FotoWeek DC 2015

For folks in DC, MD and VA, a week-long photography festival and exhibition is currently on at  various locations in DC and Virginia. If you're in town, more than a few look like they could be worth your time.

A complete list of events is at this link: http://www.fotodc.org/fotoweekdc/ 

Starting today: "In a special nighttime display from November 9-12, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will project images onto its exterior walls that feature religious and ethnic minorities persecuted in Iraq. These stunning photos were taken as part of a bearing witness trip to raise awareness about attacks on civilians in the region. The exhibition will begin with an opening program the evening of Monday, November 9, featuring a discussion with experts who will explore what is driving the conflict and what can be done to end it." More at: http://www.fotodc.org/events/2015/11/9/exhibitions-nighttime-projections

I was at the main photography exhibition space at what used to be the official residence of the Spanish Ambassadors to the US (now a Spanish Cultural Center) in DC. The photographs are everything from cute to stunning to gut wrenching.

There is one particular section on the fight for LGBT rights in Russia (part of the Pulitzer Center exhibit) and this alone is worth going out to see. There will be a panel discussion during this week that will include one of the activists who is currently in the US seeking asylum.

And then there are the delightful ones, such as the series on dogs who freestyle dance with their humans - yes, that is apparently a thing. Titled 'Everyone Likes to Cha Cha Cha,' the photographer of the exhibit, Bogo Anton, explained that she was exploring the contradictory relationships we humans have with animals ("we eat some, hate some and love the rest") and stumbled upon this dog-human freestyle dance community. She spent three months traveling across the US, photographing and documenting the pairs and their performances.

As part of FotoWeek, there are movies, panel discussions, photo exhibits (including those of contest winners), photojournalism exhibits (images from Afghanistan, Iraq), and a documentary about Dorothea Lange made by her grand-daughter.

Two Avalakki (Pressed Rice Flakes) Recipes from North Karnataka, and a Peek Into a Kitchen of the Past

The entire essay and the recipes are on The Aerogram. Here are a few excerpts.

Avalakki is a staple in North Karnataka cuisine. Avalakki Uppittu, a type of semi-dry porridge, is a popular breakfast dish. The rice flakes are also used to make quick snacks eaten late in the afternoon. A few basic spices and ingredients are all it takes to turn avalakki into dishes that are flavorful but light. More elaborate preparations of avalakki (such as Chivda) are made once in a while in large quantities to pack and take while travelling or to share among family and guests during festivals and religious observations.

Avalakki is available in three varieties — thin, medium and thick — and is sold in Indian grocery stores as poha. The thin and medium varieties (and a super thin version known as ‘nylon’ avalakkki) are ideal for dishes that do not require the avalakki to be soaked in water. The thick variety is called for in dishes such as Avalakki Uppittu where the pressed rice flakes will be soaked in water before being steamed with spices and vegetables.

 [...]

Shakuntala Bai's Kitchen
Once she finishes prepping the dough, Shakuntala Bai places the cast iron pan on the stove, checks the fire and fiddles with it a little until she’s satisfied. She moves a little so she’s in front of the large, round, smooth Shahbaz stone placed strategically near the stove. She flours the surface and pats small balls of the dough into circular shapes on the stone, her palm going pat, pat, pat on the stone, constantly moving in quick semi-circles so the bhakris turn out evenly round. With darting movements, her fingers dab drops of water on the now expanding circle to fix cracks and then some flour so it doesn’t get stuck on the stone. Water, flour, water, pat, pat, pat. A white cloud of fine flour dust swirls in the air around her.

By this time, Shakuntala Bai’s kitchen is humming. The dal bubbles softly, perhaps there’s milk boiling on one of the other stoves, fires crackle under the various vessels and pans, her hands and bangles providing a steady rhythm to the melody.

Forbes Article on D.C. Pedicabs

The nose wheel makes an acute turn and plants itself in the six-foot-wide gap between two cars idling at a traffic light on 14^thStreet. Before we have time to analyse just how our driver would steer the rest of the 10-foot-long ‘pedicab’ into that space, we’re straddling another lane line a few feet down the road between a big, red tourist bus and a truck. A few more zigs and zags later, we are in front of a bank of vehicles at least 30 cars deep, clear of all the exhaust. Our driver looks back at us and declares triumphantly, “Like I said, this is not my first day on the job!”

For the past two years, Will Visbeck has been honing his skills as a driver of a pedicab – known to the rest of the world variously as cycle rickshaw, cyclo, becak or trishaw – on the streets of Washington, D.C. It has no roof, doors, seatbelts, airbags, rear-view mirrors or stereo systems (though headlight, taillight and turn signals are in evidence) but we do get to make leisurely circles around statues and monuments as our driver keeps up his commentary of the sights.

Originally published in ForbesLife India. A link to the pdf version is here.

Not Becoming My Mother, Ruth Reichl

A couple of weeks ago we were in the check-out line at the library, standing right next to a shelf of newly released books. As the kids and and I waited our turn we scanned the shelf, picking up books and putting them back. One book - about the size of my extended palm, a black and white photograph on the cover with a middle-aged woman and a young girl, both sitting at a table - caught my eye. The woman's expression drew my attention as much as the title did - her face is resting on her palm and she is looking at the young girl, a gentle smile creasing her cheeks. The title of the book was Not Becoming My Mother, written by Ruth Reichl, the editor of the newly-defunct Gourmet magazine.

I know titles are meant to be provocative and grab the readers' attention, but it still managed to shock me. I added it to our pile of books and read it at the first opportunity I got - that night after the kids were in bed.

