Life’s co-everything ;) gone off the track a lil....

Girls only colleges are wild. I know, coz I’m in one. As someone who has spent more than three years of the my life’s prime in a unisex world after livin it up for 12 years good old co-ed , its time now to retrospect, to stare back at what a girls only life has done to me.

When I first joined a girls-only institution for the first time for my 12 th grade, I told myself that I would hate it. And I did. For a while. A whole bunch of girls, all rule abiding and prim and proper and shiny. I hated it. I swore I would run away and join a co ed for college. But life, as always , went on with its own plans and I found my self, standing in front of those same gates as I entered college life. No guys, no nothing!

I’ve always prayed for a sister. I think I didn’t make it sufficiently clear to god. He gave me whole lot of them, made of coffee brown hoods and hearts of stone and gravel(there are good ones, but they’re too busy saving the poor to have time to herd a bunch of unruly teens). Any ways, the thing about a girls-only college is that any thing goes here. And I mean anything. Our teachers can tell us the most outrageously stupid things and we’ll do it just like that. We don’t revolt. We don’t hold flags or shout slogans, and when there’s a student strike all over the state, we go to class like school kids. How many times have we prayed for some students revolutionaries (read boys… men , I mean) to come disrupt our classes and liberate us. How we’ve rejoiced when student politicians came to college on strike days and forcibly stopped classes!...oh how we adored them, even though we acted like we didn’t care.

Like most people who grew up in kerala and in a co ed school, I wasn’t physically expressive when it came to loving my friends. I never hugged or went ‘mwaah…’ or jumped up and down when I saw my friends. My way of showing love or affection was to show nothing at all. But when you come to a girls’college, prepare to be loved. The really hard way. These people will hug you every second of the day and kiss you on both cheeks whenever you meet them. Hell, we hug our teachers because we don’t know any other way to show them that we love them. We hug our ayah ‘aunties’. If you’re down one day we’ll squeeze you till you chuckle. I realized I had truly lost touch with the ‘real’ world when I found myself hugging away crazy at my stiff typical malayalee cousins and even my brother and dad and mom, whom I haven’t touched since I was a child! That’s love, girls’ only style. We get carried away with it sometimes and end up shocking our ‘normal’ friends who go to co eds, with our outrageously ‘forward’behavior’…

To be continued…

gods own,,,,,

Once upon a time in kerala, backpacking, white skinned, tourists were a rare sight. We malayalees used to peer at them with wide eyes from wayside teashops, children used to wave wildly at the ‘madhamma’ and ‘sayippu’ who rode past in motorbikes.

But it took only a few years for everything to change. India soon became ‘incredible’ and our very own kerala became ‘God’s own country’ (god help those who coined the term). Tourists and travelers now land on our shores by the tons. Bus loads of air conditioned tourists and hippy backpackers and bikers zoom past us everyday as they hop from resort to resort. Tourism has become one of the most hyped up industries in the country and thanks to vigorous ad campaigns; the ‘tourist’ is no longer a rarity. In the desperate bid of a developing nation to up its economic ‘progress’, tourism has gained tremendous importance and in many instances the down sides of the industry are conveniently neglected.

Take a look at kerala for instance. Every village in kerala worth its weight in coconut palms has now declared itself a tourist destination. Village dames arm themselves with ‘kayi kotti kali’ , tourism committees round up cricket playing boys to teach them traditional crafts and give them ‘stipends’ to keep them from running away; All in a bid to fit into the stereotyped image of a ‘typical’ village without any thought given to the carrying capacity ,infrasrtructure, waste management or resource availability..

Most tourists who come to kerala are people who travel with tour companies and visit a handful of places in the little time they have. The destinations frequented by such travelers have become special zones where every thing that’s anything is tailored to suit the needs of tourists; every shop sells over priced handicrafts, fake antiques and kashmiri shawls, every things packaged to suit the attention spans and interests of the traveler. From dumbed down versions of the kathakali to fake ayurvedic massages, every thing is standardized so that the local population’s identity and culture becomes a commodity to be packaged and sold. The influx of outsiders in search of lucrative tourism revenue and the sudden changes in living costs and lifestyle push out much of the local population.

As the number of visitors increase beyond the carrying capacity of an area, the local population slowly loses access to its own resources and end up as second class citizens. Already in most of the best selling tourist destinations, land prices have become so high due to large-scale buying by big companies that none of the local population could dream of buying a cent more of the land in which they grew up. Even in places which don’t really have much to offer to a tourist, mere rumours of ‘tourism development’ have pushed up land prices. Along with this, other resources like water are also depleted due to pollution and large scale exploitation.

