Author: borderlesssg1

Categories
Poetry

The Phoenix

By Soma Debray

Happy memories of girlhood return

With the giggling youngsters

All decked in their best

Furtive glances at may or may-not-be friends

As they chatter along.

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Hair bejewelled like the night-sky

Danglers and bracelets

No signs of fear

Like the eagle flying high

They spread their wings.

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Only man can defy and defeat

Only man can rise

Like the Phoenix

All aglow

Piercing the Universe

With its shrill cry

I live and will live.

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Leatherback turtles are back

The neel gai roam the streets

The cheel shrieks overhead

As I gaze at the green parrots…

My girlhood returns.

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Soma Debray has been a student and teacher of English literature for this half of her life. When in her twenties, she was a proud firebrand feminist, but with maturity settling in, she has opted out of –isms; finding fulfilment in womanhood, enjoying all roles carved by nature with freedom of varied explorations. She has faith in self and is a warrior for women’s cause. Women are power; power latent that need be made patent.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Categories
Excerpt

No Strings Attached

Book Excerpt from Bhaskar Parichha’s new book

The Tragedy of Itishrees 

Babina, Itishree, Nirbhayas-the list is lengthy. As 2013 fades away into history, the struggle that women face are enormous, and cases of gender inequality are monumental. Despite positive progress and legal guarantee, women continue to experience injustice, brutality, and unfairness in their homes and at the workplace. The devaluation of women and social domination of the male continues to worry sociologists and planners alike. Women in India are viewed as a shade lesser than men, the weaker gender, and this entrenched perception has led to their social and economic dispossession.

The key factor driving gender inequality is the preference for boys. Boys are deemed to be more useful than girls. They are given exclusive rights to inherit the family name and property. Bias also comes in the shape of religious practices making sons more attractive. What is more, the saddle of dowry discourages parents from having daughters. Thus, a combination of factors has shaped the imbalanced view of sexes in India.

The number of girls born and surviving in India is yet another worrisome factor because female fetuses are being aborted and baby girls deliberately neglected and left to die. Gender selection and selective abortion were banned in India under the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostics Technique Act, in 1994 but the use of ultrasound scanning for gender selection continues unabated.

In 1961, the Government of India passed the Dowry Prohibition Act, making the dowry demands in wedding illegal. However, many cases of dowry-related domestic violence, suicides, and murders are still reported. At least a dozen die each day in ‘kitchen fires’. Of course, amongst the urban educated dowry abuse has reduced dramatically. But rural women continue to be victims of dowry torture. Issues affecting Indian women are numerous. But it is domestic violence that impacts women the most. True, there are laws to protect them. Yet, they are defenseless and laws ultimately turn out to be mere pieces of paper.

In 1997, in a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court took a strong stand against sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The Court laid down detailed guidelines for the prevention and redressing of grievances. The National Commission for Women subsequently elaborated these guidelines into a Code of Conduct for employers.

 Whether it is self-employment, domestic work,   or even government jobs the discrimination of women more glaring. Equal pay laws may have been enacted, but women are still paid less than men across states and sectors. As if that isn’t enough, they are prohibited from working in the same industries as men. Several studies have linked the gender pay gap with women’s caring responsibilities- a responsibility which comes to women not on their own volition but according to their physique.

Talk about justice to women, the broad issue is one of empowerment. Even though there have been steep increases in women’s representation in parliament, state assemblies, and the Panchayati Raj institutions, there exists a case for more women in politics and public life. The horrendous crime perpetrated on Indian women says volumes about their vulnerability. The individual lives, the catastrophes, and the abuse that are the daily lots of millions of India’s women reveal poignant stories of bravery and struggle.

While there is a growing incidence of violence, many women shrink away from reporting crimes due to social stigma and weak justice systems. The costs and practical difficulties of seeking justice too are prohibitive — from travel to a distant court to paying for expensive legal advice. The result is high dropout rates where women fail to seek redress on gender-based violence. The phenomenon of honor killings is another variety of violence girls in India where village caste councils, or khap panchayats, often operate as an extralegal morals police force, issuing edicts against couples who marry outside their caste or who marry within the same village.

Though gradually rising, the female literacy rate in India is lower than the male literacy rate. Compared to boys, far fewer girls are enrolled in schools, and many of them drop out. According to various reports, the chief barriers to female education in India are inadequate school facilities such as sanitary, shortage of female teachers, and gender bias in curriculum. India has witnessed substantial improvements in female literacy and enrolment rate since the 1990s, but the quality of education for females remains to be heavily compromised.

Women in India suffer from yet another advantage. They are not allowed to have combat roles in the armed forces. According to a study female officers are excluded from induction in close combat arms, where chances of physical contact with the enemy are high. Even a permanent commission has not been granted to female officers.

Gender Inequality Index (GII) is a new index for the measurement of gender disparity that was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). According to the Gender Gap Index 2011 released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), India was ranked 113 out of 135 countries polled. This represents a poor distribution of resources and opportunities amongst the male and female.

Since independence, many laws have been promulgated to protect women’s rights. The Constitution prohibits discrimination on several grounds including sex and recognises the principle of equality for all before the law and of opportunity in matters relating to employment. Women’s empowerment in India is a challenging task because gender-based discrimination is deep-rooted social malice. This sexual discrimination can be erased only through awareness of the ‘problem’ at all levels in society.

Acknowledging the presence of a problem will lead to solutions sooner or later. While the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women has to be the goal, what is important is a fundamental change in the misogynistic attitudes that exist in our society. 

(This was excerpted from the book ‘No strings Attached: Writings on Odisha’ by Bhaskar Parichha. Click here to buy)

About the Book: No Strings Attached  : Writings on Odisha

The past twenty years have been action-packed in Odisha’s millennial history – political bluntness, natural adversity, economic deceleration, community resilience and so forth. All these are part of the narrative of this book. Every single piece in the collection is the upshot of an occurrence. There are profiles, there is politics, and there are controversies and issues that have been part of the larger political process. The book is an Eldorado.

About the Author: Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely of those of the author.

Categories
Poetry

Origin

By Sekhar Banerjee

Watermelons have intense violence stored inside

them — the blood and serum of summer

and they are always calm. I appreciate the plant’s climbing habit

from the womb of the seed

to the intricate womb of heat — vertical and horizontal;

it has a miasma of secrecy to hide

what it is developing inside its

spherical mind

.                        

