How insensitive have we become to plight of COVID migrant labourers.

A post is viral in the social media that decries all the hue and cry being raised in the media over the plight of migrant labourers. The poor have been enough and it should stop now. The middle classes have been hit just as hard but none talks of them.  just as hard but they dont cry for help. Nor should the poor do. 

 The import of the message has discomfited me. I feel it needs a riposte, hence this post. Who sent it is not germane. Knowing his age , gender and party affiliation would have helped in putting his solicitude in proper perspective. But the fact is , I simply don’t know. Notwithstanding, it shouldn’t be too fatal a flaw in grasping the mindset that mutated into this message for to read without comprehension is a deep affront to any author. And to speak of one so enlightened anonymously is equally an unpardonable abuse of his considerable scholarship. So let’s call him Shehe. 

 

 Shehe is schmaltzy, sickened by the clamorous brouhaha surrounding the poor. Drenched in a tempest of state largesse, nonetheless, they wear their poverty on their sleeves and needlessly cry, he decries. Once they walk home, a MGNREGA bonanza awaits them. Shehe just falls short of giving his personal guarantee to that effect. He frankly has no pretensions to savoir faire. 

 

 Shehe wonders free grains, free gas, free Corona tests, free from taxes, what more...? Even with all these subsidies before Corona rudely uprooted them , most had just about managed to live in survival mode. Now, sans livelihood, shelter, savings, could they , without any state support ? US is shelling out $300 billion in cash to families. Let him work out how much it tantamounts to per person. UK pays 80% of wages of employees to employers to restrain them from job cuts. Australia too has a wage subsidy package that grants $1500 per fortnight to six million workers as Job Keeper payment. Singapore is doling out $600 to every nine adult out of ten as solidarity package. Even our bete noire ,Pakistan , ladles Rs 3000 per month over the next four months to the poor five million. All this in addition to ongoing schemes. Maybe this data will give him something to masticate. 

  Shehe isn’t sentient about migrant labourers losing jobs and livelihoods, being evicted by landlords, being disowned by states , being disfellowshipped by locals apathetic to , if not abetting in, their bedraggled , torturous, heart-wrenching exodus, on foot for thousands of kilometres in scorching heat, without food and water , to lands where they once belonged but where they may now not find a ready embrace. To build life anew. It doesn’t embitter Shehe that their’s isn’t a Maoist ‘Long March’ to power and glory but one to a bleak uncertain future, to a darkness that is a creeping, enveloping shroud. As GDP contracts, Shehe’s assurance of jobs under MGNREGA looks increasingly a blank cheque drawn on a bankrupt bank. 

  The poor don’t deserve any sympathy, even less his empathy. And that is Shehe’s breezy, swashbuckling final verdict. 

  Shehe begrudges none speaking out for the middle classes, among them the temple Brahmin making do without dakshinas and offerings to the deity. They are even more distressed but take it on the chin. Because they have to maintain an up to date living. Can’t be seen as cry babies. Implying, poor too should bear it with a grin and all hullabaloo should die down. 

  He opines, the Middle Classes have loads of liabilities , towards instalments for education loans, car/bicycle loans ,home loans plus family maintenance. Now that the govt is without taxes for 40 days it has no money to pay salaries. The Middle Classes will have to bear the burden of taxes too. Why is this class being excessively solicitous of the poor , he asks. As if their own distress is not enough ! 

 He reminds me of this quote. 

 “The rich and poor truly are from different realms: one has adapted to become an expert in material forfeit ; the other has forfeited all they are to material, and thus is enslaved ,by it.” .... JKMcfarlane. 

  Does he realise that the edifice of luxurious living is laid on the sweat and toil of labour class ,the only factor of production that creates the surplus value embedded in modern conveniences. The middle class can draw on future incomes in the present to avail it, to pay astronomical school fees that is so huge that one month’s fee suffices to feed two families, he admits. The poor can’t even draw what they have earned, for rare is the contractor who timely pays full wages. The social media is awash with stentorious homilies to stay at home. Yes, they can for they all belong to the middle classes that have the financial backbone to survive for months without earning . The poor must earn daily to survive. They do the ‘dirty work’ for the comforts of the classes above them. They must not only survive but remain hopeful of upward mobility for the other classes to stay put or move up. Given limited resources the state cannot support people at all coordinates of the economic spectrum. It has to be then the poor . It’s as simple as that.

