God’s own country and hartal’s own people - The Hindu

God’s own country and hartal’s own people - The Hindu

Culture of silence and the masked and unmasked atrocities

                                          Sukumaran C. V.

If you are the high profile boss and you allegedly lure a young woman employed by you into the lift of the hotel in which you stay and make the lift stay in circuit mode, we can guess what your intention is. The ‘encounter’ can never be considered as banter, it can’t be consensual too. It is sexual harassment, it’s rape.

You yourself know that you have forced upon her. And, as she is a bold girl, you fear that even if you have warned her that ‘this is the easiest way to keep’ her job she may complain. You are desperate to keep your ‘Valley of Masks’ unmasked. First you try to convince the victim that you have done it only because of her consent, texting her that she ‘misconstrued a drunken banter’. Again you fear that your ‘Valley of Masks’ is going to be unmasked, but you want to keep the masks at any costs because if the masks are gone, you are lost.

You send emails to your managing editor explaining that the incident is a bad lapse of judgment and you must do the penance that lacerates you. You think that this would certainly keep your ‘Valley of Masks’ away from being unmasked. When you realized that neither your vile threat nor your ‘lacerating penance’ is going to save your ‘Valley of Masks’, you say that the encounter is consensual and ask the police to “obtain, examine and release the CCTV footage so that the accurate version of events stands clearly revealed”. You have put the lift stay in circuit mode only after ascertaining that there is no CCTV camera inside it. Have you decided to ‘do the penance that lacerates’ you without knowing the ‘accurate version of the events’? The way of your lacerating penance is really wonderful.

Do you think that the rapists need only self imposed ‘lacerating penances’ as punishment? Whom does your penance lacerate? Does it lacerate you or your victim? Do you think that the female will be ready to keep her job even at the cost of her dignity and pride? You must have many such ‘encounters’ before you have ‘encountered’ this 23 year old girl whom you couldn’t silence as you might have done with your other victims. Do you know that those who harass women and tell them that it is the easiest way to keep their job are the most dangerous representatives of our misogynistic culture and male chauvinism?

Don’t you know that the very culture of sexual harassment originates from our culture of silence? Our society teaches the female to be silent and she is silenced always.  And you have tried to silence your victim through many sublime ways to keep your ‘Valley of Masks’ unmasked.  People like you and the retired judge who allegedly harassed a law intern commit your atrocities against the female within the safety and security of your valleys of masks. And the female is subjected to unmasked atrocities in the public space as the Delhi girl who was gang raped and killed and the Mumbai girl who was gang raped and traumatized. If both the so called ‘educated and civilized’ and the illiterate and the ruffians share the same attitude—the female is a sexual object created for the entertainment of the male— that makes life a burden to the females in our country, can our laws and law enforcement agencies provide safety and security to the hapless lot?

Those who harass women and tell them that it is the easiest way to keep their job are the most dangerous representatives of our misogynistic culture and male chauvinism. They think that the female will be ready to keep her job even at the cost of her dignity and pride. As long as we can’t break this culture of silence or ‘valley of masks’ that perpetrates manifold atrocities against the female, women will continue to suffer harassment from the ‘educated and masked’ people like Tejpal and the retired judge; and the illiterate and unmasked ruffians who committed heinous crimes inside the running bus in Delhi and inside the deserted Shakti Mill compound in Mumbai.

Every day should be Environment Day - The Hindu

Every day should be Environment Day - The Hindu

Rain, rain, come again | The Hindu

Rain, rain, come again | The Hindu

Mend the human ‘culture’, save the living world

Sukumaran C. V.

Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drive social decisions. The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable. From birth on we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals,… —Derrick Jensen.

Another World Environment Day is around the corner and it reminds me of the photographed image of an adult rhino with its horn chopped off alive. The image has been haunting me ever since I have seen it. The DFO Sushil Kumar Daila writes: “At dusk on January 23, 2010 in the Jhaoni Island of the Rajiv Gandhi Orang National Park, as soon as the staff heard two gunshots, we set out to nab the poachers. We tried long and hard, but they escaped. We noticed, however, a horrifyingly thick blood trail in several places on the three square kilometre island. Eventually, we were able to locate the rhino. Alive.  But with its horn chopped off. The rhino would have collapsed from the shock of the bullet, but even as it breathed they had brutally gouged out its horn. The animal was in acute pain and was walking in tight circles, in utter distress. We watched helplessly, in total anguish. Grown men—we were all in tears as we watched the magnificent animal writhing in pain.”