The tussle between mothers and daughters, the conflict-ridden relationships that many women have with their mothers, is not new to me. I had a classmate back in college who struggled with her mother's jealousies. That a mother could be jealous of her own daughter's good looks or appearance was unfathomable to me. Didn't all mothers and fathers want their children to be better, to do better, to have better than them? Since then I've listened as numerous friends talked about their daily fights with their mothers over trivial matters, about massive disagreements over deeply-held beliefs, about mothers not showing up at weddings, not even coming to celebrate the birth of grandchildren. And I have read about them. With all those women I could sympathize, but I could not empathize.

I could wax eloquent about my mom and the post would run ten screens long. It's not that I did not have disagreements with her, but even in the midst of my teenage rebellion years, I saw her for what she was. She was a mother looking out for her daughter and her best interests. She was a different human being than me - quite simply her DNA make-up is different than mine - so it was an exercise in futility to expect the both of us to react in the same way to a situation.

For me, in the grand scheme of things, she was and is an awesome human being with a wicked sense of humor that she turns on herself as frequently as she does on us, with a fierce sense of loyalty to her husband and her children (and now her daughter-in-law, son-in-law and the grandkids), a fantastic cook and hostess, practical to a fault ("if something needs to get done, put your head down and do it and quit whining" is her mantra), very strong sense of knowing one's place and doing what is expected, especially when it comes to respecting elders. Being a mother myself now, it is mind-boggling to me that somehow she's managed to impart much of her wisdom to us, without even seeming to try. All in all, she is trying her damnedest to do the best she can. And I love her to bits and respect her all the more for it.

Reichl has had a far different relationship with her mother. She writes that her mother was not good at many things and she was not "if truth be told, a particularly good mother. [M]y mother was a great example of everything I didn't want to be, and to this day I wake up every morning grateful that I'm not her."

The sub-title to her book is 'and other things she taught me along the way'. It gave me an inkling that perhaps the book is not the damning indictment that the title would have you believe, but my initial reaction to the book's title stayed with me until I made my way through a few more pages and it dawned on me what Reich was attempting to do.

At first blush, the memoir is a woman's effort to draw lessons from her mother's life. But it is so much more than that. If a child wrote a letter of love, appreciation, respect and deep gratitude to their mother, it would take the shape and form of Not Becoming My Mother. It is an attempt to peel away the layers and layers of hurt that had enveloped the author over a number of years. It is an attempt to put her mother's actions in context. A mother who was brilliant and wanted to be a doctor, but not that great-looking. In an age where women were expected to be beautiful but not ambitious, it was a double whammy that succeeded in decimating her chances at happiness.

It is so easy to give in to hurt, especially when the one person in the world that is supposed to love you unconditionally does not. Which is why it is all the more heartening that Reichl embarked on the journey to figure out her mother at all, to understand her as a woman. With the help of her mother's writing she finds in shoe boxes, on scraps of paper, on old receipts, Reichl pieces together the portrait of a woman who somehow figured out how to be the kind of role model that her own daughter did not want to emulate. As the sketch fills out and we slowly start to see the flesh and blood and color appearing on canvas, our viewpoint undergoes a change. We are no longer looking at the dark and foreboding image of a bad mother, we are looking at a woman who desperately does not want her daughter to struggle with the demons she did.

Meeting Mom - the real Mom - was even harder than I expected. I never thought her life was easy, but until I read her letters I had not known the enormous burden of pain she carried with her.

There are a few good reasons why it's worth reading Not Becoming My Mother. It is beautifully written, lucid, introspective and thoughtful. It is a personal memoir, but it manages to capture the life of an entire generation of women. It makes its point and moves on.

But the most important reason of all is the fact that Reichl wants to see beyond the veneer that her mother presented to the world. Some of us might undertake the same exercise and come up empty, but Reichl does succeed in seeing her mother for who she was. She places her actions in context, understands her mother's own upbringing, learns of her desires and ambitions, her disappointments and failures. And she sees that her mother tried to do the very best she could, given her experiences and her background and her circumstances. She sees that her mother manged to get her to a place where she could be happy. And she gives her mother credit for it.

The only want I see in this story is that I wish Reichl had reached this understanding when her mother was still alive.

Updated to add the first part of the second sentence in the penultimate paragraph.

Perspectives

I'm linking to a few ideas/articles that piqued my interest over the weekend.

1. Nancy Gibbs in Time magazine on a hitherto unexplored angle on President Clinton:

One person who did not leave Chelsea alone was her father. In acclaimed historian Taylor Branch's new book The Clinton Tapes — woven from Branch's recorded conversations with the President from 1993 to 2001 — the portrait of the relationship between Bill Clinton, a man who never knew his own father, and his daughter reveals a side we rarely saw on the public stage. Bill Clinton, it turns out, raised a daughter and ran the free world, sometimes in that order.

2. There was an awesome segment on 60 Minutes this morning about former Secretary of State Madeline Albright's collection of lapel pins. Each pin has a backstory - personal, political, historical - and now they are on exhibition in New York City, and Ms. Albright has a new book coming out called Read My Pins. I can't find the video on CBS' website, but all I found was this link to a short CBS News clip.

3. Andrew O'Hehir writes in Salon, in an article titled "Confessions of a Home-Schooler," about him and his wife starting out on the home-schooling adventure with their two five-year-old twins:

Both Leslie [the children's' mother] and I went to public school and had the usual assortment of excellent, mediocre and bad teachers. We're not zealots with some animus against public education. We're glad it exists and relatively happy to pay taxes to sustain it. As I said earlier, though, we feel dubious about the ideology that seems dominant in public education these days, and especially about the idea that sending kids to school virtually all day for 10 months a year, beginning at age 3 or 4, is the healthiest mode of delivering it.

...

