Agri Bill 2020

 September 21, 2020

I’ve been pre-occupied by the events around the Agri Bill(s) 2020. I’ve watched as two of them have been pushed through parliament in a very undemocratic manner and become a law. Modi called it an historic moment for farmers but he seems to be blind to the fact that farmers have been agitating against the bill. He seems increasingly deaf to critical voices. 

 

I spent the morning watching a few recorded debates around the events, and listening to voices from different sides. I read a few articles to understand the reason for fear and to hear what the government was asserting. It claims these will give more control to farmers as it allows them to sell their produce to private parties. The BJP says that the only reason farmers are on the streets is that opposition has spread misinformation—one of their favourite responses to almost everything. Most agree that the old farmers market system needed reform but say that this is no reform. It is a move to bring corporates into the picture, corporates with clout and money, corporates who can afford small losses in the short term to create a monopoly in the long. One person opposing it even said that if Minimum Support Price to farmers was guaranteed in any one of the proposed bills/laws and not just promised by tweet or letter, then it would not oppose the bill. But MSP has not been included. Why?

 

Instead, in quick moves the bills have been pushed through both houses of parliament. In the Lok Sabha the move even caused an ally of the BJP to resign from cabinet. In the Rajya Sabha where the opposition claimed that the BJP did not have the numbers no division of vote was allowed by the deputy chairman even though it is a parliamentary rule that it must be allowed if even one member asks for it. Some asked for the Bill to be sent to a select committee but instead the bill was passed through with a voice vote. The opposition erupted in anger and as usual the BJP turned the tables and labelled them unruly instead of explaining why democratic parliamentary procedures were not followed. Today a few members of opposition were suspended because of their behaviour. What about action against the breaking of rules by the ruling party?

 

Another deep gash in democracy. 

 

What indeed was the urgency to railroad this through in such times? Why was it not sent to a select committee for scrutiny and debate? Why were stakeholders, farmer particularly, not consulted? 

 

Food and water the most basic of necessities in the hands of corporates. Shudder. Not water yet—though I remember when there was a move towards privatising water in Mumbai many years ago.

 

I thought of the privatisation of railways that Modi is moving towards. Of course it is described as liberalisation, to allow new parties to enter and thus encourage growth and better services. Same argument. Same probable outcome—of uncontrolled pricing, with the ultimate sufferer the common citizen being served up to corporate mercy. 

 

For some reason Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower came to mind. Here the world has collapsed due to climate change, wealth inequality and corporate greed. The poor are nothing more than slaves to the whim of the corporates. They own nothing, instead have growing debts to pay back which even their grandchildren won’t be able to clear. How far are we from this dystopia? One, two, three generations away? Closer? 

 

I wrote to my friend – the one who is on the other bank of the hope river—she hopes, I see the hopelessness. But together we have often found a meeting ground where our perspectives have helped us do good work in communities. Because of covid I can’t see her or work with her right now, but she wrote back promptly, saying the email was timely as she was preparing to be on a panel and my email made her more whole. She too was feeling despondent wondering where these moves would leave us citizens. 

 

No answers. We do need a stronger and more coherent political opposition. What else? Just asking the questions yet.

 

I’m running out of notebooks. I should just save paper and trees, and move to writing everything on my laptop or ipad. 

A Bit About Friendship

 September 18, 2020

 

I am struggling to find that balance between routine and free-wheeling—mostly in things relating to writing and thinking—and reach the place where thoughts begin to flow creatively and move deeply into the heart of issues. Too much structure and I go blank and without any my mind becomes lethargic. I know that spot of euphoria though when they are just right. I have felt it in when I learnt music, when facilitating a group or counselling an individual, while training, or just being. 

 

Mostly right now I have erred on the side of being too lax and feel my mind settling into a torpor. Yet I hesitate to make any commitments of constancy or structure, but I know I need some internal discipline. I don’t like the current dullness. I almost feel like I have forgotten how to think.

 

I googled ‘how does one think’ and this is one of the things that popped up -- Thinking includes reasoning, reflecting, pondering, judging, analyzing and evaluating an idea or decision. It's using your mind in a creative, effective manner. Thinking tends to be productive, goal-oriented, action-oriented.