The rhino died after suffering the pain for two days. This cold-blooded cruelty is the real symbol of the civilization we are proud of—the industrial civilization. The one and only motive of the so called civilization is profit. To make profit, it will exterminate other living beings, devastate the forests, pollute the rivers and displace and kill the indigenous or traditional communities.

Once in the North America, the passenger pigeons were greater in number than all other birds. They lived together, nested together, and flew together in large numbers. In summer these birds nested in the vast forests of the northern regions of the continent and in winter they migrated into the comparatively warmer forests in the south. In the breeding time, flocks of these birds would land on the trees and would make hundreds of nests even on a single tree. Each flock consisted of at least a minimum of 300,000 birds! The dense flocks used to cover the entire sky for hours as they passed overhead.

When the European settlers reached North America, they started hunting the pigeons for their meat and feather. Even after these birds have been continuously and commercially hunted for many decades, a flock that flew over the Cincinnati town in 1870 consisted of 20,000 lakh pigeons! The flock had been 510 kilometer long and 1.6 kilometer wide!! In 1878, from the 64 kilometer long and 16 kilometer wide nesting area of these birds in the Michigan state, the commercial hunters killed 10,000 lakh of these defenseless winged beauties. 

                                         Passenger Pigeon (female)

                                         Passenger Pigeon (male)

Today there is no passenger pigeon to fly in the skies.  If the fate of the passenger pigeon, that could fly, was to disappear within decades of contact with the Europeans, the harbingers of industrial civilization, what could have been that of the poor Giant Moa that couldn’t fly? Somewhere in the time of evolution, the Moas lost their wings. They grew up to four meter in height and weighed more than 275 kilograms. These wingless birds lived 1000 lakh years in New Zealand, till the 12^th century when the humans reached the Pacific island. The onslaught started, yet the Giants survived until the Europeans (the ‘civilized’ and ‘civilizing’ race) appeared and in the 1850s, these giants were pushed into extinction. The Dodo, the Great Auk, the Eskimo Curlew  and the Clouded Leopard shared the same fate.

                                                 Giant Moa

                                                    Dodo

                                                   Great Auk

                                                     

                                                                               Eskimo Curlew

                                             Clouded Leopard

The list of birds and animals that are extinct and are threatened with extinction as a result of the human 'progress' is endless. Still we believe that someone must pay the price for (our) 'progress' and invariably the Environment (the diverse flora and fauna) and the tribal people are chosen to pay the price—Extinction. 

The very life-style we follow is hazardous to the environment and sustainability. Industrial civilization imposes consumerist lifestyle on us and our consumerist life style encourages industrial civilization to go on with its destruction of the Environment. This vicious cycle goes on and on damaging Mother Earth irreparably. If it is not stopped, we will send more and more species to extinction and at last our turn will also come. Then there will be no chance of going back or coming back.

As Derrick Jensen says in his wonderful two-volume book Endgame, “…industrial civilization is killing the planet. It is causing unprecedented human privation and suffering. Unless it is stopped, or somehow stops itself, or most likely collapses under the weight of its inherent ecological and human destructiveness, it will kill every living being on earth.” 

Are those in power wholesale dealers of death and destruction?

Sukumaran C. V.

In the backdrop of the prolonged protest against the KKNPP, even if my sympathies were and are with the local people, even if I was and am strongly against nuclear power; I have written nothing against nuclear energy, because as far as nuclear science is concerned I am an ignoramus. As I passionately hate the corporate servile policies of our Left, Right and the Centre of the Right governments and politicians that destroy the Environment and the habitats of the wild animals and the marginalized people, I read everything Arundhati Roy writes and I think if those in power read her works like The End of Imagination, The Greater Common Good and Broken Republic, India will certainly be a better nation as far as the real Indians, the poor and the displaced people, are concerned. And it was through Arundhati Roy, I have come to know about the wonderful writer and Environmental activist Derrick Jensen and his two-volume book Endgame, which begins with the premise: “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.”