I think home schooling has brought Leslie and me closer together.... The four of us are a pretty tight unit -- it's not us against the world, but us in the world, trying to experience the days as they come.

We've planted seeds and watched them grow into sunflowers taller than Daddy; read books about Alexander Calder and Squanto and the warm-blooded, egg-laying Maiasaura; told stories about how our beloved bunny Picaro made his final voyage into the Egyptian Land of the Dead. We say goodbye to the setting sun (when we remember to) and greet each new day with tremendous enthusiasm, often much closer to dawn than the adults would prefer. I'm not saying that other families don't do that stuff too. I guess I'm saying what I said already: It works for us.

4. Ra on the myths surrounding alternative education in India:

I thought I’d tackle some of the common points (some of them myths) that arise when there is a discussion about alternative schools first:

Alternative Schools Are all very Expensive:
I think people often think that alternative schools are the same as “international” schools and automatically assume that they will be expensive. There are some very expensive international schools in India, that do follow alternative models, at least in so far as they are “alternative” to the more conventional schools. But there are alternative schools that have been around for ages, such as the K schools and Mirambika that charge around the same as lots of other schools. Some of the alternative schools are boarding schools and thus charge more, but are not necessarily the most expensive boarding schools around. Some alternative schools offer scholarships and take children when the parents are unable to meet the full fees.

What caught your fancy this weekend?

The Power of Education

I know it's not as simple. Education does not necessarily bring empowerment. But when you read Tererai's story, it's difficult not to think otherwise:

After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then married her off at about age 11.

Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy and beat her whenever she tried to practice her reading by looking at a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.

Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and other young women in her village, Luck kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant.

[...]

After Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study on her own, in hiding from her husband, while raising her five children. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for Goal 1. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. — all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattle herder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year’s formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, and then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.

Read the rest of Tererai's story in this New York Times Magazine essay titled The Women's Crusade (excerpted from a forthcoming book titled "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn). Her story and the stories of some of the other women profiled in the essay are exhilarating.

The Newsweek Oprah Story: What Do Celebrities Owe Us?

Newsweek carries a scathing article in its latest edition, about Oprah and the 'bad', 'wrong', 'risky' health advice she dishes on her daily TV show:

Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn't have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be.

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

Yes, Oprah is popular. Wildly so. Yes, she has a broad-based, ardent following for her TV show. Yes, the things she recommends on her show have the habit of flying off the shelves (or whatever the equivalent is on Amazon). But does any of this mean that she owes anything to her audience other than being honest when she says she tried such and such product or when she says she loved the book she picked for her book club?

I am not an expert on Oprah. I watch clips from her shows off and on and read her and about her in magazines and on websites. From what I've seen and read, she comes across as the person who is enthusiastic about certain things (some ideas, some products, some services) and uses her show - a vehicle and brand she created from scratch and built to dish on her view of life and its struggles - to talk about them. That a million people rush off buy the thing she mentions on the show - what exactly does it require her to do? Worry that her audience might use the information blindly without investigating it further for themselves? Should she be responsible for the actions of her audience?

This is a question I've asked before in relation to the Phelps marijuana fiasco. Just because a celebrity is good at something and they make money off of it or are popular because of it, does it mean that they should be on their best behaviour, do the right things and say the right things?

The Newsweek article places a litany of demands on Oprah's show. A sampling:

""Because of the power and influence that Oprah's show has, she should make an extra effort to be clear."" (Comment on a show about the HPV vaccine.)

"Oprah said almost nothing about possible risks." (Comment on a show about 'thread-lifting'.)

"Fanning believes Oprah should have made it clear that Thermage isn't for everyone."

Which leads me to believe that the audience has no responsibility for its own actions, that her viewers are gullible and unquestioning, that they will swallow every piece of advice that tumbles out of her mouth without assessing the pros and cons for their specific circumstances and health conditions. Is this really so? If that is the case, then Oprah and other celebrities like her are standing at the top of a very long, slippery slope. Which one of her audience members should she worry about? The ones that do not understand that medical or cosmetic procedures involve risks? The ones that do not get that medicines may have side effects? The ones that do not know enough to ask if such and such procedure is right for them? The ones that will refuse vaccinations for their children because Jenny McCarthy said so and she was on Oprah's show? Where do you start and where do you stop?

The article gives off a whiff of wanting to take the contrarian view just because. The complaints against the show appear lame and the authors and the experts they consult indulge in some heavy patronizing. The recommendations for alterations to Oprah's show (listing a procedure's side effects, introducing experts who take the opposite view on the medication being discussed, among other things) are great - if you are a C-SPAN show or a medicine ad that must follow the Federal Trade Commission rules or one of those public TV channels that no one watches. Not if you are Oprah and all you are selling is escapism in doses of an hour a day and the idea that we are all in the same boat (so what if she is super rich and super connected and super famous while most of her audience is thoroughly entrenched in the middle class?), and believe strongly in stories about wanting to be the best you can be.

So let's hang back and take Oprah's health advice with a pinch of salt. As we should. And as I'm sure she would want her audience to.

Updated June 2: Changed 'author' to 'authors' in the penultimate paragraph. The Newsweek article is credited to two writers.

The pursuit of happiness (and an unconventional tour of Washington) by Maira Kalman

Image credit: Maira Kalman for the NYT

Kalman takes you on a whirlwind tour of Washington. Hold on to your hats and enjoy this thoroughly delightful ride!

Sisterhood

I discovered Frankie Anon's blog, Object Wisdom, quite by accident. A bloghopping binge, incessant clicking, blog after blog, post after post, and then suddenly, one lovely vignette of a great aunt and uncle transplanted from America's hinterland into the Sri Lanka of the 50s and 60s. The part about the bhikku delighting in the forbidden taste of sugar at her grand aunt's dinner table was mesmerizing. I was hooked.

