Crossing over - fragments from a journey

"I am a survivor."

2011-12-03T23:15:00.003-05:00

The identity and gender questions have always intrigued me. Whether gender is a matter of soul or of externalities, it needs to be examined with a more accepting mind. I met Abhina and Simran, two transgender women, and wrote their stories.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 25, 2011

"I came to life among the 16,000 sperms. I am a survivor. Let me survive."
She was 20 years and struggling with her identity. Underneath her male
garb, she wore women's underclothes. It was liberating to assert her
identity. Gender is what the soul defines, not the genitals.
That's what she told herself then.
"This is one life. This is my life. I shall survive," she recalled.
Abhina Aher, 35, a transgender working in Delhi, survived the snares
of the society, and five years ago, found a Guru, who helped her
through her transition. While taking the oath in front of the leaders
of the seven gharanas of Mumbai in a community home in Byculla, she
discarded all her male stir, vowed never to wear them again and began
to learn the ways of the hijra.
As a project manager for Pehchan, a new five-year project that will
provide HIV prevention services for men who have sex with men and a
part of the HIV/AIDS Alliance, Abhina moved to Delhi a year ago from
Mumbai where she was working for the community previously.
Chandelier earrings dangling from her ears, and her eyes perfectly
lined with kohl, her hair lustrous and her clothes impeccable, she is
yet to get rid of her male organs but her soul has survived the
onslaughts of making it in a society where recognition of the third
sex still has a long way to go.
When the newspapers used the term "eunuch" to define the community
that recently lost 20 of its members to a mishap in Delhi during a
congregation, she felt angry.
"We are fighting against the usage of the term. It is demeaning," she said.
There are too many stereotypes to fight against.
"When they interact with me, they look at me with astonishment," she said.
At the airports, the discrimination is there. Everywhere else, too.
"I have to go with my male name. Sometimes, others don't want to sit
with me. They change their seats," she said. "It is unfortunate."
As the Delhi government tries to establish the issue of "kin" of the
hijras that perished in the fire, Abhina said the issue of identity
lies at the core of their community. At a community congregation in
Nandnagari in East Delhi, hijra community members were trapped inside
the community hall, and many died, and others are still recuperating
from burn injuries in the hospital.
"We have become more alert. We close doors because we don't want
homophobic people to attack us and it has happened in the past. But
that's unsafe," she said.
The government announced a compensation package of Rs. two laks for
the next of each kin of each of the victims after the mishap but they
are yet to ascertain the "closest relative" as the community members
live in communes called gharanas led by the Guru after they leave home
and their families to be reborn as a hijra. As per the UNDP, there are
16 lakh hijras in the country. The community members live in a world
of hierarchies, of bonds that are forged because at some point, they
have all felt trapped within their male bodies, and have felt the need
to free themselves of the burden of their male genitals.
Abhina was born in Mumbai in a middle class family. Her father and
mother were government employees. In the world that she was born and
named as Abhijit Aher, the dreams ended at getting a secure government
job and starting a family. It was a limited world.
At seven, Aher first crossed over. At that age, she didn't know the
world regarded gender as sacred, and something that couldn't flow into
the other.
Her mother Mangala, a folk and Kathak dancer, was like a diva to her.
She donned the ghungroos first.
Her body, she said, felt rhythmic.
"I had a natural tendency to pick up rhythm. My mother was a dancer
and my father played the instruments," she said.
For many years after that day, Abhina struggled with gender and
identity issues.
"I continued being a feminine boy," she said.
At the Marathi medium school in Dadar, she first realized she was only
interested in men. She wanted men to love her as a woman. But her
first sexual encounters were with gay men.
While in school, her mother found out about her relationship with a
neighborhood boy, her best friend, and since then her "reformation"
began.
"I was policed. I wasn't allowed to play with dolls, and my clothes
were monitored," she recalled. "I kept the appearances. I excelled in
outdoor sports. I even did horse-riding."
In college, she was still exploring her sexuality through chance
encounters with men. When she stumbled upon Bombay Dost, a queer
magazine, she knew she wasn't the only one struggling with gender and
identity questions. That's when she started working for the Humsafar
Trust. Those days, she recalled, they had a one-room office and she
operated out the office, and met more transponders.
"I continued with my sexual encounters," she said. "What nobody
understands is we want to be with a man or a bisexual person. I want a
man to love me like a woman. This isn't just about sex but beyond it.
The only men I was coming across were gay men. I appeared as a man,
too."
In Class 12, she came out to her parents. But she continued living at home.
"They had no options. I was the only child," she said.
After years of crossdressing, Abhina decided to find a Guru. At the
different NGOs she worked with, she had spent time working with the
hijra community of Malvani, where she met Shehnaz Nani. She had
already started taking hormonal pills in secret and was helped by the
community members by then.
She joined the Bulakwala Gharana and identified Shehnaz Nani as her mother.
"It was a difficult decision but I did it. If I lived in fear of my
own identity, I wouldn't be able to redeem myself," she said.
She kept going to the Guru.
"Guru, I see you as my mother but if you tell me to beg and borrow and
do sex work, I won't be able to do it," she would tell Shehnaz Nani.
"I needed a mother who would transform me from male to female," she
said."That's out tradition. A culture."
But she continued living with her mother, taking care of her.
In time, her mother reconciled to her son being different.
"She tells me you have given me the love of a son and a daughter,"
Abhina said. "I am providing for her. She is proud of me."
The biological mother and the daughter talk through the nights,
giggling as little girls would do. She inherited her mother's saris
and the ghungroos. Abhina herself is a trained Lavni and Kathak
dancer.
She went to the elders of the community, the leaders of the seven
gharanas and took her oath.
"You have to say we want to be in the mother-daughter or Guru-Chela
relationship and they ask you questions to ascertain whether you
really want to be a hijra," she said. "The Guru needs to have faith in
you. We were bonded. I had to look after the Guru. Shehnaz Nani had
200 chelas at the time. This is our method of taking care of the old
and the infirm. She can't walk now but she is looked after."
Now, Abhina has become a Guru as she is influential in the community
and has a few chelas.
"Once you have a Guru, you do tag and you are reborn. I changed my
name and started wearing three clothes like a female," she said."I was
dying to do it. But I haven't got rid of my male organs. We aren't
forced to. We do it when we are ready."
She faced issues regarding renting a house in Delhi when she first moved here.
"We have to pay extra rent. Much more than what you would pay. So, we
live together to split the high rents. We live by throwing money to
navigate a system that is so much giants us, that doesn't recognize
our sexuality like for instance, the government has announced that
Aadhaar or UIDAI cards will have transgender column. But what do we do
about the base documents like the Pan card. Mine is still in the name
of Abhijit. Passport has "others" and it makes you feel as if you are
an animal. Besides, all government departments need to recognize the
transgender as a separate entity. Without it, we have issues regarding
property rights, and everything else. With Pehchan, we are trying to
address those issues and sensitize the public. One example is the
recent mishap where the government doesn't know about the guru-chela
tradition. There are no castration facilities available. It costs so
much more to do it privately."
Next to her, Simran, another transgender co-worker, nodded.
"We are trying to build a support system. Pehchan has a huge grant and
we are trying to work in 17 states to promote the rights of the
transgender community," she said.
Her day begins early. She lives in Kalyanpuri where she has bought a house now.
"I am from the Poonawala gharana," she said. "I was born and raised in Mumbai."
When she was in Class 10, she told her father she thought she was gay.
He said I was not fit to be in his house so I left home and lived at
the Bombay Central Station for three days. A hijra community member
took fancy to me, and just when we were about to begin our first
sexual encounter, I told her I felt like her.
She took me to her house and took care of me for eight months.
"I learned dancing, worked at a dance bar in Khar, and even did some
sex work but it was painful. I detested it," she said. "My dancing
days were the best time in my life. I had many admirers. I felt wanted
and I made a lot of money, too."
But it was tough living as a hijra.
I was told to wear women's clothes and I was like "why can't I wear
men's clothes and go and work in office to avoid begging and
prostituting myself."
But then, it would have meant cheating myself, she said.
"There was a phase recently in my life where I had to do sex work to
sustain myself and then I got this job," she said. "I have adopted a
daughter. I used to be in Kamathipura and she is the child of a sex
worker who passed away. Three former sex workers take care of her. I
want her to be independent and not form a close attachment as I
wouldn't want to her to feel I did charity for her. It is difficult
adopting children but many hijras adopt children and bring them up. If
it were easier, we would have saved so many children from living on
streets."
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet. On the weekends, she spends most of
her time and money on beauty parlors.
"I like pampering myself," she said.
She faced a lot of discrimination. When she used to take the metro
from Badarpur, where she first lived in a rented accommodation, women
would vacate the seat next to her.
"I felt sad," she said. "I stopped taking the metro which only took 10
minutes to get here and started taking autos that cost me Rs. 120 one
way."
On the flights, most men ask the crew to change their seats as they
feel "uncomfortable" sitting next to a hijra, she said.
"I have been working here for the last one year and 24 days and each
time I walk in the compound, men stare at me and make vulgar comments.
I am tired of 24/7 attention," she said.
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet.
"I am waiting for the legalization of SRS," she said. "I converted to
Islam because that's how the gharanas are geared. We have Hindus too
but I can go to a mosque and pray. Islam doesn't allow for sexual
relations between two men."
For now, she is trying to give back to the community in her own way
and she is happy being what she is.
"We live like the woman that is in us. We spend a lot of money on
jewelry because that is passed on to the chelas and our adopted
children and that's how we live. With no care, with no misgivings,"
she said.
Gender, as we get it from the womb, isn't sacred. What is holy is how
you feel, she said.
"I feel like a nurturer, and I feel like a woman," Simran said.

Women from Mewat and men from Punjab

2011-08-23T23:34:00.002-04:00

On Day 8, I went to the Ramlila Grounds to see what they call the "revolution" and I found the energy infectious. An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on august 24, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 23, 2011

From the podium, a thin wiry woman thundered.
“Sailab se keh do, apni aukat mein rahe.”
Mumtaz Behan, who said she was a revolutionary from Mewat, was cheered on by the crowds at the Ramlila Ground. She was speaking on behalf of the Pasmanda Dalit Muslim community.
“Jo unpe haath rakhega, use benoor kar denge,” she hollered into the microphone. The crowds swayed, clapped, whistled.
In a blue salwar kurta, she went on, promising the support of all women in Mewat.
The women of Mewat in Haryana, hitherto known to be a backward region with low literacy levels and poor health indicators, had joined the movement. Hopes were running high. Corruption was the root cause of everything.
Mumtaz pledged the support of the poor women of Mewat in a hoarse voice.
The rain started to fall. As she descended the stairs, the two young men started to sing.
“Mera Rang de basanti chola ...”
More cheers. The speaker went on to list the wide spectrum of support Anna Hazare was enlisting. Farmers' unions, dalit organizations, muslim leaders, who invoked the holy month of Ramadan as they spoke about the movement's reach, its scope and its promise.
Shahid Bhagat Singh's nephew climbed on to the stage, which looked spartan with just a poster of Gandhi as the backdrop. The isolating symbols were done away with this time. No Bharat Mata this time.
On a little table, a miniature statue of Gandhi was placed.
With a group of Sikh men, the nephew Abhay Singh Sandhu sporting a yellow turban waved the flag. He said he was with Anna and so were the people of Punjab.
The tempo caught on. The music came on. Someone shouted into the mic “Inqualab Zindabad.”
And then, more speakers.
Being part of those who were throwing their weight behind Anna was considered the populist measure for some.
A leader was discussing the financial cost of it. Couple with that, there were logistical issues. But this was the right thing to do, he was overheard telling another man.
A Sikh man exhorted the crowds to dance. He was on the stage. Sandhu was on his side. The moment was right. In the rain, it would make for the pretty picture.
The cameras were arched.
Scribes were taking notes. The crowds were watching.
Intermission. The two singers have their moment. They start to croon.
Arvind Kejriwal climbs on to the stage. He has an announcement to make. The people craned their necks. The cameras panned.
“Salman Khurshid has called us. Should we go,” he said into the mic. “If he has called, we should go. But we won't do anything without consulting you.”
A round of applause. Then, the go-ahead.
In between, Ram Jethmalani is spotted. He met Anna.
"I told him he should live. He should carry on for the movement. If he dies, the movement will die so he needs to take care of himself," he said.
Then, Professor Yogendra Yadav, an Indian social scientist and a member of the NAC for the implementation of the RTÉ act, got on to the stage.
In 2009, when UP's chief minister Mayawati had addressed a rally from the same stage, the setting was different. The stage looked regal. Four airconditioners were blasting. There were the typical accompaniments – the elephants, the pink and the blue colors, the diamonds glittering in her ears.
The same stage, which looked so out of reach, and so made up, is now the focal point of the movement. On an elevated level, Anna sits.
Yadav began his speech.
“This is a festival of democracy,” he said.
He said it warmed his heart to see people speaking in Marathi in Delhi. It was integration.
He asked the crowd what it meant when they wore caps and t-shirts saying “I am Anna.”
He went on to explain.
“It means we are looking for Anna within us,” he said.
Outside, vendors selling Anna caps were doing brisk business. Everyone was looking for Anna within and without.
Anna was behind the stage. Sleeping.

The bondage of tradition

2011-05-08T01:16:00.002-04:00

I had seen the dargah on my visits to the Jama Masjid but had never gone inside. On an assignment to chronicle the life of a bhishti, I finally went inside and found a water carrier. The story is about how he won't let his sons do the job that was passed down to him by his forefathers because there is no future.

An edited version of the story appeared in The Indian Express on May 8, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, May 6, 2011

He won't hold his sons to the promise his father elicited from him. Don't do what is not unto you, he had said.
He didn't have the heart to say no. He hadn't known better then. His forefathers lived a simple life, they never exercised choice, never unleashed that force that propels you out of the familiar - the role of a water carrier handed down to them by their ancestors.
For thirty years, Shakeel Ahmed has carried the weight of the dying tradition on his worn off shoulders. A few more years and he would be spent. His body defeated, and his bones creaking he would return to his village and rest like his father Bashir in a few years. Carrying more than 20 litters of water in a hide sack is no easy feat. During the hot months of the summer, he goes up and down offering water to the pious who came to offer prayers at the grand old mosque of India, the Jama Masjid.
But he would let his children play with destiny, and choose what they'd like to do.
A tradition, a trade intertwined with his identity was handed down to him by his father, who urged him to not relinquish what they had been fated to do as Bhishtis or the water carriers.
His work earns him a lot of blessings, but hardly any money. For years, ever since he was a 12-year-old boy, he has carried the weight of this tradition, living away from his family in a dargah on the steps of the mosque. Faith sustained him. It still does. It is his service to the two saints. Within the complex with its green and red tombs, he has spent thirty years getting up at the crack of dawn, filling water in the goat hide sacks from the well, and returning in the evenings to sleep in the corridors of the shrine, under the watchful eye of the saints. He never let desire, ambition or aspiration corrupt him. He also knew his limitations. He never went to school, didn't know any other trade.
He has collected more blessings than money over the three decades. That would do for him. There's heaven beyond the world. That's where he will get his dues.
"I am the last man to do this. My children don't want to do this and I won't let them. Times have changed. Our role is no longer what it used to be," he says, crouching next to the well.
He won't shackle his children with the role assigned to them ages ago that continues to define them, or constrict them within the confines of what they are supposed to do – quench thirst of hundreds of men who come to offer their prayers at the mosque.
Shakeel, 42, lives in the little complex with his three brothers and his nephew Rashid, who took on the water carrier's role recently. Rashid, 16, was a wayward child who dropped out of school, got into wrong company. So they got him here and now the young boy, who has a disdain for this work, goes about doing it silently. His eyes have a rebellious glint, and he challenges his uncles. But when Shakeel says he would box his ears, he retreats.
"He brought it upon himself. Had he continued in school, he would not end up here," his uncle says.
At the time, living in Gajraula in Moradabad district of UP where he hails from, he didn't know better. This was something his great grandfathers had done, and his father Bashir didn't question it. Shakeel followed into his footsteps.
When his father's health started deteriorating, Shakeel told him to go to their native village and rest. His shoulders were ready to take on the baggage of tradition from his ailing father. In time, they would bear the brunt of the tough task.
Thirty years ago, he came to Jama Masjid and sewed the goat hide he purchased from Ghaziabad and he was ready to begin a lifelong vocation of being a water carrier.
"I pray to the saints for health and vigor. Let's see for how long I can do it," he says.
He earns around Rs. 100 on a regular day. Sometimes, his earnings double. But still the money is less. He sends almost all of it home to his wife and four children keeping only a small allowance for himself. His wife Zareen Khatoon's family gave up on water carrying long ago. Now, they work on farms for little money.
In the mornings, after he has delivered the water to the few hotels and chai kiosks in the mosque complex, he sits at the little bench just outside the dargah sipping tea. The breakfast consists of two matthas and a cup of sugary, milky tea with cardamoms. That done, he carries the water from the well to anyone that call for him. A glass costs Rs. 1 now. When he had had started, it was 10 paise. After the prayers have been offered in the evening, the crowd begins to thin. Yet, he paces up and down. Around 9 pm, he walks into the dargah, hangs the hide sack on the wall, goes out again to eat dinner at one of the little shops selling kebabs and roots. They all know him by name. When the bottled water arrived on the scene and the MCD's water tankers rolled in, the bhishtis started to lose work. Many have taken on other vocations. A few like Shakeel have survived.
They call them the pride of the mosque. From the days when the kings ruled from the Red Fort, they have been there. A lot has changed but they are the reminders of an age gone by. In their hide sacks, they also carry the baggage of nostalgia for the old timers, and are a relic of the history for the young who find them a museum piece.
On Fridays, he doesn't ask for money till the time the evening prayers are over. His wages are the duas that escape from the parched lips and he is content with those. The promise of heaven is bigger than the prospect of earning on the day when more than the usual numbers crowd at the mosque.
"Sabab jitna mile, thoda hai. Blessings are never enough," he says, his fine wrinkles accentuated with a small smile that forms on his lips.
There is that solace at least.
"It is a lost tradition. We are dragging it somehow. The reason I kept at it because I didn't dare to dream big. But my sons have dreams. They talk about running big businesses. Why should I cut their dreams short," he says. "My wife is against the idea of her children taking this up. I understand."
Often the brothers take turns in returning to the village to do the batai during the harvest time on others' farms. That ensures some meagre earning. For the landless peasants, life has become tougher. Prices have increased. The old barter system that was an integral part of the village economy has been replaced.
In the old days, in the village where his ancestors supplied water to the households in exchange for grain, the residents clung to their roles. They hardly ever stepped out of the confines of their defined roles Their caste was tied to what what they did. Bhishti is a word derived from the Persian word Bhisht, which means paradise. Because of what they did, providing water to thirsty soldiers who were protecting Islam, they were given the title.
Shakeel doesn't know whether he would get to heaven. But he knows many times over, people have whispered blessings in his ears as he bent down to pour them the sweet water from the well that they say is more than 350 years old.
That well lies in the dargah complex of one Hare Bhare Baba. There are two tombs – a red one, and a green one. It is here where the five bhishtis sleep. Their possessions are tucked away in the enclosures in the walls. Faith provides them sustenance. Every nit during the scorching summer months, he spreads his sheet in the passage, under the sky, and sleeps. In the winters, he moves to the inner sanctum and sleeps flanked on either side by the two tombs.
"We date from the times of the Prophet. This is a pious endeavor which defines our lineage. Alas, we fell prey to the demands of modern times," he says, as he offers water to a couple from Andhra Pradesh who have come to pay obeisance to the saints, one who of was a martyr, slain by Aurangzeb, the Mughal king. "I have lived here all my life, at their feet, and served them."
His forefathers came to the mosque long ago and since those days when the mosque built by Shahzahan was still new, they have been living at the dargah. Centuries have passed and all sorts of changes have filtered in but the bhishtis have remained. When there was no MCD water supply in the now crumbling havelis and cramped quarters of the old city, the bhishtis supplied the water to the households as they did in every city - Kolkata, Mumbai.
"We belong to where a dargah is. We serve," Shakeel says.
Sweat runs down his back as he pulls out bucket after bucket of water from the well. He has lost count of the refills. The bhishtis have their patrons. A few followers feel the water from the well will enforce their faith. He staggers out with the load of 20 litres of water slung on his back.
Outside the twin dargah of Sarmad Shahid and Hare Bhare Shah, his elder brother Jameel sits, lost in thought. A frail man, he is resting. There is not enough work for five bhishtis. But the promise bound them. So they have resigned themselves to be the pall bearers of the prescribed role in the society.
Sarmad was a naked fakir who was madly in love with a Hindu boy who sang his poems, as the legend goes. He was later executed by Aurangzeb and the tomb, red in color, symbolizes the passion and the violence in his life, which finally dissolved in the love of God as Sufis believe.
And that love is infectious. As a member of the Abbasi community, named after their patron Saint Hazrat Abbas Alamdar, who fetched water in a skin-bag and quenched the thirst of the followers of Imam Husain on their way to Damascus, he is a Sunni Muslim but he believes the saints are the caretakers of his life and wellbeing.
The saint Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed is believed to have come to India from Iran. Belonging to a Jewish family, as the legend goes, his search for the truth of Allah led him to accept Islam. He denounced clothes as a means to break free from the world.
On lonely nights, Shakeel says he has conversations with God. There is no television, no radio. From a kiosk outside selling CDs of qawalis, music flows into the compound.
"My conversations are about everything," he says. "We are Allah's people."

"A city only exists for those who can move around it.”

2011-04-21T00:35:00.002-04:00

This is what I got from a conference about social life of the cities. A really interesting take on the spaces in the city and the people on the periphery who are taking over the space they have been pushed out of through street art.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 27, 2011

"The city belongs to those who can move around it."

That's what the slide said. She calls it a manifesto, a campaign
slogan of sorts of the urban youth, mostly from poor localities,
pushed to the periphery by the lopsided development in Brazil's Sao
Paulo, a city of 16 million people, a city that's is the canvas for
the youth, disgruntled with their situation, victims of fear and
crime. They move around it, and take over its urban space, reducing
barriers of class and colour in their imagination.
Teresa Caldiera, a professor at University of California Berkeley and
an anthropologist, who is researching the spatial segregation and
street art in Sao Paulo in Brazil, walked the audience through a
selection of snapshots of graffiti and tagging in the city torn by
crime and divided by inequalities.
Hers is a study of the mushrooming street art, including graffiti and
tagging in Sao Paulo and the act of owning the city, asserting their
identities through the street art, often representations of self in
context of the society, and the process of urbanization that is now
being witnessed by major cities in the world, including Delhi.
At the three-day conference “The 21st Century Indian City” organized
by the Center for South Asia Studies, Center for Global Metropolitan
Studies, and Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at UC
Berkeley and Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, Teresa talked about
the social life of the cities and her project of studying spatial
segregation in cities in the midst of urbanization and the creation of
public space by those relegated to the periphery.
Through a series of images, snapshots of the graffiti on the walls of
the city of Sao Pualo that range from angry outbursts to vivid,
colorful images of the city and its harsh realities, she walked the
audience through a fascinating phenomenon that has everything to do
with political articulation and imposing new dynamics to social life.
Colorful, outrageous, ugly in a few instances, and very, very honest
in their being, the art was disturbing, too. But it wasn't devoid of
hope, of assertion in the face of what has become a painful reality
for those on the other, darker end of the spectrum defined by the
growing inequalities of our times.
In her slides, a slice of the social life of the city of Sao Paulo,
the urban youth from the periphery of the city were taking over,
laying claim to the city through their art, spraying walls, climbing
up buildings and writing their names in balck, bold paint. This was
their way of seeking and proving their identities and leaving their
mark on territory from which they had been pushed out. Armed with what
is equivalent of their weapons, the spray paint cans and brushes and
imagination fueled by anger and desire to assert their identity, the
youth with the spray cans tied on either side of the bikes traveled
through neighborhoods, searching for walls where they could paint, and
in the process leave their mark, and eventually in their own
imagination, take over the city bit by bit, wall by wall.
Through her slides, she told the story of fear and crime and the
assertion of the identity of the poor, unemployed youth pushed to the
periphery, the favelas.
Street art, a collage of life and inspired by popular culture, then is
the creation of an urban space, a process of democratization of the
city.
It is also a counterforce to advertising, the billboards that contain
the aspirations of the society.
Teresa said movements in Brazil have led to exclusion and the practice
of enclosure practiced also by the upper classes who live in fortified
enclaves guarded by security guards. The difference is something they
challenge. They are against the segregated city.
A recent trend in the cities of the world are the creation of
controlled public spaces by the middle classes, or the elites who live
in fortified enclaves and thus assert their right to the city, and the
street art that is now scattered through the city of Sao Paulo and
can't be missed from its streets and alleys, are somewhat in
retaliation to this.

“It is the youth's engagement with the city,” she said.

The city then becomes not just a canvas for expression but its
graffiti entails a deep knowledge of the city that comes through their
backgrounds of working class neighborhoods, struggling families and
raging crime.

As inequalities between the rich and the poor grow and anger and
frustration abound, the side effects of development, liberalization
and globalization, the ones who have been left behind want to take
over, express their right to the city, a growing movement across the
cities of the world.

“It's like leaving one's mark all over the city,” Teresa said. “They
affirm their existence in the city and through the art, they also
expose the discrimination and they represent themselves in relation to
the city.”

In a city characterised by violence and fear and high homicide rates
in the poor localities, young men from the periphery are reversing the
rules of visibility, she explained.

The street art, also equated with vandalism, is illicit but it has the
potential of democratising the city.

“It makes the urban space literally a place of dispute,” she said.

Teresa has written on the subject in her book City of Walls and is a
professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley.

In India for the conference, she said she was surprised to see the
walls of the city shorn of such articulation.

It was the silent walls of Delhi that led to a chain of arguments with
social scientists like Amita Baviskar of the Institute of Economic
Growth in Delhi reasoning that it could mere acceptance on part of the
residents in the metropolis that is behind the silent and bare walls
of the city, or maybe the people on the margins haven't yet attained
the level of anger to propel such outbursts.

Street art is illegal in Sao Paulo as it is in most cities of the
world, but since it has been done on such massive scale, the police in
the city mostly resort to spot prosecutions rather than imprisoning
the ones who paint the city walls and tell stories through their spray
paint cans.

The galleries for such artists are alleys, the walls, and the
crumbling buildings where they can paint their narrative, and through
it the narrative of the city will flow.

In Delhi, a few walls have been subjected to such expressions but
these haven't been coherent, or tie into a theme.

When the Commonwealth Games happened in the city and the poor,
homeless and the migrants were forced out of the national capital
because nobody wants to showcase poverty in the face of such
extravaganza, the city woke up to a few graffiti. These were angry
outpourings on the state of the affairs, a lament on the corruption
that was rampant.

There are many reasons why unlike Kolkata and a few neighborhoods in
Mumbai that are breeding grounds for such expressions of the street,
Delhi has remained untouched. In its tucked away neighborhoods like
Hauz Khas, now rechristened as an artists' village, walls are colorful
and graffiti is a fashionable statement, a decoration that ties into
the larger image of the neighborhood lined with boutiques and designer
shops.

They say Delhi within its walls, within its confines, houses more than
30 cities, its layers pronounced in the way its residents live and
behave.

Social scientists say the sense of belonging to Delhi is lacking. For
many, it is rite of passage. They would move on. For migrants, it is
like camping in a city and then moving on to the next one till they
can find a holding somewhere. The class hierarchies in Delhi are
pronounced, and demarcating unlike Mumbai where slums flourish, even
thrive next to the high rises.

So, there is no involvement with the city. There are unauthorised
colonies that are demanding regularization and there are the numerous
RWAs that are promoting participatory citizenship among the residents
within its gated confines, but beyond those littered examples, there
are not many instances of the poor trying to assert their right to the
city, which is brutal in its discriminations, in its whimsical
attitude towards the poor that it can throw out anytime by thrusting a
ticket in their hands or rounding them up and transporting them to the
train stations as it happened during the CWG.

Street art isn't the Art for Art's Sake variety. It is about getting
reactions and these can range from the wow of admiration to
disapproval. Street art is in cities everywhere--New York, Los
Angeles, London, São Paulo, Philadelhia and even in Syria where the
protests kick started because writers on the walls of the nation were
imprisoned, and in reaction there were even more writings calling for
the dismissal of the government. As it gains more popularity and
becomes a potent symbol of protest, cities are grappling with its
spread and appeal. Branding it as illegal or transgressive hasn't
worked in most cases.

It is in this art that urban youth realize the city is up for grabs
and if not through political participation, at least through political
articulation of the walls that's for everyone to see, the poor can
claim their space with the splash of spray cans and because it is
illicit, they can even show their guts to do what's the society terms
as illegal.

In Delhi, the crime capital according to the government, the level of
anger hasn't reached the point where walls become the testimony to
that rage. It has also got something to do with the city's
infrastructure and what is within means for its poor youth. Spray cans
are expensive for those who barely make it to the point of earning
minimum wages. Rather than wasting their labour on the walls, they
provide for their families.

In India, we have had a protest culture of a different kind. We have
taken to the streets to denounce reforms, policy changes, everything.
But recently, the protest street behind the Jantar Mantar monument was
taken pver and rules of protest were set into motion. With that space
gone, maybe soon the walls of the city will replace the protest street
with political articulation, and the right to the city will come into
being. Till then, we can move around in a city of blank walls that
speak nothing.

Where is our space?

2011-04-21T00:23:00.002-04:00

That night, when I was at India Gate to report on the celebrations on the World Cup victory, I was wondering about the lack of a public space that encourages us to engage with the city, its people.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 4, 2011

Where else would they have gone but India Gate. Because by some
telepathy, or some precedent, the joyous crowd that converged at the
India Gate on the night of the victory knew this was where the
celebration would be. In the backdrop of the monument, which is
symbolic of the nation's achievements, the revelers wanted to dance
and wave the flag.
But they hit the barricades, and like a giant wave hitting the
shoreline, it turned inwards, the swelling mass of people and it
became a moving celebration, choking city roads.
I went to India Gate, too. Because this to me was the monument that
celebrates India, its achievements. As I sifted through my list of
possible venues to witness the mass celebrations, India Gate was the
only public space that fit the bill.
This would have been the people's engagement with the city. But the
state chose to isolate the monument, and push back the revelers. On
the day of the semi-final, the streets were clogged and the traffic
was stalled for hours as residents came out in large numbers to
celebrate the victory over Pakistan.
In their imagination, the urban gathering had wanted to claim the city
by the act of celebration at its most symbolic place, the national
monument that the state chooses to host its Republic Day functions to
celebrate India's achievements.
The World Cup was an achievement. Only a couple of days ago, the
crowds had descended on the monument and danced on the streets, and
strangers were united by complex emotions ranging from pride to love
for the country and by their choice of the place to celebrate their
happiness when India defeated Pakistan.
The joyous crowd on the night of the final victory was looking to
rediscover the city's center in order to celebrate an urban gathering
where strangers living in the metropolis could shake hands, embrace
each other and dance to music blaring out of the car windows.
From all over the city, revelers came to the national monument.
This was a moment of unity, an interaction bound by a pervasive
patriotism and pride and a central urban space was required. Because
the monument reflects the nation is some way, people from the NCR
region like Gurgaon also came. Facebook was rife with pictures of
celebrations. Newspaper reporters headed to india gate, including me.
That was the obvious choice. Where else would we find the mass
celebration?
Delhi is a vast city, and continues to seek new territory. One could
argue parks and open spaces scattered throughout the city reflect the
response of urban planning to the needs of society for open spaces.
But we still lack a central public space where celebrations, concerts
or fetes can he held.
But we were confounded by these barricades. The crowd was befuddled
too. They still came to see an echo of their own sentiment, to find
reassurance from others, to witness their celebration in unison with
others', and to be one with the city.
But they hadn't expected to hit barricades beyond which the monument
lay. Delhi, the national capital, has no central space the residents
can identify as a platform to get involved with the city, partake in
its life and what it has to offer. The city has parks but there is no
central urban space where they can celebrate, protest or just be. In
fact, the national capital has no urban space in that category when
residents can engage with the city, an entity in its own right, and
interact with it through others belonging to or claiming their right
to the city.
William H. Whyte, an American urbanist, wrote that people go to “urban
spaces by choice – not to escape the city, but to partake of it.” The
city has a soul and that soul comes to life in these kinds of central
spaces that also have a democratizing effect, where anyone can go.
What Whyte wrote hasn't lost its relevance when we try to analyze the
social life of the cities and how urbanization plays into people's
assertion of the right to the city, a growing concept worldwide.
Public spaces are forums where this right is exercised. Given Delhi's
demographics and distribution, both social and economical, a lot of
residents have no access to parks or public spaces where they live.
For instance, unauthorized colonies, resettlement colonies and slums
that make up Delhi. For them to have a social life and rightful
engagement with the city, such a space is a must.
In blocking the access to the monument, the state had its reasons.
They spoke about vandalism and disruption to traffic. But traffic was
disrupted no matter what they thought or anticipated. Maybe not at the
monument, but in the streets leading to it, that became scenes of mass
cheer. Even the UPA leader Sonia Gandhi came out on the streets to
celebrate, sitting in her car window, waving to the masses a she drove
around.
Our vision of cities and its pubic spaces have gone wrong. In making
Delhi a world class city, we have denied the city of a central space
where residents can go, and expect to find others like them. Of
course, over the weekends, the India Gate becomes the picnic spot for
city goers but this isn't an urban gathering on the scale the national
capital witnessed that night.
Happiness and anger are hard to contain, particularly when they are
triggered by the state's wrongs or achievements. Only on the streets,
the emotions find their expression. We used to have a protest street
behind the Jantar Mantar monument and before that, at the Boat Club.
But in the months leading to the Commonwealth Games, the
administration banned pitching tents and overnight stays at Jantar
Mantar. Now protests have to be planned within a certain time frame.
That's a right to the city that was encroached upon.
Whyte had urged the city planners to celebrate urban gatherings. He
said these must be encouraged as it is part of the social life of the
cities.
"People have a nice sense of the number that is right for a place, and
it is they who determine how many is too many,” he said.
Whyte, who wrote The Organization Man, said how people behave in
public spaces are indeed the reflections of them as social creatures.
In India, we tend to erupt in cheer. We like to celebrate, and we like
to share happiness with all. Streets are our platform, our stage.
That should be the basis for zoning laws and urban development. In the
cities that I have spent time in, including Patna where the Gandhi
Maidan for decades has served as a place of celebration and as a
platform for protest, residents have identified with some public space
where they would all congregate as part of the urban gathering
phenomenon.
In Delhi, the planning has not envisioned such an urban space. It
hasn't accounted for its residents' social behaviour.
Urban spaces in our times need to cater to the society's needs. Social
and spatial implications of changing lifestyles in cities with
personal space shrinking as urbanization peaks demand that urban open
spaces that are planned take these into account.
As places of expression of the city's diversity and its
democratization process, these urban spaces need to be rethought and
reconsidered. These are spaces of real, social interaction like on the
night of the World Cup finals where people got out of their virtual
mode on social networking sites or email transactions to actually meet
and celebrate.
The barricades were the state's reaction to the concept of such a space.

Loneliness in the city - tale of Noida sisters' self-imposed exile

2011-04-13T23:48:00.004-04:00

This was a bizarre story, convoluted and tragic. As I stood outside their flat, I wondered what the city and its realm of public and private spaces can do to you.
An edited version appeared in The Indian Express on April 14, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 13, 2011

A hand would sneak out, grab the packet of grocery and the door would shut.
Once he peered inside but he could see nothing. He couldn't trace the hand to a face.
Birpal, the delivery man from Maha Laxmi Store in the nearby Ganga Shopping Complex, always took the same items to the sisters – milk, bread, biscuits, butter, tea and snacks. The cheque would promptly be handed by the 9th of every month. The bill usually amounted to Rs. 2500 for a month.
Last he went to drop off the items was on Feb. 16.
The sisters never called again. The phone connection was cut off. The outstanding bill was around Rs. 400. The electricity bill until December 2010 was around Rs. 10,000. Somebody had ransacked their mailbox looking for traces of their former lives. It only contained a few uncleared bills.
In the quiet neighborhood, everyone kept to themselves. Most of the army officials had come to spend their retirement here. No little children play outside, and the afternoons are bereft of much activity.
At the Kailash Hospital, an emaciated Sonali Behl lay on the bed. She hadn't been told her elder sister Anuradha had died of cardiac arrest in the morning after the two had been rescued from their Noida apartment where they had allegedly shut themselves for the last six months.
She asked for biscuits when the hospital staff brought her a sandwich. She chewed on one for a long time while looking at the ceiling. Someone asked if she would like to watch the news. She said no to the cacophony of her own tragedy.
“Please cover me,” she said.
The staff pulled over the blanket.
When she was rescued a day before, she had been wearing three layers of woollen clothing. Her teeth had stained, and her hands were mere bones. The deprivation she had imposed upon herself had taken its toll.
At 8 am on Tuesday, Usha Thakur was frantically knocking at the door of flat no. 326.
A few members of her NGO had alerted her about the bizarre case of the two sisters who had chosen to shut themselves in.
On Monday, the police had visited the flat once again. They came without a woman cop and so they returned after the sisters refused to open the door.
In the morning, Thakur went herself. She jumped over on to the terrace and peeped inside.
“I saw the two women. One was on the couch, the other was abusing us,” she said. “I called a carpenter and then we called the police.”
It was only when the carpenter started to break down the door, Sonali opened the door.
She was shrieking.
“Call the doctor. Help my sister,” Sonali said.
They were rescued and rushed to Kailash Hospital where Anuradha, 41, died of multiple organ failure at around 8 am on Wednesday.
The other is fighting for life in Room no. 163 at Kailash Hospital, oblivious of her sister's death.
“This raises a question on the society at large. What were they doing?,” Thakur said.
But in a neighborhood in a satellite town where mostly the retired army officials are staying, privacy is a given. They live out their lives behind their closed doors, and exchange greetings once in a while. On Diwali and other festivals, they sent sweets to their neighbor's houses.
A newsletter Community Samvad that raises neighborhood issues in Sectors 28, 29, 37, 21,and 25. It was started more than 10 years ago and it was started by a civilian Vinod Agarwal who stays in Sector 15 A.
The editor Kiran Bhardwaj came to Sector 29 looking to decode the mystery.
“Many people don't like intervention. These sectors are full of senior citizens and also floating population of students. In a few neighborhoods, they look after each other. We generally know about each other. They keep to their units,” she said. “They usually meet in clubs. Privacy is respected.”
So, the community newspaper is their connector, their social directory.
Thakur has lashed out against the RWA, the neighbors. The neighbors said they did their bit but the sisters denied them access, refusing all help. They checked with Vinod Kumar, the man who supplied the grocery to the sisters, and they knew they were ordering. They didn't want to intrude beyond that.
In the neighborhood this wasn't a new story. They had known about the sisters, the issues that plagued them but they chose to respect the space.
“It was not a new case,” H Sharma, the ward president, said.
Their father Colonel (retired) OP Behl had passed away in Agra in December 1992 after a road accident. Their mother died in 1995 and the elder sister left her job in 1997 to take care of the family.
When the brother moved out, they withdrew choosing isolation and deprivation.
Nobody knows why the sisters shut the door to the world. They could only speculate and that's what they did, rummaging through their memories of the family that lived a secluded life, rarely opening the door to let others in.
“The elder one had given up her job in Dehradun to manage the house after they lost their parents,” one neighbor said.
Every morning, when she got up to make tea for her husband who left to play golf at around 5 am, Mrs. Chadha would see the light in the kitchen across the street on.
Anuradha would scream, throw the dishes and that became a daily affair until a couple of months ago when the lights went out.
“They weren't very interactive but I used to see Anuradha come down and buy vegetables from the vendor but that was quite sometime ago. A few months ago, I saw them stocking up on onions and potatoes,” she said. “There are all sorts of theories. They had chosen to shut themselves. We tried to help but they refused.”
The house remained out of bounds. Sonali had carried the keys with herself to the hospital.
The rescuers had to jump on to the terrace of the first floor apartment to break into the house. Through the glass, they saw one woman lying on the couch, and the other screaming, growling at them, asking them to leave.
When they tried to break open the door, Sonali finally let them in.
She even took out a diary and gave the police and the RWA member Col. H Sharma their brother Vipin's number.
Anuradha lay on the couch, dying. Sonali picked up a file and allowed her to be rescued.
When Brigadier Jagdish Singh stepped inside the living room, he could see nothing. The odour that emanated from the two humans that lived in the closed space for six months, the curtains drawn, the furniture covered with sheets, was too much to bear.
He lived upstairs with his wife. The couple who moved to Sector 29 in 1999 had known the family. They had even attended the brother's wedding in 2007 when the sisters had come to invite them with a packet of sweets and a card.
“We sensed something was wrong when they stopped putting out the garbage about the month ago. The house always remained dark. We didn't know the electricity had been cut off. We assumed they were saving on the bills,” Poonam Singh said.
A few of months ago, the couple had alerted Col. Sharma, who in turn sent a guard to check on the sisters.
Then the police was called in February.
They came to the door that led into a living grave of sorts and knocked. No answer. They went back. The next day when they returned, a frail voice answered from the darkness “We are fine. Please go away.”
The door shut again.
A couple of times Dr. MJU Khan's wife had attempted to gain access into their lives that remained a mystery to the neighbors. Sonali, who used to work as a store manager in a complex in Sector 63, had quit in 2008. They lived quietly, seldom going out.
“They had imprisoned themselves two years ago,” Bigadier Jagdish Singh said. “They hardly spoke to anyone. Nobody came to their house.”
Poonam Singh tried calling the landline a couple of times to check but nobody answered the calls.
In the neighborhood, where mostly former army officials live, not many know each other. Consumed by their own routines, their television sets drowning out the other human voices, they could never predict that it would come to this. Till the time, they spotted the delivery man carrying the supplies upstairs, they knew the sisters were alive. Beyond that, they gave them their privacy.
On one of the windows, the bees had started to make their home. The dust had accumulated in layers.
Nobody hung out any clothes to dry on the terrace that looked out on the main road.
Isolated in their time warp, the younger sister had once asked a neighbor what time it was. Again through an opening in the door.
A doctor who has been monitoring Sonali said she spoke about negative energy that had crept into their lives after their mother died in 1995.
“She said they were feeling insecure,” the doctor said. “She is delusional but she is relevant at times.”
Anuradha gave into depression much earlier. Once the brother moved out with his wife, the elder sister became quiet. Then they lost their family dog Chhoti six months ago.
The vacuum in their lives was spreading, consuming them.
They stopped taking calls, abandoning the world, shutting themselves in. The losses kept piling, and finally the debris of their lives claimed one of them.

