Primitive and dangerous

Raju Korti
As a thumb rule, prudence and probity are the last virtues any right thinking citizen will dare associate with the political outfits of this country. Any faint glimmer of hope, therefore, extinguishes when politics of expediency and vote bank swamp a state that prides itself on its literacy and Marxist values.
In God's own country of Kerala, the Oomen Chandy-led UDFGovernment --which enjoys an unequivocal support of the Congress -- found itself in hot waters following an issue that assumes sensitivity only because of the community involved.
The trigger for the tumult was a concerted decision of nine frontline Muslim organizations who in their communal wisdom decided to knock the Supreme Court doors for reducing the marriageable age of Muslim girls from the present mandatory 18. As could only be expected the organizations did not provide any plausible rationale for this motivated step.

To early for marriage

The first reaction of most political parties across the spectrum was to rally in a rare show of solidarity and vociferously oppose this absurd and sadistic move. However, one suspects, this conscience-stricken show was more for the benefit of a perceptive and discerning electorate and given the chance the masks could drop depending on the way the political pendulum swung. The animated debate and free-for-all that followed left few surprised about what ran beneath the exterior.
The Chief Minister calculatedly chose to sit on the fence before he committed himself into giving a stock statement that Law would take its own course. The surprise was CPI (M) took sometime to gather its wits and when it did, it laid the blame squarely on Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) dubbing it as the Villain of the Piece. The bigger surprise was the posturing of the Leader of the Opposition V S Achuthanandan a man never known to mince words. "It is best not to mention the culture of the IUML which would prefer the marriageable age of Muslim girls to be 14 and not even 16."
A cornered Congress the self-proclaimed Messiahs of the Muslims in the country, decided to make a virtue out this odd conjunction. While falling in line in a pathetic display of its lust for power, it condemned the decision of the organizations and felt that it wasn't a good augury for the community when it was trying hard to come into the mainstream.
With every political party adopting a holier-than-thou attitude, the IUML, the second biggest ally of the government, directed all its top leaders to exercise utmost caution because it would be tough to wriggle out from a tight position. Realising the way winds were blowing, some IUML leaders beat a tactical retreat and washed their hands of the matter.
One doesn't have to be a political pundit to understand this unusual show of unity. Last month the media played up the case of a 17-year-old Muslim girl from Kozhikode who was divorced within 17 days of marriage by her husband -- a UAE national. In all the righteous noises, the larger issue seemed to take a backseat. No one thought about the implications behind such a move rife with political, religious and sexual overtones. More obviously no party wanted to get on the wrong side of a community that has traditionally served as their catalyst and conduit to power.
Perplexing was the inexplicable silence of the most clamorous of women's organisations. Obviously they did not want to join the issue given the argument that this was an internal matter of that community. Is a girl equipped to handle the physical and mental rigours of a marriage at 14 or 16? Should that be allowed to please a male-centric community which seeks to extract its political pound of flesh on its minority status? The ramifications are far too many to be debated here for matters of brevity but certainly not beyond comprehension.
The organizations in question did go into a shell after the widespread protests, but the issue one believes, won't be swept under the carpet so easily. It has ominous portents for a country that never stops to harp on its secular credentials. That is if there are any.
It is an irony that a Yusuf Malala is born in Pakistan!

