Upcoming

Hello Spice Lovers,

Sorry for being a bit spotty with the writing as of late. Life has been tossing me around a bit and it's been hard to gather my thoughts up into a coherent, well, anything.

The G family is launching off to Kerala for a week to see what there is to be seen. Stay tuned for details and pictures. Oh yes, there will be pictures.

Becky

What the Hell India - Marrying off Children to Avoid Rape

Hello Folks.

My apologies for generally being absent from blogging as of late - life has indeed been busy for me. I'm currently teaching 13 students and planning a recital. It takes up WAY more time than you or I think.

So. Another installment of What the Hell India is on the agenda.

The state of Haryana (which houses Delhi FYI) has an absolutely horrid record when it comes to rape. This week, a case has come to the attention of the papers of a Dalit (lower economic class) woman who was gang raped by multiple young men coming from richer houses.

 Here is Haryana for your reference:

Because everything in India has a political undercurrent, the Dalit leader from Haryana felt it necessary to weigh in. His opinion was that we just need to change marriage laws to get children married in order to avoid rape.

Ok, what the Sam diddly hell???

1. The Dalit representative had no answers for why this happened to married women or why married men where often the culprits.

2. He also ignored the fact that being married young often leads to spousal abuse and is responsible for a great number of malnutrition cases.

3. This is not the 18th century.

4. Marrying young is a foolproof way to ensure that the woman will be much less likely to be educated or financially independent.


The problem here is not when young ladies get married - it is a problem involving a patriarchal society with way too few protections for women. As much as I love this country, I cannot ignore the fact that women of all ages and socioeconomic niches are generally left out in the open when it comes to making women equal. Unfortunately, rape is a reality in India, one far too many women have to face. In an ideal world, no woman should have to worry about being accosted by a group of men while walking to her grandmother's house during the day. She should not have to stay inside during the night if no male is there to escort her outside for whatever reason she needs to go out. Unfortunately, India is a society that holds far too many men accountable that this is still as big of a problem as it is. Non-accountability added to non action on the part of society marks this action as passively acceptable. We are not in the stone ages anymore. Rape is never ok, no matter what the circumstances are.

My own husband has urged me not to go walking in the outside ring of our compound late at night. In general, for a woman with a tiny bit of common sense, this is common knowledge. Rape has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with control. And India has a very poor record when it comes to allowing women to control themselves; it's almost a national ethos. Even the idea that a woman belongs in the kitchen adds to the general idea that a woman has no right to control her own life.

India, this is not modern country behavior. This nonsense has to stop. The UN pleaded with the entire country to not take this suggestion of child marriage seriously at all. It will NOT solve this problem, it will only set the country back a few hundred years and add to the burden of problems this country is already facing. For the love of everything holy, can we stop treating women like weak little idiots that can't possibly control themselves, their future or their sexuality and just start valuing them as the half of society that they are? This is definitely one issue that breaks my heart on a regular basis solely because it's not at all rare.

Knock it the heck off men. And everyone, let's not accept solutions that set us back a few hundred years instead of calling this problem as it really is.

Becky

The Mysterious Case of the Noisy Newspaper

Alright. So the kids are outside playing, I’m sufficiently caffeinated, and I’ve managed to avoid the never ending game of spider solitaire that usually gets in the way of writing. I have another fun India story for you. Hopefully you’ll find it as entertaining as I did.

I was reading my trusty Times of India paper and not The Hindu the other day (because the newspaper man must be asked at least 4 times before I get the correct paper on a consistent basis, but that’s a story for a different day) as I was sipping my morning coffee. This is quite the routine of mine and I do it pretty much every day, along with checking what blogs I can remember I used to follow. This day, however, I was behind on newspapers for 3 days. I settled in to plow through them all at once. My housekeeper Indira was here and was in the kitchen washing the dishes.

I was nicely reading some unimportant clip about Bollywood drama when the paper started buzzing. I’m not talking barely there vibrations from a fan or my imagination, I’m talking cell phone/adult toy type vibration level. I sat there for a moment dumbly looking at the paper thinking that papers are definitely NOT supposed to vibrate. Then the thought came to my mind that perhaps a rogue bee/wasp/hornet zilla had become stuck inside the paper somehow. We all know how much I love the bees.

I immediately did the most logical thing possible and threw the paper across the room. The vibrations stopped, so I went to investigate. I gingerly lifted one page at a time, ready to make my escape should an angry, sting-ey insect come out looking for vengeance. I found nothing, so I figured he had tumbled out of the paper and was waiting in some dark corner under a piece of furniture planning his next attack.

