Harry Potter And The Manipur Video

There was a scene after the Quidditch World Cup (where Bulgaria caught the Snitch but Ireland won the match, that one? And now that we’re all caught up…) where the Golden Trio was busy celebrating Krum’s victory when all of a sudden, they heard sounds that were less celebratory and much more sinister. And of course, they went out to investigate.

This was when they saw a group of hooded, masked figures, marching in a tight cluster for pack solidarity and mob courage. Above them were four Muggles, floating along atop their pack, being dragged and controlled by invisible strings. The hooded figures jeered. Then one of them flipped the woman and “her nightdress fell down to reveal voluminous drawers, she struggled to cover herself up as the crowd below her screeched and hooted with glee.”

The first time I read this passage, it made me deeply uncomfortable although aside from the indignity and the violence, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that made me fearful. They acted out that scene in the movie as well and again, it made me frightened. But because it was an act of war, violence and humiliation, I again thought yes, probably this is why I hate this act because it is about war.

When the viral video from Manipur surfaced with two women stripped naked and paraded by a mob of leering men, I immediately realized why that scene had always been so impactful to me even though I couldn’t explain it. I never even watched the video; I just saw a screenshot of it and I would have been happy living my whole life never having even seen that screenshot.

This was the reason: it was what it symbolized. It was about degradation. Humiliation. An act of war designed to bring shame and ignominy to an entire group of people through a symbol. And that symbol was the repository of culture – women. I have always maintained that it is unfortunate and a crack in patriarchy that women’s bodies are always seen as vessels of culture although women have little to no claims to a culture. This time too, men were killed and violent words were proclaimed. But it was women the mob chose to strip naked and force to go through such public shame as no human ever should. The whole incident was designed to humiliate Kukis as a whole; it was not about the two women who actually bore the burden. It would appear that the first Arrest told his mother that he didn’t do it for his own sake, he had done it for his community. It was probably true, and this is what frightens me so much.

Women’s bodies cannot continue to be seen as simple gratification for men and unproblematic display for identity. Even on good days, no one thinks twice about commenting on women’s bodies, even to go so far as making sexually coloured statements and “jokes”. The problem with this line of thinking is that the moment it ceases to be a “good day”, the same line of thinking turns brutal and perverted and the first call of action becomes, in one word, rape.

Many times we have noticed, especially in 2012 Nirbhaya’s case, that rape is much less about sexual attraction than it is a display of power. It is simply to “put someone in their place”. Sometimes, that is a woman. Sometimes, that is women. Sometimes, that is a community.

What agitates me so much about Manipur this time is the news that mothers were instigating their sons to rape women. What does it matter that these other women were from a community they resented? We always make calls to treat women as human hence respect them too, yes, but this time these women didn’t even seem to think about the simpler thought process: Women are women, like I am. Such blatant lack of empathy is utterly terrifying for me to wrap my head around.

Most times, we are conditioned to think in terms of Us vs. Them. We do it in varying degrees. And I know one day soon, we shall forget this lesson again. It is too much to hope that it shall never happen again. But I hope it sticks longer this time and we do not need reminders again anytime soon.

The scene from Goblet of Fire was Wizard Nazis reminding other wizards they were still around, still active and very much still capable of inflicting torture on Muggles and their supporters. They were reminding people that the war was still very much on. JKR is incredible for writing these scenes that come back to mind years after the story has been completed. The layers are so real and they remain impactful. These Calls are always about principles and basic human decency – stand up for others whenever you can whenever they need your support and help. People may not be Our Group but we have to learn to remember our humanity in the face of Societal Differences.

As Kingsley Shacklebolt said in HP & The Order of the Phoenix: (Standing up for only our section of society is just) one short step from ‘Wizards first’ to ‘Purebloods first,’ and then to ‘Death Eaters'. We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.

