Search for India's Condom Man

When I ventured into blogspace the first time, one of the few promises I had made to myself was I will try to keep the blog as diverse as possible, and not repeat myself. That doesn't seem to be quite working right now, as I am back to talking about condoms.

The provocation this time is a news item in which the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) chief Sujatha Rao has said that India needed to find someone like the Thailand cabinet minister Mechai Viravaidya, famous for getting Thais to talk about sex, condoms and AIDS. Despite high incidence of AIDS, India suffers from chronic low usage of condoms.

"We are serious about finding India's very own Mr Condom," Rao was quoted as saying after visiting Thailand to study its dramatic increase in condom use over the past decade, which contributed to a sharp fall in new HIV infections.

"He has to feel passionately about the cause as Mechai does. He should have a dynamic personality to change both government policy and public perceptions about HIV/AIDS, sex and condoms," Rao said.

I thought of lending Ms Rao a helping hand in her noble venture of finding India's own Condom Man, and went through a shortlist that came to my mind.

I began with the nation's politicos. A lot of them are engaging conversationalists, can start discussions on any subject. And despite allegations to the contrary, a few of them do have the nation's best interests close to their hearts. So why not one of them?

Rahul Gandhi? He could encash on the family image to start discussions on the subject. Besides, after the drubbing in Uttar Pradesh, he does desperately need an issue to catch the public eye. The Condom Man could just be his ticket to greater fame. Though the jury is still out on whether he is engaging enough to start and keep a national discussion going, he could well be the right man for this job. Also if he says 'aye', momma is going to ensure the entire state machinery was used to make the campaign a success.

If you wanted a more earthy appeal, one could always go for the colourful Indian railway minister Laloo Yadav. There is hardly a more engaging conversationalist in the public domain than the former chief minister of Bhar. But you don't want to push a man who has fathered a dozen odd children as the nation's Condom Man. Apart from that solitary tick against him, I can't think of any other reason why the man can't do the job Ms Rao wants our Condom Man to do.

I thought of a lot of other names, before discarding them quickly for one reason or the other. Some were just too old, others you thought wouldn't look quite convincing while promoting condom usage on television or other public forums.

Once I moved away from politicians, the first two names that immediately came to my mind were, of course, Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan. Between the two of them, King Khan and Big B have endorsed most things available on God's earth, except for nuclear weapons and condoms. You can get either, even better, both of them to endorse different condom brands. They could talk about condoms on TV, preach the message of their usage in their films. Or Ms Rao can even get them to take turns to host a show on the lines of KBC. Instead of a quiz of general knowledge, this time the focus could be on condoms. We could have a KPC, Kaun Pahenega Condom (Who Will Wear A Condom) instead of a KBC.

So my first choice is bit of an either-or choice. It could be Bachchan Senior. And it very well could be Shahrukh. If not them, then....

... How about Rajnikant? Can you visualise him, exhorting viewers to have a little chitchat about condoms just before the start of every screening of Shivaji, his latest blockbuster? What if he were to announce that everyone purchasing a ticket for the movie would have to purchase a condom too? Can you imagine the spurt in condom sales? The campaign would be a stupendous success, given Rajni's phenomenal fan following in the south India.

If you are looking for a similar impact in the eastern part of the country, then the best bet would be Sourav Ganguly. The former Indian cricket captain could wax eloquent on how important it is for a batsman to have the right rubber on the bat handle. If Dada says he uses condoms, a large part of Kolkata, and Bengal, might suddenly become more condom-friendly.

But, nothing like Bollywood biggies to drive home the message though. Apart from Big B and King Khan, there is Karan Johar. Seriously, guys, what do you think about Karan Johar as a condom ambassador?

We could have a chat show like Kondom with Karan, a la Koffee with Karan. And Karan asking Bollywood studs Salman Khan or Sunjay Dutt probling questions like "So, when did you first use a condom?" Oh, the mouthwatering prospect of a whole nation glued to their TV sets waiting to hear the answer to that one. And the piece de resistance at the end of the programme -- a condom hamper for the participant. Not just condom sales, I can visualise the TRP ratings going through the roof.

And once condoms are spelt with a K on Karan Johar's show, I'm sure even Ekta Kapoor may be persuaded to support the Kondom campaign. She might start a new soap. And who knows one day, Mera Kondom, Sirf Mera Hai on Star Plus may compete with Mujhe Mere Kondoms Lauta Do on Zee Network. Oh it's such a pity Ms. Kapoor is a woman, she would have been a top contender for the job. But the job profile in this case demands the candidate to be only a male.

Abhishek Bachchan? Fellow's got newly married. A perfect candidate to talk about condom usage you would think. Honestly though he doesn't exactly grab you as a national condom icon, does he?

If you look away from Bollywood, how about our Kapil Paaji (brother)? The man who appeared on our TV screens allthose years ago and said with such style, Palmolive da jawab nahin. I can close my eyes and picture him saying just as easily : Kohinoor da jawab nahin. I mean why not? He's as macho as they come and has a terrific following in Jatland. For the Haryanvis the message would be loud and clear -- if a son of the soil like Kapil Paaji can use a condom, then why not them.

Looking beyond Bollywood and cricket, there's the adman Suhel Seth. Since you are looking for someone who can talk about condoms, get a discussion going on the subject, then who better than Suhel? Over the past few years, I can't remember a television discussion that didn't feature him. From Indo-US nuclear deal to rise in sex crimes in the national capital to gay marriages to price rise, the man can talk endlessly till the cows go home. Or he can talk till you decide to become a condom user. Only if it is to shut him up.

So, you see, a myriad of possibilities. An interesting list of people to choose from and I am sure Ms. Rao would be considering a clutch of other names, too.

