where we had to stay at the mid hour at night, we finally found it. Next day we forgot all our frustrations of the earlier day at getting lost on the way, being tired by the delayed flight and joined the festivities. We had a lot of fun drinking hot cups of tea and Coffee and gossiping with many relatives and friends whom we had not met for ages. In between we also found time to do some sight seeing, shopping and the pink city and all its ancient forts, historical places and palaces stole my heart. I was so sad to hear that recently, this lovely city with all its gentle people also saw a wave of terrorist bombs which left a large number of people dead.

However the marriage in 2005 December was real fun. We had lovely Rajasthani food and since the boys parents were from Jaipur, though we were the brides side we were also like Guests here for we did not know any one among the Guests. Hence we spent all the time talking amongst us brothers and sisters and all the neices and nephews.Neelu and Dr. Pandey were the perfect host. I felt very nostalgic that this was the girl who was born in front of me in Allahabad and I had seen her as a child , a toddler and now she was getting married. Meetu looked a lovely bride in all the bridal jewellery and dress. We all decided to wear the Kumaoni Pichodas, the large chaddor like cover worn over the saree, for the Mehendi rasam and the Pichodas look so beautiful and are so colour ful. Earlier all these would be made at home in a Kumaoni wedding with lots of songs and dance but now unfortunately all this is gone. Though there is a lot of singing and dancing , mostly Bollywood film music and a party the Pichoda is often bought from the market. Still a North Indian wedding is so much of dance and song and fun that I often miss it in the South.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Meeting the Blaire,s




One day i had a sudden surprise when i got a phone call from somewhere. i was told that Cherie Blaire the then Prime Minister of U.K. was visiting Hyderabad and she would like to meet few feminist. On the day Cherie Blaire was top arrive in Hyderabad, I was picked up from the house at nine in the morning and we reached the Institute of Good Governance in Jubliee Hills. I found that there were other friends like Shanta, Sunita, Rukmani , Lalita who were there. It was a nice get together because we were all meeting each other after a long time and it was fun to catch up. There was a room next to our room where the staff of the kakatiya hotel was ready and theyw ere busy serving us what ever we wanted. it was a fun filled day where we kept sipping Coffee, tea and chatting. At eleven o, clock we were informed that the flight had landed and now they are coming out. We were given a minute to minute account like now they are out of the airport, their car is near the public school etc. This day gave us a glimpse on how hectivc the life of a well known and famous person was. However when Cherie Blaire came to the room she was an ordinary person like us who firt told us that she would like to phone and find our how her children were. She told us that she has been travelling for quite some time and was worried about her child who had cold. I think she was also the mother of a new born child at that time. We then went on to discuss a lot about feminism in India, our work, our research, our high's and lows when we work on women's issues, the frustration we feel and what we think are the constraints for women to be an equal member of the society. Tony Blaire and the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandra Babu Naidu also joined in after a while. It was a wondeful meeting which will stay in my mind for a long time. I now hear that Cherie Blaire has published her autobiolgraphy and memoir, Speaking for Myself, where she talks her pregnancies and miscarriage to dealing with the royal family and her take on the relationship between her husband and Brown. She also discussess contraceptives, her children's conception, her breastfeeding, her miscarriage, her romance with her husband and her political views. I still have not read this book but I am sure this is going to be a very open book with littel day to day life interesting details with which she is concerned.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

New Year Celebrations for 2006






The end of the year 2005 and the New Year for 2006 will always remain itched in my memory. I was on Deputation in Maulana Azad National Urdu University, as Director for Women's Studies. In December I had invited about thirty students and three faculty from the Women's Studies Department in San Diego to visit our Centre . They were all put up in the Flatlets at ICRISAT and they loved the green lawns, the lovely ambience. We had arranged for a vehicle to ferry them to the University. We organised two workshops , one delaing with the Women's Movemnt in India and the other on Globalization and IT. WE also took them to the villages in Medak District where they interacted
with the village women. The women sang and danced and asked the studentd also to sing . They asked them if they did not have any feminist songs. These students then sang Christmas carols. On our return we visited the famous Medak Church and marveled at the intricate cut glass work and the architecture of of the building.



