It's not okay until I say so, don't think I said yes because I didn't say no- Why parenthood ought to be like sexual consent

(Disclaimer: The following post applies only to situations where women undergo sterilisation or seek to terminate their pregnancy entirely out of choice and not to situations where women are forced or coerced into these decisions, as often occurs in cases of domestic abuse)

In the UK, if you want to have an abortion or a tubectomy (female sterilisation), your doctor will recommend that you go see a counsellor. The argument is that these processes are impossible and hard to reverse respectively and women seeking them should be sure of their decision. I fully agree that women should think about the decision very seriously and I have no objection to women being offered counselling, as long as they are not compelled to take the offer up because I believe that ultimately, women have absolute autonomy over their bodies and lives.

The other aspect is informed consent so that women understand the procedure, risks as well as potential consequences. While this is desirable for any medical intervention, in case of abortions and sterilisation it is sometimes taken too far. There was recently an uproar (definitely in my head!) about women in certain American states being forced to view an ultrasound image of the foetus and listen to its heartbeat before they can have their pregnancy terminated (See here). This is appalling to say the least. If women are forced to view images and sounds designed to guilt them into thinking of what they're giving up, I think it's only fair that pregnant women are forced to take stock of what they're getting themselves into and made to view images and sounds of mewling babies, misbehaving children and watch a movie about the perils and responsibilities of being a parent.

I wonder what would happen if pregnant women were given demos of the amount of physical pain they'd have to endure or shown films about parenthood gone bad- neglected, abused children, tired faces, sleepless nights and all the not- so- peachy parts about being a parent.

But they are not and never will because the assumption society operates on is that having children is a normal and it is abnormal to not want kids.

One of the many, many problems with the world we live in is that the two life-choices that ought to be made only, and I can't stress this point enough, ONLY, based on personal choice are often taken up by people because they are considered to be a human given, a natural next-step or the ultimate goal in life. The first is getting married. The second, having children. If you talk to a large enough number of people, read the news, and basically have your eyes and ears open when you're around some so-called-parents, it's not hard to conclude that many people who have kids do so without giving it any or at the very least, sufficient thought. This is because parenthood is seen as a fundamental duty and essential rite of passage for all and sundry, regardless of their skills, aptitude, attitudes etc. etc. etc. all of which, mind you, would be taken into account before you hire someone for a particular job. Parenthood is often touted as the toughest job in the world, a statement I can neither confirm nor deny. Is it just me who finds it utterly baffling that everyone is assumed to be fit and ready for it when they reach a certain age or stage of life (in most cases, soon after getting married)?

The argument that women who want to be sterilised ought to be offered counselling so that they can seriously consider their decision because the process is hard to reverse is trite and woefully incomplete, unless people who want to have children are also offered counselling to make sure that they're sure. Newsflash: having kids is irreversible too.

The way I see it, the consequences are far more dire if someone has a child and regrets the decision than if a woman gets sterilised and wants to have children later on. We all make decisions we regret and we often require a great deal of strength to deal with the consequences of those decisions. A woman who regrets her decision to get sterilised only to realise later in life that she wants to be a mother still has the option of becoming a parent through a reversal or through adoption. Yes, she may feel regret, guilt or other upsetting emotions but she will be taking responsibility for her actions, and this is how it should be. On the other hand, the only option facing a woman who gives birth to a child only to realise she doesn't want to be a mother is to give up the child or worse, to give up on the child. Regardless of what happens to the child as a result, this necessarily involves abdication of her responsibilities towards said child.

Society operates on confused, misguided morals if it is easier for someone to conclude that they don't want to be a parent after having a child that it is for someone to arrive at this decision beforehand. The cruel, unfortunate reality is that it is easier for a child to be born, only to be neglected, discarded or abused, than it is to prevent an unwanted birth.

And it must not be this way.

Parenthood, like sexual consent, ought to be an active decision rather than a passive process. It ought to be something you consciously agree to rather than something you go along with.

The fact that someone doesn't mind the idea of parenthood doesn't mean they want to be parents.

A 'not-unwanted' child is not the same as a child who is wanted.

Sowing seeds of ugly weeds

You are constantly making exchanges. This for that. Giving up what you want for the need of the hour. Freedom sacrificed for the sake of livelihood. Love gives way to invisible pressures. Heat, dust and colour exchanged for a cool, clean greyness. Life given up for the sake of survival.

The question remains at the back of your mind, refusing to go away despite your efforts to deny its increasingly overbearing presence. There comes a time when facing up to it is inevitable. You grit your teeth and look at the question straight in the eye. You hope that the answer is different from what every instinct in your gut tells you.

Was what I traded in, worth more than what I got?

You wait, vulnerable and exposed, and you are met with nothing but silence.

No answer is forthcoming. Neither affirmation nor reassurance.

It is as you had expected after all.

The question wasn't really a question at all.

Rhetorical questions have a remarkable talent for making a frightening reality more palatable.