Frankie has stories, the kind I like to read. And she has the wonderful ability to tell them in a way that is objective and loving at the same time.

So I was (and still am!) thrilled that she thought to pass on the Sisterhood Award to me along with four other bloggers. Thank you Frankie!

The award, though, comes with a catch - I must pass it on to five other women bloggers. A catch I'm only too happy to fulfill! So here goes.

Ra - Is a thinker. I admire her passion for social issues and her commitment to righting the wrongs she sees around her on a daily basis. If there were more Ras in this world, we could all rest a little easier. I only wish she would write more!

Curiously Strong - Writes about a wide range of topics, some will throw you for a loop, some will make you nod in recognition. A blogger with incredible heart and love of life. I wish some of that would rub off on me!

Winkie's Way - Mostly writes about the adventures of the growing-up years of her two darling boys. Her posts are bathed in spirituality and have the ability to make you feel connected to her, her boys, and no matter what your belief or faith, to the grand scheme of things.

ChoxBox - Chox and I have such a similar outlook on things - the stuff we do with our kids, our ideas on schooling, on how social issues affect our kids. It's great to be able to read her thoughts.

Last, but not least, Nino's Mum - No matter if she's writing about something very personal or about the goings-on around her, Nino's Mum's writing has that wonderful lyrical quality and a depth of feeling. I know I could never write like that, but it's just lovely to be able to read someone who does it so well.

I am the luckier for having these kindred spirits (and you too Frankie) in my circle. I know I've said this before but I don't mind repeating it - we have all had such different lives, growing up far away from each other in diverse cultures, but it is just so amazing that we recognize so much of ourselves in the other. At the end of the day it's a powerful feeling to know that we're all in the same boat, that none of us is alone. And for that I'm grateful. Thank you.

If you have a few minutes to pass the thought along, here's how to do it:

1. Put the logo on your blog or post.
2. Nominate at least 5 blogs which show great ATTITUDE and/or GRATITUDE.
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
5. Share the love and link this post to the person from whom you received your award.

Blogger Templates, Blog Design and Blog Makeover

As you can tell, a shuffling of this blog's format is still on my mind. I'm looking to get some of the content on my left bar over to the right so there's some balance to the page. I got a bunch of great tips for the 3-column pages I was looking for. Not being a techie, it'll take me a while to figure out how to fiddle with the template and get what I want without ruining what I already have, but am in no rush.

In the meantime, I suddenly remembered Mahjabeen (aka MayG), a wonderfully smart and creative artist who had designed a baby shower blog early last year for a bunch of blogger friends who had babies on the way. That blog design was out of the world - the thought that went into the making of each individual feature was something I could only sit back and marvel at. I hadn't visited her blog in a while. Today when I went over, there she was, with her own blog design and blog makeover business, with a website all spiffy and beautiful, as you'd expect (and there's a picture of that baby shower blog on her site). So if you need to revamp your website or are in desperate need of a makeover for your blog, you know where to go!

It's obvious that it's a labor of love for her. And she's good at it to boot. That's a deadly combination, if you ask me. Here's wishing you the very best MayG!

Updated to add a screen shot of the baby shower blog:

What do women want?

A simple question, quite straightforward. Demands a simple, straightforward answer. Turns out women don't know what women want, according to Meredith Chivers a psychologist and research scientist in Ontario. They think and assert they want something, but their bodies tell a different story. In some graphic detail, this International Herald Tribune article explains just why Chivers has arrived at that conclusion.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms "category specific" ways. Males who identified themselves as straight ... were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. ....And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph [sensors measuring physical reactions, the objective measure in the test].

[...]

All was different with the women.... [W]ith the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph [objective measure] and the keypad [subjective measure] weren't in much accord.

This sort of physical response to varied sexual stimuli notwithstanding that the women's brains may not be along for the ride may have its origins in evolutionary theory.

Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring."

[...]

Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the split between women's bodies and minds in 130 studies by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.

[...]

The pills...don't, for the most part, manufacture wanting. And for men, they don't need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire.

Quite by accident, though, one pharmaceutical company seems to have stumbled on a possible remedy.

The medication was originally meant to treat depression ... [y]et in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased lust....[T]he chemical ... may catalyze sources of desire in the female brain.

The reason I mention this drug trial is that it's just so fascinating how serendipitous drug discoveries are. The birth control pill had a similar story of birth (heh heh). The drug was initially fashioned as a pill to regulate menstrual cycles in women who complained of irregular periods. Researchers found later that the pill also served to suppress pregnancies. And so came into being the birth-control pill. (Amrita's post "Pill of Shame" and Ra's post "A Brief History of Pain" are good indications of how culture trumps medical necessity when it comes to women's bodies.)

