I think

Summer

It seems that sun god is planning to make up for last year's leniency in our part of the world.  The famed Tamil Agni Nakshatram or Kathri season  begins tomorrow (4th, May) and the past few days have been a glorious preview of what to expect in the next fortnight.

I am a summer person.  I can take any amount of heat.  Or, I can convince myself that I can take any amount of heat.  The moment I feel uncomfortable and irritated with the heat, I automatically remember the few years in Syracuse winter, especially incidents such as this, and I am ready to go dancing in the blazing sun.  A friend and I would argue about which is better - hers being, there is no limit to the number of layers of clothes you can wear on yourself to warm up, but there is a definite limit to the number of clothes you can take off to feel cool.  My argument was that it is much easier to cool both inside and outside the body with something as simple as water, but no matter how many clothes you wear, your nose and eyes need to be bare, and just that much skin exposed to -30 can even kill you. Of course,  this friend was born and bred in upstate New York, while I belong to the tropical paradise of Chennai, so there was nothing unexpected in our viewpoints.

Each region develops its own defense against nature's elements with time.  For example, fatty meat and alcohol are staple in cold countries because of the warmth they offer.  We have our own traditional defense mechanisms.  A few minutes back, we had a dinner of cold dadhyodhanam, a simple curd rice, garnished with cucumber, carrots, mango, cilantro and mustard.  As the first mouthful of the rice reached the stomach,  the body sighed at a perceptible cooling that resulted.

In the afternoon, the kid and I, not wishing to waste sun god's bounty, chose to check out South Asia's largest library, located a hop, skip and jump away from home.  On our way back, we walked and walked for what seems like kilometers, in search of a bus stop.  What saved us and a lot of people like us from sure heat stroke were the many vendors lined along the sidewalk, selling ilaneer (tender coconut water) and water melon.    When we sipped the refreshing drink, straight from its shell, I realized that while coke and pepsi can hoard the "kewl" factor, they can never come anywhere near a simple ilaneer for true "cool"ness.

The only thing that bugs me about our lifestyle in this hot weather is the clothes we traditionally wear.  I suppose "traditionally" is a wrong word to use here, because before the ancient foreign invaders corrupted us with their personal standards of morality, our clothes, as can be seen in the many sculptures in traditional temples, were skimpy. Of course, even if you factor in an element of hyperbole for erotica in art, reality would not have been too far off.   As seen in the sculptures,  both men and women were bare chested, and wore wispy pieces of cloth at their hips. 

Then came the Muslim and British conquest of India. The chest became a bad part of the body that needed to be covered and now, here we are, wearing neck-to-ankle covered salwar kameez or the modern 5 meter saree draped multiple times around the body, with its many layers of blouse/underskirts/underwear underneath.

If the ancient invasions ruined our dress habits that were designed so well to face the tropical weather of the country,  the recent invasion by the West has replaced our natural food habits that were designed to suit the weather here.  So, now pizza, coke and junk food have replaced dadhyodhanam, neer mor and panagam, and we walk in and out of air conditioned enclosures, thereby muddling the hypothalamus and messing the body's natural response to heat.

At least the ancient invasions were by force. The newer invasions have been by our own choice.  There is nothing wrong with adopting alien practices, but when it messes up with our natural proclivity, we need to think and act. 

With that highly egotistical statement I conclude, wishing co-Tamil Nadu dwellers a safe Kathri season.

Stay cool.

 

 

CSA Awareness Month

During idle blog hopping that I seem to be doing a lot lately, I stumbled upon this site. A group of bloggers created this site to spread awareness on child sexual abuse.

Two years ago, I had written about my brush with sexual harrassment.  Thankfully, I have never faced sexual abuse, which is no consolation, but not as serious as the many horror stories that I read in that site.  I know that each and every single friend of mine has faced sexual harrassment or abuse - a suggestive remark, a sly look, bottom pinching, eve teasing and so on. 

Agreed, I am not emotionally maimed for life by the incidents in the past.  I lead a healthy family life and am not trapped in the hell of past horrors.  In fact, apart from the temporary feeling of "something is not right" at that time, it has not caused debilitating disturbances.

