CZECHING PRAGUE

It was a rainy evening, the kind that usually inspires me to write my journal or read a book in the comfort of my bed clutching my favorite mug. It was on one of those dreamy rain filled evenings that Marion (my best friend) and I began our journey of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Dragging my suitcase through the water filled cobble stone paths I got this inexplicable fresh feeling and could feel my adrenaline suddenly starting to rush. My brain completely ignored the dreariness of the weather around us. After walking through a couple of wrong alleys we finally made it out of the right one to find our hostel, an ugly pistachio colored building standing along with many cute candy colored ones in the middle of a bustling and lively street 20 seconds away from tourist central aka the Charles Bridge. Dumping our suitcases in a quaint and cosy hostel room smelling of fresh sheets, Marion and me set out to get our first taste of Prague.

A rainy Charles Bridge

Prague is a tourist soaked city that still manages impeccably well to retain all the charms of an ancient city. Dressed in architecturally diverse styles the city had a soothing and sometimes melancholic effect on me. We took our first walk to the Charles Bridge since we were living right next to it. It was a sea of humanity and stalls selling kitsch. In spite of the million human beings we took in the spectacular view of Lesser Town standing on the bridge surrounded by a bazillion camera totting people. We could see the Prague Castle, the Parliament, St.Nicholas’s Cathedral, the beautiful white Stratov Convent and a million other beautiful and awe inspiring spires and curiosity inducing buildings all at once.We decided to go back to the Charles Bridge later in the night when the tourist rush would calm down a bit.

We then made our way to the Old Town Square, to find ourselves absolutely astounded by the baroque and overpowering gothic elegance of everything standing in it, amidst hundreds of people watching the Euro-cup and singing football songs I had never heard before. At the entrance arches of the Old Town Square were a really amazing street band brandishing beautiful Bohemian looking instruments who I will never forget. Entering the Old Town Square, one first notices people milling around the magnificent astronomical clock, one of the only 3 surviving medieval clocks that is still functioning. Its magnificent golden clocks gleam in your face. A few steps away from the clock we came face to face with the dramatic twin towers of the Tyn Church. From that point on, I felt like I truly entered a fairytale.

The Astronomical Clock installed in 1410

The Tyn Church at the Old Town Square

Old Town Square

We walked past the touristy old town square into residential areas to get a feel of what the quieter more everyday parts of Prague, if any, felt like. We also walked past store windows advertising property in Prague and stretched our brains with the math involving currency conversions to dollars and euros in hopes of one day being able to jointly buy a vacation home in Prague :P We concluded that it was too much wishful thinking on the first evening. We walked past interesting statues, almost climbed a tower, heard the tunes of a flute following us while walking through some of the streets into a quiet neighborhood to take in the beauty and art of buildings. In that neighborhood, we got lucky enough to absorb Prague just by ourselves with nothing more than just an occasional tram passing by. The peace and quiet felt nicely personal. Exploring further, we walked to the Municipal hall and Opera House and wishfully looked at some really extravagantly elegant restaurants and read their menus.

Finally a neighborhood devoid of tourists

We ended our day by having goulash and traditional Czech potato soup at a restaurant that couldn't have been more Czech, with its high sloped concave ceiling, an accordion playing musician, a beer and money well paid for bottles of water that barely lasted 3 sips. We went home tired, happy and excited from our first evening in the disneyland of fairytales writing our own first chapters. At that point I figured why it took me just one evening to understand something Kafka said -

"Prague never lets you go..this dear little mother has sharp claws."

Secondshaadi

Secondshaadi.com- this website suddenly popped up on my sidebar while reading a news article. The name quite spiked my curiosity and before I knew it, it was one of those rare advertisements I actually clicked on. I had never heard of secondshaadi.com or even known of its existence. Apparently it is India’s No.1 remarriage website which I thought was awesome in a way.

‘Second marriage’ and ‘divorce’ conventionally have been very dirty words in India. Marriage traditionally was founded on comprise, tolerance and so called societal rationality as opposed to love and desire. Higher divorce rates in India today alarm me less and make me happy, especially for women in India. No matter what critiques of the increased number of failed marriages in India have to say, I believe that more women today are empowered enough to step out of oppressive and male dominant marriages. As more and more Indians are embracing capitalism, more and more women in urban and semi urban towns and cities find themselves becoming economically independent and socially bolder.

I wonder whether oppression of women was purely the reason for low divorce rates in India. For the first time ever, I recently saw the stats on divorce rates in India and much to my shock they were supposedly the lowest in the world i.e. 1.1 % also meaning just 1 marriage out of 100 actually ends.

We are currently a society of evolving values, coming of age yet clinging to some of our values and traditions. Love marriages today are relatively less scandalous and more acceptable compared to even a decade ago.

In my opinion financial stability and strength in numbers are the two main reasons women of today can step up and out of a failed or loveless marriage. As the number of divorce seekers in our society goes up for better or for worse, women have more strength in numbers. The social stigma as a result is reduced. As more and more Indian families educate women, even if to just find a suitable boy that has a huge impact on their ability to find decent paying jobs. Remarriage is happily seen less as a counter cultural issue today in India by a lot of youngsters and women. Very recently the Union Cabinet of India approved changes in the Marriage Act to help quicken the divorce process, which is often very lengthy and time consuming. The Cabinet also okayed changes to recognize a wife’s right to property that was acquired during marriage, which is a step in a very positive direction.

