Strange, not logic, yet true

 So I was eating the mud of humiliation...

By the way, why on earth am I a soft target for humiliation? That is a question that I will learn the answer for , sometime in the future, I am sure.

Going back to this particular wallow in the mud of humiliation, my heart was heavy, brain was a bit out of joint and I was in a state of mild paralysis.

Then I started to google something, and Good ole Google suggestions came up with the name of a friend

A fine woman

An upright, outstanding leader

But she had died unexpectedly. 

I had always thought  myself fortunate to have known this person. But she had died suddenly. Seeing the name of my dead friend filled me with a sorrow and this sorrow filled me up so quickly that all the feelings of humiliation was flooded over by it.

I was sad, but no longer unhappy with my situation.

Strange, so illogical, but yes, she had died,  and the shock of this thought wiped the sorrow away from my heart.

Magical Creativity vs lack of it thereof

 Well, I am going to start working on something new.

Exciting Topic

Work that will keep me engrossed

I am ready in front of my laptop.

So, what do I do? I must subconsciously be feeling upset or tensed at the difficulty level and the amount of work.For now I don't start. I become conscious of the noises around me and get annoyed. Worse, all enthusiasm seems to have drained away. Feeling empty and dull.

Rather than start something like going to YouTube for a quick fix of my feelings, I thought I would work on this situation here. 

Updates on whether this helped or not

Did writing this here help? In a way. I went back to You Tube, watched my favourite channel, became happy, opened my work document and started typing. 

Writing and a quick fix after that, helped me to enjoy and at the same time not linger. Good day to anyone reading this.

Money, no magic or even logic about it

What must it feel like to be a leader in a company like Aircel and Reliance Communications that owe thousands of crores (count the zeros, more than 10 I'm sure) to their creditors?

I hated family members who ruined the family economy by overspending and taking loans. They hated me for being boring, unimaginative and casual. This is how my economics works. I keep away from overspenders. There is no such word, right? No such person too, it seems in modern times, you do what you like, leave your creditors high and dry, ruin life as you knew it and ruin it for millions, and never let the poorest of the poor see a better day.

Money has no magic, no logic. It's nothing and it's not even a piece of paper anymore.

Cheers to a new world with no logic and no magic and just numbers with more than  ten zeros

No logic is sometimes, no magic

A young friend of mine asked me to speak on video of how tribal women expressed their shame, fear, stigma, or taboos on menstruation. She wanted to know if they spoke of body shaming or shame on genitalia.

My impressions are as follows:

Initially, we play simple games with the girls. But once we introduce the topic of menstruation, there is a deathly silence. After a session or two, girls belonging to higher castes become vocal, while it takes more time for girls from tribal families to open up. Even then, only girls who are around 16 or 17 speak. Some of the things they say were new to me.Like, they stay in the hostel and their mothers don't know that they started to menstruate. So, I asked them why they never told their mothers because many of them live just a few kms from the hostel.

 She explained how she had gone with a few other friends to the house of one among them. That girl had just begun menstruating.They had decided before hand to help their friend speak to her  mother. The mother welcomed them and offered them tea. They drank tea and chatted for some time, but left without telling her the news.

Why? I asked her. She said that it was like that.When I chanced to go into a very sparcely inhabited jungle, I saw a girl whom I had met in another school. I started talking to  her and then asked her if her mother knew that she got her periods. She told me that her mother had seen her take a sanitary pad that the school had given her. But neither had spoken about it.

Overall, the women, especially the older ones, were happy to talk to us, and shared the trauma of having no one to talk to about their periods and its related issues. 

When I started speaking to boys and men about periods, their response was very positive. One guy told me that he now understood that period blood was important and not dirty. But how could he convince his parents? They would be hurt. I cannot irritate them and go against my parents' wishes. I pointed out that he had been reluctant to talk to me at first. So were a few of his friends. But now they were convinced. He had to convince his parents slowly,  just as I spoke to him. Because it was unnecessary for his children to suffer  in this manner. He had to agree with me.

Menstrual movie magic: Chayilyam

On 26th May, I watched a movie on menstruation , Chayilyam in Malayalam, on Google meet with 52 people. This was organized by an NGO named Safe Active Periods.
It was such a well made movie
As some one commented it depicts strong bonds that make a family in a village special. The determination of the main characters, a recently widowed woman, and her father in law to not buckle under society pressure is inspiring. The movie theme is early menopause,  mental disorder and how religion tries to abuse mental problems
The spotlight also falls on the scary patriarchy that tries to force the mentally afflicted women with a divine status and use her for their own rituals. But the woman and her father in law insist that she is normal. Even the girls parents, who had ostracized her after her marriage, and neglected her following the loss of her husband, are ready to worship her as a Devi, when she is mentally afflicted and feels uncontrollably angry. So the father inlaw coaxes her to go along with the charade till she gets her period, which would convince people around her that she is a woman and not a goddess.

As he is a doctor of traditional medicine, he medicates her to so that her premature menopause is reversed and she gets her periods again. But the end comes abruptly, with the woman destroying all evidence of her period and leaving the village, which was tormenting her in many ways.

Continuous learning: A logical step to magical experience

I wanted to identify the values that mattered to me and that should be the basis of the society that I am trying to form.

I looked into the values of other organizations and felt that they did not resonate with me. For instance: Trust

Sure, I am trustworthy and yet I trust no one. I probably never will. Like in superficial, conversational stuff I trust people and take them at face value. For instance, someone tells me he has planted thousands of trees on all sides of a mountain, I think that he is a little boastful, but not that he is lying. Yet, I would not trust him on important matters.

I would trust no one beyond a certain level, and I don't expect anyone to be trustworthy.

I say this with calm and confidence because not trusting others has not stopped me from trying anything.

In my opinion, human behaviour is capricious, and it is our duty to navigate through all kinds of situations and people. Anyone can break your trust, could be because he is schmuck, is depressed, is sick, has changed, is being blackmailed, is cowardly, or is a fraud. Doesn't matter. I can still find my way around life doing what I want to a large extent.

Anyway, my previous post is about community engagement.  I learnt this value from my observation of the work done in Khamir and Shrujan,  them being organizations which have understood the needs and capabilities of tribal communities by engaging with them over a period of several years. The first value on which my society should function would therefore be/ Community Engagement

Another great experience came my way when I applied for a fellowship with Orikalankini The sharing of learning materials such as articles, speeches and conversations on social issues has made me understand the second important value that would make my society very effective: Continuous Learning

Pure Magic: Community Engagement

Engagement needs logical thinking, but it results in pure magic.

looking online for what could be a good explanation of Community Engagement, I came upon this diagram

Most community related efforts and programmes are based on giving one of the following:

 Awareness

Relief during disaster

Gifts to empower them in some profession

Surprise gifts such as celebrations

But such efforts cannot equal what some NGOs have done through community engagement.

The best NGOs (Non Governmental Organizatons) do what is explained in this diagram

They  ENGAGE 

They have conversations, enquire, consult, involve the community in their project directly, and help them collaborate among themselves and in government schemes.

They may have a particular issue in mind such as a certain aspect of health or livelihood. Or they might just try to customize the project as they move from one community to another.

Although the tone of this post is analytical, I am actually writing this because I am inspired; inspired by the work of Chanda Shroff and Shrujan in Gujarat.

Their work with the women of eight different tribes and the showcasing of their efforts in the Embroidery Museum is a class apart. In the middle of nowhere, unknown to the billion and odd Indians, there stands this elegant spacious structure which inspired me, it being the culmination of decades of painstaking effort.