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.