Look Who Is Talking

Chubby cheeks, dimpled chin,

Rosy lips, teeth within.

What do you say, son?

Looks like a good one.

Curly hair, very fair,

Eyes are blue, lovely too.

Speaks too, though, you sure that will do?

‘No, no, no!’

First published in The Riveter Review, 29 November 2013.

Yellow

Yellow means a sunflower.

A single stem brightening a whole room.

Yellow means cheer.

Yellow means a child’s nursery.

Yellow means innocence.

Yellow means butter.

A thick wad melting on a steaming hot aloo-paratha.

Yellow means temptation.

Yellow means the Australian cricket team.

Yellow means challenge.

Yellow means Winnie the Pooh.

On a night-shirt and a school bag and a notebook.

Yellow means memories.

Yellow means a canary.

Hopping and skipping and flipping about.

Yellow means life.

Yellow means turmeric.

A pinch added to a drab looking bhaji, making it seem like a mouth-watering delight.

Yellow means taste.

Yellow means a field of mustard plants.

With Shahrukh and Kajol singing ‘Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam’.

Yellow means youth.

Yellow means the piece of gold my grandmother wears around her neck.

A gift from my mother to hers, from her first salary.

Yellow means pride.

Yellow means the sun.

Light. Energy. Hope.


First published in Talking Cranes, 21 November 2013.

Self-Study

I read you over and over
As if reading poetry,
Not the kind I don’t get
But the kind that gets me.

And I go over it carefully,
Amazed, to find out what exactly it was
And why so important to me.

Discovering, or not discovering, the answer,
I go on, read further
Hoping I'll find more such,
Wanting to die trying.

To understand the poet
Who understood me perfectly,
To listen with rapt attention
To one who spoke only to me.


First published in the Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, 6 September 2013.

Colour-Coordinated

I may have privileges you lack;

Yet, sister, I am not that different from you.

I too have been black,

And at times blue too.

Though different points on the atlas,

The same lines run through us.

First published in DeltaWomen Magazine, 29 August 2013.

Are You a Consumer or a Participant?

The question was first posed in the Paris of 1968. It was the first time in history when students and workers came together in such numbers for a common cause, to join hands against state tyranny, to urge ‘the revolution is in you’.

It has been forty-five years since. We still haven’t made the right choice. Let alone empathizing with the cause of ‘other’ communities, we shy away from standing up even for our own. What are we afraid of? What keeps us from taking the plunge and becoming active, resisting participants rather than being passive, vulnerable consumers (which is any seller’s dream), except in the form of temporary attendance at protest ‘events’?

In the nursery rhyme ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’, the two characters keep on fighting with each other because that is the routine they are familiar with. Familiarity is reassuring. We are the facsimiles of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The established order is silently followed. The students-workers movement had also asked us to unzip our minds as often as our fly. We forget to unzip. Instead, our minds carry an old, rusty padlock. The signboard reads: Dissenters will be persecuted.

Alternatives are not to be looked for. If found, who would accept them? Accepting them would mean letting go of the old order which is familiar, comfortable and reassuring. The structure may be rotten. Who cares tuppence? We go on replastering. We go on clinging pathetically to the centre, till the very end, so that we know where to come back to. Suddenly, it strikes us we can be safer. We take a short rope and tie ourselves to the centre. Like we tie our dogs. So that we/the dogs do not stray afar.

Make it new, they tell us. But what is new is scary. Discovering new centres means stepping into the unknown. How many people in our generation have witnessed a revolution? How can we recreate something we have not seen? No use getting into the pointless exercise of envisaging how it would have been if our predecessors would have thought likewise.

We might have a thing or two to learn from Jane Fonda when she says, ‘Sometimes, you have to give it all up. To gather.’ We have to open your arms to gather. But they are crossed firmly against our chests. In fear. In defence. In defence of the fear. Because the old blabbermouth of our conscience would not keep quiet. It insists on whispering with its wicked mouth our own weaknesses to us.

But we can put our fears to rest. The knight in shining armour comes to our rescue. We find refuge in cynicism, aka, ‘practicality’. Everything falls in line thereafter.  Marches invite our sneers. Sloganeering passers for empty rhetoric. Long and trying struggles of radical groups get a sympathetic shake of the head, underlining the futility of any attempts at change. Our fervent prayers echo, ‘God! Give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.’ The rest of the phrase, ‘and the power to change the things we can’, sinks into oblivion.