Memorised Prayers

Mizo kids would know this prayer:

"Aw Lalpa chaw leh thil tinreng, Min pek avangin ka lawm e; I rawng bawl turin min pui la, Isua Krista hming avangin, Amen." It’s a short prayer for kids before mealtime. I think they call it Grace. In Roorkee, I learned an English one: "Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive through Thy bounty through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen." (If I remember right).

I say the Mizo one. Mostly because it’s always on the tip of my tongue. When your mother has drummed it into your head from the moment you started speaking your first few words (not even sentence), it really sticks to your brain. Also since you had to say the prayer before you could eat, one of your first rewards based behaviour modification systems, you can’t stop it now; if people put rice in front of you for you to eat, out comes the prayer. It’s become reflex at this point.

It’s actually a really sweet prayer. I wonder who came up with it. "O Lord thank you for food and everything that you’ve given us; help us to serve you, in Jesus Christ’s name we pray, Amen."

All these really long prayers that you pray and really ham up sometimes and you go on for like ten minutes and by that time you’ve started telling tales to God... I really prefer the mealtime prayer. Or The Lord’s Prayer. I like that one too. I think Jesus came up with that. Or the Bedtime Prayer. We have that one too. I don’t know who came up with that. That one is also nice.

I know the Mizo one: "Zanin ah min veng la, Lalpa kan thil hlauh ata, Vantirhkohten min veng rawh se, Khua var leh hma chuan, Amen." Quite sweet and to the point. "Lord protect us through the night from what we fear, May angels keep us save until dawn breaks, Amen." I know one English one, too. I don’t know where I learned it. "And now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, That if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take, Amen." Little dark, little morbid, little bit like me.

I really like these short prayers. One time, we were talking about prayers and a friend said that when people ask him to remember them in his prayers, he doesn’t wait for the major prayer times to do so; he just says a prayer for them wherever he is, whatever he is doing, so he doesn’t forget it later on. I liked that. I’ve been doing that too. So if you ask me to put you in my prayers, I’d probably say a tiny prayer for you then and there. Probably.

I remember too my sister one time having an epiphany about the mealtime one. We thank God for food and everything. Everything. So we thank God for all the shit that we go through as well. I guess it’s more to be read with the next line – to help us serve God. A prayer of thanks paired with a prayer seeking help for when it’s difficult. It’s only four lines. It’s really brilliant.

Artists have a special place in human society. They have for long helped us lesser mortals express ourselves through their art – their words, music, paintings... I think I’ll say a prayer of thanks now for the people who came up with these short prayers. They’ve helped me meditate; even when I am angry or scared and my thoughts aren’t coherent enough to come up with proper thought-out conversations with God, they’ve stuck. They still do.

And I think that’s nice.

Inkhualtelem Life With Real Money

The Barbie I remember most from when I was a kid was the one called Pretty Hair. I don’t know if it was a genuine Barbie Barbie, if you know what I mean? I’ve realized a lot of things we get in these backwaters are knockoffs. Today in the age of the glocal and the internet, we can usually tell the difference. Although authenticity and ethics and wallet-friendliness tell different stories.

I mean, come on, who wouldn’t laugh at the twin of Puma’s black cat jumping over a lovely calligraphy “Tiger”? It is an art! Con art, maybe, but art nonetheless.

On Barbie, I remember Pretty Hair because she had such beautiful long hair. Of course, when you’re only about 12 inches tall, even hair that reaches your ankles would only be about 11 inches long and then there’s only so much you can do with that hair. But she looked good. And that was what mattered. Her whole purpose was to have long hair and be pretty. She was a doll. She was not real. And whatever role she had in this life, she fulfilled.

Growing up, I came to realize that Real Life was just a world of play-acting for grown-ups. With real money, of course, so the stakes are infinitely higher. It seems like the purpose had shifted but the totem remained the same – to appear nice, to look good. Call me cynical but I’ve come to accept that the totem of Society is a giant non-existent emperor’s robes. Necessary evils aside, how far should we allow invisible linen to dictate our lives? The robe of the emperor is invisible. There isn’t even an emperor!