May the best man win. Amen.

When She Speaks, I Want to Listen ...

I hadn't read this interview when it was first published. Then, a while ago, while randomly surfing the net, I came across this interview of Arundhati Roy in Tehelka. An interview from December 2005. I have never quite fathomed what Arundhati Roy's politics is. I have been part of discussions on the same subject, at times even contributed to those discussions, without knowing much about what I was talking about. That is something journalism teaches you anyway. The ability to BS in an engaging manner. But this interview of Ms. Roy, I found interesting and at places, like her prose, almost mesmerising. Posted below are excerpts from that freewheeling interview.

....In India we are at the moment witnessing a sort of fusion between corporate capitalism and feudalism — it’s a deadly cocktail. We see it unfolding before our eyes. Sometimes it looks as though the result of all this will be a twisted implementation of the rural employment guarantee act. Half the population will become Naxalites and the other half will join the security forces and what Bush said will come true. Everyone will have to choose whether they’re with “us” or with the “terrorists”. We will live in an elaborately administered tyranny....

...Those who understand and disagree with the repressive machinery of the State are more or less divided between the Gandhians and the Maoists. Sometimes — quite often — the same people who are capable of a radical questioning of, say, economic neo-liberalism or the role of the state, are deeply conservative socially — about women, marriage, sexuality, our so-called ‘family values’ — sometimes they’re so doctrinaire that you don’t know where the establishment stops and the resistance begins. For example, how many Gandhian/Maoist/ Marxist Brahmins or upper caste Hindus would be happy if their children married Dalits or Muslims, or declared themselves to be gay? Quite often, the people whose side you’re on, politically, have absolutely no place for a person like you in their social, cultural or religious imagination. That’s a knotty problem… politically radical people can come at you with the most breathtakingly conservative social views and make nonsense of the way in which you have ordered your world and your way of thinking about it… and you have to find a way of accommodating these contradictions within your worldview...

...In India, the political anti-establishment can be socially very conservative (Bring on the gay Gandhians!) and can put a lot of pressure on you to become something which may not necessarily be what you want to be: they want you to dress in a particular way, be virtuous, be sacrificing, it’s a sort of imaginary and quite often faulty extrapolation of what the middle class assumes the ‘people’, the ‘masses’ want and expect. It can be maddening, and I want to say like Bunty in Bunty aur Babli, ‘Mujhe yeh izzat aur sharafat ki zindagi se bachao…’ There are all kinds of things that work to dull, leaden your soul…to weigh you down…

RSS and the Business of Pleasure

Oh, the poor, poor Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. For the boys in khaki, life has been on a downward spiral since those heady days of the Gujarat riots of 2002 when the Moslems were taught that M-O-D-I wasn't just a four-letter word. Since then, though, the successes have been few and far in between, and the list of failures is growing.

Recently, the Bharatiya Janata Party had its nose bloodied at the hustings in Uttar Pradesh. And even within the party, the blame was laid at the door of the posterboy of the Sangh, Rajnath Singh, the pracharak (campaigner) who had made it to the highest party office in the BJP.

As if the flak over the UP debacle wasn't enough, now the fornicating billion (It is logical, silly, you have to fornicate and fornicate a lot to get to a billion and more) are upto their nasty tricks. Thankfully nothing eludes the hawkeyed boys in khaki. So they eventually caught up with the dastardly act of mixing the business of sex with a lot of pleasure.

I am referring to the issue of vibrating condoms, that has stirred the nation and shaken the Swayamsevak rank and file.

Apparently, the pack of three condoms, branded as Crezendo, contains a battery-operated ring-like device. Once the battery is switched on, the device works pretty much like a vibrator. A promotional message from the company, Hindustan Latex Limited, describes Crezendo as a product that "provides ultimate pleasure by producing strong vibrations."

The company had launched Crezendo three months ago. At that time no one said anything about the vibrating ring. But now the truth is in the open. We know now that the vibrating condom is in fact a vibrator and a condom, thanks to the alertness of a Sangh loyalist in the Madhya Pradesh government, Kailash Vijayvargiya.

An angry Vijayvargiya told the BBC recently, "The government's job is to promote family planning and population control measures, rather than market products for sexual pleasure." Subsequently, a company spokesman for Hindustan Latex Limited has confessed the vibrating ring was "a pleasure enhancer", but insisted it was not a "sex toy".

Naughty, that. Sex is ok, according to the RSS, and even according to the Indian government. But pleasure? We all know, that's not on. It is only for a good reason that sex toys are banned in India.

As redfaced HLL officials go blue in the face explaining the finer differences between a sex toy and a pleasure enhancer, the good Sanghi, Vijayvargiya has dashed off a letter to prime minister Manmohan Singh, warning that the sale of sex toys in India would have "severe consequences in society".

Many years ago, and only after much deliberations at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, it was decided to okay the use of condoms. But not without reservations, for the Sangh has never looked favourably upon any sexual act that doesn't lead to procreation, and the condom is specifically meant to prevent procreation.

However, one thing helped swing the vote in favour of the condoms. Almost all its users had unequivocally stressed that it lowered the pleasure level during intercourse. Now that mightily pleased the RSS bosses. They knew what pleasure could do. For one thing, it could make people happy. Happy people are inclined to think independently and have been historically known to fight firecely for the independence of their thought process. If allowed to be happy, who knows what they might think of the RSS tomorrow, reasoned the reasonable men of RSS. So, they, in principle, okayed the use of condom.

But this vbirating condom is clearly a bit of a much. Expecting the RSS to do nothing about it is stretching the Sangh generosity beyond a level even a condom maker can't guarantee its highest quality rubber to do.

