Payal Dhar's Blog: Writer's Log, page 18

The auto-cracy strikes again

Turns out from 1 March onwards, (most) autos in Delhi are going to stay off the roads after 4 p.m., demanding a fare hike from the government. This is an indefinite partial strike and comes close on the heels of a 48-hour strike last month. But it also turns out that no one asked the majority of the auto drivers about it. Drivers who stand to lose a significant proportion of their earnings for an indefinite period of time. Drivers for whom it will make little difference even if the metered fare is officially raised.

On my way home from work today (well before 4 p.m.), I happened to ride with a particularly vocal driver who informed me about this strike. I already knew about it, but what caught my interest was the way he put it: “The union-wallahs are making us go on strike.”

“What’s the strike for?” I asked. “To increase fares?”

He shrugged and said, “It’s all politics.”

Later, when we stopped at a red light, I asked him, “Who are these union-wallahs?”

“The people who do politics,” he said.

“What about you, drivers?” I asked him. “Are you part of the union? Are you part of this decision to go on strike?”

He shook his head. It is well known that the drivers themselves are pawns in a bigger political game. There are apparently over 80,000 auto drivers in the city, and about 2,000 are union members. Do the maths.

I asked him about loss of earnings. He said: “We just have to do what they tell us. Otherwise they’ll throw stones at us, damage our autos.” Then he said something that really got me thinking: “What sense does it makes to go off the roads after 4 p.m.? It’s really inconvenient for commuters. That’s when people need to go home from offices.”

Gasp. Could it be that an auto driver actually cares and has a sense of responsibility towards the service he provides?

The thing is, we routinely vilify auto-rickshaw drivers as crooks and thieves, but there really is another side to the story. Like my driver today, most are poor, in many cases their family’s only breadwinner, and desperately trying to make a living in a system that really doesn’t work for them. Thus, the truth behind these strikes has remained the same.

Yes, the metered fares are unfairly low. Even most commuters will admit to that, especially given that CNG prices have gone up more than once ever since the last fare hike. One also needs to acknowledge that without autos, which ply in Delhi’s extreme climate (it was 5°C two months back and will be 45°C-plus in another three months), most of the city would be stranded. That said, however justified a fare hike is, it does not necessarily mean auto drivers will earn more—quite likely they’ll just have to pay higher rents to their contractors, who will continue to harass them and wield their power over them.

~PD

Can’t buy you love

Something strange happened today—I almost found myself in agreement with HT City. “Are we being conned?” screamed the headlines, asking if Valentine’s day was a gimmick thought up to line the pockets of sellers of pink and heart-shaped things. Unfortunately, a closer look revealed that the placement of the story was probably a gimmick itself. And my world was righted.

Citing a survey “across platforms”, HT came up with the revelation that 42 per cent (of youngsters aged 18 to 25) agreed that it is a con, followed by 35 per cent who thought it probably is but are willing to be wooed, and bringing up the rear were the remaining 23 per cent who felt it is a “worldwide tradition” that ought to be embraced.

Like most of these sort of polls, a closer look at the sample told a different story: 340 respondents in a city with over 16 million residents (23 million if you count the entire NCR) is hardly representative. Moreover, one would hardly imagine the “platforms” the survey was conducted on—website, social media, FM radio channel and face-to-face (and they got only 340 people?!)—made any effort to reach every corner of its complex society. Yet another testimony of how the day is targeted at a class able to spend money.

Up until liberalization in the early 1990s, we in India really hadn’t much notion of Valentine’s Day. The first I heard of it was as a pre-teen, through an aunt who worked at a Christian missionary school and was generally better informed about saints and their “days” than anyone else I knew. It was only around the mid-1990s that the commercialization started (as I recall it). Twenty years later, Valentine’s Day is a money-spinning blitz coated in shiny, glittery marketing, and pushed down our throats in a package of emotional blackmail.

Most of the carrots are dangled in front of youngsters—”Tell your special someone that you love them. All you need is this heart-shaped chocolate wrapped in pink shiny paper, and here’s a bunch of roses and a fluffy teddy bear holding a card with mushy versus inside just in case they are a bit slow.” And if you’re slightly older, there’s always that special Valentine’s Day dinner or romantic getaway. These messages are also continually reinforced by deviously planting in impressionable minds the idea that if you get it wrong, there is something lacking in your relationship. Thus, an unrelenting pressure to conform, without really stopping to wonder why.

