I
I was seven years old when we had a family get-together for the first time at a relative’s place. As the plate of freshly fried ‘alur chop’ arrived, none of us dared touch it because, well, manners. I waited for just one person out of the two dozen to pick up a piece and end this ridiculous stalemate. After seven painfully long minutes, the infamous uncle announced his presence- he is usually the one in the family who is unnecessarily loud and unapologetically unfunny. His voice broke the pointless silence of the room as he narrated a ‘funny’ bit of news that he had come across the previous day in a local daily. Apparently, in the heart of the city, a man had come back home to find salt missing from his ‘daal’. In a response quite befitting of a perpetually dissatisfied Indian, he filed for divorce the next day. The room exploded with laughter at the humor of dysfunctional relationships and abandonment issues, while a swarm of hands finally reached out to the now cold and oily lumps of potato. Everyone knew that once the ice is broken, we break bread.
I remember my seven-year old self joining in on the amusement. It was my first experience of an adda that sustained itself on humour drawn from “quirky” epistles slipped in among important headlines in our newspapers/shows. It certainly wouldn’t be my last.
Lately, though, I find myself thinking back to these episodes, trying to make sense of ideas, that we have, over time, taken for granted as ‘normal’ or ‘harmless’. And I find myself realising how privilege runs unchecked, aloof and ignorant, like an over-pampered male child in Indian households. It manifests itself not only as an invisible godfather looking over our shoulders but also as an enabler of microaggressions and wrongdoings towards those who aren’t entitled. I remember a survey carried out by an online magazine during the pandemic last year. The idea was to get an insight into the minds of husbands in the wake of rising domestic violence cases amid the mass confinement. When the article finally came out, it bore the headline ‘I don’t want to talk about abuse because I do not engage in it’ because this was the overwhelming response and popular opinion that stood out in the study. It didn’t surprise me. An elephant is cute as long as it isn’t in your backyard. So why address the ones in the room?
II
This piece, though, isn’t a commentary on randomly picked societal evils – despite my meandering introduction. It is an insight into a day I spent at my maternal place in the village of Khedail, away from the city and its convictions. I started early to avoid the heat, traffic, and the overall sublime experience of the Bengal Highways. I’d always been a good driver but thanks to my father, never a confident one. In his words, it never harms to have someone beside you while you drive. But the pandemic turned things around. His fear of going out or even letting me avail public transport resulted in me driving alone for long hours and distances. I drove past the usual landmarks of fancy cafes and roadside tea stalls, dilapidated colonial buildings, romanticized bridges, polluted rivers, and finally to a milking tollbooth as I bid this city goodbye. The last sight I was presented with was a brood of children knocking on car windows for money that would either buy them breakfast or end up in a fat liquor bottle for the father. Well, I thought, at least they looked appropriately malnourished. Not too long ago, a primetime show on one of our leading news channels had pulled an entire segment on the arrest of 43 women in Indore who were begging in jeans and tops on the streets. At the end of an hour-long farce contemplating the ironies of the affair, I had come away with two major epiphanies – First, help is to be provided only to those who look the part. And second, the purpose of the help should never be realized.
Anyhow, several hours and a largely uneventful ride later, I reached Khedail, had a quick breakfast and set off for the day with my uncle. He was in charge of supervising the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and to ensure that the scheme was successful in providing hundred days of unskilled work to anyone above the age of eighteen in the rural areas. He would oversee the progress, make note of those availing the scheme and ensure their regular payments. I had been curious for a while about the entire operation because even though I’d see scores of people purposely loitering around the village, the stretch of road connecting the highway to our house lay eternally ‘kuchcha‘. A while ago, a news story took flight from the media houses in Madhya Pradesh and gained instant traction for its apparent absurdity. A few villagers had lodged a complaint at the local Police Station that their road had been stolen overnight. News channels verified the claim by flashing an exclusive watermarked clip of a stretch of bare land where once stood a pukka road. The media did what it does best- blow the story out of proportion by inviting astrologers, conspiracy theorists, Satan worshippers even to come to a ‘reasonable’ conclusion. However, it soon came to light though that it was a deliberate strategy by the villagers to expose the rampant corruption in their municipality where the authorities were falsely documenting road constructions to divert funds towards their personal benefits. The road in question – a product of this imaginative documentation – had only ever existed on paper. In truth, there was never a road to be stolen. Indeed, it was Occam’s Razor at work, – the simplest solution is almost always the correct one. Unfortunately, by the time this explanation made its way into the corners of a news daily, the world had moved on, having already had their share of good humour. And what could have been a commentary on smart rebellion ended up being a classist joke.
