Apu’s World

Yes, yes, I know I promised to write more regularly, but the last month has been busy! Besides trying to identify new tech vendors for Women’s Web, working on some ideas to generate revenue and keep up on the content, I also managed to squeeze time out for 2 day trips - to Vedanthangal bird sanctuary and Pulicat lake, two excellent bird-watching sites within easy distance of Chennai.

With the mercury already beginning to rise, we had to go soon, since the migratory birds that assemble at these places in large numbers, will soon start the return trip to colder lands. Vedanthangal is pretty much geared for tourists, with a well-maintained path from which one can see the barringtonia mangroves and lake which support all those birds.

Pulicat lake is entirely another story. I hear that the southern part of the lake, which is in Tamil Nadu, has some sort of an island with a snack bar and a children’s play area and hence suitable for a family picnic. The larger northern part of Pulicat, in Andhra Pradesh, which we were told has better bird-sightings, looks like a Martian landscape on the edge of a small, perfectly ordinary south Indian town (Sullurpet). With the lake bed somewhat dry or marshy in places at this time of the year, it has an otherworldly feel to it. Nor are there any ‘hotels’, chai-shops, ice-cream vendors, cotton-candy carts or anything else at all. Not too many people either, for that matter - except a few fishermen at the water’s edge and the occasional vehicle on the road, on its way to the Sriharikota township that lies at the other end of the road to Sullurpet.

Note, I am not complaining. If anything, the isolation of the place is splendid and unusual in an over-crowded country like ours. At one point, we kept going on this village road off the main road from Sullurpet, and we must have travelled for at least 3 kilometres without seeing a soul, with just cracked earth and occasional swamp all around us, and endless, endless sky above. In the shimmering heat, it was easy to imagine oneself as an intrepid explorer navigating the Sahara. Seriously though, for a moment I felt as if my heart would burst with a sudden awareness of the beauty and immensity of this planet we call home.

As for the bird-watching - given that we are pretty new to it and not too knowledgeable, we had a wonderful time. We sighted at least 20 different species, with around 15 that we could identify - among them, the spot-billed pelican, a pond heron with lovely fluorescent green legs below its dull plumage, painted storks, open-billed storks, the black drongo, a highly comical looking purple moorhen, black-winged stilts, egrets and many types of ducks and geese.

Nelapattu sanctuary, a few kilometres away from Sullurpet is worth a visit too, though fairly similiar to Vedanthangal and with the advantage of a pretty good information centre that also has a good, slim handbook that is helpful in identifying the birds of the region. If you are new to bird-watching, go there first and pick up this booklet before you head to Pulicat.

As for me, I will be going back definitely - perhaps during the monsoons when the waters fill up and more wader species abound, but perhaps just to enjoy the remoteness and silence.

apu Travel Tales

In the past 8 months since launching Women’s Web, I have worked with a couple of interns to support me on various activities, and the experience has been pretty good. Since Women’s Web is still not large enough to require full-time staff, and it a completely virtual team, having a second person along to think and implement has been pretty handy. So, we are again looking for interns - one, for content writing and two, for managing social media. Please pass on the word to any students you know who may fit the role. The email to write to is admin AT womensweb.in

I have been receiving some enquiries and applications already, and while some are good, others show just how little our colleges prepare young people to survive in the world of work.

Twenty19, the portal I had advertised on, allows you to set applicants a question, so that you can gauge their understanding of a role/task. One young woman’s answer was detailed but completely irrelevant to the question. I smelt a rat, googled and realised that she had just swiped the answer off some blog. Clearly - this person had no understanding of what plagiarism means or if she did, believed that it didn’t matter!

Most applicants have no hesitation using sms-language. Increasingly, I am unsure if one should expect Gen Y to adapt itself to official language, or should it be the other way round!

Another one says, “I am currently pursuing my Bachelors in _______ from XYABCZ (name changed) college. If interested, you can contact me and I’ll forward you my CV for further details.” Now, I have no clue what XYABCZ is, I am not sure on what basis I should be interested (or not) and it’s not clear to me why the CV is a state secret that must be specifically asked for. If a company advertises for a role, wouldn’t you just send your CV rather than wait for them to ask?

Colleges are doing young people a big disservice by focusing on archaic syllabus rather than real-life skills. Nor can youngsters themselves be excused - today, there is enough information online that teaches you how to apply to jobs and the like. (I’ve written one myself - for Freshersworld, titled, How NOT to apply for an Internship).

Interestingly, the few good applications I receive are mostly from autonomous colleges. Does that say something?

apu In General

I have to confess - I’ve never really “celebrated” Valentine’s Day; never exchanged gifts with a boyfriend, never gone out for an overpriced candle-light dinner. In recent years, the fact that the hubby’s birthday falls tomorrow makes it even more irrelevant to us - we’d rather wait for the birthday to celebrate!

I don’t actually mind the concept; in fact, I think it is a rather sweet thing to remember and express your love and not necessarily only for a boyfriend/spouse. After all, although we say, why do you need one day for love etc, the fact is that most of us express our love far too rarely. Of course, I don’t hold that you have to “prove” your love with expensive gifts or that a romantic dinner is a “must”.