I am happy for the women of today who get to be part of a society where the social cost of divorce seems much less of a problem than it was ever before.

Decoding feminism in India

A discussion I recently had with a professor left me feeling mildly discomforted and unsettled, the reason being she insisted that I was a hardcore feminist who wasn’t ready to accept that.  All my life I have lived in a country where sexism stares you in the face every step you take and everyday makes you realize in different ways, that the fight for gender equality is no where close to getting over yet. Having said that, I do not even remotely consider myself a feminist, in fact the word being applied to me made me squirm for some reason. I am committed to gender equality and that’s all there is to it. After doing everything I could to convince that professor that I was not a feminist I started thinking of what feminism really was and what it really means in todays world especially in the Indian context.

Processing everything I knew about women’s rights in India from the Pink Chaddi to bra burning campaigns and more, I realized that I would have to go beyond relying on my brain to understand how feminism operates in India. So I spoke to some of my friends who considered themselves die-hard feminists and what I heard from each of them shocked, amused and confused me simultaneously.  Their ideas of feminism spanned the whole scale of stereotypes starting with equality, reproductive rights, and hatred for the opposite sex. Liberation, beauty, and vanity encompassed many of their opinions and ideas as well. The more I talked to them the more I got confused between liberals, hippies, anarchists and a weird concoction of views that everyone seems to be basing their beliefs out of.

It then hit me that feminism is a reality of its own, subtle but not subtle, there but not there, empowering in villages and raging in cities.  All the polarities in the world of feminism that seemed to exist, only told me one story- where there is oppression there is resistance. We have to learn that men are not the enemy but attitudes are more often than not the biggest enemy. Amazingly and ironically enough it was men who first started the feminist movement in India.

The more I read up and analyzed feminism in the Indian context, I realized that after so many years of being around, feminism in India has still been undefined. Surprisingly, it is still an intensely debated definition. In the urban context, it is interesting to see the evolution of feminism and how it transformed to so much more than it was originally intended for. I love the flexibility though, that feminism offers in its definition in rural places and suppressive religious environments which is the saving grace and the only source of hope, self esteem and sense of being for women and girls as opposed to how contrastingly in some urban contexts, uber-stylish activists and feminist movements seem to use it to define their existence

It is amazing how feminism can be used for feeling cool as well as attaining liberation at the same time. I guess its definition lies in the shades of gray. In a way I have started to like feminism for its liberal views and for its allowance of letting a circle fit into a rectangle quite in its own way.

Just another story of India

As I sit by my window on a day that looks like it could be winter again, half way around the world from home in Washington DC, my mind wanders off to India and gets trapped in a complex web of thoughts. Everyday my heart gets tugged in 20 million ways by so many things Indian and India that are hard to explain in words and sentences.

So far my nagging urge to write about the musings of my own mind and its inconsequential reflections have been isolated to the white pages of my numerous journals, life-long friends that have been gathering dust in shoe boxes back in my room in Pune, India.  Nothing used to make me happier than a pen in my hand, and the blank pages of my journal waiting to hear and bare all the passing clouds and thoughts in my head. Over the years, so many of my friends and acquaintances have pleaded, encouraged and suggested that I start a blog and I have finally succumbed to it.  So I hope that in a world of infinite words and never ending blogs, mine will have its own message and stories from my everyday life and reflections of the east and the west, two worlds that simultaneously co-exist in everything I do.

I went back to India for a short break recently, after almost 18 months the longest I have ever been away from home. Landing at the Mumbai airport made me feel a million different things all at once. As I transitioned into everyday life for 3 weeks, everything felt the same as always but at the same time it hit me how tradition and culture is slowly but obviously evolving into a weird hotchpotch of its own, where everything and everyone seems to be battling against the old and the new simultaneously. The more I think of what is happening in India, the more I feel like I am lost in a haze of ironies and paradoxes. It miffs me more than ever.

We have all our big IT parks and tech companies that have got us money, fame and name but the fundamental problem of unemployment still drags. In this age of science and technology and village folk making it big in the IT and other sectors we still have depressingly below standard education and government schools.

I still struggle to understand how a country with such shaky foundations does well enough to be talked about globally as one of the next big things. Ironically enough 40% of the people in my city Pune, one of the most modern cities in India have no toilets and the same is true for 80% people in Maharashtra. Mushrooming multiplexes, designer shops and a few state of the art buildings make people forget about the everyday miseries of the less fortunate. It is this huge mass of the under-privileged that actually accounts for the vote banks politicians take for granted. In spite of that, development and basic amenities are so grossly neglected towards lower and more oppressed classes and they are conveniently spared progress and a better quality of living. A professor of sociology from Jamia Milia Islamia said in a debate on NDTV “Politicians today are ready to kill but not ready to die for their beliefs and ideals.” Those words struck me as very profound and reflective of the fabric and narrative of an evolving India. It saddened me that everyday in India just seems to increase polarities both economically and socially.

As my 3 weeks were up I still did not process India, something that has been a life-long endeavor so far. I left though with hope and an inexplicable sense of optimism for reasons unknown to myself. I felt a strange sense of peace that was truly deep-seated in spite of everything. This trip has just opened up a ton of mines that have made themselves home in my mind over a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, India once again was a reaffirmation of my old judgments, love, confusion and dreams for the chaos and enigma that it has become today.