When it seems that cynicism cannot be a permanent solace, when we start noticing chinks in its armour, a movie like Rang De Basanti comes. A certain group of young people are deeply ‘stirred’ but hate to admit it. After all, when do these things happen in ‘real’ life? They are quick to explain to their friends, and to themselves, the unrealistic elements of the movie. Another section cries out loud, claps,  cheers, swears and shouts ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, all the right reactions corresponding with all the right moments in the movie. The intensity of passion finds an outlet. Catharsis happens.

We need not hasten to identify ourselves with any of the two groups. We can choose to respond in a different, third kind of manner. We do not have to critique the ‘unrealism’ of the movie. We do not have to act as cheerleaders. We do not even have to watch the movie. We just need to take a good, hard look around and what we see would arouse the same passion, the same rage in us. We can choose to build up the anger, the frustration, the agony. And then use all of it. To fight. To struggle. To build and create. To ‘make it new’. It is a unique experience altogether. Slightly unfamiliar. Slightly scary. Completely exhilarating. Listen to Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night . . . 

Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The revolution is in you, remember?

First published in Youth Ki Awaaz, 13 August 2013.

Half the Sky: Endangered on Earth

Primetime television commercials and full-page newspaper jackets zoom on fresh young faces and sleek new gizmos stressing how technology has moved forward since the time of Ambassador cars and HMT watches.  If you have any memory of the Licence Raj economy, when stifling entrepreneurship was the raison d’etre of the system, the brave bold today ads flaunt a brash, happening India.

We are made to believe that because of a new car model hitting the road every three months or the screen of our television getting bigger and bigger, we have been able to usher in a new dawn and leave behind all that was old and stagnant. But modern machines do not make modern people. Technology is most certainly a major route for reformist change, but its role as an instrument of change depends on its users and so it can be as potent in propagating stultifying stereotypes. Technology can help us grow in the direction we want but may not be able to help if we are misdirected. Just think of the supercomputer which can be used to trace the footprints of an erratic monsoon and – and develop nuclear weapons as well. 

Moreover, when newer electronic avatars threaten to throw asunder the old order, the keepers of the crusted establishment know a thing or two about protecting the status quo. When a Khap panchayat in Uttar Pradesh banned the use of cell phones by women, the diktat of the male-chauvinist kangaroo court sought to put an end to the many possibilities technology held for women in those remote villages, because the holders of power saw a definite threat in the little device. The exclusively male group was afraid that the SIM in the hands of the ‘onion peelers’ could shake the ground beneath the smug footholds of patriarchy.  (You see, all it takes is a missed call.) At such times, it is not technology but its users who would have to intervene. What would need to come into play are something as basic as the human values of courage and empathy. These cannot be substituted by technology.

The other aspect of the date between gadgetry and youth has been that while access to knowledge has never been easier, while participatory platforms have never been wider, these alone are not sufficient to pave the way towards a more egalitarian world. Yes, we now know a lot more; yes, we now are more on talking terms with more of those like us . . . But has all this ‘increased talktime’ helped the urban, privileged lot to reach out? Has it helped us be more sensitive to those that fight the survival battle in Other India, the vast tribal hinterland unvisited by the laptop and fast-food culture?

Then there is the question of those who do try to use modern media and technology to change warped mindsets. A social campaign against rape by a Bollywood personality comes to mind. The heart of the campaign may be in the right place, its intentions noble. But the principle of gender sensitivity is carried only halfway through. So while its aim is to end gender violence, the logic is flawed. It does affirm that women have their own identity and that they should not endure violence but these right noises get lost in the absence of a sharper focus. It reminds men of the many roles women play in their lives and how, therefore, they should be respected. Maybe inadvertently, but it ends up encouraging the notion that women have to be related to men and their lives in order to be deserving of this respect. It talks of what ‘real men’ do, thus solidifying gender binaries and stressing that there is something quintessentially masculine and feminine instead of an all-encompassing humane bracket. It is naïve to say that as men would take time to come out of familiar categories and would feel lost if old certainties are taken away, first one should expect them to become better men and then better human beings. The gender binary in our society is hugely skewed. One cannot take five hundred years to achieve step one, the next five hundred to step two. We can’t apologetically shrug and say that, till then, we would have to accept the present forms of violence arising from prejudices we are wary of disturbing, while new kinds of attacks each day continue to take place. This is precisely why the more things change, the more they remain the same.