I grabbed the paper and sat down again to read. No one should be at all surprised that the paper started buzzing again. I of course let out a small shriek and threw the paper again. Indira came into the room concerned that there was something actually wrong with me. I of course was standing there like a cartoon with my hand over my mouth, embarrassed that I was screaming like a little girl about something I hadn’t even seen. I again, slowly sorted through the pages. When I got to the back, the paper started buzzing like mad on the floor. In the middle of the page long advertisement was a small black device. We figured out that it was light sensitive (which was why it turned on when I had the paper open, but not on the floor) but couldn’t really figure out why it was there. It seems like a super expensive, hassle worthy advertising trick, but I couldn’t figure out any other reason for it.

So. Indira had a good laugh about my imaginary bees and I sheepishly went back to enjoying my coffee.

Well played newspaper advertisement – you definitely got my attention, even if I didn’t buy that car.

 

Becky

A Disappear/Re Appearing Act

Hello Masala lovers.

My sincerest apologies for disappearing into the internet ethers for a while. You can read all of my excuses here if you’d like.  My apologies also for dropping the ball with the What the Hell India project. Rest assured that I am still fully intending to continue that. Hopefully by tomorrow.

So. Bangalore has continued to treat me with the utmost respect and kindness. I still love it here.

I do not, however, really love fall here. It’s a bit too reminiscent of February in the northern half of the U.S. Minus the snow and freezing temperatures. Every day brings an overcast, grey sky that gets rather depressing after a while. I’m ready to be done with the clouds and the rain. It shouldn’t be much longer here. Winter is always beautiful.

Daddy G is again headed to the US in a few days. Hopefully for the last time this year. I’ve kind of had it with his job taking over every waking thought. Alright, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration (jeez, I still hate spelling that word), but not by much. Please dear, enjoy your nice long hot showers and not so expensive booze.  At least it’s only 10 days this time.

In other news, I have totally taken over most of the vegetables in India. My vegetarian repertoire in the US was sadly lacking, it isn’t anymore. I’m pretty excited about this. The only food related woe I have is finding a good ground meat shop. I have a serious yen for keema, which is ground meat mixed with spices and a few veggies. Serious yen. I’m good at cooking it and haven’t really had it in India. I have found a shop, I just need an excuse to haul Daddy G all the way across the neighborhood to check it out and make sure we won’t catch mad goat or mutton disease or something equally dreadful. He’s much better at knowing these things than I am.

One thing that I’m not too pleased with myself over is the health initiative that has gone nowhere. My vitamin habit have remained spotty at best (yet my hair has for the most part stopped falling out!!!) and my exercise habit, if you can even call it that, is spotty at best. Like once every 2 months spotty. I haven’t gained any of that weight back, and I suspect I’m still losing. I haven’t actually stepped on a scale since I left the US and I’m kind of afraid to lest that number didn’t actually move and I imagined the whole thing. I’m sure this isn’t true, but I’m still not checking. I now only have 1 pair of jeans that isn’t falling off my disappearing behind, and it’s pretty loose too, along with way too loose pajamas and even yoga pants.

 I did actually take out my blow up… exercise ball (And here you thought I was going to bust out an inappropriate comment about a blow up doll. You were right.) and my kettle ball. I bought these two wonderful things almost 2 years ago and now they’re finally out of the packages. I still am looking for a good routine to really challenge some muscles with them. The inserts that came in the package were sadly not all that effective. I do have a community gym at my disposal too, but between my penchant for catching up on sleep in the morning, my housekeeper showing up at random times, and my 5(!!) piano students, that is kind of hard to swing. Excuses excuses.

I’ve been on a two day binge of deep cleaning and writing these past two days, and it has been glorious. My housekeeper cleans some things for me and completely ignores others. Those cobwebs that pique my irritation every time I walk by them are conveniently ignored, as well as the dirty ceiling fans. It is indeed time to bust out the cleaning chair and slop wet, soapy, dirty water all over the floor in an attempt to clean them. It has been slow going, but oh so satisfying. I find that leaving the cleaning to someone else here has not been good for getting things done how and how often I want them too. I know that I cleaned the entire house way more in the US than it ever gets done here. Tradeoffs I guess. I work a lot more here than I did in the US too. Daddy G has been trying to campaign to get more household help so that I stop bothering him to help me do stuff. Nothing doing Mr. The last thing I need is more responsibility by having more people to manage. I’d rather just spend a day cleaning myself and have you pitch in a little bit more than normal. He’s charming that way. J

I think I’ll stop here so I can go research a topic for some What the Hell. See you soon!

