Techie Husbands and the Dowry Index

When reading up about a home loan, some time back, I noticed one common piece of advice all around; that a housing loan was a long term product and ought not to make decisions and choices merely by looking at the economic climate of the time. Over the 15-20 time period horizon over which a home loan usually operates, lots of things would happen; politically and economically.

And sure enough, in the couple of years that have passed by, Home loans first kept going down and every body wanted a floating rate of interest , then they started going up and up and up , and now they seem to be coming down again, albeit, a lot slower than many of us would have liked.

Some thing that lasts longer than houses and flats or at least is meant to traditionally are marriages and it seems that they are guided in the same manner insofar as the marriage alliance market is concerned. According to a report in the Hindustan Times, the current economic meltdown has not spared the matrimonial market and the “Dowry Index”. According to the report, the most sought after husbands in the country are no longer the folks in the IT sector; the tide it would seems has turned against them and the eternal favorites – the civil services are back in the reckoning at the top of the pile.

Some thing that is unfortunate though is that the insidious business of giving dowry is not going away with the more “modern” professions, only their positions in the hierarchy is shifting. One could have had the right to expect that the newer professions would come unencumbered with the baggage that some of the older professions have and would be socially progressive and gender sensitive. But that has not unfortunately happened. Like any newly listed company at the Stock Exchange, the emerging professions have found their place in the sun and have acquired a value that they now demand on the matrimonial market.

Sadly though the fact that the newly created professions are gender neutral in many ways hasn’t done any thing to dent the pernicious dowry system. Sangeeta Gupta, VP, Nasscom, had said in 205 that in the software industry, the male to female ratio is 76:24. However, by 2007, this ratio was likely to be 65:35. The trend is likely to continue and in fact gain momentum. But IT industry sources have also claimed the larger numbers of women in the sector not withstanding “gender relations have been largely ignored in studies of offshore software development. Much of the labour process is highly labour-intensive and is seen to breed a ‘masculine culture‘ as technical skill is intimately entwined with masculinity.”

What makes the story particularly unpalatable is the fact that in the older and more “established” professions, women were typically not expected to join in as employees – the Railways, the Armed Forces and the old school corporate would be a good example. But in the “new generation” professions, no such legacy exists and women and men work and are employed on relatively level playing fields. But that sadly has done nothing for the dowry system which carries on unaffected with the dowry index going up and down incorporating and imitating the vagaries of the economy into the unrelenting demands of society.

The Faith Journey of Chand Muhammad

Why do people convert and what are the foul motivations of those who do is a question that comes up for frequent speculation. So while people are still frothing at the mouth at the recent conversion to Islam of former Deputy Chief Minister of Haryana, Chander Mohan, the answer is worth investigating. It has all the ingredients of a pot boiler. Bhajan Lal, the wily former chief minister has perhaps done the smart and politically correct thing by distancing himself from his son and his conversion by disowning him from the family.

But jokes apart, the story of Chander Mohan, the eldest son of former Haryana Chief Minister, Bhajan Lal is worth recounting for a reason. Chander Mohan was already married and had two children when he got to know a lady by the name of Anuradha Bali, a former Deputy Advocate General in Punjab. After an acquaintance of about five years, they landed up at a TV station on December 7th to announce that they had both converted to Islam and had subsequently got married according to Islamic law. Chander Mohan had become Chand Muhammad and Anuradha Bali had become Mrs. Fiza.

The story of Chand Muhammad and Fiza who have developed faith in Allah in rather odd circumstances explain the more common and earthy reasons for conversion that most people have…..the inducements and enticements are there for all to see and examine….. reasons that are beyond control and regulation by any Freedom of Religion Act enacted any where in the country.

If only we would get politics out of the way, we would soon recognize that just as few conversions are for spiritual reasons, few are also at the other extreme for crass political reasons. There was of course a time when all or most conversions happened because of purely pious reasons. There was also a time when a lot of conversions happened because of purely political reasons – possibly in the middle ages. But today the reasons for an apparent change in one’s faith and belief are far simpler and therefore paradoxically more complex to interpret. The journey from Mohan to Muhammad has got shorter; even more brazen but not much simpler to understand.

The sad thing about conversions today is that the individual story behind each conversion – with all its motives, drama, pain, anguish as well as ecstasy are completely concealed. It is presented as a conspiracy full of social and political intrigue, funded exclusively by American dollars or Middle Eastern petro dollars. Well this is not to say that these kind of monetary incentives and tools do not exist or have no influence at all. But in every conversion of every individual, genuine or not, driven by love of lucre or not, caused by inducement or fraud or not, there is a human element, which is no longer considered of any value; for we are so busy chasing the foreign hand – or is it the hidden hand?

