On Independence and Other Things

Biji, my grandmother, like a lot of our grandparents, was a very political being.

Growing up in those heady days when young people agitated not for their own small freedoms, but for the big “Independence” for their country, Biji joined Bapu in satyagraha and non-cooperation, took her 4 year old son to shoo Simon away and cried bitterly as two pieces of her heart were ripped away from her by the Partition. She wore nothing but white khadi since the age of 22 and talked about the country’s leaders as if she knew them all intimately. Some, she did.

My dad was not yet 10 when Nehru delivered his midnight speech that held the nation spellbound. By the time my grandmother was 42, I had been born and when she was my age she already had 5 grandchildren.

Politics was daily breakfast fare in our household and the state of the country was of direct and immediate concern to Biji, who subscribed to 13 newspapers and magazines in 4 languages and devoured them all.

The flag, the anthem, Vande Mataram held more emotional value for her than the symbols of her religion. Each and every little landmark date on the way to 1947 was celebrated or mourned with religious fervour other families associate with id or diwali.

Between her generation and mine, there was still the direct touch of a body full of first-hand memories of life in an India not yet free. I saw it in her soft, white “dhoti”, I heard it in her night-time stories, I felt it in her hot, naked feet that walked the roads without slippers and were soaked in a tub of cold water upon her return.

Biji died of nothing, suddenly, at the ripe old age of 57 leaving behind her a full family of 2 sons, 2 daughters in law, 8 grandchildren and countless unknown faces she had benefitted in various ways that we only came to know after her death. I was then 15.

My reactions to Republic Day, Independence Day, the anthem, the flag are still hugely emotional because of my childhood associations with them through Biji. My daughter is now almost 15 and though she knows to respect the symbols of her country, Indian Independence is something she studies in her history books and takes exams on.

Independence Day doesn't mean as much to gen-next as it did to us; just as it didn't mean as much to us as it did to our grandparents. But that’s how it should be, I think. In many ways it is right and fitting that the past stops being overwhelmingly meaningful to the future.

The future will have its own challenges, its own revolutions, its own battles to fight.

Enroute to Kruger National Park

RANEE'S SOUTH AFRICA DIARIES: JOURNAL 8

May 24:

It is morning before we know it and we are up and away from the invitingly warm covers too soon. We shower and change as Anthony comes in and makes breakfast. There is another man with him this time. Sydney is the spare driver and a member of the Sotho tribe.

We leave around 8.15 through much snarled roads and pick up an old gentleman, Mr Alan “Call me Fred” Poole, at the posh hotel just next to the Wanderers club. We also have to go through more congested traffic to pick up an American couple from the Airport Grand before we can head out towards Kruger. This couple is nowhere to be found and we waste 10 minutes looking for them, Anthony pleasant and agreeable as usual. By the time we can leave the Johannesburg area, it is past 10am.

Thus begins a day that’s dedicated to the road!

Everything here is so far and takes far too long to get to. People are punctual, yes, but not punctiliously so. Time-wise, things seem flexible and people seem to take delays in their stride.

The first part of the ride is uneventful and takes us through flat corn-fields, gold-mines and coal mines. There are several thermal power plants. We stop for a toilet break in about one hour. The next part of the drive is more undulating terrain and the vegetation changes a bit. The landscape is more interesting, though not very different from what we’ve seen in the open areas of Zambia or from the planes we’ve been on. We stop for lunch at about 12.45 at Dulstroom, the highest town in South Africa, if Anthony is to be believed, at 2100 metres elevation. We eat at Charlie Cs—chicken burgers for the kids and toasted sandwiches for us.

Another Viva Safaris van and driver are here in Dulstroom to take us the rest of the way. We change vans and Anthony leaves us here after he’s had his lunch. Sydney and a young Shangaan man called Nellie take us the rest of the way.

Sanjib has to change enough of his USDs to ZARs and we were supposed to stop at a bank in Dulstroom. To help things along, Sanjib walks to the bank a few blocks away so that we can pick him up when we’re done. We go to pick him up only to see that the lady at the bank tellers window is at lunch and wouldn’t be back before 2pm. Sydney says we’ll stop at the next town and we go on.

The “next town” is Lydenberg and here we stop at the Standard Bank for what we think is a short stop. Well, we’re still there at our corner 45 minutes later, waiting for my man to come back.

The time is spent talking to our Sotho and Shangaan warriors about things sociological—the rampant polygamy, the family hierarchy, how things work in villages, their system of redressing disputes; the kings, chiefs, mayors in their villages and provinces, a structure far removed from the governance of the cities and much like our own panchayati raj.

Men are supposed to pay bride price for wives, the opposite of our dowry system—the more qualified the bride, the more the bride price. Rich men show their status by marrying several wives and having many children “but the computer recognizes only one.”

Sydney tells me a story about a man who married his half-sister, because nowadays, if a man has 10 wives in 10 different places, who can know all his siblings? So this man married his half-sister and finally had to divorce her out of family embarrassment. Stories like this continue. Sydney thinks one wife will be enough. Nellie disagrees. His father married 5 times, and so will he.