Truth in Black and White

Raju Korti

Dark and Beautiful: Nina Davuluri

In the run up to the pivotal issue here is an apocryphal story that I read in my childhood. In his supreme wisdom and fairness (!) God had "blessed" every human being with a fair skin. On an impulse, one day he decided to find out for himself who worshipped Him truly. In a large cooking pot that had boiling oil in it, he asked each one to jump in it if they sincerely loved him. Those who loved him did so without thinking of the consequences and turned dark because of the boiling oil. The others weren't true in their love for Him and dithered. So they remained fair. Actually, God hadn't intended anyone to die in that test. It was his way of finding out who genuinely loved him.
The story with all its loftiness, it occurred to me much later, was meant to appease and comfort dark people like me who nursed a green-eyed monster against the fair-skinned. The conviction that my ebony skin was a distinct disadvantage only grew with age and contrary to the concocted story, I never lost an opportunity to crib to God about the unfair deal that He had meted out to me. All those well meant and grand lectures about inner beauty being the real beauty did nothing to shake my deep-rooted diffidence.
A few movies and Mills and Boon tripe later, my sensibilities were overtaken and how! I suddenly realized that the hero had to be invariably always tall, dark and handsome and make the "fair sex" swoon if you ignore the male chauvinism that came through. The unimpeachable evidence came when an extremely fair and good looking young thing took fancy to me in my college days not because of my dark skin but inspite of it. The credit of course went to all those painstakingly earned good grades and I felt like a snake who had shed its superficial skin and was suddenly proud of its reptilian cool. The brooding, tentative and wilted Me gave way to a spunky new man with a matching body language. By fluke or by design I happened to bump into people -- mostly women -- who told me that their fancies rather lay with dark men. For the first time, I felt no trepidation walking into a photo studio.
I was also aware that the dark tribe was euphemistically called dusky or wheat-complexioned though it beat me how such a poor consolation tactic worked. It began to sink in when the Time magazine did an in-depth story "Black Power", citing how the Dark were standing up to be counted and adding feathers to the American cap. My metamorphosis was complete at that point. The dark race was like a rubber ball. The harder it dashed to the ground, the higher it rose.
The wheel of wisdom turned a full circle, I seriously suspected that there was little weight, let alone any justification in the racial prejudice. If that were so, the South Africans wouldn't have courted  Mandela as President after reducing a good part of his life to a rubble in the confines of a gaol. For that matter, nor would have supermodels like Heidi Klum chosen to marry a black hunk like Seal. Lest you get wrong signals, it is not my case here to pontificate on individual choices but to dispel misgivings on the hype that surrounds the colour of the skin.
Nina Davuluri, the first woman of Indian extraction to win America's national crown further altered the complexion of this social discourse. Far from being a front-runner for the Miss America crown with no preliminary wins or early scholarships, the chocolate coloured 24-year-old hogged little attention from the make-or-mar Media in the run up to the pageant's dying hours.
The knee-jerk reactions deluging the social networking sites to her unexpected but resounding victory showed that racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that an individual's intellect and character are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
It is another story that the feisty girl was unfazed by the racial slurs hurled at her and returned the favour in kind by riposting that she was an American first and foremost.
Behind all that racial bias is a raging, jaundiced fret. And that brings to me to the cooked up story I related to you at the outset. Racism isn't born. It is taught.

A banter for investment!

Raju Korti
For someone who is perennially short of money and keeps digging deep in his pockets to fish out greens in the fond hope of finding a few, I am amused no ends when I get inundated by unsolicited calls asking me if I have any investment plans to make.
On an average I receive at least three to four calls every day from investment firms, insurance companies and sundry banks asking to know if I wanted to invest my hard(ly)-earned money in their grandiose schemes that send me into a tizzy thinking of the lakhs I would have made upon their maturity.
Of course, initially the calls would infuriate when a man or a woman at the other end would be condescendingly polite and address me formally by first name or the surname with an honourable "Sir" as a prefix. Far from being pleased with this needless Knighthood, I would dismiss them brusquely and grope for my poor vocabulary of expletives after hanging up on them.
They all spoke with a familiarity that made me wonder if I was their long-lost friend. Their cultivated accents, put-on earnestness and pushy manners bounced off me. All that persuasive marketing would be reduced to a defensive bluster once I confronted them with an uncomfortable "From where did you get or who gave you my number?" The call that began on a benign note a Bishop would have envied, would end abruptly and me gloating over the discomfiture of the voice at the other end.
The callers, however, invariably succeeded in making me take a stock of my ever dwindling finances. A quick look at my bank balance would show that I had just about enough to scrape me through with an occasional and modest indulgence. In other words, I didn't have a hope in hell of investing if you also knew that I didn't have a job that could pay me a decent, regular income. I understood what it meant to lead a hand-to-mouth existence especially when the hand was weak enough to feed a big mouth -- literally, of course. The question of returns did not arise when there was no investment in the first place.
I have absolutely no clue what made these companies call me up -- unless they were dialling people randomly -- since (hopefully) they had no means to know about my financial health. It began to dawn upon me that it was precisely for this reason that these pesky calls started sounding more appealing to my cash-starved senses. Two reasons over-rode my feeling of anger and desperation. One, the vicarious pleasure of being thought of as a potential investor when I was anything but that and two, the more frivolous element of having some lighter moments at the expense of a searching and insistent caller.
There were times when callers sounded clairvoyant with their tempting bait: "Sir do you need a personal loan?" and I had to fend hard to save my fledgling sanity to seek one given that the calls sounded godsend at the time.  
Later, when any such call came, I would summon all my intrepidity acquired from years of experience in the Media and tell them that "I did have some investment plans and that I would get back to them soon." The decorous "Thank You" that followed told me that neither of us had fooled each other. On other occasions, I would engage the callers in academic questions that took the conversation actually to nowhere. At the end of it, anywhichways, I remained as un-invested as before and with no hope of being any better in future.
Perhaps my best was a few years back when I collected lots of credit cards that were on free offer. The curious, strange looks that people around threw at me when I opened my card-heavy wallet to shell out coins to pay for a cutting chai, brought cheers to me. I wondered how many had caught on to the fact that here was a man who had no credit at all and was incapable of attracting any either. For that matter, if anyone could have even imagined that most of those credit cards had run out of their expiry dates. I wallowed in the feeling that I could make the mare go without any substantial savings.
Money isn't everything in life and yet, money talks. And how!.
"He that cannot pay, let him pray" goes a saying. I cannot pay but I do pray that one day I shall go laughing all the way to the bank while investments bring in handsome returns.
Are the pesky callers listening?