Whether the reasons for a conversion are the most sublime or the crassest, it is, was and will bean individual phenomena. Whether it is to gain a new wife, a new job or a new identity, who is to define an inducement? And for those interested, we can now follow the faith journey of Fiza and Chand Muhammad to observe if they become the new pillars of Islamic piety.

Ayodha, Dec 6th

I was in Mathura on the 6th of December, 1992 when I heard the news of the Babri Masjid was being demolished and the first thought was if there would be rioting and firing and all these disturbances that they are usually associated. After all the Krishna Janma Bhumi was next on the list of shrines to be recovered.

Sixteen years have passed by since that day. Days then were not marked as 9/11 and 26/11 or else 6/12 would have been legend by now, as a day not just black marked for all the things that the day has any way come to be associated with but also as the day when a section of our own people literally took hammer and tongs and smashed a piece of our own heritage and history.

The towering Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan were also similarly destroyed in March 2001. These giant statues had been standing since about the 5th century AD and had withstood ravages of time and invasions through the centuries. Then one fine morning, the Taliban leadership decided that these images were not in consonance with the spirit of Islam and off they went. The way Khaleid Husseini describes the statues in his book The Kite Runner where he talks about how he went picnicking there as a child with his father and then the giant vacuum in the hillside that appeared when he read on the news that the statues had been demolished.

This post is not about fundamentalism or terrorism or communal divides or any thing like that which it could be. It is simply about the way in which we view our history and culture and the way we seem to presume that with a few blows of the hammer, we can shape or alter our history and our legacy. No one knows conclusively as to who really had constructed the mosque – Babur or his commander or any one else, but does it matter? Just as no one knows the exact spot where Ram was born or Krishna was born but do they matter, they are venerated any way, so the mosque that was destroyed on the 6th of December was part of our past.

Similar thoughts could be said of the attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. May be those involved were foreign nationals or not , the picture is still muddled on that point but the fact here is that when the Taj Mahal Hotel was built in 906, there was of course only one country – India. The hotel – a potent, very visible symbol of Indian nationalistic pride and entrepreneurship, was once considered the finest hotel in Asia and was the first building to be electrified in the country. The damage to the building s, antiques, library and other memorabilia are still being assessed but it is safe enough to say that though the hotel may be repaired and reconstructed, there is no question of restoring it to its former glory.

India has no shortage of history and historical monuments. Every day, in some corner of the country some monument, some artifact is being damaged, destroyed, or encroached up on, because we have neither the money, nor it would seem the historical consciousness, to preserve and keep them to bequeath them to a future generation.

But December the 6th is a day to weep as the day when some of our own people decided that the unpalatable parts of our history – where we have lost sovereignty, lost political power and been subjugated –and all the monuments and symbols associated with them do not deserve a life ; they deserve to be physically annihilated. On the 6th of December in Ayodha, a bunch of Hindus destroyed a Muslim monument. In March 2001, a bunch of Muslims having learnt their lesson well it would seem from Ayodha, blew up the Bamian Buddhas. May be there was a direct connection between the two- may be there was not. But on both occasions, an immense piece of our heritage was lost and like Humpty Dumpty, all the world’s efforts and archaeologists can never ever bring them back to life again.

Bhopal, Dec 3rd

Rachel Carlason wrote her epic book called “Silent Spring” in 1962. The book exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity’s faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement. It is reckoned that Silent Spring was to the environmental movement, what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to slavery or “To Kill a Mockingbird” was to racial discrimination.

In rural communities where household food security is always an issue, increasing the productivity of the land has always been an issue. The Green revolution of the late sixties and seventies ushered in an era where India became able to feed its own people after centuries of famine and deprivation. In the immediate post independence era, India depended so heavily on PL 480 food imports from the United States that it was often termed a “ship to mouth “ existence as food grains were freighted out barely after the ships had docked. The Green Revolution changed all that … for a time.

In the West, where food security hasn’t been an issue in large measure since the Irish potato famines of the 19th century, the emergence of the environmental lobby did not create any immediate difficulties; perhaps was even welcome. But in india, barely having overcome food shortages a decade ago and still living off he Public Distribution System – (ill the early nineties, the ration card was the unique identity document of Indians – not the PAN card or the voter ID), an inevitable clash of paradigms resulted.

The agronomists (not unjustifiably) were focussed on consolidating the gains of the green revolution and busy spreading the message of hybrid seeds and the increased use of pesticides and fertilizer, coupled with lesser dependence on monsoon irrigation and increased dependence on dams and canals for irrigation. The fledgling environmental movement was saying what could be construed to be just the opposite – talking of soil degradation, the menace of pesticides, the many dangers of big dams and the human as well as the economic and environmental causes involved.