Anyways, given all the hoopla over L-O-V-E, I thought it would be interesting to do a slightly different contest at Women’s Web, so here it is - the What Love Isn’t contest over at Facebook. What you have to do, is tell the world what love Isn’t - and if your answers are any good, you could win one of these two fun Valentine’s Day mugs from Chumbak! (max of 3 entries per person and ask your friends to vote for you…)

Do participate! Have fun and a lovely Valentine’s Day to you and yours…(And don’t forget to read this absolutely lovely Valentine’s Day special article on the site - 3 real-life love stories from the 1940s onwards…)

apu In General

A few days ago, I came across this article in the TOI about how young people are already feeling nostalgic about their (fairly short) pasts. A psychologists quoted in the article claims that it’s because of the pressure that youngsters are feeling today - whether in their personal or professional lives.

Having entered my 30s, it is doubtful if I can claim the tag of ‘youngster’ any longer but it is true that I wonder about the world I grew up in and how different it was from the world around me today. I don’t know if it is nostalgia - rather, I sometimes feel dread at the thought that 30 years on, the world will be unrecognizable to me, and perhaps I will be an old-timer who cannot keep up with the speed at which it moves.

So, indulge me a bit when I tell you about the world I grew up in, and perhaps you may relate to all or part of it too, if you are a child of the 70s or 80s. (long post ahead warning!)

In the world that I grew up in, no one needed to ‘keep the children entertained’. When I was 7 or 8 and had learnt to cycle, in the evenings, or on weekends or holidays, I would push off with one of my sisters or a couple of other kids from the street. On the next street was a cycle-rental shop - small cycles, 25p and big cycles 50p - for an hour. We would rent cycles and ride them around our neighbourhood.

Or, I would play with the other girls on the street. Our games were - lock and key, sankli (or Chain), I Spy, 7 stones, blind man’s buff and the like. Every day was a ‘play date’. My biggest worries were that the big girls would not let me join the game that day. When my mother felt that it was time for us to wrap up, she would yell for us from the balcony of our flat and we would go in reluctantly and always angling for a little time more. There were programmes on the single television channel we had, but I would usually be tired out by 8 and go to sleep. The one ‘extra-curricular’ activity I went to was Carnatic music, almost a mandated one for girls of our community.

If no one was around to play or it was raining or otherwise not possible to go out to play, my sisters and I made up our own world with the lego blocks that we had. All the toys we had between the 3 of us would possibly have fit into a small-sized carton, but I never remember feeling like it wasn’t enough. No one ever bought me dolls or stuffed toys, and I never felt a need for them. I think I would have found them childish in comparison to the elaborate worlds that we constructed in our imagination. Another thing was that every single toy we had belonged to all 3 of us. There was just no concept of allocating a toy or anything else to a specific child. Even if a relative gave us 3 bars of chocolate, my mother would give us one to share, and keep the other 2 in the fridge - to share later!

I suppose there must have been some homework, but I can’t remember it. Nor can I recall my mother or father agonising over it or worrying about my studies in general. By the standards of today, we had very little - yet, in comparison to most kids we knew, we were privileged.

For one thing, my father used to buy us loads of books that I devoured eagerly, besides trying out other books not actually meant for us - I read Dickens’ David Copperfield, in the original, when I was 8 - by the simple tactic of ignoring all the ‘big words’ that I couldn’t understand. The height of joy for me each month - was receiving the latest issue of the Mahabharata, which Amar Chitra Katha issued over 42 months.

By the time I joined secondary school, we moved to a big city, and my world was already changing. Few girls now ventured out to play in the streets - yet, we could always visit other girls on the street or classmates who lived nearby. We rode the bus to school, until my parents bought us our own cycles. Once, we even walked home for a week (a distance of a kilometre and half) to save the money to buy my mother a birthday present. I don’t know if my parents worried about our safety - perhaps they did; the world then didn’t seem like such an unsafe place - or maybe we just didn’t know it.

In the world that I grew up in, family included not just your parents and siblings, but aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins - and in a more familiar (some would call it intrusive) way than would be acceptable today. Everyone had an opinion on the actions of other family members and it was seen as legitimate interest. Not just immediate family, but even distant relatives would feel free to drop in unannounced and there would always be some food mustered up for them. Of course, much of this world could be run this way because a majority of the women were homemakers and worked long hours from very early morning until the last family member and guest had been fed and the washing up done.

Few things were bought, in this world, and once bought, few things were thrown away. All goodies were baked or fried at home and stored in large dabbas for consumption by a ravenous horde. Clothes would be handed down to sisters, then cousins, then finally, perhaps donated to someone else. Appliances ran for a minimum of 10 years, and if they broke down, were repaired somehow. Everything could be re-used or (much before it became fancy) - recycled. My grandmother used to collect even plastic milk wrappers which could be handed over to the kabadiwalla for some small sum of money.

I bet this world was a lot of work for adults, and while I look back on it with fondness, I’m not sure I could handle the work! For children though, it was endless fun and best of all, without the constant supervision/ interference of adults.

Of course, bad things also happened to children in this world. Parents rarely listened if a child had something done to him/her - whether it was a beating by a teacher or sexual abuse, many children of my generation knew that if you complained, you would only be scolded. The distinction between friends and parents was very clear. There was little allowance for a child who wanted to be ‘different’ in some way.

Still, we had the chance to create our own world - with sisters, with friends, with cousins - in a way that the children of today are unlikely to know.

apu In General

Excellent post by Cee Kay, ‘I am not that mother’ dissecting the furore over Amy Chua’s ‘Tiger Mother’ article - and on whether it reflects mothers’ insecurities and need to prove their own parenting skills.

apu In General