On the eve of the New Year, we had arranged for the studnets to attend a party at ICRISAT. The garden was on full bloom and Somu spent the wole day admiring his flowers and caring for his garden. In the evening we went to ICRISAT and enjoyed the party with the students. Huma Ghosh and Doreen Made this group activity very interesting and we all had so much to share . There was a lot of dancing, good food and a capm fire with lots of lights and sparkles to make the evening a memorable one. The studnets from San Diego told him that they really enjoyed their trip and this was a big learning experience for them . They were very much impressed by the vibrancy of the women's Movemnt in India and they could not believe that the illiterate village women could be so dynamic. We continued to dance till late night. We left the place around one
and the next morning started our New Year by visiting and praying in the temple.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Getting into Women's Studies





Right from my teens I used to get very agitated when I saw a lot of disparity in families and the attitudes of boys and men but then I could never comprehend the situation in terms of the structures and systems in our society. It would be right to state that I was not politically conscious that this could be a discipline with which I would be involved in future. I still remember one of the many incidents, we used to stay at Allahabad and I was a student of eleventh class and lot of relatives would come down during the Kumbh Mela to have a bath in the ganges. Once a relative brough an aunt who was about seventy and a widow. She lived in an Ashram at Brindavan and she would eat nothing through out the day except at twilight, when she had two small chappatis ( the dough made with mixing little milk and salt )with out any curry. She spent all her time in reading religious books and she had been leading this life since she was eleven years and became a widow. I had big arguments with my mother and other relatives as to what was her fault and my mother answered as she would often do, ”you talk and argue too much. This is how it is”. Today I keep thinking I wish I had spoken to her in detail and asked her questions but this image has stayed with me. As a student of class tenth in our school boys did interesting things in their craft class with repairing a fan, a press a scooter but we had to do knitting and embroidery. I got all the girls together and asked the principle that we would like to do what the boys were doing but were refused stating the Board did not allow it.


I had joined the University of Hyderabad in 1984 and I would leave my son in a crèche and pick him up in the evening, looking fresh and all well dressed. One day I reached home early and when I went to the crèche I was shocked to see fifteen to twenty children lying naked because they would soil their clothes. I was so upset that I stayed home for few days. When I narrated this to few friend involved with the trade Union movement then told me that I could afford to stay home because my husband earned enough but what happens to women who are not so privileged. Hence, along with a friend and colleague, Kameshwari I looked at this issue and we were shocked to see how callous every one was and child care was not at all an issue. It is from here that I really got into women's studies as a discipline.I think women ’s studies places a woman’s own experiences at the centre of the process that establishes women’s reality. Child care is such an important issue but it was never taken up seriously by any one. infact many of the trade Unions which wanted the support of the women to fight issues of wages, over time etc. did not give any importance to the isue of having a creche. We went to factories after factories and found that there were no creche worth their name. Some places only had a board stating creches and this was used either as a tea room or a place to store things. The factoreis had to follow the Factories Act, according to which any institution employing more than thirty women must have a creche. We found 28 women or 29 women in permanent posts and more than thousand women in temporary posts and thus the factory could easily do away with following this Act. We generally write reports and submit them, publish papers and nothing happens. We were very surprised because one day we got a call from the Director of the Women and Child development, Ms. Chandana Khan. She called us for a meeting and when we went we saw that she had invited a few NGO's and Government Officilas. She had kept our report in front of her and she had underlined many sentences. We had a long discussion and a creche for the children of construction workers was established . Our first project had a big success and we were very excited. This gave us a lot of confidence that we could really bring about some change and I became very much involved with women's studies as an academic discipline.


Friday, September 12, 2008

Family as a support group

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Once the children were small there were many occassions when we would all be together and take out group photos. Now increasingly with two , Bittu and Tarun leaving home for studies and jobs it has become difficult to get every one together. marriages in the family are the only occassions when we can all be together. Earlier we had a family tradition on which Somu would insist that all of us take photos of the family on our wedding anniversary day ie. on 28th February. We did this for a long time and hence we can see each year as we grow old and the children grow up. Yesterday I read about the Empty nest syndrom when children leave the house and how many women fall into depression.It stated that this had more impact on women than men. There were a large number of interviews of mother s as to how they were coping with life once their children left.

Betty Friedan in, The Feminine Mystique refers to The Problem that Has No Name. She writes, The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. Many women feel empty somehow . . . incomplete, or feel as if they don't exist. She interviews a number of women and talks about the voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home." I feel this is a must read for any one interested in looking at life and trying to understand it.

