Art and Propoganda

Last evening I saw a play on an issue I feel rather passionately about - violence against women. When asked after the play what I thought about it I sort of lost my voice. Such an important issue - so how could I say I didn't think much of the play?

This post is hard to write. It's very hard to criticise any effort to give a voice to these issues of domestic violence and the silence around them. It's hard to criticise artists who are working towards the goal of empowering women to speak their stories. But the feelings of disappointment - and 'gulp' distaste linger on and so I try to sort them out by writing.

The story is about a young Indian woman married three years who comes to her mother's home in the middle of the night after her husband beats her. The mother, a widow lives with her elder sister a single woman. The mother insists the girl should return to her husband and the aunt insists she should make a police complaint. The other two characters in the plot are the husbands sister who comes to take the battered woman back home and the friend who stands up for the rights of women. The two other ghosts in the story - men who are only talked about but don't appear on stage - are the battering abusive husband and the father who turns out to be a rapist.

I had issues with so many things about the play but I will only focus on a few:

- The biggest issue I had with the characters was that the only woman who really championed women's rights, the friend, was a white woman. She was written in almost as a saviour and I wondered are we in India still so internally colonised that we need our saviour to be white? 

- The aunt  began as a strong character who did not think much of marriage or men. But this attitude was explained by her being raped by her sister's husband. Are women only independent and single because they have had an adverse encounter like this? 

- The dialogue showed Indian women and society in a rather bad light - with dialogue like 'return to your husband because divorced women don't get invited to parties.' I am unsure what lines like that convey beyond a shallowness of the writer in approaching the complex cultural conditioning and inner conflicts of individuals in the story. The play stayed at the surface level, telling events but never exploring the depths.

- The two men mentioned in the play are a battering husband who flirts with his wifes best friend and the rapist man who gets away with it. Don't men come in shades that are more positive?

I know that art can be used as a tool to shed light on societal wrongs and correct them.  I know artists play an important role in changing the problems in cultures. Yet with art that is so heavy handed and simplistic I wonder what message finally remains with the audience. I guess that is the question that is most important to me as I grapple with my own characters. I tend to lecture on about issues I feel deeply about too, some of my dialogues when I write them feel more like an academic thesis - but that's in my first and second drafts. I do hope that by the third draft I can bring in depth and subtlety and the finished product will be more than just propaganda.

It's been a long gap between posts. I've been a bit busy and a bit lost. Perhaps emerging from the neurotic chaos that this combination creates?

to read or not to read

i haven't written much in several days now and i feel a bit cranky. probably because writing is one of the things that helps me to know who i am and what i really want at any moment. 

i have been reading a lot for my coursera course on sci-fi and fantasy. our first text is grimm's tales and i am really hating wading through heaps and heaps of them. i began with enthusiasm but soon i just started feeling ill. i wondered why such tales would be crafted? are they really stories we want to tell our children? some of the 'morals' seem disgusting. all sorts of unsavoury characters flourish, trickery is rewarded and the gender bias makes me want to hit someone. luckily my daughter tells me i did not read them to her even in their later, more sanitized forms. 

but right now i still read on - its like a madness. i have to just finish them. why, because i signed up for the course? is that reason enough to go on like this? i have been so busy and still in between things - on buses, waiting in lines - i read them in the hope of finishing them in time - before the next text is up for reading. i no longer enjoy the tales and yet i read on. all my empty spaces, my rejuvenating white spaces, are filled up  by these tales and i feel exhausted.

i am really confused. part of me wants to scream and stop the insane reading. another part of me believes that if i just push and get through and do the work set for the course i might learn something important. i might even be changed from the inside. just push on and i will find a rainbow at the end of ten weeks. 

is it a conflict between long term benefit and instant relief? but it also seems something else that i cannot yet pin down. it's something like intuitively knowing that this course of action is detrimental to me, to my real goals and yet not trusting that knowing. have i have lost touch with what i really want or maybe i am just not listening to my inner sense that is giving me a clear message that this pursuit is meaningless? it's also a tussle between outer expert knowledge and inner experience. i normally favour the latter - am i missing out?

back and forth and back and forth - if i don't read i am missing out... if i read i am not getting on with my own writing... but this might be a chance to deepen my writing... or i might just feel at the end of ten weeks that i wasted yet another few months... 

tied up in knots. unsure of how it will resolve. thoughts welcome :)

delhi gang rape sentence

I just read another article on the Delhi gang rape sentence. This one titled 'Delhi gang rape death sentence won't make India safer for women', by Monisha Rajesh. Of all the articles on similar themes that I had read this one has got to be the most patchy and badly thought through. 

