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Hello all! I'm going to start this email with a little warning so you don't get all irritated and break your computer. 1) I'm going to be very pretentious, because four years in Oxford is enough to embed that into your system and I haven't been pretentious for ages here 2) I'm going to sound like a right arrogant twit with all my musings on the nature of the world, but I'm going to do it anyway because, as everyone keeps repeating here 'observation is research' and I'm a researcher, don't you know 3) I might keep using bullet points or numbered lists because I've spent far too long enmeshed in Indian bureaucracy (which here means gradually learning that content is nothing and appearance is everything so put it in a list and it will look official), and most crucially 4) I'm feeling ranty. Plus it's a Sunday and since today I got a lie-in till 7.38am (would you believe, such luxury!) I'm going to go on as I meant when I started (??) and spend the day writing rambling emails. The second aim of this email is to stop me shouting at everyone here, and I've caused enough trouble by refusing to accept that the poor are better where they are (i.e poor) and that the Indian government is working very nicely, thank you very much, and the fact that only 15% of government-funded aid through social welfare schemes actually gets to village level, that corruption is absolutely endemic (pleonastic* I know [*did you note the pretension?]) and that this 'world's largest democracy' is nothing of the sort, is just a minor blip. I accidentally typed 'demoncracy' there, which might be a little closer to the truth.So, on with the rant. I apologise that this is not the usual gap-year fare, but if you stop reading now you can make up your own version full of drunken misdemeanours with backpackers, a lot of not washing and wearing slightly mouldy knitted woollen items, befriending of elephants and camels and very foolish decisions to go sight-seeing on a lake full of poisonous fish in the middle of the night in the jungle whilst the army and guerrillas fight a pitched battle having accidentally ingested a plant-based hallucinogen at a tribal chieftain's hut. Not that any of this did (or would - parents, I hasten to assure you), but if you fancy a less ranty email I'll let you imagine something like that.I've discovered in my oh-so-widely-travelled travels that some things are the same the world over. Too many fried things will always make you feel both ill and guilty, one last drink is never a good idea if you secretly want to leave, and wherever you go, people say one thing but mean the exact opposite. Never more so that here, it seems, India maa (that means in India for anyone too astounded by my grip of Hindi to realise), where everyone is busy telling me how welcoming and accepting is the culture. Sure, just as long as you're not white, or black , or "yellow" (the quotation marks indicate I've heard someone say this out loud), or female, or young, or liberal and convinced that beating people is not a good style of management, or from Pakistan, or from Bangladesh, or from Sri Lanka, or from the North (or from the South, depending on where we start), or from a different state, or from Australia, or wearing a green sari when it's a red sari day, or like to leave the house occasionally, or think corruption is wrong, or accidentally show a glimpse of your shoulder when someone in a crowd pulls your top, or want to leave the house after 9pm, or smile at someone when you walk past them on the street, or think it's acceptable to talk to a road-sweeper's son in the same way as a politician's son, or female (or have I said that already?), or anything that is at all different in any small way to the person with whom you're currently interacting. So just as everyone asserts how welcoming people are they make it very clear that your visiting them is a huge burden and that they'll forcibly kick you out if you stay one minute more, and in fact they're only letting you in because they are so welcoming. And just as everyone asserts how accepting everyone is they arrest a young woman who's been invited onto a TV chat-show for the crime of accepting two late night calls from a man she met only four weeks before. The fact that he was the head of a kidney-selling organ racket and she was just a secretary who's only crime was to believe him when he said he wanted to talk to her seems to have been by-passed in the whole fun of ruining her life and defaming her honour. How quaint, how welcoming. This is the only accepting culture I know where Christians are burnt alive for daring to be Christian, and Muslims shunned and sidelined for being Muslim, and Sikhs (okay, this was some years ago) murdered and lynched for being Sikh, and lower castes regularly trampled underfoot, starved and beaten for the crime of being lower caste - and, more relevant to me, where women are raped or molested for daring to be confidant and proud to be female.My dad gave me an interesting book when my family came to visit over Christmas (thank you dad!): Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. It's a brilliant book about four characters from different backgrounds living in the mid-70s in India (under the 'great' Mrs Gandhi's State of Emergency). It starts with a Balzac quotation, 'Holding this book in your hand, sinking back into your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.'I wish I could say I even had that luxury, but the thing-that-isn't-a-dedication-but-i-always-forget-what-it-is-ever-since-Jennie-asked-us-what-it-was-for-her-essay-last-year struck home because 'this tragedy' not only was 'true', in any sense of true that really matters, it is true, and thirty years down the line I can see only little progress. I don't know if anyone else has read it, but when I did, after I read about the torture and murder of a