Then Bhopal happened – on Dec 3rd 1984, when leaks from a pesticide plant in Bhopal killed many thousands …. 3000 immediately according to Wikipedia followed by many more in the months and years to come. Shortly thereafter in 1986, the Chernobyl, nuclear plant disaster happened and environmental concerns became big ticket.

Bhopal was a seminal event not just because it signalled the beginning of the time when environmental concerns began to be taken seriously but also because it was with the agitation to demand compensation from the owners of the pesticide plant –Union Carbide, that militant NGO activism became known. Hitherto, NGO activism did happen, but it was more of the peaceable, some what docile Gandhian variety. It was the many activists who came together around Bhopal who provided NGO work, till now part volunteerism and philanthropic and part academic, an edge that was if not quite violent, certainly very confrontational with the State. It would be many of these very same groups, that would later form the core of the anti globalization movement.

Many of the issues associated with the Bhopal gas leakage tragedy have never been resolved, and never will be. India has had many more tragedies; questionably more complex, if not bigger. Even many of the doctrinal issues will remain unresolved. Have the agricultural scientists with their obsession with high yields and more crops won? Or have the environmentalists with their own fad for all things organic – suicidal fad agronomists will say; for India is now a billion plus and with land under agricultural yielding place to airports, houses and malls, increasing productivity is about the only way out. These issues will continue to debate in the foreseeable future till one or the other lobby decisively wins; and that is unlikely to be any time soon. And till that happens, Bhopal will continue to be invoked. In that sense, Bhopal is yesterday’s story. It is also tomorrow’s.

Bhopal, Dec 3rd .......

Rachel Spring wrote her epic book called “Silent Spring” in 1962. The book exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity’s faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement. It is reckoned that Silent Spring was to the environmental movement, what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to slavery or “To Kill a Mockingbird” was to racial discrimination.

In rural communities where household food security is always an issue, increasing the productivity of the land has always been an issue. The Green revolution of the late sixties and seventies ushered in an era where India became able to feed its own people after centuries of famine and deprivation. In the immediate post independence era, India depended so heavily on PL 480 food imports from the United States that it was often termed a “ship to mouth “ existence as food grains were freighted out barely after the ships had docked. The Green Revolution changed all that … for a time.

In the West, where food security hasn’t been an issue in large measure since the Irish potato famines of the 19th century, the emergence of the environmental lobby did not create any immediate difficulties; perhaps was even welcome. But in india, barely having overcome food shortages a decade ago and still living off he Public Distribution System – (ill the early nineties, the ration card was the unique identity document of Indians – not the PAN card or the voter ID), an inevitable clash of paradigms resulted.

The agronomists (not unjustifiably) were focussed on consolidating the gains of the green revolution and busy spreading the message of hybrid seeds and the increased use of pesticides and fertilizer, coupled with lesser dependence on monsoon irrigation and increased dependence on dams and canals for irrigation. The fledgling environmental movement was saying what could be construed to be just the opposite – talking of soil degradation, the menace of pesticides, the many dangers of big dams and the human as well as the economic and environmental causes involved.

Then Bhopal happened – on Dec 3rd 1984, when leaks from a pesticide plant in Bhopal killed many thousands …. 3000 immediately according to Wikipedia followed by many more in the months and years to come. Shortly thereafter in 1986, the Chernobyl, nuclear plant disaster happened and environmental concerns became big ticket.

Bhopal was a seminal event not just because it signalled the beginning of the time when environmental concerns began to be taken seriously but also because it was with the agitation to demand compensation from the owners of the pesticide plant –Union Carbide, that militant NGO activism became known. Hitherto, NGO activism did happen, but it was more of the peaceable, some what docile Gandhian variety. It was the many activists who came together around Bhopal who provided NGO work, till now part volunteerism and philanthropic and part academic, an edge that was if not quite violent, certainly very confrontational with the State. It would be many of these very same groups, that would later form the core of the anti globalization movement.

Many of the issues associated with the Bhopal gas leakage tragedy have never been resolved, and never will be. India has had many more tragedies; questionably more complex, if not bigger. Even many of the doctrinal issues will remain unresolved. Have the agricultural scientists with their obsession with high yields and more crops won? Or have the environmentalists with their own fad for all things organic – suicidal fad agronomists will say; for India is now a billion plus and with land under agricultural yielding place to airports, houses and malls, increasing productivity is about the only way out. These issues will continue to debate in the foreseeable future till one or the other lobby decisively wins; and that is unlikely to be any time soon. And till that happens, Bhopal will continue to be invoked. In that sense, Bhopal is yesterday’s story. It is also tomorrow’s.

Sounds of Silence

One of the things that stand out a bit starkly is the relative silence of the minority groups in condemning the recent anarchy in Mumbai. This is not to say that Muslim and Christian or other minority groups have stayed silent necessarily, but if they did speak up and condemn all that happened, the voices were perhaps not that loud enough.