The politics of protest space

2011-04-10T00:20:00.001-04:00

An edited version appeared in The Indian Express on April 9, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 8, 2011

After midnight when the television channels were showing reruns of their protest street coverage, a few men were silently pinning their poems, and cards on the walls.
Only the hunger strikers and a few supporters remained. About 150 of them. The shrunken space was all theirs.
Anand Singh from Ghazipur was claiming his space. He was asserting his identity.
“Hum woh nahi jo tumhe rahon mein akela chor denge
Hum woh nahi jo ek pal mein nata tod denge
Hum toh aapke woh chahne walen jo aapki tooti sanso mein apni saans jor denge ...”
A card was stuck on the wall addressed to “Mrs. Sonia.”
“This is my first hunger strike in my life. Credit goes to you.”
Suddenly everyone had a forum.
The protest had two faces – the one that was caricatured and captured during the day, the other, more real that simmered through the night and reclaimed the space from the television crews.
A few candles were still fighting it out. The crowd had thinned. The OB vans were parked in a lane, submerged in darkness, and not so intrusive as they were during the day when they hailed the street as
Tahrir Square, a spot where revolution was being born.
The space was up for grabs. Everyone had a context, a connection, a sales pitch.
Through the day, the street had become a marketplace of sorts, too, with LVA (Layered Voice Analysis) representatives permeating the crowd and handing over their pamphlets to the people who had gathered.
They claimed they had patented the technology that could decode voice to “reveal human intensions, to detect deceit and frauds and thus help Fight Frauds, Corruption and Crime.”
They were experts at “Unlocking the Secrets of the Voice. Revealing the DNA of thoughts.”
On the sidelines, the vendors were happily selling food. A man had even come with a bag carrying cheap sandals and was sitting at the protest street waiting for buyers.
Shyam Nath has been here for the last two days. He was selling snacks. A few children were crouching and hunting for leftovers.
“I usually come when the rally comes. I saw on television and thought my sales would go up,” he said. “I know they are fasting but others are not.”
Manish Tiwari, a Delhi University student, was perched precariously on a bench and carried a huge placard.
“Suno … bharat ki galiyon se yeh awazen aati hai. Jinhe bhains charana tha, woh sarkaren chalate hai.”
“After so many days, I have got a forum,” he said.
On Thursday, the protest street near the Jantar Mantar monument was rediscovering its own potential. In this colorful and vocal space, other protests movements that had been relegated to the periphery had decided to inch closer and show support to Hazare's agitation that was hitting the headlines.
Bharat Swabhiman Yuva Sangathan, the Indian Ex Servicemen Movement, Art of Living were among the first few. Later, Paryavaran Sanrakhshan Parishad entered the street beating dhols.
A horde of television crews had descended on the street capturing the mood at what they referred to as “revolution ground” similar to Tahrir Square in Egypt.
They weren't going to let the moment of their redemption slip away from them.
“We decided we have to take this up. Else, people will say that the media has been bought over, it is corrupt,” Akhilesh Singh, a reporter with Sudarshan News, said. “What is immoral here?what's wrong is supporting the movement?”
Ravish Kumar, anchor and reporter at NDTV, was standing on a raised platform, taking in the ariel view of the dharna. He had found his ground, his pitch.
“I am not fasting but I am supporting this. I even went on the dais yesterday and spoke about it,” Kumar said. “This has revived the dharna concept. If you get an opportunity to be honest, objectivity gets better.”
CNN IBN's Rajdeep Sardesai came in the evening to anchor his 9 pm show. He had tweeted earlier.
“off to Jantar Mantar. Is it India's Tahrir Square in a manner of speaking? Hope to anchor india at 9 from there.”
His wife Sagarika Ghose tweeted she was delighted to see her son at Jantar Mantar.
After 12, when the cameras stopped rolling, people laid claim to the agitation, asserting themselves through art, slogans and manifestos.
A few men spoke about their frustrations, the ordeals of the common man who had been tagged as middle class. They spoke about their mounting electricity bills, the taxes, the corruption during the Commonwealth Games, the numerous other scams that had disillusioned them. The least they could do was come there and show solidarity with this apolitical agitation.
Rashmi Singhal, an advocate at the Tis Hazari Court in Delhi, had decided to volunteer through the night. In the evening, she had heard them announce they would need people to assist.
"This is everyone's movement. We had all been waiting for someone to do this,” she said.
A man was sweeping the street. He too was claiming the space inch by inch.

People [Live]

2011-04-09T03:05:00.004-04:00

The protests were in two parts - the one that was caricatured and captured, the other that simmered through the night.

Amplified by the media, the protest by Anna Hazare was being hailed as a revolution. But in the dead of the night when the cameras weren't rolling, the others came to claim the space that was up for grabs putting up posters, setting up the stage for their protests that would be one with the hunger strike.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 7, 2011

“Come join the wind, make it a storm, and the storm will then become a tornado,” Gurmeet Singh, a Manmohan Singh lookalike said on camera.
The ANI reporter was quick to ask him if he thought the Prime Minister would relent to Anna Hazare's demands since the turbaned man resembled the country's leader.
“Janta is the king. They have to listen,” Gurmeet Singh said.
Behind him, the crowd enamored by his resemblance to the prime minister shouted on camera “Manhoman duplicate zindabad, Anna Hazare zindabad.”
The reporter was done. Now, the cameraman wanted his time.
“Chalo naare lagao,” he told the spectators, who obliged.
“There's not a single television channel I have not given interview to,” Singh said, as he walked away to look for more airtime. “My face is God's gift.”
But the reporter who caught him on the sidelines of the agitation, a carnival of sorts, was probably thinking he had got an exclusive. In that moment, within the confines of the space that has been labeled as the protest street of India, everything was an exclusive. The footage, manufactured, was designed to amplify the agitation, to make it seem as India's revolution.
Towards evening, CNN IBN's Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted “off to Jantar Mantar. Is it India's Tahrir Square in a manner of speaking? Hope to anchor india at 9 from there.”
His wife Sagarika Ghose tweeted she was delighted to see her son at Jantar Mantar.
This was redemption. There was the Mahatama, and he was starving for all of us. He was no less than the Messiah carrying the cross. People would drink his blood, and be salvaged. It was a united front. The pillars of democracy had increased to incorporate media, which was being hailed as the movement's biggest supporter, and the people at large, S Chandra, a former bureaucrat who was walking around the street to voice his support on television, said to a Dilli Aajtak reporter, who was holding the mic as if it was a powerful weapon that alone will fight the corruption.
“Masses are with the media. In physics wen have coefficient of friction. Here, it is coefficient of corruption,” he shouted into the mic. The reporter looked bored. There were too many of these self-styled fighters.
“IPL not be gathering momentum. We make news. This will eclipse World Cup,” he said, not wanting to cut short his “live”.
On Thursday, the protest street near the Jantar Mantar monument was rediscovering its own potential. A horde of television crews had descended on the street capturing the mood at what they referred to as “revolution ground.”
They weren't going to let the moment of their redemption slip away from them. The hunger strike, the revival of dharna was breaking news. It was also going to be “shaking news” because they would ensure the government succumbs. This was their agenda.
“We decided we have to take this up. Else, people will say that the media has been bought over, it is corrupted,” Akhilesh Singh, a reporter with Sudarshan News, said. “What is immoral here?what's wrong is supporting the movement?”
You don't only report what you see, you also get involved with the news. In their minds, they had declared it a movement and they were all scrambling to be a part of it, emulating others of their fraternity.
This is the moment to redeem the media. And they were doing it by participating in the dharna, voicing their support and joining the agitation.
Ravish Kumar, anchor and reporter at NDTV, was standing on a raised platform, taking in the ariel view of the dharna, the protestors. He was surrounded by protestors, and by other reporters, who thought of his as a hero, asking him about his participation.
He said he was supporting the agitation.
“I am not fasting but I am supporting this. I wasn't there is 1947 but I am 2011. I even went on the dais yesterday and spoke about it,” Kumar said. “There can be bigger institution than the people at large. This has revived the dharna concept. If you get an opportunity to be honest, objectivity gets better.”
He was the man who was one with the movement, reporting, and living it, too.
RIP objectivity, a spectator said. He had come there to witness what someone on twitter had compared to a revolution saying “You have to be there to see it.”
He was standing there, witnessing the tamasha in front of him, the television crews perched on wooden benches, capturing the movement.
Like how the Katrina floods in the USA in 2008 altered TV journalists' objectivity, and CNN's Anderson Cooper, whose breakdown on television over the disaster that the floods brought in their wake, became a high point of every TV reporter worth their salt.
They were enacting their ritualistic performances, and they had been trained in the “myths of liveness”. They had “personalized” their reporting by mixing their empathy,frustration and anger. As they worked within their limited “grounded and objective” news alongside the enthusiastic supporters and the fasting individuals, these were on an uncharacteristic display on camera.
Through the day, the street had become a marketplace of sorts, too, with LVA (Layered Voice Analysis) representatives permeating the crowd and handing over their pamphlets to the people who had gathered.
They claimed they had patented the technology that could decode voice to “reveal human intensions, to detect deceit and frauds and thus help Fight Frauds, Corruption and Crime.”
They were experts at “Unlocking the Secrets of the Voice. Revealing the DNA of thoughts.”
On the sidelines, the vendors were happily selling food. A man had even come with a bag carrying cheap sandals and was sitting at the protest street waiting for buyers.
Shyam Nath has been here for the last two days. He was selling snacks. A few children were crouching and hunting for leftovers.
“I usually come when the rally comes. I saw on television and thought my sales would go up,” he said. “I know they are fasting but others are not.”
Yet another reporter was trying to analyze media's role. He said if the media hadn't taken a stand, and broadcast the “anshan” live, people wouldn't have come to show their support.
At least 200 young men had traveled from Aligarh Muslim University after they watched the street turn into Tahrir Square, the space in Egypt where the revolution gained its momentum. They dressed in their trademark balck sherwanis and topis and moved around the street, trying to take in the movement which was being televised live by the hundreds of media personnel.
Umar Ahmad, the vice president of the student union at AMU, said they wanted to take the fight against corruption to Aligarh.
“So what if mostly we have the media here. This is media ki awaz. They are humans and they have emotions,” he said.
The spectators and the participants were mostly the media. Their OB vans were parked near the epicenter. They had change of guard, too. Other reporters were dispatched from the newsroom to take over from the one who had held the position since morning.
For the public, well-heeled of the society who came along to show their children the lost part of their history – the culture of dharna.
A young boy sat on the dais and said it was about his future and so he was on dharna.
A group of giggling school children from Bluebells School were recording the statement of a supporter, who was out of his breath as he tried to draw parallels between the non-violent struggle of the mahatama and the one that consumed his imagintion.
“We read about it on facebook. We discussed with teachers. We want to see the movement. We are going to make a presentation and take it to the school and support the cause,” Mridul, a Class 10 student, said.
“I like the missed call concept,” Purva Aggarwal, another student said.
A few supporters were snaking their way in and handing over pamphlets that urged the people to call on 02261550789 to know updates about the agitation.
The police on duty looked bored.
“It is indeed like a circus,” a police personnel said.
The pamphlet asked a prbing question.
“What can you do against corruption?”
It asked the people to come in huge numbers to Jantar Mantar.
“Go on hunger strike and pray for a corruption-free India,” it further stated.
It gave a background of Anna Hazare's last hunger strike.
Six corrupt ministers had to resign
400 corrupt officials had to quit their jobs.
The Maharashtra government had to implement the Right to Information Act.
In 2006, the central government had to roll back the proposal to amend the RTI Act.
In this colorful and vocal space, other protests movements that had been relegated to the periphery had decided to inch closer and show support to Hazare's agitation that was hitting the headlines.
They needed visibility too and what was a better way than to associate with the popular protest.
So banners were put up.
Bharat Swabhiman Yuva Sangathan, the Indian Ex Servicemen Movement, Art of Living.
In between, a saint climbed up on the stage and made the participants do breathing exercises.
A man kept filling up bottles of water to distribute to the people.
In that commotion, as the television media looked for more exclusives, Paryavaran Sanrakhshan Parishad entered the street beating dhols.
By that time, the television crews had exhausted their limited range of people. A few well-heeled women from the fortified enclaves of Vasant had come too. They wore stilettos and spoke in accented English. They denounced corruption on air, too.
A print reporter waited for Sangeeta who voiced her concerns in fluent English as a Northeast television reporter asked her if corruption affected her day-to-day life.
“Yes, it does,” she said.
She was later raising the same concerns for the other reporter. She looked happy. She had managed her airtime.
Manish Tiwari, a Delhi University student, was perched precariously on a bench and carried a huge placard.
“Suno … bharat ki galiyon se yeh awazen aati hai. Jinhe bhains charana tha, who sarkaren chalate hai.”
“After so many days, I have got a forum,” he said. “Media is playing a big role. If they hadn't supported us, the movement would have not reached the villages.
Yet another HMTV reporter had found an angle.
He was going to do a story on the movement on the Internet.
He was busy interviewing people about the agitation on social networking sites.
A 24-hour news channel needs constant fodder. They had to provide it from the street for they had chosen this as the umbrella news, as echoed by all.
They were reporting and when they were not, they were protesting. But it was all “Live”
And the high priest of TV journalism was just going to anchor his show from what he felt was like “Tahrir Sqaure.”
They were involved. This was taking reporting to new heights. This was public service journalism.

When MPs turn poets

2011-04-04T23:45:00.002-04:00

An edited version of the article appeared in The Indian Express on April 5, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 4, 2011

"Pankh bhi hai, khula aasman bhi hai … phir yeh na udne ki majboori kyun.” (We have wings, and there is the open sky, too. But why can't we fly ...)

From her chair in the Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar recited the couplet from her poems on Women's Day. The members sat, brooding.
She was talking about the collective experience of women in India, the struggle for empowerment, lamenting the fact that the Women's Reservation Bill is still stalled in the Parliament.
She is the first Lok Sabha Speaker to have recited a poem from her chair as the members discussed the bill that aims to empower the women by facilitating political participation.
“If you give me permission, I would like to recite from a poem I wrote long ago,” she had said. Now, there is another outlet for her poems.
The Lok Sabha is all set to launch its first literary journal in Hindi soon. The Speaker will be launching it.
Her poems have been included in the first edition of the Sansadiya Manjusha, the half-yearly magazine that was conceptualized by the Lok sabha Secretariat, is a compilation of the writings of the members of the Parliament and its staff.
Kumar's two poems - “Salib ko dhota Masiha” (The Messiah carrying the Cross) and Shabri, which is the name of a woman ascetic in the Hindu epic Ramayana who belonged to the Bhil tribal community. According to mythology, Lord Rama had visited her hut and ate the berries picked by her and tasted by her to check if they were sweet. In her devotion, she had overlooked the fact that she should not have tasted the food before. She also belonged to the Scheduled Tribe.
Kumar is the first Dalit woman speaker of the Lok Sabha. Hailed as the Dalit face of the government, her poems speak of the Dalit struggle and their lot.
BJP's Ahmedabad MP Dr. Kirit Solanki has also contributed an essay on the process of democracy in India along with Dr. Mahesh Joshi, an Indian National Congress MP from Jaipur who has written on the sculpture in the Parliament. He writes that if perceived from a poet's eye, one can see the beauty of the complex.
There is an article on mandatory voting by INC MP from Delhi JP Agarwal as well where he talks about how political participating through voting rights is a must for effective governance.
Harnam Singh Takkar, the editor of the magazine, said the proposal for such a journal was mooted in October and it was appreciated by the members. Since the Rajya Sabha and several other assemblies have their own literary cum parliamentry affairs journals like Madhya Pradesh which has Vidhayani, it was time that Lok Sabha had soemthing of its own, he said.
“We have included relevant issues about Parliamentary processes. We have included the history of the Parliament and informative snippets about proceedings. We want to distribute it freely. It will be given to all the staff. In fact the Speaker has been involved with the magazine and she chose the cover page. She rejected the Parliament photo on the cover. She didn't want it as rutine. We got other designs and We solicited the pieces via the news bulletin we have for the members,” Takkar said. “This is above party politics. It doesn't support any political party or ideology. The editorial policy is that it will remain impartial.”
Takkar said he received a lot of entries for the first issue.
“I like Shabri. It is a very evocative poem,” he said.
Shabri is a poem where the protagonist is named after the mythological character. It is a personal narrative, an imagined conversation with a Dalit woman, who works as a domestic help cleanign peoples' homes and eating leftovers. In the narrative, Kumar speaks to the modern day Shabri. It is about the relevance of the community, a tale of their life, an existence marred by prevalent prejudice and stigma.
It is from her experience of her community that the poem flows. It is an insider's view. The community is the backbone of the urban life. Had they not been here to clean up, and support the new urban wealthy lifestyle, the city wouldn't stand. Shabri is the voice of the community. She comes from the slums, from the periphery of the urban landscape, marginalized and exploited.
“Mere shehar mein … shehar mein mere Shabri rehti hai. Wah jo gandi naali behti hai. Jhuggi tale wahi mere shehar mein shabri rehti hai. Mili hoon … ek din aayi thi mere ghar ki, bartan mal doongi, jhadu-pocha kar doongi, kuch paison aur jhuthan par reh loongi.”
“In my city, Shabri lives. Where the dirty drain flows, under the shadows of the slums, Shabri lives in the city. I have met her. She came to my house one day. She said I will wash the dishes, clean the house, and I will survive on meagre wages and leftovers.”
The magazine aims to promote Hindi language and Kumar said it would be voice of the Parliament, carrying its members' expressions in Hindi, which has the potential to unite the country.
For the longest time, the members and the staff had felt the need for such a magazine, she wrote in her message in the magazine. She has also lent her touch to the cover. Besides writing poetry, she also paints.
Her poems are woven around the Dalit experience and her gender. They are the stories of the struggle women and of the marginalized people.
“She isn't very vocal. So she finds her expression through her poems, which she recites in the House and elsewhere,” her spokesperson Rakhee Bakshee said.
In her speech at the Rashtriya Kavi Sammelan in the memory of her late father Babu Jagjivan Ram, the former Deputy Prime Minister and one of the most influential Dalit leaders of the country, she said there is a poet in all of us.
“Poems are nothing but an expression of pain and pleasure,” she said in Hindi. “It is a medium to express our hurt, and personal experiences. It gives relief to us.”
To her, it has become the expression of her Dalit angst, of her frustration with the state of things.
In Allahabad on a recent visit, she stood in front of the Ganges and recited “Kyun udas behti hai Ganga.” (Why the Ganges flows sadly.”
It stemmed from a lament on the pollution of the river, from her environmental concerns.
“People have called her soft power,” Bakshee said. “This is her way of expressing her emotions, her politics, her ideas and her angst. It is the voice of the marginalized.”
While she doesn't get much time to write her poetry after she became the Speaker, Kumar still tries to pen a few when she can spare a few moments.
“She is thinking of compiling her poems,” Bakshee said.
For now, she digs a couplet from the annals of her memory, a repository of her writings, and uses it to reflect on the state of affairs.
'A poet looks at the world in the same way as a man looks at a women – with surprise, bewilderment, and curiosity. The difference between a poet and a common man is all about the way they feel, seek, experience, and the ability and patience to express those,” she wrote in her speech.
Maybe as she writes that through the literary magazine, first-ever attempt in the Parliament, the members will be able to offer solutions to the pressing issues of our times, the Speaker too will be able to move the country through her poems and liberate herself in the process.

When we won the World Cup

2011-04-03T01:02:00.003-04:00

An edited version was published in The Indian Express on April 3, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 2, 2011

His eyes shut, he bent down, gathered the tricolor that had fallen off the stick and kissed it fervently. It was ecstasy. Pure, unbridled joy.
And then he ran along the streets, wrapped in the flag, beaming with pride until he hit the barricades.
He was just one of the thousands of revelers that came out on the streets to celebrate India's win tonight. They were all headed to India Gate.
India Gate had become a pilgrimage of sorts. Everyone headed there just after the victory was confirmed.
They came from all sides like rivers trying to make it to the sea, vying to get to the host sooner than the other.
But the waves hit the barricades, and then turned inwards like a tsunami. That's how the revelries began the night India won the cup. Anger was overcome by happiness. The revelers forgave the police on duty, shook hands with them, even embraced them and obeyed. By then, the rivers had rolled backwards, and the city was flooding all over – with cheer, with love, with patriotism.
When Dhoni hit the ball and the ball rose high in the air, Baljeet Singh, the traffic personnel on duty at India Gate, knew the calm wouldn't last for long. The storm was coming. Tonight, they weren't going to let anyone come near the monument. Two days ago, when India beat Pakistan in Mohali, crowds had descended at India Gate. Women danced on streets, cars were stopped, traffic was disrupted.
Extra police force had been called in this time. Men in uniform stood guard in anticipation. They were nervous, too.
It was always tough to contain emotion. Almost three decades later, India had brought home the coveted cup.
Before then, the streets wore an eerie look. Then, the streets began to move.
The first revelers were politely asked to divert.
Then, the battle cries erupted. Bare chest men ran through the streets, holding the Tri-color. They didn't get past the barricades. But so what. They stood there, and danced. Even UPA chief Sonia Gandhi came out, and celebrated on the streets.
She sat in the car window like others, and waved and smiled.
Cars moved along slowly, their trunks open and music filled the streets of the national capital. Bhangra mixed with trance.
The emotion was potent, infectious.
The streets got a life of their own.
It was a moving celebration.
“We will break through these barricades to get there eventually. We will do it somehow. We must be allowed to express our happiness. We just want to celebrate,” Kedar Singh, a Bikaner House resident, said. He had come out on the streets to mingle with those who felt one with the victory.
The Shahjahan Road was choked with cars, all moving slowly. Young men leaped out of the car windows, and shouted. They hugged strangers, and held hands.
Even the policemen were smiling. They were humans, too. They had been calling their families and checking up on scores all through the evening. This was their celebration, too.
The atmosphere was heady. Car trunks opened, and Chak De India played. Men broke into a frantic dancing. All the while, they were moving away from the monument that looked solemn, devoid of the cheer that surrounded it.
Virendar Singh was shooting the scene on his mobile phone. He was preserving the moment. This was his first World Cup moment. The frenzy was what got to him. He wanted to capture it all.
“This is some memory I want to keep,” he said. “Look at this. I have never seen anything like this. It is like the city is erupting in some ecstasy.”
Then the ground underneath began to reverberate. A few cars had stopped. Music, a medley of songs blasted. Woofers were turned at their full.
That's when you know victory is ours. That's when the ground begins to shake, another man said. He said “congratulations” and walked away.
Tourist buses came, laden with gawking foreigners who peered out of the glass windows to see the cheer on the roads. Bikers had converged at the same place, the point where everyone had to turn inwards. It was like taking a U-turn after glimpsing the monument. It was at the U-turn that the strangers converged, and laughed, and danced before they moved on to make way for others.
Across from the monument, a man stood between two policemen and shouted "Bharat Mata Ki Kai." Another man clicked him. The policemen laughed.
This was a riot of a different kind. The adrenaline flowed freely, and spared nobody.

Most densely populated district in India is hub of migrants

2011-03-31T22:47:00.003-04:00

North East district has always been a known area. I have been in its lanes many times looking for stories. It didn't come as a surprise when the census data revealed it has the highest population density in the country. In New Seelampur, it is not difficult to understand it is so. An edited version of the article appeared in The Indian Express on April 1, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 31, 2011

Now when he looks up, the sky comes to him in patches. Obscuring, obliterating the view are the new “highrises” that now dominate much of the landscape in the narrow quarters of New Seelampur, a resettlement colony established in 1965.
As per the 2011 Census provisional report, the north-east district of the national capital has the highest population density – 37,346 per sq km. In its colonies, the evidence is not hard to find. This is where urbanization has peaked. Rents are cheap, and finding accomodation isn't a task giving the lackdaisical police, residents said.
Vinod Kumar relocated to New Seelampur in the north east district in 1962 from Bela Road.
In the ensuing four decades, he has witnessed his block go through a transformation that took away much of the ease of the days gone by.
Seelampur is now in the midst of urbanization and ruralization, a culture cauldron with melting identities, and struggling families. This was one of the first resettlement colonies of Delhi where working class were dumped to make the city glisten and world class.
Across the road, French retailer Carrefour SA has opened its first store housing 30,000 brands. Like the builders, they too preyed on these neighborhoods. It sent its people into slums and unauthorised colonies, looking for kirana store owners to secure a clientele. Its glass building looks an anomaly among the hundreds of thousands of single-brick structures that are littered along the Metro line and along the river.
"There are all these manufacturing units and home-based industries. Every household is a unit where owmen work. In unauthorised colonies, one can buy a 100 square yard plot for Rs. 25 lakhs," local MLA Matin Ahmed said. "If we count all people, include those that no ration card, New Seelampur will have at least two lakh residents. How do we stop this? Census hasnt counted those who work in the factories. This is where employment is. How do we widen the roads? How do we improve basic amenities? Conditions are worse in unauthorised colonies like Jafrabad where almost no roads exist. This attracts a lot of builders. They have constructed 15 square yards flats. We all know how police acts. There is no code, no law."

It's nostalgia and then anger, and eventually frustration that grips him when he talks about his life in what has now become a ghetto with its youth dropping out of its schools, getting into petty crimes, and forcing its girls to remain indoors most of the time for fear of molestation.

North East district is an accident of geography. Iti is bounded by the Yamuna River on the west, Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh to the north and east, East Delhi to the south, and North Delhi to the west across the Yamuna.
Its three important administrative subdivisions Seelampur, Seema Puri and Shahdara. As per the 2001 census, the district's population was 1763712 and the density was 29,397 persons per square kilometer.
Over the last decade, the area absorbed a large number of migrants to the national capital.
Close to the South and Central districts, this is where most migrants came to settle over the years, finding their foot in these clusters where they could find cheap accommodation, and slowly try to integrate with the city.
Population went up as a result. With almost no regulations, and absolutely no planning, the resettlement colonies, mostly the allotments and the unauthorized slums like Sonia Vihar and JJ Colony, developed in a haphazard way.
In plots as small as 12 or 20 square yards, owners have built three-storey and in a few cases, five-storey buildings. The plots that were allotted by the government that resettled thousands of migrants in the 1960s ranged from 80 to 25 square yards were later sold to new settlers in parts.
“Yesterday, I called the police,” Kumar said, pointing to a building across the alley.
The top floor of the building had been dismantled, broken down.
“This is what has happened to this place. No wonder we are the highest in terms of human density. In that 20 square yard plot where this man built this four-storey building, there are 50 people living,” he said.
The one things that hasn't changed over the years is the demographics. The colony has remained poor. Only the working class lives here. A few jeans and shoes manufacturing units are scattered in its lanes, anchoring many of its women and migrant settlers.
“Because it was so close to central Delhi, this became the destination for the poor who could walk or cycle to their work sites,” he said. “Now builders have come to this part in the last three years and buying out these smallish plots and constructing flats and selling them to the poor who also want some ownership in the city.”
When the resettlement colony was planned and large populations, mostly migrants from Rajasthan, were moved to these parts, the plots were provisionally leased out to settlers and further sale was not allowed.
The area had been a farmland. But as the city expanded eastwards, and beyond the Yamuna, Seelampur found itself in the middle of rising land prices and overshooting demand and access to infrastructure.
In time, it transformed to a bustling region that specializes in the manufacture of jeans, leather shoes, jackets, incense, lathes, iron and timber goods, providing employment to workers in these home-based workshops.
Decades ago, when he had just moved to the plot allotted to his family, there used to be an open ground and houses looked different.
“We actually had a proper roof and these were single storey houses,” Kumar said.
The first wave of migrants to claim the colony were from Barielly in Uttar Pradesh and then Biharis followed in the 1970s.
Before then, Kumar recalled how they put their charpais in front of the houses and slept. Now, because crime has risen and there's fear that pervades the locality, they are confined to their small tenements.
Just down the lane, the cramped, colorful blue and green walls of the JJ Cluster are visible.
“That's the problem,” Kumar said. “Crime comes from there, and claims our neighborhood as well.”
Only a narrow drain divides the unauthorized from the allotments.
Then there was a wave of unplanned, illegal construction to absorb this new population.
Mohd. Sharif Ali, 22, built two extra floors of one-room each on his plot to rent those out. The family relocated to New Seelampur in 1965.
Rent is a survival factor in this colony. With inflation and given its social and economic indicators, informal sector workers and high dropout rates, it is a livelihood option.
“We get Rs. 2,000 as rent for the second floor. It helps,” he said. “But I remember the colony was not so crowded in the beginning. We had open grounds.”
Now, the children in the neighborhood play cricket in its narrow lanes.
The lanes are too narrow for four-wheelers to navigate them so even with their new money, those who can afford it, are hesitant to buy cars.
Those who bought now park them in the Metro parking lot across the road.
“What can they do? There is no space for humans here. Forget the cars,” Ali said.
A child sat defecating in the open drain. The lanes that lead into the labyrinths of this slum cluster are narrow. Lives spill over from the temporary structures on to the gullies. The lanes pervade the inner sanctums.
In one such establishment, a one-room tenement covered with an asbestos sheet, Phoolwati was cooking. Around 20 years ago, her husband bought the jhuggi. In this 12 square yard space, five people live. Outside, there is the border, the drain.
But the worlds it divide are strikingly similar to each other. Space is a non-entity here.
Spread over 60 kilometers, the north east district of Delhi has also been identified as Minority concentration district by Ministry of Minority Affairs. The basic parameters are minority population, illiteracy, work participation, health indicators etc. and given its lopsided development, it has remained one of the tragedies of the metropolis that has failed its inhabitants.
Now, the tags that sort of define this sprawling landscape of hutments and single-brick structures sans any aesthetics or planning, are violence, crime, poverty, and prejudice.
The north east district is a platter of resettlement colonies that were set on the vast farmlands in the city. In Jafrabad and Welcome and several other colonies, the victims of the 1984 Sikh riots were resettled.
Stories that come out of these human clusters are those of illegal embroidery units employing young children and anti-social elements that disturb the calm of the gentrified South Delhi and return to its maze of quarters where collective identity rules and the individual fades.

"Take care in Japan"

2011-03-19T23:32:00.005-04:00

Standing there in the school watching the Japanese children bid farewell to those that were returning to Japan, I felt sad. I also felt admiration for the great courage these people showed in the face of the tragedy.

An edited version of the story was published in The Sunday Express on March 20, 2011.
Here is the link http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2011/03/20/ArticleHtmls/20_03_2011_012_003.shtml?Mode=1

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 18, 2011

A little girl embraced another girl.
“Take care in Japan,” she said, and put the garland around her neck.
The other girl bowed, smiled and walked to her seat.
In a row, they sat, garlanded and clutching booklets their classmates had presented them with drawings, notes and pictures.
These children at the Japanese School were returning to Japan, their country that is now in the middle of a catastrophe brought by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake that has swept away thousands of people off the shore, and even shifted the planet by 25 centimeters on its axis.
The stoic clam in the face of the disaster is what has defined the Japanese reaction to the havoc created by the giant tsunami waves that ripped the shores of the archipelago.
Even the children sat calmly and any anxiety they had was concealed despite the images that showed on the Japanese television channel – bodies, uprooted houses and trees, shelter houses full of evacuees, queues of people waiting for food.
They knew about the crisis in the homeland. Before the farewell ceremony commenced, the 200 children sat in a solemn prayer meeting for the hundreds of nameless victims in their country. Iwao Sawada, the principal, told them about the tragedy and the children listened on. Then they observed silence for five minutes, their hands folded in prayer.
A teacher in a saree looked on. She too was returning to Japan.
Another student told her classmate “Don't forget me when you are in Japan. Eat well, study and don't fear. All will be well.” Then, she bowed. Both smiled and returned to their seats. A couple of mothers wiped away their tears. They quickly turned their faces away.
The school would close Friday. The classes had gone on. Even what they described as “scene from hell” with trucks bobbing on the giant waves, and fires from the nuclear plants touching the skies, had failed to disturb the routine that they so meticulously followed.
“We are Japanese. Two years. We will rebuild everything in two years,” Sawada said as he walked away to preside over the graduation ceremony at the Japanese School in Delhi a day before.
It was pride in the face of disaster, a stoic calm he maintained to haul himself from what he feared was striking at the core of his being – the tsunami.
He wasn't going to let the world judge them as weak humans. The tragedy had struck. The way forward was to work towards reclaiming what was lost.
The Japanese, he said, were a disciplined lot. They would come out of this as they had before. Disaster was no stranger to them. For them, it has been a tale of suffering and renewal. In 1923, the Great Kanto quake had killed more than 140,000. In 1995, the Kobe quake killed 7,000. Even Sendai, the face of the wreckage now, had witnessed a tsunami in 1896 that claimed around 30,000 residents.
Outside the school, cars lined up and Japanese mothers got out with their wards, smiling and bowing. Collectively they were going to deal with the disaster that pronounced Japan, their homeland, as doomed in the headlines, with the stoicism that is ingrained in them, the calm endurance that defines them.
Inside the office of the Gako Bunka Education Society, donations poured in. It was all done quietly, methodically. A notice was put up outside the school and checks with generous amounts started to stack up.
The money would be wired to help the victims of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit the Japanese archipelago on March 11.
For the small Japanese community in India that are mostly concentrated in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai, the news of the wreckage came via frantic phone calls, through the internet and emails and images on television.
They united in their grief and across their offices and schools, notices were put up asking for donations for their country.
It was quick, understated.
Katsu, the 72-year-old priestess at the Shanti Stupa in Indraprastha Park in the national capital, walked to the prayer room, chanting for those that perished.
“Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo.”
She beat the drums. The sound reverberated.
It is her belief that through the sound waves, the message of peace asking the victims to be strong would travel.
On Friday evening, she chanted again. For an hour, her hands relentlessly beat the drums.
In front of the frail priestess, the statues of Buddha and photos of Master Nichidatsu Fujii, who came to India in 1885, were lit up by a solitary bulb.
On the walls, images from Japan were hung.
Among them, the Fuji volcano in her native Shizouka captured for a calendar in the month of March.
Katsu has lived in India since 1986. In 1969, she had gone to Rajgir in Bihar and as she stood in front of the Buddha, she wanted to make an offering.
“I didn't have anything. No money. So, I gave myself to God. I became a monk,” she said.
The calamity that struck her country was God's will, she said.
“No bad fate falls like that. No storm comes just like that,” she said. “In the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands died. We will find a way out. This is a warning for the world. We must reflect on what went wrong. We will have to own the right path. We need faith.”
A monk from Orissa was flying to Japan the next day to help out. She is too old to travel but she said she would continue to pray for her country.
“What we can, we must do,” she said.
Outside, the white stupa loomed against the backdrop of a setting sun.
Katsu is among the 1,500 Japanese nationals that live in Delhi. There are around 4,500 Japanese residing in India.
When strangers stopped his wife and asked her if her family and friends were safe in Japan, Shinichi Yamanaka, the chief representative of Japan International Cooperation Agency, was overcome with emotion.
“It was such a warm gesture,” he said. “People we didn't know came up to us and showed their sympathies.”
This is Yamanaka's second assignment in India. When the earthquake hit, he was at a metro station with the new Japanese ambassador. He rushed to his office, collected the staff and inquired if everyone's family was fine. Then, they informed the Japanese volunteers spread across the country in rural areas working in the health care area.
“We are worried about the situation now with the leakage in the nuclear power plant. We are always checking news for updates. We have to see the situation and just have to put faith in the government,” he said. “They are doing their bit. See, the Japanese are disciplined and they coperative. Those are powerful qualities. We will come out of this.”
The tight-knit community has preserved its culture in the fast-changing landscape of the Indian society with its burgeoning malls, its aspirations.
There are three Japanese schools across the country. The one in Delhi is in a residential block, tucked away in one of its lanes.
There are no signs. Even the buses that ferry its students bear no names.
Its 200 students are from the expatriate families that are either working in the numerous Japanese companies in Gurgaon, Delhi and the Noida region.
Inside the campus, the homeland is recreated. There's a Japanese garden with its rocks and plantings and benches in the middle of the building. It can be viewed from anywhere. It is the courtyard where the school holds its assembly, and its functions.
The teachers are Japanese nationals. A few Indian staff work in its administrative wing but it is mandatory for them to know the language.
The children can attend the school that shifted to Vasant Kunj in 1991 from New Friends' Colony where it was first established in 1964, till Class 9 after which they can return to Japan to finish their studies.
The syllabus is what they follow in Japan.
Across the Deer Park, in the neighborhood market of Safdarjung Enclave, is Yamato-Ya, the Japanese convenience store.
There's a little table where customers can drink tea and munch on snacks.
There's everything that a Japanese cuisine requires in this small store.
A few meters down the block, there is the Japanese Association. There is a library, a recreation room and an office where one can find information on Delhi and where one can learn English, or go for a haircut like Hera, a Korean salon, or find a Japanese caterer.
In the corner, two bags full of books, including novels and magazines, were kept. These had been donated by expats who were leaving the country so the ones that were coming in could use them.
Takushi Arataki, 36, left Japan five years ago to be part of the growth that India promised.
He wanted to run a catering business for the Japanese community here. Five years ago, he came to India to learn Hindi. Now, he speaks fluent Hindi and has a successful business.
“I like it. But it is difficult too. We get cheated often,” he said. “But it is fun. We have a strong sense of community and we know most of the Japanese here.”
He is from Tokyo. When the earthquake hit, he saw the wreckage unfold on television. In Tokyo, his family was fine. The radiation hadn't reached there yet.
He believed in the Japanese resilience like others. They were going to bounce back. Such disaster were a way of life. Only this one was bigger. But no worries, he said.
In Tokyo, as tremors were felt, an Indian origin national Alok Parekh who wrote that as he was scrambling to call his family, he saw cafes open their doors to serve drinks and free bread to lighten up the mood.
“Having been born in Tokyo, I was somewhat accustomed to earthquakes. But I knew that the effects of this event would be catastrophic for the country. What I do know is that elevator conversations about 'last night's earthquake' will soon come to an end, Japan's taxpayers and corporations are rich enough to bear the cost of this tragedy, and the country will emerge stronger than ever once it starts rebuilding itself,” he said.
The same were echoed by the community here that got together to help out, and never let the world discount their courage. The calm Japanese in their country and elsewhere became the force to counter nature's fury. This was unlike anywhere – Haiti earthquake, Katrina floods.
The images of tragedy were a resilient people that worked silently against the tide, to turn it around.
And all of that was contained in the old Katsu, bent in prayer.