Where Nellie grew up, women and children were not allowed to have eggs—only the men could eat eggs. In Sydney’s village, it was kidneys that only the elder men ate—women and children could not eat them. The Americans show interest in the conversation, seeking clarifications now and then. Alan "Fred" Poole stays mum.

We still wait for Sanjib to emerge from the bank. I keep the Americans engaged with stories about the elusive tiger, whom we have hunted for many a vacation, through the Sunderbans and Sariska and Corbett, without being able to actually sight. The Americans have their own story to tell about their elusive wolf, whom they have been tracking through Alaska and Yellowstone without success. The conversation moves to the Black Mamba and Sanjib’s mortal fear of snakes. Still no Sanjib and still, Alan Poole stays mum.

I finally feel forced to go in search of my errant husband. It is now that Alan Poole comes down from the van with me and very gently offers to take ZARs out of his ATM in exchange for Sanjib’s dollars “if he’s having trouble.” I nod shamefacedly and cross the road to go to the bank to see what is holding my man up. I find him at the counter waiting as 2 tellers count out his cash over and over again, pinning every 10 100ZAR notes as they go along. They put it all, finally satisfied, in a bag and Sanjib and I run back to the van bag in hand. Sanjib apologizes to the crowd. The crowd kids him about snakes and the journey continues.

A few more hours cross. There’s more conversation now, thanks to that interlude at Lydenberg. Quiet Sydney has opened up now and refuses to stop. The Americans—Bill and Ellen from Wisconsin—are loud and friendly and even Alan/Fred has started talking a bit now and then.

tribal images courtesy:

http://www.south-africa-tours-and-travel.com/

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/

http://www.encounter.co.za/

A KAUR BY ANY OTHER NAME...

I beg to differ with you this time, Mr. Shakespeare! What’s in a name? Ask an Indian student with a name other than Christian, who has been to study abroad in the Western World (and especially in the US of A.)

(cartoon courtesy http://www.toonpool.com/)

After they’ve “so not got your name” and asked you to spell it (and still mispronounced it), commented on your colour (“like, you’ve got gold under your skin!”), remarked on your wonderfully “inneresting costume” and wondered at your remarkable mastery over the English language (“and that quaint accent”) they’ll probably want you to tell them your name again.
Your name’s the simplest thing in the world—5 letters, 2 syllables—yet you’ll have to get used to answering to all its mutilated permutations of pronunciation (Renee, Runee, Rainy…)

You don’t know it but you become invisible as soon as you enter a foreign country to work or study. Oh, it takes you a while to realize the fact because physically, you stick out like a sore thumb. Everybody makes much ado about everything you say or do (Oh, wow! Really! That’s so cool!). There are so many questions about your culture, your family, your self. You’ve never had so much attention just because of how you look and what you wear and who you are and you just enjoy it so much.

But slowly, it sinks in. Every time they are surprised, every time you answer the incessant questions, every time you’re patted on the back for understanding a local colloquialism or even just getting the punch line of a joke, you lose a bit of yourself—who you are— without quite knowing it.

Then comes the day you begin to expect the attention and to pre-empt the questions. You’ve worked out the answers the way they’d comprehend them. When they ask you your name, you don’t even bother to just say it—“Let me spell it for you. It’s Ranee as in ‘Ronnie’ and Kaur as in the apple.”

That day, they learn how to pronounce your name correctly but you become Ronnie Core. The rose is no longer a rose.

Your name—you never really think about it until you’ve lived abroad for a fair stretch of time. You’ve never thought about how it relates to you and who you are. It’s just your name. Back home, it works like that little tag you find in your clothes: “Size M, 30% polyester, 70% cotton. Machine wash warm; Tumble-dry low. Made in India.” The moment you tell someone your name it instantly transmits to them the entire surface of your identity: the etymology of the name, the region of your origin, your mother tongue(s), your religion, caste, creed and perhaps even the family you belong to and its standing in your community/society. Your name takes care of all the preliminaries of your identity. It takes care of all the introductions. The moment you’ve pronounced it, it has told everybody who you basically are.

So when your name loses its signifying power, you become invisible. You have to start groping for other ways to define yourself. Your name doesn’t define your givens: ergo, there are no givens. You now have to decide for yourself what is really given you and what you have to give to your universe. Your name does not automatically tie you down to a country a region a religion a family so you are free to decide what you want to be identified with, if anything.

Suddenly, you’re not defined at all. You’re not rooted. You’re just you, whoever you are. Step One: you panic. You cling to your Indian-ness—whatever that means—and overdo it. You rent Hindi movies every weekend. You listen only to Indian music in your car. You have your surrogate “Indian” families you “potluck” with regularly. You wear your interesting costumes more than you ever did back home. In short, you aren’t really being “yourself” at all. You’re just conforming violently to the “western” notion of being “exotic” and “eastern.”

Some people get stuck there and there they stay. Others take the opportunity of looking beyond names (or “tags”) and into people. They surrender themselves to the glorious confusion about who they are and begin the process of “becoming” somebody they really want to be. They become a mass of kaleidoscopic, shifting identities rather than one with a fixed center, focus and pattern. They learn to appreciate each little fragmented brilliantly coloured piece of all those diverse things that make them who they are. They keep collecting more identities from all over the globe. The individual shards of their multiplying identities are quite separate and distinct. They never leak or melt. They never merge and make a new composite. Sometimes they even clash with each other. But the possibilities of their “becoming” are so infinitely rich and endless!