And the rind of the fruit is striped,

dark green or blotched

to guard whatever finally transpires —  red

or pink

with numerous sorrowful pips throughout

like a smile without a meaning

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and I think of the sandy soil of a roadside farm or a forlorn

river-bed somewhere which was harsh

on it — like a trigger

to finally teach us  

how something develops — from seed to plant

to fruit and from fruit to seed to plant again

in reverse order — the order that we generally follow

in love

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Sekhar Banerjee is an author.  He has four collections of poems and a monograph on an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit. He is a former Secretary of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi and Member-Secretary of Paschimbanga Kabita Akademi under the Government of West Bengal.  He lives in Kolkata, India. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Categories
Slices from Life

There’s an Eternal Summer in a Grateful Heart

Sangeetha Amarnath Kamath brings a Singaporean School to our doorstep with a sentimental recount of her experience at relief teaching

It was pre-dawn and still dark. The shrill alarm jolted me from the depths of a death-like sleep even as I tried to cling on to the fading vestiges of a sweet dream. I was just within reach of seeing its mysterious ending but it was gone. Like a wisp of smoke! I tried to slowly blink away the remnants of sleep from my eyes—heavily lidded and which just refused to open even a crack at a grim time as this.

The alarm was ringing incessantly.

“Could it be a mistake that I set it to go off so early? At this bleak hour?!

Uh! Hold on, it wasn’t the alarm but a phone call for crying out loud!”

At this unearthly time, when most of this side of the world was asleep, I dearly hoped that it would be from one of the two sources–Either from Piny Woods Primary School or Woody Pines Primary School. Yes, Thank God! I was right! I recognised Carrie’s number of Piny Woods Primary School.

 Phone calls during pitch-black hours did tend to give me the chills, driving me to think only morbid thoughts. Groggily, as I answered my phone, the usually chirpy voice of Carrie trickled through, panic-stricken.

 “Good morning, Sangeetha! Are you available for relief teaching today?” She spoke fast and the anxiety in her voice was unmistaken. I could almost picture her, crossing her fingers hoping against all hope that I wouldn’t decline.

I steadied my voice trying not to sound garbled, my voice still thick and parched from sleep. But try as I might, my effort to greet her in my signature sing-song tone hopelessly came out more like a croak.

“Hullo there Carrie, a very good morning to you too. Yes I am.”

There was an audible sigh of relief at the other end before thanking me profusely and with a hurried “See you at 8am.”

 Yet another day when I scored a merit for putting Carrie’s worry to rest and saving her the trouble of dialling the next number on her roster.

“I’d better be up on my feet and sort out my day. Every second counts.” My thoughts were racing even though my feet were leaden, unwilling to step on it.

On this rainy and dim morning, I was tempted to burrow inside my quilt and sleep in, but it was not to be. It was a mad rush through the shower, an equally mad brush through my hair, a hurriedly made buttered toast which was thickly lathered with my favourite pineapple jam and finally I was all set and rearing to go! Meanwhile, a pot of coffee brewed. Nothing like a cuppa and a whiff of the aromatic caffeine to get me looking sharp and wide awake.

It was time… to Rock N’ Roll!

*

I was there at 7.30!  At the gates of Piny Woods Primary, there was a bustling crowd of school children chattering away as they made their way in and a jam-packed line of cars and school buses which had come to drop them. I breezed into the general office flashing my brightest smile, to pick up my schedule and made my way to the staff room on the first floor. I was all smiles as a quick glance at my schedule told me that I would be taking a Primary 1 class. An entire cohort of newcomers on their first day fresh out of Kindergarten.

*

“Goooood Morrrrrrningggg, Children. I’m Mdm Sangeetha. Your teacher is not coming to school today and I will be your relief teacher until she comes.”

 I tried to sound sunny hoping to bring some warmth into the classroom despite the overcast greyness and the blowing rains outside. The customary introductions were made which were met with blank faces. They had no idea what a relief teacher was. For them, I was their form teacher for all they cared, on their first day in a new school.

They were hopefully easier to talk to and a cinch to work with…or so I thought. I had looked forward to the day, which was obviously going to be a cakewalk. But Oh Boy, was I wrong!

 As the day progressed there were the occasional tears of homesickness which I had to put to ease to the best of my ability and quieten down some uncontrollable sobbing from stray corners before I could actually dive into uninterrupted teaching. However, the dejection inside the classroom was quite infectious and a long line of droopy faces and quivering lips stemmed from almost everyone. I just put it down to the longer hours in a new, unfamiliar school and the absence of a nap time which they were so accustomed to in Kindergarten or Day-care.

All the same, nothing that a story-telling didn’t cure in getting them acclimatised to their new environment. It was the need of the hour to change my strategies. It worked wonders when their stricken faces bloomed and their eyes lit up. There were bursts of laughter and  joyous clapping of their hands when the ‘Huffing and Puffing Big Bad Wolf fell into a pot of boiling water and the Three Little Pigs lived happily ever after’. My animated voiceover and dramatics went a long thankful way in chasing away their blues. After the initial hiccups, it was a smooth transition into Primary 1.

We delved right into the lessons for the day with great enthusiasm after I promised them with another story when the ‘big hand of the clock was on 10’, on condition that they maintain discipline in class, listen to Mdm Sangeetha and let her do her job of teaching them.

The camaraderie was instant. I had won them over.

When it was time to dismiss the class for breakfast recess, I was in for a very pleasant surprise. A very heart touching craft was given to me by Hannah as I was leaving the classroom. I had noticed that she was tearing a page off her brand-new Power Puff Girls’ diary, folding something hurriedly with it and tying it up clumsily with a strand of light green embroidery thread just moments before the dismissal hour was up. Her friend Samantha, came running up to me in the corridor and almost out of breath said

“Teacher, Hannah wants to give you something. But she’s shy to talk to you”.

I made my way back into the classroom and approached Hannah. I had to squat down to her eye level and strain my ears before I could hear her feeble voice, which was a little more than a whisper

“Teacher, can I give this to you? It’s a butterfly I made for you…”

 It was a heart-warming moment for me as she had crafted it with her tiny shaking hands in a hurry and interpreted it as a butterfly.

“To me it’s a butterfly and more, dear Hannah. It’s beautiful.” I tried not to choke on my words.

Hannah beamed at me with a wide toothy smile. I left the classroom, keeping the delicate strand of paper in a pocket of my handbag careful not to crush it. It almost felt like the butterfly had a flutter of life inside it.

Back home, it went into my treasure chest of other loving charms that I had got from my students over the years. Immaterial as they looked, they were quite hallowed.

This ‘Butterfly’ was my first welcome gift of 2017 at Piny Woods Primary School.