 

There are things I want to reflect on, analyse, ponder, decide. I’d like to delve more deeply into strained relationship with my friend. I’d like to gather my thoughts on the escalating India-China border conflict in Ladakh. I want to evaluate my handling of a situation involving infraction of rules around covid behaviour. I have a decision to make about a writing program. And there are more issues that wander in and out of my awareness that I make small dents into understanding more of, but I don’t pick one to dive into. Pick one then. Pick just one.

 

After the last chat with my friend I was left with questions about the limits of our friendship. I care about him deeply and would help him if he ever needed anything. But I feel like I can get close up to a certain place and no further. Each time we even reach this place, I feel like my friend needs a timeout. It’s happened twice before this and each time I have felt shut out quite forcefully. Felt I wasn't good enough the way I was. What our close ones think about us means so much. The first time I felt devastated, my self-esteem plummeted, and we took almost 18 months to reconnect. The second time it happened—I had sensed it coming and it hurt less but at that point I was weary of the pattern and didn’t want more, and I shut the door too. Yet I couldn’t let his birthday go by without wishing him and eight months later we resumed the friendship without analysing what had happened. Perhaps we should have. 

 

This time we are still talking and I want to ponder a bit more. I seem to accept the shape and size of this friendship. I don’t need it, but I enjoy it and look forward to time together. I trust it and don’t trust it, or something in it. My friend is trustworthy in the sense that confidences will not be betrayed but I don’t feel anymore that he will be there through all my heavy shadow times. Yet there is no anger or resentment as it feels like his ‘nature’ does not allow it. I used to think at one time that a friend was not a true friend if they weren’t there through dark times but age and experience has shifted that. I trust my sister and would not abandon her if she couldn’t handle my gloom. I would feel sad but would accept her the way she is. Why should I demand more from a friend?

 

Yet I feel it does limit our relationship. There are things I would never talk to my sister about. We choose friends for different reasons and this one was one I thought I could be myself totally with. But at some point he said I couldn't. I could if I was jolly but not if I was low. It feels like the friendship that began as a desired connection, grew with shared intimacies, has now has shrunk with ‘rules’ of engagement being defined. Feels like a poem with a sad ending, a flower that has begun to wilt. 

 

How do we handle things when I am feeling ‘negative’ and he wants to be positive? Do we walk away or does one of us not be who we need to be? I need to find a way out of the pattern, together, or by changing my internal self.

 

Overthinking it? What I googled about thinking went on to say — Obsessing, in contrast, is having your mind excessively focused on a single emotion or event. Time to shift gears, but this writing has given me thoughts and questions that might help us have a productive communication the next time we chat. No answers yet. Maybe one day we will grow into the answer but for now all I can do is keep asking the questions. 

Notebooks

September 16, 2020

 

I keep four different notebooks. They are all Muji unlined spiral books of different sizes. I mostly prefer the beige covers for my personal journal, so I can draw on them if I want, and black for the other stuff. I like B5 notebooks, but some things just go into A5, don’t they? For long I have wanted to reduce the number of notebooks and bring them together in just one—the ONE book I see in films that deep inspiring people put all their thoughts into—but something resists this move and I continue on with four.

 

One of my books is my personal journal. It has dreams, the not quite morning pages, the reflections on puzzling behaviours and interactions from the previous day, emotions—the shame, the guilt, the anger I feel about something or someone—my desires, rough daily schedules, reminders etc. 

 

The second is the place I write about thoughts on political events I feel strongly about, books I read, and research about both and other things that catch my mind. Bits of fiction, plots and characters mostly, that emerge from these thoughts and curiosities. It also contains memories from my past—a compost heap of sorts to use Natalie Goldberg’s term. 

 

The third book I use for courses I do, writing exercises and similar explorations.  

 

The last I use to write thoughts about the novel in progress. This one had not been opened for a while. 

 

I also have a very tiny diary to record appointments and a karate book where I make notes of learning—mostly techniques but sometimes wisdom, and a sketch book. The list grows. I thought I was the only crazy that had so many different notebooks but a friend, with whom I share stationery videos, had once sent me a video about a girl who has eleven different journals. Many were different types of bullet journals or scrap books. 

