THE NEW NORM

To figure out a new norm, I figured out the old one first. 1984, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, Union Carbide responsible. We made our first many bucks by selling certificates. For a whole year, and the following decade, anyone who wanted to submit to the government that they, or some member of their family, had suffered due to the killer, debilitating gas, came to us. We made a file for them, with certified true copies of their birth certificate, income-certificate from their Panchayat, ration-card and medical certificate, too. We gave death certificates of relatives, real or imagined, for a higher fee, naturally, for they were more difficult to procure (regular printer refused to print because of a superstition). That file would get them a pension for life. Or a one-time grant or some facility or the other from the government. Some even managed to get maal from the company, directly. Smart people. And what did we get? A fee, an income. We did so many people so much good. We also bought our first car. Cars. 1993, the Latur Earthquake. God was kind; we added a floor to our house. Competition had come in, but we were quick. Temporary huts, roofs, beds, gas-cylinders, sale of farmland, licences, paperwork in government offices to apply for subsidies, grants. Our rates were low: two per cent of what anyone got. Fifty rupees extra for the trouble we took to help people out. Competition was negligible. The 2000s have been generous. The Gujarat earthquake. We filmed doctors bandaging wounds, people digging trenches, pitching tents, cooking and transporting food and sold the footage to news channels. We changed with the times. Our rivals were still selling certificates. We’d moved on. Experience matters, see? I didn’t have to worry about my daughter’s dowry. Or my sister’s daughter’s. I donated a hundred and one gilded coconuts to the Siddhi-Vinayak temple. Nothing’s too good for one’s favourite deity, no? 2001, January, the tsunami. We gathered truckloads of clothes, rations, medicines. People were ready to buy cooking oil, petrol, soap, water. Wherever we went, whenever we set up shop, whether in Tamil Nadu or Andhra, it was hard work. Businessmen from all over the country were setting up shop. We had expected to make a tidy profit, but no, the competition kept the prices low. We didn’t make a loss. That’s all I can say. 2006, the Mumbai floods. no luck there. That city has its own network. We did some business and stayed put, which was good, because we do some dhanda annually, nothing spectacular, but regular stuff. Plastic-sheets and gutter-cleaning labour-contracts, mainly. Herbal teas and immunity-boosters were good investments, yes. Natural disasters are a boon, yes. 2013 and 2019, Uttarakhand cloudburst and collapse. We ran there as fast as we could. We’re the experts. We can give you any disaster material anywhere in the country, anytime you want it. Glucose biscuits made locally, packed with wrappers to make them look like the real stuff. When you’re hungry, been out of food for three-four days, tastes the same, whether the biscuits have paraffin or maida. One hundred and ninety-nine percent profit? Arrey, multiply that by ten. You want drinking water? We give. You want paracetamol? We give. You want to call the Army? Ok, we have our limitations, but we try. If you pay, we try. 2020, January. We got a whiff that something was happening, weren’t sure. March, the Pradhan Mantri, bless his chest, announced the Lockdown. Covid-Corona, Virus-Shirus, curfew. Wah. Milk, dal and rice, wheat and sugar, there was money to be made, we thought and the family sat to bounce ideas. It led to nowhere, too many players around. Then, we learnt about the PPEs and masks. When the planet bowed to the whims of a mutant-nucleic-acid, we weren’t prepared, I admit. We learnt overnight, like a million-million others, to do things together that we’d never done before. Online education and WFH is what you think. We’re different. Standing in our balcony at 2000 hours, one particular evening, clapping and banging our thalis with spoons, we realized where the future lay. We raced to make or buy and sell elastic-eared masks. Paper ones, jute ones, synthetic ones, cotton ones. With stripes and zari-work, masculine-looking ones, colourful checks for the style-conscious, bright-motifs for toddlers and old-fashioned ones for old people. Millions of masks at a profit of Rs. 1 per mask comes to… do the math. Disposable gloves, aprons, head-gear. Home-made sanitizers, sanitizer-bottles with/out pumps, sanitizer-bottle-dispensers with foot-operated levers. Chaandi hi chaandi—no, sona hi sona. Life is good, Corona-mata ki jai ho. One of my cousins is negotiating with a dozen hospitals for ventilators and another is having discussions about garbage-removal/disposal contract with a couple of MLAs. Viva. The other day, I walked into a new beauty-parlour at Porvorim. Nothing they can do can make me beautiful, for that I’d need a jadugar, no less, I agree. What impressed me was, they were charging Rs 100 for a safety ‘kit’ which including plastic footwear covers. Now, to tell customers that the present mutant might jump from ground to nostril and endanger all around was novel. I came from there a wiser woman. The new norm requires one to be quick-thinking, a step ahead of the others in the race. It’s not about selling home-made ladoos/chaklis. It’s not about tailoring your own clothes or making family movies and putting them on YouTube/FB/Instagram to bore relatives on the other side of the planet. The new norm is about frightening people or convincing them that they should be frightened—or at least more responsible until the vaccine takes over—and buy chappal-covers in barber-shops so we can enjoy the hospitality of Bank Managers, get a free diary/calendar for 2021. It’s when you compare the new norm with the old that the picture becomes clear: whilst change is the only constant, as things have been, things remain.