Or has it ?

I refuse to leave my seven year old daughter with anyone alone.  The only three men I trust my daughter with are her father and two grandfathers. I do not send her to school by the school van or an auto by herself.  Everytime the cell phone shows an unidentified caller when the kid is at school, I panic.  When I give the kid her weekly oil bath, I involuntarily check her body for tell-tale signs. I wonder if she would be traumatized when I give her an oil massage - even if I AM her mother, am I allowed to touch her body ? 

I get paranoid when strangers smile at my daughter or even pass an innocent comment  and mad at my daughter when she responds to innocent comments. When the kid wants to play outside when I am working, I peep out of the window every minute to see if she is alright.  On the rare occasion that I take the public bus somewhere with her, I place her in front of me, and stand so close to her so that not even air touches her. Every week I talk to her about good-touch-bad-touch.

Everytime I read or hear of some form of CSA, my stomach churns and I check up on my daughter, and don't leave her out of my sight for many days after that. When her father and I are walking around the stadium, and she is playing, if I can't see her for one second, I am swept by a wave of desparation.   As I see signs of impending tweens in her, and promise of a beautiful teen, one part of me is proud, but the other worried.  Would I rather she be a plane jane than the beautiful woman she promises to grow into?

And its not just with my daughter.  When I see young tweens standing somewhere by themselves, I want to go and stand with them and deliver them to safety.  When I see my daughter's friends S or J riding their bikes by themselves in an otherwise empty alley, I feel very uncomfortable.

Life should not have to be like this.  I should not have to be so mistrustful of co-human beings. 

But it seems that I am justified.  CSA is rampant.  FSA (Female sexual abuse) is equally rampant.  I recently heard of cases where in our peaceful and apparently safe campus, a friend got flashed by a random stranger, outside her own house. Another friend was pulled into the woods and may have been violated but for passersby.  I don't even want to browse the newspaper any more having yet not recovered from the news of the kids in Coimbatore being assaulted and killed by their own school van drivers a few months back. When I hear news like this, I wish I could send my daughter back into my womb where she would be safer.  I wonder if I should just lock her up inside the house, home school her and generally release her into the world when she is fifty years old.  But then, there would still be GSA - geriatric sexual abuse. Will it ever end? 

If I met God, I'd ask Her to redesign the human sex apparatus (including the one in people's head) such that it operates only when both parties willingly consent.  It's not too much to ask, is it?

 

Musings on Social Networking

This post is a reply to the overwhelming response (TWO people, one on facebook, and one here - thanks Karen and Rads) to my FB-closedown announcement.

As I muse more over my position in the grand scheme of social networking, I realise that "privacy" is not really my issue.  I blog about my life here - I don't even know who many of my readers are - how private can that be?  No. My problem is not (entirely) with privacy.

Social networking like facebook and twitter are built on the basic premise that its users like to chit chat.  Make small talk.  During my childhood, my mother who was in her thirties, as I and most of my friends are now, would take me to our neighbour's house every evening. While I played with the kids, she chatted with the "Aduthaathu maami", cutting vegetables, rolling appalams and in general, bonding estrogenically - a practice that many psychology experts claim to be therapeutic.   Yes, gossiping was certainly a part of it, but that was not all. They swapped recipes, child care worries, music talk, movie talk, family woes and everything else, with no judgments attached.

Now, we don't sit over the cutting board in the veranda of our neighbour's house, chatting. From the comfort of our homes, we facebook. We twitter. Apparently "bonding", although it seems there is a lot more testosterone thrown into what used to be predominantly  female activity.  Only, now, vegetables don't get cut during the process, appalams don't get rolled, and it is a group activity, where, everybody seems to be talking, and no one paying any more attention to it than the quick 2-second cursory glance and 1-second reply.