My general derision for Valentine’s Day does not mean I’m opposed to romance or love. Just that the idea that you’re supposed to express it in a certain way on a certain day is loathsome (to me). Especially because doing so will mean I’ve falling for the marketing brainwashing. Also, who can really get excited about a day that “revolves around a deranged baby with a weapon” (from Switched at Birth)?!

Call me regressive, but if you love someone, they should know it by how you are every day, not because you buy them overpriced roses and take them to dinner because a shiny ad in the papers said so.

~PD

 

Things to do

Things have been busy lately. A humungous editing assignment and a string of persistent deadlines have thrown my preferred priorities to the winds. However, I intend to rein in the madness before the month ends. What better way to start than to make a list.

Things to do before February 2013 ends:

Finish Mass Effect 2: Hell’s bells, it’s been so long since I played ME2 that I’m sure I’ve forgotten the controls. Commander Shepard lies forgotten in my Windows partition, into which I dare not boot lest I get tempted to while away the hours in yet another loyalty mission…
Find my feet in Shadow IV: I admit, I’ve been floundering (yet again) in the fourth book. Some part of me is in favour of a complete rewrite, but the other is rather fond of the story so far. In any case, I need a breakthrough soon… when I have a moment to think.
Make crochet goodies for sibling: I’ve been promising the sibling lovely crocheted goodies for many years now, but have consistently failed to deliver. However, thanks to my newly-re-found enthusiasm for craft, I am fully determined to come good finally. (If you’re reading this, no, it isn’t your birthday present, pig!)
Work out an e-publication plan for the Shadow series: Which includes combing the previously published version for typos, formatting the documents, and figuring out which platforms I want to put the e-books up on. Oh, and getting the covers designed.
Finish aforementioned humungous editing assignment: So I can get my life back.

All that was in no particular order. Of course.

~PD

 

Where’s all the chocolate?

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.
(Linda Grayson)

For someone who doesn’t have too many of them, I sometimes feel I tend to take friendships for granted. I don’t mean in the take-advantage-of kind of way (at least I hope not!), but more in the way of not really questioning my relationships—sort of assuming that they’ll always be there. It’s not that I’m a bad friend overall: I keep in touch, I try to listen, I do my best to be around. But it doesn’t always work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of the friendships lost. I can count three off the top of my head (not counting the ones where both parties have drifted apart out of mutual consideration)—two of them were valued friendships that I miss and would like to get back; the third was barely even a friendship, but taught me a nasty lesson anyway.

(Note: The individuals I talk about may recognize themselves, but I hope I’m taking enough precautions so the rest of the world does not.)

Lost Friend ONE:

Sometimes you meet someone and it feels like it was destiny, even if you dismiss all that nonsense as… well, nonsense. You think alike, you have the same interests, and you get along like a house on fire. It’s the stuff best friends are made of, really. Then, at some point, your paths diverge because your lives naturally steer away from each other. Again, nothing earth-shattering there—all relationships realign now and again without their coming apart. But then comes the blow—your old pal doesn’t want to be friends with you any more because new people in their lives don’t like you.

Lost Friend TWO:

A breach of trust is always serious, but it isn’t necessarily impossible to find your way back from it. That is, if you want to. So, what do you do when you find someone you know has been misrepresenting themselves to you? I personally find that slamming the door shut works fine.

Lost Friend THREE:

The longer you live, the more complex the world reveals itself to be. Therefore, when you find someone who looks at it with the same lens that you do, you want to hang on to them with everything you’ve got. Especially when you’re known to not be particularly traditional in your politics, it’s important to have people who think like you do, who can put you right when you need a push, who can make sense of the impossible. And you hope that you can be a support to them too. But sometimes it seems like you fail—even though you have no idea why—and you turn around and find they’ve walked away from you.

…

So, here’s what I’d like to say to my lost friends, if you’re reading this: My world is not the same any more. Is yours?