The 10-page article goes on to discuss the role of intimacy and culture in female sexuality. If you are interested in that sort of thing, the article, written by Daniel Bergner whose book The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing is set to be released this month, is definitely worth a read.

~~~~~~~~

Updated to add a link to Ra's post.

20 Minutes

I made it to my first meeting of the writer's group I signed up with three months ago. Finally! I got to meet some cool women, listened to their work as they read it out to the group, and got a sense for some of the issues they were dealing with as they tried to shepherd their writing towards publishing.

I also got 20 minutes. Of pure silence. On a weekend. In the middle of the day. To write.

That alone made my scrambling to get to the meeting, and dragging myself in late, worthwhile. Each one of us wrote to one writing prompt for 10 minutes and passed the prompt on to the person to our left and wrote another 10 minutes on the second prompt.

This was the first time I'd done anything like that. It was fun as it was revealing. I was surprised at the little nuggets of memories that popped into my head in that short duration. It was fun to read how differently we'd all reacted to the same prompts. And it was amazing to see how much work can get done in 20 minutes with no distractions.

Salt

A few days ago C asked how salt was made. I gave him some vague answer about salt beds and evaporation and crystallization. Today's Washington Post has the story of one family that works on those salt beds. The latest in its series called A Woman's World - The Struggle for Equality Around the Globe, the story is about the unequal schooling opportunities for boys and girls in South Asia and traces the harsh life of one family as they leave their homes and spend part of the year near the salt beds.

Though the village of 12,000 is a seven-hour walk from Jyotsna's isolated hut on the salt pans, it might as well be England, it feels so different and far away.

"It's easier to be a boy," said Jyotsna, who was forced to drop out of school at 10 to help her parents. "They get to go to school." Jyotsna's mother said she could not afford to let all three of her children study, so she picked her daughter to work.

[...]

"I regret she has this hard life," said her mother, Ranjanben Patadia, 35. "But this is the destiny of girls. It was my destiny, too." Unlike her mother, who never set foot in a classroom, Jyotsna did study on and off for a few years, thanks to a major government effort over the past decade to enroll all children. Though Jyotsna can still barely read or write, that progress has made her more aware of what she is now missing.

[...]

Clack. Clack. Clack. The "machine," as everyone calls their water pump, sounds like a heartbeat. And in a way, it is. If it stops, so does life here. No more salt, money, meals. Jyotsna's parents earn $500 annually from mining salt, and that all depends on the rickety old pump sucking briny underground water to the surface.

Once there, the water is channeled into hand-dug ponds. The sun bakes it, and the salt crystals left behind are sold to flavor potato chips and scrambled eggs in distant lands.

[...]

Her parents had left before sunrise. They earn 35 cents for every 220-pound bag they fill with salt, so they start early and work late.

[...]

Her parents struggle in the heat, and her father, Bhopabhai Patadia, 39, sometimes collapses. He has high blood pressure, as do many people here, because too much salt seeps into his body through cracks in his bare feet.

I don't think I'll ever take salt for granted again. The photo gallery is especially gripping.

From the reporter's notebook, a wry look at toilet facilities, or the lack thereof, near the salt beds.

The entire series is a fascinating, sometimes hearwrenching, look into the lives of women in various corners of the world - Germany, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Pakistan, UK.

Ajji

As I was going down the list trying to check off the things I'd done before I turned 30 for one of the posts below (150 Things To Do Before You Turn 30) the one event that jumped out of the list was number 92 - "Buried one/both of your parents". My first thought was, How morbid!, but then it occurred to me that the creator probably meant this to be a list of things that have may have transpired in a 30-year-old's life.

Sometime during the following day, in between shuttling the kids around, the housework, the newspapers, a fight with the electrician, etc., it occurred to me that the list said nothing about grandparents. It's more likely for 30-year-olds to have lost their grandparents than their parents.

By the time I was 30, I'd lost all four of mine.

I know my paternal grandparents as Avva and Thatha, but only by way of referring to them in conversations with my father. I never called them by those names because I never knew them. My grandfather died when my dad was eight years old, so all I know about him is that he was tall (6ft 2), dark, a math teacher, soft-spoken and that he died penniless. My grandmother died when my dad was 30, before he got married. She was all of four feet tall, fair, a fiercely independent woman who brought up ten kids, half of them boys, much of the bringing up done on her own.

My maternal grandparents were very much part of our lives. For most of our childhood they lived in Mysore, in a decent-sized house with a huge front garden. The house had a porch, a veranda with wire mesh windows the size of half a wall, two rooms along the street, a hall with built-in showcases, a tiny, dark kitchen, a large bathroom and a room my grandparents mostly used to store the coconuts from their two coconut trees.

The house was an unending source of fascination for me and my brother. It boasted many features that we did not have in any of the houses we had lived in. Through the wire mesh in the veranda, you could look way up the street, watch buses whizzing down the road, keep an eye on the bakery and smell its delicious buns and puffs right around tea time. The coffee powder shop and the mill were the two other sources of olfactory stimuli. Then there were those built-in showcases with all those books and dolls on their shelves. A huge garden full of rose plants, daria flower plants, jasmine bushes and creepers, a sampige tree, a papaya tree, a large curry leaves tree and two coconut trees graced the front of the house.

Best of all, in that house lived our grandmother. She was a large woman, slightly bigger than my grandfather, but all of that real estate was put to excellent use - she was soft and cuddly, and was the owner of a cozy lap. From her capable hands flowed one delectable delight after another - obbattus, sakkaré achchu, chaklis, kodu balés. During festivals, her long fingers, gnarled and wrinkled from constant use would conjure up the most delicate flower patterns out of foil and cotton to decorate the idols, some of which she would have dressed carefully with saris and dhotis made of colorful paper. And all year round, her strong arms tilled her front yard, dug up flower beds, planted seeds and saplings and cajoled even the most recalcitrant ones into a bountiful life. She strung together jasmine buds and roses and made her famous moggina jadés (flowers would be arranged decoratively and stitched onto a long cardboard strip so that the strip was entirely covered with the flowers and then tied to braided hair) for young girls headed to the studio to have their picture taken (forcefully by the mothers) or headed to a dance recital.

