Heres the thing: I don’t see race. I know it’s a landmine of a statement to make. A hugely problematic one at that. But let me explain, when it comes to me – I don’t see race.

When I look into the mirror, I don’t see the ‘brown’ anywhere in me. I am aware of the colour of my skin and I know that it’s not white. But I don’t see what I am supposed to see that makes me comfortable with ‘brown’ or ‘woman of colour’.

Of colour- what does it mean to be of colour? Am I ‘brown’ because my racial identity is associated with being non-white? Does ‘brown’ – that one word, adequately explain my non-whiteness?

On me, ‘brown’ feels like a weightless identity, like adding it or subtracting it will not change anything about me.

But I often pause and think, am I supposed to feel it’s important because that is what is expected of me? Am I looking too inwards by dismissing that part of me. Is it all simply privilege. Yes definetly- never having had racism directed towards me allows me to ward race off like it didn’t matter. But it’s a little more than that…

Because when I look into the mirror of other things I see the unmistakable signs of my class, my caste- the Tam-Brahmness that I know will never leave me no matter how much I try to unpack my upper-caste privilege.

I live that reality everyday, it gets reflected in every choice I make, in the food I eat, the way I eat it, the gods I am supposed to worship, the gods I am not supposed to, the temples I go to, the treatment I’ll get from a priest.

Because when an archaka handing prasad to devotees looks at my face and gives me a ladoo packet in addition to the prasad, but doesn’t give it to the person behind me- its not the ‘brown’ he’s seeing

Its something else altogether….

Yes, I know those identities are not to be convoluted…and yet one of them feels a lot more real to me than the other. I know all that changes when I go abroad soon. I know that suddenly, everything else will fade and somehow ‘brown’ will come to the forefront. Will I embrace it then? The ‘brown’ in me. Who knows. For now, I see the tone of my skin for what it is- the tone of my skin.

Being a girl in India means many things.

It means you’re valued less, you’re harassed more.

It also means that you have to be very very careful about how you choose to cloth yourself when you go out.  Am I going to a conservative neighbourhood definitely not the skinny jeans then?  Can I walk around in boxers in my home? Sure but always be ready to pull the fastest trick change into pajamas if a guest comes calling.

You’d be amazed how many times I have changed from perfectly okay clothing to go somewhere because; well… it’s just not okay to go there.

I know all about, I have the right to dress how I want and not get raped.

But I also know something else- I most definitely don’t want random men to stare at my legs when I walk down the road in a skirt. I don’t want to be whistled at by random teenage boys on bikes. I don’t want to be standing in a bus and have to bear uncomfortable staring from the men at the back because my shirt is clingy.

Does that mean I have to always dowdy up? No not really, because you see my upper middle class privilege lets me do all kinds of things. It lets me have a car that I can drive around in wearing whatever the hell I please. It lets me go to malls and restaurants and coffee shops and plays in revealing clothes where I can walk in confidently with the expectation that no one will look at me threateningly. Because that’s not what ‘people like us’ do now is it?

But yes, I police myself. I don’t wear skirts to work even though I want to because I have to take the public bus. And even if this is Bangalore where it’s quite okay to dress how you like because this is where the cool people live, And even if the bus I take is a nice red Volvo with air conditioning and padded seats and really helpful drivers and conductors and   ‘a better class of people’ who can afford the Rs 30-40 fare and who don’t ‘ostensibly’ engage in leching (It’s called ‘checking out’ if it’s done by software techies instead of day labourers, I believe),  I don’t because I still have to stand everyday at a bus stop for five  minutes waiting, when I all I want to do is be swallowed up by the earth because I can feel every single man staring at me.

This constant mortification, even for five minutes, is not a price I am ready to pay for the joy of baring my legs. Call me a coward, call me a bad poster example for women’s liberation, but I won’t do it.

The skirts meanwhile, lie unworn…

Note: This post can also be found at the wonderful Jaded16′s blog.

He returned to class the next morning only to be flooded by an avalanche of worried rants and advice on countering depression. One friend even wrote him a detailed letter on how much he meant to him and how he was not alone in the world.