 In colonial times there were only two classes - the Macaulay class of brown sahib (bhadralog) and the brown skinned (toilers -labourers and peasants). Upward social mobility wombed the middle class. Lack of empathy for it from one in the middle class ,therefore, seems so unnatural and contrived. Is it so ? 

  Fine if the post is a stray, random, atypical musing of a budding social thinker , let a hundred flowers bloom. But if held by many and vociferously adumbrated, it holds ominous portents. For it necessarily entails accentuating inequalities, a recipe for civil strife written in the history cookery book.

Revisiting ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ , Anne Frank

Did someone say,  familiarity breeds contempt ? When it's about books, especially good ones, this truism doesn't impress.

Like a homing pigeon, at times I  re-read a good book. Foolish as it may sound ,for there is a whole expanse of  literature that may take seven lives to read , one cannot dispute that the  'known' is innoculated against disappointment.

When the mood is less venturesome I pick up one such, much like one surfing the channels and finally settling to watch a  movie classic once more in quietude, 'Chupke Chupke'.

Anne's Diary never disappoints. It adorns the private collection of all book lovers for it ranks among those that one must read before the Maker's Stop Watch trings, trings, 'Time Up'.

Tragically, Anne, the teenager, who felt "youth is lonelier than old age" didn't live to test it.  Neither she lived her youth nor saw old age. In the two years she spent in hiding in occupied Amsterdam with her family and two other Jewish families before becoming Auswitch bound she encapsulated the wisdom of a life time in her narration of  those two years in the diary.

That never fails to boggle my mind any time I read it. Such perspicacity in one less than fifteen years old ? Amazing !

I will end this walk-through of the diary with some quotes that bear eloquent testimony to her perceptive observations and  intellectual and emotional precocity.

We all live but we dont know the why or the where for. We all live with the object of being happy.  Our lives are all different yet all the same

Older people have formed their opinion about everything and dont waver before they act.
It is twice as hard for our young ones to hold our ground and maintain our opinions in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God.

All children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on
right paths. But the final forming of a personal character lies in their own hands


How noble and good everyone could be if every evening before falling asleep they were to recall in their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it , you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day, of course , you achieve a lot in the course of time . Anyone can do this. It costs nothing and is certainly very helpful.

Book Review : The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

'The Handmaid's Tale'

by Margaret Atwood

Through the first 'wood' in the coppice of Atwood !

Wasn't soft, breezy reading though. The narrative waltzes too frequently between past and present events. At times the reader is asked to divine what might have happened ('It didn't happen that way.' Oh! ' it didn't happen that way either', and finally 'not sure how it happened ',says Offred, the protagonist).That doesn't deter, rather eggs the reader on and keeps him hooked to the very end.

Gilead is a totalitarian dystopic state. As is commonplace with dysfunctional regimes Gileadeans breathe in a miasma of state repression, coercion ,fear, covert surveillance, neighbour vigilantism and disinformation. All of it the book portrays with chilling repugnance. One's sensibilities are truly, brutally outraged.

Ironically, the raison d'etre of a dystopia is a utopia ! The Gileadean utopia is the orthodox social order enshrined in the Old Testament. That forms the basis for repurposing the role of women and reinterpreting man-woman relationship in Gilead.

A woman , asserts the commander , cannot "usurp authority over the man...For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived . But the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved by child bearing".

Gileadean women are purely human breeders. Love does not enter the equation, is expendable and dispensed with. Equally, her right to property, education, assertion of her individuality, fashionable wear and vanities are redundancies that they have to do without.

What if a woman fails to concieve ? Gilead's answer is Genesis; 30:1-3 OT where Rachael tells her husband ,Jacob, " Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children" So if the wife of a ruling elite is barren an ovulating woman is billeted with her to do what Bilhah did under the watchful eye of the wife. Soon she delivers or fails impregnation within the assigned two years she moves to another needy housewife. She is the Handmaid- a wandering womb or renter of female reproductive organs. And the novel is an autobiographical fiction of one such handmaid, Offred.

And for men variety is the spice of life. Says the commander,

"it's part of the nature's plan . Women know this instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes in the old days ? To trick men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day."