*

The phone buzzed at an alarming rate before I could answer it. It was a call from Woody Pines Primary School.

“Mdm Sangeetha, are you available for relief today?” The frantic voice of Magdalene got me on my toes in a trice. There was no time for formal greetings and niceties as it was almost 20 to 8. I hadn’t expected a call this late either. I had to hustle it if I had to make it on time.

I was also told that there was the festive Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations going on in the school and that the children were all in ethnic costumes of any country that they wished to represent. I too was supposed to come to school in a traditional attire, if I so wished.

I didn’t need to be asked twice. It was a dream come true! An opportunity like this never passed me by without dressing up to the nines. The children in my Primary 4 class were all agog to see my shimmery grey Ghaghara fringed with shiny diamantes paired with the silvery organza Dupatta  

For a brief moment, I too was taken aback by their reaction and double checked myself to see that nothing was amiss– that my face flushed from scurrying in a mad dash that morning wasn’t melting my makeup and streaking my eyeliner down in black tears. God forbid if I had looked like a Halloween masquerade rather than anything else.

 But no, my fears were unfounded. They were all actually in admiration of my Ghaghara and the ‘Kundan’ set of accessories that I wore. They wanted to know all about my country and the name of my attire.

I was only too happy to oblige them with the rich culture and customs of India. That being done, we proceeded with the lessons for the day. After the initial excitement over each other’s costumes subdued, a pin-drop silence ensued with productive work being done for the rest of the hour. As a reward, they had a 10 min time-off for a quiet storybook reading or drawing to recharge. Which in turn led to a little something from Janice, to brighten up my day.

All the Chinese New Year gifts handmade by her were either tagged or already given away to the regular teachers and she had no idea that a relief teacher — that I was coming to her class today. With a lightning flash idea, she drew a caricature of me on an A4 paper — in a floating Ghaghara with a flock of birds flying in the background and gave it to me as her CNY gift.

 Needless to say that the drawing went into my cherished file folder which held innumerable scraps of papers with stick figure drawings on them, Origami crafts and post-it notes with words of appreciation in every style of scrawl and childish handwriting.

But, the ones that I hold most dear are the pages which have undecipherable squiggly-wigglies on them from my Primary 1 classes.

*                              

 With the end of Term 3 in Woody Pines School close on hand, the schedules were getting more compact, deadlines were like a two-edged sword dangling above everyone’s heads and group presentations were getting more and more daunting for the pupils. The weather was wickedly humid and steaming, not helping the mercurial tempers either. I was  in a Primary 5 class scuttling about from workstation to workstation trying to finalise their ideas about project work from rough draft onto the PowerPoint slides, brainstorming those still lagging behind, facilitating them to the best of my ability and stamina, besides cooling down tantrums and teamwork squabbles.

 All in all, a good nonstop 3 hrs and more in only one class. It was a backbreaking, nerve-wracking day and I was psyched enough to plop down limply like a rag doll.

It was a touching moment when Lawrence looked up at me, pointed to an empty chair at his group table and said, “Mdm Sangeetha, you are on your feet since ages, why don’t you sit down here for a while”.

 I was at a loss for words. I did take a seat gratefully, nodding dumbfounded and drained out of my wits when he turned to me and said kindly

 “Being a teacher must be a hard job, right? I understand….” He is a Wise Old Soul, he is!

 It was! It truly was! I was ready to crash and burn…

 Well, the story doesn’t end here! My last hour for the day before dismissal, was in a Primary 2 class. It was a generally good class with kids being kids. And I dutifully lined them up in twos’ to lead them to the parents’ waiting bay area when Kyle said to me in all innocence,“Lǎoshī*, can I hold your hand as we walk?”

Alarmed at having missed a condition the boy might be having and feeling guilty for having overlooked it, I subtly and compassionately asked him –

 “Does your regular teacher always hold your hand as you walk?” He shook his head expressively and pointing in the direction of the bay said

“No, I just want to hold your hand and walk up till there”.

 I obliged, taking his tiny hand in mine. Or rather vice-versa. The trust, acceptance, and the approval– I was moved beyond words. As we reached the gates of the waiting bay, Kyle sped into a run, and turning back waved a bye at me. Stirring moments like these were a cool mist of respite on my scorching soul and on the extremely boiling day as well.

                                                       *

My teaching days at Piny Woods and Woody Pines were not always a rose petal strewn path. I’d had my fair share of unruly classes and  mass indiscipline where I’d  been driven to my wits’ end with the helplessness of my voice being unheard over and above 30 screeching, playful voices even as I was standing in the doorway. News of their regular teacher being absent would reach them even before I did and they would be jubilantly celebrating away.

 If they wouldn’t settle down upon seeing me, what was the next best thing that I did? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!

I would calmly take a marker and write in bold on the board,“Ready when you are! If I don’t finish my lessons in 1 hour, all of you stay back after class!”

Then without a word, I would cross my arms sternly and give a dead stare at the wall in front of me, behind them all. It was only a matter of time before someone spotted something unusual in my composure and would take the lead to shush the entire class. It was only then that I would give them cold stares and each one a pointed eye-contact from where I was standing. That would make them bend down their heads sheepishly and apologetically.

I would never raise my voice at them. Not to scold, never to yell.

Only when they had started to behave themselves and got reined in, which they ultimately did, would I show them the side of me that could be warm-hearted and friendly with them as well.

*

 On a clear Mid-November Friday afternoon, the school term at Piny Woods Primary School was coming to a close for the academic year. There were varied emotions from the graduating Primary 6’s. There were tears of parting, bear hugs with their besties and some trying to keep straight faces with moist eyes and yet ,there was a charming  compliment from Victor after having seen me around, about, in and out of their class for a year now—-

“Why does everyone call you Madam? Are you really Madam?” Madam being the salutation of a married woman, it was my turn to get amused. And in the best way possible not to get blurry myself, I replied that I’m indeed Madam. I really started to wonder how this enlightenment had set in him out of nowhere, when out popped another remark from him—

 “Lǎoshī, serious, ah? You look like Ms.”

More cheers in the background from fellow classmates at their friend, Victor.

I realised no sooner then, that Victor was diverting the class from getting swamped with emotions and lightening the overall energy and mood of the class.

“Yes dear, seriously!! I have a daughter in Secondary 2, so I’m the most perfect candidate for Madam”. They looked at each other, their jaws dropping.