All I can kept thinking after he finished his story was how impossible this scenario could be today

“Where were you?”

“Do you know how worried we were?”

“Couldn’t you have told somebody where you’re going?”

Ever had one of these conversations with your parents. Most likely not in the last five years at least.  Unless you have been living under a rock and are unaware of the concept of the cell phone- that magical device of hyper connectivity, the one that starts going off the moment you step out of the two kilometre radius or break your curfew by a second.

If you’re like me and reading this in an ominous slasher movie voice, you know what I am saying when I say- ‘They always know where you.’ What’s more? ‘They always want to know where you are.’

Cell phones are not just cell phones. They are human GPS tracking chips, the technical upgrade to the Marco Polo game. They are to parents, the apparently mysterious vault of secrets where children conduct CIA classified correspondence, which must be probed and questioned every time the text message alert comes in.

“Who was that?” What was it about?” These are not the paranoid questions of controlling parents, but the almost unconscious enquiries of the normal ones, who don’t even realize how tiresome it is to have to report the mundane contents of conversations. Try and blow them off and then they automatically assume you’re

up to no good. Be vague and they press for details.

What is it about cell phones that make the most rational and easygoing parents so curious and sometimes neurotic? It is not like they ever ask to read your emails, or to monitor your interactions or ask for an hourly report on what you’re up to. No, but this frustrating piece of technology in some strange way makes them feel like they’ve been excluded from your life; ergo the need to monitor it.

In other news, my cell-phone services have been barred since yesterday owing to me consistently ignoring every message since the last four weeks asking me to submit my documents at the nearest showroom.

I don’t feel terribly inclined to do it and have gone a whole day without fretting over who might be trying to reach me, this is even after the service providers promised me free talk time if I would just submit my goddamn papers.

There’s no hurry. I seldom get calls in any case, e-mail being my preferred form of communication.  I really don’t like talking on the phone so much and I have a decent landline that I can always use, if should feel any irresistible need for vocalizing anything over the airwaves.

Maybe I’ll give it a couple more days before I march myself over to the nearest ‘relationship’ centre. Till then, all my cell-phone is good for is to serve as an alarm clock as I struggle to rev myself up for my early morning work day.

When it comes to the issue of writing and reading, my snobbery knows no bounds and will brim and simmer without apology. Though I can’t make any claims to being well-read, I attach immense judgemental value on what constitutes good writing.

A few months ago, I was with a couple of friends and we were discussing pretty much everything under the sun. Over subway sandwiches, we sat in the courtyard of the dance department at two in the night and ranted about inter-religious and caste marriages, a conversation which deserves a whole post in itself. But somehow, as it often happens with conversations, we ended up talking about books.

One of my friends, who is the most wonderfully candid person I’ve ever known was telling us about how she found the sheer thickness of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy intimidating. It is not an uncommon lament. But both the other friend and I assured her that sticking through it would be a worthwhile exercise. We then got into the business of good books, always testy ground, when I complained that I hated the manner in which Chetan Bhagat has become the most recognizable face of contemporary Indian fiction.  Surely there were more deserving authors to bear the mantle.

This friend of mine, an unabashed champion of massy popular culture, argued that be as that may, a lot of young Indians who would have otherwise never picked up a book started reading only with Chetan Bhagat and that she was one of them and that people like me were not right in trashing him and his work.

My other friend, who is like my kindred soul in matters like this, jumped to my defence.  That wasn’t what you would call a reading habit at all, we obnoxiously held to our conviction mostly because we really did hate Bhagat. Not him personally as much as his brand of average prose. There were infinitely better books that one could read. In our heads, we really believed it was morally wrong for anyone to say they love books and then list One Night at a Call Centre on their Facebook pages.

Friend number one very politely told us that we were being condescending and that we were in the minority, so no one could care less what we thought. We knew that of course that she was right but it didn’t stop us from assuming our faux-pedantic high ground.