Though sex toys are officially banned in this country, in Delhi's underground market (a physical fact, not to be mistaken as a metaphor) Palika Bazar, one can buy a range of vibrators. Other toys like strapon dildos and customised sex dolls can be discretely supplied if one so desired.

I asked one of the suppliers if the business wasn't fraught with risks and if he feared a backlash from the RSS or other custodians of Indian culture. His response was rather interesting. "Nahi (no) sir, it is because of their continued hostility the government can't officially allow the import of sex toys. Which is good for our business." The demand is always high and the margins are very good, he said with a grin. The inflated dolls, I gathered, are sold at rather inflated prices.

Meanwhile, my own investigations into the offending, I mean vibrating, condom has reached a cul de sac of sorts. I checked with my friendly neighbourhood chemist and he said he had run out of the vibrating condoms. All the controversy was very good for the business. "They just vanished off my shelves," he said. Elsewhere, HLL is understood to have taken the confoms off the shelves after being made aware of their erring ways by Mr. Vijayvargiya.

So, for now, the hardworking Swayamsevaks can heave a sigh of relief. If the much-venerated RSS mouthpiece, The Organiser was anything like a Times of India or a Hindustan Times, the next issue might even have carried the story of the successful campaign against vibrating condoms, with RSS IMPACT printed in bold.

I have this naughty naughty friend who is into these inflated dolls and first told me about their availability in Palika Bazar. Clearly a heathen himself, he has no understanding at all about the workings of the RSS. He is worried if the boys in khaki, emboldened by the stunning success of the campaign against vibrating condoms might muscle into influencing other areas of sexual behaviour. I asked him, like what? Like the RSS leadership doesn't have anything else on its mind.

But that is beyond the comprehension of lesser mortals like him. So he continued to pester me with his unending queries : "Umm, what if the RSS tomorrow said masturbation was bad too and banned it. I mean that too gives you pleasure and doesn't contribute in any way to procreation."

Admittedly, he had a point there. There was the issue of pleasure involved and also no connection with procreation. And then my clarity of thought, my wisdom, honed for years by the Sangh's way of thinking, returned.

Silly fellow, I told him, how can any organisation with swayam seva (self help) as its central theme be ever opposed to masturbation? Now, THAT shut up the thick head for good.

Welcome to the "Token" Republic

For over a week now, India has been exercised over the issue of the (s)election of its First Citizen. Now it is fairly certain, barring cross-voting at a rather large scale, that the next Supreme Commander of the Indian armed forces is going to be a woman.

A woman called Pratibha Patil.

The Indian media has had a field day asking, "Pratibha Who?" After her recent not-the-most-politically-correct conmment about Hindu women in Rajasthan using the veil to protect their honour from Muslim rulers, questions have been asked about her suitability for a post that may be ceremonial but it is a job that, on occasions, calls upon its incumbent to display considerable political wisdom.

At the heart of the controversy over Pratibha Patil's choice lies the fact that she was not by a long shot the first choice of the ruling United Progressive Alliance goverment. A slew of names, from Shivraj Patil to Pranab Mukherjee to Arjun Singh to Sushil Kumar Shinde had been considered, debated over and then cast aside.

The current Home minister, Shivraj Patil had the blessings of Sonia Gandhi, but Comrade Carat, oops Karat, and his band of merry communists chose to play spoilsport. They argued Patil was not secular enough and too much of a political lightweight for the august post of the President of India.

It is a specious argument in itself because it implies the Left Front is okay with a non-secular home minister in a government that it supports but would not support the same man for the President of India's job. One would have thought given the nature of his job, a home minister would have to be more hands on with secular issues, and as the President his job would be more ceremonial, as enshrined in the Indian Constitution itself. But logic has not often been the Left's strongest suit.

After Madam Patil's history lesson on the veil, though, the Left might have similar worries about the secular credentials of the Patil they chose to back over the Patil they didn't. But now the Left Front would have to dwell on those thoughts in private, and Comrade Karat, in all likelihood would have five long years to mull over what they have brought upon themselves and the rest of the country, because the matter of election of the next President of India has already moved significantly forward.

Soon after Sonia Gandhi sprang the surprise candidature of the woman who was until recently the governor of Rajasthan, Congress spin doctors were quick to highlight the "progressive" decision to opt for a woman Presidential candidate. A happy picture was quickly painted of the largest democracy of the world with its First Citizen a woman and what such a move would do for woman's emancipation in this country and so on and so forth.

Now, we all know, THAT is such bullshit. Understandably, members of the media have reacted sharply to such a spin. Columnists like Shobha De have stridently protested against the sham symbolism of linking Pratibha Patil's candidature to women's emancipation. Others have rubbished the move as "blatant tokenism", the real purpose of which is to have a rubber stamp President, sympathetic to the interests of the ruling UPA government.

And so it is. Blatant tokenism it is, but all the same a shrewd move (albeit one she was forced to make) by Sonia Gandhi after the Left forced her hand. Honestly what were you and me and the rest were expecting other than blatant tokenism ?

We are, after all, a nation of, for the lack of a better word if I am allowed to coin one, "tokenists". We are most well versed in the intricacies of tokenism, better than anyone else I can think of. We can't stomach hard facts, whether in the political arena or on a sports field. We always prefer symbolism over more harder options.

We pay token tribute to secularism. In this non-violent land of Mahatma Gandhi, Hindus kill Muslims, Muslims kill Hindus, every now and then a Church gets burnt, and the odd nun gets raped -- a veritable plurality of killings in this plural society. And remarkably no one gets punished for these orgies of violence. No Hindu, no Sikh, or no Muslim has been sent to the gallows in this nation over communal violence. Perhaps that is our notion of secularism.