This candid, light-hearted conversation did help banish the despair in the classroom to some extent. Trying to sound convincing, I further assured them that life was a circle and that they were bound to meet each other in Secondary School, Junior College, University or even at their workplaces in future. This consoled them that graduating from Primary School was not the end of the world, after all.

After which, there were fist bumps, hi-fives, promises to keep in touch and smiles of gratitude for the best six years spent together with friends and classmates through countless joys and sorrows right from Primary 1. It sure was a long journey and a hard one to break away from, a bond so concrete.

In the face of it all, it took a lot of grit to maintain my composure and not breaking down in front of them.

Next year, there was bound to be another graduating Primary 6 class and another Primary 1 class to welcome with open arms.

Life gives us many Hello’s in good measure for every fond Goodbye!

*

There’s an Eternal Summer in a Grateful Heart

“I am pleasantly surprised when you know my name even before I introduce myself,

I’m immensely overwhelmed when you are happy to see me early in the morning and greet me with a great show of enthusiasm by cheerfully jumping up and down with a pitter-patter of tiny feet.

 I’m divinely blessed when you come up to me with your teeny-tiny snack boxes wanting to share a biscuit with me, a piece of sandwich or a potato chip. It’s with a heavy heart that I refuse to partake of it so that you have your full fill of it yourselves.

 I feel truly honoured when you share your deepest thoughts and classroom squabbles and fallouts with me, trusting my judgement to solve it for you.

I feel extra special when I see the joy on your innocent faces when I meet you after a gap of a couple of days.

 I feel accepted and approved when you give me that look of recognition and respect.

You make my days fruitful and fulfilling.”

 Thank you, Class for giving me an opportunity to realise my potential.

Disclaimer: Based on true occurrences. Names of locations and characters have been changed to protect identity. Any familiarity, similarities of names of actual people in said locations and of the locations mentioned herein are purely coincidental and unintentional

* Lǎoshī – Chinese for teacher

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Sangeetha Amarnath Kamath did her schooling from St.Agnes Primary and High School, Mangalore, India. She is a B.Com graduate form St.Agnes College, Mangalore. She is an aspiring self-taught creative writer.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Categories
Poetry

Two poems from Malaysia

By A Jessie Michael

Caged Birdsong

They stride in graceful rhythm

Qi Pao* fluttering in morning breeze

They swing their cages with gentle sway

Going to Nanjing Park

To bathe in sunshine and breathe fresh air.

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Their feathered friends rise and bend on perches

Flap their wings and stretch muscles.

They are one in movement, master and bird

Lifelong learners each, going to Nanjing Park

To bathe in sunshine and breathe fresh air

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There’s a crowd of cages on every low branch

And sweet birdsong fills the air

Feathered friends chirp and tweet and trill

Outdoing each other; hearts are bursting

Here to bathe in sunshine and breath fresh air

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Old men’s yarns and chortles mingle

With caged birdsong flowing free

A daily short spate of being alive

Voices let loose in cacophony

Bathing in sunshine and breathing fresh air

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Then cages are curtained into darkness

Echoes of birdsong dissipate in the wind

Men in silence swing cages home

To drown in the darkness, and choke in the haze

Of crowded cubicles with no window space

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Weighted

My heart is a kite with a stone on its string

Straining and fluttering to be free

But it is anchored to earth while the wild winds sing

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It longs for new love and youthful flings

It wants to break free, fly over the sea

But my heart is a kite with a stone on its string

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It wonders what the future will bring

When the heart is corralled to what can only be

It is anchored to earth while the wild winds sing

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I was the air beneath the falcon’s wing

I was the joy of sunshine before day’s reality

But my heart is a kite with a stone on its string.

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Sometimes in a dream I feel the old zing

Of our youthful love, my heart’s soaring glee

But it is anchored to earth while the wild winds sing

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The loss is too great, no end to the longing

The fluttering and flittering of fantasy

My heart is a kite with a stone on its string

It is anchored to earth while the wild winds sing.

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*Qi pao – Cheongsam, a dress of Manchu origin.

A. Jessie Michael is a retired Associate Professor of English from Malaysia and a writer of short stories and poems. She has written winning short stories for local magazines and newspaper competitions and received honourable mentions in the AsiaWeek Short Story Competitions. She has worked with writers’ groups in Melbourne, Australia and Suzhou, China. Her stories have also appeared in The Gombak Review, 22 Asian Short Stories (2015), Bitter Root Sweet Fruit and recently articles in Kitaab (2019) and poems and Short story in Borderless (2020). She has previously published an anthology of short stories Snapshots, with two other writers and most recently her own anthology The Madman and Other Stories (2016).

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Categories
Ghumi Stories

The Tower of Babel

By Nabanita Sengupta

Jharkhand: Photo Courtesy; Wiki

Raya was little more than three-and-a-half years old when her world suddenly became full of strange babbles. She could not understand the changes in her surroundings, in the people around her and the way they spoke to her. And in turn she went silent. Well, almost.

All that her little mind could remember was a long journey. She remembered her old room and the people there. She also remembered how her mother used to show her a picture of a long thing on wheels called a train. Her mother had told her that they would be travelling by train. She also remembered the journey and how, just as in her mother’s stories, huge trees, houses, farms, vehicles and even people flew past her window. But after a while everything grew dark and she had to sleep on a hard, narrow bed. Of course she took a long time to fall asleep and her mother had to keep on trying various means to make her comfortable. But just after that Raya found her world completely changed. She missed her old world, its people sorely; and would often cry for it. The solace that only familiarity brings to children was suddenly missing. 

Meethu, her mother, was having a difficult time managing Raya’s mood swings and trying to control her tantrums. The active and cheerful child had suddenly turned into a sullen cry baby with perpetually puckered lips. The reason, she rightly thought, was perhaps the change of location – the shift from the familiar to the strange. But they had relocated from Calcutta to this obscure township in Jharkhand recently because of her husband’s job and returning to Calcutta was not even a possibility in the near future.

On her part, Meethu was quite in love with the new place – calm and quiet, free from the tensions of an urban life. But what she loved the most was the greenness of her surroundings that wrapped Ghumi like a cosy blanket. She loved their small two roomed apartment which stood at the end of a series of such houses. These were all factory owned houses. The tar road ended with the boundary wall of her home and from there began a kutcha* road. Theirs was the last of the houses in the factory colony beyond which began the panchayat* area. 