The Samba spy story

2011-03-14T23:19:00.003-04:00

Meeting the victims of any tragedy is never easy. In this case, it was even more difficult because these people were the victims of a hoax. An edited version of the story appeared in The Sunday Express on March 13, 2011.

Chinki Sinha

Jammu, March 11, 2011

In time, the definitions of the victims and the perpetrators started to overlap.

In the Jammu Central Jail, strangers connected by profession and betrayal and suffering met and forgave each other. In the evenings, they heard each others' stories, cried and gave hope to each other.

At first, when he saw Milkhi Ram walk into the prison, Satpal Singh was full of rage. He had been sentenced to 10 years in the prison because Milkhi Ram had named him during those countless interrogations. The torture was unbearable. They were given electric shocks, kept up the whole night, hung upside down from the ceiling, and burnt with cigarette buds. If they only agreed to implicate others, they would be exempted from the infernal treatment.

So Milkhi Ram had named Satpal Singh in the infamous Samba spy case that set off a chain reaction of sorts where one accused named a random official to get a break from the torture meted out to them by the army.

Around 60 odd jawans and officials found themselves in the midst of an espionage hoax that had two Pakistani agents at its crux. From this epicenter, the waves went out and drowned many lives in its fury.

The case dates back to more than 35 years. It all took place in the 168 Infantry Brigade in Samba district in Jammu. This is where the border that separates India and Pakistan runs.

These men were accused to crossing the border, colluding with the enemy and working against their country.

Milkhi Ram was named by Ram Lal, a fellow soldier, who in turn was named by the flamboyant Pakistani agent Sarwan Dass, who crossed the border first in 1972. He wanted to make money. In the other world, they promised him women, wine, money and everything else that he couldn't afford with his gunner's salary in the army.

It was in the interrogation centre that Milkhi Ram made a list at the behest of the officials.

“I took the names of Mulk Raj and Satpal Singh,” he said.

It has been a tough life so far. After he served his term in the Jammu prison, he returned. But with the tag of a spy, it was difficult to get absorbed in the society. It felt as if the sentence had been extended to eternity, he said.

Milkhi Ram served a total of seven-and-a-half years in prison. He had been sentenced to 10 years but got out earlier on the basis of his good conduct.

From the prison, the men had filed a case in the Jammu High Court in 1978. But nothing came out of it. The case was dismissed.

Setting their grudges aside, the men united in their fight against injustice, and their hope tied them together. All they wanted was that their names should be cleared.

Milkhi Ram bears the marks of his torture. His hands are scarred.

“They gave us electric shocks and it was horrible,” he said.

He later became a mason to get by. His family – wife and six daughters – suffered along with him.

Freedom is what they are after now. The fact that the case has dragged on in the courts for three decades now hasn't diminished. Even if in death, their names are cleared of the charges of spying, a grave dishonour for any ex serviceman, they'd feel vindicated, they said.

Life fell apart for Kamla Rani, the widow of Ram Lal, who was implicated by Sarwan Dass. He served time in the prison, came home a dejected man who had given up on life.

He was suffering from tuberculosis, too.

For almost seven years, Ram Lal woke up in the nights and sobbed. He looked lost.

“He used to cry and say that his life had come to an end,” Kamla Rani said.

Twenty years ago, the man who eventually lost his sanity left home. He never returned. The wife is in a limbo of hope and loss. She doesn't know if Ram Lal died or if he is still alive.

His two sons and one daughter had to quit school. Kamla Rani worked as a maid and brought up the children. But the damage had been done. The family is struggling. Kamla Rani can't even afford the train fare to go to Delhi to fight the battle.

“I want to know everything. We have fought with the government for 30 years. Now, there is no money to fight. I want compensation,” she said.

In the nights, his screams reverberates in her mind.

“He was physically and mentally tortured. We got him out on bail after a few years but by then he had broken down,” she said. “This is scar that we carry. For fourteen months I didn't know where he was. Then I found out. When I went to meet him, he was a different man. His bones had been broken.”

It was like being in a labyrinth. Hopes were crushed, but names were elicited. More entered the dungeons, and broken down by torture, they took even more names.

Then they all testified against each other, those they hadn't seen or met in some cases. But in the courts, they came prepared. They pointed out to the men in the docks and said they had taken them across the border.

Those who sat in judgment in the army courts scribbled sentences and assigned them prison terms.

Major N R Ajwani, the deputy adjutant judge advocate-general at the Northern Command, who sentenced Banarsi Lal to 14 years imprisonment after Sarwan Dass implicated him, was later arrested by the MI after he was named by Major AK Rana, who in turn was named by Captain RS Rathour, a bright official in the 168 Brigade in Samba. Rathour later wrote a book “Price of Loyalty” about the cases that were built on torture and his own ordeal and fall from grace while he was in Tihar serving his sentence of 14 years. He was arrested in 1978 after Aya Singh implicated him.

Banarasi Lal is a sad man.

It is in his deep, sunken eyes, that the story reveals itself. Banarsi Lal was arrested in 1977.

He had joined the armed forces in 1969 when he was in school. He had gone to the city with a friend who wanted to undergo the test for the army. While standing at the gates, he was spotted by an officer who asked him if he wanted to join and he said he'd rather study. But the officer insisted and he went through the test and other formalities and became a gunner.

“I was in the 217 Medium regiment,” he said. “I came to Samba in 1974 and was posted in Akhnoor.”

Sarwan and he were in the same unit. He had known Dass as a colleague only.

On Thursday, he met Sarwan Dass after almost 35 years. As the two men faced each other in Chakra, Banarasi Lal looked angry. He wanted to get away. Here was the man who he sourced all his suffering to.

"Forget what happened. It is the system," Dass said. "Come over to my house and we can talk. It was all our fate. This was pre-destined."

Banarasi Lal smiled and refused the offer. He sat in the car, and looked ahead.

"I don't want to talk to him. He is the man who started it all. He was never jailed for espionage. But we all became what they call us - spies."

When he was named and subsequently produced in the GCM with Major Ajwani as one of the presiding judges, he had refused to admit to crossing the border because it was a lie.

“Major Ajwani told me to admit so I could get a lesser sentence. There was no other way out. I refused. I got 14 years of jail,” he said. “They tortured me a lot. We still can't face people. It is a shame I carry everywhere.”

The ghosts of the past haven't left him. His children, who have grown up now, know about his case. They don't ask him. His wife never broaches the subject either.

Outside the Samba military headquarters, Banarasi Lal shook hands with another fauji. But he quickly stepped back. He didn't want to be carried away and say he once worked for the army, too.

It would initiate a slew of questions. Which brigade? When did you retire? Do you get pension?

“I want to walk as a free man. I once worked for the army too,” he said. “My identity is ambiguous. It is only a name with no past, no future.”

Banarasi Lal works odd jobs and lives in his native village near Bishna in Jammu.

Their regard for the army and what it does hasn't been tinkered by their own suffereing.

“We have to die in any case. But we wanted to die as soldiers and in combat,” Satpal Singh said. “We never hated the army. If at all, it provided us a purpose in life. When I joined in 1969, I was full of ambition. I wanted to serve my country. After a while, I came to terms with Milkhi Ram. He was suffering, too. Now, we fight together to get what is lost. Our honour.”

Samba is a sleepy town in Jammu. Recently, it was converted into a district. Through the day, the military convoys roll down its narrow roads. On either side of the road that leads to Ludhiana, there are army quarters.

Inside the Samba military headquarters where the 168 brigade is still stationed, it is a strange, unreal world.

“The rules of your world don't work here,” the man, who escorted us inside, said. “To asses the levels of this establishment is like measuring the sea's depth. Impossible.”

Thirty-five years later, the ghosts of the Samba spy scandal still haunt the 168 Infantry Brigade headquarters.

As he stubbed his cigarette, an army officer said he knew about the case but he wouldn't say anything further.

The Samba spy case as it came to be known as later started with the arrest of one Captain SR Nagial who was implicated by Aya Singh in 1976. Nagial is still fighting the case to get his name cleared. In the intervening years, he suffered what came his way. Any mention of the case and his name could still jeopardize what he so painstakingly built, he said.

But it was only in 1978 with the arrest of Captain RS Rathour that the connection with Samba was forged. Most of the hoax case victims belonged to the Samba brigade. The two spies also hailed from Samba district.

In the 1978 sweep and what followed later, the many jawans and majors were sentenced.

“It was done for getting rewards,” Major Ajwani, who lives in Mumbai, said. He was arrested in January 1979 after Major AK Rana named him. He served term for around a year and was later released because there wasn't much evidence against him.

It was Major Ajwani who later asked the Supreme Court to intervene and ask the Delhi high Court to pronounce its judgment on the case.

In 2001, Sarwan Dass had confessed in the Mumbai's magistrate court that he had named innocent people because he was forced to do so. He accused four MI officers—Brigadier T.S. Grewal, who was then MI deputy director, Brigadier (retd) S.C. Jolly, who was then a major, Captain Sudhir Talwar, and Colonel V.P. Gupta.

“I had given a statement. I had gone to Supreme Court in Delhi around a year ago. I was asked if his confessions were my own. I said yes and I left,” he said. “I don't know what happened to it.”

In 1977, Sarwan started naming people. He named gunners Banarasi Lal, Babu Ram and Sriram, Naib Subedar Daulat Ram and his battery commander Captain R.G. Ghalawat, who was his commanding major in Babina. Ghalawat later died of heart attack. The others still fighting the case say he was depressed. The tag of being a spy was something he couldn't deal with.

Rathaur, during his interrogation, named 11 Army personnel. The list included Captain A.K. Rana, Brigadier Karam Chand, Lt Col Kayastha, Major S.P. Sharma, Captain V.K. Dewan, Captain Sujjan Singh. Rana named 27 others from the 168 Infantry Brigade. He was jailed for 10 years.

It became a vicious cycle. Even Havildar Ram Swaroop's death in 1978, three days after he was taken into custody, didn't prevent the MI from spreading its tentacles to those it wanted to settle scores with.

Rathour, who now runs a security agency and lives in Gurgaon, said life was tough. When he walked out of the jail, he didn't have the bus fare to come back home. He spent years in a slum in Paharganj where his wife struggled to provide for the family.

“It was a nightmarish experience,” he said. “I built this from scratch. But the scars don't go away.”

Retired Brigadier SC Jolly, who now lives in Noida, and has been named as one of the perpetrators of the spy scandal, said he didn't want to comment on the case.

After years of fighting court battles, at first in Delhi High Court, and now in Supreme Court, the victims have now found some hope.

Last month, a damning piece of evidence emerged. The postmortem report of Havildar Ram Swaroop, who died in custody in 1978, was traced to the Aruna Asaf Ali government hospital in Delhi where the autopsy was carried out. For years, the army had maintained it had not tortured Ram Swaroop and he died of drug overdose but in the postmortem signed by Dr. B Singh, it states that he died of 39 injuries, including burn injuries.

He was declared dead at the base hospital in the wee hours of the morning of September 30, 1978.

Ram Swaroop was being interrogated at the interrogation centre near Naraina in Delhi and his body was found on the road.

Swaroop, who was 40 at the time and belongs to Udaka village in Haryana, was the only accused to have died in the scandal. The havaldar was posted in Samba in the 527 I&FS Company under the 168 Infantry Brigade. He was an intelligence havaldar and worked under Rathour. Once while he was posted in the field unit at Red Fort in Delhi, Rathour came to meet him, while he was under the radar of the Army.

Prime Minister Morarji Desai had wanted a probe into the death of Ram Swaroop but he was told by the Army that Swaroop was a spy.

Postmortem reports were never produced in the court like other documents that the victims are still asking for, documents that could prove their involvement in the espionage racket if indeed there were any as the Army maintained.

The Army has all along refused to produce this postmortem, dated October 1, 1978, in court. Swaroop died three days after being taken into custody by Military Intelligence (MI) for interrogation.

The fresh evidence has now been attached to their court petitions by the officers, including Capt. RS Rathaur, who was implicated by Aya Singh, still fighting to clear their names in the spy case and declared “innocent.”

Even Swaroop’s widow Anguri Devi is also planning to file a fresh appeal to reopen the case files of her husband’s death on the basis of the new evidence. She had filed a case in the Delhi High Court in 1996 but it was dismissed in 2001 for lack of evidence. Now, armed with the report, she has hopes of vindicating her husband's honour.

In 2000, judges K Ramamoorthy and Devinder Gupta of the Delhi High Court called the Samba spy case “a gross miscarriage of justice”. But in 2006, however, a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Arajit Pasayat set aside the 2000 order of the Delhi High Court, and sought a re-examination of the case. But in 2007, the Delhi High court duly dismissed the cases of the two petitioners.

However, because the army has gone in appeal in the Supreme Court, the seven officers whose court martials were struck down by the Delhi High Court are still fighting their cases. They want to be declared “innocent.”

Same with the others. They are still hoping against hope that this may turn the case around and they'd be able to cleanse themselves of the tag of being spies and betraying their own country.

“You can see the marks on all of us. We can't hide the shame. It was forced on us,” Milkhi Ram said. “If not in this life, then maybe even after my death, I would want justice to be done. We would be free then.”

The spy

So many years later, his matchbox that he took out of his pocket still had a woman's picture on it. Only this time, it had “Made in India” written on it.

Sarwan Dass, the self-confessed Pakistani spy who implicated many men in his brigade after he was caught by IB and handed over to the army, once brought back a similar matchbox from across the border. It had a Pakisani model's picture on it. He loved them. The women on the other side were more beautiful, healthier and they were frank in matters of love, he said.

Money could buy him so much in the other world that he saw was struggling with poverty. Women were readily available. He was being paid by the Pakistani agents. They even arranged for liquor for him when he visited. In return for information on the army's establishment, they pampered him. He had dinner in the bungalows. They called for fish kababs and he loved his drinks.

He loved the luxuries of his spy life, its flamboyance and its promise. Everything was within reach.

As he lit his bidi in his house in Chakra village in Jammu where he now lives with his wife Lajwanti, he remembered those heady days.

Of course, it wasn't these cheap bidis that he used to smoke. He smoked those filter cigarettes.

When they came to arrest him, the Subedar Major sighted the 20-pack Wills brand cigarette pack in his trunk in Babina, Jhansi where he was then posted as a gunner for the army.

The official stared at the expensive cigarette box for a long time before admonishing the guards that accompanied him that they should look out for such sings.

With his salary in the army, Sarwan Dass couldn't have afforded those filter cigarettes.

That gave him away. His flamboyance, his love for a good life that his two acres in his village and his paycheck in the army would not have got him, was what made him cross the border.

They said in his village that if you crossed over to the other side of the border, you could strike gold.

That evening when he left home, and walked towards the border near his village, he had made up his mind. He was going to cross over.

It was a rainy evening in 1972. Dass walked through the fields. The fields stretched into eternity. On both sides, they looked the same.

In a wink, he was on enemy's terrain.

“It was a nasha. I didn't think it through. I just crossed,” he said. “In those days, there were no fences. You could just keep walking and in a few moments, you would be there. Besides, I was angry with our army, with the way they promoted people or assigned designations.”

He walked through the night and in the morning, he boarded a bus and got off at Sialkot in the afternoon. When they asked for the fare, he lied he had lost his money.

Hungry and dejected, Dass slept at the bus stop. In the night, policemen woke him up and asked him to produce identity. He kept quiet. They searched him, found his identity card that said he worked for the army and took him to the police station.

“After two days, I was sent to the Sialkot Gora Jail,” Dass said, his face twitching in memory of those grim days. “You just can't make out if it is day or night in that prison. There are small cells. Insects are crawling inside. It is filthy and in the middle of those cells, they have placed iron beds. It was dreary and cold.”

There, he saw a lot of Indians. They were tortured, and roamed around half-naked with scars visible on their bodies.

“I was scared,” Dass said. “Then, the Pakistani FIU came to me. They beat me up endlessly. I thought I should give in their demands. They wanted me to return and bring back information. They said they would reward me for my services.”

He was then dropped off at the border and he crossed over again. They had given him around Rs. 200. During that time, Dass was on holiday.

He crossed the border again after two weeks as he had been told.

“I gave the information on the units and was paid in return,” he said. “Between 1972 and 1975, I went to Pakistan a total of 10 times.”

They wanted him to recruit more people. That's how Aya Singh became a spy, too. They worked for Army's Field Intelligence Unit officer Major Akbar Khan.

The duo met in Babina in Jhansi where they were in the same unit and became friends. Dass saw Aya Singh, who belonged from a Jammu village, was also an ambitious man like him.

They came back together and one night in March 1973, they crossed over to the other side together. A car came to pick them up and thus Aya Singh became part of the spy network.

“We both didn't go back to the unit for six months,” Dass said. “Then we decided to go back to the unit. We were tried for desertion and sent to serve term in Secunderabad. Then, we went back to the unit.”

However, in 1975, the IB trapped Sarwan using a double agent. The agent produced a letter to the interrogation officials written by Sarwan.

Within a week, Dass was arrested.

But the arrest also led to MI's humiliation where its intra-system rival, the IB, had exposed a Pakistani agent working in their establishment.

Then started a chain of trials and confessions and court martials, triggered by MI's embarrassment in the face of the IB's discovery, and propelled by the inhuman torture.

It all led to the arrest of over 60 Army personnel of the 168 Infantry Brigade and its subordinate units in the Samba sector in Jammu.

Aya Singh and Sarwan Dass were interrogated and confronted. They took each other's name. On way to Jammu, Sarwan Dass jumped off the train near Jalandhar after duping the guards. He had latched the doors of the first class compartment they were travelling in from the outside.

He took a bus to his village, sat next to a woman and started off a conversation anticipating checking by officials once the news of his escape spread.

He finally reached his house, and met his wife Lajwanti and mother. A man came to take him away but he fought him off. It wasn't safe anymore.

He crossed over again. And this time, he stayed in Pakistan for around seven months.

“They had given me a quarter. They asked me to marry again but I resisted because even in the Koran that the maulvi taught me because Major Khan wanted me to understand Islam, it was written that I couldn't marry unless I divorced or had valid reasons.”

He used to cross over to his side for a few hours in the night to meet his mother and wife but never stayed. One night, Lajwanti pleaded to him to surrender. It was arranged. Dass surrendered at another village, in Mukhiya Booti Singh's house to the IB.

That was in 1975. He was given over to the army, tortured and coerced to take names.

“I had said punish me. I have committed wrong. But they didn't listen to me,” he said. “Aya Singh told me to keep lying. That was the only way out. He took this major's name. He was his relative. He was the first man to be jailed. I spent three years in prison. We had struck a deal with the MI officers. They told me to say Major AK Rana and Captain RS Rathour had come to Kandral to meet Major Khan. They were so obsessed they forgot that Kandral is a village in India and it is where the Kandral post is. The border is one-and-a-half kilometers away from Kandral post in Jammu. In 1974, if I was in Pakistan, how could I be in Kandral.”

After all this, Sarwan Dass rejoined the army. He was only tried for desertion and not for espionage. Aya Singh suffered a brutal fate. He was shot dead by the army at the border in 1986.

Now, the once flamboyant spy, barely makes ends meet. He cultivates vegetables and rice.

His wife, who waited it out for him, came to terms with her fate long ago.

“I had to spend my days in this world. I refused to remarry. His wedding gift to me was a lonely life. Much of it has passed,” Lajwanti said.

Even now, the taste of the filter cigarette lingers in his mouth. It is one of those leftovers from memory.

When we offered him a Marlboro, he lit it and took a deep drag.

“See, this is what the spy life gave me. Now, I can only afford bidis,” he said. “I regret what I did but they are the culprits, too. They should be booked and charged.”

The villagers have boycotted the family. Their relatives, brothers and other kin, don't entertain them. They haven't for ages.

“It is a difficult life but what can I do,” he said. “I was discharged from the army without pension.”

The one thing that breaks his defiance is the mention of Havildar Ram Swaroop who died in custody, tortured by the army as per the postmortem report that was recently recovered from a Delhi hospital.

“They tortured him so much. They asked him who he had met and he said 'you.' they asked what did they give him. He said 'you gave me whatever you gave me'. He wouldn't give in. They beat him till his eyes popped out,” Dass said. “I was there. If they call me to the court, I will testify. I will tell where they killed him and how.”

Maybe that would be the salvation he has been chasing all these years.

“I did wrong but I am willing to do right, too,” he said as he lit another of his bidis.

The matchbox with its model was on the side. Even now, the man has held on to the tidbits of his other life. It wasn't the same, but at least it was similar. Memories don't require much to come back. Because they are always on hold, ready to be retrieved. All he has now is the glory and the shame of his spy life – the former in its luxuries, the latter in its repercussions.

The Case

* Aya Singh and Sarwan Dass were arrested on the information of IB in
mid 1975 for spying against India for Pakistan. They were arrested
from Jhansi where they were posted.
* They were brought to Jammu at the joint interrogation centre
separately and Sarwan Dass escaped en route and went to Pakistan.
* Aya Singh was brought to Jammu JIC and later handed over to the army
for trial.
* In 1976, Sarwan Dass was arrested again. Dass claims he surrendered
but police claims they apprehended him. He was interrogated at the
JIC. While at JIC in Jammu, both named each other.
* They were kept in the MI custody and there, they started naming
people. Those who were named by them were arrested, tortured and it
went on.Trials went on and more arrests continued to be made.
* Captain Sewaram Nagial was arrested in 1976 and charged for crossing
the border.
* Aya Singh was made to name Captain RS Rathour.
* Together they duo implicated around 18 officials before Captain RS
Rathour, who was sentenced to 14 years. Around 50 officials lost their
designations, were court martialed and were sentenced.
* More arrests were made on the basis of confessions.

After the Acid Violence - A conviction, and a curse

2011-02-13T00:12:00.005-05:00

This has to be one of the most challenging assignments of my career so far. Without the victim's voice, the story would have been incomplete. But finding her was the challenge. We met the accused in Tihar where I booked an appointment through the helpline. It was a difficult meeting. I was abused verbally for landing in the prison, hijacking an appointment that was meant for her sister and friend.
A Nigerian inmate at Tihar started beating against the glass shouting "Leave" and so I left.
But Simran had spoken to me and I had hurriedly noted her words on a few sheets of paper I was allowed to carry inside.
But Anu was missing. It took us days and nights roaming around the streets, the neighborhoods she lived in, and ransacking court documents and pleading the police for some lead. Nobody knew where she had gone.
We finally stumbled upon someone who said they would take me to her place on Saturday night. On Sunday morning I went. But she wasn't there. At 3 p.m. I stood underneath her house and saw her emerge from the taxi. I sent a message to my editor that I was standing in front of her but I couldn't say if she will speak to me.
She did. It was difficult being there, and see her narrate once again what she went through.
An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday Section of The Indian Express on Feb. 12, 2011.
Since I spent too many days chasing the story, I didn't what to omit and what to include. Thanks to the editors who cut it beautifully.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, February 10, 2011

Her body feels like a cage.
Trapped inside the stitched-up confines of her face are tears accumulated over six years where she cried for hours mourning the loss of her face, her eyes, and her chances at a better life after an acid attack one evening six years ago.
The acid that melted her face didn’t spare her eyes. It went deep into the sockets, dismembering nerves, and cutting off the light forever.
The doctors sealed up the eyes. An aperture in one eye bleeds those tears once in a while but when Anu Mukherjee, the bar dancer that ruled the hearts of men, cries there’s only the muffled sound of sobs that seem to emerge from a void, knocking desperately against her own body to find an outlet.
The acid violence that took away so much from her also rendered her “tearless.”
The perpetrator was a friend, a fellow dancer at the same bar who was overcome by jealousy, according to court records.
Anu Mukherjee and Meena Khan alias Simran danced at the same hotel, and had the same patrons. But one was the rising star. The other was afraid of falling behind.
The story of rage, jealousy and insecurity culminated in an acid attack that left Anu with a disfigured face. For years, the case dragged in the lower courts. In January, the judgment came. Simran and her brother Raju alias Qayoom, the co-accused, were sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment.
“Since the complainant has gone blind due to the act of the convicts, both accused Simran and Raju are ordered to undergo RI,” Justice SC Rajan said in the courtroom.
Anu wasn’t there. The victim was somewhere in the city coming to terms with her fate.
The accused were arrested and a chargesheet was filed against them under Sections 307/326/120B (attempt to murder/causing grievous hurt/criminal conspiracy.
The court acquitted Simran in case relating to attempt to murder, saying that the intention of the accused was not to kill. It was only to disfigure her face so that she loses her job.

Life in the Bar

Her face is like an undulating landscape, and the monotony of it breaks only with the nose, which was reconstructed, a hasty job done by the doctors. The acid had melted away too much.
We found Anu after days of searching around the city. For six years, Anu has been trying to disconnect with the past, changing apartments, leaving people behind. But it caught up with her. She came to know of the judgment through the newspapers.
Anu sat trapped for years inside her decaying body, feeling her flesh harden and become permanent.
Six years ago, on a cold December evening, her face burned, and the stench of charred flesh kept off everyone. She lived with it.
On December 19, 2004, in the twilight hours, Anu Mukherjee stepped into Parvez Alam’s auto to get to Rajdoot Hotel where she danced in two shifts.
Around the corner from her rented apartment in Garhi, a man was waiting, lurking in the shadows. It just took moments for him to lift his shawl, and hurl the chemical on to Anu’s face.
The man, Anu later said in her statement in the court, was her friend’s brother.
Both Meena Khan alias Simran and Anu danced at the Rajdoot Hotel.
That’s where the girls became friends.
They had the same patrons, too. On the stage, the one with vines in the background and a series of yellow and red disco lights that covered the girls in colourful beams
of light, and old Ahuja brand speakers, the girls danced, and dreamed of a career in Bollywood, or falling in love, making someone fall in love with them so they could leave behind the notoriety of a bar girl’s life and the insecurities associated with a profession that lasted only for a few years until the wrinkles didn’t begin to show.
The stage became the focal point of the story of the two dancers - the perpetrator and the victim.
Both had similar stories. They were poor, and danced to survive, and run their families.
Anu, who hails from Kolkata, came to live with her aunt who lived in Mehrauli in Delhi at a very early age. Her other siblings stayed on with her parents in West Bengal. Her father Sunil worked as a lawyer and had five children.
She was orphaned at a young age when her parents passed away in an accident.
“I was around 10 when they died,” she said. “That’s when the troubles began.”
Anu dropped out of a Bengali medium school in Mehrauli after she completed Class 8 and took up a job of cutting threads at an export house in Govindpuri. It paid her Rs. 2,000 for her labour.
By then, her younger brother Raju had come to live with them.
“I left the job soon. I always had big dreams,” Anu said.
That afternoon, as we sat in her small apartment with its garish orange walls, Anu revisited the horror.
“You know, at 20, I left for Mumbai to work in television serials. I wanted to earn money. I finally ended up in Maya and Deepa bars in Mumbai,” Anu said. “I loved to dance. I liked that life but I had responsibility.”
After days of asking around for her, we finally found her in a small apartment that she shares with a friend and her brother and Frooty, the dog.
After the acid attack, Anu said she received threats from Simran, who served about three months behind bars and got out on bail. They changed several apartments over the next few years and left no numbers.
In the court records where she last recorded her statement in 2009, Anu used her Garhi address.
Nobody knew where they had gone. Even the public prosecutor wondered if Anu had read in the papers about Meena Khan’s conviction. In January, six years after Anu was transformed from a lively and beautiful 25-year-old dancer into a blind disfigured survivor of the acid violence in a matter of few seconds, Meena Khan and her brother
Raju were sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment by the Patiala House Court.
Additional Sessions Judge S C Rajan also imposed a fine of Rs 1 lakh on the duo, directing that 80 per cent of the amount should be paid to the victim.
In 2005, Anu recognized the perpetrators by their voices in the courtroom. She said in her statement “ ... as she was envious of me and I was more beautiful and was a good dancer and for this reason she used to hate me. During that quarrel the accused, Simran, threatened me that if I quarrelled with her and said ‘agar mujhse panga legi toh” she would get acid thrown at me and would get me killed.”
In the FIR, she had said Simran was furious because Anu danced better than her.
The judge noted in the court “The complainant has gone blind due to act of accused persons and they are not entitled to any leniency.”
But for Anu, the sentence isn’t proportionate to the damage that was done to her.
She has found faith since. But back in those days when she was still trying to come to terms with the reality of an acid attack that disfigured her face, which she could only feel with her fingers because it also took away her vision, Anu Mukherjee was a lost soul.
She lived in Garhi then.

After the Acid Violence

In its cramped gullies, with its buildings almost embracing each other, the sound of her loss never travelled laterally. Instead they rose up in the air, and on most nights they found a receiver in the woman on the fourth floor, who listened in, but never could gather the courage to run downstairs and console the wailing woman who mourned through the nights the ruination of her identity, of what could have
been and what was to come.
The woman upstairs had only heard from others that the acid had melted the dancer’s face. She didn’t want to scream. She knew she would. They talked in the building that her face looked like an alien’s face. It had no human features.
Anu hardly ever stepped out of her apartment and when she did, her face was tightly wrapped in a scarf.
She recalled how Anu had come to her apartment on Diwali.
“She looked so beautiful,” the neighbour said.
One night, she saw Anu jump off her balcony. She fainted.
That was a year after the acid violence. Anu had attempted suicide earlier, too. She would turn the knob and let the cooking gas seep into the rooms.
The neighbours told a harried Raju to lock the kitchen door.
And then, one night she jumped and landed on the concrete below. She was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital.
“I don’t want to live and if they want me to live, they must show me a way to live,” Anu said. "I have no money, nothing."
A woman who lived next door told Anu to turn to God and faith slowly began to fill the void in her life.
Next to her bed, there is a small fake Christmas tree. Anu is waiting for a miracle.
Faith defies reason, or science. It fuels hope through the possibilities.
Doctors have said that her vision won’t be fixed. But in the same church where she found peace, she stumbled upon hope, too.
“I pray. I go to temples and churches. I want to be okay,” she said.
“I want to see Jesus and I want to dance again.”
Anu stayed in Mumbai for two-and-a-half years and then returned to
Delhi to take care of her brother.
A friend spotted an advertisement in the papers for dancers at Rajdoot Hotel. Anu went for an interview, and was offered the contract job to dance in the bar through the evenings.
“I bought dresses, lehengas and sarees and started the job,” she said.

The stage

The hotel is stuck in time, too with its maroon leather chairs and a moustachioed man who mans the bar. The dancing stopped in 2004 but the stage hasn’t been dismantled. It is preserved as a tribute to those heady evenings where men toasted to
beauty.
On the sides, there are fountains, and it recreates some idyllic landscape from the mythology where beautiful women danced suggestively to disturb the meditation of great saints.
Once the fountains must have gurgled with water, and the speakers must have played the hit Bollywood songs.
There were around nine dancers.
“I danced in front of 500 men. Who knows what they thought. I was an artist,” she said.
As a child, she had learned Bharatnatyam. When she found the job, she enrolled in a Bollywood dance class in Lajpat Nagar.
After a year when she had some savings, Anu moved out of her aunt’s house.
“There was the collection and the salary and that was a lot. When I danced, they threw money. Half of it would go to the hotel and half would be mine,” Anu said. “We had a good time.”
Her rise also triggered her fall. She was crowned number one on new year’s competition for a few years in a row. She also became Miss Rajdoot.
“I looked beautiful. I was young. I loved life,” Anu said. “Meena was my friend. She got jealous and I didn’t pay heed to her threats.”
She has albums as a testimony to her lost beauty.
In those days when her career peaked, Anu had coloured hair, a shade of gold, and had chubby cheeks and a sweet smile. She loved the camera, and posed often.
She was in love. A man, who frequented the bar, had proposed. His wife had died and he had a son named Harsh. In the album, traces of that love are scattered.
They were to get married soon. But after her flesh was corrupted, corroded and made to look like pulp, he abandoned her. Anu wouldn’t speak about the bitterness of the relationship. She understood. She had to.
A few patrons from her past life are in touch still.
“She was a great dancer. I used to request for her dance each time I went to the hotel,” he said over the phone.
In her isolation, Anu called him up looking for support. After a while, Mayuresh stopped taking her calls.
“I couldn’t afford helping her,” he said. “The doctor’s fee was too high. In 2010, I stopped giving her money because I had my own family to provide for and my business wasn’t doing too well.”
Mayuresh said he knew Anu since 2000. A few days ago, he read about the conviction and called her. He said she should appeal in the high court against the judgment.
“It is too less. But then I thought what’s the benefit. What will become of her life? She is dying every day,” he said. “For someone so beautiful, it is unbearable to accept that her face is disfigured, and is beyond repairs. She was the beauty queen back in those days. Now she looks like an alien."
On December 20, a day after the acid struck her, she was to board a train to Vaishno Devi to pray for success. The New Year’s competition was around the corner and she needed blessings.
“I still have the ticket,” she said.
For three days she lay in the hospital. She screamed and kicked about, talked to the dozens of media persons who beat against the hospital windows for interviews.
“I kept crying. I couldn’t see,” she said. “I had no eyes.”
A surge of anger beat up in her, and she shivered, trying to fight back the tears that would remain stuck as countless others.
“I want them to die in the middle of the street and such a death that it should send shudders through others’ bodies. I want a strong message to be sent out,” she said.
According to the public prosecutor Indra Kumar, the conviction and the sentence didn’t constitute a strong message.
Five years isn’t any deterrent, he said.
He said he would appeal in the high court against the judgment of the lower court.
“Her life was spoilt. She lost her vision, her beauty and her life. At least, it should be 10 years,” he said.
Another neighbour, a woman who stood by her through her most difficult days and lived on the same floor in the Garhi apartment, said she couldn’t bear to look at her after the acid attack.
“Nobody could dare to see her. After the surgery when they reconstructed the nose, we could bear to look at her,” she said. “She attempted suicide. That’s when I told her to start chanting. She sold all her gold in her frustration. She was very poor. I met her first in 2004 on Diwali when she came with a gift. I tied her saree and she
looked so radiant and beautiful.”
In the building, people’s reference changed overnight. They always referred to her as the model. But after she was disfigured, it was the blind girl, the victim who lived with her brother.
In the colonies that she lived in after she left her Garhi flat, the vendors, the dhobis all remember her as the blind girl with a burnt face who lived with her brother.
Her brother’s life was also affected. He had to drop out of the MCD school in Malviya Nagar and look for odd jobs.
Now 21, Raju works at a hardware store in Nehru Place and earns about Rs. 6,000 a month. He bears a striking resemblance to his sister.
“We had to struggle. She laughs and she cries,” he said. “We are always running away. We don’t want to face people, their questions.”
In the court, Anu came with Raju. He was 15 years old.

Meeting Simran in Tihar

In the court files of the State Vs. Meena Khan case, the accused deemed “incorrect” all the allegations.
Meena Khan signed off with “I am innocent and falsely implicated.”
But Indra Kumar, the prosecutor, said that the accused didn’t produce a single witness to substantiate her claims.
We met Meena Khan in Tihar jail.
In the waiting area, we sat on cold slabs. A Nigerian man sat in a corner, a few women were crying silently. An old man was tugging at a bag full of snacks for his daughter who was serving time in a fake currency scam.
They called out my name and I went past each window trying to figure who Simran could be.
She emerged from the background and motioned to me come to the last window. The glass barrier separated us.
It didn’t begin very well. She was upset that I hijacked an appointment that was meant to be with her sister and friend.
Simran’s hair was golden like a blazing sun. The curls framed her face.
She didn’t like the prison. She said she had young children who needed her. Her husband passed away a few years ago.
“Anu wasn’t beautiful. Even the dog won’t piss on her face,” Simran said. “I am suffering for a crime I didn’t commit. Even my brother has a family. They are on the streets. Anu is a bad woman. She was a prostitute.”
She said two months before the court order, Anu had asked for Rs. 10 lakhs from her to withdraw the case.
“I am poor. Where would I get the money from,?” she said. “Babbuji from Rajdoot Hotel was mediating. He knows the truth. Look at me. Am I not more beautiful?”
“How is it that they relied on her statement? At least 10 people are called to identify victims. She was the only one. This is not justice. She is lying. She was older than me. I was 18 only,” Meena Khan yelled.
Then she was whisked away by a woman and she refused to talk further.
I was asked to leave.
Manmohan, the owner of Rajdoot Hotel, said he knew both the women. He said it was a shoddy investigation done by the Delhi Police.
“Simran was a better dancer of the two. I remember the night they came to take her away. She was dancing in the hotel. I accompanied her to the police station,” he said. “Why would Simran’s brother throw acid? What is his incentive? It is a false case.”
The hotel paid the hospital bills and even sent Anu to Punjab to get her eyes checked. But nothing came out of it.
“It is a sad story of two women. One of them lost her vision and the other is in jail. I won’t mind deposing in the court. Simran was the star. Neither of them was afraid of losing their jobs.”
But the hotel official who deposed in the court didn’t say any of this in his statement. Kamal Sharma of Rajdoot Hotel said the girls were contract employees and weren’t the staff of the hotel.
“During the cross examination, Simran didn’t say she wasn’t there. When the court gave her the chance to explain, she didn’t say anything. She never made any hotel employee a witness,” Indra Kumar, the prosecutor, said. “In her state, in that kind of pain, why would Anu make false allegations against her friend?”

The Hope

There are too many voices in this story. There were 19 witnesses.
In six years, a lot has changed. Anu has learned to hope.
And it is hope that drowns the sorrow, and the anger, the betrayal.
“Maybe I will get my eyes. Doctors have said no but I have faith. I want to serve with my eyes,” she said. “I want to see myself. I have desires. I want to dance again.”
Dream by dream, she is learning to hope.
Her dreams have their context in her situation now but the images are of a lost world.
Anu said most nights she dreams she is laying on a hospital bed and doctors are bent over her with their tools.
In her dreams she has faith in the doctors. They are working on her eyes. Her vision would return.
And then, she wakes up. Darkness takes over.
It is a dream of dreams. It replays every night.