I don’t quite remember how we stopped talking on that particular subject. But ten minutes later, we were on Meera Nair’s Kama sutra, (I think it was because the first part of the film is based on an Urdu short story… can’t be sure)

While the conversation has since long, ended, the particular issue has stayed with me for quite some time now. The question of narrative versus form. Is what is being said important or is it the how and what in the end is good writing really?

To me, the ideal book is an effortless blend of story and quality prose and I truly think that majority of the contemporary Indian English Fiction is very high up there in that regard.  While it is admittedly writing itself into a larger clichéd South Asian identity narrative as seen through anglicized eyes trope, there is unquestionable richness to these stories that are told.

It is disturbingly easy for me to not account for the class privilege the authors have because I am utterly seduced by their “good’ writing and the issues they’re addressing: diaspora, urban life, contemporary relationships, and self-aware, self-deprecating colonial baggage. Subjects that suit my “liberal-arts college education” sensibilities perfectly and ones that make me think without making me cringe.

So in the game of hypotheticals, what happens to stories that don’t fit into this new cannon? Stories which might have something very important to say, but lack the readability to say it or the “good writing” for them to be taken seriously. Voices that will never be published by Penguin or Harper Collins and stocked in Crossword and Landmark, receive the kind of word of mouth that a Rana Dasgupta or a Jhumpa Lahri will invariably get.  Not even a “have you read this?” or “you must read this.”  For the sake of argumentative clarity, I am not including non-fiction, non-literary writing here at all, a genre, which comes with its own set of affectations and deserves separate scrutiny.

If one took a strictly market view, there is someone out there who laps it up. But it won’t be me or anyone I know. Fashioning a world view that is centred around one self is not particularly helpful or even scientific. But I think there is a fair case of ‘people like us’ that goes around in this country that decides what is standard.  “High-reading” comes with a mega-serious affliction of ‘people like us’. I remember gushing over a brilliant piece in Granta by Rana Dasgupta on the discontent of the mind-elite over the cultural encroachment of Delhi by the real-estate nouveau riche. It resonated with me because having spent six years in Delhi; I knew exactly what the author was trying to say. I recommended it to everyone I knew, insisting that they had to read it because it was the most eloquent piece 1000 word equivalent of what had been my resentment of the vulgar face of Delhi as opposed to the Habitat centre- IIC- LSR version of it that I knew.

‘People like us’ is the way which in which we, i.e. the Indian English speaking  elite with the sub-clause of intellectual  , go around spending our entire lives in a circle of referential texts thinking and wrongly assuming that we alone decide the right books and the right movies. We are very quick to acknowledge different voices but only so far as they fit into our virtuous othering paradigm.

All dissent is too internalized and academically clear in our heads that we don’t even realize that we  don’t care about other people’s issues unless it comes to us in  neatly written books again by someone like us who took on the brave  job of writing for them.  It’s an astonishingly hypocritical paradox of our lives, a trap of our own doing and one which, if I may be so bold, no one really wants to get out of.

Clark’s books are my single point of best seller fixation. She is one of the few best seller authors whose books I’d buy based solely on the fact that she wrote them.

If the obviously ominous sounding titles are not clues enough, Clark’s books belong to the thriller/murder mystery/best seller hybrid genre of fiction, a genre that I really, really dig. While essentially dealing with crime and crime solving, the stories do not follow the investigative procedural with the trademark  detective character pathway. In a sense, they have an Agatha Christie meets Sidney Sheldon vibe where there is the traditional whodunit or in the case of Clark, who is going to do it again which combines with a best seller like narrative style.

Well crafted plots of mystery and suspense with an engaging B-storyline, strong characters and descriptive writing all which combine to make a good read, she has a flair for providing gripping narratives without necessarily going over the top in the sensation department. The central characters in all of her books are women in the midst of danger and lurking threats. Often they come from a traumatic/unhappy past which invariably leads to a connection to the present danger that they find themselves in.  The plots mostly deal with how a character manages to solve the problem and unmask the person at the root of it all.  The author chalks out resourceful, urbane, rational and smart women characters who can hold their own without making them out to be super human crime solvers and that’s where she deserves credit.