What bugged me first is the title itself. It was not for rape that the death sentence was passed and it certainly was not  to appease those baying for blood. India does not yet have the death sentence for rape - I am shocked that a journalist writing on this would not even know this or wrongly represent it in the title. Secondly the title suggests that another sentence would have been better in this case or specifically that another sentence might have made India safer for women. If that is the case why not suggest the sentence and if that was not the intention of the writer then maybe the writer should have thought carefully and chosen another title.

The writer then has gone on through the article just using bits and and pieces of commonplace information that she has not even bothered to connect up well together. It feels like she has just lifted them off other articles that actually dealt more thoroughly with each issue. I am left unsure of what the writer really wants to say about the issue except be controversial? She seems to have not one original thought in the article nor really want to even rearrange other thoughts in any new way that makes one think deeply on this topic. 

But what bugged me the most is the writer seems to present it as an either/or situation. That now this awful sentence is passed the discussion will not continue. Does she mean to say that if there had been some lighter sentence then at least the conversation would continue? The Indian public is not stupid that we feel that just this sentence will make the country safer -  not one of those crying for justice ever felt that i think - and nobody is 'hushed up' by the sentence, and even when media stops 'talking' about rape many conversations continue.

Not sure how to conclude this post but this really is bad journalism at its worst - at least in my opinion. It's an issue i feel passionately about and it hurts me to see it handled this way.

What do I think about the Delhi sentence? That I cannot really say in a handful of paragraphs but I do feel that nothing less would have given some sense of justice to the victim's family especially after the  judgement given for the juvenile involved. 

friendship

what kind of a friend am i? what do i value in a friend? i am not sure, but this week i got a chance to reflect on this. i wish this post was just a list of qualities that i look for in friendship but its more complicated than that and quite hard to write.

do i fight with those closest to me more than others? do i tolerate more in them and at the same time have more expectations of them? am i always my best self in relationships and when are those times that i cannot really be authentic or kind in relationships? several questions many of us ask ourselves.

several years ago just before me and a very close friend were both on the brink of surgeries we  got into a deep conflict that created a rift between us for a very long time. i remember feeling very hurt by her and i talked of the experience to another common friend. i had forgotten that i had spoken about it at all and cannot remember what i said but i probably spoke from an angry and hurt place and my words must have been unpleasant. this week in a conversation with the friend who i had been in conflict with i learnt  that though the common friend asked her about this conflict she understood even then that i had spoken in pain and she herself did not say anything at all about me or the conflict. she was a better friend to me then than i knew how to be and she modelled to me a quality i would like to see in myself as a friend. she gave me this gift then and this week i think this memory was given to me at a time when i am in the midst of another conflict with a friend to help me perhaps be the best i can be?

i had been trying to connect with a friend all week and felt her evading it. finally when she agreed to meet me i wasn't even sure i wanted to, so hurt i was with the double signals she had given me this week and for a while before. but i wanted to ask her about it and so we met. it was hard to do but i brought it up and she said it was true and that she felt meeting me was heavy and draining and she would like to not meet me anymore. i was stunned for several reasons - but i tried to listen to her experience. she said i had been very negative for a while and while i accepted some of it as true - thinking back to this year with the loss of two loved pets, one aborted move, a feeling of being betrayed and cheated by the agent, anxiety about my daughter who was in a foreign country with a severe kidney infection, worry about my mother who suffered from several chronic pains and who was also depressed because recovery was slow and my own chronic and confusing back injury  - i also  actually knew that i been feeling a fair amount of optimism for several months. as i listened there came a point when she spoke of me being negative during a time when i knew i had been feeling the happiest i had felt in a while - i knew then that what she said was not all just about me but came partly from her own processes. but i could also see that she felt burdened by what she thought was my negativity. i walked away giving her the space from me she needed and giving myself the time to let my pain cool.