~PD

 

A hairy story

Fact: women’s body hair is dirty. And how do I know this? Because I’ve always been told you’re cleaner if you shave your legs; and, stretching that logic, unhygienic if you happen to have armpit hair. And it’s on TV and in the newspapers, so it must be triply true. Heck, according to the media, even perspiring is a sin and will send you straight to hell.

In short, shaving your legs, waxing your arms, depilating your armpits and, while you’re at it, shining your vagina are mandatory. The question of personal choice doesn’t come into it. They are, after all, the little milestones on the path to becoming a Real Woman. How else do you expect to top your exams, make friends, get a job, snare a man and generally have fun or find success in life, silly?

There’s the logical part of me that wants to scream, “I am a mammal; I have body hair. Get over it!” or “It’s my body and I decide!” or similar such witty, insightful put-downs. But it has only a tenuous hold on the part that has been pickled by social conditioning. It is frighteningly difficult to rationalize with yourself that there is nothing wrong with the way you look when the world keeps hammering the opposite message at you relentlessly. (Cosmetic products and ridiculous expectations are also thrown at men, but that’s a subject for another day.)

For some reason, hairy legs are fine for men, but “unnatural” on women. That’s just the way it is; there’s no room to argue. And the other day the woman who cleans my house asked me if I “did” my eyebrows. I said I’d tried, found it too painful and given up. She found it amusing and said it was fine because I am “like a boy” anyway. This interaction disabused me of the notion that this terrorism of beauty hadn’t reached the working class—and to be fair, if looking good (I mean the narrow definition) is sold as something to aspire to, doesn’t everyone have the right to dream?

Actually, “shaving your leg” is an apt metaphor—for the pretty arbitrary guidelines that society lists for women to be suitable for public consumption. And they are sneakily, insidiously drilled into us until we find ourselves subconsciously adhering to these rules without questioning them—and we know how patriarchy has honed this technique to perfection.

When I was in my early 20s, I overheard a friend of my mother’s talking to her about the way I dressed: “I, too, dressed peculiarly when I was her age,” she said, going on to add that she grew out of it when she got married, ostensibly thanks to real life catching up. I didn’t stick around for my mother’s reply, but in my imagination she defended me. I’m completely surprised how many people feel they have the liberty to comment on my body, what I wear, or how I look (outside of asking if I’ve lost or gained a few kilos or saying that I’m looking nice today or pointing out that I’m wearing my trousers inside-out) just because I don’t look or dress the way they expect “normal” women to.

When you actually sit down to analyse it, and see that all these dos and don’ts only restrict women in various ways—tottering in high heels, caked in make-up, tripping around in saris and skirts, lugging huge handbags—you’ll be forgiven for screaming “Conspiracy!” And despite our better judgement, we keep getting pulled in.

I know, for instance, that body shape varies considerably and that being fit does not necessarily mean being “thin” as defined by pop culture (or vice versa). That the flat-stomached and liposuctioned models pushed in my face are not representative of all healthy bodies. That sweating is the body’s natural cooling mechanism. That hairlessness does not equate with hygiene….

And yet I can be unhappy about the tyre around my middle when I sit down, I may suck in my stomach when I walk into a room full of people, I have been embarrassed about a patch of sweat on my shirt, I don’t always have the nerve to walk stubble-legged into the swimming pool…

So much pressure, so many expectations. But cultural conventions are transitory—they are not laws of physics; they were just made up by someone, probably with a vested interest in doing things in a certain way (or more likely because they were bored). Some conventions we hold sacred are easily smashed by looking into their antecedents. For example, the pink/blue divide and women’s “inborn” attraction to high heels.

Some of the shackles I have managed to throw off have been hard-won. If you are a girl and don’t like bows and frills, don’t do nails or use make-up, and have no compunction about eating a chocolate pastry every day, you must be broken. Therefore, the world will try to fix you.

If you’re not careful, it will succeed.

~PD

[Photo credit: lilieks via SXC.hu]

Review: The Torment of Others

If you’re a reader of crime fiction, you’re likely to have an impassioned opinion on the pair of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. I doubt there is any fictional duo that has frustrated me quite as much as them. Yet, these two creations of Val McDermid’s fertile imagination has me going back again and again to the books.