Each afternoon she and her daughter used to take the kutcha road which led them to the river side. She let Raya run around the place, not letting her go too close to the river. For that brief period of time the chirpy little girl in Raya returned each day. Meethu did not want to miss these trips at any cost as she realised whatever it was troubling her little girl, the river side could heal it, even if temporarily. These trips reassured the mother in her that the little girl was not completely lost in the throes of sullenness; that there was still a chance of reclaiming her natural cheerfulness. But, each day, as soon as they reached the vicinity of their home, Raya turned petulant and sullen. 

Apart from Raya’s tantrums, Meethu was struggling on another front too. Ghumi was a place where people had gathered from different parts of the country, tied by a common source of livelihood, the factory. So the commonly spoken language was Hindi there. There were pockets of other vernacular communities too — like a group of Malayali speaking families often held get-togethers and would interact in their mother tongue, similarly a group of Bengalis did the same. But the majority of the people spoke Hindi. That Ghumi was located in the Hindi speaking belt was also a reason for that. Meethu had yet not picked up that language and was trying hard. The only person with whom she could practice speaking it unreservedly was her husband. Otherwise, in the gatherings she felt tongue tied out of diffidence. So whenever her husband, Asim, was free, she struck up a conversation in her heavily accented, broken Hindi. 

It was a chance discovery or perhaps a result of Meethu’s constant monitoring that she realised Raya’s crankiness increased in geometric progression whenever they spoke in Hindi. The little one would glare at them and throw a volley of unfamiliar sounds, gesticulating in anger. Meethu, to confirm her finding, tried switching back to Bangla and she saw that it calmed her daughter immediately. The difference was glaring. It was then that the worried parents realised the root of the problem. But they did not know how to help the little one! Even if they stopped conversing in Hindi in front of her, how would they keep her isolated from the society! They themselves were quite an extrovert couple and had already made friends in the neighborhood. At loss for a proper solution, they decided to give her some time and also to minimise their social interactions for a while. 

But Ghumi had other plans for them. Their neighbour, whom all the kids of the locality addressed as Dadima*, came as their saviour. The silver haired woman had taken a liking to this young Bengali family. She had got used to Meethu’s broken Hindi and enjoyed talking to her for some time at least each day. But she too, out of her own experience, had realised Raya’s discomfort. An extremely observant woman, she had seen the child tug disgruntledly at her mother’s anchal* each time they spoke. She had also heard Meethu expressing her anguish over the child’s behavioral changes. So when Meethu did not come for her daily chitchats for a couple of days, the elderly woman realised something was amiss. She could see them going to the river in the afternoons, so health was not an issue she was sure. 

After a serious contemplation, she visited little Raya’s home with a katori* full of laddoos*. As she called out the little girl’s name from the door, Meethu was a trifle hesitant. She saw the elderly woman and her katori and she cast a glance at Raya playing by herself on the floor. Immediately there was a change in the girl’s demeanour. Dadima called out Raya again, this time in a soft coaxing voice and showed her the laddoos. The little girl’s face mellowed a bit, though she did not take a step forward. Dadima entered the house, kept the katori on the table and whispered to the little girl in a heavily accented tone – ami tomar bandhu (I am your friend). 

Besan Ladoo: Photo Courtesy: Wiki

The little girl’s face broke into a dazzling smile at the sound of the familiar words and she stretched her hand to point at the laddoos. Dadima put a laddoo in her hand and repeated in a heavily accented Bangla – ami tomar bondhu, Dadima (I am your friend, Dadima). Raya took the laddoo and repeated, ami Raya (I am Raya) and pulled the elderly woman towards her toys. Meethu watched in happy amazement as the childhood innocence found the end of her miseries in the comfort of age old experience. 

Dadima broke the ice that day that had been gathering around the little heart. But she did not stop there! She instructed the people of the neighbourhood to stretch their linguistic skills and speak in whatever broken Bangla they could, to put the little member of their community at ease. Slowly, the incorrect, broken language became the balm that healed the little girl’s scared heart. And Raya took wobbling steps between familiar and the unfamiliar vocabulary to find her own space in that harmonious community. 

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*kutcha: Unpaved

*panchayat: Village council

*anchal: Loose end of a saree

*Dadima: Grandmother

*Katori: small metal bowl

*laddoo: Indian sweet

Dr. Nabanita Sengupta is an Assistant Professor in English at Sarsuna College Kolkata. She is a creative writer, a research scholar and a translator. Her areas of interest are Translation Studies, Women Studies, Nineteenth century Women’s writings, etc. She has been involved with translation projects of Sahitya Akademi and Viswa Bharati. Her creative writings, reviews and features have been variously published art Prachya Review, SETU, Muse India, Coldnoon, Café Dissensus, NewsMinute.in, News18.com and Different Truths. She has presented many research papers in India and abroad.

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Categories
Poetry

Husbands’ Gift

By Md Musharraf

They talked of how small they were, yet with dignity.

They talked of how humiliated they were, yet sheltered.

They talked of betrayal they faced, yet pretended to be loved.

They talked of brother’s love, lost on the way due to land and properties; owed.

They talked of husbands beating their wives, yet pretending to be a perfect practicing Muslim; destined to be a Jannati.

They talked of lovers; promising to spend life, yet broke hearts and crushed innumerable souls.

They talked of insecure women, tired and wrinkled with their husbands’ gift. Gift of beatings and scrapings on their skin. Gift of hair torn out of their heads, and the pain tinctured into the skin.

After all the necessary yet unnoticed talks; born out of boredom and exasperation,

One of them walked into the kitchen, taking frozen beef out of the fridge, marinating it with love.

Love born out of husbands’ gift, love born out of fear; it was not!

It was love born out of gifts…. of beating and scraping, hair torn out of heads and pain tinctured into the skin.

Beef, somehow, felt soft and suffered. A story involved and a tale to tell. Hands shivered as if she could feel the love (born out of husbands’ gift) on the softness of the beef. The cruelty it faced and hardness it cherished; yet the softness it possessed.

She couldn’t marinate beef; the sun took leave and husbands came with their gifts; as always!

Next time, they talked of beef; thrown out on the verandah.

Next time, they talked of yellow turmeric-paste used in the marinade; splattered on the verandah with its anti-inflammatory properties; yet it looked as inflammatory as their husbands’ gift.

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Md Musharraf hails from the silk city of Bhagalpur (Bihar), who believes it to be a place of intellectual labors and hard-working scholars. He has completed his graduation from Sharda University in B.A.(Hons)English and has published with Half Baked Beans and Select Publishers.