Transgenders first to be enrolled in UIDAI in Puducherry

2011-02-11T08:44:00.003-05:00

So, it began with a message in the morning that said this had begun and I could get more details in case I was still interested in the transgender issue. I thought I must write this story and I did.
Sheethal, the first member of the transgender community to be enrolled in the UIDAI, was very helpful. She even gave me her orkut password so I could access her pictures. It was such an act of faith. I had only spoken to her on the phone. This is for her.
An edited version of the story appeared in The Indian Express on Feb. 11, 2011.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, February 10, 2011

In the war of identities, Sheetal, a transgender based in Puducherry,
has secured her first victory.
The 33-year-old becomes the first transgender in India to be enrolled
in the Unique Identification Number (Aadhar) Project in Puducherry on
January 24 when the enrolment project was launched in the state.
For years, Sheetal, Sahodaran, a Chennai-based group that works for
the prevention of HIV/AIDS among homosexuals, fought for inclusion of
her own unique identity, a gender that couldn’t be squeezed into
“male” or “female” categories.
“Our identity is third gender. In Puducherry we have nothing. We need
voter identity cards and we need a place to stay. We can’t find rented
accommodation. With this, they can identity us and include us in
welfare schemes,” Sheetal said. “Now, they are looking at us.”
Puducherry, where the Planning Commission’s initiative to give every
Indian a unique set of numbers that would be their identity, 64
transgenders will be the first to be enrolled.
Officials said it was a conscious decision to include the socially
marginalised group in the union territory as poverty and deprivation
aren’t issues in Puducherry.
Ashok Dalwai, deputy director-general, UIDAI, said that one of the
basic objectives of the UIDAI project headed by Nandan Nilekani, is
to reach out to deprived.
“We are one of the first to recognize the third gender and it is
incidental that we started in Puducherry. We kept telling the
registrar we should try to capture the marginalised. Then they said
the marginalised in transgender. Since it is a small place, it may be
easy for us to identify the transgender here and their representative
has taken an initiative,” Dalwai told The Indian Express. “It is good
to see they are establishing their own identity. There is no shyness.
We saw the confidence and eagerness.”
Sheetal is one of the two members of the transgender community in the
state to be enrolled on the launch day. Now, Sheetal will act as an
introducer and help the government reach out to more members of the
community.
Over the next 15 days, 64 members of the transgender will be enrolled
in Puducherry.
That would the first phase.
The UIDAI’s focus is on social inclusion and in most states and union
territories, the agency in collaboration with the government
departments that are the designated registrars for the project, is
working to get the marginalised sections enrolled first.
For instance, in the national capital, the homeless migrants living
under the flyovers and the night shelters became the first
beneficiaries. The decision was taken keeping in mind the
characteristic features of an urban centre where migration is a given.
A lot of welfare schemes announced by the government that were
previously out of bounds because of lack of valid identification can
now be accessed by the homeless and poor migrants.
Dalwai, an IAS officer, also said that the first section of the
society to be enrolled in the UIDAI project in Karnataka in Mysore
district would be the physically challenged and in Chhattisgarh, it
would be the naxals.
“In Karnataka, we would like to capture the physically disabled. They
also form part of the socially marginalised. It is just a pilot. There
are challenges in capturing the biometrics. In a way, it will serve as
a pilot,” he said. “Then we can escalate it elsewhere.”
The Government of Puducherry has set up a State UID Implementation
Committee under chief secretary to monitor UIDAI implementation and
the Planning and Research Department of has been identified as the
nodal department for coordinating the project on behalf of the union
territory.
The Director of Civil Supplies in Puducherry, Priya, said that she
identified the group on the basis on social exclusion.
“So far they have no identity so we thought of including them first,” she said.
For Sheetal, the identity that she has been accorded is akin to empowerment.
“I was fighting for ration card and everything. We never got our
rights. First time, we got the respect. It is very important. We don’t
want to be the woman. Our identity is the third gender. Since I was
working with the food and civil supplies department, I kept telling
them they should do something about our community and then Priya said
I should come forward for my community if it is okay. I needed
visibility and I didn’t mind being on the stage and urge others to
come forward,” Sheetal said.
After Chennai, Puducherry is yet another state that is now
implementing various schemes for the transgender community.
Ashok Row Kavi, who is at the forefront of the fight for the rights of
the LGBT community, said h was happy to see the government was finally
taking notice.
"At first, they had male female and eunuch in the electoral rolls and
the community objected. Even on passport forms, it was "m", "f", and
"e" and now it is "o" as we would want it to be. Now, all is good," he
said.
From "E", "O" is a long way forward. And Sheetal is excited to be at
the front of the drive for her community members.

Census 2011 reaches out to the disabled, NGOs pitch in their bit

2011-01-16T09:35:00.004-05:00

Finally, the government has turned its focus on enumerating the disabled in the country. With eight categories on multiple disability, the 2011 Census is being more inclusive of the diversity of disability.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on January 16, 2011.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, January 15, 2011

Sitting in one of the rows, Kshama Kakade Kaushik, a disabled rights activist from Ajmer, made a mental note of meeting the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's block resource teacher in order to sensitize her about the enumeration of the disabled in the 2011 Census questionnaire. Through the resource teacher, she would be able to tap the caregivers who have access to the remote rural areas and they can spread the awareness about “number 9” question on disability.

Kshama was among the disabled rights activists from across the country who had traveled to the national capital to discuss ways to raise awareness about the 2011 census' disability question, which has been moved to number 9 in the order from the 15 th spot it previously occupied in the 2001 census.

Besides, the commission has revised the number o categories from five to eight, enumerating mental illness and mental retardation separately and incorporating a category called multiple disability where one can enumerate upto three disabilities.

But what the activists are touting as a major development is the inclusion of a category called “Any other” where autism, dyslexia, Alzheimer's and any other disease that doesn't fit into the other categories can be listed.

In the 2001 census, where a question on disability was included for the first time after the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) and the Disabled Rights Group led by Javed Abidi lobbied hard for the inclusion of what they called the missing millions, the disabled people.

“The numbers of 2001 census on disability are all wrong. The truth is hiding somewhere between the percentages of 2.1 percentage and 10 percentage. We need to find it,” Abidi said.

In the last census, the five categories included seeing, hearing, speech, movement and mental disabilities. These left out disabilities like cerebral palsy, autism, etc.

But because of a lack of sensitization exercises for the enumerators and the people with disabilities and their families, a large number of disabled were not enumerated. According to the 2001 census, the percentage of the disabled in the country was pegged at 2.1 percent as against the United Nations estimates of 10 percent of the population in any developing country is composed of disabled.

Abidi said in the current census exercise which will begin from February 9, NGOs like AADI and Vishwas have been involved in training the enumerators on the disability question. An hour-long slot was dedicated to disability in the training of Census officials.

The NCPEDP has designed the Instruction Manual for Census 2011 Enumerators with the guidelines for the enumerators who would be the people on the ground conducting the surveys.

The training module urges the enumerators to ask the question.

“As an Enumerator you can make the difference! It is you who would be going to every house in the country. You will be the witness to the fact that people are there, they exist. You will report this data to the Government. It is this data that will be used for next 10 years for policy making, for resource allocation and for making facilities. It is therefore, in your hands to make the ‘invisible population’ ‘visible’!”

It goes on to list the disabilities and what to include and what doesn't qualify as a disability like a person with vision in one eye or a person who is color blind are not to be enumerated as disabled. Similarly, a person with hearing in one ear is not to be listed as a disabled.

But it makes it clear that short-statured persons or dwarfs are disabled in the category of “movement” and differentiates between mental retardation which it clarifies as a disability a person is born with and mental illness, which a person can acquire later.

It also asked the enumerators to not indulge in any discussions or counseling and to refrain from expressing disapproval in case a person talks about their disability. They are also instructed to keep the information confidential and convey it to the families so they don't shy away from listing their disabilities because of the social stigma.

With just three more weeks before the exercise begins, the NGOs and activists who met in Delhi at an event organized by AADI (Action for Ability Development and Inclusion) and NCPEDP brainstormed about what they can do to help raise awareness among the people.

Kakade, who works with the Mahila Kalyan Mandal, was among them.

“Information is key. We need to get the word out there. I came to get a perspective from the national capital,” she said. “In Rajasthan, transport is a an issue and traveling to remote rural areas is difficult so I am going to tap the SSA and the Local Level Committees in these areas,” she said.

Operating with a limitation of funds and resources, it would require reaching out to other NGOs in other sectors in states like UP and Bihar where there aren't many disability NGOs in order to spread the word, G Syamala, Executive Director of AADI, said.

“We have to see our strength is. We don't have much time,” Syamala said.

She said the solutions would depend on the cultural and regional context, too. For instance, in Rajasthan, Kathputli shows can be organized to raise awareness about the disability question. Besides, contacting local government officials, SSA teachers, youth organizations and role models could be useful in addition to organizing press conferences at the district level to involve the local media, which has a wider reach in the rural belt than the national dailies.

Several activists suggested ways to take the awareness campaign forward in order to get a significant proportion of the disabled enumerated so at the policy level, the numbers could be used to draft welfare schemes for the disabled as the politicians would be able to see what percentage of their vote bank consists of disabled and then work for them, according to Abidi.

Renu Anuj of AADI said solutions could be as simple as getting a chair and a table and sitting in crowded markets or railway stations in order to tap more people and making them aware or using the NREGA program officers to spread the word.

“Everyone knows their folk songs. We can use the Ramlila organizations. We just need to say disability is no curse and so come out and get enumerated,” she said.

"Tears without Onions"

2011-01-16T09:24:00.002-05:00

Why I love what I do is because it leads me to so many truths. Before going to Azadpur Mandi to write about the onion sellers I had no idea that they get paid Rs. 2 to carry a 55 kg sack of onions. This was my moment of truth and it keeps so many of us grounded.
An edited version of this appeared in the Indian Express Real Page 3 section on January 16, 2011.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, January 13, 2010

Sitting among the sacks of white and red onions, Suresh, a labourer at the Azadpur Mandi, is mourning what he feels is the impending death of its smell.

It lingers on, faint and fleeting, not so strong as before for ever since the supplies were hit, fewer trucks carrying onions have started coming in from Maharashtra.

He can't deal with the betrayal of the smell. It means loss of livelihood, and empty stomach on most nights.

“Out lives have been spent smelling the onions,” he said.

Ever since the rains damaged the crop and pushed up the onion prices along with the raids the government undertook to rein in profiteering by the traders, fewer trucks have lined up outside the Mandi, and his shoulders have carried lesser number of sacks than usual.

Work is less, and so is the money. Suresh, like others, earn Rs. 2 per sack. A few weeks ago, he was able to make around Rs. 200 per day. These days, it hardly touches Rs. 100.

“We can't send money home anymore. There is hardly any work,” he said.

The air outside the tin shed stacked with sacks of onions feels lighter, strange even. Sans the pungent odour of the onions, it felt bare to Suresh who has worked at Delhi's Azadpur Mandi for almost three decades. Like others, he lives there, too. Their belongings are hung on the poles or piled up against the wall.

Long ago his eyes stopped watering when the rancid smell struck them.

The smell has become part of his being in the 30 years he has spent loading and unloading sacks of onions, sleeping on the floor strewn with onions, and getting up with the sight of trucks stacked with onions lining up outside the Azadpur Mandi every morning.

The oppressive smell engulfs the floor space, the roof, all of it, permeates their bedding and a few rags that the daily labourers who live in the shed have hung on the poles.

“It's fragrance. We don't feel it,” Raju, another labourer, said.

But these past few weeks, the air inside has started to feel different. It is losing its strength, its character.

On Thursday, only 15 trucks lined up. Chaudhury Bhullan Singh's A-311, one of the 119 onion wholesale retailers at the Mandi, where Suresh works with six others. These are lean days for the group.

Before the onion crisis hit the markets, at least 300 trucks from Maharashtra carrying onions came to the Mandi early in the morning and Suresh and his men would rush to them, grabbing the sacks and running to and fro, breaking for lunch late in the day.

These days, work is over by afternoon. At A-311, they are lucky they have work, even if it pays little. At other shops, workers are sitting around, waiting for their trucks.

“We are stuck. There is nothing else we can do,” Raju, who hails from a village in Mau district in UP.

He came to the Mandi 12 years ago after he realized migration was a human reality for his lot. With shrinking farmland and droughts and increasing family size, he couldn't rely on the tiny piece of land he owned.

So, he got on to the Satyagrah Express and landed in the capital with a man from his village who said working at the Mandi would help his family get by.

Each morning, the seven of them get up, go to the nearby Raj Hotel for tea and snacks and start work.

The skin on Raju's left shoulder has hardened with years of carrying sacks weighing at least 55 kgs each.

It hurt once upon a time when he was new in the trade. Now, he feels no sensation.

“They have become like the skin of my heels,” he said. “Hard, and weathered. We are like mules but have no other chance in life.”

Their clothes have been rendered threadbare because of the coarse jute of the sacks that rubs with it for hours. The left shoulder looks a little tilted, a bit worn. But they have accepted their lot, and the potential damage to their limbs, as part of their daily drudgery.

Suresh studied until Class 10 in his village school but dropped out when he had to help the family.

When he came, he used to earn 35 paise per sack. In the last three decades, not much has changed in his life. The smell is the constant, and so is the numbness in his left shoulder.

“I don't know if I could do anything else. This is the only work I know,” he said.

There is a strange camaraderie among the men, who identify with their fellow's situation. Suresh divides the earnings of the day based on the numbers of sacks that have unloaded or loaded during the day among the seven.

For five weeks, ever since the onion supplies have taken the hit, they have been taking turns in sending money home, pooling in their savings to help a family that might need the money more than the others.

Suresh is the eldest. At 54, he is like the patriarch, the man who has kept them all together.

“This mandi is now home,” he said.

He has tried bargaining with the traders. But sans any unions, he hasn't been able to deliver on his promises. The increase per year is a paltry sum of 20 paise per sack that doesn't match the spiraling prices of basic commodities.

On most days, they debate if they should skip a meal and send money home instead. The dilemma is what is causing pain, and a few of them go hungry at times so their families don't suffer.

At less than Rs. 100 per day, it is pretty tight and they are hoping the crisis gets over so they can return to their usual lives even if means shooting pains in the shoulder and the back.

At his age, Suresh knows his shoulders won't last too long.

“We sell the strength of our limbs. There's no savings in this work,” he said. “But what's the alternative?”

Their work promises no social security, no perks, no bonuses. But there are onions they can pick up, the ones that have fallen on the floor in the chaos of the brisk buying and selling.

“That's the privilege,” Raju said. “But you still have to buy rice and vegetables and other things.”

For the MPs, by the MPs and of the MPs - a magazine for parliamentarians

2010-12-22T23:55:00.002-05:00

An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on December 23, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, December 13, 2010

This one's for the Members of the Parliament, by the members and of the members.

A magazine, due to be launched next month by the Constitution Club, will map the unknown side of the members, their quirks, their hobbies, and spread them across 28 pages.

This will be their space where they can write about what the other mainstream media won't explore, or cover, officials said.

Because even under the constant public stare, the eye, the representatives always had the other side, another dimension to their public life.

The magazine will make them more human to the public at large when the magazine, at some later date, starts selling at the stalls. Tucked into these pages, their personalities will span out beyond the tag of the policy maker.

In his own time, former Union Minister of State Vijay Goel likes photography. And that's a lesser-known fact about his life. South Mumbai MP Milind Deora strums the guitar in clubs because that's what he is passionate about.

Called the Central Hall, the magazine's editorial board will have journalists, editors and members, including HT Media's Sobhana Bhartiya, The Pioneer's Chandan Mitra and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, the BJP spokesperson and secretary of the Constitution Club, who will take turns to write columns.

“The purpose is to cover what media doesn't cover,” Rudy said.”This is the first of its kind. For 60 years in the history of the Constitution Club, we never had our own publication.”

In the works for more than six months, the magazine will be circulated among the members at first. But the officials plan to make it accessible to the public later.

The first issue of the monthly magazine will include an interview with Sharad Joshi, as well as a feature on Prakash Jadavekar’s wife Prachi, an academician, and how “an MP’s wife can make a difference to society in her own way”.

The reporting and writing will be done by the Club's research cell, Rudy said.

Each issue will consist of 5-6 features, including one on the Constitution. For instance, the lead feature for the first issue is on how does a bill become an act.

Members can write about their own experiences as well. Rajya Sabha Member Shahid Siddiqui has written a personal account of his experience of staging a play on the occasion of Children's Day and his take on the laws regarding child welfare in the country.

“We thought there needs to be a publication where parliamentarians can write about themselves rather being dependent on others. They together will own it,” a Constitution Club official said.

The cover has been designed by Anando Dutta, a visual designer who has designed logos for Tata Infotech using the cover of the Indian Constitution.

When it launches for the public, the cover will be redesigned, officials said.

“We are still in the decision-making stages. It took 50 years to come out with a magazine so we are taking it slow,” the official said.

The magazine also seeks to provide a forum where families of the members can interact and know more about each other by featuring them in its pages. Features will also cover their spouses, their children and their activities.

Besides adding a gym and a spa to the Constitution Club and organizing a car rally of the Parliamentarians, the magazine is the latest edition to the club's offerings to its members.

Love in the times of war - Parliament members come together for photo shoot

2010-12-02T22:02:00.003-05:00

Since we didn't get the permission to witness the event, we tried to reconstruct the scene here through people's memory and description of it. An edited version was published in the Indian Express on December 3, 2010.

Here is the full story.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, December 2, 2010

In the nine rows, as they sat or stood according to their designations, the hundreds of Members of Parliament and the ministers looked like school children posing for a group photo. They giggled, adjusted their clothes and poses, and smiled often.

Only the camaraderie that was infectious at the moment just before the session and the chaos that has been disrupting the work, was fleeting, only captured through the lens of a special camera.

Dressed for the photo shoot, a tradition, a ritual that would capture them in one frame, a visual record to be hung in the inner lobby of the Lok Sabha, the members reached before time, smiled too often, and cracked jokes.

The shoot was scheduled for 9:30 a.m.

No 2G scam was going to come in the way of their smiles as they looked into the camera that rotated, and clicked, capturing the moment for eternity.

For the South Mumbai MP Milind Deora, the session was bitter sweet, a reminder that all of them should take the sense of pride that they felt at the moment when the shutterbugs clicked farther than the stands.

“In a school photo shoot, you have different houses but you still come together for a larger purpose. That was missing. It didn't manifest itself in this session,” Deora said. “Last time, when it was my first photo shoot, it was not in the backdrop of this unproductive session. Why can't this happen everyday, why can't we let our sense of pride in belonging to this institution precede our differences and have constructive debates?”

As newly elected members, one of the first things they see are the photographs, hundreds of representatives smiling out of one frame, the sense of unity superseding the diversity, of the differences of political agendas.

It was the former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who first commissioned the group photo in 1956 and since then it has been a ritual, an institution in itself.

Gopal Krishan Datt, the photographer and son of late Anant Ram Dutt, who Nehru had asked to click the group photo way back in the 1950s, stood on the stone platform and dictated the photo session to the hundreds of ministers and Members of Parliament and ministers who teased him and in turn were made to smile by the photographer who has been shooting the group photos of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha members since 1967.

“People dress up. It is a special moment. I spoke with Farooq Abdullah and he was asking me when the photo would be ready,” he said.

It was a colorful frame, too.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, an MP from Bikane in Rajasthan, wore a multicolor turban saying he wore it to represent the hues of his state. After all, the photo is an expression of the people, too, and who they chose to represent them, an MP said.

Farooq Abdullah wore a black achkan, and a traditional Karakul topi, to showcase his Kashmiriyat, and Satabdi Roy, All India Trinamool Congress MP from Birbhum in West Bengal, veered away from her traditional churidars and kurtas to a saree for the shoot.

Many young MPs wore Nehru jackets like Varun Gandhi who wore a peach colored one, and Rahul Gandhi, who wore white kurta and pajama with a sombre Nehru jacket.

Among some of the best dressed for the occasion, according to a Parliament official who was present for the session that is done once every five years and for every Lok Sabha composition, were Dinesh Trivedi Trivedi, All India Trinamool Congress MP from Barrackpur in West Bengal who wore a formal bandh gala suit and Supriya Sadanand Sule, Nationalist Congress Party MP from Baramati in Maharashtra who wore a green silk suit.

Shiv Sena MP from Kalyan Anand Prakash Paranjpe chose to wear a suit complete with a tie for the occasion. It was his first photo session, a ritual he was looking forward to. In 2008 when he was elected, he didn't have the “privilege” to stand in the temporary stands, hidden from public view by boards put up in between the enclosures to give the moment the sanctity it deserves.

“I wear suits very often to corporate meetings. It is a really a privilege to be there among the 543 members. Everyone was there. It was a precious moment, everyone was happy, and it was one of the most memorable moments,” he said.

When he arrived at 9:15 a.m., the stands were already full. UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi in a blue and green saree and opposition leader and BJP member Sushma Swaraj in an ochre yellow saree were already seated in the front row meant for the cabinet ministers. There was excitement, buzz, and amity.

“People fight on the floor. But they are friends outside,” he said. “I thought suit was better. I don't wear typical politician dress. To stand in the photo gallery, it is really a privilege.”

There were new faces, too like Putul Devi, wife of Late JDU Leader Digvijay Singh, who contested on her own from Banka in Bihar and is now an elected independent member, one of the eight independents. She took the oath on Thursday and wore a cream saree for the occasion.

But as the photographer downed the shutters of an Eastman Kodak which Anant Ram, who was a photographer to the British officers and Indian royalty, b ought for Rs 100 in 1914 and has used since Nehru asked him to shoot the members in one frame, the members got off the stands, walked to their seats in the house and the scams and differences took over. But then, the moment, a rare one of smiles and handshakes, had been preserved.

Of day discotheques and neon lights - my lost decade in my state

2010-11-30T22:59:00.004-05:00

An edited version appeared in the Indian Express http://www.indianexpress.com/news/day-discotheques-in-patna/716915/ on November 27, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 26, 2010

That year, Ali wanted to change many things about Patna. He wanted the
boys and girls to dance to the music he would mix on the decks in a
restaurant with revolving neon lights, and a dance floor.
He wanted Patna, reeling under the lack of security for women and men,
to experiment with a day discotheque. Colleges shut at around 4 p.m.
The discotheque would close at 4:30 p.m. so girls and boys could come
in and dance and go home before the sun went down.
That was about a decade ago. Ali had spent a few months in Delhi,
Mumbai, Chandigarh, and wore anti-fit jeans and cool sweat shirts and
knew how to party.
He had rehearsed his role, too. He would play the DJ with headphones
plugged in his ears, a glass of beer on the side, and play his own
funky brand of music.
In those days, under the shadow of Lalu’s reign with his goons roaming
around, kidnapping women, raiding shops at will, we never partied at
clubs. In the evenings, we would sit at home and drink tea, or watch
television.
We all wanted some change, a break from the monotony of our routine
lives, from the oppressive fear that kept us indoors. We were young
and we wanted everything that everyone else in other cities had
access, too.
We wanted a discotheque even if it meant dancing under cheap neon
lights during the daylight hours.
Ali even managed to convince a restaurant owner to let him use the space.
He transported his equipment, huge speakers, a mixer, and headphones,
and we all sneaked out of the political science class, changed into
jeans, applied some cheap mascara and giggled at the prospect of going
to a disco.
I remember many students came. But the magic didn’t last. Towards the
afternoon, Ali could sense trouble was coming his way. The restaurant
owner, he told me, was anxious. This was dangerous. He was excited but
this was courting trouble.
The day discotheque shut.
Patna wasn’t ready for such adventures.
Lalu’s men were on the streets. They were indomitable, fearless, and lawless.
Those were the times I grew up in Patna, under the shadow of fear and
kidnapping. If I didn’t reach home by 4 p.m., my mother would start
calling up my friends’ homes, asking if I was ok.
We didn’t have cell phones then.
News was scary, too.
In July 1999, Shilpi Jain, my senior in Patna Women’s College, was
raped and murdered. They later dismissed it as a suicide. But
politicians were involved. On young politician refused to get his DNA
tested, saying he didn’t want to cooperate.
I had seen her at the coaching institute I attended to crack the MBA
examinations that morning. She was young, beautiful, and had been
crowned as Miss St. Joseph’s Convent at the farewell event.
The next day, the papers were full of tales of her grim, ruthless
murder. Her naked body had been dumped on some highway along with
Gautam Singh, her boyfriend. In 2003, the CBI closed the case terming
it as a suicide case.
But the infamous case had done its damage to our lives. We weren’t
allowed to have boyfriends, go out with friends, wear jeans with short
tops. It is better to be invisible in the strange times that we live
in, my mother had said then.
Fifteen years of my growing up years were filled with the fear of
rape, of being spotted, of desperately trying to get out of Bihar.
Those years were filled with longing, too, to do things that others
could with so much ease.
They used to call it “jungle raj”.
It was anarchy everywhere. Lalu engaged us all with his wit and we
laughed. But we also knew we were missing out on so much. There was
too much corruption. Roads were bumpy, shops downed their shutters by
8 p.m., and my father gave up on driving to Patliputra Colony on the
other side of the town for card parties because one night, he was
stopped by a bunch of men who demanded ransom and said he was on the
hit list.
Brain drain peaked in the state. Those who could get out, chose to
pack up and leave. A friend who had a franchise of Mahindra cars
relocated to Pune after men came and picked up cars from the showrooms
saying it was Lalu’s daughter’s wedding and they needed cars.
Caste barriers were enforced. We felt isolated. My family gave up on
the "Sinha" tag. We started using two first names so our caste doesn't
become our identity in a state that was showing the nation how to
divide and rule. My cousins are all a set of two first names. We were
the last of the "Sinha" surname in our family. A lot happened in those
15 years. Fear, and insecurity ruled all decisions.
I moved out in 2001. My mother would give me a list of instructions
before I took from Delhi or Mumbai to Patna, citing examples. There
were too many of those. A woman was drugged and her body was dumped at
one of the stations.
We never took the Rajdhani train to Delhi. It was packed with party
people, who clanked glasses, got drunk and created mayhem.
At the university, too many strikes became the order of the day. There
were strange men roaming the campus, saying they could do anything. I
went to a convent college, and was relatively safe. But my friends
faced issues. They dressed in plain clothes, tied their hair, anything
to avoid getting noticed.
On August 3, 2001, Pandora's Box, a discotheque, opened its doors.
This was yet another attempt to defy the system. It wasn’t Ali this
time but a young graduate named Aayush Sahay. But this was a day
discotheque. Nobody could risk late night brawls, etc.

But this too shut down. A local journalist told me gunshots were heard
inside the discotheque and it closed down a few months after it dared
to change the status quo.

Patna remained in its cocoon.

When I went home in 2008, after I moved back from the United States,
something had changed. Maybe just a little but it felt a lot easier
just going to the Patna Market on my own.

Then the floating restaurant opened and I went on it with my mother. I
saw many young girls and boys having a good time in the evenings. A
few malls had opened up. A lot more restaurants had opened up. They
looked fresh, full of life unlike the ones that had their waiters wait
it out for hours before people walked in. The fear was gone.
Someone asked me if I feel empowered with this spectacular win. I
don’t know if I feel empowered but I definitely feel safe and at ease
now.
Maybe Ali should come back and play his music now.
Maybe he is on to a banking career now, or maybe something else, like
all of us who just left when our moment came.
We had lost too much. Those 15 years, we felt imprisoned in our own house.
Maybe now is the time to return and reclaim our lost years in our home state.

More from memory ...
Not that everything is perfect in Bihar. But of course roads are
better, and the drive is no longer bumpy. I remember we drove to Ara
to my grandmother's place on weekends. It was a distance of perhaps
just 60 kms but on the potholed roads, it took us 2.5 hours. We
avoided leaving late from Ara and used to leave in the sweltering
afternoons during summers. Now, I hear those roads are nice and wide
and it takes only an hour. In those days, we only Maruti 800s and
Ambassadors, those bulky, heavy vehicles. Now, I see all sorts of
cars. People are not afraid to park more than one car in their
driveways. In those days, you'd be afraid to attarct too much
attention lest you got on the "hit list."
Doctors got kidnapped, young girls were picked up from Dusshera melas.
After a point, we ceased to go out and enjoy the melas through the
night. It became too tight for us to move around. It was like living
in some bubble. You knew your limits.
My mother still complains of the long power cuts in Patna. And people
complain of the power cuts at the crematoriums where half-burnt bodies
languishing in the furnace till the power comes back on, make a
mockery of the state and its upward swing on the development curve.
But I tell her that it is in the little details that we see the
change. In those days, there was only Lee Cooper. Now, we have all
brands. Now jewelry shops don't have an army of security men posted
outside the shop. Now, we go to the movies, the multiplexes and buy
popcorn and watch films without the fear. We had dared to go watch
Fire once at Ashok cinema. It was mad rush, and then they pushed us,
tried to grope us. We had to shout for help.
Once we went to watch DDLJ in a crumbling theatre in Ara. They told
the men to take the other side of the hall, and moved the women to the
other part. It was for security, they said.
In a theatre, in our boxes, once a man came and demanded my friend
accept his proposal. Then he went after her, and created a scene
outside her aprtment. He said he had political connections, and he
could get her picked up. My friend was married off in the next few
months. The family couldn't have dealt with the kidnapping stigma and
the shame.
Such were the times we lived in. We had dreams, too. But those 15
years of that fearful regime crushed those.
So I tell my mother she needs to see the change in little things, in
my smile, in my coffee dates with friends. Change is coming. It may be
slow but it will.
Then, we won't have to migrate, and we won't have to deal with the
hatred spewed upon us by the likes of MNS. Then, we will have our own
opportunities in our own state and the trains won't be so packed with
Biharis, the poor migrants, the rustic fellows, the unwanted,
invisible people, trying to leave a ravaged state to find livelihood
elsewhere.
Give him sometime to undo the damage done in the 15 years, I tell her.
From a sick state with so much to deal with, we are now a state on the
right track with young entrepreneurs willing to come back and invest.
We are going to be fine, I assure her.

Deft, nimble fingers

2010-11-17T22:53:00.004-05:00

The tragedy and its aftermath's spillover continues. As I stood outside the LNJP Hospital, I met this man who was trying to scan the board for more familiar faces. An edited version was published in the Indian Express on November 18, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 17, 2010

The child's deft, nimble fingers had been crushed under the weight of the building.
They didn't show on the photograph pasted on the board, one among the nameless 42 who had perished in the building collapse.

It was only a face, eyes shut, distorted. Blood that dripped from the forehead, or seeped from the bandage, was a shade darker on the gray scale photo.

Majju, 14, was the youngest among a group of young men, who traveled from Dhapra in Katihar a few months ago to barter the speed of their slender fingers that could bead artificial jewelry faster than adults, for a few hundred rupees. They stayed in a group, under the supervision of the contractor who had promised them the moon, or what looked like a first step towards a better bargain at life. They came from the very marginalized families in the village, the poorest of the poor.

Abdul Bari almost missed the crushed face of Majju, ashen and grim, pasted in the third row of the board outside LNJP Hospital where the victims of the Lalita Park mishap had been brought.

He was third in the row. The first was 23-year-old Arshad, who also hailed from Dhapra. But Bari, who works in a garment manufacturing unit in Mehrauli, could not put together a whole face from the crushed features on other photos. He kept scanning the board for familiar faces. Out of the 10, only two were adults and over the age of 18 years, Bari said.

Eight of the ten in the group of mostly minors whose fingers worked for hours threading beads into threads, making jewelry that was exported to foreign countries, had died. Their fingers mangled and reduced to pulp with the disaster that killed more than 67 people, and injured many others.

“The contractor is also injured. We found the bodies here. They are in the mortuary. We will leave tomorrow for Katihar,” Bari said.

It would be a journey spanning hours. Almost 24 hours by train to Katihar, and then local transport till they reach Dhapra, where wailing mothers and sisters are waiting to bid the final farewell, the village mourning its loss and poverty, and its fate.

On the board, the faces of children, innocent even in their painful death, stood out. There were side profiles, and a few captured their faces turned towards the camera.

Of the 67 reported to be dead, 21 are minors, or under the age of 18 years. The youngest to die in the collapse is a one-and-a-half-year-old child. Then there is a three-year-old and a four-year-old, too. Most of the children who died were at home when their mothers had gone to their work at the nearby, more affluent houses. That's when the tragedy struck, and that's when then the dark thumb of fate pressed them to dust and rubble.

Most of who died were under 40 years of age, mostly labourers. Of the 42 that were brought dead to LNJP, only three were above 40 years.

In the drizzle, the mortuary seemed a dark, dreary place. The faces, now on A 4 size paper, were pasted on the wall. Relatives, friends, acquaintances crowded under a parapet, under the photos. They had recognized their dead. No paperwork was required. One just had to get the series of number handwritten on the photos and take those to the mortuary, claim the bodies, and wait it out.

The smell of stale blood filled the passage as a Mithilesh's body emerged from the back, the dark chamber where many such bodies lay. His brother-in-law was pushing the stretcher. Its steel was splattered with blood, the sheets reddened.
At least 29 bodies from the ramshackle building that fell Monday night lay there, waiting to be identified, or taken away. Another 26 were languishing in various departments in the hospital, a few in the ICU even. No more deaths were reported from the hospital on Wednesday.

According to the Medical Superintendent Dr. Amit Banerjee, 20 bodies had been identified by 3 p.m. The hospital had put up photos of the men, women and children because most families that lost their kin were illiterate, could barely make out the letters. Their eyes could only recognize the features, the shape of the familiar faces.

Most children died because of haemorrhage and asphyxiation as they lay crumpled, and crushed under the debris.

“Their families have been informed. Some of their relatives are here. It will be a sad journey, taking bodies of children to their parents who never anticipated this,” he said. “But they were so poor. The contractor would only take children.”
It was all about the deft fingers, the speed at which they wove together the beads. Now, they had been rendered lifeless, a pulpy mix of flesh and blood, and dead.

BOX

The census of India reported 12.66 million working children.

But agencies like The Global March and the International Center on Child Labor and Education (ICCLE) estimate that here are roughly 25-30 million child workers in India. Human Rights Watch pegs the number at 100 million.

According to the UN case study of the Delhi garment industry, poor, first generation industrial workers are recruited by contractors known as thekedars from rural areas as migrants do not unionize and can be exploited.
Many of these migrant workers are Muslim boys and young men from Bihar who work in small units in and outside Delhi. They are the invisible links in the in the global supply chain.
The case study also reveals that these children work up to 12 or more hours a day and work all seven days of the week.
They live in “extremely difficult and dangerous conditions”.

Remnants in the rubble

2010-11-17T00:38:00.003-05:00

The building collapsed and we were at the site where I couldn't just walk away from the rubble. Leftovers from lives can tell one so much about people who once owned these. An edited version was published in the Indian Express on November 17, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 16, 2010

A red saree, or what remained of it, fluttered in the breeze. An Amul milk packet, torn, peeped from the chinks in the pile. Too much of everyday life that was consumed in seconds was there. A clock that stopped at the hour when the tragedy struck was among the objects that were slavaged, not by choice, but because they were part of the debris.

Between the tragedy and the resurrection, a pile of rubble lies. It is a connector of sorts, a bridge between the remnants of the past and an uncertain future.

From the bricks the crane spewed on to the playground as the officials cleared the debris on the site of the collapse, emerged details of lives that had been uprooted, lost or left in a limbo. They fell with the bricks just like the five-floor building in the corner did Monday evening.

The pink pillars, measuring only the size of an index finger, had been struck off. But the figurines in the wedding snow ball were intact. The crystal globe with its pink and black hero and heroine dancing lay on a pile of bricks, illuminating the loss. The broken pillars reminded of the immediate event, the tragedy that sent reverberations across the neighborhood.

In the juxtaposition of the joy that was when the snow ball may have occupied a place of pride in the dinghy rooms where men and women slept in dozens, and the present moment where it was a part of the ruins, summed the human tragedy that left more than 65 people dead, and displaced hundreds of others. The tension between what remained, and what was lost played out in the rubble.

In the shattered, mangled remnants, lives had been trapped.

A kettle, lopsided in its tragic placement, was thrown on the side. Next to it, a few plates were strewn. A gas stove, blackened and distorted, also filled the space as rescue workers and police scrambled to get to the actual site. The rubble was on the way, neglected in a corner, a space where such things collected.

A few leaves from an album was found, too. A mother and a son are shot against the backdrop of a fir tree and turquoise skies, and blossoming flowers. A studio in one of the villages they must have hailed from. They said it was Karimpur in Bengal.

The mother is sitting in a red plastic chair. The son is standing, his face tense as he gazed into the camera.

From the rubble, voices also emerged, pleas for help, they said.

The ones under the heap dialled from their cell phones. They were desperate to claim their lives, get rescued before the battery died, or before they died.

The rescue workers talked about a woman who called someone. She was buried. But that was in the morning. After that, she didn't call.

Nobody knew what happened to her. Maybe the rrubble consumed her and she became a remnant of the rubble, too.

Through the afternoon, and the evening, the rubble piled up. More stories, not a coherent whole, but scattered and thrown apart and told through notebooks, passport photos, torn clothes, and distorted kitchen utensils, emerged from the heap of bricks.

Vikram Halder's English notebook was placed on a bed of bricks. It had been arranged carefully, and juxtaposed with the snow ball, and yet another notebook of a Class 12 student of the Govt. Co-ed Senior Secondary School.

A few members of the television crew had arranged them to show the scale of the tragedy, and its toll on aspirations, dreams, opportunities.

In one of the pages, Mukesh, the Class 12 student, had written “Who told you this news? What harm did I do to you?”

A child's innocent drawings, his jibes at his classmates and teachers were now a public spectacle, a photo-op, part of material that could tell a story of someone who either had come out alive, or had perished or maybe was still waiting under debris to be rescued.

On the same page, a lined notebook, oblong, Mukesh wrote “Memoirs of a childhood.”

Under it, he wrote “agony” and then in Hindi, he wrote “Afsos.”

On yet another page, he scribbled “Today when I am not there, then everybody want me.”

Towards evening, nobody had come to claim the notebooks. A passport photo of a young boy was in the pages. But in the confusion of who was and who wasn't, the name and the photo were separate identities, and existed without the other.

He had sketched portraits, pigeons, dogs. He had meticulously translated sentences in Hindi into English. He even had a teacher write “good” on a few pages.

He must have been fumbling for words when he wrote “There are some strangers that cross that river.”

What he was meant to write instead of “strangers” was “fishermen.”

But in that moment, in that confusion of loss, many strangers had crossed the river. Nobody could tell if Mukesh and Vikram were among them, or they had been cast on the shore.

Obama's tribute to Gandhi

2010-11-09T00:15:00.005-05:00

Went to Rajghat in the morning to se Mr. President. Was whisked away, made to sit under a store parapet, a rifle pointed towards me lest I jump and wave to Barack Obama. Made it to Rajghat later, and saw the signs of his visit.
An edited version appeared in the The Indian Express on November 9, 2010.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/king-memorabilia-for-rajghat-is-tryst-with-his-heroes/708417/

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 8, 2010

In his fluid handwriting, his two sentences sprawled across five rows of the visitor's notebook. A sweeping signature, with its “B” and “O” rising above the other letters, marking their prominence, also cut through five rows. Underneath it, the First Lady Michelle Obama wrote her name.
Four years ago, on March 2, George and Laura Bush had visited the site, a simple black marble platform on the right bank of the river Yamuna with an eternal flame at its back, too. Their two-line tribute was spread across the page. Bush, the former president, Obama's predecessor, had placed Gandhi among the “great leaders” of history for his “contribution to all mankind.”
A decade ago, Bill Clinton paid homage to the slain Father of the Nation with a single sentence “Thank you for keeping this sacred place.”
At around 10:30 am on Monday morning, the president, his wife in tow, entered through the VIP Gate at Rajghat, and walked towards the black stone. The green carpets had been laid out as the protocol for dignitaries required. Two velvet chairs had been placed side by side. The couple sat, removed their shoes, and walked barefoot to the memorial, a white wreath in front. Green tarpaulin sheets hid the world from those who were present in the morning, lending the place a solemn, surreal look, isolating it from the issues that waited outside. This was a personal moment, and the curtains ensured the world didn't spill over.
They stood in silence for a minute, and walked back. Four times, the president uttered “very simple and beautiful memorial.”
For Obama, the man who was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, for his efforts to bring about peace, his connection with Gandhi runs deep. This wasn't a head of state marking a visit to a man the world recognizes as a great leader but a man paying his homage to the leader he proclaims has influenced him.
Towards the end of his 20-minute visit to the memorial, Obama sat in the brown velvet upholstered chair, a lone one placed in the foreground of the Mahatma's samadhi, its back facing the black stone covered with flowers and a wreath made of carnations and lilies and tied together with a ribbon of the US flag colors, and scribbled a tribute to the “Great Soul.”
“More than 60 years after his passing, his light continues to inspire the world.”
On Saturday when he landed in Mumbai, Obama had walked into the two-storey building on Laburnum Road, the Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya, a museum that contains memorabilia and more than 50,000 books. Almost half-a-century ago, Rev. Martin Luther King, yet another world hero for Obama, had spent two days at the building with his wife Coretta King.
In a gold box, with the Eagle emblem of the United States embossed on it, Obama carried a stone from the memorial being built at the National Mall, Washington D.C., and is being funded by the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation to revere Martin Luther King, also the first black man and the third non-president to be commemorated with a memorial in the National Mall area. He presented it to Rajnish Kumar, the secretary of Rajghat Samadhi Samiti, who received him in the morning.
“I could see it in his eyes, his admiration for Gandhi. I can read from the expression,” he said. “He is a follower. No guest is small but he is more influenced with Gandhi.”
On behalf of the Samadhi Samiti, the President was gifted with a Charkha procured from Kerala Emporium, a scroll with the seven sins written on them, a bust of Gandhi, and three books – an autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi called The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, and Mahatma Gandhi 100 Years.
As he sat writing his tribute, Michelle leaned over. According to Rajnish Kumar, the First Lady's excitement was contagious. She had gasped saying “very beautiful” when the marble stone loomed in front of her.
She later sat on the chair her husband had occupied and signed her name.
As the couple walked out, the champa tree that Bill Clinton had planted, and the mango tree that George Bush Senior had planted, flanked the path. These are among the 200 trees planted by various dignitaries.
On Monday, Obama didn't plant ant saplings. They say there is no space. But the stone that he brought combining his love for the two great leaders, bringing the tangible memory of one to the memorial of the other, will be kept in the office. That would be his mark, a testament to his visit to the testament of the life of who he referred to as his “real hero”.
Just when he was about to step in his car, Rajnish Kumar said to the President “In our culture, we always say come again and never say bye.”
Obama laughed.