 

Something about having these different books makes sense though I cannot explain why, not really. Maybe they are like subject notebooks at school and one cannot write history notes in a geography or math book. Or maybe it is easier to find something I want when I have to look only in the relevant notebook. But they all contain knowledge and musings and the thought that I shouldn’t compartmentalize or fragment myself in so many journals also vexes me. Already things in the journal one and two overlap.

 

Like today I wrote in my personal journal (because it lies on my bedside table and I was too lazy to get to journal #2) about some socio-political stuff that arose from watching the coverage of a supreme court case against Sudarshan TV’s ‘hate’ programs and the larger questions around free press and government that rose from this – particularly how media regulation might work or not, and about having transparency of stakeholders and advertisers in media houses, as well as about where government spends tax payers money on advertisement. What further tickled my thoughts while watching another program on the same issue was how the head of one media house who would be labelled (pseudo)liberal talked about which news channels he watches and an article a friend had sent me about the gap between liberal values, which often are equated as elite values, and populism. I also wrote about an interaction with my sister around her interaction with the secretary of their landlord. How he huffed and puffed and evaded her calls and wouldn’t give her answers—basically how people connected to powerful people use that connection to bully others. This led to some memories from childhood of being a tomboy and why, and remembering others who were tomboys and wondering what their motivations were, and wondering where on the gender spectrum we feel ourselves to be now. 

 

I found a novel on my bookshelves that I need to read next—The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It is about a woman writer who keeps four different coloured notebooks, holding different aspects of her thought, and at a moment of crisis attempts to bring them together into one golden notebook. 

 

Hoping it will illuminate why I keep so many too. This rambling post about nothing meaningful has been very useful in a way I don’t yet know. I have been resisting the commitment to write a daily blog and perhaps I will commit or perhaps I won’t. 

Denying feeling and sensory states

 September 14, 2020

 

I spent a considerable amount of time last week denying how badly the vertigo that hit me Wednesday was debilitating me. It was bad enough that August, where I had been caught up with handling bank stuff in Bombay, had felt so unproductive. I wanted, I needed to feel it was behind me and that I could move forward. 

 

And in a small way I had done that. The circular days of August had given way to the zigzag of October. Not quite forward movement but a zagging towards making some choices about the next months, actually finishing reading a book of short stories, thinking of changing my days to include outings -- bus rides and leisurely teas -- where I could soak in some sensory inputs from the outsides and dream into the lives of the girls having an animated conversation on the table next me, or translate a conflict from my own life into a tale others might identify with. 

 

But then the sinus flared up and soon full-blown vertigo descended on my head, spinning me, spinning me round and round, and I couldn’t bear it. Not after the August I had just lived through. I needed stable grounding and a mind that could focus. So, I tried desperately to just close my eyes and imagine it gone. I even forced myself to write a vapid blog post on Friday that I cringe when I look at today.

 

I had a conversation with a friend this weekend. It had a familiar ring to it, at least part of it did. He had become aware of how he was losing his positivity and how that made him cynical. He wanted it back as he identified more with the parts of him that felt life was a precious gift. I listened to him explain his process, the videos he had watched or the passages he had read that helped him find his way back to positivity. After, I tried to share my own states and struggles but found a door closing each time. So, when he said he would read something from a book to me I said nope. I said I felt he wasn’t listening to me, that he wasn’t interested in what I had been up to over the two weeks we hadn’t been in touch. He admitted it was true. He felt my despair about what was going on in India was too heavy for him, it pulled him back, away from the positive, and he didn’t want to hear it. He said though he felt sad about how bad things were he also knew that there was nothing he could do to help and so wanted to shut it out. I said when he shut the door on that about me, I shut more of myself from him and withdrew. I said though I didn’t quite believe in his ways of coping, or his belief systems I was interested in his authentic search for himself through them. I needed to feel he was interested in me. 

 

Of course, the conversation got very real and things shifted, and we spoke and heard at a different level. This was an old conflict between us, one that had created much distance between us before. I think perhaps we handled it differently this time, but I also wonder what it means about the friendship. It feels it limits it when one person cannot bear to share the burdens the other is feeling. I don’t know where things will go after. 

 

But beyond the relationship questions, I also wonder about how one gets back one’s positivity? It feels too forced to me. But perhaps I don’t understand it so stuck I am on my side of this river – believing that negative and positive are both part of the whole and forsaking one would diminish life and just make me feel worse. If I am despairing or in pain that is where I am. 