It is a different time. A different village. But as I walked down our kuchcha road with my uncle, the land beneath my feet too whispered stories of an impending theft.
***
We spent the first few hours roaming around the various active work spots in the village. Some groups were engaged in sifting sand along the embankments for the approaching monsoon, while some were building mud roads in the inaccessible areas. But apparently, the same work had been ongoing at the same spots for years now. The local leaders had doled out a simple directive which strangely coincided with my outlook on college life-pace and purpose was immaterial. As long as the state parties kept being funded in grants and raw materials, and the villagers kept getting their share, Happiness Index was through the roof. Basically, no work was ever done, at least in these parts. Except before the elections, Durga puja, and other such extravagant festivities.
Speaking of elections, the recent change in the local political landscape too was, to put mildly, visible. Saffron was oozing out of buildings, flags, t-shirts, car stickers, even the backs of bullock carts. Cows sat quietly along the fields, doing what they’ve done for centuries, yet completely unaware of their recent rise in stardom. I wonder if anyone’s told them that according to an Aaj Tak special, their milk is the source of the aliens’ advancement in science and technology, and that they are sometimes sucked into the UFOs for ground-breaking purposes. If they knew, I think they’d still sit under trees, ruminating over fodder and other equally important matters even while religious fanatics went about declaring wars in their name.
***
The next few errands were rather more personal in nature. A relative of my grandfather had holed herself up in her house and was refusing to talk to anybody. We wanted to visit her, hoping that she would at least open up to her family. As we approached the house, it welcomed us with decaying arms and a stillness that echoed with muted despair. As we had anticipated, she opened the door, ushered us in, but immediately locked it back in haste. The room was bare, every corner stripped of even the smallest possessions. What remained was a piece of tattered sheet in the middle of the floor and a fifty-eight-year-old woman looking just as bad, if not worse. We had to extract words out of her sobs as she explained how she had been ‘robbed’ by her own daughter and son-in-law. Stories like hers were not new to me. On the contrary, it is common enough on our newspapers to border on the mundane. Once in a while, we find an absurd twist to this familiar tale that piques our interest and our funny bone alike. Like the time that a peculiar event in a slum near my para had made so much noise in the local newspapers that my father had felt a gleeful pride in narrating the story to me. A thief had broken into an old woman’s house who had been away for the night to her daughter’s place. The young miscreant had come in, cooked rice, daal and aloo posto, hung a mosquito net, slept the night and before leaving the next day, forgot to rob the woman. As he remembered what he had come for, he rushed back but in the process was caught by the neighbors. It was easy to find humour in this casual tidbit, and crack jokes at the ‘lack of discipline’ in today’s youth that even spilled over to its thieves, primarily because we can never comprehend the extent to which inaccessibility to the bare minimum resources leads harmless kids into paths they might otherwise never walk. Sometimes, the yellow wood has just one road and nothing one does makes a difference. I’ve been caught too- coming out of places in the wee hours of mornings, but my unkempt hair would never know tales of dearth or suffering.