Yet, we persist on back-breaking sycophancy. Some of us bow so low to money and perceived authority our noses must surely touch our knees. We sacrifice principles at the altar of Acknowledgment of the Rich and Powerful. Mouthful of an altar. Many times, we don’t even hobnob with the R&P; we just want them to know us. We would always rationalize it as acts of not ruffling feathers unnecessarily which is understandable, god’s honest truth! But of basic decency, dignity and loyalty, we can no longer claim to be practicing members. It is always the choice between what is easy and what is right. Always with the choices since the bloody Garden of Eden. What a pain!

Anyhoo. I discarded Pretty Hair the moment my sister cut off her hair to satisfy her curiosity or maybe to test her barber skills. I’m sure Feli would have felt the sting of cutting Barbie’s hair, though, because surely I must have avenged Pretty Hair for such a heinous crime which must not – could not – go unpunished.

Of course, real world punishment for heinous crimes against decency and principles are not as swift. But I believe Karma will out. And actually, constantly does so. Whether or not we choose to see it. I guess for now, we stick to ass-kissing and generally just throwing people to wolves whenever it benefits us. Ah well, c’est la vie!

Greta Gerwig is making a Barbie film and I can’t wait to see it. I want to see what she makes of the doll and her plastic world. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with Barbie when I was girl. I absolutely adored Barbie Girl as performed by Aqua. There’s never really been a Barbie news I’ve not been interested in. Barbie is in a world of structural non-functionality as I call it because she has seemingly everything but in a weird, incompatible size to her and also, essentially inoperative. Yet somehow we accept it. Like real life, really.

Inkhualtelem life... with real money.

Pretty Hair is a distant memory. The plastic remnant of her must lie in a dump somewhere, waiting to decompose, maybe. Hazard to the environment, no less. I wonder where the totem of Real Ethics rest.

Everyday Miracles

I always wanted God to perform magic for me. Instant knowledge. Instant cure. Instant smiting. To recall a few prayers. The last one for my enemies.

Today I know better. I still want magic but I know enough to not expect it. I may have faith the size of a mountain but I doubt if it could allow me teleportation. So I leave the ultra-amazing to sci-fi and fantasy fic.

I implore for quiet miracles now. Not magic.

I’ve made karma my new religion. As you sow, so shall you reap. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. This thought has deeply affected how I have come to conduct myself. Tried to, at any rate.

I still believe in miracles but I no longer think God performs tricks and magic, bending the laws of nature, weaving illusions and defying logic. It is all just knowledge, I guess.

If we are to accept that God is the beginning and the end and everything in between, then foreknowledge is included in the package deal. So someone who already knows what can or what will happen can ensure a lot of things.

I liken it to a great many things we do in office. From experience and from the rule books, we know a bunch of stuff that can potentially happen. Which is why we methodically work to ensure that the negative is avoided and the positive encouraged. Most of us, that is. Take election, for example. Election rule books are heavy and detailed, accounting for almost all the things that can possibly go wrong. And it keeps giving you solutions to those problems. Should they occur. So when something out of the ordinary happens on Election Day and the officials readily know how to deal with it, it was not magic. Just preparation and foreknowledge.

The best thing I’ve learned about adult life is that nobody knows anything. We’re all just shuffling along, faffing and pretending we know shit. So it’s alright if you don’t know something either. Nobody really does. It is a huge burden lifted. All you have to do is the best you can and leave the rest to God. The Universe. You’ll be fine.

Someone who already knows the plans for you will have prepared the way for you. You just have to live a little on faith. Faith. How simple a concept and yet how complicated and intricate. And if you have a little, how much stress it can lift off of you.

In the end, I suppose the best thing we can do is just be kind and invest in good karma. None of us are islands. Every bit of support counts. And every bit of non-support also affects. We are never useless, unless we choose to think of ourselves thusly. We can be parts of quiet, everyday miracles.

And those are the best kinds.

Invictus

One May day Feli came back home from her swimming at Blue Trident and announced that she was signed up to participate in a national level swimming competition at Hyderabad in early July. All of us were super excited from the get go.