Spending is an Art or My Heroes 2020

There’s a difference between expenditure and waste. Wonderful words. I typed them on the screen and read them aloud and I was going to expand on them, when I could type no further, because Shri Husband peeked over my shoulder and made a nasty comment. Because he had nothing better to do. Because he is presently partially locked, and it doesn’t matter to him that all of us are. He scowls nevertheless, thinking he alone is being punished for something that is not his fault in any way. He is, therefore, in a permanently bad mood (since it’s a continuing condition, can’t really make out what the triggers are, honestly). When the government says ‘bhiu-pa chi garaz na’ and the doctor says, ‘take all precautions, mask-wash-distance, it’s a bad infection, this corona virus causes’, can’t blame him now, can I? They say, and I have read, that full un-locking (or should I say locking-up?) will take years if not months, vaccine or no vaccine, because the no-one’s sure how the virus will behave and mutate. So, bored in the interim period, he’s (Shri Husband, not the doctor) ready to pick on anyone. Mainly, me. I erased what I’d written. “You mean ‘deleted’,” said my personal, domestic interferon (what an apt word to use in these Covid Times, heh, heh, to describe Shri Husband). “Whatever,” I retorted, typing on, hoping my months-long-grown hair would block his vision. No such luck. “But it’s true,” he said, agreeing with me in a grudging kind of way, “Spending really is an art.” He must have heard this in childhood or read it on a car-sticker or something. Can’t believe he could come up with something so profound. “Means?” I said, hoping to shut him up. Usually, when I ask such questions, he gets up and walks away. He didn’t. Instead, he told me: “Spending, whether of time, energy or money, is a habit. A habit is an acquired behaviour pattern that is followed so regularly it’s almost involuntary. Examples of spending habits might include shopping for trivia on pay-day where money is concerned. Where time is concerned, getting up late in the morning and watching television at night and then panicking when the deadline for the column is very close.” He was getting into lecture-baazi mode, so I kept typing, bashing on regardless, ignoring him. That’s the best thing to do, I’ve learnt. In bygone years, I have known housewives who sorted out the husband’s salary (in those days wages were disbursed in cash even if the earner wore a white collar) and put fixed amounts in envelopes labelled ‘bread’, ‘eggs’, ‘butter’, ‘daal’, ‘soap’, ‘gas’, ‘milk’, ‘vegetables’, etc. Oh, and ‘matches’, for induction and micro-wave cooking didn’t exist even in fantasy stories. Nor did the internet. Or the mobile-phone. It was always a mystery to me what they did if they needed extra salt, sugar or oil in a particular month because the ants attacked a dabba or carelessness led to spillage. Shri Husband felt, still feels, that wives like me “would take out from one envelope some money and put it in another to neutralize a deficit in the latter and play musical envelopes till the end of the month”. Not true, but I don’t protest. I still know families who budget their EMIs, credit-card amounts, birthday-party gifts expenses, Netflix charges, petrol-bills, medical insurance and stuff. As an afterthought, they add school-fees: I should know, have been phone-chasing defaulters since the beginning of this academic year. But I stray… Smart people manage and manipulate their twenty-four hours. Shri Husband snorted: ‘Smart’. I knew he was thinking of, or referring through that snort to those like me, who need twelve hours sleep, some minutes snatched through the day and, steadfastly, many hours at a stretch at night. They also