Clark’s books also have an interesting way of detailing and delving into criminal psychology. The murderer while obviously being the ominous shadow, who looms over the narrative, also has a fully sketched out identity in the stories. He or she comes with a past, a story which thankfully does not become a justification. A multiplicity of characters gives the books different voices and succeeds in spreading the net wider so there’s almost no way of accurately guessing whodunit till you at least get half way.  The psychic phenomena is often incorporated into the stories with ESP, clairvoyance and telepathy being common themes or devices in moving a story forward.

The predictability quotient as with any author gets higher and higher as you begin reading their books one after the other. It doesn’t go unnoticed though that the protagonists are almost uniformly white, attractive, upper middle class women with lucrative careers in wealthy suburbs or neighbourhoods. Clark’s signature patterns of story telling become easy to see through and if you’ve read enough of them, you kind of know quite soon on what direction the book will take. What still keeps me hooked though is  the fact that each book starts with a new premise and always makes an earnest attempt to allow the reader a glimpse into the psyche of the villain.

Here I present, three of my top favourite Mary Higgins Clarks and why I like them-

# I’ll be seeing you- My first tryst with the works of Clark . In I’ll be seeing you, a reporter investigates the shade under goings at a In-vitro Fertility Clinic while  dealing with the  mysterious nature of her father’s fatal accident and the consequences of his past actions. The premise which quite doesn’t present itself as neatly as my one line description unfolds over the course of the book and makes for a very interesting read. Meghan Collins, the protagonist is one of Clark’s best characters.

# On the Street where you Live-  A lawyer , gets entangled in the middle of serial killings that happened a hundred years apart.   Trying to get away from a bad divorce and a traumatic stalking, Emily buys her old family home in New Jersey, where the body of her ancestor is buried under the pool.  As she delves into the past, she stumbles upon present dangers leading to a solid climax. Deserves kudos for just the incredible amount of creep factor.

# Loves Music, Loves to Dance- Takes us into the unusual and seedy world of personal classifieds. Best friends, Erin and Darcy answer classifieds as part of research for a TV producer friend. Erin disappear after one of her dates with her body discovered later with one dancing shoe on.  Darcy sets out to find the killer. Another serial killer premise with a definite twist, its setting makes it different and interesting to read.  The past murder sub-plot, a common theme in Clark’s books is one of the best written segments of the whole book.

The story is simple enough.  Boy meets Girl. He is the dyed in the wool cynic about Love and anything within a five mile radius.  She is almost entirely made of candy floss, Bollywood flavour. He comes with the baggage of his parents’ broken marriage.  She colour coordinates her wardrobe with her fiancé.

Needlessly to say, our protagonists meet on the sets of a film where he is assistant director and she is set designer. Heated words are exchanged, cold stares are thrown and in a Mumbai where every girl the dude picks up is white or speaks with an accent, the greatest clash of ideologies since the cold war seems on its way. Only, one vase related confrontation and an upbeat song they’re all happy and chummy and picking out cushions together.

The cold stares morph into mellow, thoughtful gazes as girl begins to fall for boy but he’s not there yet or he’s there but doesn’t know it.  Girl is heartbroken, advances trip to foreign location and gets back with her pastel matching fiancé. By then boy realizes that he actually loves her and well you get the drift.  Many such peaks, troughs and shenanigans later, the romantic duo is united.

The Indian Rom-Com follows a shockingly limited number of tropes.  Either it is the saga of childhood sweethearts, the they’re good friends who realize lately post much angst that they’re actually in love or of course the ever popular they hate each other only to realize that it was love. I Hate… belongs to the third category of the opposites attract paradigm, that essential of cinematic ideas which has given countless forgettable and unforgettable movies. Only here, it takes a self-deprecating effort shot at itself through endless parodies and spoofs of its predecessors through its film within a film sub-plot. While a few do make you laugh, there is a certain staged nature about the in-house jokes that leave you cold after a point. The excessive referencing interspersed over the thin story line also cause fatigue by the time one gets to the predictable ending.