A perfect 180

20:16 - I stare out the window at a brick building. It isn't very tall. As my eyes trace its length to the the top and stop, I have an instant image of myself falling off it. In poetic, slow motion. I land with a "splat!" on the concrete. There is a splatter of blood as my head hits the hardness with a crunch. I smile. Then I conclude I am fucking crazy.

The predominant feeling is one of despair, and being trapped.

20:50 - I am tucked in bed under a duvet, wearing pajamas, drinking delicious white wine, and watching football while cradling sleepy loveliness in my free arm. Despite the fact that I know there is work to be done once the match is over, the predominant feeling is light, and of things being just right.

These two are parallel universes within which I exist. Usually, I forget the latter while in the former, but am unable to do vice-versa. Maybe when I reach vice-versa, the former will implode.

Meine Ruh' ist hin

Meine Hertz ist schwer

- Goethe

Rahi na taaqat-e-guftaar aur agar ho bhi
toh kis ummeed pe kahiye ke aarzoo kya hai

My "mirroring" other- A book

"The act is 'simple, determinate, universal' but his self wishes to be complex, indeterminate, and unique. The act is 'what can be said of it' but he must never be what can be said of him. He must remain ungraspable, elusive, transcendent"

That is R.D. Laing commenting on Hegel's notion of action in "The Divided Self".

Reminds me of what a professor said to me three years ago- "I can't quite grasp what you're about. It is almost like even in telling me everything, you are concealing something. The only thing I have ever received from you is the sense that I can never really receive the real you"

Genuinely pleased at the accuracy of his interpretation of the countertransference, I smiled and said, "You're right"

Koi dil ke khel dekhe

Ki mohabbaton ki baazi

Woh kadam kadam pe jeetey

Main kadam kadam pe haara

What is it, really, that you wish to achieve?

Couple of years ago, I attended a talk in New Delhi on restoration of the Red Fort. While I do not have any particular interest in the architecture of the Red Fort, and I knew the talk was organised and delivered mostly by architects, I was drawn to because the evening was to include a reading by William Dalrymple. I sped to the venue after work and got the best seat in the house.

I didn't have any expectations about how it would go. I thought they would make a case for restoration by relying on romantic metaphors and poetic versions of the history around el Fuerte Rojo. So it's fair to say I was surprised when the architects presented information about the Red Fort using slides with scientific diagrams and such. Blueprints, formulae, and so on. Physics, something I deliberately minimised contact with for majority of my school years, was the last thing I had expected to encounter.

I couldn't at all relate to what they were saying, even though I am wholly in favour of protecting monuments. That's because every ounce of the Red Fort's charm for me lies not in the red bricks or the dimensions of its arches and corridors, but rather in the life associated with it.

By the time they finished, I was craving to hear Dalrymple. He read from The Last Mughal. He read with passion and spiritedness, passages about how Ghalib felt about mangoes and how evenings in Chandni Chowk were steeped the fragrance of ittar, smoke from hookahs, and the intoxication of wine, as Ghalib and Zauq, under a canopy formed by the appreciation of listeners, contested for the position of 'poet of note'. His readings were evocative and powerful enough to ship me off on the sea of imagination to a time when the Red Fort was still alive. Not once did he resort to trigonometry, geometry or other mathematical devices to illustrate the significance of the structure in question.

I was surprised at their having chosen Dalrymple to aid them in their task, since he was alluding to something they hadn't even managed to get a whiff of. They were suggesting the Red Fort should be cared for because of the building's architectural genius. Whereas for Dalrymple, the Red Fort was of importance because it served as a backdrop for the lives that were lived both within and around it.

I find restoration itself to be a ticklish subject. Two questions seem pertinent- restoration for whom, and to what extent? If one wishes future generations to also be able to take pleasure from fragments of the past, it is a noble enough idea. Preservation is aimed at accomplishing just that. Restoration goes many steps further. While I disapprove of defacing monuments and approve of efforts to preserve them as they are, I am uncomfortable with the use of cement and paint to patch up cracks in buildings that have been around for centuries. I was mortified, for example, when I walked into Lodhi Gardens one evening to find that they had done up one of the structures in some ugly pink paint that they had hoped would resemble sandstone. I think cracks add character to old buildings. Every chunk that chips off due to the natural passage of time, adds greater depth to the history of the structure. Efforts aimed at restoration smack of an attempt to deny the passage of time. "Back to the way it was before" is an impossible position. Even if one managed to restore the Red Fort to its exact state at the time of the Mughal empire, the essence of that time would still remain lost. You may recreate a structure exactly as it was, and you may stand back with pride, only to realise that the thing out there is nothing like the thing within.

Loss itself is not a negative. Indeed it is one of the certainties of human existence. I personally regard it as a friend, a constant companion. But rather than resign ourselves to the void it leaves behind, might we look at the value it adds to our lives?

