Season's greetings...and memories

It's that time of year again.

That time of year when I so yearn for Calcutta and my childhood that I forget to see what Delhi has to offer. Missing Park Street has become something I look forward to now. Never attended midnight mass at St Paul's Cathedral in all my years at Calcutta. But managed to score on that count last year by ringing in Christmas at a crowded Sacred Hearts Cathedral.

Miss seeing the lights of Park Street, the Christmas trees peeping in from windows and balconies, wishing the sisters at Carmel a joyous festive season and much much more. Miss the Christmas party at Latha aunty's house, the pleasure of all us 'kids' raiding the phuchka shop at Lord's More on the pretext of celebrating Christmas together.

Miss the gulp of a much diluted vodka surreptitiously downed years ago on this day and the sip of wine that followed soon after. Miss some friends who got me drunk with their mere presence, some who brought cheer with all the fights we had, the smiles, the arguments, the making-up-after-huge-fight sessions, the badminton matches played till the halogen bulbs at the para court started flickering and the shuttles started begging for mercy.

Miss the plum cakes my mom would get ritually every year for me and my brother, the New Year, the book fair, the annual picnic and Saraswati Puja.

Yes, it's that time of year yet again and I am missing my past, the city of my childhood, the city where I grew up, the city where I first thought I fell in love.

This city isn't bad either. At least this Christmas I have lots of plum cake on which to feed my nostalgia. Along with it I have some yum gajar ka halwa... a labour of love of sorts made painstakingly and with single-minded focus. I have the chilly winter breeze to look forward to. So what if I still have to discover the Park Street-like warmth here, so what if I don't have Carmel to go back to.

I miss my mommy, but she, hopefully, will be with me next Christmas if I manage to move to a bigger warmer house, cos where I am right now, is pretty much freezing my soul, not just my body. Looking forward to the warm Christmas sun to un-freeze my heart...

Best wishes of the Season to one and all! May it fill us with cheer, peace, forgiveness and love!

Aruna's Story, My Thoughts

'Unconscious for 36 years, woman seeks SC permission for death'
Aruna Shanbaug, a woman whose fate is so fearsome that just the contrast between who she was before November 23, 1973 and what she has been since then, evokes a strange unrest in the mind.
"I met a big learned pujari who said I had a sau mein ek patrika [a rare horoscope], that I'd be a success, will live long & would go abroad..... but even if he was talking rubbish it does not matter because I know I will become known in my field’’ Aruna is believed to have said when she was a 20-something nurse.
Soon after, the woman from Karnataka was brutally sodomised by a ward boy at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai where she worked. She was left blind, without speech and paralysed by the incident. For the past 36 years, according to newspaper reports, she has been confined to a room, in fact, a bed in a hospital. Her family today consists of the nurses and attendants who look after her.
The man who dealt that crushing blow to a bubbling, promising life probably lives unknown in some part of this same country. He is protected by the same laws that force her to continue living a life that is undignified and painful.
The law, which finds it unpleasant to rule that she should henceforth not be force-fed and should be allowed to die, did not have provisions that could nail the rapist who brought her to this vegetative state. Where is the justice in this law?
Why can we just see such stories, such incidents, feel pity for the victims and just forget about them once the channel is turned off, or once an anniversary passes?
Just the injustice of the whole debate and the need to hold it seems to take away from Aruna's right to dignity in life and death.
While we ruminate on the provisions of the law on life and death, while we examine whether her plea to not be fed amounts to killing her or not, while we argue about the powers vested in us as a society and law, Aruna lives another day dying — force-fed, in fear of what she has been through, and probably praying intensely that a certain pujari's prediction about her long life will become untrue.
And while we debate whether or not we should shun our sense of propriety as society and interfere in matters of life and death, we do nothing to make that life more worthwhile, safer or even more worthy of living.

Bhopal, Bahroop and more

So many things are clouding my mind right now.
Characters from plays I have been part of are suddenly walking into my life. And I stand, gaping.
First there was Tsutsomu Yamaguchi. The man who survived the only two atom bombs ever used in history. And I always thought that Ennamen Kawaguchi in Badal Sircar's Teesvi Shatabdi was a figment of an exceptionally cynical playwright's imagination. I did not think Fate would cruel enough to let a person go through such tragedies. Imagine what a laugh Fate would be having to have seen Yamaguchi/Kawaguchi or many more such unnamed men and women escape the atom bomb at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. And then what vile pleasure would be Fate's to guide them to Nagasaki, where a similar experience would be waiting for them. Is there a purpose in Fate? If yes, what is it?
Then there was Rajkumar Keswani and the Bhopal gas tragedy and the many people I encountered on my journey through reams of dialogues during the production of Bhopal Kyun/Yahan se Shahar ko Dekho. To have smelt a tragedy of enormous proportions six months to a year before it actually took place, and to have seen it and lived through it to tell the tale 25 years later.
What could have altered destiny? What was the purpose in so much destruction? It all seems so wanton now, when politicians haggle over the amount to be spent on a memorial to victimes without discussiong how much money should be spent on cleaning up toxic wastes that have been dumped at the same place over ages or how it should be done.
There must be a reason for everything no? For the people we meet, the choices we make, the place we are when we are, the things we do that we do.
Still searching for that reason.