This is ok for most people. But some of us have a rather sensitive attention span.  Momentary sound bits cannot penetrate the thicker skull.  Most often, when I open up my fb or twitter (that I closed down some months ago, for the same reason),  I am of a reasonably tranquil state of mind. As I spend more and more time, the ripples become larger and larger until the wave of too much disjoint information, too briefly delivered, threaten to engulf me.  And for a long time after I close it down,  the waves lash about, making logical, coherent thoughts impossible.

Is it my job requirement, or my own mental deficiency that my thoughts have to be linear? Multi-tasking the brain is not my forte.  I am not as good as, say, my dude, in holding on to a thread of thought for a very long time; my threads are shorter, but they ARE threads, nevertheless, not knots.  Perhaps that is why I find blogging easy, for I am able to take a thought through a certain length of time so that it makes some sense to me.  My friends will tell you that even my mails are long; they have to be because that is the only way my brain can even identify a thought or a fact.  So, when I open my FB, and discover that A has had his second baby, before the thought is registered (it didn't, I read the news yesterday, but I have forgotten the baby's name already), I read that B and C from another era of my life met over coffee, and by the time I can react to it, I find that D has a question on entrepreneurship that I can answer, and E has sent me a message filling me on details of her life so far and asking for mine. Yes, A, B, C, D and E are all dear to me.  I want to address each one of them, but by now, my mind is not even thinking clearly and I am jumpy already.

Now what would have happened if I had gotten all these messages by email?  I'd read an email, address it, take necessary action and go on to the next.  I'd remember A's second baby's name because I spent more than the customary 2 second that I did on FB. Why can't I do it for my FB or twitter?  I don't know. Maybe it is all there in the open, enticing me, shouting for my attention.  Picture yourself sitting in the middle of the room, there is M.S. Subbulakshmi singing "Rangapura Vihara" on one side,  John Lenon with his Imagine on the other, P.G.Wodehouse in your hands, and Friends is on T.V.  Just thinking about such a scenario gives me a headache.

Perhaps I have ADD. 

But that is not all (Read the part above that says my thoughts are threads).  I find social networking bordering rudeness.  No, I am not the self-centered, mal-adjusted, egomaniac that can't handle rejection.  But I need to know that I am rejected, not kept in a limbo, not knowing what my status with people is.  Just because X accepted my invitation, am I part of his life now, even though he hasn't really commented on any of my entries yet?   Y, who was my close friend in school, would not accept my invitation, although she has accepted Z's AFTER I had sent her mine - didn't she see mine? Or did I do something to offend or alienate her?  So, why does she not just reject my invitation? At least there would be closure.   Q sent me an invitation, who on earth is Q?  She seems to be in the neighbourhood of all my friends, so, she must be someone I knew.   Why does E write to F and not to me ?  

If you get the image of me constantly obsessing over such matters, you are wrong.  But in the course of my FB time, such fleeting thoughts do whizz past along with the seventy nine 2-sec thought bytes that cruise in and out.  And I don't like it.  I would much rather have fleeting thoughts such as "this would be a good blog post topic" or "I need to file this thought for later proposal use", or "graphene is such a cool discovery worth the nobel" if at all I don't mind thoughts that fleet, which I do, by the way.

And here is the last reason to close down. Social networking sites numb your perseverance and kill your patience.  I am going to cross-post this blog entry on facebook.  50% of my FB contacts will click and arrive.  But I am willing to bet that not more than two or three will actually read this post fully, once they see how long it is. Facebook and twitter have justified, even glorified laziness and delineated, incoherent thoughts. We would much rather spend five minutes jumping from person to person than the same time reading (or worse, creating) something that requires a certain amount of consistent effort and concentration.  It has reached a level where nothing ever registers any more.  When dude deleted his very active twitter account, none of his 580 twitter "followers" even realised he was gone and kept addressing him in their tweets for a while - goes to show you the level of sincerity and observation powers in social networking.

I sometimes get disillusioned that I don't get enough comments to justify my blogging. But at the moment, I'd much rather blog, even without encouraging response because I am spending some effort and time in it. That is a reward in itself. 

Perhaps my Alzheimer can thus be a delayed by a few hours.

(replace the television with Social Networking and it would still make a lot of sense)