At the same time, to achieve a fast solution, one ought not to pluck a half-ripe principle. Even if we forget the ideal of honest means for an honest end, this is not sustainable. If a man tries to be a ‘real man’ by not hitting his partner, he may also have some expectations from her that he thinks should be fulfilled by a ‘real woman’. So, at its very inception, such patchy logic is ridden with holes.

The sellers and propagators of technology, companies offering new technological ‘solutions’ every day and swearing by the notion of ‘progress’, cannot operate in a value-neutral vacuum. If women are threatened with rape on Rediff chat or Twitter, the portal and service providers cannot throw up their hands at these ‘non-technical’ issues. They are being run by people, not machines, who are a living-thinking-feeling part of our society and they cannot but address these violations in the strictest manner possible.  Such contradictions are also blatant when ‘new age’ IT companies practise gender-based wage difference and evade putting women in top positions notwithstanding their merit.

On a personal level, I have felt this yawning (literally) gap in the modernity of a techno-savvy blooming glowing shining dining young India and the way we lead our lives and make our choices time and again. A year or so back, when people I know had not started chiding me for the pounds I had gained, I got a call from a friend in advertising. A couple of actors/models had backed out at the last moment, and my friend had been assigned the task of looking for replacements. I have problems with something as commercial as product endorsements. But this was to be for a publication and promised a ‘public interest’ message. I love doing different things; this was something I had never done before, and I got all ears for the details. She described the scene to be shot to me.

Two women are in a public space, a man tries to harass one, the woman is nervous, the other woman intervenes, thus lending strength and solidarity to the first one. It seemed simple enough. It wasn’t. The two women could not be just any women. They had to be a particular sort. The target: thin, preferably fair. The intervener: someone bigger. 

I had to be the target. Always allergic to stereotypes, I asked to play the latter. My friend went back to the director and asked him. He said he couldn’t flip, that he had visualized the scene a certain way and couldn’t play with the aesthetics of it, and that it wasn’t about stereotypes. I wasn’t convinced, and my two minutes of potential fame went down the archetypal drain in less than two minutes.

My first job involved working on the Right to Information. A journalist friend informed that her magazine’s next issue was on young activists and for a change they wanted not models but activists for the cover. I appreciated the nous of the magazine in wanting to have real, ‘flawed’, and not airbrushed people on the cover, something that most mainstream magazines are loath to do. As for being on the cover, I felt I was young enough but not activist enough. I asked her if I could pass the brief around, thinking I’d ask a young friend who had been engaged with activism longer than I had. My journalist friend asked her editor. She reverted to hesitantly inform me that while the magazine was looking for activists, they wanted someone thin, and preferably fair. I stated that I wasn’t up for it if such were the criteria for selection. But I told my other colleagues about the opportunity. (Looking back, I felt I shouldn’t have passed the word around for a shoot that ostensibly chose people for their work but based on their skin colour and body type.) I thought I shouldn’t impose my opinions on them. Finally, someone was chosen from our group who, though not fair, was slim enough but was even newer to activism than I was.

The cover needed men too. When my friend proffered, they required him to get rid of his facial hair. He refused.

The magazine cover we eventually saw on the stands had some stiff models, except the person chosen from our organization, in fashionably ‘ethnic’ clothing. Considering that the magazine was conforming to stereotypes, it hadn’t done a great job of it. The models were more ‘model-like’ than ‘activist-like’ but, the lord be blessed, reflected enough white light and had all the right angles.

That we live in a regressive society riddled with stereotypes around gender, class, caste, race and religion is yesterday’s news. But the jab of disappointment is particularly sharp when as young people, ‘with it’ in every way and adept in playing with the toys of technology, we go back to walking on all fours the moment we are called upon to stand up for things. In the first instance, a young director, in whose hands sophisticated technology willingly yielded to enhance his creativity, felt turning stereotypes on their heads would interfere with aesthetics. I do not have his skills, experience and expertise, and I am in no position to question them. But can aesthetics and politics not go hand in hand? Does art have to be apolitical and politics unaesthetic?