need to chew their food well and sit before, during and after meals/baths or returning from or before going to office/market. How to spend time calls for another column. Some are good at energy-conservation: they peel garlic while the milk is on the boil, run the mixer whilst the pressure-cooker whistles, sweep and mop whilst the washing-machine churns. Wise they are, for they accomplish much through the day. “And,” mumbled the man in my life, “some are otherwise.” Before I could react, he rectified that and said, “You do manage a lot of free time, I must admit. Teach me how to do it.” When he asks a favour like that, I go chup. He believes I’m a creative person. He also believes that lazy people are creative: they think of ways to get out of energy-expending situations. We both appreciate—and you know it’s rare for us to agree upon anything at all-- those who know what gives them pleasure: music, trekking, bird-watching, growing vegetables, collecting mouse-pads (or wrist-watches, which is my hobby, ahem), brewing wine, making jewellery, baking sour-dough bread, travelling, clicking photographs, etc. Those are the people who rule the money they earn. Money doesn’t dictate that it should be saved or splurged upon short-lived joys like buying shoes you will wear but once and then let the fungi and mould feast upon them. “The same,” said Shri Husband, indicating that I should take down what he’s saying, “is true about spending/wasting time or energy.” I have noticed that those who are careful with money are careful with time and energy. I saw Shri Husband nodding. In agreement. A never-to-be-forgotten moment. It was then that the Universe colluded: we both simultaneously heard the news that Mr. Ranjitsinh Disale had won the one million US dollar Global Teacher Prize for being an exceptional teacher who made an outstanding contribution to the profession. There were 12000 applications and nominations from 140 countries. The gentleman is from a Zilla Parishad Primary School in a place now prominently on the map: Paritewadi, Solapur, Maharashtra. That was impressive. We were delighted. More joy: Mr. Disale shared half his prize money with the other nine finalists. Which means half of more than seven crores in Indian rupees. Each of the other finalists will get, thanks to Mr. Disale’s generosity and consideration, fifty-five lakh of our currency. Whew. Shri Husband said, “He’s only thirty-two, and he knows how to spend correctly.” We’ve learnt a big lesson from someone half our age. I thought—Shri Husband all but forbids me from thinking, says it tires my brain, but I think anyway—that just as important was the fact that the person who constituted this award in 2014 was also an Indian, Mr. Sunny Varkey from Kerala, a businessman and long-time resident of the UAE. He heads the Varkey Foundation, which is a charitable organisation dedicated to changing lives through education. Imagine spending a million US dollars per year on a prize. Another man really knows to spend; for once, Shri Husband and I agreed yet again. In this Year that Changed the Planet, at the tail end of the year, I virtually met my heroes 2020. These two men, may their tribe increase, have shown how when time, energy and money are correctly utilized—‘spent, not wasted,’ Shri Husband reminded me--- magic happens.

a poem on inoculations

file:///C:/Users/Sheila/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/248-Blinded%20Article%20Text-1338-1-10-20191222%20(1).pdf

individual needs in plastic surgery

https://www.rhime.in/ojs/index.php/rhime/article/view/267

a poem about dying on an operating table.

https://www.rhime.in/ojs/index.php/rhime/article/view/261/279?fbclid=IwAR3fY16CnHGnmqkc-qvP51BUHtzLck9Ar9EaJpL5axNhO2pMpSS1MbA6qGw

lockdown 700 students.