Leave aside the pollution and resource depletion and skyrocketing land prices caused by uncontrolled tourism, what is most shocking is the fact that we Indians, the native population are slowly becoming unwelcome at the most hyped up tourist destinations and resorts. Instances are many when local population is turned away with various excuses from eateries and wayside cafes which target easy to please foreign travelers who would pay outrageous sums to sit in the sun and sample anything spicy and ’Indian’. In large resorts and hotels, the staff complains that Indians ‘dirty the place’. One would expect that the four or five figure sum that ‘Indians’ shell out along with the foreigners would ensure equal hospitality too, but then again , we Indians have always been stingy with tips compared to foreigners. All of these along with the unconscious belief in the superiority of white skin embedded deep within the minds of most of us result in a raw deal for domestic travelers and the locals .Unsuspecting Indians can be seen screaming ‘wasn’t what I paid money?’ after being shocked by second class hospitality. What are we coming to when the local population’s rights are compromised for the sake of dollar bills? This form of ‘apartheid’ is slowly growing in our country as the gap between deep pocketed foreigners and ordinary local population widens. Whose country is this? God’s or the tourist’s?

Well may be we do deserve this. We, who have taken away the native lands and livelihoods of the indigenous tribal populations, are now being pushed to the sidelines by others like us. This is God’s country after all.

ammamma

I went to my grandmother’s place to spend my break from college, its onam over here. The festival of all malayalees……….

My grandmother lives with my uncle and his wife at a small town called cherthala. She’s a retired school teacher.she’s also the most efficient, fun person I can remember. Even though she’s retired and nearly 80 she calls the shots at her house. She does all the house work alone with a little assistance from her daughter in law for whom she has utmost contempt(no offense). My poor aunt is no match for the fiery personality of my grandma. That does not mean she’s mean to her. She just ……..how do i put it, tolerates very patiently the irritation that she suffers due to the unworldliness of my aunt.

Any way, I hopped on a bus this Monday and went off to visit my ammamma. She’s one cool grandmother and the many summers of my child hood that I spent with her are the most delightful experiences I ever had. I never knew my grandfather, who passed away due to a heart attack when my mom was in college. my ammamma brought up my mom and her three young siblings all on her own. She maintained the family property, married off all her children including the youngest, her only boy in true Indian fashion…then she shed her strict rule over her children and made her home a heaven for her grand kids. she can put any teenager to shame with her bustling energy and the discipline and vigour with which she approaches any task in front of her…..one busy bee she is, a clever one too…she has all the right tricks up her sleeve, from handling her troublesome domestic help to showing us kids how to have a goodtime………

I reached there Monday afternoon and scrambled up the back porch in the rain. expecting her to be cooking up roast fish by her antiquated little kitchen with its stone stove with wood burning in it. I called out to her and saw her emerge from her room down the hall from the kitchen and dining area. She had a book in her hand and her reading glasses on. Her face lit up and her familiar voice called ‘aa…..ethiyo?..’ she laughed. She had been waiting even though I hadn’t called to tell I her I’d come that day. I felt like I had come home at last. The murky life back with my parents shed off and my mind restored for a second….she talked in her witty style, cracking me up with her humour.she had been reading in her room, trying to beat the rain which was playing spoilsport with her onam plans. "I was sewing earnestly all of last evening, I even missed a good movie that your uncle brought home…I sat in my room and sewed up everything there was to sew in this house"…she said with a smile… " then I woke up this morn and I can’t even sit up….this is what I get for my sincere pains!" she said in her familiar banter and I started laughing again…its going to be a good onam.

I called up my two cousins who were in town. They said they’ll get there that evening. By then my grandma had got a big fire going in her kitchen. she was out of gas due ‘wicked pilferers’ in her gas company , but ever the soldier, she was cooking everything on her traditional wood fed stove and a little contraption called ‘the mannanna aduppu’the extinct kerosene stove…… the strong smells and flavours of her spices mixed with the comforting warm smell of smoke wafted out of the blackened chimney. …

I changed into the salwar kameez which I had bought especially for her sake. You see, my grand mother prefers to see me dressed like a young woman than like a brat in shorts which is my style back home. So eventhough I came wearing a jeans I needed to blend into the country side in order not to offend. Nobody messes with ammamma’s rules!……..

Soon enough the dining table was set and I sat down to lunch with my aunt and uncle. As always my plate contained enough food for three and on top of it ammamma served her delicious curries. Fried fish, cooked fish in coconut, tangy white mango curry with coconut gravy…the works……

my grandmother never sits down to lunch with the rest of us.she runs around the table serving food. she makes sure everyone’s done, she then cleans her kitchen, takes a shower and then eats at a kitchen side in peace.thats her style.rarely, she sits down with all the women folk during gettogethes where all the ladies waitill their husbands and kids to clear out so they can gossip and eat in a peaceful pace.but today I ate with my uncle who runs a hardware and building material store on the street where my grandma’s house stands and of course my dull aunt. I felt suffocated. My uncle, a tall goodlooking man with all my grandma’s fine features in a much darker shade, tried to make small talk, but it burnt out soon and I fled to the safety of the kitchen…..

