Let Me Know

I have spent most of my time in the last month and a half obsessed by one phrase so much that when people use it in conversation, my ears perk, as though I were a labrador: Let Me Know. Confession: I typed that and was about to type the url in the bracket right away, with “Breaking the Information Barrier” after a colon. Anyway, so you know, it’s www.letmeknow.in 

Let Me Know is a youth-driven social enterprise that puts people in touch with opportunities. As Nitin Rao, who founded the organization says, we all miss out on too many opportunities, simply because we didn’t hear of them. Incredible. Is what I thought when I first heard this. The excitement must have been infectious because in two minutes – or what seems like it – later, I was blogging for the organization, which was run as a blog all last year. What I was doing essentially was helping ensure that the next Sneha didn’t have to take the circuitous route I took to finding out how to explore her interests.

Let me describe that in all detail. Sneha (aka, moi) was into development, and had no idea what to do about it, coming as she did, from a family where she was the only non-medic; and from a college that was as baffled by this History major’s interest in development studies, as she was. So, she started a paper on Reservation Policy that ran much longer than it was supposed to. But the good thing was she happened upon an article by a man named Parth Shah. Parth, the article told her, was associated with the Centre for Civil Society. Interesting, she thought. So she checked it out. And guess what, they had seminars all over the country. One in Chennai two months from then. She applied. And so, one year before she sat down to write this article, she decided to take the chance, when she got the acceptance letter and much as people asked, “Are you even sure this is legitimate? I mean none of us has heard of it.” she went. But that’s all in the dark ages. Now all she’d have to do is check out Let Me Know

‘Nuff said, really. Let Me Know thrives on the fact that it’s such a straightforward idea. After resounding success in the last year, we launched on December 7, 2008 as a full-fledged youth portal, on the incredible site designed by Grayscale, a team from BITS Goa. 

What has Let Me Know given me? Hmm… let’s see, I found out about StartingBloc, an incredible Fellowship programme from the website, decided to attend it, and started Sa, my feminist webzine after I returned. Two, I got to fulfill a secret ambition of being a publicist (!), and three: remember the paper on Reservation Policy that started it all? It’s been accepted for presentation at an international conference that I could not have heard of, if I hadn’t seen it on Let Me Know. 

Go, check out Let Me Know, and do me a favour: let me know what you thought of it. 

Merry Christmas!!

I love you; I love you not.

I’m back. Barring the fact that it sounds eerily like a sequel to a horror movie, I’m back in more ways than one- back on my personal blog after ages and back in Cuddalore, or as I liked to call it for most of my life, the dingy old place.

The town of Cuddalore has been to me, both the Tower of Rapunzel and the Provincial town that Beauty longed to leave in the years before she met the Beast. But then it’s also been Pocahontas’ Virginia before Radcliffe and his men came and well, considering all the dig, dig, dig, digeddy dig going on, well, it just could be. Incidentally, with the number of ditches they’ve been building in the name of cable lines and storm drains in Cuddalore, my Dad is wondering whether we need to rename the town, “Thirusaakadaiur” (the town of the revered ditches).

The storm drains don’t work. I have proof in the many times I’ve had to wade my way to school and through it. Having a nice Daddy who drove me helped quite a bit, but not everyone has a car and I’ve seen children wade through the slush that is the very un-delectable mixture of ditchwater, human and animal waste and road dirt. Now, especially considering the number of ramp like structures that the Cuddalore municipality has seen fit to build in the middle of roads to apparently – yes again here it comes – accommodate storm drains – I don’t doubt that the storms are indeed going to drain, into the homes of people and onto the roads, filling them with the waste that we wade through.

The ditches of Cuddalore also bring back other memories – memories that are not so gross, but nevertheless not pretty. I played Tennis at the Cosmopolitan Club in Cuddalore and we had a ditch right outside the courts. So you can imagine what happened when a bunch of seven and eight year olds played tennis just across the wall. Our balls often smelt of the ditch and high and mighty as some of us girls were, we wouldn’t touch them. The dirty balls were for boys to play with. After all they were the ones who didn’t hit them as they were told, and anyway, they were made of  “frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails” as a colonial rhyme had taught us.