On the way to Rajghat

As the cavalcade started to move again, life bounced back to its usual chaotic self. A few staff that were confined to the offices during the visit came out. They were packing away the velvet chairs, folding the carpets. A group of European tourists descended on the Samadhi.
“It ain't that speacial,” Vannoten Reno, a Belgian man, said. “I mean, he just visited.”
But for others, it was unusual like the policemen who reported for duty at 5 a.m. or the Rajghat staff that worked through the night decorating the samadhi, hanging the garlands, making the sun logo with white, red and yellow flower petals on the shrine.
From silence, a forced one, cacophony, almost a suppressed shriek that crackles at first, emerged. And then it was all honks, human voices, and usual sounds of life in a metro, and everyone in a hurry.
From behind a park, and underneath the parapets of store fronts near Delhi Gate, a group of men and women rushed to the street. They had been whisked behind the trees, and made to sit without talking, by the Delhi Police officers on duty who panicked about the security.
After all, it was Obama. The nation's promise and pride were at stake. Civilians walking around, scrambling to get to office and avoid the traffic blues, had to be restricted.
At 10:11 a.m. when the cavalcade moved along the deserted, silent streets of Daryaganj and Rajghat areas, a woman stood up.
“Wow, so many cars,” she shouted.
The policeman rattled his gun.
“No, you can't get up. Don't talk,” he said, his face tense.
“This is pandemonium,” Subhashini Rajan, who works at the nearby Oriental Insurance office, said. They say India is on the front page of the US nespapers but I wonder for how long. We have this colonial mentality.”
A harried policeman came running and shouted “shant raho”.
“In a free country, you can't do this,” Bharti Gupta, another woman who waited it out squatting on the sidewalk said. “We should move Rajghat out of Delhi or build a helipad so Obama can directly land there and not get us stranded here like this.”
This was their brush with the President of the United States. At least they walked through the same streets that he wad crisscrossed a few minutes earlier. They didn't need to see him. He was there, and they were witness to it, even though their gaze was interrupted by a rifle.

As he fell, he rose in stature - India's first BASE Jump

2010-10-30T00:32:00.003-04:00

Long ago I had read Tom Junod's The Falling Man and feel the way he describes the descent of the man from the burning Twin Towers is unparalleled. I was asked to write about the jump in this case. It took a few seconds for the man to land on the greens but in those few seconds, a lot happened. An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on October 30, 2010. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Fall-and-rise-of-India-s-first-BASE-jumper/704754/

This one's about the jump, and how he fell from the tower, the way I wrote it and I saw it.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 29, 2010

The tower looked like a needle that shot up to the sky from the earth
– lean, cowering, and intimidating. At 235 meters, everything looked
puny in front of it, including the man who was to jump from the top,
who was reduced to a dot in the context of the looming tower.
On top of it, at the platform 158 meters from the ground where
spectators lined up early morning to see the “fall”, he hesitated for
a mere two minutes. The winds were rough.
On Thursday, Lt. Col. Satyendra Verma, 42, had felt a little nervous.
His BASE jump, the first in India, was part of the centenary
celebrations of the Corps of Signals, Indian Army. He had proposed the
feat, trained for it, and it was a few hours away.
“I had apprehension. I have jumped from Kuala Lumpur KL Tower, which
is more than 900 feet. But the higher the structure, the less the
danger because then you have time to react and plan. Pitampura tower
was a challenge,” he said. “The winds were strong last evening. I
thought if it continues in the morning, I won’t jump.”
He took the elevator to the top of the structure at 5:30 a.m. Friday.
The jump was scheduled at 6:15 a.m.
“The winds were strong,” he said. “I was hoping the winds calm down
even for a few seconds. I would use the window of opportunity.”
It was man against the force of nature. Man on a mission to prove he
is bigger than his creation, in this case, the tower that formed the
backdrop, the focal point of his base jump. He needed to conquer the
fear, the tower, the nature, and the spectators.
At 6:17, he jumped. A tiny bird falling in the sky, vertically.
For a fraction of a second, his feet swerved. He drifted towards the
left where a eleven storey building stood. For a fraction of a second,
in the space of the blink of the eye, nature took over. If he hadn’t
manoeuvred, harnessed his will and the parachute, he could have hit
the walls, brick and mortar.
“The winds were coming from right hand side. The parachute went in the
direction of the wind. So I had to correct,” he said. “You have to
maintain your body position. Once you tumble, it can be dangerous.”
The winds did shake him a bit. But he managed to get vertical again.
And in his fall, he rose in stature.
At about 120 meters from the ground, after about 2 seconds after he
jumped of the platform, Col Satyendra Sharma pushed the button to open
up the parachute. The green and blue parachute gave him wings. The
gravitational pull, another force of nature, was defeated.
He rose, the green and blue fluttering above him, and he fell. The
steep jump transformed into a slow motion gliding almost. If he hadn’t
opened the parachute, it would have taken all of 4 seconds for him to
hit the ground. The wings broke the speed. He drifted for 15-20
seconds before he landed.
Legs down, he drifted in the sky, the tower behind him, despite the
“environment forces”. He was carried by the wind, and then it was an
effortless fall that started with a determined “jump”.
He landed gently, and before his feet touched the ground, cameras had
already surrounded the first man to ever jump from the high rise
tower.
His wings lay collapsed. As he walked towards the “picture frame”, a
board celebrating the centennial of the Signals, he carried the blue
and green wings that looked like a mutilated butterfly. On his helmet,
the Indian tri colour was pronounced. Two cameras too had been fixed
to it to capture what the earth looked to him from his height as he
fell.
It all took a few seconds. Groggy-eyed photographers and reporters
gasped. A few missed the spectacle. He jumped while they were still
walking towards the spot. Cameras secured in their backpacks, they
looked up, and in moments, the spectacle ended.
The tower looked forlorn. Its height, pride had been breached. It had
been subdued by human endeavour and spirit.
On top of the building, men and women had collected to watch him jump.
“It happened like ‘dhurrrr’ and it was done. Maybe 6-7 frames. That’s
all I got. The light wasn’t too good,” a camera person said.
When he jumped, the skies were a dull grey and orange. Minutes after
Verma attempted India’s first BASE jump, the sun came out. And he had
his moment under the sun, with shutterbugs clicking at the speed of
light.
His family – wife Monika and a son, 9, and daughter, four-and-a-half
years – weren’t there to witness his free fall.
“I think she was scared,” Verma said, as he laughed.
Verma has trained in Kuala Lumpur and has performed BASE jumps at KL
Tower in Malaysia and Perrine Bridge in the USA.
Now, he wants to attempt wing flying in the Himalayas next year. He
started training in BASE jumping a year ago but has been involved in
adventure sports for a long time.
“It is adrenaline rush. It is a thrill from conception to planning.
You get a great satisfaction,” he said.
At the lawns of the TV Tower, a few staff from the DD were standing.
For three months they had been roped in to facilitate the event, JR
Arora, station engineer, said..
Cameras had been installed at the ramp on top of the tower on Thursday
night. Each moment of the free fall had to be captured, history had to
be manufactured through the lens.

In the Ramlila green room - Gods in the making.

2010-10-24T09:36:00.004-04:00

I had never watched Ramlila so I went to the Red Fort grounds one evening to watch the epic being enacted. Found my way to the green room and spent time chatting with gods in the making.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, October 12, 2010

It took a few strokes of the brush, and greasy Camlin Oil Colour, to transform the mortal into the God he was to play. They were still using the old techniques. Black oil colour was best to paint moustaches, and dye eyebrows. This was in epic proportions, a morality play of good over evil, the characters had to be "done up" likewise.

Bhaskar Joshi, 23, a management student from Moradabad, was almost in a trance. Once in a while he liked to step into God's shoes. At 23, that was his high. With his lips painted bright red, and mascara loaded eyelashes, he felt beyond the mundane. The Ramlila was his arena. Here, he would weep, sacrifice, kill, forgive, repent, lament, go through all emotions and bring God to the masses.

Last year, the President folded her hands in front of the epic hero of the Ramayan. That was it. Other mortals would fall at his feet, look up at him with moistened eyes brimming with hope, prayer, devotion, everything.

He felt like the avatar. In the green room with its gauzy pink curtains, and tin trunks overflowing with God's garb, he sat with a coterie of friends, including Hanuman,who wore his shades and called him “Prabhu”. Hanuman had no business hanging around in the greenroom. Tonight, it was Manthra-Kaikeyee Samvad, a part of the epic that told the story of how the queen went into her “warth palace” as it was explained in a notebook designed especially for foreigners who the organizers expected would come by the dozen, and Ram's exile.

In the little tent that looked like a square box, fortified against mosquitoes that could spread the Dengue fever, something the foreigners were wary of as they poured into the national capital for the Commonwealth Games, with rectangular glass windows for viewing, a few Indians, mostly the privileged, sat. The Lav Kush Ramlila Committee had put up this little enclave with seating for 50 for the Germans, French, Australians, Kenyans, everyone that was not Indian. This was their commitment to merging the epic tale with yet another epic event – the CWG.

Indians were mostly confined to the grounds with its army of mosquitoes.

“We are habituated to this. We don't mind,” a committee member said. “Yesterday, a couple of Africans were in the tent watching the Ramlila. The notebook has all details of embassies and illustrations and maps. We have worked hard on this.”

Besides Ram and Sita, Shera, the official mascot, was prominent on the posters, on the little coffee mugs they had designed as part of the welcome kit for the people beyond the seas so they could take home the lessons from the epic.

Next to Joshi, Neha Vashisth, a 21-year-old “fresher” from the Uttar Pradesh town, was waiting to get her face painted. Among the various gods and his family, she, who was to play Sita, the wronged goddess who triggered the battle because Ravan, the anti-hero took a fancy for her, was looking too brown, too mortal.

Ram preferred this Sita. The other one who he acted with for the last three years got married. Besides, she looked much older than him. Neha was younger and he thought they looked together.

“He is handsome. He has good personality. I like him as Ram,” she said, blushing. “No, no affair between us.”

“I like this Sita,” Ram said, unabashed by Sita's denial.

Maybe there is an affair. All sorts of things happen when Gods and humans interchange roles. Million possibilities can arise.

For the Ramlila committee too, possibilities have come marching. Now, they are streaming live telecast of the nine parts of the epic on their website www.lavkush.com. Besides, a team of public relations strategists have totally delved into pitching faith to all. Already , 2200 members have joined the Facebook page. Big leap of faith for all.

They aren't twittering yet. In the server room at the back of the giant stage, there are laptops, entangled wires, harried staff.

They are trying to connect, merge the new and the old. Faith needs to be revived, sold in a package with freebies.

With Commonwealth Games consuming the imagination of the young and the faithless, they have a strategy too. Instead of Bollywood stars who the committee called to attract more public, this year they have banners with faces of the known Indian sports persons like Sania Nehelwal, Abhinav Bindra, and Vijendar, the boxer, a pin-up poster boy for the young girls who go gushing over his looks.

“Today, things have changed. Today Ramlila is standing with the country in its glorious moment of hosting the CWG. We are with it. We sent out 5 lakh invitations, we are into technology, everything,” Arjun Kumar Singh, 55, the “permanent” secretary of the committee, said.

For 31 years, he has been involved with promoting the faith, the values that the epic endorses through its characters.

As a kid, he watched the numerous small neighborhood Ramlilas.

“Ramlila is the solution to mankind's problems, to disintegrating families. They only need to learn from Ram and his brothers Bharat and Lakhsman the virtues of sacrifice, how to keep families together,” he said.

Arjun Kumar is in the construction business. Each year, he digs into his wealth like 20 others who are associated with the committee and funds the extravaganza at the Red Fort grounds.

It cost the committee Rs. 1 crore this year.

On the stage, Manthra was convincing the queen Kaikeyee to send Lord Ram into exile so her own son could get to rule Ayodhya. At 9:11 p.m., a power cut froze King Dashrath. At the moment, he was crouching on the floor, overcome with sadness and the price of his promise to his beautiful queen.

Manorama Joshi, who enacted the stepmother, was in her element. For a few seconds, she didn't move. Then she looked around, adjusted her hair, and took in the audience.

In the greenroom before it all started, the start of the 14-year-old exile and the making of the epic, Manthra stood, trying to fit a pillow in her already-bursting velvet bustier. For 32-year-old Sanjay Sharma, who always wanted to be an actor and even spent time lounging outside the filmistan studio in Mumbai hoping that someone would take notice of his acting talent, playing Manthra was a challenge.

For 12 years since he first got on to the stage and felt liberated, he had played the character of Lakshman, Lord Ram's brother, who accompanied him into the exile.

In Lakhman's character, he felt like a Black Cat Commando in his element. Once, the commandos gave him a thumbs up.

“There's anger in me. Lakshman was an angry man. In my life, I have anger too. He was also committed to sacrifice. I wanted to make my father, a railway official, proud of me, but he passed away. There's so much I wished for. But wishes are elusive beings. They never come true,” he said, chewing paan masala, holding his saree while the director fixed his hair.

“You see, I can do roles that no man here can. I can become this scheming Manthra. Why not,” he said.

The Ramlila was not just about faith then. It was also about pent-up frustration, broken dreams, crushed aspirations, and an outlet for the creative, artistic urge that never found a footing the other grand stage, the Bollywood.

Rishi Pal, in his white wig, was counting the beads he held. In his Saint Vashishth role, he felt he was doing great service to the cause of religion that was soon exiting the human mind and soul.

The 55-year-old has been part of the Ramlila for 40 years. The committee pays the artists a lump sum and bear their expenses for the 11 days that they are in Delhi, giving the national capital its tryst with gods.

“Ramlila has changed. Now, we don't wear garish makeup. It is more like Bollywood makeup but then the artist can come out more. The dark makeup hid the expressions,” he said. “Religion is important. I am doing my bit for it.”

Outside, in the barricaded seats, 32-year-old Satish Kumar, a Bihari migrant worker, sat engulfed with an overdose of faith and gods. Each time, Ram came on stage, he would fold his hands, utter small prayers that had remained unfulfilled.

“I come everyday. For me, he is god incarnate,” he said.

As Kaikeyee stomped and kicked and threw her bangles and beads that looked more like the Mardi Gras pink and green beads in her fit to have Dashrath announce her own son as the king, Kumar looked crestfallen. Of course he knew this was coming. But for god to go through all this, it wasn't a nice thing, he said.

On the periphery, there were food stalls. A woman in a bikini smiled from one the advertisemnts. Too many advertisements dotted the Ramlila landscape.

Rahul, a 12-year-old volunteer in his white trousers and shirt, was busy checking passes. For the last four years, he had been part of the Ramlila Committee as a volunteer. This was his service to go for a better life, a job, too.

“We are only sewaks,” he said. “God will give blessings.”

On the stage, Ram was preparing for his ordeal. The audience was “tch tch” on his plight. But the story had to go on. It would go on.

Kaikeyee, in her “warth palace” and in her black saree, had won the round. Dashrath lay slumped on the floor.

Manthra was busy chewing her gutkha inside. He had totally killed it. It was kick-ass, his performance.

Meanwhile, Shera looked a misfit in the battle of the evil and the good.

Going hi-tech, the future of Ramlila

An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday Eye magazine of The Indian Express. on Oct. 24, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 19, 2010

Squeezed in between the Yellow Sea and the East Sea, the red dot showing Ramlila viewership seemed an anomaly.

Arjun Kuma Singh, the 55-year-old organizer, looked again. Yes, they were watching online Ramlila in South Korea. Total adrenaline rush.

Singh was kicked. His investment of Rs. 10 lakhs on making one of the oldest Ramlilas in the country, the Lav Kush Ramlila Committee, hi-tech by installing a separate server in the backroom, setting up a technical team headed by his son, invading the social networking website www.facebook.com and making Lord Ram a Facebook celebrity too, had paid off.

“Online Ramlila, live telecast is the only alternative to continue the faith. Else, all be lost. South Korea surprised me the most. Imagine, they were watching the live telecast there too,” Singh said.

On Monday, after eleven days of telecasting Ramlila with the help of three cameramen and six others, Singh was sitting with the Tata Communication Server representatives to discuss feedback. More than six lakh hits in 11 days on the committee’s website www.lavkush.com and it was from all over the world. The seas, the mountains, the
enmity, the foreign relations, all of those didn’t come in the way of Lord Ram making way to the thousands of screens worldwide at the click of the mouse.

Viewership spanned America, Dubai, Canada, England, South Asian countries and Gulf countries. Last year, they broadcast live the eleven parts of the grand narrative but it was through broadband and it was a failure like with other Ramlila committees too that were trying to go hi-tech, Arjun Kumar said.

This year, they connected the uudio and video input to a computer complete with a special software to stream the telecast online at Tata Communication Server through high speed internet connection. The streaming is then picked up by several servers located across the globe. Organizers said buffering would be no issue as the telecast can be viewed with as low as 250 kbps speed connection.

But on facebook, several members had issues with the buffering. As the battle between Sri Ram and the demon king Ravan, who abducted the god’s wife Sita, technical glitches as one tried to connect to the online Ramlila in Bhopal caused the sword to be stalled in the air.

Hanuman, the monkey god, was fixated in his antics as he flew in the skies. It was buffering, the epic.

But datacards weren’t capable of handling the war of epic proportions.

Speed was crucial. But of course the organizers are brainstorming on how to make it better next year. Even the effigies are going to be fitted with gadgets and gizmos and special effects so the charm in unparalleled like how Ravan effigy had tears in his eyes and had tape recorders fitted in his mouth for high-strung shrieks that seemed as if the effigy had suddenly turned human with all the attributes.

“You see, we did it for the first time. Now, we will go on twitter, other such sites. We needed to attract youngsters and empty stalls were an issue. We had been researching all through the year. We got calls from London, America asking us to come there and stage the Ramlila. All this was because we decided to go onine in a big way,” Arjun Singh said. “Hi-tech Ramlila is the way. This is the only
alternative.”We are the first ones to sue this separate server technique. There is only a 10-second telecast delay. Others have buffering issues because they are using broadband.”

It is not just the Lav Kush Ramlila Committee that decided to harness the powers and scope of Internet, but others too like the Nav Shree Dharmik Leela Committee that decided to integrate technology with spirituality and are present on Twitter, Orkut and Facebook.

Lord Ram needs networking, a viewer said.

“Facebook is crucial for his status. We need status updates from gods,” he said.
In just about a week, the viewership burgeoned to hundreds, then thousands came on board.

“More than 50,000 are watching every day. We are getting professionals to act in the Ramlila. We have a team of 10 people who are dedicated to make this online Ramlila a hit,” Piyush Agarwal, who is in charge of the technical team, said. “Because of facebook we got connected to 6,000 youth.”

Arjun Singh was already recieving calls from people in Pakistan, Canada, USA thanking him for the live telecast of Ramlila. He was happy. Maybe next year, they'd do more. The empty stalls at the Red Fort grounds didn't dampen his spirits. Server problems were proof that virtual stalls were full of the faithful and the curious. It was all god's grace, he said.

It took a few strokes of the brush, and greasy Camlin Oil Colour, to transform the mortal into the God he was to play. They were still using the old techniques. Black oil colour was best to paint moustaches, and dye eyebrows. This was in epic proportions, a morality play of good over evil, the characters had to be "done up" likewise.

The “godliness” had to be applied carefully, keeping in tandem with the changing times. Now, it is more “Bollywood” with glittering, shimmering eyes, defined lips, highlighted cheekbones. Sita looks uber cool in her matted makeup, her lips painted bronze.

To keep up with the times, the Lav Kush Ramlila Committee has expanded its space and it is not just the sprawling grounds of the Red Fort that it occupies, but virtual space too. Live telecast through a separate server so the net is cast far and wide, across the seas and mountains, and quite a following on the social networking site
www.facebook.com are how the organizing members of the committee, one of the oldest in the country and established in 1979 in Delhi, ensured the tradition survives. Such traditions can’t be in isolation. They must be integrated with the technology for survival, the members said.

The website, www.lavkush.com, where the live telecast of the epic in 11 parts is being played, has registered more than 6 lakh hits already. On www.facebook.com, there are upwards of 6,000 members who “like” the group.

It is not just the Lav Kush Ramlila Committee that’s into harnessing technology and the worldwide web for expanding its reach to millions of youngsters and others elsewhere in the world, who can’t be present in the stalls to watch the actors playing their parts in the centuries old epic, but hundreds of other such organizations too that are increasingly becoming tech-savvy to ensure the continuity of a tradition that many feel could well become extinct if not promoted on the virtual space. After all, Ramlila isn’t just about tradition but also about one’s moral duty towards faith and its survival despite the distractions of the modern world, members said.

On its facebook page, discussions are on in full swing.

One Sukhbir Soni wrote “I am very happy to see The great Indian role history on line Thanks.” Others too expressed their gratefulness online. This tryst with online Ramlila was way too cool.

This online approach was inclusive, it was all-encompassing. This is where physicals, externals melted and only spiritual remained.

For years, the traditional art form demanded the actors stuck to the morality play rules, apply makeup that also reflected the good or evil in them for this was Ramayan, and not Mahabharat where the hero was a tragic one with redeeming qualities. Here, it was clearly good and evil.

But as with the online crossover, adoption, adaption, other cosmetic changes too have changed the art form. Previously, there were seasoned actors whose faith made them join the moving committees from small towns in India. They traveled, dedicated their lives to the service of Lord Ram, and brought the God to the masses. Now, there are management students, athletes, professionals who feel being part of the committee may give them a break in Bollywood, or bring them closer to faith that
they are so out of sync with.

Election Commission, UIDAI recognize third gender ...

2010-10-12T02:52:00.002-04:00

This is for Frances Mary Fischer, the transgender woman I met in New York.

An edited version appeared in The Indian Express on October 12, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 11, 2010

It was a fight for a column, a space where the numerous transgender could affirm their identity and not be compartmentalized into either male or female.
With Bihar becoming the first state to implement the Election Commission's mandate to have a separate column “Other” in the voter enrolment and registration, Dr. SE Huda, a Bareilly-based doctor who had approached the apex body that conducts elections in 2009 asking them to recognize the third gender, feels vindicated.
It is not just the Election Commission that took the lead so “others could follow suit” as per the Chief Election Commissioner SY Quershi, now the UIDAI, a Planning Commission initiative to accord identity to all Indian residents, has also extended the gender identity and inclusion to “Transgender” on their enrolment forms and their database.
The UIDAI enrolment form will now have “M”, “F” and “T” so the one million eunuchs can register as themselves.“It was a legitimate demand and we said let others follow out example. It is a good thing that the UIDAI is doing it. In the voter enrolment, the officials refused to register them as females because of their male voice so we decided to do this,” Chief Election Commissioner SY Quershi said.
“There was some representation to Navin Chawla and we immediately decided to do it. It is an all India instruction but starts with Bihar in the upcoming elections.”In February 2010 the election commission of India allowed intersex and transsexuals the right to register as voters with “Other”.
This was what Bareilly-based Dr. SE Huda, secretary of Syed Shah Farzand Ali Educational & Social Foundation of India, which has offices in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi where they work with women, children and eunuchs, fought for. At a conference for third gender equality in Bareilly in April 2009, his organization had decided they would take this up with the Election Commission, with the Census, and with the UIDAI, so the right identity is accorded and statistical data on the number of transgender in the country becomes available. Dr. Huda was also called to Delhi by former chief election commissioner Navin Chawla to discuss his work with the community and how to reach out this segment of voters with a low voting rate.
In August, the UIDAI wrote back to Barielly-based doctor Huda that the authority had already provided a third option – transgender – on their enrolment form and in the database. The 30-year-old doctor had asked the Planning Commission to include the “third sex” to accord them their rightful identity so they could access various government welfare schemes like the Tamil Nadu government's scheme of a welfare board and free sex reassignment surgeries at the government hospitals for the transgenders and the Karnataka's government pension scheme for the members of the community. For the UIDAI Huda's letter was an endorsement of sorts, and a reassurance that they were in the right direction with the marginalized community, UIDAI Deputy Director General K. Ganga said.
Ganga had responded to Dr. Huda's RTI application and she told Indian Express that the Demographic Data Standard and Verification Procedure Committee had already decided to capture the information whether a person was transgender though it wasn't their mandate to collect statistical data on eunuchs way back in December 2009, something that Dr. Huda wanted. "We had received this letter and I was the one who had responded," Ganga said. "We wrote to the President office who Huda had also written to telling them we could capture the gender but that would not be for statistical purpose. For us, it was an endorsement of our plans." In future, the UIDAI may also partner with groups and organizations that work with the transgender community.
Around five years ago, a transgender person had asked for an appointment at a hospital in Barielly but at 10 in the morning she didn't turn up at the hospital. She came later in the evening and Dr. Huda, a 30-year-old doctor who wrote to the UIDAI earlier this year to ask them to include the third sex on their enrollment form, asked her why she didn't come earlier.
She was in pain as she was suffering with cervical spondylitis and pain was radiating towards her heart and her limbs had become numb. But even acute pain couldn't bring her to go to the hospital earlier.
She asked if he wanted her to go through yet another round of humiliation in a crowded general OPD ward. Dr. Huda recalled he didn't know what to say.
“She asked me if I had the courage to diagnose her in front of everyone,” Dr. Huda said. “That led me to work towards the inclusion of the transgender in the mainstream society. I had followed it up. It is good that they did it."

Living behind the CWG posters

2010-10-04T01:37:00.001-04:00

An edited version appeard in The Indian Express Real Page 3 on October 3, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 1, 2010

There is a hole in everything. And through that whatever it was that
they were trying to hide comes pouring out. In this case, a little
child, in his rags, who stood in the hole, or where the Commonwealth
Games posters let the world seep in, or the poverty peep out, was
crying, mostly sobbing for his mother who had gone off to the other
side, across the road to fetch water.
At the Cooli Camp in Vasant Vihar, under the shadow of the Vasant
Continental Hotel, this hill, rendered blue with the brightly painted
walls of the jhuggis, the posters that the city administration has put
up everywhere they thought poverty was at its best in its drive to
deck up the city and hide its truth, the bitter sad truths of poverty
hunger and marginalised lives in the middle of luxury and brands, they
came Monday evening and put up the bright blue posters, enough to hide
the squalor at the ground level. But the rise of poverty, its
placement on the hill, defied the efforts. From atop the hill, the
poverty, naked, stark and in-your-face, came tumbling down like little
secrets of a child, too flimsy, and vaporous yet too large to be
contained in a box, into a sea of shining roads, luxury malls and
luxury cars and denial.
The bright blue with Shera, the official mascot for the CWG,
contrasted with the other blue, that of peeling paint, and the
shabbiness of it. The MCD staff came at 6:30 p.m. Monday evening and
the whole slum of about 1,000 people, watched as the posters
barricaded them in. They didn’t protest. They were too overwhelmed.
The games were coming. They had to be shut out from the view.
“ Even the wind stopped coming. It is a strange feeling when you live
behind these huge posters. You know they are trying to hide you
because you are what they call shame on the city’s image. Not that I
mind. But it feels as if we have been imprisoned,” Usha, a 15-year-old
girl who lives on one of the little shanties on top of the little hill
said.
The posters, their brightness and their message is turned towards the
city and its visitors. On the other side, the side that Usha and
others confront everyday, is a dreary grey colour, no variations to
it. Plain, dreadful, dark and grumpy grey. Even the sun doesn’t make
it come alive.
In the evenings when their cooking, cleaning and other such chores
were done, Usha and her sister-in-law would squat outside their little
huts, too small to contain them all, its low roof hanging oppressively
on their minds, and watch the cars and people. The bikers were Usha’s
favourite.
With the posters, there’s only a dull grey that lines their vision.
“This is the first time they have done this. I have lived here for 10
years. It feels a little strange. Down there, they have problems with
light. They blocked the sun,” she said.
Women in the slum now have to circle the whole area to get out to
fetch water from the other side. Children have to squeeze themselves
in and out through the chinks to be able to avoid the longer, new
route.
Dhiraj, 8, and Niraj, 7, were on their way back from their MCD school
in Sector 5, Monday evening when they encountered the mascot who
covered their homes. They climbed up, and then looked down. The view
wasn’t quite right.
“This is dirty. That’s why they have done it. Maybe some important
person is coming. They say some games are happening,” Dhiraj said.
While the posters come in the way of the view from the top, their grey
forming an ugly line, from the street below, the poverty rises above
the posters, and seems to mock the effort. Yes, everything has a hole.
The posters, too.
The Delhi government has come under fire for its drive against the
poor and the homeless in the city as news of beggars and other people
who don’t have an identity card being driven out of the city’s borders
by the police. It has also done what other global cities have done in
their moments of hosting such mega events. Put up walls, posters,
everything to hide what is perhaps the underlying truth of all urban
cities – its rampant, ugly poverty.
But then these can only hide so much. In Safdarjung Enclave, the
garbage containers have been swished behind two huge posters. But then
the stink knows no walls.
In Nizamuddin, where thousands of homeless slept on the pavements and
lived their lives in full public view, the posters have replaced the
humanity. Nobody knows where these people have gone. Maybe they will
return, they say.
A few peeped out from the hole, the point where one poster is joined
with the other, as they sat there, hunched against the grey.

Along the Yamuna Expressway ...

2010-08-28T12:01:00.004-04:00

When we traveled on the Yamuna Expressway last year in December for a story on the project, we stopped in many villages to talk to farmers who said they felt they had been cheated. A protest had been brewing then. Since I write 20,000 words on an average for a story, these are some of the leftovers from the piece.

Link to the original article Link to the http://www.indianexpress.com/news/on-the-highway-to-agra/562621/0

The Highway Road

Rajmal Singh hopes the road doesn’t come. But he knows it will. Because from his village, he can see the massive pillars, and the noise of the machines keep him awake through the nights. During these long nights, he fears for his future. When they came to acquire the farmland in Salarpur, a village on the outskirts of Noida, Singh became a millionaire overnight. But he doesn’t know what he will do with the Rs. 2 crores that he got for his land. He has bought some land in Mathura. But this is where he was born, and the road full of promises has nothing for him.

And When the road comes, he won’t be here. He would be gone like many others in his village to look for work elsewhere, and learn to live with loss of his past.

He almost wishes the road project is disbanded, the workers are sent home, and then they can reclaim their lands and grow wheat as they once did. Because the money won’t last forever. That’s the truth of it.

“We are not educated. Where can we find jobs?,” he said. “We feel betrayed. They promised us jobs but we have heard nothing so far.”

But Jaypee officials said Abadi Scheme was proposed for those who lost their houses to the project and the company would ensure they were rehabilitated.

“See, some issues were there but we agreed to the compensation that the government set and in many cases we negotiated. We have given handsome compensation but all dreams can’t be fulfilled,” Samir Gaur said. “With progress and development, changes come. But we have schemes for villagers and there are abundant of opportunities. We are coming up with Abadi villages near the residential plots.”

Salarpur’s fate was sealed when the project was conceived around six years ago. Squeezed in between the Formula 1 racing track and the Yamuna Expressway, almost the entire village falls under what the villagers term “acquirement.” Only three houses will be spared because the road that split their lands, and now threatens their homes, is a hungry road with a voracious appetite.

Most of the land acquisition process is over and only in some cases, physical possession of the lands is remaining.

The Allahabad High Court in December 2009 dismissed a bunch of writ petitions challenging acquisition of land by the state government.
But the village itself is in a limbo, waiting, hoping, and yet it knows it doesn’t have options.

Along the “highway road”, hopes ran high once. Dreams came floating on the road.

In Salarpur, they thought they would set up shops along the way, and the exodus wouldn’t have to take place.

But then, all the land is earmarked for development. A sports city is being built; an airport is on the cards, residential plots are already being advertised and sold.

In the evenings, the skies turn pink. It is what they call the steelworks sunset. Pink and blurred. Something to do with welding, smelting, or fixing. But it is no longer how the sunsets were before the road snaked through the farms. In time, more things will change. Just like the sunset, they too come under the spell of the road, charmed, yet slave to it.

Rajmal Singh knows this well. Already he can see the signs of evil. He feels the road is the wreckage of everything, of the past, of the future, of their existence.

“Some bought plots. But that’s just a few of us. Some bought cars, some will drink away the money,” he said. “The road has only brought misery to us.”

The liquor shops are stocked and villagers queue up, angry, frustrated, dejected.

“We didn’t want to sell but we had to. We will die of hunger. They didn’t give us any jobs,” Inderpal Singh, another farmer said. “Now, all we do is play cards and drink. We are just ruining ourselves. Perhaps, when all is over, we will go to Delhi and find construction jobs.”

Inderpal owned just under a bigha of land. He got Rs. 5 lakhs.

The villagers had tried to hold on to their lands. They approached the Bharitya Kisan Union, protested, marched, but now the fervour is sort of dying.

The young are angry still like Sarjit Singh, who is pursuing his computer science degree from a Greater Noida Institute.

“It is a betrayal. They took the land. They should let us keep the house,” he said.

Like his father Rajmal Singh, he can’t resign himself to the inevitable.

Then there are others who don’t know if they should be angry or cry over their fate.

Sixty-five-year-old Shanti Devi came to Salarpur half a century ago as a young bride. They didn’t own land but reared cattle. The expressway authority has quoted Rs. 6.75 lakhs for their house that falls in the zone earmarked for development alongside Yamuna Expressway. With two buffaloes and a bit of money, the family is at a loss for options.

“I will not leave. My son is weak. Where will we go? This is my silent protest. I will die in my house,” she said.

Salarpur and six other villages have been notified. Where they stand, residential plots, the racing track and a university will come up.

The expressway is facing opposition from farmers’ groups. Many of them are openly rebelling against land acquisition saying the compensation is not at par with the market rate. Some are not ready for negotiations even. Last year in August, one farmer was shot in police firing on farmers protesting against inadequate compensation for land being acquired for the expressway. In Mathura, the protests intensified after farmers burnt down the police chowki and the post office in Bajna, Mathura. For five days, the village had shut down.

Risal Singh, a local, said the road divides their village and although they parted with their land, they can’t sit back and let the authority occupy more land. The state government notified more than 1100 villages when the project commenced leaving thousands of farmers in a state of insecurity and fear.

So, a protest is again brewing, and farmers organize meetings frequently. In at least 400 villages in the area, the agitators are distributing leaflets, organizing and mobilizing more farmers to stage dharnas if the authority tries to acquire more land. They have been notified but they were told that the more land would be acquired only if the need arises.

Rajendra Singh, who was shot on the day of the protest, lived in Avalkhera village. Since his death, his widow and his children have left the village. But his death has left the village in a state of shock, including Mukesh Nauhar, 30, who still has to limp. After a bullet hit him in the leg on the day of the protest, he has been “useless”.

“I can’t work on the fields. I don’t know what to do,” he said. “That day there were so many people. Then police came. I thought something hit me and then I saw blood. I still can’t walk properly. My leg has become numb.”

The addiction to growth is catching up, infecting all, permeating to the little corners that could only be accessed through narrow lanes running through the farms.

Finally, the road and development was going to come to them. Land prices have shot up like in Kuberpur where the interchange is under construction at the Agra end for the expressway.

But against the backdrop of development and all its promises, there’s discontent and a sense of loss, of betrayal.

From her primary school in Vas Agaria, Chandni can see the “highway road” and she speaks of her fears. In the village, they talk about the vices that will travel on the road when it is built.

“They say it is bad. It will bring damage. People can go and jump off the road and die. We will become like the city. There will no fresh air,” she said. “We will no longer remain innocent.”

That’s what she heard her parents say about the road.

But until they put in the iron fences, and the set up the tollbooths along the Yamuna Expressway, the mud and fly ash road is their playground. Young boys climb on to the road with their cricket gear and make the dusty road their pitch.

Further up on the road, a yellow truck carrying mud and ash rolls by. On its rear “Global Truck” is painted in black.

On the side of the road, the village waits its turn to be globalized, for malls, apartment buildings, hotels, motels, and displacement.

About the Expressway

* Jaypee Group has also been awarded a concession to develop a 1,047 km long eight-lane access-controlled Ganga expressway between Greater Noida and Ghazipur-Ballia, the largest private sector infrastructure investment in India. Yet another
expressway is being planned in the state called the Hindon Expressway named after
yet another river in the state like the other two projects. The 250-km-long Hindon Expressway will pass through Ghaziabad and
Saharanpur up to Dehradun in Uttarakhand.

* The Jaypee Group is also building an eight-lane 20 km long inner Ring
Road in Agra at a cost of around Rs. 1,100 crores. This will be built
on Design-Finance-Operate and Transfer (DFOT) basis.

* The Yamuna Expressway is planned to be a dual carriageway initially consisting of three 3.75-meter wide lanes in each direction.

* Planned expressway facilities (some of which will involve third-party service providers) include rest areas with parking, shelters and toilets; roadside facilities with fuel stations and coffee shops, restaurants, motels and various other facilities; and plantation and landscaping for environmental, safety and aesthetic purposes.

* Around 9,000 families are allegedly affected by the expressway. Around
Rs 460 crore have been disbursed as compensation.

* Motorists can drive at a speed of up to 120 kmph on the expressway
drastically cutting down on the travel time from Noida to Agra. The
expressway will have no speed breakers.

A look at the compensation rates given to farmers for their land.

*Compensation rates*
* NOIDA: Rs 800 per sqm
* Aligarh : Rs 390 per sqm
* Mathura : Rs 350 per sqm
* Hathras: Rs 350 per sqm
* Agra : Rs 400 per sqm

The Expressway to be developed in Three Phases:-
1. Phase I: Expressway Stretch between Greater Noida and Taj
International Airport.
2. Phase-II: Expressway Stretch between Taj International Airport and
an intermediate destination between Taj International Airport and Agra
3. Phase III: Expressway Stretch between intermediate destination and Agra.
Deadline – Commonwealth Games, 2010.

Quick Facts
Length 165.537 Km
Right of Way 100m
Number of Lane 6 Lanes extendable to 8 lanes

Jaypee Infratech Limited an Indian infrastructure development company engaged in the development of the Yamuna Expressway and related real estate projects. JIL part of the Jaypee Group, was incorporated on April 5, 2007 as a special purpose company to develop, operate and maintain the Yamuna Expressway in the state of Uttar Pradesh, connecting Noida and Agra.

The clash of cultures - the village in the city

2010-08-08T01:42:00.003-04:00

For a couple of days we tried going into Delhi's urban villages trying to locate the conflict between the city and the villages that have existed for years. In the end, we visited Wazirpur and that's when we convinced the father to show us his daughter's diary. The diary told her story and that's what we narrated, too.

An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday section of The Indian Express on August 8, 2010.

The battle of identities

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi

Under a picture of Katrina Kaif cut carefully from a glossy magazine cover, Khushboo Nagar wrote her name in blue on the first page of her diary. They said she resembled the Bollywood actress. Her hair was styled like hers, too, streaked and cut in layers, framing her face. She believed in the comparison but the 18-year-old Gujjar girl wanted to go beyond just the resemblance. She wanted to be the cover girl herself.