My abiding sense of her is that she was a purposeful woman who worked very, very hard. Other than sitting down exhausted at the end of the day, I don't have a memory of her complaining about any of the things she had to do. Things needed to get done and so she did them. And then she did some more on top of that. She and my grandfather raised five children on a shoestring budget, educated them and got them all settle and married. Then she threw herself into her community. She made things for people, she got people to go to the Rama Mandira for hari kathé sessions or for special pujas. She taught them how to make all the beautiful things she created with her hands and her imagination. She conducted veena classes. She had a large circle of friends who she mined for information about prospective grooms and brides. Armed with horoscopes a few inches thick, she was a fearless matchmaker, her mind assessing the various possibilities when presented with a query, even on the street, her mental Rolodex flipping furiously.

Sometimes, standing in my own kitchen early in the morning before the sun has risen, with a boiling pot of hot water for my tea and the ticking of the kitchen clock for company, I remember dark, pre-dawn mornings from a long time ago. The milkman would be making his rounds on his cycle, calling out "haalu" once in a while, jataka gaadis would already be clip-clopping up and down the street, there would be the stray moped. From the kitchen, I would hear my mother and grandmother, their voices thick in the way voices are when you first wake up in the morning. They would be gossipping, catching up on all the news that had remained undelivered in the age before there were telephones in every home.

I can picture my grandmother sitting just inside the kitchen, probably making coffee in her small stove on the floor while my mother waited just outside, in the hall, giving her company without crowding the kitchen. My grandmother would talk in Telugu and my mother would respond in Kannada. Of her five kids, my mother was the only one she spoke to in Telugu, perhaps because that's what we (my parents and us two kids) spoke at home. Which is why I always called her Ajji but referred to her as Avva when I spoke about her with my parents or brother.

(If you diagrammed the languages spoken in my house and who spoke what to whom, it would produce an illustration akin to a bowl of spaghetti. More on that in another post. Updated to link to the languages post: One Family, Three (or Four) Languages, One Fine Legacy.)

When I think of her getting ready to go somewhere, the image in my mind is one of her with her butti, a basket woven out of plastic strings with four metal rivets at the bottom so they would not topple when set down on the floor. She would hang the two handles on her arm, pull the pallu of her sari around her shoulders, put her head down and be off.

I don't know if she was deeply religious or not, but festivals were a big deal in her house, especially the Gauri and Ganesha festivals and Dussera. And I do know that she believed very strongly in some things - such as her mangalasutra. I remember once a hook needed to be repaired and we went to the goldsmith. She took it off from around her neck very reluctantly but refused to let go. She held on to it tightly with her hands while the goldsmith did his job. And to watch my strong and strong-willed grandmother be so afraid was a revelation. As if for a fleeting second, I had been allowed a peek into her soul. Perhaps it was this memory that spurred me to take mine off a few days after I got married, afraid that as time wore on, I would invest it with powers that I knew it could not have.

Ten years have gone by since she passed away, after a protracted battle with bone cancer that left her exhausted and racked with pain.

I am happy that she was there when I got married. But I wish I had spent more time with her, getting to know her as a person. And I wish my children had known her. She was one of those real-life heroes. Unsung, because she did the things that ordinary men and women do every day. The ones that bring up their children, take care of their families, are good neighbors and don't let anything else get in the way. The ones you can actually touch.

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As I was writing this I got the feeling that I had talked about some of the things in other contexts in earlier posts. I went back into the archives and found these:

• Love Amid Cameras and Cables
• A Woman's Worth
• Traditional Baby Baths in India: A Community Affair
• Sakkaré Achchu: Sugar Figures That Hold Memories
• On Visiting Mysore Again, Two Decades Later

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Updating to add a link to Sharanya's moving tribute to her grandmother and to Bird's Eye View's post about her ajji.
And to add a request: I would be thrilled if you would share stories about your own grandmothers in the comments. If you decide to write posts on your own blogs, please do leave a link here. Thanks.
Update (Dec 12, 08): Adding a link to Choxbox's endearing post about her grandmother:

At night we'd huddle around her and she'd tell us stories. There are so many delicious memories involving all kinds of yummy things associated with the huge house overflowing with uncles, aunts and cousins. I had my first baby at mom's place and she came over and stayed for a month or so; she is the prime reason I got through it with barely a scratch. She always has a very calming effect - her simple wisdom makes everything seem much less complicated.

Update (February 20, 2009): Adding a link to Tharini's lovely tribute to her Raji Patti:

I wanted to remember Patti the way I had always known her to be. Sweet, smiling, with a red kumkum in the middle of her forehead, walking in little steps with her hunchback, the strength of her character always shining through. And I wanted no part of reality to slice up this remnant of my childhood and make me face its glaring truth. That times change, that people change, strengths fade away, that the body weakens and succumbs to old age, and that the one I looked to as my source of strength would be needing that same kind of strength from me. When we climbed up those 3 floors to my Uncle's flat, my heart was sinking with each step. But I knew, I must see her, and accept her the way she is now.

Update (March 1, 2009): Linking to Frankie Anon's 'Party Grandma'story - a trip down a windy, bumpy memory lane that evokes the many complex relationships that are the stuff of every family's lore:

The Party Grandma had been a flapper in her youth, sporting bobbed hair and cigarettes, and to her dying day at 81 she liked make-up, music, and martinis. She loved a good joke, and when I picture her, she is laughing. But somehow, in spite of the laughter, something about her the Party Grandma made me sad. Her eyes rarely smiled, and even when I was very young, I sensed that her exterior was a lie.