So now you can potentially be Ranee and Renee and Runee and Ronnie and Rainy and every other permutation. You can be at home everywhere, but you become effectively homeless because you see, your home isn’t really home anymore because it excludes all those other homes you’ve known. It becomes harder for you to separate “us” from “them.” You can no longer validate those boundaries of religion or colour—your world cannot be black or white.

All that can happen at the sound of your name on foreign tongues. A rose by another name is no longer a rose. It is another flower in the becoming.

Oh and Mr. Shakespeare, about the second half of that line? Nix that too, would you? What smells “sweet” to you may seem like an olfactory attack to another nose. Let me tell you about the time I cooked my first Indian dinner in a small apartment I shared with American roommates…

Livingstone - Johannesburg

RANEE'S SOUTH AFRICA DIARIES: JOURNAL 7
May 23

The morning is relaxed and after breakfast, we putter around and pack and see the Victoria Falls spray from the jetty for the last time—today it is rainbow coloured and for a long while, we watch the fascinating drama of the top of the spray breaking away into clouds and then nothingness.

Then it is time for Paul to come for us at 11.15 and we are off to the quaint little airport again after picking up a few people along the way.

“International departures” has a nice lounge where we go after immigration, but the flight is delayed by an hour and a half and we have many hours to kill. We realize after a while—my husband asks the authorities where he can go to have a smoke—that immigration is not quite a one-way street. A person can walk out with his boarding pass and a wave at the lady behind the counter, have a beer, smoke a cigarette outside the airport and walk back in without being security-checked or questioned. This kind of relaxed, trusting atmosphere points to another, gentler time in the past and is not quite here and now.

As we sit in the lounge, we observe some of our fellow travelers. There is a Gunther Grass look-alike with a “jhola" like bag. This guy manages to get to the gate without putting his bag through the scanner. He’s a man in a hurry to go, but obviously, there is nowhere he can go. So he goes to the gate.

There is another Gujarati family. They have their main meal sitting in the lounge. Out come their little bags of food from a big bag of food. Out come the khakras and theplas and Bhujiyas and other farsan. The food is displayed on the floor of the lounge, paper plates are filled and handed out by the women who sit on the floor to do this. Then the family eats with gusto!

All of this makes the wait go faster and finally our plane arrives from JNB, unloads its passengers and luggage as CE202, loads our paraphernalia and us as CE203 and we walk a few yards from the gate to board it, Gunther Grass leading the way.

The flight back is just as frenetic in service as the flight in. The added treat is a superb aerial view of the Victoria Falls that gives us another perspective of the totality of Mosi-O-Tunya.

We reach Oliver Tambo two hours beyond our arrival time and rush through immigration only to idle a long while for our baggage to arrive and finally emerge to find Anthony waiting good-naturedly.

We spend some more time at arrivals going through the Dollar exchange rates—what we get ranges from 6.26 to 6.38, nowhere near the 7 we want—and going away with our money unchanged. It is about 5pm before we leave, but this time the traffic is not too bad and we are at Anthony’s before 6pm.

Jo’burg is still very uncomfortably cold and we are still under-dressed. In the evening there is much to do. We pack for Kruger, wash 2 loads and hang them out to dry and cook and eat dinner. By the time we go to sleep it is past 1am and far colder than my feet can stand. I toss and turn all night, trying to get my feet to warm up enough so that the rest of my body can sleep.

The Cream and Scum of Blogging

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 1, the first edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Scum and cream both surface, slimily climbing the fluid staircase of their liquid wombs, sucking life from the amniotic juice that gives them their existence.

Gaining texture, growing layer by layer, both rise to the top, smothering their mother-solution, draining it of all its properties.

Both appear only when the emulsion that gives them life becomes stagnant and complacent.

Yet one is glorified and the other reviled.

Time for us to reflect a bit on value judgments, my friends—one man’s cream may be another’s scum and vice versa!

Scum may feed and sustain while cream clogs arteries and becomes the cause of death.

I’ve always been wary about making decisions on worthiness.

I believe all forms of being, however nanoscopic,--bacteria, virus, algae and all—are whole and universal in themselves and that they are all integral, organic parts of the cells that make up the universes.

Cream and Scum—they are both valuable, both worthy in their own ways, both capable of good and bad effects, both essential in the tasks they are destined to perform.

When I write, or you write, or someone else writes a blog, that writing is an expression of a little part of the universes that are or will be or have the potential of being.

If scum I am meant to be, I aim to be the best scum it is possible for me to be!

The fellow Bloga-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton are Arjuna, Saimanohar, Dhiman, Vipul Grover, Avdi, Daisy Blue, Sid 'Ravan' Kabe, Shankar, Shilpa Garg, Bharathi, Ranee again and Pawan. Click on their respective names to read their posts on The Cream and Scum of Blogging. To be part of the next edition of this online marathon, visit and start following Bloga-Ton.