By not speaking out at moments of national mourning and grief – if mourning is the word, they run the risk of marginalisation and being labeled as sectarian – which of course some but not all are. While being concerned about the fate and welfare of your own people is important, it is unhealthy if that happens or appears to happen at the expense of a larger concern and identification with one’s fellow human beings and citizens.

After all, terror is no respecter of faith or ethnicity or any of the recognised markers of identity – at last count 44 Muslims were killed and 35 injured in last week’s Mumbai blasts. Of course this piece isn’t about Muslims alone; it is merely a handy example from a context where all leads uncovered so far are leading to people who claim to be acting inspired by that particular faith and that of course is unfortunate.

Should minorities be in particular being asked to proclaim their solidarity by being loud and vocal? Is that a healthy thing to ask for or expect? Probably not. But perhaps eminently desirable; partly because the voices that were decrying the events at Kandmahal and Batla House were loud and vociferous and suddenly when those voices become quiet in the face of an equally colossal tragedy, if not more, the silence looks deafening.

But this is not about Mumbai and how to react to that either. It is merely to amplify the human identity that we fundamentally share and pay lip service to and ever so often love to forget

t is merely to amplify the human identity that we fundamentally share and pay lip service to and ever so often love to forget.

And so Hindus who speak up only when Hindu terrorist groupings are unearthed and seek to justify them as cultural terrorists count. So do Christian leaders who lament only when one of their flocks is in trouble in Orissa or else where. As do militants from the North East who find a common religious faith not good enough and called Bandhs at the slightest perceived slights to their ethnic (and only their) ethnic pride. Silence is also cruel when North Indians react only when one of their own is lynched or killed. And of course it is cruel when Maharasthrians only worry about their own home grown Marathi manoos.

Is it wrong to care about your own and air your own slights? No, of course not. Especially when it is a matter of minorities, in insensitive times, if you don’t care about your own, may be no one will. But there is a problem if we all suddenly start retreating into our fortresses and peep out of the ramparts looking out through our spy glasses for just our own kind. For then, we have to conclude that we are not just short sighted but truly blind!

Proud to be Indian....

Airtel has a new jingle. “Proud to be Indian”is the by line … followed a little later by the fine print …” Proud by Bharati”. The advert sounded good to hear till the other day. But now it kind of jars in the ear. Not that I am not proud to be an Indian any more- make no mistake, I still am but there is some thing of an embarrassment that is pricking me since the Mumbai incidents of the last few days.

The jingle talks about harnessing the power of a billion people but some times it looks like a fitting illustration of the Biblical “Sheep without a shepherd”. Actually at last count, we were 1.2 billion people and growing but it would seem that all those numbers don’t count for much. If people and we are not talking of straying fishermen clad in a loin cloth here; but people with the most evil of intentions setting sail in a boat or a ship, landing casually on the coast and then spreading themselves across the city and spread mayhem.

Law abiding citizens face a million harassments every day and they have learnt to take it all in their stride. Be it a family outing with a movie in the multiplex, or a shopping trip to the mall or boarding a flight in the airport , you need to be prepared to be frisked, empty out your luggage, not carry this or not carry that and be subjected to a hundred inconveniences every day. And people have got used to it over time. And yet any blooming terrorist – doesn’t matter what their ideology is or from where what accent they speak Hindustani in, can just saunter across without as much as a by your leave…. And no body stops them, forget about stopping them… no one even notices that they are there.

We make a lot of noise about illegal Bangladeshi migrants in the country. This is not to say that they should be condoned or nothing ought to be done about them. But what comparison is a large bunch of illiterate and unskilled refuges from Bangladesh or else where who are here because they would be starving in their home land or may be even executed or imprisoned in their home land – like say refugees from Myanmar compared to the bunch of ideologically committed killers. People from the poorer neighbors who are making a living cleaning our toilets or washing our dishes are hounded out like cattle and deported while those who kill and murder our people and vandalize our heritage – (those who do not know the history of how the Taj Mahal Hotel came to be built ought to read that up in Wikipedia) can simply saunter into our coast as if on a cruise and try to wipe it off the map.

Of course there are elements to be proud of in all this and the press and television channels have done the right thing by paying tribute to the many unsung heroes of Mumbai. But the irony is that the real irony is that the real heroes will remain unsung – after the Last Post has resonated out and the mourning and funerals are over, the unsung will be required to retreat into their conventional silence. And those people we really need to be proud of, the ones who don’t give press conferences; whom television channels don’t interview will once again disappear into the proud woodwork. Proud to be Indian – yes; proud to be Bharatiya, yes – but proud of the right people —- like the memorial to the Unknown Soldier; we need a way to honor the unknown citizens of all hues – the ones who really make us proud to be an Indian