Apu’s World

I have a friend, a very good friend, who from time to time will throw in a casually dismissive remark about herself. Because of the colour of her skin - a beautiful, cocoa-coloured one which of course simply is not entitled in this country to be called beautiful. My friend, is one of the most beautiful people I know. Kind, to the point of being unable to say no to people who sponge on her. Incapable of being mean to anyone. Highly accomplished at what she does and hard-working. Loved by everyone who knows her. She is indeed one of the nicest people I know. Now, you may think none of this inner beauty stuff is the sort one can see in the mirror. So let me tell you that she also has a fine figure, sparkling eyes, evenly set teeth and a lovely smile. All of which she can surely see in the mirror, and yet, I can see that she does not think herself beautiful.

Simply because she has a skin tone that is the common skin tone found across our country. Simply because, in this country, there is only colour that qualifies as beautiful, and that is white, the whiter the better.

The recent ruling on a L’Oreal division being found guilty of racial discrimination is only a judicial affirmation of what is already known. Whether in France or here at home, marketers and advertisers believe that dark-skinned people do not sell. If this is indeed true, then it points to an even more pervasive problem, for it is not marketers alone who are pushing on us this idea of whiteness - society as a whole has internalised it.

I’m tempted to agree with that, although it cannot help a dark-skinned child to be constantly bombarded with images of whiteness and to be told that this is the only kind of beauty. Yet, 20-30 years ago, when atleast in India, media and television weren’t so pervasive, the craze for whiteness still remained. Almost as soon as a child is born, that’s the first question asked, ‘How fair is s/he?’ And of course the question carries disproportionate weight for girls, since everyone wants ‘fair and homely’ girls. Dark-skinned boys can make up with their achievements in other fields, but since girls must be beautiful above and beyond everything else, the weight of dark skin cannot be shed so easily.

I remember something I heard years ago when a somewhat dark girl in the distant family was finding it difficult to find a suitable boy. Someone said, well, if the boy is fair, they want a fair girl to ‘match his looks’, and if the boy is dark, they want a fair girl so that atleast the children will turn out fair! Either way, there is relentless pressure to turn into something you cannot.

What does it do to a child to constantly hear that she is in some way inferior? What does it do to a South Indian child to be told that she ‘looks South Indian’, as if that were an infectious disease? Discrimination on colour is well and kicking in this country. Leaving aside the issue of media representations, until parents and schools start confronting it head-on, a large proportion of children in this country are going to grow up with warped ideas of what beauty is.

apu Other Social issues in India, Women & Feminism

Nita discusses how the cloud of class hovers over our assessment of a crime; she also dispels the myth that rape is about inability to control one’s sexual urges.

It was clear that she had no idea of what the crime of rape actually signifies. That often its not about wanting sex. But violence. Rape is often about someone wanting another, at any cost, even if it means that the victim is unwilling. In fact the unwillingness often plays an important part in the wanting. Why can’t I have her…too? Or how dare she refuse me?

apu Women & Feminism

Reading Tarquin Hall’s mystery novel, ‘The Case of the Missing Servant’, one cannot at times escape the feeling that it tries very hard to explain India in the manner of a television anchor breathlessly exclaiming on the gigantic contradiction that is India. What else is one to make of a paragraph that explains the great Indian arranged marriage?

And yet the arranged marriage remained sacrosanct. Even among the wealthiest Delhi families, few parents gave their blessing to a ‘love marriage’, even when the couples belonged to the same religion and caste. It was still considered utterly disrespectful for a child to find his or her own mate. After all, only a parent had the wisdom and foresight necessary for such a vital and delicate task.

Throughout the novel, the feeling persists that this is a murder mystery set in India, about Indians, yet written by an outsider, for outsiders. Despite this feeling, ‘The Case of the Missing Servant’ is an enjoyable read and its characters, if teetering on the edge of becoming stereotypes, never quite succumb to it. We meet here, Vish Puri, India’s ‘Most Private Investigator’, a Punjabi sleuth in Delhi, a man of integrity and ingenuity, who can access the corrupt and complex nightmare that Delhi is, and yet stay somewhat detached from it. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Vish Puri relies not on a single Watson, but on an entire streetsmart team whom he has affectionately christened with names like Tubelight, Flush and Facecream.

Unlike the highly individualistic and brooding detective of most Western fiction, Tarquin Hall creates here a fundamentally Indian detective who is a ‘family man’, and this means a Mummy-ji who gets involved in the investigations and does some cool sleuthing of her own. There is also the statesman Chanakya, whom Puri reveres and considers the original Guru of detection, from whom the upstart Holmes copied his techniques.

