DEVcast

Keep it simple silly – thats what I could think of when I saw this video! Its a simple way of combining, words, with pictures and voice over! The message however that it communicates has nothing simple about it. Girls and women face challenges that could break the most hardest of us but they still manage to overcome their circumstances and give hope. Its a simple but powerful video and am glad that powerful forces such as New York Times and International Herald Tribune have combined their resources and reach to capture these stories.

The first thought when I saw this video was how fast a girl grows up into a role that society expects of her. There can be countless debates and researches that can state whether the nurturing nature is biological or social or both. But for Punam and children like her there is no debate, they have to grow up and take on responsibilities that expect from them much more than what can be expected of a nine year old.
There is no doubt that Punam being able to go to school despite all the hardships and household chores, can make her a “success story” (it is a loaded term, but I use it nevertheless). However, it is not hard to see the future when all it will take is one decision to stop her from going to school and take care of family and start earning. But till then she gets to be a parent without having fully lived as a child. As development workers we must provide alternatives that can help best leverage the existing circumstances of an individual or community, in this case what Punam has going for her is her father letting her be educated, which sadly is not the case for other children from her neighborhood.

This video made me question a lot of things and I will try to coherently narrate them in the hope that some of you will comment on this. I believe that the experience with caste, religion are very different when you are growing up and that as an adult. The reasons are numerous but will save them for another day.

However, ever since I moved to the US, one of the questions I have most frequently been asked by my peers here is – is the 4-caste’s system still very prevalent in India? This video confirmed my unease with a yes/no answer to that question. It is impossible to give a yes/no answer. And an average attention span often is way shorter than the time taken to explain the complexity of the answer I may need to give to justify that response.

The reason I mention the age of an individual when you experience caste/religion is because for me it has been that. I did not grow up in India. So when I returned to India as a teenager and started working in the social development field, my understanding of history, caste system, social construct, rich-poor divide has been key in my decisions to work with marginalized communities. Just as it is hard for people to imagine a ‘South in the North’ it is equally hard acknowledging the fate of the ‘poor’ within the Brahmin caste, otherwise synonymous with wealth, knowledge and plain well-to-do. So is there a caste divide in India? My answer is : there is a “rich-poor” caste in India and the traditional caste system plays into it depending on which side you are from!

Scenario1: Being poor is my primary identity and – if I happen to be a Brahmin then the caste system has not helped me in anyway to remain rich today, if I happen to be a Dalit then the caste system exists. Scenario2: Being rich is my primary identity and – if I happen to be a Dalit then the caste system has been reversed for the first time making me an equal, if I happen to be a Brahmin then the caste system has continued to keep my supreme status intact.

So you tell me, what kind of caste system exists in India?

There are countless times in any woman’s lives that we cross a road or a street and cant help but want to scream ’stop looking’. Eve-teasing has been tackled by various people through different ways, for some of my favourite instances, see this project or the video below from Jagori’s project Safe Delhi. Eve-teasing happens even when one doesnt know its happening, it does not need to be a whistle, a touch or anything more obvious, all it takes is – that ‘look’ or even the intention of that ‘look’.

BUT all its takes to stop is that firm action, that scream, that slap!

When I came across this article, I hadnt seen the videos below. As a student of communication and power relations, such examples of subaltern media – to create a space of difference, is always fascinating. Ofcourse those who dont read Hindi, would find it hard to follow, but the gist of the matter you can read in this article as well. (btw, the vidoes are in a 3 parts so click on the arrow at the right edge of the screen)