I rarely write serious stuff.
I work as Administrator of three schools. Two (a Konkanni-medium primary school and a high school) get grant-in-aid from the government and one is unaided.
A few of our ‘aided’ children, from standards I-VIII come to school attracted by the midday-meal provided by the government. We can’t help them with food through their vacations anytime, even in years past, that’s true. But, the lockout that flowed from 22 Mar into the summer holidays meant many of them would be drinking/eating Pepsi/vada-paav (or basic fare like chapati-onions equivalent) for more than two months.
These midday-meals comprising two pulses and two vegetables, and bread, are monotonous, but nutritious. When I joined, and found that on some days the food was bad, I threw a minor tantrum and threatened to complain to the authorities. After that, the local women’s Self-Help Group started making pretty good stuff. (Aside: four women cater to a total of 1200 students in different schools, daily, in Porvorim. They start cooking at 0445 in the morning and dispatch the dabbas by 0945. Covid19 has locked down on their income, approx. Rs 7000/m/person.)
The UNaided school’s fees are low, approximately Rs 600/month; I don’t know whether the parents will henceforth be able to afford even those.
The lockdown means a large number of students would lose out on routine. I don’t mean a rigid time-table, but expected events like getting a meal at all or an uninterrupted night’s rest. A single room shared by family members and ‘guests’ from the village, even a tenant or two, don’t allow for the humdrum existence and privacy most middle-class persons take for granted. Unpleasant silences and high-decibel quarrels are the norm. Physical fights, substance abuse, sexual harassment provide highly avoidable excitement.
Considering they’re already lagging in studies compared to their better-off contemporaries from well-off homes and expensive schools, this gap—already big-- is going to be hard to fill over the years post-lockdown. Unlocking cannot be switched on, it will take time for the parents’ incomes to stabilize and for their homes to return to normalcy.
I read posts on Facebook. This is what comes to mind. The Covid-19 Lockdown, to those connected with schools like mine, is not about getting used to doing jhaadoo-pocha. Our PTA comprises plumbers, electricians, masons, tea-stall workers, maids and such like who have never had groceries home-delivered, who believe their children will get a better life than theirs because they wear a uniform and attend school with a bag and books.
Many of the semi-/illiterate parents aren’t unintelligent. They recognize how the Lockdown losses will affect them. So do those of my ilk. But we can plan. We won’t starve. They might.
Goa locked down a few days before the rest of the country. Schools and colleges were among the first to shut their doors to students, though the teachers/staff attended. Exams were initially cancelled, then postponed. For the first three days, only the stray dogs that prowl in the compound missed the children. The rest thought it was time to catch up with Whatsapp messages, finishing corrections and making long-pending register entries. By the time the national lockdown was announced on 22 Mar, there was a sense of unease: what to do about the IV, IX and X standards?
Standard IV is when the child leaves primary to enter middle school. It involves re-admission, even if it is into the same institution’s senior section. Standard X appears for the Board examination. It’s the first rung of the future, the first external exam. The backgrounds of the students notwithstanding, our Board results have been good. Speaks well for the teachers/staff.
IX is important for a completely different reason. That is the only time a school need not promote a student who has not fared well over since the time s/he joined school, when students can decide whether they want to subsequently do vocational/academic courses, or take up jobs.
Until VIII, schools are supposed to continuously evaluate students through the year on classwork, homework, projects, oral responses, behaviour, attendance, etc. Practically, in a class of forty students, most of whom are first-generation school-goers, the only way to evaluate a child’s progress is through tests and exams. It is almost impossible to make a child repeat a year, which is why this policy has earned the name ‘no-fail’ policy.
Many of the 700+ students of my schools aren’t going to be learning music/craft with their parents. The online tutorials on the free channels are in English or Hindi; our Konkanni Primary kids won’t follow any of it. Even our high school students will find difficulty without guidance from a teacher. They must be whiling away their awake hours playing games on their parents’ phones. Or hanging around OUTside their homes as there’s not much space inside. The swampy, garage-littered surroundings won’t do much for their physiological/psychological well-being.
Much though people grumble about ‘government schools/teachers’, my small audit sample, restricted to these schools, has shown me that the teachers really do their best. They have to tackle more than finishing portions and imparting knowledge through modern teaching methods. They are faced with poverty, malfunctioning families and their consequences. They hand-hold the children from ages five to fourteen. Releasing them into the world at the best of times is heart-breaking.
The lockdown can’t be suddenly lifted. Whilst the haves will pick up the threads quite easily—their parents have spent quality time with them, their teachers have gently taught them the reading/writing/’rithmatic, craft/music/PE through virtual media, the have-nots would have developed deficiencies in nutrition, emotion and discipline.
Can I bring myself, anxious as I am about the future of ‘my’ students, to think about new recipes, embroidery, poetry, painting, when in isolation/solitude? Yes. I have running water, electricity, cooking-fuel, food, a roof and the ability to read. It helps.
But, the Covid-19 Lockdown has, after a very long time, forced something humourless to get typed out of my keyboard.