We pay token tribute to socialism. All the parties are committed to pro-poor policies, their election manifestos utopian. Yet, as the sensex is on a long bull run, Fortune 500 companies head India's way and we talk of a resurgent, new India with a double digit growth rate, in another India, farmer suicides continue unabated, and unemployment continues to rise alarmingly. As rich India waxes eloquent on socialism, poor India starves.

We pay token respect to our elders. We scorn the west for their old-age homes, and gloat over our ancient family values and then abandon our old parents. Younger men and women jostle past, push around their elders in public places, in buses and metros.

In our cities we build the world's finest hospitals, manned by worldclass doctors. Yet within a 250 km radius of all major cities in this country, you can find public health care centres which languish in abject neglect, the poor denied even basic health care. People from the US and western European countries fly down to India for top quality medical care. Yet even today women die in labour by thousands in this country not too far from these centres of medical excellence. And we talk of free health care for the poor. More tokenism.

And we pay token tribute to our women. We rape them in our cities, starve them in our villages, abort them in their foetuses, burn them for dowry and say "Nari hamari Ma hai (woman is our Mother)."

Why are we so surprised then about the latest tokenism, blatant or otherwise, of the selection of Pratibha Patil as a Presidential candidate? The list of tokenisms is very very long and makes for rather sorry, and unsavoury, reading. Poor Pratibha Tai is only the latest in a long line of tokenisms.

It will be a delicious irony of sorts if the fears of Madam Patil's detractors were to prove true and she indeed went on to become a token President of a token secular, a token socialist, and a token democratic republic.

Last, but by no means the least, I am not averse to the Tai's presence in Rashtrapati Bhavan for an entirely different reason. In case Hillary Clinton makes it to the White House, we can always tell the Americans that we put a woman in the President's office before they did!

My Brother, My Friend ...

Given the amount I usually put in relationships to make them work, I am amazed how easily, how without any effort, this one worked. Right from day one. I can't quite remember the first time we ever met or what we said to each other.

My earliest recollection of us is in Calcutta in our maternal grandpa's house, both of us lying on the bed, facing each other, with an open book in between. I couldn't have been more than eight, he was two years older. He was reading one page, and me another. The trick was we had to read at the same pace, so that one could turn the page without inconveniencing the other. The name of the book was 'Dubojahajer Urro Koyedi' (U Boat's Pilot Prisoner), a Bangla book, which was a translation from English.

It was a World War II story, about an Allied pilot who was a prisoner on a German U-boat. I have never been able to remember who was the author, or any other details about the book. But I remember very clearly, both of us read the book at a breathless pace, skipping baths, finishing meals quickly, not paying any attention to whatever was going around us, until we finished it.

From that day onwards, two things remained constant between us -- his bucktoothed smile and our passion for books. Both of us started out with Deb Sahitya Kutir's translations, and graduated to more exotic stuff. We were both voracious readers, and every summer vacation when I landed up in Calcutta, we would compare notes on what we had read over the year -- a habit that lasted both of us a lifetime.

When I was in Class XIth, I rcommended him John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Next time when we met, we discussed the character of Cathy for hours. Until then she was quite the most fascinating woman character we had ever encountered, in fiction or in real life.

Next year, he introduced me to Drishti Prodip, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's classic tale of two brothers and a sister. During our college years and later, I became his window to English literature, and he was my guide to everything good in Bengali -- from books to theatre to food.

He was always a man of few words. A smile here, a gesture there, would be all that was forthcoming to show he cared. One day he showed up in my house in Calcutta with two tickets for Jogonnath, one of the most memorable plays I have ever seen. Another day, as I packed my bags for Delhi, he casually handed over a book to me. "Got this one for you, I know you will like this." It was Shesher Kobita (The Last Poem) by Tagore. Till today I can't turn a page of that book without remembering him.

In 1975, he came to Delhi to visit me. We both were seriously into table tennis then. World Cup Table Tennis had just got over and a Hungarian had won it. We played our own World Cup -- me, him and few of my friends. We even made a cardboard cup. He took the cup to Calcutta after he beat all of us. The highlight of the stay was watching Sholaay. We were both most distressed by Jai's death, and over the years discussed several alternative endings. Now I can't ever think of him. without thinking about alternative endings.

One summer afternoon in Calcutta, I was in Class XIIth and he was in his first year of Engineering, we browsed books on College Street, had the mandatory coffee in Coffee House, then saw a movie (can't remember the name), but both of us wanted something more. After we had checked we had enough money between us, we decided to have some beer. The only hitch was what if someone we knew saw us. We knew we were in an area which was frequented by the elders in the family.

So, drawing upon our considerable combined wisdom, we decided to don sunglasses and walk confidently into a pub. The plan was breathtakingly simple -- even if someone saw us, we would be unrecognizable because of our dark glasses. We were already so charged with the task on hand, the beer hardly hit us, and we came back home, thrilled to bits, mission accomplished.

About a week later, we had just finished our evening smoke, when our youngest maternal uncle, Tomal Mama, materialized out of nowhere, put his hands on our shoulders, looked into our eyes and said in his deep gravelly voice : "Ki re, kalo choshma porey beer khele kauke aar chena jayena na? (If you wear dark glasses and drink beer, you think no one will recognize you?)"

We stood speechless, our bad karma having finally caught up with us. Then Tomal Mama's face creased into a huge grin, and he said : "Theek aachhe, ghlabrash na, etai to boyesh beer teer khabar (Don't worry, after all this is the age to drink beer)," and blood once again began to move through my veins.

That was the first of several more memorable binges over the years. None more funnier than the time I had landed in Calcutta after getting my first job with The Statesman. I had to meet a friend at the National Library at 11 a.m. who eventually didn't show up, and on a working day I was left with nothing to do. I phoned him up (a year ago he had joined as a junior engineer with a private sector company in the city), asked him if he could meet me. There was a moment of hesitation at the other end, and then he said: "Give me 30 minutes".