he evening saw the coming of my cousins, a brother sister duo born to my mom’s younger sister ‘vava’…that means ‘baby’ in English… ammamma’s face brightened up further and she busied herself making sure we were well fed… new delicacies and onam dishes emerged. We followed her around , fascinated by her quickness, and eager to help. We skinned onions, ground dried spices and cut raw plantains to make chips….all done squatting on the kitchen verandah on ammamma’s low wooden stools only two or three inches high. In the mornings we went around picking flowers with her and made up designs with them on the courtyard. Every now and then she’d disappear and then emerge with more flowers in her hand and new design suggestion….

bus ride....

I live an adventure everyday. And I don’t mean it in the romantic, ‘my life’s great!’ kinda way at all. The thought occurred to me while commuting to my home from college in a bus with people bursting out through its doors and windows. Hanging from the rails at the door, almost fainting due to the congestion and suffocation inside ; Holding on to dear life while the driver showed off the precision of his brakes (ouch! That really hurt) and his skills at overtaking speeding buses which , unlike our bus, didn’t have the entire population of Kochi inside them.

you think you know who you are but you will be surprised at how many more times selfish, snobbish and cheaper you are until you’ve traveled in one of the ‘private’ buses in the rush hours. Boy, won’t that be revelation! There I was , this evening, waiting for the bus to come take me home. Feeling good about myself. Confident, socially conscious, principled young woman that I am. And then came the bus. It stops reluctantly a mile away from the bus stop. I forget my sophisticated airs and run to the ramshackle vehicle. Many older, hardened ‘chechis’ push and shove to get in first. I wait patiently with an unsteady look on my face. There’s no seat in there! Where are you people rushing to?!. "Get in there fast", the bus conductor growled and I jumped in. the bus was sufficiently crowded. I found a comfortable place to lean on through my hour long commute. the bus reached the next bus stop. A group, well, a mob of students waited at the stop for the same bus just the way I had waited a while before. How my heart fell as the we stopped to let them in. my social conscience and basic humanity evaporated at the thought of being squeezed in further by all those annoying people. I checked myself. They’re people too. They need to get home just like you do. Crap!

My body feels pricked by strangers' touch, their smells, the sweat. The girl in front of me has long frizzy hair. It keeps getting into my face. I fight hard to keep it out of my mouth. I make clear signs of displeasure. She looks at me. What’s she supposed to do? The bus is crowded beyond all imagination. The old ladies keep complaining. Why don’t theses people shut up?

I hungrily eye the group who’s to get off at the next stop. My legs will give away any second now. I keep trying to prevent myself from falling into the lap of the old lady at the adjacent seat. People are getting out now. I politely move to let them go. How I wish I had had the guts to rush for their seats. Its all gone now. How did these people manage to grab those empty seats so fast?.....the rest of the people seem to expand to take up the vacant spaces. I can’t find my feet. My hair’s a mess. I smell like an old currency note.

The bus conductor kept shouting for his money. Old, hardened ladies shouted for him to shut his mouth up as they tried to fish out notes from their bags. The exertion had left me drained. I tried to keep myself conscious by reading the hoardings outside and talking to myself in my head about the others who crowded beside me. A lady coughs. A small child started to non stop. Right when I thought it was getting easier. ‘would you shut that thing up?’ I shout into my head. I’m never having children.

I passed my measly change to the conductor. He eyes me suspiciously. ‘student concession’ . he accusingly thrusts the ticket into my hands. ‘you should be paying me for traveling in your mad truck I tell him in my head. Humph…!

Can’t you drive this thing any faster?........ are we there yet?...

vande mataram

Independence day……

Its 9 minutes to yet another independence day for India. My heart aches with love for this country. The only one I’ve ever known; this land of great mysteries, of even greater tragedies. What’s there in store for us as we embark on another year of ‘freedom’? a food shortage may be and a hand full of bomb blasts and dead bodies and crorepathi politicians.........

Three farmers were shot dead today for standing up for their right to a livelihood. Killed by an administration which spends thousands of crores of rupees in immortalizing their leader’s ‘legacy’ through gigantic statues and monuments but has no time or resources to spend on its poor farmers!

11 schoolchildren died today…..washed off into the unknown as their school bus fell into a river. 11 blooming hopes, 11 dreams and aspirations….gone in a second.

Are these the harbingers to our free yeas ahead?........ or will we some thing in the line of our Olympic gold? Will we feel once again that feeling when our heart lifted out with pride and our eyes filled with joy at the thought of our beloved land……….. the sight of our tricolor rising proudly, accompanied by the sound of our anthem…..

Happy independence day India………I love you.

a little understanding....

A little understanding……….