Jensen made me confident to write against whatever that is nuclear. Still I don’t claim that I have understood all the nuances of the nuclear science. And Endgame is not about nuclear science. But to see that the use of the ‘nuclear energy’ has done more destructive work than any creative or useful service to the living world, no expertise is needed. The terrible history of nuclear ‘energy’ starts with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is high time the advocates of the nuclear energy (and nuclear weapons too) learnt that, as Derrick Jensen says, ‘the planet had already come up with the best solution for storing uranium: keep it in its natural state underground.’ 

It is from natural uranium the fissionable isotope uranium 235 or enriched uranium—the fuel for nuclear reactors—is separated. And what is left of this process of separation is called depleted uranium (DU). Jensen writes: “The term depleted uranium is something of a misnomer in that it implies that the remaining uranium has become significantly less dangerous, more, well, depleted. But depleted uranium—99.8 percent uranium 238—is just as toxic and about 60 percent as radioactive as enriched uranium. And with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it will truly be one of this culture’s trademark gifts that keeps on giving: it will kill essentially forever.”

If the DU, the left over, is so dangerously radioactive and cancerous, we can simply presume the destructive capacity of the enriched uranium—the fuel we use in the nuclear reactors and its waste. DU and the products from its decay, including other isotopes of uranium, thorium 234, and protactinium release alpha and beta radiation that causes cancer and genetic mutations. Whatever the short term gains of nuclear power, it is stupidity of the highest level to advocate it or to argue for it.

And let us see what the U.S. is doing with the DU. It is better to quote Jensen: “The United States has made a lot of it, well over a billion pounds. Beginning in the 1950s, the feds started trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of this stuff….leaders of government and industry solved the problem of disposing it in typical win-win (for them) fashion by giving it away free to both national and foreign arms manufacturers….The list of countries using or purchasing weapons or shells made with DU is long…Spreading these toxic, radioactive materials around the world is bad enough, but the real danger comes when the weapons are used. And they are used often. In 110,000 air raids against Iraq during the so-called First Gulf War (“so-called” because my understanding is that for something to be called a war the other side has to actually be able to fight back), U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft fired about 940,000 DU projectiles.”

“When a DU projectile hits a target, about 70 percent of the round vaporizes into (hot) dust as fine as talcum powder…300 tons of  DU are estimated to be blowing in the wind from this particular desert storm….As well as affecting U.S. soldiers, DU has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for the residents of Bosnia, and soon we will be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent years in southern Iraq, with some locals experiencing a 700 percent increase. And there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report, “In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs…””

Do we the humans occupy the earth to live or destroy? Is the destructive urge the prominent feature of the human race? Isn't it high time we stopped destructing and killing and started to live and let live? We have been listening for centuries to the so called omnipotent Gods and devastating the living world. We have been listening to the so called Scientific Knowledge for centuries and devastating the living world. Now let’s stop listening to these inherently destructive forces and listen to the Natural world and have a sane and sustainable way of living without abusing the Environment and without violence against the Environment; without abusing the females and without violence against the females, the marginalized, the downtrodden and the poor.

Endgame, which excellently argues for a sustainable way of living and passionately defends the Natural World, concludes thus: “George W. Bush invaded two countries because, he has stated publicly, ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.’

Bush listens to God, I listen to trees. What’s the difference?

...God does actually talk to Bush, and trees actually do talk to me. This leads to another question: Who would you rather listen to, a distant sky God—disconnected from and superior to the earth—who by his own admission is angry and vengeful, and who has preached and justified more rape and rapine than any other god we have ever heard of; or trees, who to the best of my knowledge have never once told any one to go forth and subdue the earth, and to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth; trees who have never once justified a single act of rape or rapine, trees who have never said that they are jealous, trees who live right next to us, and who are our closest neighbours?”