Engraved in Steel Covid Lockdown.

Covid-Lockdown = Spring-cleaning.

Whilst rummaging through kitchen drawers, something I saw triggered a typical Bambaiyya-Hindi phrase from long ago: “Iss per tera naam likha hai kya?”, commonly said-

• in school by mates who wouldn’t share exam timetables,
• in buses/trains during seat-grabbing,
• by clerks in government departments who took their own sweet time opening a lock/drawer/file,
• by uniformed guards at mall-entrances snapping at loiterers lingering near the luggage-rollers, curiously eyeing bags/packs.
• by acquaintances who wanted to puncture egos of foreign-returned persons who wouldn’t show them imported ball-point-pens (to own one meant you were a ‘someone’).

As I inspected the old utensils in my kitchen, I discovered how ‘naam-likha-hai’ might have originated.
In the old days, buildings and bungalows all over India were often named after a member of the family that built them: ‘Narayan Sadan’, ‘Champa Nivas’, ‘Radha Kunj’, ‘Pethe Nilayam’, ‘Umaid Bhavan’.

Peculiarly, at a lesser economic level, south of the Vindhyas, eg. Gujarat, Maharashtra, brass/steel-ware in bought in the 1930s-‘70s, was always ‘marked’ by names of the owners.

My mother-in-law’s possessions: The handle of every spoon/ladle/spatula/strainer, the side of each vati/ pela/ dabba/ taat/ zhaaknni (=bowl/tumbler/box/plate/lid) had a name/date engraved on it. Every vessel, big/tiny, had a history.

I read one written in English: Sow Savitri Ghanashyam Doiphude. (Sow=Sau=Mrs=Saubhagyavati). Who’s that, I ask my sister-in-law over the phone; ‘might have been a neighbour’, she said. Perhaps she had loaned my mother-in-law sugar in that dabba? Excellent cursive penmanship. The letters flowed.

A big and heavy paan-daan (closed container that held betel-leaves, supari, tumbaakkoo, choona, kaat, dry-coconut-shavings, gulkand) was gifted to my father-in-law, ‘with grateful thanks’, by a certain Advocate Siddhananda Maharudhreshwar Rajyadhyakshya; the names of his juniors and staff – I imagine--have also been included, possibly rank-wise, as they weren’t in alphabetical order. The writing, again, remarkably neat, was at the bottom of the dabba. Complicated names, perfectly inscribed.

A 12”-diameter brass chapatti-dabba, the well-proportioned paraat and the wooden chakli-making-gadget had my grandmother-in-law’s name on it, greeting her on her first post-marriage Ganapati-festival. I marvel that the legible letters engraved close to a century ago have survived scrubbing with abrasive powders and coconut coir.