I waited on the curb across the National Library, in front of the Calcutta Zoo. He showed up exactly after 30 minutes, with his bucktoothed grin in place : "Tor jonney mone hoi amar chakri ta jabe (Because of you I think I am going to lose my job)." I asked him what was the Plan of Action. He lit a cigarette, smiled at me enigmatically and said : "Just wait patiently."

He had barely finished speaking when a taxi came to a halt right where we were standing, and the eldest of our brothers got down. Another brother had produced another enterprising excuse to get out of office on a working day. What followed was some serious daytime drinking, of all the places, in Calcutta Zoo. The zoo had a bar on its premises and my brothers were in no mood to waste any time, going to a pub which was some distance away. Not that I was opposed to the idea.

I realise the futility of trying to capture a relationship of, and for, a lifetime in few hundred or even a few thousand words. Which is what I had been trying to do until now. To share with you all, my memories of someone very special, very dear to me. They are good memories, great memories of growing up together.

They are my own Wonder Years. I horde these memories, when I am alone I often count them as if it were a currency, and check and re-check the tally againt the last such count. You become like that, a little obsessive, when all you are left of an association of four decades are just memories.

I have been like that, a little obsessive, the past five years. For five years ago, on this day, the man, who was not just my brother but as close a friend as one is ever likely to have, died.

This blog is about someone who made my life great by just being part of it, and left a hole in my heart that time can't even come close to healing. If there was Internet in the sky, I would like him to read this piece and know just how much that bucktoothed grin is missed.

Trouble Down This Road

Last month, I had posted a blog here about how the Jarawas, a Stone Age tribe, of whom just 250 survive today, are facing extinction in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, off the eastern coast of India. The Jarawas have been declared as one of the three most endangered tribes in the world by Survival International, a London-based tribal rights group. A road built through the land earmarked for the Jarawas is forcing human contact on the Jarawas, exposing them to a lifestyle they are not used to and not trained to cope with. A contact that anthropologists fear would eventually lead to the extinction of one of the oldest tribes in the world. Now, a top official of the government of India has echoed similar fears in an article in The Hindu, one of the leading Indian newspapers. Meena Gupta was till recently, Secretary, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India and was recently appointed as Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests. Here's what she has written :

THE deprivation of a name, the loss of a homeland, the extinction of a tribe — this seems to be the ominous progression of one of the oldest extant hunter-gatherer tribes in India, indeed, possibly, in the whole world. ‘Ang’ is what they call themselves, but the world knows them as the Jarawa, the Palaeolithic tribe that lives deep in the jungles of the Andaman Islands.

The word ‘Jarawa’, in the language of the Great Andamanese (another Stone Age tribe of the Andamans) means ‘the stranger’ or ‘the outsider’. To the Andamanese, the Jarawa were outsiders; a different people, albeit of the same Negrito stock and inhabiting the same islands. It is unfortunate that this name — rather than Ang meaning ‘humans’, which the Jarawa use for themselves — should become the name by which we know them.

Total isolation

The Jarawa are one of the five Stone Age tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which have lived in almost total isolation in the dense tropical forests of the islands, and have survived virtually unchanged up to modern times. They are hunter-gatherers, who do not practise even rudimentary agriculture, wear no clothes, shun contact with outsiders, and are fiercely independent. Their physical appearance — dark, almost ebony skin, closely curled woolly hair, and negrito features — are quite distinct from the population that originates from the Indian mainland and mark them as a race apart.

Because of their small numbers (240 persons as per the 2001 census, 317 persons as reported by the Andaman administration in 2007) and their being nomadic deep forest dwellers, they are virtually unknown as a community to the rest of India and are only a name even to the inhabitants of the islands.

The plight of the Jarawa has, in recent years, generated a lot of interest because of an almost sudden change in their behaviour in the late 1990s — from avoiding all contact with the outsider to actively seeking such contact. This change, which began in 1997, has heightened their vulnerability and threatened their way of life.

The single activity that has had the most significant, and adverse, impact on the lives of the Jarawa is the construction of the Andaman Trunk Road. Running in a south-north direction from Port Blair, the administrative headquarters in South Andaman to Maya Bunder in the north, the ATR was started in 1958 with the very laudable intention of linking Port Blair with the several settlements scattered in the middle and north of the Andaman Islands.

These settlements, which consisted entirely of people who migrated from the mainland (refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, other people who had migrated in search of better opportunities, descendants of convicts and jailors brought by the British) were either consciously established by the administration or, more rarely, had sprung up on their own.

Established at great human and financial cost, they are now flourishing habitations, with the people conscious and vociferous about their rights. Before the construction of the Andaman Trunk Road, these habitations were connected to Port Blair (and to the mainland) only by sea routes. With the completion of the ATR (an endeavour that took approximately 40 years), a direct and unimaginably convenient land link was established between the settlements and Port Blair.

The trouble was that the ATR sliced right through territory that was, until then, the exclusive and undisturbed preserve of the Stone Age, hunter-gatherer Jarawa tribe. In fact it was because this territory was, by and large, undisturbed that the Jarawa had been able to survive with their way of life almost unchanged over centuries. The incursion into their territory, through the means of the ATR, exposed them to modern civilisation and its baneful influences like tobacco, alcohol, unfamiliar foods and diseases against which they had no immunity, which could together take them to the brink of extinction. What was a boon for the settlers, therefore, could very easily sound the death knell for the Jarawa.