It does have to its credit some clever working in of film based themes and motifs, those which are different from the spoofs. Case in point when Jay’s ( Imran Khan)  friend attempts to  script and stage his reconciliation with Simran (Sonam Kapoor).

As far as performances go, Sonam Kapoor does an admirable job while Imran Khan fails to make an impression. His repertoire of expressions has to improve by many fold and someone should have told him to do away with the face shrug after the twentieth time he used it. Also, kudos to Punit Malhotra on the characterization of the staple must have bimbo. He actually makes her even more caricatured and flimsy then one would have thought was possible.

What makes I Hate Luv Storys watchable in the end is its inherent watchabilty. That formulaic romantic comedy slickness of well clothed people, style and decent cinematography that makes it easy to see and not expect very much from.

We’re on our way to drop my sister  who is leaving for Chennai. Its the end of summer and college reopens for students.

It reminds me, I am no longer a student.

Almost all of my life has been ordered by this annual shift of season. Summer ends and a new year of school begins. School ends, college begins. College ends, there’s nothing to begin yet. The cycle of life one has become so familiar with  has reached its first big breach.

It unnerves me. Had I been on my way to Grad School in the US as was my original plan this August, the routine would have remained unbroken. But that’s not till next August. This year will be different. There will be no back to school at the end of summer.

The  I-20 form lies folded in a corner, much like my disappointment at having to defer my admission. There’s no time to be wasted brooding. What’s a year really? Ten months actually when you come to think of it. By May, preparations for the big leap overseas would have commenced in any case. The flurry of familial visits, the monumental task of packing, the anxiety of it all.

Time has an unreal tendency to fly by. Next year it’ll be me on that same ride.

Different airport, different roads. They all  lead back to a familiar pattern.

End of summer, beginning of school.

About her and Bliss: in Seven Chapters, a theatre-dance performance by eminent artist  Anita Ratnam and her troupe, the Arangham  Dance Theatre was presented here at the University of Hyderabad on February 18, 2010.  For those unfamiliar with her ( like me until last night), Anita Ratnam is an accomplished Indian classical and contemporary dancer and choreographer based in Chennai. She has also done cameos in films like Kandukondain Kandukondain and Boys.

Exploring the concept of womanhood and bliss, the performance stringed together seven different pieces.  Anita’s solo performances drew from the mythical repository of Hindu goddesses and saints as she weaved in contemporary narratives into the images of Saraswati, Durga, Lakshmi and Meera Bai. Saraswati is embodied in the spirit of her grandmother and daughter one wise while the other fiercely independent. In Durga,  Anita enacts Mahishasura Mardini.  Her  Lakshmi comes through in the feminine aspect of modern- day consumerism whereas Meerabai, she forsakes that very material world in search of more.    

Interspersed between the major chapters were group performances by the troupe, starting with paying homage to the dancing God, Nataraja which incorporated movements from Bharatnatyam, Kalari and Yoga. The second piece went onto explore the world of ‘tweens’ while the last piece was a more traditional performance. Elements of dialogue, music and sounds were fused together to form the soundtrack of the performance.

 The part the struck me the most in from the whole performance was the chapter on Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity which Anita chose to explore through the female icons from the worlds of film and fashion. Using an interesting play of popular culture of Helen’s cabaret songs with Tamil shlokas, Anita did her own tongue in cheek portrayal of the glitterati.

 Though all of the performances were very well conceptualized, this piece resonated with me the best. It got me thinking about who our modern-day Lakshmis were. Are they not is some way our icons of popular culture?  The capricious nature of their wealth, fame, and beauty, so like the goddesses’ fickle bounty: to be given and taken away at will and without reason.

 It also makes me think that despite all the problematic elements of women in Hindu mythology, (and boys are there several: Anyone ever cringe at the sight of Lakshmi pressing Vishnu’s feet), our goddesses are awesome. The things they embody: knowledge, spirit, strength, courage and well-being are amazing qualities for any woman to aspire towards.

