After the Acid Violence - A conviction, and a curse

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 ...

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

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.