Who would you rather like to listen to?

America & terrorism - The Hindu

America & terrorism - The Hindu

Boston bombings and the U.S. culture of violence

                                Sukumaran C. V.

   

                                               A Boston blast victim
If and when we hear the news of a bomb blast in Bangalore or Hyderabad or Delhi or Mumbai; we are not shocked, because we know that it happens in India quite often. Bomb blast in Karachi or Islamabad; we are not shocked. We know it happens in Pakistan. Bomb blast in Kabul; there is nothing to be shocked. If a bomb explodes in Baghdad and kills many, nobody is shocked. If a psychopath enters into a school in the U. S. and shoots and kills many students and teachers, we are not surprised; because we know that it happens in the U. S. intermittently. But on hearing the news of the bomb blasts in the Boston Marathon; we are shocked. We are shocked because the scourge called terrorist blast has shattered the immunity of the strongest nation also! That means terrorism can’t be contained by military power or police force, however impregnable it may be. We are shocked not because that we love the U. S. 

Nobody who knows the true history of the U. S. can love that nation. The nation has been built by slaughtering the Native Americans en masse. The nation has been built on the sweat and blood of the Native Africans. The nation has enriched itself by looting the resources of the people all over the world. The nation has killed more people in the world than any other nation has ever had been able to kill in the whole history of the humankind.

The Native Americans ‘were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality and their belief in sharing.’ This is how the ancestors of the U. S. dealt with them:
“Among the Arawak Indians, mass suicides began with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250, 000 Indians on Haiti were dead…The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes: deliberate attacks on noncombatants…Captain John Mason proposed to avoid attacking the Indian warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”  

This is how the U. S. has transported the Negroes: “They were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”

                                             Chained Negro slaves
This is how the U. S. has devastated Vietnam: “By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were 20 million bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth….On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Nagai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death…It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people—most of them women, children and old people—had been slain and buried there….Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings told reporters in early 1971: ‘Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.’” (All the quoted passages are from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States).

                                                  Vietnam
And we know what the U. S. has done to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Boston bombings are gruesome, but gruesome is a milder word to describe the U. S. cruelties on the Native Americans, the Negroes, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of Chile, of Iraq and Afghanistan.

                                                 Hiroshima
It is high time the U. S. and the world learnt that violence breeds violence and we can’t reap love and co-operation by sowing violence and injustice.

We should not allow WikiLeaks to be stifled out

                                                  Sukumaran C. V

WikiLeaks has exposed a range of suppressed facts and unethical practices in a manner and scale never before seen. It has changed the rules of the game for newspapers.—The Hindu. 

                                                           Julian Assange

When I finished reading the U. S government’s concerted efforts to stifle out WikiLeaks after the not-for-profit media organization revealed ‘rare insider accounts of U.S. diplomacy across the world, angering and embarrassing Washington’ in The Hindu on October 25, 2011 (WikiLeaks fights back in the face of financial blockade and arm-twisting) I searched in my collection of books for a long forgotten work—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels.

In the book Engels writes: “In most of the historical states, the rights of citizens are, besides, apportioned according to their wealth, thus directly expressing the fact that the state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class.” 

WikiLeaks revealed the terrible manipulations and anti-people activities of the possessing class of the world’s greatest democracy to the people all over the world. It has also revealed an incredible number of skeletons in the cupboards of other countries—both the democratic and non-democratic.

Until Julian Assange started WikiLeaks, the states could conceal their nefarious and ugly business from the people. WikiLeaks made it impossible. It helped people to view the un-democratic ways of the democracies. When its ugly side is fully shown to the people, the State stands embarrassed and sheds all the pretexts of democracy and the rule of law.  The witch-hunt starts. First it was fabricating a sexual harassment case against Assange, then arm-twisting and unlawful and arbitrary financial blockade! 

