Wednesday
Salon posted a story about inappropriate responses to 9/11. Mark Steyn of the National Post wrote this piece sometime ago. He warns against "grief mongering" in this straight and sensible paragraph:
"As Miss Quindlen described them, "the father, the mother, the two-year old girl off on an adventure, sitting safe between them, taking wing." Christine Hanson will never be three, and I feel sad about that. But I did not know her, love her, cherish her; I do not feel her loss, her absence in my life. I have no reason to hold hands in a "healing circle" for her. All I can do for Christine Hanson is insist that the terrorist movement which killed her is hunted down and prevented from deliberately targeting any more two-year olds. We honour Christine Hanson's memory by righting the great wrong done to her, not by ersatz grief-mongering."
I also greatly admire my friend Ayesha Saldanha who is part of womenspeacepalestine — an international group of women who have set up a center in Hares, Palestine. The women will take turns living there throughout the year and provide written and photographic documentation of human rights abuses in Palestine. Ayesha has been volunteering on the Gaza strip for some years now. She has written a great piece about her experiences and the ways in which the internet helps refugees in Palestine. You can read the article on Online Journalism Review, where I worked for the two years that I studied at USC. I never thought that I would miss it, but I do. It was a small unversity-run web site when we began working on it, but its looking great now with a redesign. The great thing about womenspeace is that you can volunteer to help them with a range of things-- from olive picking to responding to emergency calls.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
I'm very proud of both my friends in San Francisco. Aditi is going to start training to become a counsellor for victims of domestic violence. Swaroopa has already finished the same course and may soon be going on to study non profit management and international human rights policy at Harvard!!!!
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Ganesha Habba. That was yesterday. I had originally wanted to say a shloka and perform a small puja. But I don't really know any shlokas despite my staunch brahmin upbringing and forced attendance at numerous pujas. So I looked online for a ganesha mantra and found a site with translations. I guess I sought some superficial ties to tradition. I felt I should incorporate some of these traditions that I'd grown up into my life right now. To my horror, the very first mantra said something to the effect of Oh Lord Ganesha, grant me wealth, grant me health, prosperity, blah..and BLESS OUR FAMILY WITH THE BIRTH OF A SON. It just seemed too awful a thing to chant in this country of female foeticides and a skewed male-female sex ratio.
I realised then that I had deliberately left religion out of my life. Brahminical tenets and rituals are still representative to me of an awful system of subjugation, a notion of superiority that is based on the knowledge of mantras, shlokas and pujas. To be fair, there are beautiful, lyrical mantras-- when they are well chanted, they can truly elevate you. Some mantras that celebrate Durga and Kali are powerful. And there are many, many gentle poor brahmins who hate brahminism's execesses.
But there is something about these rituals that makes me uneasy. Maybe I associate it with the pompous pandits who would sometimes perform pujas in our house and their notions of brahminical purity and the terrible hyprocrisy involved in maintaining that purity. But on festival days, I paradoxically find myself craving that comforting smell of rituals -- wood fire, kum-kum, agarbathi, silk and jasmine and the rythmical sound of mantras. It might just be a simple association with home. So i just lit chandan incense and wished for a number of things including a better world. Lion was very clever..he wished ganesha all happiness and wealth. I don't know anybody who does that ...people are usually too busy asking the lord for various things.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
We have found most of the furniture for our new apartment!!!. It was such a beautiful day today, unusual for Bombay. Not too sunny, not too windy, just a light warm breeze. I loved Lion's design for the Sunday Midday (he designed the print edition) anniversary issue. So we drank our ginger tea, lazed around and looked at the papers. I had made idlis for breakfast. We set off to see The Living Room in Mahim, which turned out to be a surprisingly reasonable store. We were actually considering just sleeping on mattresses and buying a cot later, but we saw a nice wrought iron bed that will be perfect for our room. We were just so happy to be out in the sun today. The only catch is that I had to come to work, but i've spent most of the time just tinkering with my blog. There are so many typographical errors. And yours truly is supposed to be a copy editor. But its only been a week or so, I'm sure I'll clean it up soon.
Sunday, September 08, 2002