Colonial. That’s another word that fits with Cuddalore very well. I once described my home as being rosewood downstairs and wrought iron upstairs. Colonial downstairs, 21^st century upstairs. That just about describes Cuddalore. We hide our modernity well, so well, we sometimes forget it exists. For instance, people still run to open the gates for the people they work for, they treat you like royalty if you employ them, embarrassing you to no end sometimes, especially if you aren’t used to it. But that’s how the town works. That ‘s the Zeitgeist.

Cuddalore is a town full of convents and churches. I myself went to one for twelve years of my life. The nuns become family counsellors and sometimes misplaced marriage counsellors and sex educators besides playing their real role holding up the religiosity of the town and educating it. They could also be best friend to a somewhat lonely but hyperactive and very dyscalculic child, as it happened with me and Sister Joseph, who remains, though she was older than my grandparents and now with her God, I think, the best friend I have ever had – someone I could rely on for comfort and love, and lots of punctuation education, which sadly, I never learned, as my bad punctuation should tell you all. But the best thing she gave me was courage. I was afraid of going on the stage for the simple reason that I came from a long line of good speakers. I was the Ron Weasley. Somehow, though, she turned me into the person who now wins debate competitions.

Cuddalore is also home. Perhaps, above all, that’s what it is. Home. It’s where I grew up, in a large tower-like home, too huge and too silent for its six occupants. It’s where I remember watching with awe as my grandfather, who towered taller than even my father, pushed himself up and walked down the corridor, paralysis and all. Walking down that corridor recently, I realized that my being about three feet tall contributed to that feeling. The walls are no longer that huge. It’s also the town where my family and I survived the Tsunami of 2004, thanking all there is to thank that we were not at the beach that morning and that the backwater flowed before our home.

All in all, Cuddalore and I share a love-hate relationship. I strongly believe that if this town remains a town trying to but failing to develop fifty years after it began to try, it’s because it isn’t focussing on trying, it’s focussing on the reasons why it has not succeeded. I am a critic of the unwritten social code in the town that prevents me from walking about it in the same freedom I experience in Chennai, or going to its beach, dressed as I want to. But all the same, I love it. It’s the dingy old place but it’s my dingy old place. Maybe I see its faults so clearly because it is my town. It’s home. 

Junglee

The words to a popular (in the 60s) old Hindi song begin “Chaahe koi mujhe Junglee Kahe...” Literally, of course, Junglee means “forest-dweller” but anyone would translate that song to mean “Even if people called me uncivilized…”

I found nothing anomalous about this song – and I don’t believe I am alone in this – until Dr. Vijaya Ramaswamy, a professor at JNU asked a very pertinent question in one of the lectures she recently delivered at Stella Maris College, “Why is Junglee a synonym of uncivilized?” And all of a sudden I began to become conscious of how much we historically stereotype in daily conversation.

Not to draw controversy into this article, but I remember remarking to my sister that I thought that it was “positively barbaric” that a cricketer should perform animal sacrifice. Now I see what I was really doing is assume that the Berbers, really a North African people, are – or were – any less civilized than I. When you become conscious of a particular daily habit, instances of it tend to jump out at you more than you realize. Suddenly I was hearing “vandalizing the school halls” or “dehati” (a pejorative term indicating lack of manners or finesse even though it literally means “rural”) and wondering if we were just blindly taking the winners’ word in Roman history and indeed how a dehati could be anything negative in a country that is still largely rural.

Of course the evolution of words has a lot to do with it. When people and racial stereotyping of people is not involved, etymologies can be a lot of fun. For instance, we ask each other today, “Aapki tankha kya hai?” (What is your salary?) “Tankha” was incidentally a currency in the early Islamic past of India. Today, it merely signifies money earned. The same goes with the word “Panam” in tamil that comes from the old “Fanam.” “Salary” itself of course comes from the latin “salarium” meaning “salt.” As Dr. Ramaswamy says in this regard, read Asterix and you’ll know.

Returning to the basic issue at hand, though, what got me thinking about this was when I read the term “oriental barbarism” in Thomson’s classic history of Europe after Napoleon. Shocked as I was, considering the double stereotyping, I couldn’t help thinking that that made me a Junglee. Yahoo?