 It makes me think of the pedestals that my parents put me and my sister on. To them we are goddess and more…

 It makes me think yet again of Acchi, the lambadaa woman I met last week who told me that if the baby she was carrying turned out to be a girl she would either sell her or kill her.

It makes me think and that’s a good thing.

When the idea of a trip in ‘covering deprivation’ is floated for the first time in class, the only thing I think of is : how utterly condescending. For us to sojourn into the rural hinterlands to find poverty on display  to gape at. Then to feel sorry about what we see and write about our encounters in sympathy evoking prose. The idea has always rubbed me the wrong way even if the learning experience of it has tremedous potential.

I think to myself as I pack my bag the day before, well alright, an hour before we have to leave. Don’t the poor exist in the cities? The cities that we live work and make homes in. Yes they do, in excessive numbers. Behind every posh suburb in Banjara Hills and high-rise in South Bombay, there are hundreds of poor people who are magically invisible to us and only pop out when we need our cars and houses cleaned.  Why couldn’t we just take the cloaks off and see them instead of taking road trips in SUVs.

 I already know the answer to my question. Urban poverty rarely makes it into our thought process because we have so guiltlessly internalized it to some tiny little glitch of otherwise shining India Inc.  But we can allow ourselves to feel something for rural India. After all, feeling being one of those little things we can actually do.

 I try to keep my dyed in the wool cynicism to myself and we embark on our journey in search of characters to fit our stereotypes. We land at our first site, a Chenchu colony in Timmapur, Chandampet mandal in Nallagonda. Conversations began as the Telugu speakers translate and mediate for people who can’t speak the language. Cameras begin clicking away rapidly as we rush to capture this strange new world that we seem to have stumbled upon.

 I hand over mine to a friend. For one I have the half advantage of understanding the language but not speaking it quite so well. So I can inconspicuously listen and write down furiously as the people in the village tell their stories while others have to wait for their translations. Perhaps my reluctance also comes with the unease I feel at this blatant invasion. We never did ask them if we could take their pictures. They never did object, but still…

 Now, all I can remember when I think of that place is not the repository of displacement tales we collected, but the old lady with a stick in hand who shook from head to toe with Parkinson’s as she struggled to remember her childhood.

 We move onto a thanda,  a Lambadha  hamlet named Katrawath. Descendants of the Rajputs, Lambadhas are a beautiful people with striking features and tall builds. The whole village gathers around our entourage, eager to answer and participate in the conversations.

 A woman expecting her eleventh child who tells us point blank that if it turned out to be yet another girl like the rest of her seven surviving offspring, she would either “sell her or kill her”. The local health worker, gets into a confrontation with her, telling us how she just “refuses to listen.”  Has our presence made her so bold or are these kind of public arguments on private matters of reproductive health so common? I feel a strange anxiety for her if the former turns out to be true. What would happen to her after we left? Would she face problems for airing dirty laundry in public?

 By the time we have reached, our third village, another thanda at the very end of the Mandal, we are exhausted and in our words have “seen enough of deprivation”. Reluctantly we stumble out of the cars. The village people gather once again and the Sarpanch sit down to talk with us. She is unhappy with the way the village has been neglected, no public works have been started for the area. “I spent Rs 5 Lakhs on the campaign, no use. No programmes or policies have been given.” She says glumly.

 While a few are active participants in the interaction, most are onlookers. They are looking at us, possibly judging us on our strangeness, our ‘otherness’.  It is the first time I realize that we have become somewhat of a spectacle everywhere we have gone. Those who we went to observe have been observing us all along.

My mind speculates. Have we unearthed any groundbreaking truths or have the people simply given us what they thought we wanted to hear.  Did they ever sit and think about how deprived they were until we went and asked them the same?

 It reminds me uncannily of something a journalist had once said at a conflict reportage seminar years ago at the India International Centre in Delhi on the western coverage of the Vietnam War. It was not that the Victoria Falls did not exist till David Livingstone saw it.  But it was still   ‘discovered’ when a white man saw it for the first time.