Alarm bells about the impact of the ATR on the Jarawa should have started ringing long ago. When the road first started, sensibilities about the environment and human rights and the different rights of tribals were low. Therefore creating a road through someone else’s homeland, destroying virgin forests was not a matter of great concern.

Opposition

But over the 40 years or so it took to construct the ATR, consciousness of environmental issues and human rights has grown by leaps and bounds. However when the rights of a tiny group of people clashes with those of a much larger one, it is usually the more clamorous and stronger voice that is heard. And that is what has happened in the case of the ATR.

There was certainly no dearth of opposition from the Jarawa. Starting with the killing of the labourers building the road, to shooting with bow and arrows at buses and other vehicles when they started to ply on the road, the Jarawa made their objection to the violation of their homeland and space quite clear. That the administration continued with their efforts could be seen as an act of valour and determination in the face of odds or callousness and insensitivity towards the rights of weaker people depending on the point of view.

The Jarawa became the subject of a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Calcutta High Court in the 1990s with the High Court issuing an order to frame a policy for the Jarawa. The Jarawa Policy was prepared as a consequence, in consultation with a number of experts, and was adopted on December 21, 2004.

The Jarawa Policy dwells not inconsiderably on the ATR and its impact on the Jarawa. It recommends, among other things, that the traffic on the road be restricted to essential purposes (which have been specified) and allowed to move only during restricted hours and in convoys. It repeatedly stresses that all manner of interaction between the Jarawa and the travellers, particularly tourists, be prevented. Very importantly, the policy talks of encouraging and strengthening facilities for travel by boat and ship. The policy also talks of removing encroachments in the Jarawa territory on priority basis, and ensuring that no such encroachment of non-tribals take place.

No implementation

In the two and a half years since the Jarawa policy has come into being, little has been done to implement its recommendations, particularly the more difficult ones. In defence of the administration, it must be pointed out that the inaction was not, perhaps, deliberate. The Jarawa policy was adopted on December 21, 2004. Just five days later, on December 26, the devastating tsunami struck the islands. The Jarawa were not affected by the tsunami, so the administration, whose entire attention got diverted to the affected areas, had little time to think of the Jarawa, apart from verifying that they had not suffered any loss.

The Jarawa policy has thus remained, by and large unimplemented. No attempt has been made to explore alternate sea routes to link the places that the ATR goes to. Little effort has been made to curtail the number of vehicles plying on the road. The average number of vehicles plying on the ATR annually shows a steep increase from 17,179 in 2001 to 35,798 in 2006. The number is poised to exceed 40,000 in 2007.

Convoys of vehicles leave eight times a day from Jirkatang and Middle Strait — the two opposite ends of the portion of the ATR that runs through the Jarawa reserve — with an average of 120 vehicles per day. And despite explicit stipulations of no contact with the Jarawa, vehicles conveniently break down or stop on one pretext or the other on the portion of the road inside the Jarawa reserve to allow tourists to see and sometimes interact with the Jarawa.

The subject of the Jarawa was again studied by a sub-group of experts and officials, set up in January, 2006 by the National Advisory Council, to examine inter alia institutional arrangements for protecting the Jarawa and to suggest various measures to ensure greater protection. By January 2006, the Jarawa policy adopted in December 2004 had not had a fair chance at implementation. Just a year had passed, and the tsunami and its aftermath had grabbed all attention and resources. The sub-group studied various aspects including the notified Jarawa policy and its implementation and made several recommendations.

Regarding the ATR, it has suggested that the portion that runs through the Jarawa reserve eventually be closed, after alternate arrangements for transportation by sea or air were put in place. This means a further delay since very little action has been taken to explore other arrangements. Unless a firm decision to close the ATR (i.e. the portion inside the Jarawa reserve) is taken, the administration will continue to drag its feet on alternate routes.

Other alternatives

Despite the Supreme Court having taken such a decision in 2002, the administration has filed a review petition, which is yet to be finalised. It is easily forgotten that before the completion of the ATR (which is fairly recent), sea routes were the only alternative.

Even today, for all other islands, e.g. Car Nicobar, Havelock, Great Nicobar, other islands of the Nicobar group, Little Andaman and many others, transportation is only by boat or ship and, very occasionally, by helicopter. Therefore the people living in North and Middle Andaman can hardly claim that they will be specially inconvenienced.

Almost all the officials who work or have worked closely with the Jarawa, whether of the Andaman administration or the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti, a registered society set up to look after matters relating to primitive tribes, privately aver that closure of the ATR is essential to reduce contact with the Jarawa and protect them from abrupt induction into the 21st century.

However, other officials strongly claim that closure of the ATR, even a portion of it, is impossible since it is a lifeline for the northern settlements. The attitude of these latter officials is understandable, but unsupportable, if one keeps the future of the Jarawa in mind. It is apparent they are thinking not of the Jarawa but of the other inhabitants. For these inhabitants, other alternatives are, or can be, made available.

For the Jarawa, who virtually have their backs against the wall, there is no alternative, and time is fast running out.

More egg on the BCCI face!

Many years ago, a friend of mine had likened the goings-on in the Indian cricket board to a drunken couple performing a waltz -- one step forward, two steps backward. We have just seen another stand out performance from the BCCI, to take the dancing metaphor a step forward, now that Ford has refused to tango.

That Ford fellow is rather smart. He sussed up the situation pretty quickly during his brief stay in India on Saturday and his instinct for self-preservation must have prevailed over the lure of, despite its obvious pressures and considerable distractions, taking up what must be one of the hottest jobs in international cricket today.

On the face of it, Ford had seemed an excellent choice for the job. His record was second only to the Australian John Buchanan, among post-1999 coaches. He was a low-key person, something of a welcome quality in Indian cricket right now, after the departure of the oh-so-media-saavy Greg Chapell. But all that's water under the bridge now. For, as Sunil Gavaskar said yesterday, the Board is back to square one.