We nostalgically reflect only on that which has been lost. And the very thing being reflected on is changed by the act of reflection, for what is viewed through the lens of memory is not the thing in itself, but a representation of the thing. The picture that Dalrymple presents for example, of people chatting on the steps of the Jama Masjid at dusk, is made richer first by his own imagination of it, and then by the imagination of each reader who reads it. None of these people were actually there, yet each has a unique image of what it must have been like. Should we not just let these multiple imaginations prevail? Should we not let time go by and allow our memories to alter the impressions of the past?

So lovely is the recreation by memory of a lost beloved that I confess to harbouring a wish that I were the one lost. Just so that I too may be the subject of fond remembrance, for a moment or two.

Every time two of my many great loves meet, I skip a heartbeat!

Keh do in hasraton se kahin aur jaa basen

Itni jagah kahan hai dil-e-daagdaar mein

Song: Lagta nahin hai jee mera

Lyrics: Bahadur Shah Zafar (allegedly)

Singer: Habib Wali Mohammad

Dil khaakh ho gaya yeh kisi ko khabar nahi

Sab yeh samajh rahe hain tamanna nikal gayi

Song: Duniya badal gayi

Lyrics: Shakeel Badayuni

Singers: Shamshad Begum and Talat Mahmood

I love locating, in Urdu/ Hindi poetry, psychoanalytically informed descriptions of a variety of human conditions.

The above mentioned are examples of what Bowlby and others would call "Avoidant Attachments"

Sigh.

Someone asked me few years ago if I "only listened to the world's most sad songs". I said I found more beauty in sad songs.

Isn't it wonderful when the expression of sadness is as lovely as this?

She rubbed, scrubbed and scraped until

her palms were red and sore

But the writing on the wall remained

Taunting her more and more

Embarrassed and ashamed she was

About her disfigured core

And pleaded and begged for time to rewind

To the way it was before

TOI really knows how to pick the right words

"SHIMLA: After Vidarbha farm widow Kalawati, it was the turn of Nand Lal, a poor driver, to hog the limelight, thanks to Congress general secretary secretary Rahul Gandhi who showed interest in his well-being."

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Without elaborating on the specific nature and level(s) of my discomfort with the above-mentioned lines, I think there is something seriously wrong with the socio-political situation of a country where a newspaper article begins with these words.

She wept and wept from morn to night &

Soon shut up, lest she cause a fright

For those who couldn't find words to say

To soothe her when she was less-than-gay

And so it was day after day

Till death- a life of feigned delight

Padharo mhare des

"Kesariya Balam... Padharo Mhare Des" is a beautiful, lilting melody that immediately conjures up the image of a lone traveller traversing the sand dunes of a vast desert in Rajasthan, of a woman in bright clothing and eye catching jewellery waiting expectantly for her lover to return, of palaces, princes and proud moustaches of turbaned Rajasthani men smoking a hookah in the hot afternoon sun while drinking strong, sweet tea.

For me, that is.

The song itself, while it is described as a traditional Rajasthani welcome song, is for me more a song of longing. A plea that is sent out across the sands, carried by the dust in the hope that it shall land on the ears of the one being waited for. The melody is slow and seems deliberately prolonged, as if mimicking the lament of a lone bird, hoping that it will pull at the heart strings of the beloved 'other' who feels so painfully far away.

I had the glorious fortune of listening to a street performer play this melody at the entrance of the Jaisalmer fort. He played it on Sarangi and it was a moment of loveliness.

I wish I could recreate that experience in memory but it is partly lost to me.

Now, I find solace in listening to the song while looking out of the window, in a foreign land.

(Go here for Rajasthani performers and here for a rendition by Mehdi Hassan)

Kaosu

There is a reason why I labelled this "Psychoanalysis" as well

Tune deewana banaaya toh main deewana bana

Ab mujhe hosh ki duniya mein tamaasha na bana*

-

You drove me to insanity and I became insane

Now don't make me a poor joke in the world of the sane

* Hazrat Shah Niyaz

(Translation by Muzaffar Ali)

A question

Did you exchange
A walk-on part in a war
For a lead role
In a cage?

A plea

Jag hasi hai
Tu na hasiyo
Tu hasiyo toh
Zulam huyi jaaye

(From the thumri- Hamari Atariya Pe)

Flower on a balcony railing

I saw it lying there casually, probably carried and placed here by the wind. I saw it and my heart skipped a beat with the frank and open beauty of it.

Stop Female Foeticide

This is what adorns one of the walls of my room at work. I think the painting is as beautiful as it is symbolic.

Below it, the text reads-

"To all the woman who have made our country great.
And to all the little girls who will make it even greater"

*Artwork courtesy UNFPA

There is a veil, past which you will perhaps never see

Having a woman sit before you, hearing her pour her heart out- speaking after a long period of silent desperation, and watching her break into a smile as she continues to cry is truly one of the purest, and most beautiful things I have ever seen. And one of the clearest things I have ever felt.