lower caste tanner and his entire family for daring to cross caste boundaries, I found a story in the newspaper about a young girl of lower caste (she was either 8 or 12, I can't remember which) who was gang raped and murdered, along with her 10 year old brother, because that brother had dared to stand up for her when she had been molested the week before by an man from a higher caste. I read about two school aged children beaten for daring to pick up a text-book from the posh school - and I saw in local learning centre street-sweepers' sons driven out and humiliated for wanting to learn to read. I read about beggars crippled, maimed and organised by a Beggarmaster - and I saw children and babies with fresh mutilations begging in organised gangs on the road side. I read about the government's destruction of slums causing homelessness and loss on those who already had nothing - and I heard about the latest city 'beautification' project in Delhi which will demolish the slums and 'JJ clusters' ('unseal' is the euphemistic technical phrase) and arrest those living 'illegally' there because there is no affordable housing. I read about the forcible sterilisation of villagers with crippling complications and consequences to meet targets - and I read in the news a government-sponsored organisation that organised 300 eye-operations on poor villagers in one day to meet a quota, performed by a surgeon without qualifications so that 201 people are now completely or nearly blind. I read about the power of landlords and debt collectors - and I saw and met people who've been in bonded labour since they were 8 because someone in their family once made the mistake of taking a private loan to buy a buffalo, which then died. [in the midst of this email my boss calls me through to her office to give her 'inputs' on a questionnaire she's writing - which means rubbishing my suggestions and talking at me non-stop until I get bored and wander off - and I glance at the back of a newspaper. There, at the bottom of a page in a small snippet is an article about a dalit man who was pushed into a vat of boiling oil by his boss because he had called in sick for four days in a row. His co-workers, who found the charred corpse, and his family are still trying to prosecute the boss for murder, with little success]And I'm sure many of us would say, 'yes, we knew appalling things happen, they happen everyday'. But it's only when confronted by them in a book, when you're meant to display the 'normal' emotions - sadness, pity, anger, or whatever - that you realise how wrong this acceptance of them in the real world is. Especially when there are places in this world - little old britain, for one - where there is some safety net, where there is a welfare system however limited and however flawed, where becoming a bonded labourer isn't the inevitable path of your life, where servitude, slavery, exploitation and manipulation are negative ideas not a part of everyday life. My sister asked to me when she arrived in India why people don't rise up and do something about this (or something along those lines), and I mumbled something ineffective about the Reservations (positive discrimination in the government) or Dalit-driven Panchayati Raj (lower caste involvement in the village level systems of government). The answer is the success of the caste system, the systematic destruction of any sense of a person's 'rights', the crushing of spirit.I was subject to an interesting conversation the other day…[oops, sorry meant to write something here but got distracted and can't remember which of the many it was!]…….. The curious phrase, 'at least when they pickpocket you here they never take anything important' was even spoken. I was a little to shocked to bounce back with the obvious 'that's because you don't have to carry all your money and your passport and all your things on you. I assure you that when you are pick-pocketed in India as a foreigner you'll find these things take on rather more importance.'One final element of rant is a result of personal outrage as well as the general India-bashing despair you might have picked up in the tone of this email. Jess-the-NGO-worker gets a call from a government department at which she's been a regular visitor (and here, visitor means annoyance that won't go away until she gets a meeting with the Director), informing her that there's been a problem with the application. At least the application got through, thinks Jess to herself, that itself is an achievement. And in a land where you have to chase for weeks to get even what little pension is owed to you, that the government called the NGO is excitement enough. So off Jess and her boss go, and sit in the Director's PA's office. It turns out there was a problem with the previous year's project report by the NGO: it was incomplete and 'not proper'. Now Jess knows and her boss knows for sure that there was no problem with the report, and they say so. Ah, says the PA, but that's what it says here. At this point a member of another department comes in, with whom Jess has a meeting later that week. So she spends a little time talking over the NGO's new proposal with him. Back to the matter at hand, Jess' boss talks a little more about the capabilities and competencies of the NGO, Jess mentions the successful work in previous years and the other projects undertaken with the same department. Then the PA says, don't worry, I'll sort this matter out, and Jess sees over his shoulder that he deletes the words 'Problem with Application. Report not Proper', solemnly types in 'Discussed with NGO - advised for shortlisting' and changes the amber background of that part of the spreadsheet to green. It's smiles all-round as NGO thanks the PA and leaves the office. Jess is even feeling a little pleased with herself, knowing it had little to do with her really, but at least she played some part in