When I ask my friends in advertising about why commercials still try so hard to conform, they say that while they are dying to do brave new work, their clients are afraid of taking risks and have no romantic notions about traversing the road less taken. So on screen, we hardly see men changing diapers and women being the breadwinners, though such real-life instances have been around for quite some time now, even if they aren’t the norm yet. Technology, claiming to deliver things ahead of our times, fails when as popular media it cannot even keep pace with the times.

Of course, there do exist some young people discerning enough to acknowledge that this is not how it should be. Having studied literature, my friend went for an advertising course hoping to introduce to that world the gender sensitivity and non-conformity she had always believed in and absorbed even better in college. Upon joining the new course, it did not take her long to grasp that advertising expected her not to use her previous education but unlearn it. She tried to change things, came up with exciting presentations of her ideas but nothing budged. She ultimately decided to quit and got back to academics, instead of doing something that flew in the face of all she stood for.

There are also some who stay but keep trying to create a dent instead of allowing themselves to get completely co-opted. An editor I know ensures that the primary school textbooks she handles have Ravi and Sunil fetching water and doing other household chores, apart from studying.  ‘No Malti or Susheela would ever wash utensils in by book, while Ram goes to school,’ she promises. While publishing is a business, she ensures that being responsible for the content she does not lend a hand in planting gender stereotypes in young minds.

If there were more such who insisted on pushing against the wall instead of predicting it won’t give way, or resisted becoming a part of something they did not believe in, if we did not let ourselves be a supine mass of wood floating in any direction that wind or water would deign to carry it, undoubtedly the tectonic shift one had never dared to hope for because of its scale would have happened. Still can.

In the case of the magazine cover, we had a well-established publication for the youth trying to do something different and real. But the media house was trying to be radical in a halfway, conditional manner, not confident that their young readership would be welcoming enough of their initiative. When I was in the Film and Television Institute, Pune, we had a guest lecture by young film-maker Dibakar Banerjee. He has contributed gems to the Hindi film industry like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Love Sex Aur Dhokha and Shanghai. Among other things, his films often expose middle-class hypocrisies. In each of his works, he has shown brilliant film-making and has got his politics right, thereby answering the question of the compatibility of politics and aesthetics. Speaking to us, he shared his frustration over how young couples ‘modern’ in every sense of the term would say that they cannot marry each other because one of theirs is a no-onions-nor-garlic family. No different are our matrimonial ads where the young gleefully participate with their parents in a caste-based elimination-selection of prospective partners.

In Love Sex Aur Dhokha, we witness an India which is abreast with technological advancement but is actually using it to fulfil its greed, creating a divide between the doer (the user of technology) and the done upon (the ones against whom technology has been used). One example shown in the movie, and something rampant in recent India, is the use of hidden cameras for pornography and blackmail. The employment of technology to commit crimes like foeticide is also common amongst the middle class. At the other end of this lie our daily soaps where they reveal that girls are valuable indeed and, of course, the best way to understand this is to see them performing sacrifices and participating in trials by fire, all in order to do what they do best – ‘keep the family together’.

All these issues are related to the young inhabitants of India, who know their iPods like the back of their hand but are shy of breaking free of the old dogmas on which they base their lives. The old principles – honesty, truth, standing up for ourselves and others, sharing our privileges – lying forgotten are the inconvenient ones. Even as I wrote this, it came as a small shock to me that I paused to think of whether there are ‘cooler’ substitutes for these words; words that should have been basic to our existence now sound ‘loaded’, ‘outdated’, ‘moralistic’, as if human values also come with an expiry date, and all rights and wrongs have become perspectival (unless we are at the receiving end of those wrongs). Those of us who have discarded all ideologies need to find them back. Those who think who they have them need to probe deeper to practise them with complete scrupulousness. The young, technology-driven India is an India privileged like never before. But on the other side, there’s the underprivileged India, some of whose young members are fighting brave battles on their personal and societal fronts. The privileged India cannot simply be the benefactor of a modern India and refuse to acknowledge its accountability. If a girl from a family where ‘honour killing’ is a threat runs away to escape a fate imposed by her family, she is of huge inspiration to me. People like us are clearly better ensconced and do not run risks so dire. In comparison, and also in deference, to that girl if we do not even shake ourselves out of our stupor to assert to our (surely, more understanding) families a right as basic as that of choosing our partners, we should shed all pretensions of modernity. One expects this young India to raise the right questions and find some answers, and if the process causes discomfort or inconvenience, to kindly deal with it.