I’ve been re-reading the books to review them for the site—unfortunately in random order. I start with The Torment of Others, a book that is indelibly printed in my memory for the ‘hideous insights’ (Daily Telegraph in their review of the book) into a mind so deviant that it keeps one awake at night.

That I’ve read Val McDermid’s The Torment of Others twice is a sterling testimony to my nerves. In short, it’s a horrifying story featuring stomach-churning violence and messed-up individuals, brought together in an edge-of-your-seat package by a veteran author.

The Torment of Others reunites cop Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Tony Hill in an impossible quest. A deranged serial killer is going after prostitutes in the fictional English town of Bradfield, but here’s the twist—his signature is identical to a spate of killings for which a man has already been convicted. The case against Derek Tyler was cut and dried, and signed with unshakeable forensic evidence.

Read the rest of the review.

~PD

Happy New Year 37

Turning older in January means that it is easy to see the regular new year thing and the birthday thing as a big, all-encompassing Big New Year Thing in general. It also makes it possible to procrastinate doing my usual year-end audit.

Overall, 2012 and Year 36 was a mixed one. From a professional perspective, there were hiccups, but things ended on a generally good note. A long-time freelance opportunity shut down, making a serious dent in my finances, but having a job helped tide over that one. New writing opportunities opened up as well, so one has hope.

Writing-wise, I had a book out, so I mustn’t complain. But then, I’m dissatisfied with the progress of my writing generally. I feel I need to write more; I need to play around with more ideas and experiment more.

On the personal side, it was very mixed. There were satisfying highs and terrible lows, but one emerged unscathed for now. I had a great trip to Spain and felt more settled than I ever had. But the euphoria and feelings of doing okay were scarred by the loss of friends—one due to a breach of trust that I’m not losing sleep over, while the other is more complex and consuming.

Health-wise, I took steps in Year 36 to keep body and mind together.

In sum, one year older, and none the wiser. But still standing.

And how did I do with my Year 36 resolutions? Let’s find out:

Write a short story every month: Oops. Big fat ZERO!
Write a blog post every fortnight: Another resounding fail.
Do more book reviews: Grand total of one book review, but it was for the Deccan Herald. Does that make it better?
Take more photos: I wasn’t regular with my photography, but did quite a lot on my Taiwan trip and in Spain.
Start learning a language: Yep, pass. I’m learning Spanish.

Though each year I wonder why I bother with resolutions, it doesn’t stop me from making new ones. So here’s the to-do list for 2013 and Year 37:

Write more generally: finish at least one novel draft; write more shorties; and definitely do more blogging and book reviews.
Do more craft: try to give only handmade gifts;
Redesign Writeside.net
Get more freelance work—and return to full-time freelancing
Stay fit.

~PD

Doing a phoenix

Is my blog dead?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for quite a few weeks now. The answer I want to give is: “No, of course not!” The truth… well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. But then, if I do want to resurrect Writer’s Log, what better time to do it than on my birthday. So, yay, happy birthday to me.

If Writer’s Log is to rise from the ashes, I figure I need to have a plan. This blog was never about chronicling my life—it was to talk about the things that were important to me. Over the past few years, I find, I’ve stopped engaging directly with social issues of my concern. I hope to change this. Right now there are heated debates and discussions going on around me about violence against women, gender inequality, rape culture and others. I want all this to figure in my blog.

The book reviews need to come back. I still have to put up old reviews in the Book Reviews section and also really need to start adding some new ones.

Apart from reading, the one other thing I’ve not stopped is gaming. So, yes, there will be more talk about games on Writer’s Log, even though I still deny that I have a Sims blog. Web design and techie things are some other things that have featured here, and though they are a lower priority, hopefully they’ll come back as well. As for sport… let’s not go there.

So, once again, hello world.

~PD

Writing about writing

…Or why I’m not a beetle

Writing about writing—my that’s a hard one. Which is a bit of a paradox since I write for a living. Even this piece, which I started writing for a website that was inviting entries about what writing means to different people, could be put down to “work”. Needless to say, my entry didn’t make it to the finalists’ shortlist, so, of course, what else could I do but publish it on my own site! ).