Ford's refusal to take up the Indian coaching job, less than 48 hours after the dramatic announcement of his appointment by the BCCI, is only the latest in a series of eminently avoidable situations the Indian cricket board finds itself. Ford's snub comes in the wake of Nimbus walking out of a deal to cover the Afro-Asian cricket series and Zee Network's decision to cancel the contract to telecast offshore cricket matches involving India.

Then Kapil Dev, honorary director of the National Cricket Academy, and Kiran More, the last chief selector of Indian cricket, have embarrassed the BCCI by associating openly with TV moghul Subhash Chandra's proposed cricket league. More who was not too long ago accused of seeking bribe to select a player rather bluntly told a TV channel the other day : "Even the petrol I use to drive to the Mahrashtra Cricket Association's office is paid by me." Not very haqppy days for the Indian cricket board, eh?

A potentially embarrassing, if not downright explosive, situation could still emerge out of the protracted contracts negotiations. Though the Board is understood to have offered more money to the players in the form of higher television revenue share, the players are almost unanimously opposed to the cap on endorsements -- a decision that was taken in the first place without much reason and more as a populist step to convince the Indian cricketing public and the Board's eventual paymasters that the BCCI could act tough with non-performing players.

There is also the little matter of protecting the interest of the Board's official sponsors as opposed to the sponsors of individual players. Adidas has already taken Nike to court over a sponsorship row involving Sachin Tendulkar. Surely the last hasn't been heard on that matter. An ineffective BCCI would in the days to come be open to more such litigations as sponsor interests clash. Not surprisingly the Adidas case, I'm told, is being watched with considerable interest in the Indian corporate world.

Meanwhile, my friend who had come up with the drunken couple performing a waltz one liner came up with yet another gem last night to describe the Ford fiasco.

He said, more egg on the face wouldn't bother the Indian cricket mandarins. He said : "I am sure one of these days someone like Lalit Modi, the current Mr. Moneybags of Indian cricket, would grandly announce that with so much of egg around, the Indian cricket board has decided to get into the poultry business!"

A Midsummer Day's Dream

Life in a hospital's Intensive Care Unit (ICU) can be pretty exciting. The care IS very intensive -- nurses poke you with all kinds of needles at periodic intervals, thermometers are stuck up different orifices, medicines of different colours, shapes and sizes fed to you during, before and after meals and doctors with smiles as fake as Pamela Anderson's breasts tell you not to worry about a thing and then cheerfully reel off some very worrisome facts about your body.

Why am I rambling?

It is a pleasant 40 degrees in the shade. Brave (and, I thought, a bit foolish too) young men are playing cricket in this lovely weather. And yet I can't string together a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. Heat gets to me. Always has. Among my several serious reservations about self, the biggest one undoubtedly is my inability to relocate myself from a city that I have hated with some passion over three decades now. At one point of time I used to gripe about the people of this city, but for a long time, a very long time now, I haven't enjoyed living in this city because of its terrible weather. Not that life in the decidedly more humid Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai will be any cooler.

But this, the Delhi heat, is a different sort of beast. It works on you from the beginning of February, gets its claws into you in March and April, overwhelms you in May and June, saps your energy in July and August and by October end, you are so beat you think the coolness of November, December and January is just a figment of your meteorologically deluded mind. And then its February once again, the beginning of the nine-month summer season. More than anything else, it is the length of the Delhi summer that gets to you.

I once read somewhere how the author, a political prisoner in an Indian jail, would tell stories to young children, who were staying in the jail premises along with their prisoner mothers, about dogs and cats. And then she would notice the blank look on their faces and realise most of them had never set foot out of the four walls of the jail and had never seen a cat or a dog.

Similarly I fear Ritwik would never know spring or autumn, easily the two most beautiful seasons of my childhood and adolescence, if he grows up in Delhi. In this city, one day you go to the laundry and hand your sweaters and coats for dry cleaning and then come back and don your bermudas. In Delhi, the transition from winter to summer is terribly abrupt.

On top of it, this is a city without a major waterbody in and around it. You call Yamuna a waterbody and the river itself would rise from the mire of silt and from under the city's refuse and sue you for defamation. The water in Yamuna is as much of a chimera as the mythical Saraswati is. You knew there was water there once.

Damn, I am rambling again.

Point is, I am spoilt, both in terms of plentiful water and good weather. I grew up in Andamans, in the towns of Port Blair and Diglipur, when the population was sparse and the forest cover, at a conservative estimate, anything between 90 and 97 per cent, and anytime of the day and anytime of the year, you could feel the sea breeze on your back. In Port Blair, the front of our house faced the road. But the back of the house opened into sand and you could walk straight on to the beach and then to the water. From every room in my house, I could see the sea. And now from every room in my apartment in Delhi... ohh nevermind!

Long after I left Andamans, the islands became a refuge from my physical and emotional troubles. I would transport my mind to Port Blair or Diglipur and shut myself off from everything else. These days when I get depressed, I think a lot about the ten days I spent last year in the ICU. Both, I guess, are clumsy attempts at coping.

Right now, even as I write this, beer is emerging as a serious option. That is, as an attempt at coping.

In my mind's eye, as I wipe the dust off the years, I can see a big tub with chunks of ice, and countless bottles of beer buried in between the ice. The air conditioning on at full blast killing the afternoon heat. A bunch of old friends who can communicate even by passing a cigarette butt, an old seventies movie (could be Angoor or Golmaal or Chupke Chupke, take your pick) on the DVD in a semi-dark room with blinds drawn. Someone almost unobtrusively passing on plates of non vegetarian snacks at regular intervals. Mmmmmm.

