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.

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…

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.