On the next page, she scribbled “Height – 5.5, Weight- 50 kgs, Age – 18 years”.

Flip through the pages and there are cuttings from newspapers – mostly beauty tips on how to make lips softer, how to improve complexion. In those pages, floating in between the handwriting, and the astrology predictions that she meticulously pasted on the pages trying to score a perfect future, there is an undercurrent of the conflict between modernity and tradition that her life had come to embody.

Khushboo, a Gujjar girl in Wazirpur, an urban village, one of the many in Delhi, near Ashok Vihar in Delhi, dared to dream past the village’s boundaries. That’s where the waves broke and rolled back for others. They could go into the city but when they returned, the “cityness” had to be abandoned at the village threshold.

Not for her. Khushboo wanted to be a model, fell in love with a model coordinator, and eloped with him. She crossed into what they call the ugliness of the other side. But no thresholds had ever beaten Khushboo. Not when she scribbled those aspirations in her diary. Not when she wore what they called “outrageous” clothes, not when she ran away from home in May.

It's been more than two months since Khusboo has been missing from her Wazirpur house. And while they were searching for her, Khushboo's cousin Monica and her sister Shobha were killed in cold blood by the family for defying the unspoken rules of the village, of their community that's struggling to hold on to their tradition in the midst of a city that is lurching forward in its obsession with modernity and with being a world class city where cultures intersect, melt, and everything becomes a fluid identity. At least that's the dream. But on the road from inception and fulfillment of the melting pot dream, there’s a lot of distance to be covered. They were the first casualties in the battle of identities between the village and its wayward child – the city. This was the battle between the core and the periphery.

In the heartland of this city, the national capital that they will showcase this October to the world during the commonwealth Games for which infrastructure projects are being completed at a fast pace, beyond the front row of houses that seem to uphold the melting pot identity, there are urban villages in and around the city that are unwilling to give up on their customs.

The national capital has around 135 urban villages, so called because they are no longer surrounded by farmland. Instead they are in the midst of untamed development.

These are spaces where municipal planning rules do not apply. Basic municipal services like roads, water supply and drainage have not reached them. But cars, amenities, and other such luxuries have.

A spate of honour killings have rocked Delhi and the NCR region. Sangeeta, a Gujjar girl, was killed in her ancestral village in Bargadpur in UP village after she married Ravinder Kataria, a Jatav community member who she had met while pursuing a computer course in Mayur Vihar in Delhi. She was a resident of Noida. On July 13, four months after she had secretly married her lover, her family took her to the village, strangulated her and set her on fire.

On June 14, a 19-year-old girl and her boyfriend were electrocuted by the girl's family in Swaroop Nagar in north Delhi.

According to police, number of couples seeking protection has gone up in the city. Nidhi and Kulbhushan, who married at an Arya Samaj temple in Delhi, approached the Delhi Commission for Women seeking protection after the girl stared receiving threat calls from her family.

At the DCW, officials say they now receive one or two letters seeking protection against honour killing daily and at least two couples drop by personally demanding the same.

“After the khap panchayats in Haryana that ordered such killings, we have got at least 20 such complaints from Delhi. Most couples were educated and parents were harassing them. We summon the parents and we do counseling. They usually work. We used to get cases before also. But after the killings in Delhi, the couples are more scared,” a DCW official says.

Such gruesome killings have also been reported from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana where the khap panchayats have openly dictated that such errant youth must be killed in order to preserve their culture and to set an example.

Recently, a youth was stabbed was stabbed to death in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district allegedly by the father and brother of a girl who he was having an affair with.

Lal Singh, Anju's father, has been arrested along with his son Rinku, after they admitted to killing Mithun, 20, a graduation student to protect their family's honour.

As urban way of living becomes more attractive, it also destroys traditional cultures. Anthropologists have pointed out that a city is a social context very different from peasant communities. Robert Redfield, who focused on contrasts between rural and urban life, cities are the centres through which cultural innovations spread to rural areas.

His body was found is Kajipura village in Uttar Pradesh.

The police says they can only take action after the crime has been committed but in most cases, the killings are hailed by the family and the villages as the right thing.

People tend to judge their surrounding world according to their space grounded in ethnicity, gender roles and norms, and that helps them differentiate from right from wrong, good from bad. It is a question between collectivism and individualism, anthropologists say.

In these villages, the individual obeys the tradition. If anyone fails to meet those expectations, or to conform to the “identity” they are taken to be endangering the order of the society, of upsetting the apple cart. That leads to the emergence of urban-rural conflicts and individual freedom. In Villages, everyone is connected. Everyone knows everyone and that knowledge functions as social control.

Therefore urban and rural function as different social systems.

However, cultural diffusion does happen and then caught between two or more social groups, people usually experience an identity crisis, researchers say.

That's what happened to Monica, Shobha, and Khushboo.

Monica married a Rajput boy from the village around five years ago. And Shobha was having an affair with a Muslim boy called Nawab Raja who ran dance classes in Ashok Vihar area.

Five years ago Monica, a Gujjar girl and Khushboo's cousin, married a Rajput boy from the same village. As per the village's worldview, that was a sin. In the 400-year-old history of the village, no girl had dared to do this. Butthey looked the other way. Monica left the village. They were outcasts.

When Monica's cousin sisters – Shobha and Khushboo – dared to cross over to the other side, so they could merge with the city, its diversity, marry it with their own fluid identity, the one they thought came with wearing jeans and shirts at their elder sister's marriage, they had clearly upset the cart. Girls in the village were going astray. They had to be reined in. With the killing they made a statement. A message was sent out. There were no victims. Only heroes that were to be venerated.

Memories of the past, of Monica's marriage came tumbling out of the closet, and during conversations, Mandeep, Khushboo's brother, taunted Ankit that he wasn't able to stop his sister Monica from marrying outside her community. Ankit retorted saying Mandeep too was not able to rein in his sisters. That's when the killings happened. Three in a day, within minutes of each other. Monica, her husband Kuldeep and Shobha whose body was only discovered a couple of days later from a car parked in the locality and only after the stench from the decomposing body gave her away. All of them shot at point blank range in the head by their brothers.

***

Not that these murders are a recent phenomenon. Choudhary Charan Singh Lohmod, a member of the Ghitorni village panchayat in Delhi, recalls an incident in his own village, a village that is teeming with millionaires because of the real estate boom and with teenagers sporting designer wear and driving expensive cars.

More than 15 years ago, the village witnessed its first honour killing. A Gujjar girl was strangulated for marrying a boy from the barber community. No police report was filed. The body was cremated and it was reported as a suicide case.

“The whole village knows about the killing. We couldn't do anything. We didn't interfere,” Charan Singh says.

There was yet another case of honour killing in Dayal Pur village in East Delhi around 17 years ago. That was a marriage within the Dedha gotra, a sin equal to incest because in the village everyone is part of the bhaichara and hence are brothers and sisters. There are scientific reasons behind our tradition of not marrying within the gotra, he adds, a rhetoric oft repeated by the custodians of the village culture.

“They had killed the boy. I don't know what happened to the girl. A panchayat was called, the khap dictated the family must be boycotted. The girl had left the village after marriage but then they found the boy and killed him,” Charan Singh says. “Today the world is changing. Although I don't approve of inter gotra marriages, a murder can't be condoned.”

Charan Singh can see the change. He has been around for long. With urbanization and development, views are changing. Young and educated people don't care much about the tradition, he says.

“In a few years, all of this will crumble and break. In all these killings, there's a desperation to hold on to something that we are losing. Delhi will first witness the dilution of the caste barriers, the gotra barriers because we are living in the city. We have a few girls in the village who married outside caste. The families have severed ties with them but they didn't kill them. The girls have left the village,” Charan Singh says. “Systems are changing. Education has changed a lot of things. We must be ready for the change. All this tradition, codes will break, melt. There are signs. The city has changed us in so many ways,” he says.

Already the villagers, astounded with what the city can do to their structure by its proximity, are blaming the Delhi government for its soft stand on migrants. The population has soared. That’s how the

corrupting winds of change started to howl in their ears. More men and women, those who didn’t cater to their prescribed rules, the ones that have been intact through generations, entered their space, claiming their share, paying rent that the villagers needed to sustain themselves in an inflation-ridden metropolis, but bringing ideas that struck at their very core.

“This has to stop. Crime has increased because of this,” his brother Samay Singh says. “We are traditional people. We have bhaichara in our villages. Villages have rules. The government must stop this infiltration.”

***

Long ago, when the real estate boom took over the city whose boundaries expanded into the farmlands and into the cultures that surrounded the city as demand for space went up, the Gujjars and the Jats, the two communities that had their villages in and around Delhi, experienced the rush, the high that comes with wealth, the transition that it promises.

In Wazirpur in North Delhi, farmers sold their land to the government in the 1960s, built multistory buildings that jostle with each other for space, jutting their necks out for visibility, to show they too are among the “rich.” There was an influx of migrants soon after. But here in this village where the differences between the two communities are starkly visible, the tenants subscribe to the village rules.

There is a wall of silence between them.

They won’t talk about the murders in the village. They won’t disapprove of it. Nor will they approve. They are suspended in silence.

“We have no opinion, no advice, no memory of it,” one young man, who refused to disclose his name, says.

While the Gujjar community says they don’t have Khap panchayats like the Jats, the other predominant community that have followed the same trajectory in terms of social-economic status, they have village elders whose diktat is as good as the word of law. Even on the matrimonial websites like www.Jeevansathi.com , most Gujjar girls, including doctors and MBAs, have listed their gotras in their profiles.

Like hundreds of other urban villages clustered in the heart of the national capital, Wazirpur would have remained an obscure village trying to insulate itself against the city's overtures had it not been for the “folly” of three Gujjar girls from the village who dared to overstep the boundaries their culture imposed.

Cars can't navigate the narrow lanes of the urban village that is not very far from the city's glass and steel structures, the glittering malls, and the Metro. Electric wires hang from the poles, and the drains are overflowing.

A young girl stood in the balcony of her second floor home of a multistory house in Wazirpur. Behind her a older woman stood as if on guard, craning her neck to follow the girls' eyes. About 200 meters on her left stands the house where the two “disgraced” girls lived.

Khushboo left the house on May 25. The family waited until June 3 to file a complaint at the Ashok Vihar police station. Every morning, the family sent out two cars to look for the youngest daughter of the house who had brought shame to the family, to the village and to the community.

But they didn't find her.

The father Jai Singh Nagar shrugs off the death of his other daughter Shobha.

“What's done can't be undone. Those who have died have gone. But I want to know where Khushboo is. Her marriage was a fraud one. This Arya Samaj marriage must be banned,” he says.

He is waiting for his daughter, the one who had long legs, and who danced and loved dressing up, and who he says was misled by an advertisement in the local paper about this modeling agency.

She fled her house on May 25 to marry Ravi, a model coordinator from Bhajanpura.
It's her sister's death and her defiance of the rules that dictate the address to their house. Jai Singh Nagar sits in his grocery store on the ground floor as if nothing ever happened. But what was he to do.

It was the city that corrupted them. How could he, placed as he was in such a setting, the metropolis surrounding him, its evils eroding the layers of tradition, stop it from happening.

He was a doting father, he says. There's an old family picture, one of those black and white framed pictures shot in a studio with the fake backdrop of mountains and blossoming tress years ago that still acquires a place of pride in the family's living room.

There Khushboo sits in her father's lap, the youngest of six siblings – four girls and two boys. Shobha is in the frame, too. They were beautiful girls, the father says.

In the wedding album of their eldest sister Rajni who was married within the community but outside their gotra in December 2008, Shobha and Khushboo wore jeans and sateen shirts. They danced and sang through the night. They were wild, but innocent, he says.

He is a father. He puts up a strong front.

No, they won’t kill Khushboo, the runaway child who doesn’t know the difference between right or wrong. He just wants to make sure she is fine.

But Khushboo, the aspiring model, is under police protection at an undisclosed location. The police says she is doing well and is happily married with Ravi, who her family alleges is a tout.

On June 20, the brothers had planned to kill her too. But Khushboo didn’t call. She was spared the fury that raged within the men.

There’s an eerie silence at the family’s house. Rajni, who is here for a few days, doesn’t know how to react to the mention of her two “wayward” sisters. She steps back, and murmurs she misses them. A tear falls. She turns away.

In this space, it is hard to say who the victim is and who the perpetrator is. That distinction is blurred.

“I don’t know where I went wrong. I was the sort of man that chased away men from the corners of the streets,” he says. “The police says she is fine but at least show her to us even on television, let us see that she is not involved with the wrong sort of a man. I don’t want her to tell me later that I failed her as a father.”

But for a few in the village, he failed Shobha.

But Jai Singh is the product of the village’s social dilemmas, its bid to try to retain its heritage.

"I think we have lost control. I had two lavish weddings for my daughters Rajni and Kajal. I allowed them every freedom. They wore western clothes. But we didn’t see this coming,” he says. “We won’t kill our daughter.”

But daughters had been slaughtered. In the village, and in the city.

Khushboo escaped, The village’s ugliness caught up with Shobha whose body wasn’t even brought to Wazirpur. Her cremation was a rushed affair.

In the following days, the family erased Shobha from their lives. They gave away her clothes, her shoes. No traces, no memories to remind them of the shame.

On the internet, many Gujjar community members have hailed the killings as an act of courage.

“Everything comes with a price tag. Same is the case with development.

The negative change in the new generation is the price we Gujjars are paying as the cost of this development,” a member who identified himself as Gurjar Krishan Kumar wrote on www.ashokharsana.proboards.com, an interactive web portal for the Gujjar community set up by Ashok Harsana a few years ago to discuss the community and its issues.

Others acquiesced. They said it was a classic case of “disruptive urbanization” that upset the social structure of the urban villages, threatening its values as other population marched into their space bringing with them the ills, the sexual liberties, the free mixing between sexes, part of the city's culture with them.

Yet another man posted that the Delhi-based Gurjars had a bad reputation elsewhere because news of Gujjar girls eloping with boys from other communities were far too frequent.

“Very often there is news that some Gujjar boy has done love marriage or yet another Gujjar girl has run away with a boy and Gujjars outside Delhi say that we are not real Gujjars because we can't save the honour of our families,” said someone who called himself 'Hardcore Gurjar.'

The virtual space is rife with such commentary barring a few that cautiously denounce the killings.

Mandeep and Ankit, the killers who are serving time in jail, have been compared to Lord Rama, the mythical hero who abdicated Sita after she returned from Raavan’s entrapment.

“That Rama, the Lord is still worship by the people. If the same thing done by our brother then how it can be termed as crime,” Ravi Kasana wrote in the ongoing thread. “I strongly termed Ankit and Mandeep to be Kalyugi Ram and Krishna and salute them for showing this world that pride is more important than life for Gurjars. Murder is wrong but this (killing) is socially the best thing that has been done.”

Such killings happened earlier too. But they didn’t hit the headlines. Those were hushed killings. The death of a daughter or a sister gone astray would be termed as an accident or a suicide. Penetrating the layers of the village to investigate the deaths would often be a futile chase, a Jat community member said.

Kanwar Singh Tanwar, the former Bahujan Samaj Party member who has now joined Congress and is a heavy weight Gujjar leader in South Delhi, says he is in favour of such panchayats.

“Gotra this is our history. Yes, inter caste marriages have caught up and culture has changed. Now more and more Gujjars and Jats are sending their daughters and sons to schools and colleges. We have doctors, engineers, and not just bouncers,” he says. “Aajkal ke gaon mein ladkiyan hi-fi hai. We have a system. We can’t let go.”

In the battle, the new recruits are a few Gujjar youth who have taken it upon themselves to preserve their culture.

Pramod Mavi, an engineer who set up the Youth Gurjar Federation last year to reach out to the community and focus on education, travels to Delhi’s urban villages on weekends and talks to the youth about their culture, the gotra system and the temptations like smoking and drinking they must resist.

With a group of young people, he is also collecting material for a book on Gujjar culture and tradition listing all the gotras in the Gujjar villages across India.

“We are working on it. We have state level people going into Gujjar villages and taking to sarpanchs asking them about gotras in their villages,” he says. “But it is at preliminary stages. We plan to distribute it free of cost to the youth. I am against honour killings but we are bound by our tradition.”

Ram Niwas Gujjar, of the same organization, says they have been holding meetings in Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan regularly to educate youngsters about the Gujjar tradition.

"Money has gone to their head. We tell them that you need to hold on to the tradition,” he says. “We are against inter caste marriages, and those within the gotra system. This is to counter honour killing so people don't have to resort to such things.”

***

At the point where Ghitorni, another urban village with a predominantly Gujjar population, opens up to the metropolis, a car showroom has set shop.

On display is the dream car – a two-door red Mercedes sports car. Its doors open out in the sky just like giant wings.

Outside, contradictions abound.

Of the around 140 Gujjar villages in the city, Ghitorni is among the ones where money knows no limits. The farmers sold off the prized land to the private builders, to the very rich who went shopping for sprawling farmhouses. Resto bars have come up on the sides of the road.

The blazing red car has already 80 suitors on its list. Many are from the nearby urban villages where roads are not yet concretized, and are riddled with encroachments and potholes.

That itself is proof of the transformation of the urban villages that are still steeped in tradition, in the rigidity of its dos and don’ts but are finding it hard to wrestle the changes that have crept in.

The money that once brought the adrenaline rushing to their brains, the sorts where you feel nothing can escape your fancy, where dreams are one with reality, is now making them realize that money can also make you lose control just like the drugs.

So they are in denial of the mess that money has made their lives.

Youth, with their pumped-up muscles from working out for hours in the local gyms that dot the village landscape, roam around the locality, whiling away time at the property dealers’ outlets. Many sport thick gold chains and tight T shirts accentuating their biceps.

In the evenings, they pack themselves in swanky cars, and ride through the village’s crumbling roads, loud trance and techno music playing, and go to city’s numerous pubs.

Elders say the villages have no rape cases in the village. That’s because boys and girls know that the rules prohibit them to marry within village. So they are all brothers and sisters.

A group of young men turned away when a bunch of young girls from the village passed.

In Wazirpur, at the Natraj photo studio, a young man said village girls came to get their pictures clicked for marriage purpose. But no, they were all sisters. What if fell for one? No, that’s not going to happen.

“You don’t know the rules of the village. I think you are not from here,” he says.

The Pradhan of Wazirpur Choudhury Subhash Kahri says it is the loss of the land that anchored the village people to a lifestyle is the core issue. All of that is gone and has been replaced by inflated bank accounts. They have been rendered rootless, aimless and with a thick wad of crisp notes, they have no option but to indulge.

But this money is not going to last, Tanwar says.

Not many of them have invested in other properties. So, the young people are torn between the lifestyle of the rich, lured and tempted by the freedom of choice, and the unwritten codes of the village.

Riya Lohia, a 12-year-old, studies at the Poorna Prajna Public School, is a product of that conflict. At her age, she knows she has to live within an invisible boundary.

Her friends from school hang out, stay over at each others’ house, but Riya is chaperoned if she has to attend anything outside school.

“They can go out. We can’t go alone for outings alone. So we have different lives,” she says.

Her uncle Kiran Kumar Lohia lives with his four brothers – a joint family setup that the community has not relinquished yet.

Five cars are parked in the courtyard where she sat with her uncles.

“We have women doctors and teachers in the house. We are for education but we can’t let go of our culture,” Kiran Kumar says. “No, we don’t mind inter caste marriages. The only issue that threatens our society is the population growth. Our youth are getting affected. But it is up to us to tell them what is within bounds and what is wrong.”

Riya silently walked back to the house.

The Dishonoured

On June 14, a 19-year-old girl Asha and her 21-year-old lover Yogesh were electrocuted by the girl's family in Swaroop Nagar in North Delhi. Before they were killed, they were flogged with steel rods for hours.

Sanjeeta, a Gujjar girl, was killed in her ancestral village in Bargadpur in UP village after she married Ravinder Kataria, a Jatav community member who she had met while pursuing a computer course in Mayur Vihar in Delhi. She was a resident of Noida. On July 13, four months after she had secretly married her lover, her family took her to the village, strangulated her and set her on fire.

In the last four months, in yet another instance of honour killing a newlywed man Rajesh Negi was burnt by his in-laws as he married outside his caste in Kichripur in Mayur Vihar. The entire family of the bride Bhavna Pal has gone into hiding. The two married secretly in January but when the bride's family came to know, they allegedly threatened the couple.

Then, in June again, the Wazirpur killings happened. Monica, her husband Kuldeep, a Rajput man, and Shobha who was seeing a Mulsim man named Nawab Raja were killed din cold blood by the family on June 20. Ankit and Mandeep, who are in jail for the murders, also tried to kill Khushboo, the third sister, but she had gone into hiding.

In Daula-Razpura village in Greater Noida, a khap panchayat sent out a diktat that daughters of all Dalit families will be abducted last month after an upper caste girl from a neighboring village Mandiya Priyanka eloped with Suraj Jatav, a scheduled caste boy from Daula. The panchayat also issued shoot-at-sight orders for the couple who fell in love in college in Dadri. The couple is still absconding.

While NGOs have sprung into action including a group called Love Commandos headed by Sanjoy Sachdev to help the couples that face such threats, a bill on honour killing is yet to be approved. On Thursday, Home Minister P Chidambaram said the government plans to introduce a bill on honour killings in this session of parliament. He said all state governments are being asked for their views and the “murders” must not be condoned but punished with severity. Khap panchayats have protested against the bill and have been asking for amendments in the marriage act to ban marriages within the same gotra.

The gappers

2010-07-25T00:16:00.002-04:00

An edited version of the article appeared in the Sunday Eye section of the Indian Express on July 25, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
Udaipur, New Delhi

All through his school years, Nirmal felt he was sprinting, trying his best to be a student so he too could stumble over the finish line.

But in his head, among the jumbled up calculus lessons and geometrical shapes, strange fish were trapped.

And the fish only got bigger. It was as if his head would burst with those. Nirmal wanted to capture them on canvas before his imagination shorted out. But more school work flowed into his hours, and in those crowded hours where he could hear the sound of pens and papers, the air became still, thick and stifling.

That's when he knew he needed a psychological pause, a break year from school, before moving forward so he could slow down, paint his magical fish, and breathe easy.

So Nirmal bunked off after Class 10 when he was 18. In other words, he became a “gapper”, someone who takes a year off during or after school to travel or indulge in hobbies, a popular idea in the west.

“I didn't like what school looked like, or behaved like. It was too much sitting there for hours, your attention compartmentalized into periods,” he says.

Nirmal is among a growing number of children across the country who are walking out of schools to take a break and indulge in what they like to do. They may either join school later or opt for homeschooling after the break. But in their gap year, time taken off between two stages of life by students - between high school and college - they want to travel and explore their own inclinations free from the pressures and restrictions of formal schools. While it is not a recent phenomenon as there are instances of students taking gap year 20 years ago and even before in India when Rabindranath Tagore left his hometown at 11 years to tour the country and be home-educated in history and astronomy, the idea is now gaining ground with many
parents and children who feel a gap year is important for the child to figure out their personality and get a breather.

In the schools that a few parents compare to factories, where children sit for long hours, their personality camouflaged with the school uniform, constricted almost, the children were beginning to feel suppressed, and they were getting homogenized, they said.

So in the absence of school, Nirmal's days expanded. In those drifting middle of the day hours where he could hear the cars honking in the distance, the occasional breeze whispering through the leaves, he painted his fish.

On his canvas, the bodies of the fish disappear midway and from their intertwined torsos explode elephants' heads with shriveled, shrunken noses. On another one, an elephant's trunk metamorphoses into giant, headless snakes. These huge paintings stacked in Nirmal's little studio overlooking the Aravlis in Udaipur, perched on a hill slope in a housing scheme, were tributes to unfettered imagination itself of a
18-year-old.

Had he remained in school, the fish on his canvas would have remained true to its species, he says.

He wasn't painting like this when he was in school. Back then he learned the art of traditional miniature painting – Ganeshas, Maharajas and beautiful queens from the folklore of Rajasthan. Then they suddenly became grotesque, distorted as his imagination expanded in his little room overlooking the city, and in those hours, free from school, his fish outgrew the limits nature had imposed and Nirmal felt
comfortable with the ambiguities of his paintings as he was with his
own nonconformity.

It wasn't easy convincing the family. They thought it was crazy idea. Who drops out of school to paint, they asked.

It was like taking a step backwards and giving up on the chances of a decent job, his mother argued.

But Nirmal knew that if he looked like he knew where he was headed, the questions would eventually fade out. After all he wasn't saying no to school. He would return when he was done finding himself.

At at an art workshop organized by Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development at Udaipur, which was set up by Manish Jain who left the United States after a stint with investment banking and working on international education policy at UNESCO to move towards de-schooling, or how to de institutionalize the individual in 1998, Nirmal figured others like him were taking such sabbaticals, too.

Shikshantar provided a creative space where people – especially young students could experience a different style of learning that more hands-on and community-oriented.

“You know I wanted to take out my feelings on the canvas. We talked a lot. Manish and me. He never told me to leave school. But you know I never liked school not in the way that it held me back from so many things,” he says. “My family was opposed to the idea of the break. But I put my foot down.”

The gap year was all about the things he wanted. In that gap year, he let his imagination run wild on canvas. He hasn't sold a single painting yet. But what he painted in that gap year, he says, set him free.

Nirmal, now 25, never went back to school. The freedom from routine, from teachers that demanded too much, was addictive. The freedom he had stumbled upon, he wasn't prepared to surrender to the system.

***

The 'Gap Year' concept originated after the Second World War when young people started traveling to understand other cultures. It was encouraged by the states to provide for more understanding of global cultures and as a safety valve against future wars. The world was in tatters after two wars. If only youth could travel, cross over, and learned to adapt to diversity and even accept it, peace would not be so elusive.

So the young Brit hippies headed to the mystery countries preaching love and peace, swinging in the sixties to songs that spoke of a world without bombs, without misery, without differences. They too had walked out – many from schools, a few from other institutionalized structures.

The first gapper took off from the UK, traveled on the hippie trail, and set a trend. Then in the 1960s an educational trust was set up to promote Gap Year Volunteer Placements market where students could avail of student work visas and travel abroad, work, and explore.

Toward the fag end of 1970s, GAP Activity Projects, a UK organization, started facilitating volunteer placements for 'Gap Year' in between school and university and that's how it was introduced to the schools first, the concept of gap year.

A new breed of gap travelers started to traverse the world, lured by exotica, looking to find interesting places, and people, taking a break from schools so they didn't “burn out” and could use an extra year to get mature. It became the “rite of passage” for students.

Then in 1998, the gap year hit the world wide web. Launched by Tom Griffiths and Peter Pedrick gapyear.com, the website that helps students and others with information on interim gap year programs and work visas.

Now, the “gap year industry” is slated to become the fastest growing travel sector in the world, according to reports.

In India too, gap year isn't a such recent phenomenon either. Fifteen years ago, Rahul Alvares talked his parents into letting him take a sabbatical after Class 10.

It was during a summer break in Class 9 at the Pune Snake Park when the idea of a gap year first crossed his mind. He promised his parents – Norma and Claude, both conservationists – that if they let him take a year off, he would work hard and score a decent percent in Class 10 examinations. He scored a distinction. He was finally free from school for a year.

On the first day of his year-long break, Rahul Alvares cycled to an aquarium shop in Mapusa in Goa, a two-room shop off the main road with twenty fish tanks. That's where he would work for weeks, breeding fish, learning to build aquariums, and running errands for Ashok D'Cruz, a college friend of his father, who owned the aquarium shop.

He would cycle to the shop at around 9 a.m. and stay there until lunch helping out with everything – cleaning fish tanks, remove dead fish, feed the fish, and run other errands.

Later in his sabbatical year, Rahul went and spent time at the Pune Snake Park after Neelimkumar Khaire, Director of the Snake Park in Pune, called him for a visit.

Khair's daughters Bany and Lara too had taken a sabbatical after completing school a few years ago to travel across the country.

Rahul kept a record of everything. His diary later became a book “Free From School”, a chronology of his experiences in the gap year, that was published by the Other India Press.

In the beginning, Rahul says he almost felt guilty about the gap year. He kept asking himself whether he was allowed this sort of an indulgence. It was the diary that helped him keep track of his days.

“There was nobody else taking a gap year. But after I took my sabbatical, both my brothers took gap years. That year changed my life,” he says.

“It was like I got my freedom. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to handle snakes.”

That's what he eventually did. Rahul Alvares became a herpetologist.

“In school I wanted to have a decent job and breed fish. Then in the gap year the fish thing went out of the window,” he says. “I learned about snakes without knowing if it was the career for me.”

Rahul returned to school, enrolled in science stream, and then went to college for his bachelor's in science. He again took a gap year after his graduation and went off to Thailand to learn more about snakes.

In “Free from School” he begins with “You must try to understand that when I finished school I was as raw as raw could be. I had never travelled anywhere on my own, never purchased a train ticket ... I had no experience of how to handle money ...”

And he concludes with “And I wish to repeat here, at the end of my book, that June 1995 to June 1996 was the most wonderful year that I can ever remember. I learnt a lot, not only about the things I wanted to learn, but about many other things as well. And best of all I had a lot of fun and a whole lot of freedom to do all that I ever wanted to do. I certainly look forward to another sabbatical! And so, by now,
should you!”

The book has been translated in at least two languages and is still in print. Written by a 16-year-old, its 14 chapters are all about Rahul stumbling upon a rare freedom and making the most of it.

In 2008, Samyuktha, who decided to walk out of her school in Andhra Pradesh, wrote yet another book called “Learning the Heart Way” where she wrote about her experience of creating her “own curriculum” after she opted out of the 'rat race of learning’, out of the labyrinths of “endless tests and scores” and the “endless chase after MBA degrees”.

***

While most students abroad spend their gap year traveling around the world volunteering or working overseas, and in part immersing themselves in the culture and most popular destinations for such experiential travel are India, China and Brazil, in India students mostly travel around the country, helping out with community service in rural areas. A few who can afford it even travel to different countries like Sakhi, a Nashik-based girl, who took a gap year after Class 7 at 13 years. Sakhi traveled to Jordan and Lebanon in her first gap year that she took five years ago. She later decided to opt for homeschooling and returned to formal education in high school three years later because she felt the need to go back to her peer group.

“School was just not giving me time to do things I wanted to do,” she said. “After a point I started not looking forward to going to school. That was when I wanted to get out for a year and explore.”

So in Class 7, when she was 12 years old, Sakhi put together presentation called “Skipping School” where she listed all the things – learning Sanskrit and French, traveling, cooking, art – she would want to do in her gap year from school for her parents.

Her parents – Anita and Nitin – were supportive of their daughter's decision.

“We thought Sakhi should give it a try. Our own belief in the education system was dwindling. It is not as if nobody is thinking about alternative ways of learning and a few silent people full of conviction are charting their own path. People just fail to understand that there are other ways of learning,” Anita says.

Sakhi left college this year after finishing her intermediate to take another gap year.

Earlier this year she was in Delhi teaching English to women from lower income groups who are training to become cab drivers at the Azad Foundation. She also traveled to Canada with her parents to participate in a seminar on young leaders and alternative education.

Her friend, Mukta Navrekar, 20, another Nashik girl who took a break from mainstream education after her Class 12, spent her sabbatical year volunteering for the Indian Red Cross Society and then for the Nirmal Gram Nirman Kendra, an organization run by her parents that works on environmental sanitation in rural areas.

“I was not interested in mainstream education. I didn't know what I would do after school or college. I wanted to find myself and this way I gained experience that helped me figure what I want to do in life,” she says.

Now, Mukta is pursuing her bachelor's in sociology from IGNOU and doing community service.

While many of those who are taking a break year belong to higher middle class segment, the idea is trickling down to other strata of the society too, says Nyla Coelho of TaleemNet, an organization or a facility that helps people to think outside of set norms of learning and is part of the Multi World Network, an international body of thinkers who want to restore the diversity of learning and challenge the prescribed education system.

Last year, a student Minshu Kulkarni from Dharvar in Karnataka visited her facility in Goa with a friend after they decided to take a break from school.

“He took the gap year after Class 10 and came with his friend. Both of them are now traveling in various parts of the country like the Himalayas and this year they will decide what they want to do,” she says. “They thought going from one classroom to another didn't offer much. Since 2000 many children have come to us. It is a tough thing to do but there are a lot of serious parents and children who are choosing to do this..”

***

In the United States, guidance counselors and admissions officers are increasingly advising the high school seniors to explore the option of gap year so they could get a refresher and a primer on life outside classroom and its limited world. In 2009, Princeton University in New Jersey in United States formalized the gap year program wherein, students who have been accepted into the university, will be asked to
go for a year of social work to other countries and those that do accept will be eligible for financial aid. Many companies also offer gap year programs.

In India, gap year is not so institutionalized yet. India's first Gap Year College was founded in 2007 in Kempty in Mussourie, Uttaranchal. The nine-month programme meant for people more than 18 years old offers creative design, architecture, wood art, sketching, theatre, publishing, environment and ecology, among other things. Three years later, Manish Jain set up Swaraj University in Udaipur that offers a two-year learning program for people who are 16 years and older and who are interested in green-collar enterprises and are willing to support local communities.

But barring these two, there's not much recognition to the concept of a gap year.- in the country.

Gap year still raises doubts. It still veers away from the standard. Gappers are still a rare bunch of either “too cool” kids or “loser” ones who didn't quite make it in school. It is considered a luxury that only the well-heeled can afford.

Others, if they fall out of the herd, they will no doubt hit the pits.

Amita Mulla Wattal, principal of Springdales School Pusa Road in New Delhi, says her students belonged to middle and lower middle classes and they couldn't afford such a break.

“The question is who will fund this gap year. This is a luxury of choice,” she says.

That's what the family of Sunny, who also took a gap year after Class 12, argued. They weren't “rich” and Sunny like his brothers needed to get a proper job with a regular income.

But to Sunny, a lean, lanky guy who looks out of place in the neighborhood with his curly hair that frame his face and cool T-shirts, the idea of a sabbatical, a whole year free from textbooks, from anxiety, from routine was alluring, liberating almost.

Three years into his gap year, Sunny, who bakes solar cookies, says formal school only him, he says.

Three years ago when he had first walked out of his school in Udaipur, he traveled to Auroville in Puducherry, Kerela, Maharashtra, Goa , and then worked at a village alternative school called Hunar in a tiny hamlet in Rajasthan teaching children life skills, rain water harvesting, sharing other pieces of knowledge that he had picked up on his travels.

When he got back from his travels, he bought a second-hand solar cooker, and now uses local grains to bake cookies that he also sells on orders. Eventually, he wants to increase awareness about local grains and about solar energy.

“In my break year, I learned about alternative education. I asked a lot of questions, I found many answers and now I know what I really want to do,” he says. “I took a different path and I am happy I chose to be unconventional.”

Sunny too never went back to school. But his family asked him to take open examinations. There was too much at stake. He can't be baking solar cookies all his life, his mother Mangi Devi said.

In the little living room of his house in a housing cluster, his brothers, who have gone on and completed their graduation, are a little unsure about Sunny's choice.

“We felt why was he doing it? We didn't approve,” Mangi Devi, his mother said.

But Sunny counts the names of people, of people who did well in life despite dropping out of school. In his own way, even though the rebel tried to be the non-conformist, he succumbed to the temptation of the system's definition of “successful.”

Even Rama's parents opposed the idea of her taking a gap year. That would hold her back while her peers would go on to complete college in time. But for Rama, school wasn't helping her indulge in passions that consumed her imagination. She didn't want to be a doctor or a teacher, to live out her parent's aspirations.

“I believed I could convince them. I have learned a lot and matured as an individual. I am more confident. I feel as if I could do anything,” she says.

Rama walked out of her government school after Class 10 around three years ago. Armed with a handy cam that she was given as part of a film making workshop in Goa, she is now trying to capture life and its quirks. The first film that she shot was called “Meri Movie” and it told her story, how she left school, and how she has changed as a person.

After she walked out of school, she suddenly stumbled upon lots of open space, space that she needed to fill. There was no routine anymore, no compulsions, only desire, and imagination.

She is now pursuing her studies through open schooling, torn between her own rebellion and her parents' concern for her but she is still making films, her latest being on the only woman auto driver in Udaipur Manju Khatri or “auto aunty” in Udaipur.

There are several other examples like Ravi from Delhi who left school after Class 9 who dabbled in street theatre and has now launched his own organization, NECTAR, to share performance media with street children. Or like Chinmay Futane who quit his distance education programme from IGNOU after his year off from school to do organic farming.

The walkouts also represent a diversity of background like the Delhi-based girl
Aayushi, a student of Class 5 at Apeejay School Noida, who is in the third month of her year-long break.

Her father Sanjiv Pandey said he was not unhappy with the school but with the “rote” education system with its focus on examinations.

“Holistic development is important. Right now, we are exploring, traveling. We will see how it works out and then she can either go back to school or we will decide to homeschool her,” he says.

Whether students find purpose in their gap year, or whether the sabbatical is a trait of those who are bothered with the uncertainty in their lives, it is nonetheless a breather.