Update (March 9, 2009): Ardra shares cherished memories of her Ammamma:

Ammamma has been a very strong influence in our lives. She is well read and keeps abreast of current affairs and has a strong opinion on everything and does not hesitate to express it. She takes good care of her health and follows a disciplined routine. People who know her come to her seeking advice and Blessings. She gets invited to grace and speak at functions in our village. She commands a lot of respect from everybody around her. She does have a somewhat strict countenance which makes some people a little wary about approaching her. However once the ice is broken they realize that it is just a veneer.

Update (May 27, 2009): Sriram writes a loving tribute to his Patti:

My Paati (Paati is the Tamil word for Grandmother) is an influential figure in my life. She is everything to me. After my mum, she is the first person to see me. From paaladai to ooti-vittufy, she has fed me. She has told me stories. She introduced God to me. She taught me how to pray. She taught me the value of having values, the importance of doing one's duty, to love unconditionally. From her, I learnt how to be soft and yet strong, how to be innocuous and still be assertive...Most importantly, I learnt who I am and who I can be.

[...]

People dream. They aspire to do lots of things. Many aspire, but only few steadfastly work towards it and realise the dream. My Paati is one of the few. I believe she has achieved her dreams. Her life is punctuated with many challenges which she has overcome with grit, hardwork, determination and sense of faith. To me, my Paati is a real achiever and a true all rounder.

Update (October 10, 2009): Minal shares loving memories of her Aaji:

Mom called me at 9.30 on Thursday night and her voice was shaking when she uttered Mothi Aai’s name. At that very moment I knew what had happened. Mothi Aai was no more. My Aaji, my only granny was no more. When I was finally getting to be close to her and letting her know that how important she was to me, god decided it was enough.
People tell me she lived a good life, I know she did. She did not trouble anyone till her death, she was independent, loving, talkative and fun-loving. She travelled places and loved visiting people. She was fit and fine and on her 2 feet despite 3-4 operations. She refused to accept any diet restrictions cause she believed in enjoying her life to the fullest.
She had 5 lovely children, 2 wonderful son-in-laws, 3 doting daughters-in-law and 8 loving grandchildren. She was not perfect, I know she was flawed, she had her biases , did not make the best mother-in-law but she learnt, tried and improved her self with times. She adjusted to her rebellious grand children and came down to being their friend instead of an over-bearing grandma.

Update (October 12, 2009): Shoba remembers her Ajji with fondness:

There was a hall and two small bedrooms, where all of us, including cousins visiting from their respective places, used to sleep together. With children running around, Granny used to feel frustrated with her “Madi” avatar. Special mention has to be given to her “Madi”. Very few were allowed in the kitchen to help her out. Even when she ate food,rice was molded as a ball and thrown in to the mouth, with the correct trajectory.Never missed the target.Yes, both my grandfather & grandmother were proficient at that art. Personally hand washed sarees hung out to dry on ropes tied up above, very close to the ceiling using long rods. Wonder where she had the strength to use those rods.
She was always busy in that dark kitchen, looking for something, grinding some powder,cooking for everyone or in the bathroom getting the hot water ready. One had to pour water in to these huge copper vessels called “Handi”, and heat water using charcoal. In Bangalore, hot water was a must and there were not geysers around.

The Face of the Great Depression

Image source: Wikimedia; Original photo by Dorothea Lange

In Salon today:

In the black-and-white photograph, known as "Migrant Mother," Katherine is the child on the left. Her mother, then-32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, had seven children at the time, who worked with her in the fields, picking cotton.

[...]

The next day, when the photograph ran in a local paper, the family had already moved on, but they heard about it. "The picture came out in the paper to show the people what hard times was. People was starving in that camp. There was no food," McIntosh said. "We were ashamed of it. We didn't want no one to know who we were." Living in tents and cars, sometimes her mother would go hungry so her children would have food.

Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin

Amanda Fortini articulates how the problem of plenty was not actually what it seemed at all.

[...] it is disappointing to watch what some have called the “year of the woman” come to such an embarrassing conclusion. This was an election cycle in which candidates pandered to female voters, newsweeklies tried to figure out “what women want,” and Hillary Clinton garnered 18 million votes toward winning the Democratic nomination. The assumption was that these “18 million cracks in the highest glass ceiling,” as Clinton put it, would advance the prospects of female achievement and gender equality. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

In the grand Passion play that was this election, both Clinton and Palin came to represent—and, at times, reinforce—two of the most pernicious stereotypes that are applied to women: the bitch and the ditz.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Guest Post: Homes In My Heart, Padma Venkatraman

After those two long interviews (with some wonderful questions) on Thursday and Friday at Saffron Tree and at Reading, Writing, Wondering it’s nice to have a stop here to write a short guest blog. Thanks for having me, Sujatha!

As I said recently in an interview with South County Independent editor Betty Cotter, I have a lot of homes inside me. And that’s what you’d asked me to blog about – travel, my early life, how (if) that has affected my writing.

I grew up in India. I lived in Chennai (Madras) until I completed High School and I spent many summers in Mumbai (Bombay) in my sister’s home. Chennai and Mumbai are of course the cities where most of Climbing the Stairs takes place. One obvious way living in different places has influenced me is the detail with which I can recollect and thus recreate the ambience of these cities. I can still remember the Jamun tree that grew along the drive in the house in Velacheri where I spent my early childhood, and the ripe fruit really did dye our drive purple in August, just as the tree outside Vidya’s home does at the beginning of the novel.

For my undergraduate degree, I moved to Bangalore – mostly because I was stubborn and I decided that I wouldn’t do engineering or medicine (the two professions that everyone else around me who got excellent grades wanted to do). I wanted to do something for the environment and only St. Joseph’s College in Bangalore had Environmental science as a major.

My days in Bangalore…I met a lot of people, made many friends, enjoyed myself socially. I don’t really remember studying very hard, but my CV indicates that I must have done something right…