The Indian class system and treatment of servants, rural poverty and the exodus to urban India, the stark contrast between slums and gleaming urban palaces, the tortoise-like pace of the Indian judicial system - all these become part of the case of the missing servant, Mary, that Puri is called in to investigate and must solve if he is prevent an innocent man from being convicted of murder. All this while he continues to handle his ‘routine’ cases, the screening of grooms before arranged marriages are conducted. The novel flits between Delhi and Jaipur with an occasional detour into the rural hinterland, as Puri pits himself against an ambitious police officer who’s made up his mind minus evidence, and sees no problem with that.

Will he succeed? Is the client, Ajay Kasliwal really innocent? What is the Kasliwal family hiding? With no fancy psychological explanation and little use of forensics, Puri relies on good old-fashioned detection and a solid amount of leg-work to arrive at what is a very satisfying conclusion.

Publishers: Random House Group

Price: Rs. 429

apu The Literary life

கண்ணுக்கு தெரியாமல் காலம் நம் மீது எழுதிக் கொண்டிருக்கும் வயதின் சித்திரங்கள் உலகியல் காட்சிகளை மாற்றிப் பார்ப்பதற்கு பழக்கிவிட்டிருக்கிறது.

- ’உறுபசி’ (முன்னுரை)

Invisible to our eyes, the lines of age that time is drawing on our bodies, make us accustomed to looking at the events of this world differently. 

- ‘Urupasi’ (Foreword)

My translation doesn’t quite capture the sense of tiredness or resignation in the original. I came across these lines last night in ‘Urupasi’, a Tamizh novel by S. Ramakrishnan that I’ve just begun reading and was somehow much struck by them. Perhaps because, just two days ago, a friend and I had been discussing something similiar; how we felt that time was in a sense running through our lives, leaving us with a mild sense of dissatisfaction. I also thought about this expectation that most of us have when young, that adult life is what we are ‘really’ waiting for. All through the years when I was a teenager, I waited for my life to ‘really begin’.

Implicit in that belief was the assumption that I only had to grow up to do things, and then, I would really do things. Instead, here I am, living a quiet, contented sort of life, with my family and my friends, my work and my writing, my reading and my music. My friend and I wondered whether leading a honest and mostly-happy life is sufficient, or are we letting ourselves settle in too easily? Sometimes, I still feel like I am a teenager and waiting for something to happen. 

apu The Literary life

Contrary to expectations, work hasn’t yet tapered off to “normal” levels. I am back though because I started missing the blog! Yeah, how does one miss something like a blog? I guess what I’m trying to say is that I missed being able to spout verbose on things that catch my attention. 

Lately, I have been thinking of the effect of “group-think.” Now I know that sounds very Orwellian, but I don’t have anything sinister in mind. What set it off was that about ten days ago, I spent an evening with two of my aunts at the Ramakrishna Mutt in Chennai. (Beautiful place, for those of you who haven’t been there - worth a visit just to inhale the heady fragrance of the Champa trees in the well-maintained campus, even if you are the non-spiritual, non-religious sort).  We went to attend the evening Aarti and Bhajans, and while I enjoyed those very much, what struck me was the immense quiet and peace that filled the cathedral-like room. There wasn’t a single board asking for silence and no one was policing the place. Yet, all 40-50 people attending the session sat down quietly and participated, including the many young children in the audience. 

On our way out, there was a small vessel with holy water, with a lid on. One by one, in a queue that formed itself, people walked out, opened the lid, took some water with the spoon kept in the vessel and moved on to let others do the same. Now, can you imagine this scene in any temple in India, regardless of the city it is in or the community it serves? 

Of course, one explanation is that as opposed to people who go to most temples, visitors to RK Mutt are likely to be a more educated lot - perhaps people who have read the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and been inspired, not simply people who bow their heads to a deity as part of a ritual. On the other hand, fly anywhere in India and while air passengers are likely to have some fairly high income as well as education levels (high proportion of business travellers), the bid to get off the airplane as though those at the end will be carted off to Siberia, is amazing. So, one could maybe say that education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for socially civilized behaviour. 

My theory is that it is not so much because of education or affluence as because of what we think the group expects us to do. While I was a stray visitor, it is likely that many of the other worshippers were regulars. Perhaps they have internalised the codes of the mutt which stipulate it as a calm refuge to focus one’s mind on a higher plane. When others enter the prayer hall, they see the behaviour of these, more enlightened devotees, and subconsiously, they realise the unwritten code. Unlike an airplane where one couldn’t care less about the views of one’s fellow travellers and is prepared to nudge them aside to get off (or on) first, here, as a spiritual seeker, perhaps one is more conscious about the views of the group. This is a group whose approval is worth seeking. Being part of such a group makes one feel better about the self - by association, you become a calm, peaceful and enlightened being. 

That means, there are two things at play:

• The views (expressed or unexpressed) of the group are important to us
• With the caveat that the group itself must be considered worth following

It’s not just group-think, it’s also about identifying the groups one thinks are worthy enough to follow. 

apu In General