As Nyla Coelho puts it “Along the way, let's savor each moment, for life is in the here and now. Having 'walked out', let's walk on…"

Love story of a former street kid

2010-07-11T23:42:00.004-04:00

Last Thursday night I was researching a story on walking tours of Delhi when I stumbled upon an article published in The Guardian four years ago about this Salaam Baalak Trust City Walk ... There were two numbers listed - Shekhar and Javed - if you wanted to book the walking tour through city's street life. It was 10:30 p.m. I just called the number. Asked for Javed. The guy on the other side said Javed had left and now lives in America and was married. I was curious. So I asked to tell me more. Shahadutt now conducts the walking tours and was Javed's friend.
He said an American girl fell in love with him and she came back several times for him and the two got married this year ... I told my editor. He said I must write the love story. So I ransacked the facebook and found Javed, sent him a friend request and a message. He accepted. It was 2 a.m. We spent large part of the night chatting and then called him the next day and I asked if he could send me those firt emails and he said why not. I guess it was simple. This one had me converted.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday, June 11. And my editor didn't cut this one at all.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2010

She was the girl who passed by the Salaam Baalak Trust with the little dog. That’s how Cristina Maria Kameika identified herself in the email she wrote a year later to Javed, the tour guide, the man who
grew up on the city’s streets getting high on Tipp-ex and subsequently redeemed himself, crossed over to the other side of the street and was conducting guided tours of the lives of the street children in Delhi.
“I had even thought for a second ‘wow! I think this is the one!’. I felt a strong attraction and connection,” she wrote on October 1, 2007, a year after the two – an American girl who was in India traveling and volunteering, and Javed, a runaway child from Bihar who battled the city’s brutal streets, slept with dogs and other infernal beings, ate leftover food, and later lived in a shelter home run by Mira Nair’s trust founded in 1988 now run by her mother Praveen Nair and three others, and continued his studies.
Javed wrote back ‘I am but anything. You are everything.’
It took Cristina nine more trips to India to figure out her attraction. It was love. Three years later, the two got married earlier this year in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her father, a captain with Delta Air Lines.
Over the phone from Atlanta, 26-year-old Javed’s voice is peppered with a slight accent and he refers to his village as “countryside.” He is adapting to his new life in an apartment next to his father-in-law's place. Now he drives a Honda CRV and is trying to apply to a master's program in a university there. Tom, Cristina's father, is also helping him find a job as a translator with the airlines.
“I have to start somewhere,” he says.
Four years ago, he had seen Cristina walk towards him at the Aasra, a night shelter for homeless kids near Hanuman Mandir. He says he loved her laughter and her short hair. She had a dog – Rocky - and she came looking to volunteer at the center.
A day ago, Cristina, then 23 years old, had gone on a guided tour – Salaam Baalak Trust – City Walk – an walking tour of city's Paharganj and New Delhi Railway Station areas aimed at sensitizing others about street life and street children.
She had seen posters advertising the walk and she came. Later, she landed at the centre wanting to volunteer. Her girlfriend who she was living with at the time was not interested in the things she wanted to do so she came along, Rocky tagging along.
“I liked his smile,” Cristina says. “I had a feeling after 5 minutes of talking to him that he was the one. It was weird. The feeling was in the stomach. And I thought it was a crazy feeling and i thought what the hell I am American and how can I do this.”
But Cristina kept coming back to the night shelter with her dog under the pretext that she brought Rocky so the kids could play with the dog. She would sit and listen to Javed narrate to her strange stories about his life on the streets, how he spent cold nights curled up in a secret attic with dangling electric wires, how the cold bit into his skin and how he once crashed a big, fat Indian wedding and danced and ate chicken wings until the guards chased him out.
Javed, who was studying sociology through distance education from Delhi University, was working as a tour guide for the Salaam Baalak City Walk, an initiative of John Thompson, a volunteer from the UK who spent a lot of time working with the street children in the city. He lived in a one-room tenement at Paharganj and earned only Rs. 4,000.
AK Tiwari, an educative member at the Salaam Baalak Trust, said Javed had emailed all of them about his marriage and how happy he was.
“He was a happy child. But he didn't want to go home. He belonged to a poor family and then we admitted him to a government school. We are all very happy for him,” he says.
Cristina, Javed says, came from a different world. He didn't want to lose his only job by proposing her. Besides, those kind of love stories only played at the Sheila Theater where he watched mushy romance movies with his street buddies. Javed had run away from home at eight years and lived on the streets of Delhi for more than two years before he was rescued by the trust's members.
Cristina was looking for signs. She painted lotuses outside a shop in Paharganj. She called Javed to come see those. He didn't turn up.
But Javed had called the number and the landlord said Cristina didn't live there. She went back to America, broken-hearted.
Meanwhile, Javed hung all the paintings that Cristina brought over his bed at the shelter, and at the trust's office. A few of them still hang there.
But she missed him. So she wrote to him and he responded and she was on a flight back to India, to the dusty, grimy streets.
“My mom said yeah, you should go for your dreams and see if this is real. It was so perfect. I went back nine times,” Cristina says. "It was so much fun."
Cristina's own parents divorced when she was little. Her mother, who stays in Miami, Florida, attended her wedding. She says the family had no issues with her converting to Islam, or with her taking on a Muslim middle name.
"Their marriage broke. Mine won't. I have never been so happy before. I have never met a guy like him. This is a crazy love story," she says, her voice laden with excitement.
She even visited Kalyanpur, a village in Munger district of Bihar where Javed's parents lived. During the week she spent there, locals would climb up their roofs to see her. She was the first white person to visit their “countryside”, Javed recalls.
“She wore salwar kameez and did everything that was in our culture. My mother who was a bit hesitant about me marrying someone outside our religion loved her,” Javed says.
Even Cristina's father flew in from the United States to spend time with Javed.
The couple got engaged in Delhi and then flew to the United States. Cristina changed her name to Cristina Khatoon Kameika and even wore a saree in the small ceremony at their Atlanta house after they registered their marriage at the court.
While Cristina is pursuing her studies from Georgia State University, Javed is hoping he will get a head start in life, too.
Among everything else that he took to the states, he carried the box where he had kept the printouts of all the emails Cristina had ever written to him and her lotus paintings.
Back home, his friends Vicky and Shahdutt hope the fairytale romance comes their way, too.
"It is one hell of a journey from the streets to America, and then marry the girl of your dreams," a friend says.

So, I meet Bunty Chor again

2010-06-24T15:14:00.002-04:00

This time he was a free man. So, all crime reporters were waiting for Bunty at the Lodhi Road Police Station on Thursday. I was the odd one out. I had met Bunty a year ago when we managed to meet him in the prison. I had given him my number then.
Bunty walked in. He looked at me. Then he said "chinki?"
I hollered "Bunty Chor"
And that was all that was needed. I spoke to him for a few minutes. He said he wanted to be good again. I said it is good to be good again. He asked me if I had cut my hair. I said a little. He said he remembered me. He asked for my number. I scribbled it on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Maybe I will see him again.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Friday, June 25, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, June 24, 2010

From the futuristic submarine he had wanted to build, the one that would also crisscross the skies last year when he gave his imagination a free run, Bunty Chor aka Devender Sharma, now 39, after he was released from Tihar Jail last week, is now hopping on to the city buses, trying to start afresh. He is a nobody now. From the madman who rambled about having been to heaven and how peaceful it was compared to the cramped quarters of the jail where he thought everyone was out to get him, Bunty is now saner but a worried man.

The lovable, suave thief who ruled imagination, and even inspired film scripts like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, a movie that chronicled his whimsical style, is looking for a regular job, anything that would help him lead a straight life.

“ It's not easy. But at least it is not as bad as jail. I am happy to be a free man again,” he said. “I just need a chance.”

As he walked into the Lodhi Road Police Station on Thursday evening, he didn't look like his former self. At Tihar, when we had met him last year, he had looked shrunken, his collarbones were prominent, his eyes sunken. Here he was in his bleached hair, a red cap and a matching red Polo T shirt and blue jeans. His brother's gift, he said.

But his brother Balvinder Singh said he didn't buy him the clothes. He said he didn't want to keep his brother. Not after the family attempted to try to reform him twice earlier.

“ We can't keep him anymore. He always runs away,” he said. “I don't know where he is staying. Probably at the police station itself. But no, our doors are closed for him.”

Ever since he was released, Bunty, a Class IX dropout, has been coming to the police station hoping the man who nabbed him in 2002 and 2007, the cop who understood him and who he confided in telling him about all his exploits, his weaknesses, would help him lead a straight life. But for the cop, who can't stop talking about the unusual thief, it is like walking on a tightrope. In 2006, Bunty had promised him he would stop stealing and live an honest life. After he was released from jail in 2006, when he promised Singh he would lead a straight life. But after cars being stolen were reported from Defence Colony and Malviya Nagar in south Delhi, SHO Rajinder Singh knew it could be none other than Bunty. He was later arrested from a house in Noida. It had been a dramatic episode. The police broke into the house but not before Bunty had called the Police Control Room saying some goons had got into his house. The two sets of police argued and it took sometime for Singh to convince them how the suave looking man who had pictures of his wife and children displayed all over the house was indeed a conman and the photos were of another man's wife. Finally, Bunty was arrested. He had given the police a slip thrice before.

Singh still swears by Bunty's good and moral character. He said he is not a violent man. When he had arrested him, the super chor asked him not to slap him, he had asked for a chair and like a respectable man, admitted to his wrongs. More than Rs. 5 crore worth of goods were recovered from his instance. Later it was all distributed.

Leaning against the chair in his office, Singh’s eyes wander. He is waiting waiting for Bunty. Earlier in the day, Bunty called him and said he would be coming to meet him. Bunty is now staying with his elder brother in Vikaspuri. His family had first denied him saying they didn't want him to return. His tag of a thief would not rid of so easily.

Bunty was released from Tihar on May 30 and was then taken to the Amritsar Central Jail and released finally on June 14. He had already served three years in Tihar's Jail No. 4, a high security prison, for burglary and theft. He had at least 550 cases against him. Most of them were cases of unusual theft – a parrot, cutlery, a little dog who caught his fancy.

“ Bunty had a typical style. He stole only what he liked,” he said. “Girls loved him. He was in love and that's what led to his mental state. The girl is now married. Bunty when he came back tried to meet her but I guess she refused.”

The clock struck 4:30 p.m. Bunty had said he would be at the police station by 3 p.m.

“ This is his test. But I know he will come,” Singh said.

At 5 p.m. Bunty walked in. He was on the bus. It took time, he said.

“ For a man who drove expensive cars, even owned one that he fitted with gadgets, this is proof enough that he is trying hard to be good,” Singh said.

On Jun 15, a day after he paid the Rs. 2000 fine imposed by a sessions court in Amritsar, Bunty called Rajinder Singh. He wanted to meet him. The same day, Bunty Chor walked in with a little bag. He looked worn out. Singh got him a pair of shirt and trousers, then fed him lunch. For fours hours, the thief and the cop who had put him behind bars spoke about his life, his recovery from the mental illness, and his future.

That night Bunty stayed at the police station. He had nowhere to go. On the following night, he spent the night at his friend's house.

The Lodhi road police station is not new to former convicts staying and helping out with chores. Twenty-one-year old Abdul Wahab ,who was arrested for burglary after he ran away from Gujarat, is now an errand boy at the police station. The police officials are helping the young man with his studies, contributing to pay his fees. In return, Wahad runs errands for them.

But with Bunty, it isn't easy. He is an intelligent thief and you got to be cautious, Singh said.

“ He is trying to reform. But we are watching him. I am trying to get him some sort of a job but it is difficult given his reputation,” he said.

Singh has been approaching his friends, acquaintances, anyone to help out Bunty. He feels he has a responsibility towards the thief who wants to live a decent life.

“ My only worry is that if he doesn't get anything soon, he may turn to burglary again and that would not be good for us and the society,” he said. “I hope somebody would come forward.”

In fact it was Singh who called Bunty's elder brother asking him to give Bunty a second chance. The man was trying to make amends, he said.

All that Bunty had amassed is no longer there. He was duped by his friend, and then his lawyer, Singh said.

“ He has nothing,” he said.

Nobody will confirm where Bunty is staying. Bunty said he is living with his brother and would be helping out with his spare parts business but his brother denies the story.

Bunty had once told Singh he could help out a private detective agency, or assist the police with cracking burglary crimes. Now, he wants to get a passport and drive cabs in Japan. But he can't get a passport or a visa. He is having trouble getting a driving license with all his past records, Singh said.

“ Someone at some point will have to trust the man. Someone will have to give him a chance,” Singh said. “Maybe Dibakar Banerjee should compensate him. At least he could start some business with him. They made a story on his life. The crew came to my office to do research. They even went to meet Bunty in Tihar.”

Bunty said he would like the director to acknowledge him, maybe give him a role in one of his movies.

But then the man's past has already paved his future path with doubts.

“ What is the guarantee? We are extending help. Where is the process of rehabilitation? We think he doesn't want to indulge in crime. But who can be sure,” Singh said.

Miracle babies

2010-06-20T22:30:00.005-04:00

Sitting in the hospital waiting for Bhateri Devi, the oldest mother to give birth to triplets at 66 years, my stomach churned when I saw her drag herself towards the ICU to feed the babies who are premature.
We had been to Jind earlier in the day to meet Rajo Devi Lohan who is the oldest mother in the world to give birth to a girl. In 2008, at 70, she delivered a baby girl at the same clinic.
It is a health hazard for these women. Regulations must be put in place before it becomes a popular trend.
We left for Haryana early morning to track thee women down and to understand why they go for the IVF at such an advanced age.
An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday Express on June 20 in Section 2.

Chinki Sinha

Hisar, Jind

A little plastic baby doll in a swing smiles from the ceiling of the lobby at the National Fertility Clinic in Hisar. It is the sum total of the desires, the aspirations of the couples that walk in tempted by the promise of the IVF – pro-creation. Age isn't a restrictive force here. Motherhood is a limitless opportunity.

It transcends all barriers – infertility, age, situation in life. The plastic baby's arms are stretched out, the smile on its lips is permanent. It seduces the women, the men alike. The dangers, the complications then fade away, they get filtered out. What remains is the urge to procreate, to hold and rock the baby just like the baby that sits and smiles from the swing above. In this space, there is no getting into the right or wrong debate. It is only about demand, and the muchness of it.

National Fertility Centre was established in 2000 in Hisar by Gyanwati Bishnoi, a gynecologist. In ten years, the numbers of couples coming in for IVF has gone up exponentially. From a mere four or five couples, now the centre has more than 100 couples flocking to it per month hoping they can give birth despite all odds.

This is where Bhateri Devi came too. Twice the doctors transferred two embryos in her uterus. But it didn't work. In the third attempt, they transferred three embryos. All of those fertilized. At 66, Bhateri Devi from Satrod in Haryana became the oldest woman to give birth to triplets. She suffered. She went on the ventilator, she bled excessively. But the triplets were born. Complications were forgotten. In her village, everyone is waiting. For years she suffered the taunts, and she lived with the tag of being barren. Now, she proved to herself and to everyone else that she could have children too. Motherhood wasn't going to elude her.

National Fertility Centre is probably the only IVF clinic in the country that has the reputation of being the only centre where women of any age can go and conceive successfully. In its reception area, newspaper clippings adorn the walls. Boastful clippings from local media and national newspapers are everywhere. There's the miracle story of the 70-year-old Rajo Devi Lohan from Alewa in Jind who gave birth to a daughter in 2008. According to Dr. Anurag Bishnoi,Gyanwati's son and an embryologist, she is the brand ambassador of IVF in India. She is the oldest mother to give birth in the world at 70 years. Two years later, Rajo Devi's miracle tale dictates the directions to her village in Jind. There is the happy picture of Inder Devi who also gave birth to triplets at the age of 48 in 2007. Across the waiting area, the is Chameli Devi holding her twins she gave birth to in 2007 at 58. The story in the newspaper charted her painful survival and her miraculous achievement despite high blood pressure.

Almost all the stories about the elderly women trying the IVF as the last recourse to escape the stigma of being barren and not producing an heir, a must for a wedded wife, have a similar narrative. Their husbands married twice, thrice even desperate to get a child. Chameli Devi, the doting mother in the three-column picture, was her husband's second wife. From Santo Devi, his first wife, he wasn't able to produce an heir. So he married again. But Chameli Devi was unable to bear him children too. Then the couple discovered IVF and all was well, the narrative ran.

For Bishnoi, the criticisms that it is a health hazard for women at an advanced age to produce babies and that the doctor is acting immoral by helping them as it produces dysfunctional families where the child might be orphaned after a few years, are baseless. That the baby would be rendered motherless and fatherless too soon is not what is his call. He is only doing what is asked of him.

“That you should ask the families that want to go for this,” he says. “I am doing it because we can and it is what they want. There is a demand for it. We have the technology. We are doing it.”

A social change is in the works and this is what it is. Nothing less of a revolution, a change that is for the good. The IVF is the solution to the ills of the society. The rising numbers of people who are resorting to this technique is an indicator of its success and its relevance, he says. “It is changing the conservative thinking that women should be blamed for the problem. The attitude is changing. Every woman should have a child,”

Bhadur Ram, 60, sat hunched in the waiting area of the centre. He came from Hanumangarh in Rajasthan with his wife and neighbors to the centre hoping for a miracle. Nothing less than that, he said. He married twice but none of his wives could conceive. The second wife Lilawati is much younger than him. But at 40 years, it is like swimming against the tide if you hoped to conceive naturally, he said, his neighbour translating for him. As Lilawati waited inside for the tests, Bhadur Ram was suspended between hope and dejection. He had tried the shammams and the babas who promised healthy children in exchange for sacrifices and rituals, doctors who prescribed pills – red, green, yellow, blue. Nothing worked. Then, he found out how other women in his town had got pregnant despite being pronounced as infertile. It was the IVF. He bought into it. For Rs. 90,000 for the first injection, it was expensive but he would do it.

At first, the IVF when it was introduced in India as the other option was not a popular recourse. But over the years, its success in a society where stigma about childless women in deeply entrenched has permeated the economic stratas, the rural-urban divide, and the inhibition of the people. It has cut through the barriers. It is the the miraculous cure, the best gift of science to them.

“At first they looked down upon the IVF. They thought it was never clear if the father was the real father. But now having read in the newspapers about the older women successfully giving births, I know this is the option for us,” he said. “I don't want to die without having babies. I have to leave something of me behind. An heir, and a name.”

Bishnoi, who joined his mother's centre soon after he finished his medical training, says.

“You know they tell me that panchayats here now tell the man to try IVF when he approaches them for permission to marry for s second or a third time because his wife is unable to bear him children. Now panchayats interfere. IVF is heralding in a change that's positive. This is showing to a man-dominated world that money can be spent on women's treatment and that they should be given a chance before being relegated to the second position. Now the societies are accepting that there are techniques and they are worth trying.”

He says they don't guarantee that all women who come to them will be able to bear children. “We can tell them results are good,” he says.

More than 20 percent of the women that come to the centre for IVF are above 50 years of age. Around 40 percent of them are in their 40s and the rest are less than 35 years of age. Yet another doctor in Hisar where there are two IVF clinics disapproved of the centre's practice. Govind Fertility and Research Centre came up in Hisar three years after the National Fertility Centre was founded. But Dr. Manju Khurana said they never encourage women more than 40 years of age to go for IVF.

“It is about right and wrong. You can play God. There is technology available but with technology there is the question of responsibility,” she said. “What kind of a family it will be. Imagine the child who will have to grow up knowing their parents are not there for long. It is a very selfish thing. It also has initiated a dangerous trend. Complications can happen at that age. The government must intervene, set up a cut-off age, an upper age limit. The guidelines are ready and they will be submitted soon. I guess the age we have proposed is around 45 or 50 years. This isn't healthy. See, IVF is a positive thing like ultrasound. But look at the flip side of ultrasound when it started being used to determine the sex of the baby. Then the government cracked down on the clinics that did it. Something like that must be done with regards to IVF, too. At the bottom of it all, it is a question of right or wrong. You can do it but should you do it. That's the question we must ask ourselves.”

In Haryana, there are around six or seven IVF clinics. In the country, there are more than 150. The first IVF centres were established in Jaipur, Delhi and Mumbai in 1991. Then these centres mushroomed everywhere spanning rural, semi-urban and metropolitan cities. One has come up in Bhatinda in Punjab. But a lot of people desirous of having a child still flock to the National Fertility Centre because of the success stories. There are no regulations for IVF that exist in India currently. This is the baby boom of a different kind.

Anyone can become a mother. The test tube baby has arrived and infertility can no longer subdue their spirits, their being. No longer will they have to live with the tags – barren, infertile, un-woman like, a traitor to her husband and her species. For the women, it is the ultimate dream, the eventual fulfillment. After all they were created for a purpose. That they should procreate is what the God mandated. The technology is only the means to that end. Nothing is without God's will. This is what he has willed, Bhateri Devi's husband Deva Singh said.

“She told me even if she dies while doing it, it is worth the try,” he said. “It was Bhateri who asked me to marry twice. My children are beautiful.” Deva Singh promised Bhateri the world for the children. He bought her gold bangles, he said. “She can ask me for anything,” he said. “She has given me what I yearned for all these years.”

***

In creating life, Bhateri Devi started to lose her own grip on it. Blood gushed out. It just won't stop. Breathing came in spurts on the night of May 29 when the 66-year-old mother gave birth to triplets in Hisar in northern Haryana.

At the National Fertility & Test Tube Baby Centre, they moved her to the ICU for the night. She was on the ventilator but she survived, her husband said.

Bhateri Devi who set a world record for being the oldest mother to give birth to triplets bled through the night and days after.

Yet another operation and she survived. The bleeding stopped eventually. But it took its toll.

As she walked to the intensive care unit of the Java Hospital in Hisar where the triplets weighing 1.2 kilogram, 1.1 kilogram and 780 grams are kept, to feed the babies, she almost dragged herself. Her face , wrinkled and crumpled as rivulets of sweat ran down her cheeks, looked haggard.

Outside in the hospital's lobby, a crowd of scribes and locals had gathered to see her. A celebrity now, Bhateri Devi lashed out at the media. She doesn't want the attention. She already went through a lot.

On the night of the operation, she was moved to the ICU. She had difficulty in breathing and according to doctors, she was on the ventilator. But the triplets emerged one after the other. All three embryos that were implanted in her uterus fertilized. Bhupinder, Isha and Bhupesh are premature babies born one-and-a-half months before they were due. Every two hours, Bhateri Devi goes inside the ICU where the triplets are lying in an incubator along with several IVF babies, to feed her children hoping they gain weight fast and she can return to Satrod, her village, and celebrate. That would also mean more loans. Already her husband took out a loan of Rs. 7 lakhs from a cooperative bank in Hisar mortgaging his land. It was all worth it, he said.

He saw the triplets once. He cried when the doctor at the National Fertility Clinic told him the babies had arrived. He had waited for a child for 48 years.

“We put everything at risk. This is god's wish,” he said, sitting inside the Room no. 104 at the child care centre in Hisar. His phone rang constantly. Relatives had been camping at his house, waiting for the children to come home.

Not that Bhateri Devi didn't anticipate the dangers. The couple knew their third attempt was a huge risk. No, the doctors at the clinic didn't tell them what the operation involved. They conducted the tests, said Bhateri could conceive and that was it. At the same clinic, the couple had tried conceiving twice before. But they weren't lucky. In the third attempt, the doctors transferred three embryos.

God was more than willing, Deva Singh, 70, said.

“Children are important. I hope I live until 100 to see them grow up,” he said.

Deva Singh, her husband, who married thrice so he could produce children, was a little nervous at first.

But the temptation overrode any concerns. At least nobody would taunt him in the village saying the couple was unable to produce children, that they didn't have an heir. Adoption was never an option for them. They wanted their own blood and flesh no matter what it cost – lives, limbs, anything. In yet another village, a 72-year-old woman is trying to hold on to life. The house in Alewa in Jind is a landmark. This is where the miracle happened. A pair of pink sandals with Cindrella's pictures was brought in by the visitors who haven't stopped coming to the house. Upstairs, in a closet, boxes of new clothes and toys are piled up. All are gifts. Rajo Devi holds the little fingers of her 18-month-old daughter Naveena, almost grips them. She isn't prepared to let go.

Rajo Devi Lohan who gave birth at the age of 70 years also went to the National Fertility Centre. But she developed complications. Two months ago, she started to bleed again. The couple went in for another operation recently. The bleeding has stopped but the woman is too weak. She tires too soon. A couple of years ago, a neighbour had brought in a newspaper clipping about the success of the centre. It even mentioned the women who had successfully given birth at an advanced age in Uchana. So Baba Ram, 75, went with Rajo Devi and his second wife Omni who he married because Rajo couldn't bear children, to Uchana. They were convinced and then the three went to the National Fertility Centre in Hisar.

Omni, who is Rajo's younger sister, had high blood pressure so the doctors said she couldn't. But Rajo could. They didn't warn them about the complications that could develop later or during the birth.

“We only go ahead in cases where the women are strong and healthy. We do thorough check-ups and then allow,” Dr. Bishnoi said.

Naveen was born in November 2008. The father sold off his buffaloes, his cart, and mortgaged his land. It cost him around Rs. 5 lakhs. They threw a grand party where guests from neighbouring villages came. Almost 2,500 guests ate at the celebration, Baba Ram says.

“Blood is thicker than anything. I am against adoption. The child is not your own. He will not take care of you,” he says. “I know we are old. But Omni is there. She can take care of her when we are gone. We have relatives who can do that. The child is a toy. We play with her the whole day.”

Two years later, the debt hasn't been repaid. Rs. 50,000 is remaining. But the family is planning on a grand birthday celebration again on Naveen's second birthday. After Rajo Devi's miracle feat, a biological wonder, two other women in their forties also went to the Hisar centre but weren't able to conceive. Baba Ram waited for almost 40 years for a child. Now, he wants to live till eternity. Rajo Devi wanted to go for a second child through IVF. The couple wanted a boy. But then complications developed and the uterus had to be removed.

“We can die sitting here only. The fear of death shouldn't stop you from trying for a child,” Rajo Devi says. “I am happy I could do this before I died.”

The anguish of living in a village where people referred to you as the family that didn't have children was gone. It was a relief. Baba Ram's sperm was fused with an anonymous donor's egg. But it was in her uterus that it began to take shape. It was hers. It emerged from her.

“The baby belongs to the uterus,” Bishnoi says. “This has been happening for years. Only now people are able to admit it because awareness about IVF has increased.”

As the child suckled at her breast, Rajo Devi's face lit up. A few moments later, she collapsed on the bed. The daughter ran around her. But her frail fingers had already lost their grip.

The other Delhi

2010-06-05T23:21:00.002-04:00

I was invited by friends to take the Ring-rail but never quite made it to the station that's minutes away from my house in Nizamuddin. I didn't know something like this existed. But on Saturday I took the ring-rail service and saw a different city.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on June 6, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, June 4, 2010

From the windows of the grimy train of the ring-railway service, a showpiece during Delhi's Asiad Games in 1982, an invisible, embarrassing city unfolds.

This is the city they are trying to hide this October when the tourists come pouring in for the Commonwealth Games. They have built the swanky Metro with its sleek air-conditioned coaches, its shiny metallic body, and there are the new buses. They have fancy stations, modern-day bus stops. That's the illusion of the city.

But a parallel city, the underbelly of the capital, with all its poverty, squalor and vulgarity and numerous slums, spills on to the platforms of the railway line and the train doesn't rush past them. It is not avoiding them. It halts, blows its whistle. People – mostly daily-wage labourers, students, and saleswomen with their sacks – get off. A few get in. Stench from the manufacturing units in Daya Basti, from open-air toilets next to the tracks because in the slums teeming with the poor, private toilets are a luxury, and smoke from the stoves get in too. The passengers don't squirm. They are used to it. It's part of their life. The train is part of their life, too.

The coaches are never full. But the train has retained its loyal passengers like Rajinder Singh who once was tempted with the Metro and hopped on to it once to get to work from Mundka. After changing five trains and then boarding a bus to get to work at INA, he ended up spending Rs. 76. One-way ticket on the ring-railway cost only Rs. 4.

He was back on the sooty, grimy train the next day.

“I have been using the ring-railway from 1985. It takes me an hour to get to Daya Basti and then I take another train to Bahadurgarh. This train has never betrayed me. The city has forgotten this exists because I guess they are uncomfortable to see what lies beneath the polish,” he says looking out of the window.

At Inderpuri Halt, a old man with thick, misty glasses had set up his bidi shop on the platform. The shanties had slowly made their way on to the platform. Tarpaulin sheets and colorful mud walls hid little of the squalor, the crumbling lives, the resurgent spirit. They had all spilled on to the platform. The boundaries between private and public had been blurred. They weren't bothered by the oncoming train. The eyes would rest on them for a moment only. They had an understanding with those who stared out at them. Those eyes were not intrusive. They weren't judging them for their situation in life. The train would go on, show other lives.

“Poverty can't be hidden. On both sides you have slums, you have naked children running around,” he says. “Maybe the tourists should not be told that this train is there. Then they will never know this side of the city.”

On the dilapidated tracks that were laid in the 1970s, the drab train travels around the city, exposing its ugly back lanes, the windows that led into dark rooms, exposed the vulnerability of the walls that had cracks on them because nobody bothered to or afford to fix them.

It's a city that you never see from the steel and metal windows of the metro. The metro never criscrosses its path with the ring-railway. But it can be seen. At one point, the tracks run parallel – one above the ground, the metro train perched on the narrow pillars, the other close to the ground.

There are slanted houses that looked bent with all the people that were sharing the small space, there are threadbare curtains covering up the shame of poverty on the way. But there is beauty, too. In the city that's feeding on aspirations, a journey on the ring-rail is comforting. There are so many who have been left behind in the race.

On the tracks, they are the ragpickers who are busy doing drugs. The train doesn't startle them. They are used ot it. It is always on time.

Rajinder Singh, who works in the Delhi Development Authority, said he likes to look out of the window and ruminate. The train ride takes away all his regrets in life. He thinks of God as the train lurches past the numerous stations. He has done well for himself and his family. He can tell that when the stench from the slums gushes in from the windows.

In the distance, from under a sooty footover bridge, Daya Basti emerges. Kamla rushes in with her two daughters – Aasha and Anuradha. She has been living in the jhuggi for the last 10 years.

She was going home in Gorakhpur and the train would take her to New Delhi Railway Station for Rs. 12 only.

Kamla works at a mobile charger assembling unit in Daya Basti and earns Rs. 3000 a month. That's not good enough, she says.

Everytime she takes the ring rail, she thinks about the metro. It looks enticing. But it is so out of reach. The metro doesn't connect with the ring rail at all. Most of the 21 stations on the circular track are in places that are not connected by feeder services. Perhaps nobody thought of giving that luxury to those who used the ring railway. Maybe she will go on it once, she says.

“But where will I go. It can't take me anywhere,” she says.

Her daughter Aasha craned her neck out of the window and pointed to a little lane. That's where her school is, she says.

A mountain of garbage, colourful with pink and yellow plastci bags, hid the school. Then came the tin sheds at Kishan Ganj and then yet another slum.

The train goes around the city. The life along its tracks too goes around in a circle. The misery, the poverty is a vicious circle too.

There are 12 electric trains on the ring rail and it can accommodate 7,000 people. But many have broken off from the circle and from the ring rail. There's not more than two to three percent occupancy in most electrically maintained units.

There are only four ring-rail services in the day – two in the morning starting at 7 a.m. and two in the evening starting at 4:55 p.m. from Lajpat Nagar station.

The people on it are familiar faces from the city. There are sweaty, tense, and nervous faces. A few urchins squat near the door. Others are quiet, absorbed. Only here you know where they return to when their drudgery in the city of the future ends.

Born inside prison

2010-05-23T01:02:00.007-04:00

Finally, this piece I had started working on in October 2009 made its way to Sunday Real Page 3 of Indian Express on May 23, 2010. I had written about the girl with big, black eyes and her life in prison. The edited version seemed very different.
Here is what got published http://www.indianexpress.com/news/little-steps-in-prison/622469/
Here is what I wrote.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 6, 2009

On a cold December morning five years ago, two undertrials – husband and wife - sat on the cold stone steps inside a prison, and spoke urgently. The wife had just told him she was pregnant.
Their first child would be born inside the high walls of Tihar, shut off from the world, born free yet jailed. It would take its first steps inside a crammed barrack, and wear hand-me-downs most of its growing years until they took her away and put her in a residential school elsewhere, she said.
He didn’t know how to respond, Sonia recalled. Under the watchful gaze of the guards that kept pacing up and down, Mohd. Kalam felt awkward. Sonia could tell.
Walking up to him that morning, she had debated how to break the news to him. Two weeks after she was remanded to Jail no. 6 in Tihar, a co-accused in a murder case along with her husband Mohd. Kalam, the doctor at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital where she had been taken for medical checkup, a prison routine, had told her she was pregnant. That was 10 years after she was married. The law in India, as in many other countries, is that children can stay with their mothers in prison until they are five years of age. Then, they are put in residential schools where they live with other inmates’ children and complete school.
When their 30-minute interaction was over, the guards led them to their barracks to be locked up for a week before they would get to see each other. They had decided to keep the baby.
Sonia is a co-accused, along with her husband Mohd. Kalam who is serving time in Jail No. 3 for a murder case, and both are undertrials at Tihar Jail since 2005.
Inside the 400-acre campus of Tihar jail, in her stuffy barrack that she shared with eight other women, Sonia first told another inmate, who incidentally was also pregnant, about her fears, and joys, the bouts of ecstasy, and the subsequent pangs of guilt of wanting to give birth to her child inside a prison. She just couldn’t abort the baby.
“Who knows if I would ever get pregnant again? I am not getting younger,” Sonia said. “We thought about a lot of things. Her future, her needs. We have facilities inside the jail but it is not the same. Here we live in a limbo, waiting forever.”
For years after she married Kalam, a leather goods manufacturer in Mongolpuri, the couple had been hoping for a child.
And so when she took those hurried steps towards where her husband was sitting on the designated day of meeting (prisoners whose relatives are in the same complex get to meet for 30 minutes on the first, third and the fourth Saturdays in a month), Sonia had already decided her child would share her sentence.
A year later, while they were still fighting their case in the court, the baby was born in a city hospital. Two days later, she came home to her barrack inside the women’s jail at Tihar.
There could have been no other name for her. Tamanna was the sum total of their desires, the yearnings of two undertrials waiting for their sentence or acquittal, for a closure to their suspended lives in small prison cells where they spent their days oscillating between hope and dejection, hoping they could someday raise their daughter in a proper home, together, far from the madness of the prison, and its quirks, its stories of torture and sadness, its grim cells and its convicts.
They named the frail baby with thin arms, and dark hair Tamanna or desire. Inside the grim prison where they slept under the window that had no netting to keep the mosquitoes out,
Tamanna grew up inside the 40-acre prison compound, following the prison rules, meeting her father for 30 minutes over the weekend, supervised by the guards. At first she hadn’t known him, didn’t get used to him. It was only later that she started to respond to him. But the daughter breaks the deadening monotony of prison life for the mother. There is something to look forward to, she says.
Tamanna, now four years old, has large watery, unblinking eyes. The frail, quiet child, is one of around 2,000 children languishing in prisons across the country, including Tihar, as per the National Crime Records Bureau survey in 2007.
She doesn’t smile too often, and not so easily. She has learnt to be passive. When the other children tease her, pull her hair or tug at her sleeves, she doesn’t fight back.
Tamanna, the quiet child, always tags along the other children, trailing behind them.
Ruby, 6, is her friend. Soon, Ruby will leave the prison and go to a hostel where an NGO will take care of her studies.
Often, the children talk about home. Ruby is from Narela and has drawn on paper her house so Tamanna can see.
“Tamanna says she wants to come home with me,” she said. “I tell her we are in jail and she says when you get out, take me with you. I tell her there’s babu, there are cows, and flowers in my house. Tamanna’s house is far. She has told me.”
That’s what Sonia tells her daughter anyways. She wants her daughter to understand that this is a phase, that jail, its barracks, its convicts are only part of this life and that there is a life for her that’s different.
But Tamanna has no reference point. For her, home is the L-shaped barrack where the duo keeps their belongings in a bag, and where her mother plugs her ears when the women hurl abuses at each other.
The largest prison complex in Asia, Tihar was built in 1958 as a maximum security prison run by the Punjab government. In 1966, the Delhi government took over the prison and in 1984, it was renamed Tihar Prisons. It has nine jails, and staff quarters.
But it was not until 10 years later that Tihar started to experiment with prison reforms ushered in by Kiran Bedi who took over as the Director General in 1993.
When Bedi saw the children, who lived with their mothers till they turned six, hurling abuses and using legal jargons like custody and bail, and playing gang war games with paper knives and paper guns , she was shocked.
Then started a string of prison reforms under her. A crèche was established for the children where they could spend the day away from the barracks and learn to read and write. Stella Mama, a Nigerian, who has been convicted for smuggling narcotics, is in charge of the crèche. She knows the children by names, she has their background at her fingertips and she has grown fond of them because they provide a break in the monotony of her life, too.
“The children talked about courts and orders because they attended the courts, they talked about knives, played stab-stab and made knives out of spoons,” Bedi said. “When I saw all that, we didn’t take long. We put them in a play way school.”
Bedi won the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1994 for initiating prison reforms policies inside Tihar.
Tamanna sleeps in the barracks in the women’s jail, and attends a school run by the former Director General of Tihar Kiran Bedi’s NGO India Vision Foundation.
In her cramped corridor-like cell where Sonia sleeps under the window, and where they keep their belongings – a bucket, a few clothes, and a few old toys handed down to the girl by the NGOs - the mother says she has tried to speak about home to Tamanna.
But the daughter who was born inside the prison has no reference point. Often her friends tell her they had a garden in the village, and an uncle and cattle. Home is an elusive concept, something that she can’t connect with, a vision she can’t imagine. She has never known freedom outside the prison, her mother says.
Instead, Tamanna knows the rules of the prison. She is not a troublesome child. After school, she plays with other children, and at 6 p.m., she quietly returns to her barrack.
She spends the rest of the evening in the crowded cell in her corner, leaning against the wall, playing with her doll, a birthday gift from the crèche till the lights go out.
That’s when her space expands. There’s nobody watching. It’s dark and it’s only her with her mother. She snuggles close to her mother and talks about her fights, and new friends and what Stella Mama, the warden, taught them.
When she was six months old, Sonia started taking Tamanna to the crèche run by Kiran Bedi’s NGO.
Sonia too started working in the crèche, cooking meals for 40 odd children, for Rs. 1,000 a month. The money gets deposited in her account and she can use coupons to buy little treats for Tamanna from the canteen inside the jail sells tea and snacks to inmates.
The prison provides meals. The canteen is one of the luxuries inside the prison complex for those who can afford it. A glass of tea costs Rs. 5.
On her daughter’s first birthday, Sonia asked another inmate to see if she could get her family outside to bring her two dresses for Tamanna. She traded her coupons for the baby clothes.
“You find a way out. It’s not easy brining her up here. There are so many things you can’t do. This was the least,” she said.
Bringing up a child in a prison with all its questions and demands isn’t easy. Sonia has realized that.
She has already spent about four years in the jail, and doesn’t know how many she has left. Inside the walls, she feels protected but even though she knows nobody is waiting for her release, she would rather be free.
It is the feeling of being locked up, of being branded that Sonia detests.
Inside the prison, the barracks and the cells hold hundreds of such stories, tales of abandonment, of love gone wrong, and of ambitions cut short.
Eva Jennifer Antony couldn’t give up on love. And she couldn’t make her man change his ways. So she became an accomplice in his crime, she said.
Together, they stole money through credit card fraud. She tried to dissuade him. Eva worked at a BPO, earned about Rs. 18,000 per month.
They could live well, she argued.
She had moved in with him by then. She got pregnant. There was no way out.
A few months later, both were incarcerated in a murder case of a man whose credit card details the duo had used to swindle money.
“I loved him and I ended up in jail,” she said.
Fissures in their relationship surfaced when her boyfriend wanted her to abort the baby.
But the 28-year-old wanted to keep the baby. Eva, with her dark, brooding eyes, and a ready smile, was abandoned when her husband got out on bail and never came back. He was lodged in Jail No.4.
Eva remained. Her mother came to meet her once in the prison. That was it.
“If he comes back, I will shut the door on him. He made his choices. I don’t need a man now,” Eva said, holding her five-and-a-half month old daughter. “Yes, I am a single mother, and I care two hoots about the society.”
Eva carries her baby around all day, and seldom speaks to other women.
She is worried about Rozanne’s future. It was one thing to bring her into the world. That was about her values, her love, and her rebel spirit. To bring her up inside the prison is a task, and Eva, a strong, free-spirited, and tough woman is slowly crumbling, disintegrating. The prison with all its reforms and comforts, and its abuses and criminals, and its depressing stories can’t give to her daughter what freedom could.
For those children whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fifth birthday is the most painful day because then the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in residential schools.
Tihar, Asia's largest jail, is home to around 60 children. There are an estimated 1,392 children
living in jails across India, as per a Home Minitry figure in 2001.
The National Institute of Criminology Forensic Sciences, Ministry of Home Affairs, conducted a comprehensive study on the children in prisons in 1999. In it, head of criminology B.N. Chattoraj said the government needs to improve jail conditions for women and children. His researchers had found that there were no separate facilities for the children, who had to share their mothers' bed, usually a thin mattress in case of undertrials. Many prisons still don’t have crèches or recreational and educational facilities for children. In some cases, women and children share the same ward with men and conditions in prisons could be best described as sub human, the study said.
The study also said that children live in conditions of depravity.
The crèche in jail no. 6-A, where Sonia cooks and Tamanna learns to put names to colours, is a big, airy room with a high ceiling. On the walls are bright posters, and on the floor are scattered numerous red chairs and floor mats. There’s a cupboard with the toys and there are cribs where younger babies sleep rocked by women. Across the hall, there is a beauty parlour for women, yet another rehabilitation scheme at Tihar, where women learn the trade.
The India Vision Foundation established the crèche in 1994. Later, they tied up with residential missionary schools to educate the children like the Assisi Convent in Noida, and Grace Mission in Gurgaon. Rubeena is a six years old girl in Assisi Convent in Noida. Her mother is an undertrial and Rubeena is sent to the prison complex once a year to spend a week with her mother.
But their lives are suspended in the cycle of court hearings and sentences and arguments. The mesh is too dense for them to contemplate resolutions. So, they take the little pleasures of life and tuck it in their minds. Long after Tamanna is gone, Sonia will dig those out from the corridors of her memory and those will sustain her day after day in a prison where her baby was born, and she became hopeful.
For now, she is dreading the moment when her daughter will go. But the abdonment is imminent. Prison is a place of no luxuries. Motherhood, and love are expensive treats.