Becky

What the Hell India: Bomb Blasts

Listening to: Shadow of the Day – Linkin Park

There was a bomb blast in Pune recently. For edjumacation purposes, Pune is here:

One of the most amazing things (and one of my personal favorite things) about India is that it is truly a country that absolutely oozes diversity. You can’t throw a stick around here twice without hitting 2 completely different people. The wonder of this, is that for concentration of people combined with all these differences, the amount of violence seen is relatively low. Unfortunately, it does happen.

So here’s the What the Hell for the day. Bomb Blasts.  The Pune bombs were designed to be a terrorist act that backfired and didn’t cause as much destruction as it was meant to, thank goodness. As with other attacks of this nature, they were designed to cause chaos and fear and had cause roots in both political and religious retribution.

India does have its fair share of terrorists, both domestic and imported. What is unique about the problems that India has of this type is that not all of the terrorism is related to religion, as we are used to thinking in the U.S. In India, politics often inspires this level of violence too. In fact, if you are interested, Raajneeti  is an absolutely excellent movie about Indian politics if you can find a copy with subtitles and are into foreign films.

There are always the wars that occur between criminal factions that occasionally catch an innocent bystander. As you can imagine, religion does play a part in some attacks. India is a secular country. The two main categories of religious believe in this country are Hindus and Muslims. I’m not including Buddhists because they tend to leave everyone else alone. For many reasons, there is much bad blood between the two groups and sentiments against the other group from fundamentalists from either group sometimes wander into the hatred and violence arena.

I get frustrated with action of this type. It tends to lead to bloody, unnecessary, drawn out retributions that are born out of hate for others and what they are/what they believe in.  The tragic thing about this problem is that it is probably impossible to get rid of. Biases get passed from one generation to the next. Backward thinking in people determined to stay that way is damn near impossible to change. With India being what it is, there will most likely always be points of friction when people of opposing views are pushed up against one another. What bothers me about the bomb aspect if this problem is that the perpetrators don’t care about casualties in their personal wars. India isn’t short on violence – but it can never hold its own with modern countries when blowing up different people seems like a reasonable retribution option.  There are plenty of other types of crazy here (postal system anyone?) that wouldn’t hurt India as much in its quest for modernity as bombings do. Indians, this destroys your credibility and makes the world want to lump you in with the scary fundamentalist countries - which really doesn’t do this amazing place justice.  Knock that shit off.

Becky

Launching

Mood:  Hyper (my coffee must have been strong today) and Irritated (why oh why does the housekeeper feel the need to come at a different time everyday and be here when I have to pick up my youngest from the bus stop???)

Listening to: Blow Ya Mind – Eve and Gwen Stefanie

                                                                                                                                                 

Hello Lovelies. I hope everyone is having a great week.

I wanted to tell you about a project I’m launching this week for Following the Masala. It’s called “What the Hell India?” I came up with the idea based on a previous post I had written during the A-Z challenge, which you can read here if you are interested.

India has the distinction of being an up and coming country. It is both a place where modernity has prevailed and ancient attitudes hang on stubbornly. I’ve been reading Times of India since we moved here. It tends to focus most of its stories on Bangalore, since that’s where the G family resides, but also includes lots of news from other parts of the country. Every few days, I’ll read an article that will make me stop and wonder what the hell is going on that this stuff still happens in a country that struggles to be up to date as India does. This is where we’re going to take a look at them.

Disclaimer: Most of these stories won’t be funny or comfortable. If you are a reader from India, you may even have strong feelings about a subject and/or me raising an issue as a foreigner.  I welcome comments, from any viewpoint on a subject. Please do let me know what you think of any of these posts. If you think I got it totally wrong or are missing an important aspect of something, please do let me know. I can only share from my own perspective, and one person can rarely understand every element of an issue.

Most of all, I want people – especially Indians - to be aware these things happen and that they’re not ok. This is your country.  I can sit and holler all I want as a foreigner, but it won’t do much good unless Indians decide they have had enough and won’t tolerate this anymore.

 I hope you guys enjoy it.

Becky

Cooking Gas and School Mahem

Mood: Neutral. Don’t laugh, that’s the best description I can come up with right now. Not good or bad, just meh.