Let’s return to Engels: “The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split… Society which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”

The activities of the State again and again prove what Engels said by analyzing the states of his time, but his prophecy of  the State being  put into the museum still remains as a beautiful dream. The states don’t show any willingness to be seated by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe. They become stronger and stronger and the non-possessing class becomes more and more hapless and disoriented. Against this bleak scenario, the media organizations like WikiLeaks are a necessity to strengthen and orient the dispossessed millions. The state knows the role and commitment of such organizations more clearly than anybody else and wants to crush them.

The U.S which imports democracy to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other ‘uncivilized’ countries and wax eloquent on freedom of expression has savagely been stifling WikiLeaks ever since it started publishing the confidential cables exchanged among American diplomats worldwide, and it is now forced to suspend work! The most ‘liberal’ and the most ‘perfect’ democracy of the world arm-twists Julian Assange just like the Medieval Roman Catholic Church arm-twisted John Wycliffe and John Huss.

We the people should not allow WikiLeaks to be stifled out. It represents the interests of us the non-possessing class. We are in desperate need of whistle-blowers. We want someone to speak out that violations of people’s rights are rampant in the name of democracy. Even if we may not be able to put the State in the museum, we want at least to make it something which looks after the interests of the non-possessing class too. Therefore, let’s contribute as we can to save WikiLeaks from being stifled out. Let’s twist our weak arms together on behalf of the not-for-profit media organization. Many weak arms twisted together will make a strong arm and it will help the organization to fight back and to continue its praiseworthy work. 

The witch-hunt of the ‘democratic’ U.S with the help of ‘liberal’ Europe against WikiLeaks reminds me of the intolerance of the ancient democratic Athens towards Socrates. Addressing his accusers and judges who told him that if he promised to give up his discussions with people and changed his ways they would let him go, Socrates said: “If you propose to acquit me on condition that I abandon my search for truth, I will say: I thank you, O Athenians, but so long as I have breath and strength I will never cease from my occupation with philosophy.”

Socrates still lives in the hearts of the people worldwide, but nobody knows the names of his accusers and judges who trialed and condemned him to death for the ‘crime’ of his discussions with people. It will be better for those who try to smother WikiLeaks to keep this truth in their minds. 

Astonishing - The Hindu

Astonishing - The Hindu

Kodumpaapikal (great sinners)

Sukumaran C. V.

Farmers depended solely on the rain, 

And the rains deserted the village,
The summer seemed to be endless.


People prayed to the rain god,
But He refused to be propitiated.
It was the fiercest drought the village has ever had,
But even then the drought failed,
To dry up the wells and ponds and rivers.

‘Drag the effigy of Kodumpaavi’,
The elder people told the youth.
An effigy was made with hay,
And dragged through the whole village.



Between the dragging and the rain,
The ‘educated’ could see no relation .
I belonged to the 'educated' and
It took years for me to ‘uneducate’-
Myself and see the relation:

The rustic people respected the ways of Nature
And Nature heard their call in distress.

Today the summer dries up the ponds and wells,
And the fiercest drought of yesteryear
Seems benevolent now.

It is the result of man’s great sin
Of killing the trees and filling the wetlands.
Nobody is there to drag the great sinners, as
Everybody has sinned greatly by waging the
War of 'development' against Mother Earth.

Water, the elixir of life

Sukumaran C. V.

Man has through ages sought in vain for an imaginary elixir of life, the divine Amrita, a draught of which was thought to confer immortality. But the true elixir of life lies near to our hands. For it is the commonest of all liquids, plain water! —C. V. Raman.

In the past when there were hundreds of acres of paddy fields in my village, whenever I have been in the fields, I used to remember the title of an essay written by India’s greatest scientist C. V. Raman—Water, the  Elixir of Life—which was the first lesson in the English textbook of my Pre-Degree class. It is from that essay I learnt the meaning of the word elixir and whenever I watched the pure waters gurgling through the kazhaya from one field to the other, I used to tell myself— the elixir of life. 

In our mythology there is a word called amritu and I thought it was only a mythical imagination until I learnt the essay. Then I could see water is really the amritu and our paddy fields, the wetlands, were doing great service to the humans and other animals by preserving the elixir of life. There was a little creek alongside the paddy fields and even in the summer months pure water used to flow through it. Along the banks of the creek, screw-pines grew in abundance and water could be seen trickling down from their roots.  And summers have never been as scorching as they are now.