Dystopian fiction transport the reader to a world beyond the real one. The unfamiliar, uncharted , frothing with inconceivable possibilities naturally evokes reader's curiosity and inquisitiveness, both essential to holding his interest. The ones that seem too far-fetched in the context of the times they are conceived in, like Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' end up as entertaining time pass. No more. But those that seem even remotely plausible disturb the reader's equipoise and invade social 

consciousness. Hey, this could happen ! Beware. 

Atwood's dystopia is one such. Not too imaginative in the context of the times we live in. World history alternates between totalitarian and liberal regimes, so a totalitarian regime is no anachronism. Faced with an adverse demography -more deaths than births, could not a totalitarian regime institutionalize the role of Handmaids in some form ? A blood curdling plausability !

With Right on the ascent, a cacophany of nativity, racism, religious fanaticism reverberates throughout the world. It looks longingly to an antediluvian social order, a utopia of bliss, harmony, strifeless existence, a figment of tortured imagination wholly lacking in historicity.

Nearer home, at times men in the corridors of power get 'nostalgic' about a distant hoary past when pushpak vimans air taxied , test- tube babies were born, plastic surgeries performed and wars live telecasted. When the distinction between mythology and history gets blurred, when faith overrides reason, alarm bells should start ringing.

For in that imagined idyllic state women fare poorly- property of men to be used to rear children and service the family, to be staked at the gambling table, to sate male lust as courtesans, to strike politically profitable matrimonial alliances between royal families, in short, womanhood minus any pretence of individuality.

So when a law maker opines that rapes occur due to women dressing up immodestly exposing too much skin, or because women keep moving till late night, Atwood springs to mind. Or when men in power state a women's proper place is the home echoes from Atwood's dystopia reach me to shake my sense of complacency and disturb my equanimity. 

That is precisely why 'The Handmaid's Tale' resonates and compels me to think twice- can it really happen?

One last thought. History records an upward linear progression in women's rights. Surely, the future cannot be so perversely monstrous to abrogate, circumscribe it all . Yet, aren't there enough provocations in the air to at least pause and wonder ? That's what the novel asks of us.

A must read.

The need to abate CORONA fear psychosis

India’s COVID tally shoots past China, the nation with the slur of the 'original sin' . And it climbs to 11th spot in the 180 affected nations. The upshot ? LockDown 4.0 

How should citizen react ? I believe - like the coyote !

 A certain coyote had never before seen a lion. The first time he accidentally met one, he was very scared, almost frozen from fright. The second time he saw one , he was scared alright but not quite as much. And the third time , he looked it in the eye and went its way unafraid. 

Like the coyote we need to look CORONA in the eye and learn to live with it ; wearing our protective shields and going about our restricted lives, not cowering in dread of it . 

Many have corralled themselves for over two months within the boundary walls of their homes, expecting daily needs markets to come to their doorsteps, failing that ,curtailing their needs , or finding 'others' (presuming those others are corona immune) to fetch things for them. But from all indications the pandemic is here to stay tilll a vaccine or cure is found. Can nations and people remain bottled up till then? 

Normal economic activity, with appropriate safeguards, need to be gradually restored , as is being done, the pace of it may be arguable. So must people go about their normal lives, prudently and protectively. 

 Running away from the lion is not the coyote way. And for now not an option too .

Demonetisation and Covid Lockdown

Plight of common Indians in two severe economic famines !

Lament of a Fast Food Stall

‘Khushboo Fast Food ’

Why am I where I lie ?
Tethered to a pole
Suffering miseries untold.
Time still, but weeks fly.

Legs stiffen, yearn to move
To a milling crowd.
But I lie in a dusty shroud
And see the master grieve .

Days bygone he did stir and fry
Eggs, rolls, and chow.
Girl or boy, low or highbrow
Stood salivating by.

Alas! an unseen evil now stalks,
Distancing men from men,
Men from me , a bad omen.
For master puts me under locks.

No longer do I earn,
The idle master bemoans.
His life dives into unknowns,
With oodles to mourn .

So little left to feed his brood.
And a daughter lying in wait,
For a groom that he promised to bait.
Little wonder oft he slips into surly mood.

Yet, worse he has weathered.
This too shall pass,
Before he too comes to pass.
In him hope never floundered.