Marriage in silence

2010-05-16T00:14:00.002-04:00

This was an experience. I saw the email invite in my inbox and it got me curious. So, I went and it was fun - the introduction, the courtship, everything. But what lurked beneath was fear of the unknown and of the future.
The marriages seemed to be working. After all they came from the same worlds, they spoke the same language of silence.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on May 16, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, April 30, 2010

No word. No sound.

They mostly communicated in silence about their expectations, of love they were trying to find. She followed closely how his hands rose and fell, how his fingers clasped, unfolded, wound again, how his lips twitched as he tried to tell her what books he read or what time he goes to work. Before she said yes to Yogesh, Babal Kumari, a 25-year-old deaf and dumb girl, needed to know more about him.

He went through the motions again, adding more to his profile, hoping she would say yes to him. She knew how to decode. Outside the large hall where dozens of parents of deaf and dumb women and men congregated to participate in the Pranay Milan Sammelan, an annual event to facilitate matrimonial prospects for the hearing impaired, at the Sacred Heart Cathedral she met him first. Her brother-in-law and his father had approached each other before after Yogesh went up on the stage and communicated the family wanted a Rajput girl.

But Babal left unimpressed. The boy followed. Of the women who had come seeking an alliance, he had already set his heart upon Babal.

So, they met again. A friend facilitated the meeting. She stood and watched, listened through his hands and eyes what he had to say and excused herself and walked up to the front row to sit. She flipped through the file with the photos and the information on the men and then looked up at the stage where more men were still advertising themselves.

In its 18 th year, the Pranay Sammelan, organized by the Delhi Foundation for Deaf Women that was established in 1973 to help deaf women get education and vocational training, has gained popularity among the parents of deaf and dumb children who flock to the event to seek a groom or a bride because the deaf and the dumb have their own community, and their own language and it’s only within the like that they stray, express, love and hate.

When a utensil fell on the ground with a loud thud and Pooja didn’t look up, Brijendra Singh knew something was wrong. He took her to a doctor, and then did the rounds of hospitals in Agra where they lived and in Delhi, too, but the doctors said this was incurable. His daughter was deaf. She could speak, though. But in her world there was only silence. How would she then imitate the sounds she heard? There was no reference. Her lips moved but the sounds that came out didn’t conform to any language. She spoke her own tongue and only her mother seemed to understand.

Pooja learned the sign language so she could communicate. She also learned speech therapy in Agra and learned to say her name.

“It is difficult. It takes months to teach one word,” Brijendra Singh said.

When she was 23, he brought her to Delhi last May to participate in the Pranay Sammelan. She looked her best and the parents proudly walked up to the stage and talked about their only daughter.

A match was found the same day. A family from Agra was looking for a bride for their son who works in Hero Honda group. They liked the slight, coy girl.

On February 7 this year, the marriage was solemnized in a grand function at Agra. Renu, the girl’s mother, said when Pooja walked on to the revolving stage, she looked resplendent. She had never seen her so happy.

Pooja came along with her husband Santosh to the event on Friday. They shared their stories with others.

Pooja who is a trained beautician now lives with her husband in Gurgaon. They have evolved their own way of communicating while he is away at work.

A few minutes before he gets home, he sends her a text message and she comes down and opens the door. Little adjustments but they understand each other and they complement each other, Renu said.

Standing with her husband, Pooja spread her hands to include her mother-in-law, her parents and her husband and then clasped them to say they were all happy together.

“On her wedding a lot of their deaf and dumb friends had come. It was fun. They talked so fast we couldn’t keep track,” her father said.

Sometimes, the father becomes sad that there are so many things that have remained unspoken between the two of them. In their limited world of communication without words, he often wonders the boundless conversations the father and the daughter could have had it not been for the sound of silence that filled her ears and the words hat filled his mind.

But over the years, as he watched her grow up, he became part insider of her world.

“They have no pretensions. They have a lot of trust and faith,” he said. “Their world is simple. She tells me it is better this way. She doesn’t get to hear the bad things that go on in the world.”

In 1991, the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women started hosting the event to facilitate matrimonials between the hearing-impaired. For years, they had filled in a crucial gap by providing vocational training but when they saw the families express anxiety about their future, and the girls’ themselves indicating how they needed a companion, they decided to help them find a match.

Rajlakshmi Rao, the president of DFDW, said the marriages survive because expectations are low.

“They learn to be grateful all their lives. They have a lot more empathy. All they want is a companion who can understand who they are,” she said.

The DFDW circulates the testimonials, including the salary and qualifications of the boys and the girls, and their profiles, and helps parents interact with each other.

Four years ago, www.shadi.com , the world’s largest matrimonial website partnered with the organization to help the cause. So, they have been sponsoring the events such as Friday’s and also offering to upload their profiles on their website for free.

Almost 5 percent cases on shadi.com are special cases, Neelesh Borgharkar, the national sales head for the website, said.

“This is just helping them to widen the platform,” he said.

For years, the organization has relied on word of mouth to get the parents to come to the event. SB Kumar and Durga Devi had heard about the event from a friend in Patna. Last year, they had attended a similar event in Varanasi to look for a match for their daughter Pragya Anand, who is pursuing her bachelor’s in sociology through distance learning.

“We weren’t lucky,” the father said.

Most of the men and women who came Friday had either left studies after high school or had pursued further education through distance education. Pragya's father said it would have been nice if the government opened more colleges and gave more opportunities to the deaf and dumb who are bright but only can't speak or hear. Pragya plays chess at the national level and is good in studies but has only limited options. It's difficult in college because many institutes of higher learning don't have special educators, he said.

On Friday, he had already short listed a few profiles in the file they had been handed. Pragya, 28, is not ready to marry yet but for parents, it's time she did.

“She doesn’t understand. What will happen to her when we are dead?”, the mother said.

The daughter and the mother learned to leave behind the luxuries of the language years ago. But they speak through the nights about their fears and longings. Where sound fails, eyes and hands take over. Emotions were never a prisoner of words, Durga Devi said.

But now, it is time their daughter found a man.

“We have come with a lot of hope. Let’s see if we can find someone for her,” the father said.

While the parents spoke about their concerns and reservations, Pragya and Rizwana were quietly watching Babal Kumari and Yogesh strike up a conversation. They hadn’t found their own suitors yet.

Raish Ahmed said he wasn’t able to find any Muslim grooms at the event. Rizwana, who has completed her high school and is well-versed in household chores, is already 25. the Pranay Sammelan was his biggest chance. Perhaps if they advertised better, more Muslim families would come.

“They don’t know. Many of us don’t know about this,” he said. “It’s so much better to come and find someone who belongs to the same world.”

Surabhi (name changed) would give it a second chance. She had been married once. But it ended in divorce because both of them didn’t speak the language of silence and signs. The man wasn’t deaf and dumb. After a while, it ended, her mother said.

“Those kinds of marriages don’t last. There’s nothing to speak after a point,” she said.

A few men showed interest. They were keeping their fingers crossed.

Up on the stage, men and women wearing numbers to identify them paraded in front of the audience.

Other voiceless pairs cheered on. What had never been told in a language or ornamented with words, shone through the eyes without the pomp of speech. They wanted to break the silence with a companion and that’s what brought them here.

"Success has many fathers. Failure has none. Why do you come after me? Media always goes for those shining stars." - Ravi Kumar to me

2010-05-10T00:12:00.004-04:00

We went to the UPSC building after the results were announced to "get colour" but there was nobody there except a few television crew members who were trying to capture some footage of the list. We hung around waiting for candidates to trickle in. At last we saw Ravi Kumar looking at the list anxiously. And we tried to help him find his name. At one time, I thought I saw it. But it was "Ravit Kumar" and he corrected me saying he had made the same mistake. When he was sure he hadn't cleared the exams, we were sad, too. I followed him and he told me something I will always remember "At the end of the day, I will be alone with my sorrow."

An edited verison was published in Indian Express Sunday Real Page 3 section on May 9, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, May 7, 2010

When he had only three pages of the list to scan for his name, his fingers stiffened as he rolled them down the list of successful candidates who had made it to the Union Public Service Commission examinations.

No, it was not there. But maybe he had missed it. At least that was the hope then. Ravi Kumar was one of the very few candidates who came to the UPSC building to see the list where they had pasted it on a notice board outside.

He went through the list again. When he had read through 440 names, almost half of the list, tiny beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He fought off the tears. This was his last attempt. For three years, his name had eluded him. It wasn’t there this year, too.

For the school teacher, becoming a civil servant was a childhood dream, a passion that consumed him, an obsession that didn’t let him pursue anything else. Born and raised in Patna, Bihar, Kumar came to Delhi to prepare for the civil services examinations. He completed his teacher training and worked in a government school in Saket. But that was only to sustain him while he gave all he could to get where he wanted to.

But outside the building where aspirations converge and too many dreams crash, Ravi Kumar didn’t mourn his loss for too long. He needed to get away.

“Success has many fathers and failure has none. At the end of the day, my grief is personal,” he said.

On the list, Shah Faesal, a Kashmiri youth’s name stood out. A doctor, he had topped the list in his first attempt. Son on a man killed by the militants in the valley, he grew up believing he could do it and be a role model for others. He came to Delhi in 2008. Some of his coaching and lodging and boarding were sponsored by the Zakat Foundation of India, which was established in 1997 to help the poor and the needy. Two of the seven candidates the organization had helped – Shah Faesal and Mohd. Shahid Alam, who is from Jharkhand – have made it to the list. For many, the examinations are a great equalizer. It doesn’t cost more than Rs. 100 to take the examinations.

Faesal hadn’t come to see his name. He was the star of the day. Nor had the other toppers - Prakash Rajpurohit, a B Tech holder from IIT, Delhi, who was ranked second, and Iva Sahay, MA (Geography) from JNU, who secured the third rank.
Among the top 25 candidates who had cleared the examination, 15 are male and 10 are female candidates. Their phones were ringing off the hook. The news had reached them.

A few who had come, came anticipating the best, and fearing the worst. By then, they knew they weren’t in the top 25. But the list was long. Maybe, they too figured in the middle, towards the bottom, somewhere.
Ravi Kumar walked away slowly.

A few moments ago, Rahul Sinha had run along the same pavement to hug his friend. He had cracked the examinations and he couldn’t contain his excitement.

From his tea stall, Ravindar Nath watched the expressions closely. He was used to the exuberance that was infectious. But he was also used to seeing the fallen faces and itbroke his heart each time he saw somebody walking away slowly, unsteadily. He knew then that the building, its promise, its myth, and all that it stood for – change, exaltation, fame – had just eluded them.

Nath has been working at the tea stall for more than 35 years. Until five years ago, on the day the results were announced, it was like a mela. There used to be a lot of activity, buzz then.

“People camped here for hours. They would come and spread sheets and sit for hours. They came early and we sold them snacks and tea,” he recalled.

In those days, he also hung a light bulb from a wire on a pole so that in the evenings the place was well lit.

“They used to place the list here on this side. It used to be a different sight then. All along the road, cars were parked. The traffic got crazy as people came to see the list,” he said.

Now, he leaves early. Mostly by 8 p.m.

Now he doesn’t stock the little shop with snacks – patties, cakes and biscuits. The business was different then. He was hardly able to leave before 11 p.m.

“I sold a lot of tea. Now, hardly anyone comes to see the list. They see it on the internet,” he said. “Then the grief is not public.”

A few more trickled in. They were curious passers by, a few relatives, and some friends. An old man studied the list closely. He wasn’t searching for any name in particular. He was just partaking of their success. It made him feel good to see the list, to see so many had made it through.

Rajesh Kumar was on his way home from the Home Ministry office where he works when he jumped off the bus near the UPSC building. He saw some excitement around the place, a lot of television crew and he knew the list was out. His brother Ajay Kumar had taken the examinations and he wanted to surprise him with the good news.

“I hope his name is there,” he said as he scanned the list, meticulously going through every name.

Anup Pandey was already on the phone. His friend Jaishankar Upadhyay had made it to the list. As he was in Gorakhpur, he had asked Anup to look at the list for him. Sometimes, the excitement and the anxiety are too much for the candidates to see the list themselves. They are nervous of the fear, of the extreme possibilities – dejection and exhilaration.

“He is very happy. This was his last attempt,” he said. “He is rank 412.”

On Thursday, the list was put up at around 2:30 p.m. A few people came to see the list in the afternoon but by evening, it was deserted.

Jyoti, a woman guard said last year she had seen a few women last year celebrating outside the building.

“One of them had made it and they came to confirm. They had seen the list online but they wanted to see it on paper outside the building. Then, it wouldn’t be wrong,” she said.

“But this year, it is so silent.”

In Masada's narrative, Israel begins to live and convince

2010-05-03T12:06:00.005-04:00

I wrote the piece after I got back from Israel in December. Masada stayed with me after I left the country. Its beauty enchanted me and its story made me wonder about the other side, the side I was so not willing to explore.

An edited version was published in Sunday Eye (Indian Express) on May 2, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
Masada

It’s in Masada that Israel begins to make sense. Because in this region where there are only two extreme identities – of the oppressed and the oppressor – in Masada the roles are reversed. And you must let Masada tell you its story. You must listen, and not ask questions. That will break the spell.

As we drove in the desert towards the fortress, Zivit Sari, our guide, stuck her neck outside and shouted she could see Masada. All we could see looming in the distance was a cluster of sandstone-colored mountains. Somewhere in the middle was a flat-topped mountain, Dead Sea in front, the desert in between them.

Then it began to slowly emerge - the three terraces of King Herod's grandiose palace on the north tip precariously balancing themselves down the rock like the gardens of Babylon. It came out of the rock, blended in, and yet carved out of it. Here’s where nature helped man forge a getaway fortress from its belly - beautiful, delicate, and yet so formidable. Masada sat in the mountain like an embryo – protected and enigmatic.

Masada is where stands the refuge palace of Roman King Herod, who was himself Jewish, built by him in 38-4 BCE, and this was where a thousand Jewish refugees died centuries ago defending the "last stand" of Israel. During the First Jewish War, the Jewish rebels captured the mountain as they fled from the Romans after Jerusalem was captured and the Temple was burnt. It is not like Caesarea where there are shopping arcades, and restaurants amid the ruins.

Only Masada remained because it was built to intimidate, and it was inaccessible. But in 73 AD, Roman General Flavius Silva besieged the fortress after camping there for months. The Jewish refugees, as the myth goes, killed themselves preferring death at their own hands rather then be enslaved by the enemy they so loathed that they wouldn’t even use the Roman bathhouse built by King Herod. While they stayed there, they built their Jewish baths around the ancient bathhouse and the ruins are a testimony to this.

The Roman armies destroyed the wall around the fortress, and then they burnt the new wall the refugees had built of wood. That’s when the Jewish refugees understood they could not hold out any longer. But embracing death was a calculated move, too. Zivit told us how they left the storage area intact to show to the enemy and to the world if they came to document the incident that they had enough food to last them for years, that they didn’t commit suicide because of the threat of the enemy but because they chose freedom and pride and rejected enslavement as narrated by Josephus in the The Jewish War .

As we waited for the cable car that would take us up the mountain and into the refuge fortress complete with a Roman bath and a palace overlooking the Dead Sea, I found the narrative getting to me, and I started believing in the myth, too. It was Masada enchanting me, charming me with its sadness, its magnificence and its fate. It was staring at me, it was in my face convincing me with all that was left of it, and when I looked down from the top, I knew why it was so beautiful in its remoteness. The Dead Sea, its blue water, the Jordanian mountains reflecting in its waters, changing colours, stretched across from the fortress. The desert was beneath it. The hills closed in on it, the rains had carved the limestone mountains when they gushed forth in the rainy season, pulled down by the earth’s force. This place had everything and maybe that’s why Herod came here, lured by its promise of everything.

Masada ’s appeal has only increased over the years. Conde’ Nast Traveler magazine rated it as the world’s most popular tourist side recently.

Of course Zivit had internalised its tragic story, passed it on to her children and didn’t once mention the controversy about the Masada myth of Jews sacrificing their lives to dodge enslavement by the Romans that diluted the story of heroism because then it would mean negating their own struggles, their beliefs and their place under the sun, her own time serving in the Israeli Army always trying that Masada didn’t fall yet again.

The battle of Masada was lost. But the settlers saw that the idea could help in recruiting a force, and Masada resurfaced, and remains as important as it ever was.

It is in Masada, perched on a flat-topped limestone mountain, that the Israeli Defence Force recruits held swearing-in ceremonies shouting “Masada shall not fall again” from the 1927 poem by the Ukrainian poet Yitzhak Lamdan for many years until doubts about the accuracy of the Masada story itself was challenged by a scholar.

The idea of Masada trained soldiers to do anything; it became a symbol of Israel surviving among enemies, and occupied a place in the collective memory.

The fact that Israel has mandatory army service, it is a nation constantly on alert, trying to defend its borders and expand them, too. They are surrounded with countries that have denied its very existence.

It is here in Masada that I began to understand why Israel can fight the way it does, aggressively, ruthlessly, to defend the piece of land that’s their home and refuge and a place where Jews from all over the world can return to.

On most holidays, Zivit would pack her children in the car and drive over two hours to Masada in the Judean Desert, and the children would climb up the Snake Path and listen to the narrative of the Jewish refugees. They needed to be inspired, to look forward to the army time, and they needed to believe in the cause, feel sorry for the victims, she told us.

Because this is the age of doubt and doubt corrodes faith, she added.

The story that was relevant almost 2,000 years ago still holds ground. Surrounded by countries that have not recognized its existence , it is the perennial source of inspiration and dozens of children still climb up to the fortress, their mothers prodding them on, their teachers exhorting them to climb faster.

Zivit’s children too had soaked in the story, walk through the ruins, and listened to their mother saying how they should always be brave and never fear death.
That’s a ritual that Jewish mothers believe in. It’s part of the Jewish upbringing, a way of preparing their sons and daughters for the army, a service that is mandatory for the youth in Israel, she said.

“Because then they will never show their backs on the army and fight,” she said. “That’s how we raise our children.”

When Zivit, who now works as a tourist guide out of Haifa, was a young girl, she had trekked the narrow and steep path, too. The story of Masada is an important part of Israel’s national narrative, a myth that sustains its ideology, its wars, and its space.

I had been to Jerusalem, walked in Jesus’ footsteps, the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus took when he walked to his crucifixion, stood outside the Al Aqsa Mosque and wrote my wishes on a piece of paper and stuck it in the Western Wall so they could be answered, and watched in silence the hundreds of Jewish women reading the Torah facing the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish Temple. But in the old city I found identities, its clashes. Religion hung heavy on us, but even in the tears of the Jewish women I saw praying at the Western Wall, I couldn’t find the idea of Israel convincing enough.

Until I saw Masada, I was still trying to understand the Jewish mind. There were memorials scattered throughout the country, there was the Holocaust Museum, but it needed more, at least for me. Because in Jerusalem, past the security checkpoints, past the heavily-armed gunmen, it didn’t take much to see why Palestine needed its own place. This was their space denied to them.

In Masada, I knew why Israel needed to exist, too. Because here I saw how the Jewish refugees struggled to defend Israel after everything else had been taken over and how they died in the hopes that Messiah will gift Israel back to them. According to the account by Josephus, they killed each other until the last man killed himself while the walls burnt around them believing that God was punishing them for not being able to defend Israel. When they reclaimed Israel, they knew they were only trying to get what had been theirs. It’s another story that in the intervening 2,000 years, others had come to inhabit the region – the Palestinians.

In Israel, the first immigrants after the Nazi Germany hounded them and persecuted them, established communes called Kibbutz, pushing the boundaries of their country into the deserts, into hostile neighbor’s territories, incurring the wrath of those who were uprooted, and the world that often criticized them. They needed to sustain the zeal, and wanted their children to grow up believing in the struggle, and their victimization.

And this is why they needed Masada, and its heroic narrative.

For years, the schools have been bringing students to the fortress, narrating to them the story they have heard at home, that they will grow up with, and which will kill their doubts on war.

Masada is key to understanding the country’s insecurities, its youth and its transformation as its old generation gives way to new, the ones who are growing up in an age of aspiration.

Masada was rediscovered in 1838 by two American travelers, Edward Robinson and E. Smith, in 1838.

And from the 1930 onwards, after the Jewish National Fund bought it, it was a destination for Zionist youth. It wasn’t excavated until 1960s and at once became the centre of national interest, a site of pride for settlers who derived their sense of clan and community living from those Jewish refugees who came here. It injected Israelis with heroism needed to survive in a hostile environment, Zivit told us.

But Israeli new historians like Nachman Ben Yehuda have debunked the Masada story saying only a few skeletons were found in excavations later and Romans could not have waited out the whole night to get into the fortress whose walls they had burnt already.

But anyone visiting Israel, who needs to understand the Jewish people, needs to walk in the ruins of Masada and let it enchant you, and let it explain to you why it should not fall again and why they won’t let it fall again and why its beauty is so tragic and so convincing.

Facts about Masada

The Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority has restored Masada’s ruins and adding to the historical site a museum consisting of nine rooms that house statues and other finds to help tourists reconstruct history was opened in 2007.

Masada was incorporated in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 2001. While Masada presents spectacular scenery in the night when the moon is strong and the ruins glow with its light, the sunrise viewed from the top of the flat mountain is equally famous. An audio-visual light show chronicling Masada's history is presented at the night time during summers. The dramatic show takes place during March and October and documents the last days of the rebel’s in the cliff-top fortress.

While a cable car has been built, a winding snake path built in those days to ferry people and supplies is still used by the people. The Snake Path opens about one hour before sunrise but is closed during extreme weather conditions. The treacherous path was built by Herod to get food and raw materials up on the 450 meters fortress. It is very narrow and steep and many still wonder how the palace was constructed and how slabs of stones were carried to that height. But there is what seems like a mining quarry that suggests the stones used to build the palaces were from the quarry.

Masada, with its myth and its conflict, will also host Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” in June. It will be produced by the Israeli Opera.

The fortress that sits in the mountain like an embryo was voted as the most popular tourist site in Israel in 2008 by Dun and Bradstreet.

Also known as Metzada, the fortress is on the western shore of the Dead Sea and is in the Judean Desert. Its east and west edge’s measure between 400 meters and 90 meters in height. This is where the Sicarii, the Jewish rebels, fled to after being hounded by the Romans centuries ago.

It was largely undiscovered until a Hebrew poet’s poem called Masada in 1920s generated interest in the site. Then, in 1960s Yigael Yadin started to excavate the region and the site became one of symbols of Israel.

The road to justice for 1984 anti-Sikh riots

2010-04-28T04:11:00.002-04:00

An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on April 27, 2010.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, April 27, 2010

Outside the Karkardooma Court Complex, a group of Sikh men and women burnt the effigies of the two Congress leaders, one of who was let off by the court on Tuesday after it accepted Central Bureau of Investigations’ closure report in a case related to Jagdish Tytler’s alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. On each hearing, the group has collected outside the court complex, anticipating a verdict that would avenge their loss, and their frsutration. On Monday, after Tytler's clean chit was upheld, they said they had no hope in the courts and on Friday, they would march to the Supreme Court in their final bid to get justice.

An elderly Sikh man beat his chest, and pointed to the black charred mess on the street saying this is how the Sikhs were set on fire 26 years ago in a carnage that killed more than 3,000 members of the community. The outrage was expected. The court had just let off Jagdish Tytler saying there was not sufficient material to send the Congress leader to trial.

On one side, Lakhwinder Kaur, who had opposed the investigating agency’s closure report giving clean chit to Tytler in April last year, was trying to muster more strength to go on. Slain Badal Singh’s wife’s counsel Rebecca John said this was not a final order and they would either challenge it in the High Court or the sessions court.

She said the CBI had ignored Surinder Singh’s statement where he had named at least three more witnesses who were present at Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi on the day of the murder of Badal Singh. One of them, Alam Singh, works at a gurudwara in California, she said.

“CBI almost became a cross-examiner. They picked on the two witnesses,” John said.

Vrinda Grover, a Delhi-based Human Rights lawyer, said this was not an honorable discharge of the case.

“In many situations, the agency is capable of manipulating investigation. CBI investigation in this case is extremely suspect. They have pitted witnesses against witnesses. They were acting as a defense counsel in this case,” she said. “They have protected them for 25 years. Surinder Singh was alive for 25 years but Tytler managed to drag the case.”

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Rakesh Pandit said the statement of Jasbir Singh, who is in California, had no relevance to the case of killing of Badal Singh and those of witness Surinder Singh were “self-contradictory”. Last year, the CBI filed an affidavit signed by Surinder Singh two days before his death in the court that said Tytler is innocent and was not part of the mob that attacked the gurudwara where Badal Singh was killed. But Grover said the case was never heard in the court.

“That affidavit we can’t prove whether it is right or wrong. It provided no twist in the case. It was not examined by the court. It is not on record,” she said.

John had asked the court to order further investigations in the case related to 66-year-old Tytler’s involvement in the 1984 riots.

In its closure report, CBI had said the two witnesses’ statements were “false and concocted.”

Tytler's role in the case relating to the killing of three persons, including Badal Singh near Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi was re-investigated by the CBI after a court had in December 2007 refused to accept a closure report filed by the agency.

“The CBI has examined two other persons who said these three people were not there and the agency accepted that statement. We wanted further evidence. There are other witnesses,” Grover said. “Nobody wants to pursue the leads. It shows they want to protect him. We know one of the three granthis that Surinder Singh named in his statement is alive and is in California. It is the job of the agency to trace the other two. They haven’t done it.”

The counsel also said the CBI didn’t examine Satto Singh, father of Jasbir Singh.

In an affidavit filed before the Nanavati Commission, Jasbir Singh had deposed that Tylter of November 3, 1984, had instigated the mobs to carry out the riots, while Surinder Singh had said that Tytler was responsible for inciting the riots where three people, including Badal Singh was killed.

For Lakhwinder Kaur, it is yet another disappointment on the way to justice.

“Twenty five years is not a short time. I was so angry. Today, I feel like I am losing strength. Thoda hausla tootne laga hai,” she said. “But I will not give up.”

Kaur had been married two years when her husband was killed at the gurudwara by the mob. She was pregnant with a girl child and had a five-months-old daughter. She moved to Tilak Vihar where many Sikh families were resettled in the aftermath of the riots and now works as a peon in the education sector.

While Tytler was yet again given a clean chit, another Congress leader Sajjan Kumar’s trial continued in the same court complex on Tuesday with the CBI arguing that the two cases in which Sajjan Kumar is an accused – the Delhi Cantonment case in which five people were killed and Sultanpuri case where at least seven people were murdered in the riots of 1984 – must be taken up separately by the court. Counsel for the Central Bureau of Investigation, R.S. Cheema also said they would press for sedition charges against the Congress leader and base it on the testimony of Nilpreet Kaur, a riot victim, who later joined the Khalistan movement after she lost her father in the carnage.

Sajjan Kumar, Khushal Singh, Girdhari Lal, Balwan Khokhar, Mahender Yadav, Maha Singh, Capt Bhagmal, Santosh Rani and Krishna Khokhar were named as accused in Delhi Cantonment case.

The CBI field the chargesheets against Sajjan Kumar in January in two cases for allegedly making provocative speeches that instigated the mobs and led to killings of Sikhs.

The five named in the chargesheet in the case relating to killings of seven people at Sultanpuri in north Delhi are Congress leader Kumar, Ved Prakash Pial, Peru, Khushal Singh and Brahma Nand Gupta.

The case that was transferred to Additional Sessions Judge Sunita Gupta’s court this month. The accused side will begin its arguments on Wednesday.

However, in both cases involving two Congress leaders, it is interesting to note CBI’s role and method. In Tytler’s case, as alleged, it didn’t examine witnesses and ignored many crucial leads. However, in Sajjan Kumar’s case, the agency has dug out FIRs filed 25 years ago and has traced four crucial witnesses so they could depose before the court, including Nilpreet Kaur.

In the land of the forgotten, a place of memories

2010-03-21T09:25:00.002-04:00

When we climbed up the stairs and they unlocked the gates, I was nervous. I didn't know if the women in the mental shelter would like my presence. Renuka Puri, our photographer, had been there before. She knew them. They had become used to her. But I was a stranger. They looked at me from behind the iron grill and they smiled. So, I knew I had nothing to fear. I wish I had spent more time with the women.
An edited version of the story was published in the Indian Express newspaper's Real Page 3 section on March 21, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 12, 2010

In the land of the forgotten, upstairs in an old government building, beyond three iron gates, 18 women have been resurrected, reclaimed, and renamed.

Because they didn’t remember their names. Names didn’t matter in the streets, in the dumps where they lived, their bodies full of maggots, their lips muttering incoherent tales of their lives.

In the corridors of their memory, no windows opened. They just couldn’t tell. Only their scars screamed about their damned lives.

So, in Sudinalaya, a shelter home for women who are abandoned and are mentally disabled, they started calling the woman with short cropped hair, but with large lucid eyes, the one who covered her face always, and who had mood swings “Imli”.

Imli never talks. She just raises her eyes, the sorts that are deep, and dark, and calm. But then when she is upset, the watery eyes flood, and the anger spills out. Then, she screams and shouts and cries.

“Imli is the soul of Sudinalaya. She is sweet and sour. She laughs and she cries,” Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary, founder and chairperson of the NGO, said. “All their names signify their behaviors.”

The large hall, bare except for a television mounted on the wall, and 25 iron beds, is full of stories, fantasies, outbursts of rage, longing, and love.

Anju insists that they call her “Janu”. That’s what her husband, her lover called her. She is old now. Her hair is peppered with gray and white. And wrinkles on her face are like little rivulets, each containing within its folds the many mysteries of her life.

She was found at a petrol pump near Okhla.

Anju never recovered fully. The shelter isn’t a destination but more like a passage where once the inmates are able to recall their addresses and other details about their lives, the staff tries to rehabilitate them.

“Where will I go from here,” Anju says. “Pankaj will come to pick me up. I know I will find him one day. One day I will meet him.”

So, she is waiting. Waiting for her lost lover – real or imaginary. He makes her blush. Anju is in love. She has always been in love. In her reborn state, where age doesn’t matter, this love and longing is her only bridge to the past.

Bano is longing, too. She wants to go home to her husband in Sitapur in Bihar. Her little children are waiting, she says.

Bano was rescued almost two and a half years ago from the streets. She was crawling, the staff recalled.

For months, she was on a wheelchair. And then, she held the walls of the large room, and learned to walk slowly. Her burns have healed, too.

She had a husband who worked in Delhi and she left her village to come here to see him. Now, she wants to see him again.

Then, almost in the same breath, she says he beat her up, and sold her.

But it is her children that call her home. And she pleads and begs the staff to send her home.

“Only when we find your house. We are trying to get reservations,” Inderjit, who looks after them, tells her.

“I am not mad,” she says. “I can walk now. Take me home.”

It’s not easy being here.

It a tough place, a place where memory is fragile, brittle. It requires patience, and lots of it. It also demands that you learn to believe, even though the stories transform overnight, and it demands that you remain unfazed even when they come at you, eyes full of rage, their teeth clattering.

Vimla ran away once. That night, Indira got wild. She beat up everyone, and she screamed. Vimla, one of the staff, locked herself in a room.

“At these times, you don’t know what to do,” she says.

But Asha, who stays overnight at the shelter, has over the years learned that the women, old, delicate, vulnerable, are like children.

“You don’t fear them,” she says.

So, when Asha cooks, she calls the women inside the kitchen and they cook together.

Where they live, somewhere in between memory and loss of it, the inmates have all learned to lean on each other.

Munni, who they named so because she is like a child, and laughs all the time, cries when someone is hurt. She will come to them, hold them by the hand, and cry and point to the person.

Sometimes, Munni sings, too. An old Bollywood song. She has been in the shelter for years. The shelter was established in 1989 by Choudhury who now runs 11 such shelters across the country. Three are in Delhi. One caters to about 50 men who are mentally disabled and two others to women. Choudhary who worked the crime beat in a city newspaper says she wanted to help the women she saw on the streets – abandoned, and vulnerable because they were mentally disabled.

It has been a tough road for her, too. It’s difficult to find committed volunteers. Her organization has sustained only on the basis of donations, and goodwill of others.

The women are referred to them by AIIMS, Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi police and citizens.

“There was an urge to support victims,” she says. “Then I started this initiative. These women were easy preys for organ dealers.”

In one of the corners, an elderly woman is muttering in English. Shikha was rescued from the INA market by Choudhury several years ago. When she saw Choudhaury, she asked her to sit and in an agitated state called out to “Pappu” to bring in sweets and fish curry, Choudhury recalls.

“She talked about mosaic and servants,” she says. “She is from an affluent family.”

But there is no way to tell. Because the shards of memory are not enough to fill in the gaps. So, they go back and forth, shuttling between memory and forgetfulness.

In yet another corner, Dhapu, named so because she said “Dhap, Dhap” all the time, is calling out for Rani, her daughter.

“Rani has gone to school. They should bring her here,” she says.

When they found her, she had a young child who she held close to her. Even at the shelter, she would not leave the child. Then, they took Rani away and put her in a school and a childcare center.

But the mother only remembers her lost child. And amid laughter, and songs, her wailing is hard to miss.

They have clung on to the past or whatever remains of it with a ferocity. After all, the new names are not all that they stand for.

Inside the Afghan bakery

2010-02-01T04:09:00.004-05:00

At a friend's place, we were offered Afghan bread and he suggested I should visit the bakery, which I did and I wrote its story.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Real Page 3 of the Indian Express on Sunday, January 31, 2010.

Chinki Sinha
January 28, 2010

New Delhi, January 27, 2010
Long ago in a little bakery in Kabul, Aqa Sayed learned to knead the dough, cut it into pieces, then weigh it on a scale, flatten it and gently put it inside a stone-lined fire pit.

An apprentice to his father, a baker, Sayed came to his father’s shop in the afternoons after school, to learn the art of making Afghani roti.

Many long years have gone by since.

Now, Sayed, 48, is reclaiming from memory the bread-making skills he learned as a child in a little rented shop where an Afghan bakery has recently opened in the crowded Bhogal market.

Outside the shop called Afghan Nanwaee (the bread maker), a queue of Afghani people has formed. Most of them came to India as refugees, fleeing the perpetual state of turmoil in their homeland where the smoke and splinters from a bomb blast, and soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs and marching in the streets and on to their lives, are part of everyday living.

But home is an idea and like time and place, is a keeper of sanity. Familiarity, a semblance of what was destroyed, left behind, is what the refugee seeks.

So, inside the bakery, the four Afghani men have recreated their homeland, lining its sooty walls with tapestries of a countryside village, a mosque in its background, and pewter plates with Koranic verses on them. A broken part of a bed that once belonged to someone in Kabul, and has pink roses carved on it, that a refugee packed with his meagre belongings so he could keep a piece of his former life with him always, hangs near the entrance.

The oven, the fire pit or Tandoor, was bought here in Bhogal, but the bread that comes out of it, is intrinsically Afghani with little designs made by poking tiny holes, the size of a dot.

At fifteen, Sayed, a Tajik, gave up on school because there was no hope of finding a job as one war bled into another one in his homeland, and he stopped counting how many bloody wars ravaged Afghanistan, its people, the schools, the hopes, and the bakeries, too.

“We never knew who was ruling us. It changed too often, it mattered too little,” he said, Ali Jan, a Hazara boy, interpreting for him.

His wife and two children died when a bomb exploded in one of those streets in Kabul. Bombs were forever exploding, and killing, and filling streets with blood of their children and women.

Sayed then came to India. In Kabul, his bakery shut down, too.

For a few weeks, he was barely making ends meet. The little money he brought with him lasted a few days only. Then he met Ainuddin, popularly known in the locality as Mullah Jan, who was running this bakery and needed men who could bake.

Sayed had been a bread maker. His hands knew the craft, the acrobatics of baking the perfect home bread.

He is a sad man, always brooding, they said.

Only when he plunges his hands into the flour and pulls and pushes, and leans into the fire pit to check on the bread, he smiles.

The bread that he pulls out is a connector of sorts, its smell transporting him to a life he loved, and his memory comes alive.

On a Wednesday morning, after they had baked the first batch of bread, the four men sat down for breakfast – rotis, fresh cream, and afghani chai. A woman stuck her face inside, and asked for bread. She was late but her daughter didn’t want anything but bread. Mullah Jan picked one from the stack of breads they’d eat for breakfast and gave it to her.

***

Mullah Jan, 36, came to India three months ago. At 10, he had left Afghanistan.
The wars were getting personal, he said.

He lived in Iran, and then in Pakistan for ten years. In Afghanistan, things only got worse in the meanwhile.

“When a child leaves home, the homeland becomes an alien city. It is difficult to reconstruct your life from the rubble,” he said.

Mullah Jan completed high school, and could have studied further had it not been for his refugee status in the world, and the limitations of it. When he returned to Afghanistan after Taliban left where his family still lives, he opened a restaurant in Khoust.

Then, one day a bomb went off.

“My restaurant was blown to pieces. A bomb had exploded in the market,” he said. “So, I came here. The Afghanis wanted someone to bake bread for them so I said I could do it.”

He paired with Mohd. Sarwar, another Afghan refugee.

Sarwar said the initial days were difficult. He came with a thousand dollars and after it was spent, he lived in the burial grounds near Nizamuddin for a week. When he figured that Afghani families needed a bread-maker here in Bhogal, he knew he could do it.

“I took out a loan from friends and set up the bakery with Mullah Bhai,” he said. “It’s doing well.”

At least three times in day, people queue come to the bakery to buy bread – morning, afternoon, and evening meals are not complete without the bread.

“We usually buy our bread and don’t bake at home. That’s our culture and tradition. Mostly men bake the bread in shops and women do it at home,” Mullah Jan said.

A few years ago, an Afghan refugee operated a little bakery in the back lanes of Bhogal. But when he opted for a third country resettlement in Canada, the bakery downed its shutters. Since then, the local families started getting their bread from an Afghan baker in Lajpat Nagar. In Tilak Nagar, where many Afghani refugees live, there are a few Afghan bakeries.

But Bhogal is the new Afghani ghetto. In its crowded alleys, rent is cheap, and in the evenings, an Afghan boy sells momos and soup outside the bakery and men smoke and chat as they had done in Kabul.

Mullah Jan will tell you the Afghanis are resilient people, and even if you left them in a jungle, they’d survive. Because they have suffered enough to know better.

For the Tajiks, India is home, and Delhi seems familar. They have grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood movies, lining the walls of their homes with posters of
Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. The smattering of Hindi they speak was picked up from the films, and so assimilation was never so difficult.

There is no definitive number of Afghanis that live in Delhi. In Bhogal, there are upwards of 500 Afghani families, Mullah Jan said.

They rent out small rooms, most of them built in the fashion of a train corridor, one room leading into another dark room, and then to another. Most of them are unemployed, and short on money. Without the refugee status, they can’t find any jobs. And the waiting time to get the status stretches into months, years. So, they wait it out, pawning jewellery, working illegally in sweatshops, trying to get by.

Ali Jan is a Hazara boy with hazel brown and green eyes and rosy cheeks, who is learning English at an obscure school. In his free time, he doubles as a cashier at the bakery trying to earn his fees of Rs. 750.

“I hope I can get to college,” he said.

For Ali Jan and Sayed, the bakery is a relief, a means of getting somewhere.
Sarwar too has a plan. He wants to get married and that’s another reason he came to Delhi.

“The bride price is too high in our country and people like me can’t afford a bride. In India, we can marry because you don’t have to pay,” he said. “With the bakery money I can raise a family easily.”

For the families that have left their homeland, the bakery is a reminder of the happy times when life was normal in Afghanistan.

Ten years ago, at least 28 such bakeries dotted the city’s landscape. Then, people left for elsewhere and these bakeries were closed.

Now, as the war intensifies, and cars begin to blow up again and Taliban is once more active, more and more refugees are coming to India, and to Delhi.

Next to the bakery, there’s Kabul restaurant, which also opened recently. It sells Afghani food, and on most evenings, it is packed to capacity.

In the evenings, a steady stream of customers leave the bakery with rotis the size of snowshoes wrapped in newspapers.

Abdul Rehman was late. The bakery had shut for an hour. But he needed the bread because that’s what his mother-in-law wanted. She was sick and had peculiar demands.

“She just wants to eat the bread. Can I have one, please?”, he asked.

Mullah Jan obliged.