More Bhopal

Bhopal -- 25 years of living with a toxic tragedy.

At this same moment two decades and a half ago, poisonous fumes leaked out of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, killing thousands of people. According to government figures about 3,000 people died. According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, between 8,000 and 10,000 people died in the first three days of the gas leak. About 25,000 died of exposure to radiation within the next ten years.

Tragic, isn't it? That an industrial disaster could have caused so much death and destruction?

But what is more tragic is that 25 years later, the government still claims that there are no hazardous chemical wastes in the Union Carbide factory or around it. This, when independent groups have conducted research that calls their bluff.

To add to it, the Madhya Pradesh government wants about Rs 116 crore from the Centre to build a Hiroshima-type memorial at the site.

Isn't it crazy? Rs 116 crore, which is almost 5% of the total sum the Indian government got as compensation for the thousands of victims affected by the leak of methyl isocyanate will be spent on setting up a memorial for the victims. So much of it can be spent on medical research that may find cures to the various kinds of ailments that come with drinking poison everyday. After all, isn't it tragic, that even 25 years after a pesticide plant misfired and shut down, children are still born with deformities?

Or with foresight, the government may find a more permanent and lasting solution to the drinking water problem there, so that at least from now on, they will not be drinking contaminated water.

The government could also spend the money on cleaning up the crap left behind by Union Carbide, so that there can be an end to the continued contamination. There could be special facilities for those affected by the gas leak.

But no, what we want there, is a memorial, where more and more politicians in future can go to pay homage to the people they have failed and will continue to fail.

What will be the purpose of such a memorial? To remember the futility of the deaths? To keep reminding ourselves of how well we have failed them? Or to pat ourselves on our back that we have the courage to continue working and making people work in death traps such as the Union Carbide plant?

It really makes me wonder about the value of human life. Is there any value for life? Or have we stooped so far below into the depths of greed that we do not care anymore?

Will things change? What is the price of justice? What is the fruit of justice?

When we have deadlines for everything, why not for something as basic as a deadline to provide the right to a life of dignity so that we don't die like flies stuck to a swatter, helpless, and oblivious to the greater heights we can aspire for.

It's 1.26 am. Maybe the fumes would have been churning now, waiting to escape into the dark starry night and poison a city's destiny. May be I should just go to bed and leave the world handle its minor glitches on its own.

:(

Bhopal Again

Another date on the calendar, or is it just another date?

When 25 years ago, thousands of people dropped dead

Like flies swarming to those same dead bodies...

Today, they are but photographs and memories

Not lessons learnt and lessons that should have been learnt.

A toxic gas leaked they said, blinding, killing, maiming

Accidents happen. Deaths are inevitable.

But what of the generations of maimed we bring into this imperfect world?

Twenty-five years ago, the B&W photo of a child stunned by toxic fumes

Shocked living rooms across the world

Today the same child gazes out with those same haunting eyes

From the same B&W photo out of the same newspapers

It surprisingly fails to move me the way it did the first time

Something has snapped.

Is it the hope that things will change?

That the child’s life was not lost in vain?

It's all about numbers and facts.

So many dead, so many dying,

Chemicals with fancy names, fancier aims

Bleed people, day in and day out.

Poison water in a ghost town.

More children are born with the scar of a mistake made 25 years ago

More children will die, because that wrong was never righted

Because we have lost the will to fight for justice

Because we do not care any more about deaths, disease and despair

Because we have become numb to everything around us

Because we have to be worried about tomorrow's headlines & today's deadlines

Much deeper than the toxic wastes seeping into the ground

A cynicism has seeped into our collective existence.

We are all in a stupor, chasing a fading finish line

Where the only way to get is grab

Where the only progress is regressive

Where the only pleasure is pain

And where the only knowledge is ignorance.

Forgive us O unnamed child of Bhopal,

Who died in 1984 and lived forever after,

That we have failed you and so many others like you

That we have sacrificed your lives

In this race for some unnamed utopia that keeps us going.

Maybe there will be a time for redemption

Or maybe there is no Judgment Day

Till whatever the end, it's just another disaster

Just another anniversary

Just another date in just another yellowing calendar.