My best friend is always in trouble with my teacher. Her crime: she’s always late to class in the morning. She’s so bad at being punctual that none of us, teacher included, expect her in class before at least half an hour after class has started. All of us have flaws. Tardiness is her imperfection. Some times we wonder if it’s physically impossible for her to come to class on time. But friends are supposed to be under standing right? And the only way to understand is to find out why. Why is she late to class every single day? What are the road blocks on her path to becoming a teacher’s pet?

Now, my friend’s a typical teenage girl (although with enough brains to know that Europe’s not a country). Anyways, she lives in a typical teenager’s world where many things are expected of you as a ‘typical teenage girl’. After class, some unwritten rule insists that all of us friends hang around chatting about everything and nothing for at least two hours at our class room or at the bus stop or the friendly neighborhood shop cum restaurant, which means that she reaches home a full three hours after class.

Once home the beast in her takes over and she spends some time nourishing her body, tired from her efforts at fulfilling her typical teenage duties. Being a girl and eighteen, she’s doomed to spend the following two hours taking a bath and grooming her hair, skin nails and eyebrows. She painstakingly scrubs, plucks, waxes, tones and moisturizes. At the end of this tedious routine, she’s left with very little time to do her home work and more importantly, to watch TV to enrich her head with very important pieces of information which every teen should know if she’s to sustain any two minute conversation with her peers .she dutifully spends her time enlightening herself on the lives of reality tv stars, actors and other ‘celebs’ .in the midst of this come urgent calls from her friends –boyfriend problems, movie on Saturday?-she multi tasks and manages them all. And if , god forbid, any of her friends has a birthday coming up, she has to spend hours deciding on a gift and making plans to bring about that ‘surprise’ every birthday girl expects. After all this exhausting work she logs on to her orkut/facebook/whatever... account to do the mandatory amount of social net ‘work’-ing . she spends hours replying to all those annoying scraps and scribbles and fending off irritating friend requests from either boring people with no profile photos or hyper active ones with 900 friends. Then at last, past midnight she shuts her laptop with tired eyes only to suddenly remember that the assignment given a month ago was due the next day. Ever the responsible pupil, she dutifully finishes it and collapses onto her mattress after another round of combing, scrubbing and moisturizing.

She’s shook from her slumber by the faithful phone alarm which shouts out some annoying tone.Snooze. Five minutes.There it goes again. Her mom pokes her head into the room. My friend pretends to get up and goes back to sleep. Then a pair of hands, her mom’s, physically removes her from the bed and shakes her till she wakes up.

My poor friend, with only an hour and a half till class begins, takes a ten minute bath and proceeds to dress. An act of no consequence which would take five minutes you’d think. But you’d be very, very wrong. She’s about to make the most important decision of the day in our typical teenage world. That un answerable question: ‘what should I wear??’. She spends half an hour contemplating and trying on different sets of clothes. Then she puts on her favorite pair of jeans and a carefully picked top and proceeds to makeup and hair. She tries on different hair dos and then takes a look at the clock and puts it all into a pony. She carefully draws her eyes and lips .she hunts her drawer for earrings and other paraphernalia and puts them on. And voila, she’s done. Ready to face the world. Thirty minutes to class. What else? Books! She puts her texts and notes into her bag and stuffs her lunch in. no time for break fast, has to catch that last minute bus. She races towards the bus stop, the bus is already at the stop. She runs. The bus jerks forward and then stops again for a lady. She waves wildly. The bus passes her by. The conductor grins.

She waits for the next bus. Ten minutes till class begins. Where have all the buses gone? The next one takes another five minutes to arrive. She jumps in. she prays for the bus to over speed. The conductor looks her up and down as she gives him her student ticket change. ‘Card’ he says.. She fishes out that scrawny little yellow card. The guy looks at her photo and scrutinizes all the little details in it. He gives it back with the ticket. The bus is overflowing. Guys hang on to the door handles with their life. The driver drives slowly lest he should accidentally shake off some of the people dangling on one side. Old ladies push and shove and mess up my friends carefully combed hair. The bus plods through the dirt tracks which lead to the city.

After twenty minutes of torture my friend is pushed out at the college stop by a torrent of humanity. Her dress is crumpled and she realizes that the bath she took in the morning had been a waste. The class has already started. She rushes with other late-birdies and risks her life crossing the road with no zebra crossings or signals. She walks as she can. The campus is eerily quiet. She almost slips and falls while climbing the stairs in her clumsy slippers. She runs to class and is joined by other late comers to our class. They wait at the door with embarrassed expressions as the teacher tries to figure out what to do with them , “ oh, just come in…”she says in exasperation. “The next time, I will send you to the principal, why can’t you come to class on time? You’re only students. What’s keeping you so busy that you can’t make it to class on time?”

With all due respect ma’am, you have no idea………..