Homeless in India.

Two items caught my eye on the Edit Page of The Times of India a couple of days back. One of them was an article by a documentary film maker describing the plight of the tribals in India who are made homeless every time the governemnt decides to build a dam on a river. It seems there have been 60 million oustees ever since 1947 as a result of these river dam projects. I had written about this sorry state being a symptom of the utter heartlessness of the Indian State earlier. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/are-you-hungry-tonight.html. Sagari Chhabra’s ‘Sarkari Violence’ cites several atrocities perpetrated by forestry department’s official, police personnel and contractors on tribals. The first one of them was at Pararia in West Bengal in 1991 where the guilty went scot-free. In the second instance, a few years later in Sagbara District in Gujarat, the two policemen who raped Guntaben, a young tribal, were imprisoned for ten years thanks to the intervention of Amnesty International on her behalf. The other instance he cites happened in Nandurbar, Narmada Valley, where the tribals were displaced four times, literally hounded by the officials all the time. The motive for the horrendous treatment according to Chabbra is to demoralize the hapless victims who have nobody to turn to, nobody to fight on their behalf. The Dalit have a champion in the shape of a political party. The other instance the author mentions is the first major river valley project, Hirakud in Orissa, where the oustees living on open land were relentlessly harassed by the forestry personnel. The story repeats itself in Singrauli, also in Madhya Pradesh, where the tribal oustees were displaced at least three times in three decades. The other eye-catching item in The Times of India was cheek-by-jowl with Chhabra’s article. This little piece by PM Warrier (‘Banyan Jitters’) was about the writer’s trepidation at the likelihood of what might happen to the banyan tree right across his brother’s house in Kothakurssi (Palakkad District, Kerala), called “our” tree by the Warrier Family. The reason for worry is as follows. One of the nearby banyan trees which was supposed to be the residence of malignant spirits had been sawed down. The oustees had gone berserk and had gone on a killing rampage. The only way to placate them seemed to be to find them a new residence. The author was horrified by the possibility of that “honour” falling on “our” banyan. Ironical, isn’t it? Anything is possible in “our” country, where mangalik brides marry peepul trees in Varanasi, banana trees in Bengaluru and gold or silver idols of Lord Vishnu in Ayodhya and get slapped with a PIL for their trouble, though. http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=2f1c739c-cd0e-4916-bf95-f69176a0102f&ParentID=ad80e5d8-e01d-4474-8892-04c2678fb19f&.

Why a duck to water? Quack, quack.

I’m amazed. Astounded. Maybe, even dumbfounded. (No, I didn’t have Roget’s Thesaurus within easy reach.) Witnessing the sorry plight of many of the non-English speaking students these days, I cannot simply comprehend how I ever managed to become fairly proficient in that totally alien language. Because I too belonged to a middle-class family that spoke Marathi all day. So, I had no contact with English until I first joined a mediocre school in the neighbourhood. Somehow I took to it like a duck to water, though. I never needed to mug up spellings or rules of grammar. All of it came to me kind of intuitively. Unlike the situation now, there was no pressure then at home to master the language. In fact, apart from The Times of India, the three magazines the family subscribed to were all Marathi. My mother used to read them and I followed suit. My sister, though, had a few English magazines home-delivered to her by a ‘circulating’ library. I’m not quite sure if I even glanced at them. (But, if memory serves, Coronet and Pageant numbered among them.) At the same time, I was also good in Marathi. Later on, when I passed my SSC examination from a somewhat better school, I topped my class in English with a distinction and even got a prize for it. My experience suggests that the lack of ‘exposure’ is not what hinders youngsters from learning a language. Lack of interest and/or too severe parental pressure probably explains their failure. Read some useful info here: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0005contextual.html. P.S.: Those children of a Lesser God who haven’t even heard of Why A Duck – a large format book of stills and dialogues from Marx Brothers’ movies which I had bought from Nalanda at The Taj Intercontinental ages ago but seem to have misplaced somewhere along the way – can at least take a gander at http://www.whyaduck.com/. Believe me, though, goose. It’s nowhere close to the real thing.