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Categories
Essay

Cinema Viewing: Zooming In & Zooming Out

Gita Viswanath and Nikhila H explore how the world of moviegoers has changed with time and with COVID19

During the pandemic, people all over the world watched a lot more films due to the lockdown than they normally do. The use of social media also increased exponentially. The proliferation of OTT (Over the Top) platforms has given immeasurable access to cinema and other modes of entertainment to those who have the means and technology (such as internet connection and steady bandwidth, viewing devices, etc). While some term this phenomenon as a democratisation of film-viewing practices in a given society, others feel that the nature of cinema is bound to change in the absence of a collective social experience of film viewing.

The history of the motion pictures has seen a shift from 35 mm to 70 mm; the decline of the latter, and then its resurgence in the 1980s. During these times, going to the cinema was an event in itself. It necessitated the rituals of planning, the booking of tickets in advance, dressing up and stepping out of the homes. The singular mark, if we identify one, of this era of film spectatorship, would be its collective nature. It was not uncommon to witness several members of the audience cry, laugh, or cheer together. While there are several films that show their characters watching a film withing their plot, Abbas Kiarostami’s entire film Shirin (2008),focuses on women audience’s responses to watching a film on the legendary lovers, Shirin and Khusrow. The story of the lovers reaches us exclusively through the soundtrack. The creation of the star was also a consequence of collective viewing. The euphoria surrounding the star, at times translating to audience performances in the form of whistling, hooting, flinging coins at the screen, and performing aarti (a Hindu prayer ritual)when the star appeared, could not have happened in the isolation of the home. 

By the mid-1970s, almost all major cities in India had television broadcasts. The growing popularity of the television, even with its diminished screen size, as a means of watching films challenged the primacy of the cinema hall as a site of exhibition. The spatial shift from the public cinema hall to the private homes as viewing spaces is also a consequence of the arrival of television. However, the total individualisation of the viewing experience was yet to happen. Families, at times, even neighbours, would gather in front of the television, where the Doordarshan telecast around 6 pm and ended by 10 pm. Programmes were made specifically to appeal to groups of people across age, occupation, and class. While Tania Modelski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Women’s Narrative Pleasures (1982) argues how television, particularly soap operas play upon women’s fantasies and feed their longing for an alternative to their isolation within the nuclear family, it is also possible to argue that watching films on television meant being subjected to informal censors within the family and domestic situation.

Scholars have talked about how cinema-going created a new kind of sociality and public sphere around cinema. In the Indian context, a short story by a Kannada feminist writer Vaidehi titled “Gulabi Talkies mattu sanna alegalu” (Gulabi Talkies and small waves) for instance, gives us a glimpse of how through cinema-going the public sphere became accessible to women, otherwise sequestered within their homes. Girish Kasaravalli’s film Gulabi Talkies (2008) ostensibly drawing from the short story, gives us an insight into the fantasy worlds opened up by cinema for women, as well as delineates the destruction of that social imaginary and their proclivity for fantasy, when women got pushed back into the private sphere with the coming of television.

Soon after, the advent of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) and Video Cassette Player (VCP), became hugely popular ways of watching movies with the added advantage of recording them for repeat viewings. Lending libraries mushroomed and entire families were able to watch a movie for the price of, or perhaps, less than that of a single movie theatre ticket. In India, this led to a complete change in leisure practices to the extent that cinema hall owners ran into huge losses and most theatres that had seen their glory days had to either shut down and get converted into shopping complexes or lay in a state of neglect.

The 1990s heralded the era of the multiplex that once again drew audiences to theatres, at least in the urban areas. With admission rates way higher than single screen theatre tickets, the multiplex became a site of the upper middle-classes flush with funds in a newly globalised, consumer-driven economy. This even gave rise to an entire new genre of films called the multiplex film. Young filmmakers with exposure to world cinema cashed in on this change and made films that may not have been feasible in the era of single screen theatres whose audiences comprised people from different classes. The more homogenised audience of the multiplex enabled filmmakers to produce films that catered to the taste of a particular segment of the market.

And then came mobile telephony in the new century. The miniaturised screen size transformed film viewing, which was essentially a public and later family/group activity, into a highly individualised one. Today, it is not unusual to see different members of a family watching different films on their phone screens in the same house or even same room – the use of headphones or earbuds making it even more convenient.

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the intermission/interval; peculiar to film screenings in India. This device, as Lalitha Gopalan has noted in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002), even became an important consideration while scripting the film wherein the interval would be located at a turning point in the narrative. The interval in cinema halls also provided the scope for sale of snacks, which in the era of multiplexes turned into a focal point with the aim of providing a wholesome and complete form of entertainment for the audiences.

Turning our attention back to viewing films on the laptops or phones, we may say that the act of determining the interval is also controlled by the viewer. We could stop watching to eat, to visit the washroom, to turn off the stove, to get the door, or when the plot slackens and our interest wanes, to doze off. With the alarming speed with which attention spans are decreasing, filmmakers are turning their attention to short films.

The abundance of OTT platforms for distribution of films has led to easy access to world cinema. Until some years ago, it was difficult to view international films unless one frequented film festivals. Now, it is a different story. Platforms such as Mubi, Netflix, Prime Video, among several others, provide us with opportunities to watch films from all over the world. Just as in the case of the rise of multiplexes, similarly, OTT platforms also have proved to be a boon to filmmakers. Professional organisational set-ups, constant demand for fresh scripts, and scope for experimentation have made OTTs viable for young filmmakers.

At a time, when socialising in the real world became highly restricted, a flurry of activity was visible in the virtual world. One such popular enterprise was the formation of online film clubs to watch and discuss films, which the authors of this article also engaged in. What is interesting about such groups is that the film viewing experience is not collective. We do not watch the film to be discussed together; rather, we watch them at our convenience after deciding upon the film and only get together virtually to discuss our individual responses in the process of a personalised experience of viewing. 

Let us think about the nature of spectatorship that online groups engender. The sense of the collective does not stem from the act of seeing, which, in any case, happens in the privacy of our homes. Rather, it stems from the sense of a joint endeavour and the need to contribute meaningfully to it. While most theories of affect talk about the process of experiencing cinema, it may be equally important to look at the communicative aspect of affect; hence articulating what we feel about a film is a way of affirming and making available for ourselves (and others) how we feel about a film. Lakshmi Srinivas (2013) talks of how film viewing is framed by the social aesthetic, that is, film is a pretext, which provides a context for the social experience of film going. The audience response in any Indian theatre, she argues, provides a frame for the filmic experience; similarly, in our isolated film viewing case, the Saturday meeting becomes the ‘social’ within which our filmic experience may be framed.