Today our district (Palakkad) is parching and scorching under the summer sun. As all the indigenous trees which absorb the UV rays are felled and uprooted, the level of UV rays are unprecedentedly high. The older people say that they have never experienced such scorching heat in their life. Rivers have dried up and the still remaining ponds are drying up. As we have deserted paddy cultivation and converted almost all the paddy fields to plots and estates and felled and uprooted every big tree, there are now no wetlands to preserve the rainwater; and no trees to absorb the scorching heat and protect the birds, humans and other animals. 

Everybody complaints about the heat and drinking water shortage, but nobody notices the dried up water bodies and ponder over the reason of their drying up. Along the banks of our village creek there is not even a single tree or screw-pine bush now and there is not a drop of water in the creek either. Water used to ooze into the creek from the wetlands, the paddy fields, and the water was preserved by the roots of the screw-pine bushes and indigenous trees. 

Now the wetlands were gone, the screw-pine bushes gone, the trees gone and is it possible for the water alone to remain? All of these are inter-related, and the humans, blinded by their selfish greed, forgot the interconnection. They converted the wet lands into dry-lands, destroyed the thickets and trees, and discovered that water also disappeared together with the ecosystem they have destroyed. 

Now the humans are suffering, but the brunt of the suffering is borne by the poor who are not part of the onslaught on the ecosystem. And the birds and animals also suffer.
Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, and other birds need water in summer not only to drink, but to bathe also. It is my wont to put a tub of water in front of our home for the birds to drink and bathe. And it is always a wonderful experience to watch birds drink and bathe. They never quarrel while sharing the water. I have seen even woodpeckers drink and bathe from the tub! Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, orioles and magpie-robins come regularly. 

When the jungle babblers drink and bathe, if a bulbul comes, it will wait patiently until the jungle babblers finished quenching their thirst and taking bath. I have not seen any bird attacking others on the matter of sharing the water!! There is no fight over the water either between two birds of the same feathers or between different kinds of birds. They behave themselves and show wonderful manners. No policing is need!
Jungle babblers are the birds who repeatedly bath and they always come in large numbers. It seems that they are highly social birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, orioles magpie-robins and other birds come in pairs. 

In our district, there are people who have to walk miles to fetch drinking water. While even the humans have no drinking water what will the birds do? (Of course ours is an anthropocentric world!). The stupid humans still think that everything was created for them. They are still unable to learn the truth behind the scathing satire of Jonathan swift.

In his Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes Man as the most dangerous of all animals. In the second book of the satire (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” (Italics added)

 
As C. V. Raman says, “there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of the countryside as water, be it just a little stream or a little pond by the wayside where the cattle quench their thirst…..The rainfed tanks that are so common in South India—alas often so sadly neglected in their maintenance—are a cheering sight….Water in a landscape may be compared to the eyes in a human face.”

In the name of ‘development’ we have blinded the eyes, and we are groping in the darkness of a drought-like situation. We are reaping what we have sown.

Imprisoned in the body

Sukumaran C. V.

I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silence, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.—Adrienne Rich

Karaikkal Ammaiyar was a staunch devotee of Lord Siva and one of the prominent Saivaite Saints (Nayanars) in the South Indian Bhakti Movement (circa 7th century to 11th century AC). The main thrust of the Movement was to help the agrarian development and the consolidation of Chola political power in South India. But if we look at the Movement  through a gender perspective, we can see that it also helped to consolidate the Patriarchal power over women. The story of Karaikkal Ammaiyar proves that even within the ideology of bhakti, the female is denied her agency and independent role.

Chekkilar’s hagiography (Periyapuranam) speaks about 63 Nayanars.  Of the 63, Karaikkal Ammaiyar is the only (prominent) female Nayanar. 

Before she metamorphosed into a ghoul, Ammaiyar was a beautiful lady called Punitavati. Chekkilar says that Punitavati was a staunch Sivabhakta and once when an old man, a Saivaite mendicant, visited her home for bhiksha, as she had not cooked the mid-day meal, she gave one of the two mangoes her husband brought home to the mendicant.   