I and Sam relayed this thrilling news to Joe when he came to help set up house on May 29th. And Feli told him she was starting training in June. He congratulated her and said this was exciting. Then she told us how she was going to start learning how to dive in June. This rather gave him pause and he asked if he heard right and she was only just learning how to dive and she was competing in July? She nodded and said: yes, I’m learning how to dive in June. As someone who had assumed by ‘training’, she’d meant more like finesse and extra details, and not learning the basics, he expressed certain lament. Which we realise was understandable. And perhaps, should have been a given.

It only hit me then that in my immense excitement over her news, I’d not even thought about her not knowing how to dive. Yet. But I guess that’s what sisters do: insane support even for the most mental Herculean tasks. As long as my sister wants to do this, I support, kind of a deal.

And so it was that she trained for a month. And she did train hard. Sometimes her muscles were sore and she could only raise her arms a certain height. But it did not deter her from trying. She’d drive a long distance out, rain or shine, and trained. She’d belly-flop but she did not give up. In time, she could dive. And as she puts it, increased her lung power. She fully intends to make use of this newfound lung power to good music use. I love this indomitable spirit of hers. We all do. She is in our constant prayers.

When we dropped her off at Lengpui airport, her team lined up to take pictures. Five girls with determined looks on their faces, each wearing their own ID cards around their necks, holding their banner up, smiling for the camera. Someone mentioned how other Indian states would probably send in a hundred swimmers, people who’ve been prepping for ages. They started to resemble those five escaped aquarium fishes from Finding Nemo. Alternatively, an image starts getting conjured in our heads of a sea of Rottweilers standing around, all grim and tall. And there in their midst, five little fluffy white hill dogs, heads raised and chins up.

Perhaps we are not just rooting for the underdogs; perhaps we are rooting for the under-puppies. Nonetheless, here they are, masters of their fates, captains of their destinies. I love this team. I hope they win. I hope they have fun. I hope this event will always remain a core happy memory. I hope to hear good stories when they come back home. I’d drink to that.

Uncharitable Sunday Thoughts

A pastor’s wife mortified me once and I’ve never been able to forgive her. Every time something happens that reminds me of the incident, I get triggered again and I feel the same revulsion. It is quite hilarious to the people who know about it. It amuses me too but also, I am still upset about it.

It was a seemingly innocuous incident.

I am nosy. And I am curious. Call it a character trait. If there is drama, I could pop out of my blanket in the dead of winter just to go check it out. And when there are performances in church, I go early and scoop out the best seats so I can get the best view.

Which is what I did one Easter Sunday in Delhi, back when the whole DMI would meet as a congregation at Green Park. I was there before the church bells rang, excitedly sitting in what I considered the seat with the best view. The actual performers had not even reached the church for rehearsals, is how early I was for church.

And then the congregation filed in one by one until the church was buzzing with activity. The church soon filled up with churchgoers and someone started singing and everyone joined in. A few minutes before church actually started, the pastor’s wife from the first paragraph walked in, made her way over to me and my sister sitting there on our very good seats, tapped my shoulder and said: “This is my seat; I always sit here. Kindly go find some place else to sit.”

I was very young, only in college. I was also pathologically shy and an introvert who had not found her way out of the cocoon even for short bursts of social energy. When a grown ass woman asks you to move out of your seat in full view of an entire church, and catching more attention every minute because it is the Law Of Societal Attention-Grabbing that the more sombre the affair the more pronounced the effects of any single feckin’ deviation, you just do.

I am ashamed to say I moved out of my seat and searched for another seat in the by-now-crowded room. If the same shit were to happen to me today, I would not have moved. I would have created a scene right then and there. The quiet rage I felt when I realised the woman was a pastor’s wife has since coloured every single feckin’ view I’ve held since of anyone who is a pastor’s wife. My first thought is invariably: Are you also an entitled Good Christian Bitch?

Uncharitable. But also imprinted in my brain. Unfortunate, isn’t it?