No spelling mistakes. This ‘writing’ on metal was done by salesmen in steel-utensils shops in Mumbai, sitting on hard cotton cushions with white covers, next to the cashier-owner, using an electric machine with a needle-tip that tapped the metal surface at high speeds. They would have been barely literate, and in the vernacular. There was scope for errors (at least in English); there were none.

The inscriptions on three tiffins, in Marathi, tell me something about Shri Husband and his sisters. Alongside each name is the date on which the tiffin was bought. The small ones were for the primary-school years, for carrying easy-to-eat laddoos and shakkar-parya. The flat, compartmented, rectangular ones with clips on the sides were for middle-school, for chapatti+bhaji+banana. From standards eighth to eleventh (no 10+2 then) they carried multi-layered containers with usal, chapati, curd, the inevitable banana, and possibly a fistful of roasted groundnuts or homemade chakli.

There are drinking-water lotas with ‘sa-prem bhet’ (=with affection) or ‘abhinandan’ (=congratulations) written on them, presented on a birthday or on clearing a Board Examination. Some have tiny, flawlessly executed flowers/leaves drawn alongside. I marvel at the precision of the work.

The most interesting ones are the small haldi-kunku presents:

• one oil-container can pour out a teaspoonful of liquid through a beak. On it is written, ‘Lata-kaki heechya kadoon, sankrantichi bhet’ (=from Lata-kaki, on the occasion of Sankrant).

• a comb-holder from a certain Guna-atya to my eldest sister-in-law. No one remembers this Guna-atya, but the illustration of a baby held up by two sturdy hands and the fact that she was called ‘atya’ suggests she was close to my in-laws.

• Soap-dishes, wick-lamps, kunku-dispensers, sugar-pots, tea-strainers, spatulas, ladles, a remarkable assortment of spoons of all sizes, shapes and quality have at least names, if not dates and occasions, written on them.

Tiny letters, long names, longer messages, all squeezed into two-millimeter-wide, inch-long spaces. We need magnifying glasses to read some of those. I’ve seen men doing it with the aid of only ordinary spectacles.

I don’t know where/how this custom was born.

Correlle, Pyrex, Corning, Borosil, Opal, Khurja, microwave-friendly cook-cum-serve dishes look nice on our dining-tables, may serve as family heirlooms, but are unlikely to arouse curiosity. No Tupperware salad-box or Milton casserole is personalized like this. No name, no date, nothing to differentiate it from any other.

Drums to store water, with taps, before the era of the square ‘syntex’ tanks that now cling to kitchen-ceilings, had bold engravings and proudly occupied precious space on kitchen otas (=platforms). Heavy, grey, no longer shiny, but quite indestructible, impossible even to dent, our steel inheritance gave us a sense of the past, a link to parents/elders/philosophies/attitudes long gone. Many of these items, from homes like ours, have gone to charitable institutions because they are cumbersome to use and take up too much space.

I discover that the word ‘own’ has no equivalent in Marathi/Hindi.

Aadhar cards and passports have our parents’ names on them, but they don’t give a feeling of ‘ownership’.
I had not eaten from a thermocole/foil-coated toss-away until I was well into adulthood. In my parents’ generation, money was spent on education, food and rent, in that order. Every item bought was meant to last forever, hence ‘marked’.

The other markings were on our arms/thighs: to fight small-pox/diphtheria/dysentery/tuberculosis.
We’ve changed our lifestyle and habits, and in the near future, will change them drastically again. Vocabulary and habits have changed drastically and will change some more. Strangely, the phrase ‘naam likha hai kya’ might, I believe, live on.

This compulsory staying put, caged in a comfortable home, thinking about those who don’t have what I have, is a memory forming, nestling, staying put in every human mind alive and conscious today. Across country and race, war and riot, garden and golf, a collective, never-to-be-forgotten part of Mankind’s memory.

Covid-Lockdown=Engraved Forever.