With COVID-enforced isolation and restriction to stay in the house, films and social media platforms became a way of escape and reaching out, though not in the same way as the more conventional ways of watching cinema. The need to have social interactions beyond the family may have motivated some of us to embrace the world of online interaction. The form of discussing films (and virtually all of the films we discussed spoke to and of the contemporary times) on our Facebook group, Talking Films Online, for instance, became a way of thinking beyond and outside the oppressive present.  It helped most of us gain a perspective by contextualising the present itself, while we seemed to be in danger of being cut off from the known and the familiar past. Thus, the activities of watching films and logging in for discussions on Saturdays became a way of regaining a hold on our lives, when we all felt adrift.

The lockdown gave many spectators who were part of online film groups, the experience of seeing and hearing and being seen and heard on screen. While initially thrust upon as an inevitable fall-out of the situation, people soon learned to equip themselves with better devices (where possible), requisite apps, necessary accessories to be better seen and heard. Being part of the discussions on the films, recording them and sharing them make participants content generators in their own right, leading at times, to the creation of independent YouTube channels for uploading the recordings of the discussions and for live broadcasts.

Thus, the shift in patterns of spectatorship over time goes beyond a mere change in ways of viewing films. Rather, the ways of generating content to accommodate these changes have themselves transformed. The resultant transformation in modes of sociality is just about beginning to become apparent. 

Gita Viswanath is the author of a novel, Twice it Happened, a non-fiction book, The ‘Nation’ in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema, as well as a children’s book, Chidiya. Her poems and short stories have been published online. Two of her short films, “Family Across the Atlantic” and “Safezonerz” are available on YouTube.

Nikhila H. teaches in the Department of Film Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her areas of research interest are Filmic Translations and Gender Studies. Her recent publications have been on remakes and multimodal translations. Her current projects include a commissioned essay for a volume on Shyam Benegal for Edinburgh University Press, and for a collaborative volume on New Cinemas of India.

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Categories
Poetry

From Sunrise to Sunset

By Y. Deepika

As  the  sun  slowly  comes  in  sight,

To  wake  up  or  not,  with  myself  I  fight.

A  dash  of  coffee  in  my  mug,

Makes  me  pop  out  of  my  rug.

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As  the  sky  turns  reddish  orange  in  shade,

And  the  bright  sun  starts  to  fade,

I  watch  the  birds  fly  to  their  nest,

After  a  long-toiled  day  finally  to  rest.

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As  the  sun  goes  down,

I  settle  down  in  my  night  gown.

Sitting  near  the  window  of  my  living  room,

Watching  the  little  red  rose  that  is  yet  to bloom.

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As  the  moon  and  the  stars  twinkle  in  the  sky,

Where  no  one  can  reach  so  high,

They  light  up  my  little  bedroom  floor,

With  millions  of  dreams  in  my  head  I  snore.

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With  a  positive  hope  and  thought  in  my  mind,

I  leave  all  the  worries  of  the  previous  day  behind,

And  start  my  day  with  a  whole  lot  of  new  things,

This  is  how  for  me  a  new  day  begins.

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Y Deepika is a facilitator in Delhi Public School, Nacharam, Telangana. She a Doctoral in Life Sciences and teaches in a school. She loves to experiment and enjoys trying and learning new things.

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Categories
Essay

Cyber Nationalism: Can that be a reality?

Pratyusha Pramanik explores the impact of social media

The Chai pe Charcha* in the Indian subcontinent often has a  political undertone. The various adda or gossip sessions I have grown up watching in Kolkata have been at tea stalls situated at the parar more*. In these engaging discussions on politics, cricket and cinema I have often seen the conversations turn violent with disagreements; but soon these disagreements were laughed away over a cup of cutting chai, tea, and sutta, cigarette. Social media which is fast replacing this Chai pe Charcha, especially during the pandemic, does not give the option of agreeing to disagree. Equipped with algorithms which are created to bring together ‘like’ minded people, these medium are playing a massive role in political polarisation.

Although born and brought up in Kolkata, I shifted to Varanasi for my higher education. My social media is filled with friends from both the places and from other parts of the countries too. While this offers a diverse blend of opinions, I found myself at a very uncomfortably polarised situation when I saw the posts on the occasion of the Ram Mandir Sthhapana. There was a group of friends who hailed this as the triumph of dharma. There was another section that put up posts declaring they would unfriend anyone who is a bhakt. Both of these groups being my close friends, I was put in a social dilemma.

While watching Jeff Orlowski’s docudrama The Social Dilemma, I found a lot of answers to my unadressed questions. Like why do I start getting advertisements for lipstick, soon after I messaged my friend mentioning a lipstick! Or how would YouTube know I would want to listen to Emptiness at midnight! Although the discourse about data mining is not new, the interpolated interviews coming from industry insiders is almost like a wakeup call. The show is even more relevant amidst this pandemic, because of the increasing screen time as the world of physical interactions between humans has come to a complete halt. As India bans several Chinese apps on account of national security and as we come face to face with Facebook’s hate speech policy and its bias towards the ruling party we need to understand that these social spaces are not as friendly and accommodating as we may have been thinking. Ironically the platforms which have made possible #metoo, #BlackLivesMatter and have been a voice against many human rights violations around the world is also becoming a means of polarising it. The insight that this docudrama offers is that this may not be a bug which is accelerating the spread of fake news or propaganda; it may be a consciously in-built feature which is programmed to manipulate its users. This is an industry which has been developed to feed on its users’ multi-dimensional insecurity and anxiety.

The COVID19 crisis has forced us into physical distancing, which in turn has increased our dependence on online platforms — for entertainment, for communication, even for groceries! The social media has become our constant source of information. Not only were we indulging ourselves in some harmless challenges, but we were also trying to distract ourselves from the impending crisis. Even before we realised our screen time had increased and there was not much we could do about it. There was also a false sense of comfort in this doom, as we saw people around us get back to their lost hobby or become a more productive version of themselves, we too found some lost part of ourselves!

My mother and her college group of friends started cooking exotic dishes and exchanged images; my academic friends arranged online lectures and invited each other; all of these may seem very constructive when we look at it, but this enforced productivity is to maintain a sense of belonging in the community. So to be on digital fasting, uninstalling one or more of these apps to take a break would not only make one feel isolated but also inconvenience others. Social media is no more an app for our leisure, with different features like chat rooms and private groups; there is a continuous effort being made to add more professional features. So while on the one hand, we have Microsoft Teams which is used by different institutions and companies for professional purposes, with various features like reacting to posts a general wall where one could post photos, animations and other media; there is Facebook which is trying to bring in more professional features, not to forget a lot of human resource activities are now being arranged on Instagram and other similar apps by private companies.