It’s hard to delve into what writing means without going into cliches. I read some of the other entries that were published, but none of them had any resonance with what I felt. No, writing doesn’t complete me or put me in touch with my inner self or heal my wounded soul or make me feel beautiful—and no, these are not quotes from the entries, but descriptions I’ve heard before. Maybe something is very wrong with me that I call myself a writer yet don’t imagine my writing is a “window to my soul” or the “meaning of my life” or something equally profound but incomprehensible.

At the crux of it, it’s very simple—mostly I write for fun and the rest of the time I write because I have a deadline. And it’s just something I do. Also, probably, I write because I love to read, and writing is one of the logical steps to take from there. (The other, of course, is to read even more, but, whatever.) But the long and short of it is, if I have to run out of the house during an earthquake, the one thing I’ll take with me is my laptop, Stephen, which is what I write on.

Yes, mostly writing is fun; but sometimes it is that annoying “work thing” that just has to get done before the deadline blows. There are moments when my fingers can’t fly fast enough to get the words out on the page; there are others when even another half dozen words to conclude a sentence is a struggle. There are times when I can marvel at the ideas that tumble from my mind (ugh… modesty isn’t a writer’s strong suit); and there are those when the words on the page makes me cringe (and yet, we can be really hard on ourselves… it’s a mystery).

To cut to the climax, if I didn’t write, I wouldn’t be who I am. And would life be worth living if it weren’t for that quickening of the pulse whenever a new idea popped into my head or a plot point suddenly resolved itself? Nah… I might as well be a beetle.

~PD

Bookaroo 2012

On 23, 24 and 25 November, the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival was held in Delhi, bringing together about 70 authors, illustrators, theatre people and various other storytellers—and, of course, thousands of young readers. While 23 November was the schools’ day, the next two days were open to the public. Entry was free and the crowds were impressive.

The Sanskriti Anandgram complex was a perfect setting and the mildly sunny winter afternoon weather was just as conducive. There were readings and discussions, workshops and quizzes, storytelling and puppet shows—plenty of stuff to do for children. The sessions were age-banded, starting from 4- to 6-year-olds up to 12- to 14-year-olds.

In attendance were well-known names like Paro Anand, Sampurna Chattarji, Wendy Cooling, Anupa Lal, Ranjit Lal, Frane Lessac, Manas R. Mahapatra, Parnab Mukherjee, Roopa Pai, Jerry Pinto, Geeta Ramanujam, Anushka Ravishankar, Rosemarie Somaiah, Marcia Williams, Bulbul Sharma, Natasha Sharma and Ovidia Yu. They came from not just around India, but from Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, Sweden, the US and the UK.

Despite the obvious good that Bookaroo is doing, I feel it needs to take a closer look at its scheduling for future programmes. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There were 10 different locations at the venue hosting different sessions—and this is not counting the gallery and the bookshop—which made for an impossibly packed and confusing schedule. As if it wasn’t hard enough keeping track of what was happening where, many similar sessions clashed, forcing visitors to choose—and more importantly, forcing children to miss out on sessions they’d like to have attended.

This was Bookaroo’s fifth year, and perhaps the only such event in India, where the focus is not on selling books—though there was a bookshop at the venue as one of the organizers is a bookshop—but on getting children closer to stories. This is particularly important since despite the growing focus on children’s and YA literature in India, it still lags behind Western contemporaries. Some of this was evident at Bookaroo, such as when a bunch of kids asked Roopa Pai if she was the author of Horrid Henry, and the bookshop itself seemed to have most of its crowd concentrated in the non-Indian section. Also, it is difficult not to make a comparison between the high-quality foreign books and the sometimes-tacky production of homegrown counterparts.

Be that as it may, Bookaroo fills an important space in the sphere of children’s books—not to mention its outreach programme for schools, Bookaroo in the City, which takes authors and others to schools for readings, dramatized sessions, workshops and discussions. BIC also covers Kendriya Vidyalayas, MCD schools, schools run by NGOs and so on, organizing sessions in both English and regional languages. This inclusion was something that has been missing so far in the Bookaroo festival, which is clearly tailored for a more upmarket, English-speaking audience.

But five years is not a very long time, and one waits to see how Bookaroo will evolve in the future. Meanwhile, some photos follow (click for full versions).

~PD