 

I mean trying to deny the unpleasant spinning of vertigo in the hope that it would go away didn’t work for me – it just made me more miserable. Perhaps it’s not a good analogy. Vertigo is largely an out of control process while choosing to be positive is in one’s control. I don’t really know why I value sadness or heaviness, but I feel that allowing it to exist is what helps me deepen my soul and be compassionate to others. I wonder sometimes why my friend does not feel that as I suppose he wonders why I choose not to be more positive. 

 

Today I am accepting that I will not be productive or creative or even useful practically till the vertigo passes. There is anxiety about when that might be but also curiosity about what happens. 

Random thoughts

 September 11, 2020

 

I still remember being on this date in 2001. I had been feeling uneasy for a few days – like something catastrophic was about to happen. I was lying on my bed and reading, when a friend texted me and told me to put on the TV. I watched the twin towers shatter like they were made of fragile glass. The world changed — I still remember the ways in which it changed — it felt very crazy for many, many months, but not as much as it feels this year.

 

There is different crazy everywhere. Here in Singy the covid numbers are now only in double digits per day and yet we live under restrictions. Some people still talk and behave as if covid is a huge threat here. Many are convinced that these restrictions will continue into the next year.  It feels weird — especially when I contrast it with India where numbers are growing speedily, and still people seem to be wandering around – and sometimes crowding together too. Where there is little talk of covid on media channels or by government officials, creating a sense that covid is a thing of the past. The minor (compared to the crash in GDP, the inadequate healthcare and growing unemployment) problems of Bollywood stars are blasting through most channels all day. And the out of touch with reality PM is saying that the aspirations of 1.35 Indians are throbbingly alive and all is well in control in India. Some of us watch and say, ‘Hey, did he just say that?’ While others, many more others, cheer and say ‘Great job Modiji.’Then there are the forest fires in California but in places like Europe people are travelling to other European countries and making social media updates about their travels. It feels so strange — as if those parts are moving on while some of us are stuck in morass.

 

Most times I am aware of things pulling me in several different directions which makes it hard to focus on any one thing. Except karate, which continues to soothe, to make happy, to ground momentarily. As does reading. I just read a short story, by Tessa Hadley, where a girl coping with grief of multiple losses wraps a blanket around her body and loses herself in books whenever she can. I am aware though that what I read and loved in the first week of 2020 no longer interests me now. And if we are what we read, as many book clubs I belong to say, then I suppose I don’t know who I am since most times I am so uncertain about what I want to read, but it is definitely not what I wanted to read last year. It shouldn’t surprise me that I am not the same person that I was before covid became the threat it is. My life isn’t that deeply changed by covid, so why should I be changed, I say to myself. But then the world has changed completely, and I live in the world almost completely. 

 

It is true that karate and reading feel good, but both are addictions that take me away from something uncomfortable writhing within that I can’t yet touch and name. I feel a need to stop soothing myself using these and focus on the queasy feelings inside which seem to be blocking some vital connection to both the outside and inside. Or maybe the connection is so strong, or it may simply be that I devour all news about the issues people are facing in the world, that everything uneasy in the world finds its way into me, and this overload is best solved by the process of detachment that reading and karate give me.

 

I wonder how others are in this bog of covid? Fatigued and beaten down, or hopeful and still seeing it all as way to slow down, and get rid of the unnecessary from their lives? I remember how I had felt in March and April, that my life was slow enough and I had already pruned it to the basics, and rather than listening more to my true voice the noise in my head became crazier – like all the non-essential rubbish from the deep recesses of everywhere had chosen to invade my mind.  

 

But I do want to prune down further. I want to clear out things – books, which I normally would take down to the library and leave on the shelves where others could browse through and take home if they wanted. But those shelves have been taped off because of covid, so that process will have to wait. I put on the same clothes again and again hoping that they will wear down so I can have more empty space in my wardrobe. I’d even love to cut down my precious stationery, though I don’t know what and how. 

 

I read a report from BBC which says that poorer nations and poorer people are affected more by covid then their richer counterparts. Coloured folks and women more than white men. But this isn’t surprising. Is there a catastrophe that can undo the inequalities and affect the rich more? Or will the world have to be destroyed and re-started from scratch for that to happen. A failed experiment – pour it all out and try again.