After the 16 December rape case in Delhi, we had cried ourselves hoarse asking the state and the police to deliver justice and had sworn that we would not let this go on. To fulfil that promise, we ought to do justice to our own lives as conscientious beings. We have to use technology and all the privileges we have received as part of the modern world package to seek and destroy whatever is rotten in the state of India. There is no other way we can allow ourselves to go on.

First published in The Equator Line, August-October 2013.

Perspective

When I go begging door to door

Only to return with an empty bowl,

I prefer to think charity is obsolete

Rather than wonder if my bowl’s chipped.

First published in The Criterion, June 2013.

Just In Case

I discuss politics with my lover

For we aren’t merely fools in love;

When we saw

The conversations between us

Were as impassioned as our sighs,

Our choice of each other got cemented, a well-brewed decision.

Still,

As I argue and frown and nod and smirk

In these debates

I hurry to hold him and love him in my head

Alternating between ‘leisurely’ and ‘feverishly’

Lest time runs out.

First published in Writers Asylum, 21 July 2013.

Of Mice and Men

The secrecy surrounding science has often been expected to be forgiven and forgotten. It is assumed that the relevant observations and inferences derived would be too much for an untrained mind to handle. Accordingly, we are encouraged to gratefully acknowledge the conclusions beginning with, ‘In simple terms . . .’ The activities that would have appeared clandestine in one context thus often appear merely Byzantine here, convoluted when it comes to comprehension but otherwise innocuous.

There was a time when activists dealing with issues of science and technology were seen as inhabiting a different category than those working on subjects more widely understood. But we soon realized that even ‘technical’ issues greatly impact the most basic of people’s concerns. We have learnt to develop a broader understanding of our problems in an age when even global warming has been known to be most damaging for the economically backward classes.

With people finding themselves the biggest stakeholders in the government’s decision making, the layman decided to lay down the rules this time. The Right to Information (RTI) Act, proudly and endearingly addressed as the ‘People’s Act’, came into being. The Act strengthened the common man’s ‘audacity’ as an outraged ‘govern-mentality’ looked on. The demand that followed, that of having a say in the decision-making process, was here to stay.

On more than one occasion, the Indian government has earned approving nods from giant corporations for its ‘no nonsense’ approach when it comes to talking business. Environment waivers have been awarded to several such groups with the benign generosity of a Eucharist priest. True to our reputation, we leave no stone unturned in being the hospitable host. We encourage our foreign friends to protract and perpetuate their stay here, often at the cost of the very household that accommodates them. Regulations, laws, rules, guidelines, strictures, all are dismissed with the wave of a hand. If we cannot bend, we shall amend.

Relatively, when it comes to giving information to its own people, we see the same government practising remarkable parsimony. When genetically modified (GM) foods came to be known as bad news, Monsanto-Mahyco’s anxiety over their consumers getting ‘out of the market’ was only expected. But what to make of a situation in which the Review Committee for Genetic Manipulation (RCGM) has been petulantly guarding the meeting minutes close to its chest? Those who were supposed to be our knowledge providers found it difficult to transcend their sympathy for (the imagined) ‘competitive position of the third party’. With even the Ministry of Environment and Forests clearly expressing its reservations about the competence of a court of law to rule on science and technology issues, where do the consumers go? Do they wait for the much touted ‘third party verifiable information’ by disinterested groups (if any such exist) to surface? Or do they take the declaration of pro-GM parties as a word of honour? Even if the latter is to be so, and if pleasant surprises are all that these groups have got to unravel, why not make their data public, clear the mist of suspicion generated by ‘environment groups’ and let GM foods be welcomed by the people in a warm embrace?

It is precisely because such disclosures were not initiated by either the companies or our own regulatory boards that groups like Greenpeace decided to take up the issue. A need for participatory consumerism was felt and one of the longest RTI battles to be began in 2005. Random, unofficial and, at times, irrelevant, information was fed to the people in crumbs and the farce is being played out till the time of writing this piece. For instance, in response to an RTI filed by a Greenpeace activist, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) put forth the argument that the requested data on toxicity and allergenicity on mustard, okra and rice cannot be provided as it is under generation and has not been submitted to the RCGM. Contrarily, the DBT Appellate authority went on to put on record that the same data is under the RCGM’S consideration.