Toggling between different apps that helped us work from home and these social media apps it has been a different experience. It has taken a toll on our attention span. This is significant among teenagers who are using phones to attend classes on different platforms. Children today have been using phones from a very tender age, but online learning has given them greater exposure to this cyberspace. The scandal around the Bois Locker Room on Instagram is proof how the cyberspace has gradually become more toxic for teenagers. Teenagers are walking a tightrope while they switch between Google Classroom or similar apps and social media as they are attending a class. As a Teaching Assistant, I have always felt the challenge of competing with an AI (artificial intelligence) to grab my students’ attention even in physical classes, but with online classes, this seems to be an insurmountable problem. Here expert supervision will not work, since, in India, most of these children are the first generation mobile users, so they will definitely outsmart their parents and even their teachers. The threat around TikTok a Chinese app trying to manipulate young minds in different parts of the world is therefore not ill-founded. India, the US and other European countries found the app a potential threat with the possibility of mining data from young and naive users. As more and more apps are scrutinised to find how their users are being analysed to manipulate them, we are under the threat of cyber nationalism; here not only our governments are putting us under surveillance, we are also under the surveillance of other nations. The threat is primarily for naive users who are not otherwise equipped to understand the complex mechanism that goes behind these apps and the propaganda that runs these industries.

The State using the ideological state apparatuses to obtain consent from the people is not a recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, what is noble about this is the kind of false sense of security and neutrality that these platforms offer to manipulate the users into willingly handing over their data.

As Facebook tries to work on its community guidelines, and the Parliamentary Committee probes into the collusion between BJP and Facebook, the users face a social dilemma. BJP has had remarkable social media presence, especially with Modi’s enigmatic election campaigns and other activities. The thaali bajao diya jalao*amidst the Corona had captured the imagination of the Indian middle class; these activities were as much social media campaigns as they were offline activities. The fake news forwarded around these times about how Corona will be eradicated with these campaigns remains amusing. A significant amount of party resource is used in keeping the people engaged with ever-changing narratives. Facebook being an active party in generating these narratives and manipulating its naive users, comes as a late realisation. The industry insiders who are interviewed in The Social Dilemma cite similar examples where social media have acted as catalysts in the hate campaigns against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. If we look deeper into this, we realise that this phenomenon is not different from the news channels that prefer to conduct a media trial of a woman even when the country is going through medical, economic and other crises. While the news channels are driven just by the target rate points or TRPs, in the cyberspace the AIs work towards catering a feed that will initially suit the user, and gradually tailor the user to suit the feed! 

There is more to this dilemma. The security threat from China also falls under cyber nationalism. China which itself has the isolationist approach towards internet, has a history of hackers trying to hack systems of enemy nations. So when the government of India banned several Chinese apps, it was more concerning issues of security than about economy. However, experts in the USA have not denied that the boycott of Tiktok and several other apps might have come into effect for the threat posed by the competition it gave to Facebook. The western market wished to curb the growing popularity of TikTok before it expanded into domains beyond videos. With Modi’s call for self-reliance or Atmanirbhar Bharat, there is a definite intention of developing homegrown apps that will gradually replace these foreign threats. However, cybersecurity is still a concern in a country that is not yet efficient in using internet facilities and has poor cyber hygiene. National Security Adviser AjitDoval while delivering a keynote address at c0c0n, the two-day virtual international conference on hacking and cybersecurity arranged jointly by the Kerala Police, the Society for the Policing of Cyber Space and the Information Security and Research Association, has observed that there has been a 500% increase in cybercrime, “Financial frauds have also increased tremendously owing to the increased reliance on digital payment platforms.” He also added that several prominent UPI Ids and web portals were forged; fake apps were launched within hours after the Prime Minister declared the PM Cares fund. The PM Cares fund became a popular public fund where a huge section of the population decided to donate money on the onset of the pandemic. Several cyber criminals used this portal and other online transaction apps to fraud several innocent users. The Arogya Setu app, which was used by Government of India to monitor the health of the user and keep a check on the Covid situation, was also used to extract information from the users or sometimes deceive them.  

As the government comes up with indigenous solutions to these foreign threats and promotes start-ups which will cater to the demands of homegrown apps, we should keep in mind the role AIs will play in manipulating the users. If Facebook, Twitter or YouTube could manipulate users around the globe, it will not be challenging to influence a country where the ordinary people are not adequately cyber-literate. The docudrama The Social Dilemma thus comes at a significant juncture in history, when most countries are adopting an isolationist cyber nationalist policy. As elections draw near and fake propaganda fill up inboxes there will only be a handful who will be able to sift through these game. Social media thus will become the Orwellian telescreens which will be encoded in different Newspeaks as will be suitable for the nations. Tristan Harris, who formerly worked as a designer ethicist at Google warns in The Social Dilemma: “We were all looking for the moment when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence. When is it gonna cross the singularity, replace our jobs, be smarter than humans? But there’s this much earlier moment when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses. This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarisation, radicalisation, outrage-ification, vanity-fication, the entire thing. This is overpowering human nature, and this is checkmate on humanity.” It is towards these human weaknesses that the nationalist apps will be targeted.  The right time to come up with alternatives for these apps or to collude with the manufacturer of these apps is at moments when the users find these apps irreplaceable because of their addiction and the apparent utility. Populist governments will come in power with the aid of these apps, and they will secure their position and propaganda using these apps too. Thus, we are not only under the surveillance of the telescreen we are being manipulated by the Orwellian thought police.

Coming back to Chai pe Charcha, which is a very democratic setup, does not serve the purpose of the thought police. So there will be tea-sellers and their stalls of stories, but not one that will sell stories in the interest of the people! When the social media was launched, we came  nearest to Tagore’s  ideal of the ‘Heaven of Freedom’, with its free knowledge and a world without ‘narrow domestic walls’, words came out from the ‘depths of truth’ as the mind was led forward into ever-widening thought and action, but gradually ‘the clear stream of reason lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit’. The pandemic has catalysed the threat of AIs. We have already been warned of the vaccine nationalism; what lies ahead of that is the cyber nationalism.

Pratyusha Pramanik is a Research Scholar and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanistic Studies, IIT (BHU) Varanasi. She is working on post-colonial social movements in Bengal, she is also interested in gender studies. She is a cinephile and is an amateur film critic. Few of her works have been published in Feminism in India. Her interest in the role of intellectuals stems from her desire to search for a life purpose. 

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