Later, her husband Paramadatan, having eaten the tasty mango served to him, asked for the second one. Punitavati couldn’t reveal the truth. She went inside as if to fetch the mango and prayed to Lord Siva and there appeared a ripe mango in her hand! She served the mango, but noticing the unique taste, the husband asked the reason. Punitavati could not but reveal the truth. Paramadatan could not believe it. He mocked her and asked to pray again. Then, to his surprise, he saw a ripe mango appearing in the hands of his wife. Terrified, he left Punitavati to find an ordinary wife!

                             Punitavati gives one of the mangoes to the mendicant

As she was deserted by her husband, Punitavati asked Lord Siva to take away her female beauty and make her one of his ghouls—the bhuthaganas—and in that terrible form (Pey) she wandered in the forests of Karaikkal praising the Lord, and came to be known as Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

In this regard, it will be interesting to examine the attitude of some prominent male Nayanars towards their wives. Iyarpagai Nayanar was so great a devotee of Siva that he gave his own wife to a mendicant, when the mendicant asked. Another one, Tiruneelakanda Nayanar, deserted his wife because she had committed, according to him, a sacrilege by blowing off a spider which fell on a Sivalinga.  Yet another one, Kaliyar Nayanar, tried to sell his wife in open market in order to buy oil lamps for a Siva temple. Siruttondar Nayanar, a temple supervisor, cut off a queen’s nose for smelling a flower from the garland which was meant for the deity—Lord Siva. When the king, Kalar Singer, knew this; he proceeded to cut of the hand of, not the culprit Siruttondar but, the queen for taking the flower to smell! 

As Vijaya Ramaswamy says, “In all these instances the devotional fervour of the male Nayanars has been highlighted at the expense of the women who have been depicted as objects rather than as persons.” (Walking Naked: Women, Spirituality, Society in South India)

While we see so many instances of men’s devotional fervour highlighted at the expense of women, it is difficult to point out even a single instance in which the role is reversed. Let’s come back to Punitavati. She was a beautiful woman and wife before she became the Pey of Karaikkal. The role of a wife and that of a staunch devotee were not allowed to go together. That was why Punitavati, the beautiful wife of Paramadatan, had been deserted by her husband. We see many an instance of men being devout Saivaites or Vaishnavaites and at the same time husbands also.

The famous example is Sundarar (Sundaramoorthy Nayanar). He even marries two women and his deity himself helps him to accomplish his desire of having both Paravai and Sangili as wives. But in the case of Punitavati, when her husband discovers that her devotion to Siva gives her divine power, he deserts her, because, he was ‘deeply perturbed by his wife’s supernatural powers and convinced that she was no ordinary woman’. But Sundarar, with his Siva bhakti, produces bricks of gold, a large quantity of paddy etc.; and yet his wives never thought he was too divine to be a husband.

In the legend of Karaikkal Ammaiyar, what we see is that even the ideology of bhakti is deftly used by patriarchy to constrain the female in her body. A female bhakta, however devout she may be, is not free to use the public space with her female beauty. But the males are allowed to do it. Sundaramoorthy is called so because he was so handsome. He never finds it cumbersome to wander through the world. But Punitavati has to uglify herself to wander through the world!  

It may be interesting to compare this act of Punitavati with the more or less identical act of Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess really makes her ugly for two reasons. As her husband deserted her, she no longer wants her beauty and she desperately wants to escape the lustful attack of the outer world—the public space.  

Karaikkal Ammaiyar lived nearly 1000 years ago and she realized that the public space was exclusively meant for the males.

Still public space is not meant for woman and girls. Still our culture is not ready to let woman grow beyond her body. We find manifold ways to make woman believe that she is only her body and that body is meant for man—to harass, to molest, to throw acid and to pass lewd comments at, to violate, to rape and to kill with virtual impunity.

It is high time we let woman grow out of and beyond the body. It is high time we made our private and public space gender egalitarian. It will be possible only if we get rid our culture of its deep rooted patriarchal, misogynistic traits.