In an ideal situation, all such knowledge should have been accessible in the public domain, as it is one of the many ‘obligations of public authorities’ under Section 4 of the RTI Act: 'It shall be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps . . . to provide as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals.'

The failure is all the more flagrant when seen in the light of Section 4(c), under which a public authority is required to 'publish all relevant facts while formulating important policies or announcing the decisions which affect public'.

Again, in Section 4 (3) it is made clear that 'every information shall be disseminated widely and in such form and manner which is easily accessible to the public'.

While all these provisions have been passed over, there is Mahyco on the other hand that presented a harried application to the Central Information Commission complaining that Section 2(n) of the Act has been violated because Mahyco’s submissions as the ‘third party’ were never invited. The company never chose to enlighten anyone on how information about whether they were manufacturing something toxic and allergenic would ruin their ‘competitive advantage’. Even if reason is thrown to the winds and it is assumed for a moment that such a thing were to happen, this case should be treated as the quintessential representative of the spirit of the Act, which mandates that ‘larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information’. In the same application, Mahyco pleads that its arguments be considered in favour of ‘the principles of natural justice’. It is most intriguing to discover that those who do not flinch from putting the lives of millions at stake subscribe to such humanitarian philosophies.

The DBT insists on becoming the sentinel to Monsanto-Mahyco’s commercial interests instead of the health and survival issues of the citizens of India. Activists accused of keeping their fingers glued to the panic button have been facing the exasperation that comes from stating the obvious over and over again. Something like the 2006 field trials should have cautioned the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee suitably, when not just the farmers and the village panchayats but also the usually in-the-know state governments were clueless about the presence of transgenic crops in their fields. But the fact that field trials of GM crops are still on at the time of writing this is a distinct indicator of the seriousness, or the lack thereof, with which public health is treated in this country.

Foucault was right in believing that it is through discourse, or knowledge, that we are created. But if discourse is perpetuated by those in power, how does one know what kind of counter-discursive elements need to be generated to resist that imposition if the powerful keep knowledge locked in their sanctum sanctorum? Groups like Toxics Link have already used the RTI to uncover alarming data on bio-medical waste and import waste. The GM foods debate is yet another case where the direct co-relation between the right to know and the right to live rings true. It is precisely to uncover such vital information that the Act was designed. By turning its back to people’s Right to Information, the government is only lending certitude to the suspicion that it has something to hide. Even if we accept the government’s assurance that it is worthy of its people’s confidence, it is all the more perplexing to witness the government’s camouflage tactics in relation to its professed commitment to transparency. In a country where mice and men are made equally vulnerable subjects of experiment and people’s representatives turn into indifferent kings, the fates of its people can easily be shoved into dark grottos by alien pied pipers.

In fact, this case highlights what might well become one of the main challenges to the transparency regime in the years to come. The world is becoming more and more specialized and information is being expressed increasingly in a language that the layperson cannot understand. Therefore, even if people can exercise their right to information, it is not much use unless they can comprehend the information they get, and that too, in the correct context.

Perhaps the best example is the arena of medical sciences where more and more patients are unable to understand the prognosis, the treatment or even the nature of their diseases. And this is not because the whole matter is too complicated but because professionals have adopted the habit of talking in a language and using terms that only fellow professionals can understand.

In such a scenario, it is incumbent on governments to take an initiative in demystifying all these ‘technologies’ which critically affect the lives of people. It is the concurrent responsibility of people’s groups to develop information-clearing houses where such mystified information can be accessed from governments and other ‘technical’ institutions and made available to the people in simple terms and in a relevant context. It is admirable that Greenpeace has started doing this about many of the issues they work on, including the whole area of GMOs.

With Shekhar Singh. First published in Genetic Gamble: Safe Food-The End of Choice? Greenpeace, 14 October 2008.

Doodling

When does what you drive become more important than what drives you?

When does your accent become more important than what you are saying?

When does the need to turn a blind eye become more important than the need to see? 

When does the need to laugh with others become more important than what you are laughing at?

When does how many boxes you have to live in become more important than whether you are actually living?

When does your celebration of life become more important than another’s struggle for it?

When does what you have become more important than what you give?

When does what you can conveniently follow become more important than what you believe in?

When do others’ standards become more important than your own?

When does the cover become more important than the book?

First published in the IndianReview of World Literature in English, July 2010. Subsequently published in Labyrinth, September 2010.