Listening to: Can’t Take My Eyes off of You

Our apartment complex has a gas vendor. We don’t have cylinders (like so many independent houses do), but we have pipelines to the gas room in our apartment complex. We all have meters for our cooking gas in the kitchen and for the water heater in the third bathroom (the other two are included in maintenance charges). When you move in, you go to the gas office in the basement under one of the apartment and you get a card, which you then charge with some money. The card then goes in a meter in your house in an electrical shaft outside the kitchen. Back when we moved in, it took us quite a white to figure out all of the complexities of everyday life here, including the gas. We put Rs. 300 (about $6 US) on the card, figuring we could recharge it whenever we needed to. Well, that amount lasted us for 7 months. So you can imagine how thrilled we were about cheap cooking gas. We used to pay much, much more in the US.

Since Daddy G came home and was craving some chicken curry, that was on the menu for Sunday, as was lentils with greens (still trying to grow my hair back!). I didn’t have much other food in the house as I tend to not make full  on meals if all four of us aren’t at home.

After stopping at my little local chicken shop it was time to get down to business. I love me some cooking. I get the radio blaring with some GNR, ACDC, Velvet Revolver, Metallica, etc and sing along while creating things I love to eat. It’s like going to church for me – music and cooking. Half way through, I noticed that the chicken curry was no longer bubbling, as it should have been. I figured that maybe the back door breeze (this is not anywhere as dirty or disgusting as you think it is gentlemen) blew out the flame, which has happened before. I discovered that the lentils were no longer cooking either. In fact, none of the burners worked. We had finally run through the money we loaded the card with.

I figured, no problem, we can just go recharge the card. After grabbing my youngest to come along for company, we headed down to the basement.  There are 7 towers in my apartment complex that are all connected by a basement parking lot. I couldn’t remember where the office was, but I figured there were only so many places it could be. We slowly meandered around, checking each of the towers. We stopped in a shop to ask and she sent us across the complex. This was indeed NOT where the office was and I ended up wandering around for 15 more minutes before locating it in the last tower to be checked. Of course, their hours were Monday to Saturday. Oh was I pissed. Not only couldn’t I cook for my husband who had a serious yen after being in the US, I was worried the food wouldn’t keep half cooked until the next day, especially the greens I had soaked in salt water and chopped. I said a little prayer to the food gods and shoved everything in the fridge, pots and all, hoping I couldn’t just start up where I left off the next day.

We ended up ordering food (which was honestly pretty good) from a local restaurant, but I knew it wasn’t what Daddy G really liked. He’s one of those picky types who loves his Mama’s food. Since I learned from her, I make acceptable substitutes, restaurants do not. For dinner we had savory, spicy oatmeal. I love that stuff. It wasn’t a great culinary day, but at least we ate.

The next day, I went to the office first thing and with the assistance of 2 very polite guys, recharged my card. I managed to save all of the food I had started cooking the day before and everything came out really well, to Daddy G’s and my delight.

My husband had a good time laughing at how frustrated I got that the gas ran out on the day we couldn’t recharge it. Things like that happen here and either you roll with it, or you end up with an anger management problem. I would like to think I roll pretty well with life here, but every once I start getting twitchy. Like any time I deal with my kids’ school. You would think we deal with a government institution the way that everything turns out about 3 times more complicated than it needs to be. We’ve been having some drama with checks being returned due to signature differences. 

When I wrote the checks, I was standing in a stifling hot basement office in a line waiting to be seen in a cubicle by a harassed, cranky man whose name I won’t mention because I seriously don’t need anyone at that school hating me more than they already seem to. To be honest, my signature didn’t look at all the same trying to sign it under those circumstances and the bank returning them was valid. I found out about it from the bank and went the extra mile of hiring a cab and dropping off new checks (which I signed exactly like they should have been!) at the school. The school is now harassing me to send in Demand Drafts (which are like money orders for two other checks to make sure they get the money coming to them. I refuse. They are getting checks because I am not making a special trip to the bank when I have checks at home. Poor Daddy G listened to me rant for a few minutes and then asked me what the big deal was. The bank is a few minutes’ walk, why not just go get one. I told him it was a matter of principle and there was no reason why they couldn’t just take another check. There really is no point in fighting the school; it won’t do me any good and I’m aware of it. I just am tired of jumping through hoops to deal with them about ordinary matters. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a hassle with schools and my oldest has been in school for the past 5 years. It’s a matter of principle.

Becky