successfully getting empanelled for this project - but luckily Jess has learnt in this topsy-turvy place (cf. above rant) never to mention what she thinks or feels until she's sure what is meant to be acceptable. Oh, sighs the boss in the car, 'Rs.20,000'. Rs. 20,000? Rs. 20,000 (which, dear readers, is about £235 in pure terms, but one fifth of the cost of running a learning centre for a year), the boss asserts, we have to deliver it to his house next week. That's why we got the project, and that's why we were called into the office, and that's what I agreed to when you were distracted.So what do you do? Maybe you try being friendly with cleaners, maids, sweepers and servants, try to demonstrate that I'm here and you're there but the only difference between us is in terms of employment - but then nothing gets done, my house gets shunned and no-one will send their children to the learning centre because they think that I must be very low caste if I'm treating a cleaner like that. Maybe you try to stand on equal terms with servants on the one hand and men on the other - but then you're robbed of all your backup funds by the servants and molested and abused by the men because they think there's no male figure to protect you. Maybe you try and speak out about these things - but then the latent hatred emergence (and it's real hatred this, real resentment and real anger that expresses itself in real violence) against not only foreigners but women, and especially against those who try to overturn the increasingly challenged, increasingly unsteady reign of terror. Maybe you try and shun all government offices and turn in the corrupt - but those who advocate anti-corruption procedures, and the police, are the most corrupt. As Kyla said to me the other day, this recognition that you're really alone, that if your wallet is stolen there's no-one to help you beyond offering to murder the thief for £250, that the only way to avoid corruption is to leave the country, is a curious feeling. On a larger scale, I'm sure Benazir Bhutto was corrupt to the core, and I'm sure that her trials for corruption were based on fact. But I'm equally sure that her opponents were engaged in far worse corruption (probably with Bhutto herself), and that trying her for corruption was nothing to do with the corruption itself, but was part of some corrupt deal to get rid of her (politically, not rid of her in the far more immediate sense of early this year). Corruption corruption. Have I said it enough times in the last three sentences yet? That 85% of government funds are 'absorbed' before reaching grassroots field levels makes a mockery of 'Western' aid, grants and loans before you even start on the negative consequences of such aid. Gosh! There it is - I did warn you, and hopefully you decided to skip the violent rant above, made up some jolly gap year email and are just checking the end out of interest. In case you did plough through it, I thought I ought to add a coda: though there are lots of things I don't like about India (could you have guessed?), there are lots of things I do like about India - rickshaw rides in the afternoon sun, big velvety cows ambling down the road, small children playing cricket everywhere, dancing like a dervish in a glittering sari at a wedding, buying crazy vegetables in the late night vegetable markets under big spotlights, watching fireworks blossom over Delhi at all and every opportunity, sitting in rural villages listening to the elders talk in parables while the children conduct scientific experiments on my hair, eating puris straight from the pan at big family gatherings, temples full of fire and incense and tasty sweets, and so on. And mostly this is just Delhi - everything outside Delhi, so I hear, just gets more and more beautiful, whether the Himalaya and Kashmir Valleys, the tea-groves of Assam, the jungle waterways of Kerala, and wherever else makes me sound like a guidebook. For all my ranting people are welcoming, giving food, shelter, clothes and advice freely and willingly to this strange pale girl that doesn't understand how to deal with monkeys, how to open coconuts or how to dress herself in a sari. And all I need to do after a particularly blood-boiling government meeting is take a rickshaw ride through the backstreets and see that life goes on, see that people snatch but never complain. Having ranted so, I should probably make it clear that this point that in no way am I trying to insult India or anyone from India - this is just what I've found. But then, I was always going to have issues in a place that values order, self-control and restraint, waking up early, and good, well-behaved, respectful little girls, and where laughter is invariably an insult. And still, it's lucky to be learning about this sector in the real 'land of the NGO', and I'm increasingly surprised by how many times I've seen UN projects having a incredibly positive effect here - much against the prevailing SOAS attitude of most young 'western' people in my position. Anyhoo, I'll let you be now lovies. I've got a few more rants up my sleeve on a variety of topics (including the rather worrying development of Jess' national pride - which Kyla and Kiran might have witnessed in a rather inebriated rant involving cars, Michael Caine, and filmography (though that was more anti-American, for which I make few apologies), but which generally was non-existant - that seems to manifest itself into a strange pride at proving to Indian government official that you can't bribe your way into British governments / charity offices), so let me know next time you're bored and I'll oblige. In the meantime, I'll single-handedly be saving the world and thinking of you all. Let me know that London, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Colombia (and wherever else you are) are still there. Jess xxx
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