i struggled with my hurt and anger. i struggled with the worry i felt for her. i struggled with wanting to just tell her off and with holding back. i struggled with the choked feelings and memories. i struggled with her weaknesses and my own and mostly i struggled with integrating the memory of my other friend who who had understood that my actions came from pain then and i tried to act from my best self now. i really struggled with being a good friend to her as my friend had been to me those many years ago. but in the end i just walked away.

even as i thought long about the friendship and felt tears filling my eyes in the dark when i was just falling asleep. i also thought long about why now? why had i not brought this up earlier during all the time i had been feeling that something was wrong and disconnected between us.

the years events had left me drained too and i was not really myself for a while. i know that the beginning of this year had taken away from me the ability to trust my instincts and act authentically. somewhere in the end of august as i was completely drenched in an unexpected rain shower, just as i was walking back from a painful session with my physiotherapist, the day before my birthday, i felt the shock of thunder in my body. the relentless thundering of the demolition next door rattled and shook the very flesh from my bones and finally after the fall in bombay where i re-injured a back that i felt  was on it's way to healing i felt more fragile than ever. i felt pruned down to my last resources but it  also brought me to my obscured core again. and then the time with my mother, sister and some loved friends who found a way to spend time with me, during my short mostly housebound visit, revitalised the blood in my spirit veins. i came back finally able to trust my instincts and speak from them again.

i am still struggling with being a good friend. but now in half an hour i can leave for the airport and hug my daughter again. she returns today and yesterday afternoon right on time to really enjoy this week with her i finished the last scene in my second draft and sent it off to my two readers, vandana and tamara, who have given me the gift of their time, attention and feedback. i cannot enough express my gratitude. my first writing effort, my first readers. thank you both. an unexpected third reader also emerged who knows me so well and pointed to me how the book expressed parts of me. thank you monica. 

this has been one of the hardest posts i have written. perhaps because i am still in the middle of it all. i think i am a good or a bad friend depending on many factors. i think what i value in a friend is what i value in myself. i think i want to be a better person and friend. i think this year of the snake has peeled off yet another layer of my skin.

loss

i should really be finishing up the last scenes on the second draft of my novel. i might have said this before - this second draft probably is more like what an experienced writers first one would be. but thats ok. we all have to start someplace. and my two readers have given me amazing feedback which i hope i can integrate and have a much better third draft. i have a goal of finishing this draft before shibble arrives on sunday and with only 8 scenes to go i can see that happening. and once she comes there is much work to do together on a goal be both share.

but on this windy, thundery day i cannot really focus on that. so i am dropping out of my schedule and taking time to stare. the grey sky i see through the rain-spotted window pane suits me today. it allows my pensive mood in a way a sunny day would not. I am sad. we in our iogkf singapore dojo said farewell to our sensei last evening. 

i met sensei five years ago when i moved here. in the beginning the only constant and structure in my life here was the dojo. my growth path in karate was shaped a lot by the two sensei's in this singy dojo. it is a big loss. 

loss sweeps in change, sometimes before we are ready for it. it is a time to really gather the self, face those fears and insecurities and hopefully take a leap into the future. we have an amazing group of students committed in different ways to learning goju. there are many resources within the group to tap into. i am excited to see what will develop. but sometimes i also get nervous.

i guess for me it is time to step more fully into my authentic self. i am who i am and if i have the courage to just be with all my weaknesses and gaps in knowledge - i must trust that things around me will fall into place. the fears themselves will become a reason to dig deeper and find my own way through. the supports i need will manifest. the inner growth will continue and what i have learnt, about karate and about life, will form within me and will find a way to express itself and be useful to others. 

ultimately each step takes me to the naked core. the me without masks. i feel like standing open armed,  under the falling rain and inviting in new life.