Bangalore…when I returned there recently it was such a shock…high rises everywhere…so many lovely old homes destroyed…gridlock…no longer the idyllic place I was sentimental about. MG Road, Brigade Road, Commercial Street…Koramangala…and of course Indranagar HAL Stage II I think, where mum bought a flat…Rotaract Orchards…research at the Indian Institute of Science.

Then, I left India, for the most part, to study abroad, although I did return to work as a researcher on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – the place where my second novel, Island’s End, now under contract to Penguin and scheduled for publication in 2010, takes place.

Where else have I lived? England for a bit, at a very Hogwarts-ish boarding school. A few years ago I met an old friend from there and he said reading Harry Potter had taken him right back to Brockwood Park, the international Krishnamurthi School where I’d spent a few years, both as a student, and later as director and head of Inwoods, the elementary-middle school there. I remember beautiful walks, rolling hills, and mountain climbing trips and hikes to Wales, Cornwall, Dover, Dorset, the Lake District. Maybe I’ll write about it someday, who knows? We’ve had lots of Brits write about India from their point of view, and now we Indian authors are starting to write about the UK…

Germany. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel set here…for adults though, not YA. Why is that? I can’t explain. But if I did write a book set in Germany, I think it would have to be a book for adults not children, not even young adults.

Then, of course, America. The College of William and Mary, where I did my graduate work. The colonial parkway covered with dogwood blossoms. The sparkling waters of the Chesapeake. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I did post-doctoral work. The farmers market in the middle of the city. Swimming pools on rooftops. Cozy coffee shops. Crazy ambulance drivers screeching past my flat all night long.

And now, Rhode Island. Ocean State sums it up perfectly. Started my life in the ocean state of Tamil Nadu, and now here I am in the Ocean State of Rhode Island… but not quite at my life’s end, I hope! After all, I have the rest of this blog book tour to complete.

Here are my remaining stops:

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 25th, I’ll be blogging on the topic of being a writing mom and finding time to write at Desi Momz Club;

Monday, May 26th, another guest post. Where were the British colonies during WWII? Doing background research for Climbing the Stairs, at author Laura Purdie Salas’s blog;

Tuesday, May 27th. Climbing the Stairs - The process of writing the novel, weaving together the different threads, at the 5 randoms;

Wednesday, May 28th. Oceanography, research and Climbing the Stairs. Making my schizophrenia work to my advantage. My (at least two) personalities. What it’s like to spend your 21st birthday on a research vessel at author Greg Fishbone’s blog;

Thursday, May 29th. What exactly is that dot on the forehead all about? Arranged marriages, Women in India in the 1940’s, Indian marriages today, gender equality issues in Climbing the Stairs, anything else you ever wanted to know about India at author Carrie Jones’s blog; and

Friday, May 30th. The grand finale. Moving to America, Becoming an American, Multicultural writing at author Mitali Perkins’s blog.

And before I forget, if you want to travel to places online that have reviews of Climbing the Stairs, here are some links:

http://www.padmasbooks.com/
http://padmasbooks.blogspot.com/
http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-CLIMBING-STAIRS_05-18-08_6HA2FQC_v7.b6a7bc.html
http://www.uri.edu/news/releases/index.php?id=4393

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Padma, thanks for stopping by. Best wishes for a fun and successful book tour, and for continued writing success.

Photoshop Magic Erases Faith Hill's Elbow

Redbook, supposedly the magazine for a "mature" audience, is in some hot soup this week following a behind-the-scenes look at the machinations to "fix" Faith Hill's cover photo. Jezebel.com got a hold of the "before" picture and has helpfully created an animation that jumps between the before and after verions of the country music star's image. Here's a blow-by-blow account of the the fixes if you want more details.

It's mesmerizing.

Karwa Chauth: Lovely essay in Washington Post Magazine

Here's Anu Kumar's well-written essay in this past weekend's Washington Post Magazine about Karwa Chauth from the perspective of a woman torn between her feminist ideals and nostalgia for a time gone by.

A Woman's Worth

Even as a teenager, the best thing I liked about my grandmother was her soft, squishy, plump lap. She would groan under my weight as I settled in and leaned back onto her bulky stomach, but as she wrapped her chubby arms around me, I would feel the loose flesh of her neck on the side of my face. I cannot remember a time when my grandma was not big and soft.

It never occurred to me that she was not beautiful or that she should have had non-flabby arms or slender thighs.

To me, she was someone who made yummy things to eat (the best coconut obbattu in the whole world) and beautiful art out of cotton and shiny paper; braided young girls' hair with intricately set flowers (moggina jade) for portraits or dance recitals; had the gumption to yell at my mother and my aunts and uncles; someone who never addressed her husband by name; never ever took off her mangalasutra (even when it needed to be repaired, she held on to it while the goldsmith fixed a loose hook); who was proud that she and her husband had managed to bring up five children on a shoestring budget and found good spouses for all of them; someone who took joy in the fact that she was a grandmother many times over.

There is something absolutely calming in staring at the face of someone that has been through a whole life and has come out at the other end of it without frayed edges and with the center intact.

By the time I'm her age when she passed away, I shall count myself incredibly lucky if I could achieve a semblance of the kind of relationships she had with her children and the comfort she felt in her skin.

But this is not the message girls growing up get these days. We've all heard and read about (and can see for ourselves) how the media is inundated with ads exhorting women to become fairer, put on fewer wrinkles, have sticks for arms and legs, banish gray hair and have flat stomachs but full breasts. The engines of the $200 billion cosmetics industry run on these aspirations.

Which is why it was somewhat shocking and gratifying to see this ad for Dove in Time Magazine yesterday. True, Dove still sells shampoos and conditioners, and face and body lotions, but the message of this pro-age campaign and the message of their Campaign for Real Beauty effort are ones that resonate.

A woman's worth measured by the number of wrikles she has earned, not by the number of wrinkles masked; a woman's worth measured by flab acquired by years of living, not flab supressed by years of poor eating; a woman's worth measured by the streaks of gray in her hair collected over a lifetime of ups and downs, not by how successfully they are covered up.

One can hope.