Gosh, more rambling.

But I like the train of thought ...

In Defence of the Self and More!

Dear Anonymous,

I liked Cheeni Kum "just because". I am 43, remarkably superficial, a journalist by design if not training, so I am conditioned not to look at things too deeply.

And no I didn't think the movie to be "psychologically realistic" or "shockingly refreshing" or "morally complex". I just liked the movie, yaar.

I grew up watching some really terrible movies, countless number of them, in fact. And for years went to movies with very little expectations. I sat in dark theatres and wished for good photography, slick editing, witty dialogues, oh and the occasional nice story.

I found a bit of all that in Cheeni Kum which is what got me excited. I remember watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gum and smiling most contentedly at one point when Kajol asks Shahrukh "Aaj jaldi ghar aa jana" and Shahrukh enquires "kyon?". Kajol has this lovely smile on her face and says "Aiwayi". That dialogue made my day, redeemed the movie in my eyes. As I said it takes little things to make me happy about a Hindi movie.

Ditto for Cheeni Kum.

All I see in a movie like Cheeni Kum which I like is that the gap between Indian movies and Hollywood is narrowing. It’s good entertainment for two and a half hours. And ,speaking a tad more personally, I am not exactly averse to the idea of seeing older men woo women far younger than them. It DOES give me hope.

As for older women and younger men. In self defence, all I can say is I watched 'Notes on a Scandal', quite loved the movie, and couldn't find any moral outrage within me about a teacher falling for a fifteen year student.
Looking back, I also quite enjoyed watching The Graduate and The Summer of 42. And please don't hold it against me that I was in my teens when I watched both the movies.

A film maker likes nothing more than a viewer identifying with the movie's protagonist. With someone like me that has happened over the years. I remember watching Sholaay as a eleven year old with a brother two years older than me. When Amitabh dies, and Veeru enters Gabbar's den, shooting down his henchmen on sight, my cousin broke into spontaneous applause and said : "Shabash Veeru, aur maaro".

From mid seventies to early eighties, I WAS Vijay. In Shaan, I was the one who smashed open the door to the villains' den and said : "Mai hamesha apne dushmano ko ghar me ghus ke marta hoo". And in Kabhi Kabhie I was the one who sang "Mai pal do pal ka shayar hoon".

It was also easier to identify as a young man with both The Graduate and The Summer of 42. I found the idea of a young man seduced by an older woman quite "hot". I can't quite honestly say I find the idea as appealing today.

On the other hand, one does get this nice feeling watching Bachchan wooing Tabu. Having said that, I must insist, plausibility plays an important role here. Bachchan and Tabu look good sharing screen space. There is a certain chemistry between the two.

Thus the real issue here, according to me, is not of the appeal of an older man falling for a younger woman, or vice versa. Point is, whether you can carry it off on screen. In Nishabad, the same premise took a beating, yet for me it works in Cheeni Kum.

Of Ghalib and review of a review of Cheeni Kum

Mat pooch ke kya haal hai mera tere peechhe,

Tu dekh ke kya rang hai tera mere agey,

Baazi chahe atfaal duniya mere agey,

Hota hai shabboroz tamasha mere agey...

Someone whom I haven't seen for a few blue moons sent me the above lines. Now, I usually need an interpreter for Ghalib. I have one local interpreter and another I call up in New York. These lines reached me without any help, though. I guess that's why some of my more sensible friends swear on the genius of the fellow. Today he made me smile and write about a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed watching ten-odd days ago.

I almost didn't see Chini Kum. I was so discouraged by Khalid Mohammad's review of the movie. And then my fondness for movies got the better of me. Thank God for that! I thoroughly enjoyed watching the movie. Along with Metro, it happens to be my favourite movie of the year so far.

I am no critic and finer points of movie-making escape me regularly. But I found the setting interesting, the story plausible and the acting of Amitabh Bachchan and Tabu (particularly the latter) very very good. All of which made for a most entertaining two and a half hours.

Khalid Mohammad in his review exhorts Amitabh Bachchan to act his age and give up on his 'Sexy Sam' (obvious reference to his character in Kabhi Alvida Na Kahna) image. Sixtyfour year olds cavorting with women half their age stretches viewers' credulity, avers Mohammad. Personally I thought it somehow offended Mr. Mohammad's sensibility.

At some point in the movie, Amitabh tells Paresh Rawal : "You are jealous of me. You cannot imagine someone my age can be happy, can be looking forward to new things in his life. You had me slotted in a particular image and now you are upset that you had presumed wrongly." Bachchan could have been talking to Khalid Mohammad.

I thought Big B and Tabu looked rather good on screen. Two mature inelligent people who made mature intelligent conversation. They looked far better than, for instance, the pairing of Dharmendra and Nafisa Ali in Metro.

Cheeni Kum is very different from Nishabd. In both the films Big B is seen being attracted to women far younger than him. But that's where the similarities end.

Admittedly Jia Khan and the Big B looked a complete mismatch in Nishabd. But that was not just due to their age gap. The difference between Tabu and Jia is not just in their years, but also in their histrionic abilities. Tabu is a classy actress and methinks one of the most under-rated actress of our times. She has two national awards in her kitty -- for Chandni Bar and Astitva, should have won another for Maqbool, if you ask moi.

I liked Cheeni Kum because of the dialogues. I am sucker for intelligent dialogues and there were a fair number of them in this movie. I loved it when the chef remarked to his colleague: "Tere aur Maya ke beech koi hai. Tere daant." And thoroughly enjoyed Tabu sending Amitabh on a jog, after he had held her hand.

Now I remember the connection between Ghalib's lines and Cheeni Kum. Both made me smile.