I also feel that soon the house will be empty if Chottu also decides to go out to study or work. As of now he is not sure and keeps telling a different thing every day as to what he wants to do after his engineering.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Our Home - Survasant

 
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house 019  house 020

Since I am a historian to me the past is very important and the documents in which this past is hidden become an important tool for research. Now when we are focusing more and more on history from below, the history of a home becomes very important especially when one is talking about women's history. It was the home which was the domain of the woman in the past and continues to be so at present. Hence I write today's posting focusing on our home.
We were earlier staying in a flat, Vijaya Towers at Ameer pet. My twins were born here and these were beautiful flats. In 1989, there was a huge pond next to it and many dhobis would wash their clothes. There was a Gold Spot factory next to it. This was very close to the market area and we could walk down and get our vegetables and the daily requirements . Our flats had sixteen flats on one floor and all these joined to form a corridor. We had a eight feet corridor and the children grew up here playing skates, football and cricket. Occasionally an aunty would come out once in a while asking the kids to be care full with the glass but no one really objectyed to the kids having a whale of a time. My University was nearly 23 K.M from here and the house hold depended only on sevants many of whom took great advantage of the fact that we left the house early and came back late.
We started exploring to have a house near to the University. Somu's office was also near this side and hence we zeroed it down to Gachi Bowli. My University was only four kilometers from here. We took a house in a colony called Lakshmi Enclave. There were few people from ICRISAT and the University who lived here. There was no development and the whole area was green and filled with large rocks and boulders. The first thing that I remember was when I looked up the sky looked so bi and vast and the crows and birds flying seemed very far. I wondered why this looked so and it was then that the fact struck me that I had been living on the fourth floor and the birds and crows looked near but my sky was only the balcony through which I could see the sky. Here suddently there was such an immense expanse and open spaces around that one did get a sense of freedom and the spirits soared high.
However when the house was being build I would get up at night and get afraid as to how we will take an auto to the station, How will we reach the airport, how will I get my bread and eggs daily. Soon the house was complete and we did the Grah Pravesh in summers. Bittu and Tarun Varun took a lot of interest in cleaning the area around it . Somu soon lay a garden which became his great passion. He put up a lawn and refused to take the help of a gardener. He believed in doing things himself. He continues to take care of the garden himself and does not believe in taking any help for this. Slowly beautiful flowers came around the house. In fact we immortalise our first roses by clicking them and framing them. We put them in the verandah of our house.
When we built the upper floors and remodelled our house many times we wanted to have a nme for the house. Finally it was with the help of Dipti and others in IIT that we kep the nmae of our house SUR Vasant. SU for Suresh, R for Rekha , Va for Varun , Sa for Sankalp and T for Tarun. I always wanted Sankalp to hold his two brothers by his side providing them emotional support.
Today , nearly fifteen years after we came to this area which was a village and had nothing much to boast off but the University, Gachi Bowli is the heart of the city. Gachibowli has grown into a software hub for companies operating out of Hyderabad. It is home to some top IT companies like the Microsoft, INFOSYS, Wipro, Satyam, Computer Associates, Polaris, Virtusa etc. There are International banking insitutions such as the Fraklin Tempelton Investments, Union Bank of Switzerland and Bank of America here.The area is growing at a very fast pace. A new IT SEZ is also coming up in this area. The Indian School of Business is also established here and so is the IIIT. The International Institute of Information Technology IIIT, is a well known center for excellence in technology. IIIT also houses the Oracle school of Advanced software technology, IBM School of enterprise wide Computing, E-Governance National Institute of Smart Governance. Apart from the IT industry, Gachibowli is also a sports hub. Some of the best stadiums in the city are located here. The GMC Athletic stadium, a world class Hockey stadium and an Indoor stadium are located here. The recently held Military World games were conducted here at Gachibowli and many more. A beautiful golf course with natural rock formations has come up here recently.
Alas but when I look around , there is only a concret jungle all around. Now I have to walk only 200 meters to go to Dominos Pizasa, Subway and the HDFC. But all this development has changed Gachi Bowli. Initially there was only a Doodhwala and few shops and each and every one knew each other , one could walk for hours and only see few trucks going on the road and now it is difficult to even turn the car and I have to wait for quite some time before I can turn towards home. Even morning walks have now become difficult due to the immense traffic on the roads. May be this is development, one that is very impersonal and no one has time to stand a stare and life goes at a very fast space.