Here, at Khedail, listening to the resignation in this frail woman’s voice, the news I sometimes glossed over, took on a different shape. We had come to draw her out, but after this strangely sobering exchange, we found it in ourselves to understand her urge to lock up and hide. We realised that nothing we said could convince her to come out, let alone file a formal complaint. Resigning ourselves to the old woman’s wish, we came away, offering her help both in cash and kind before we left, which she dutifully turned down.
III
In this country, humour is often peddled at the expense of those who cannot retaliate. Today, media outlets funded by specific political agendas clamp down on humour as a primary form of protest. But in the middle of this abject loss of laughter, there is a strand that still unites us all – our great ability to laugh at anything that cannot bite back or the rush of power we enjoy when the numbers are on our side.
Our next stop was a family who had not withdrawn their payments for a while, which is unusual considering their socio-economic condition. The matter was a technical glitch from the Bank’s end, but once nervous fears had been allayed, the conversation veered towards darker matters that neither my uncle nor I would ever bring up on our own. This family had a daughter who had been sexually abused by a group of men from a prominent NGO and she had never recovered from the trauma. She lay in bed all day and had, on multiple occasions, tried to take her own life. Apparently, one of the perpetrators had responded to the mother’s protests by venturing that it wouldn’t matter if there was ‘one less Bihari on earth’, since they all looked alike and served no discernible purpose. When a news anchor from KTLA 5 confused Samuel L. Jackson with Lawrence Fishburne on a live interview, the former had instantly silenced the anchor as he tried to laugh it off as a harmless mistake. We celebrated because it was one more ignorant racist quip nipped in the bud. There is reason, indeed, to rejoice here. Yet, discourse on racial abuse cannot be removed from the context of privilege – whatever be the nature of said privilege. And privilege is relative, and often a complicated function of too many variables. I looked at the forlorn figure of the girl’s mother, almost believing in the degradation of her own lot, and my thoughts jerked sharply to Samuel L. Jackson shutting down the news anchor while the cameras went crazy around him. At that moment, I remember feeling that I had had enough for one day. My entitled self was way outside his comfort zone.
We had one last stop to make but before that, we decided to stop by the market. I was the guest for the day and hence had a customary mutton dish awaiting. Every perishable item on display was as fresh as it gets, and they lay there in sharp contrast to the look on the farmers’ faces. Neither Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) nor a zillion other schemes were helping these primary producers in any way. Usually by the time the benefits of agriculture laws trickle from the North to the East, they often become obsolete in the North. And the East picks up the leftovers. More importantly, subsistence farming in Eastern India is still majorly dependent on monsoon but the required infrastructure is redirected towards Air Force One from where our Hon’ble leaders can post photoshopped pictures as they pretend to fly over drought and flood affected areas. This year there has been a surplus of onion produce as opposed to the severe shortfall of last year when onions had reached the price of gold (or at least fuel). When necessity reaches the price of luxury, people resort to strange ways of rebellion. The middle class usually rants about it over their evening tea while the suburbs and countryside are more creative in their approach. As was this village whose antics took up an hour of Prime-Time news. For the first five minutes, I remember the anchor screaming “Chudail maange pyaaz. Raat ke andhere me pyaaz mangti chudail’. The rest of the broadcast was ‘notable’ at best. Twitter exploded with rich, entitled kids taking a dig at these people while being completely ignorant of the fact that the elders of this village had started this rumour to ensure that their kids do not misplace or waste even a single piece of onion. But using a ‘chudail’ as caution was apparently more ridiculous and stupid than spending lakhs on self-proclaimed fortune tellers, disbelieving in the science of vaccination, subscribing to ‘BrahminMatrimony.com’ or using cow urine as a disinfectant. To each their own.
We ended the day with a customary visit to the municipality office. The logbook had to be submitted, the ‘Sir’s’ greeted, and niceties exchanged in return of future favours. As I left my uncle to these tasks, I remember being fixated on the building itself which, a long, unpleasant time ago, used to be a Zamindar’s residence- the kind that would turn on his own people to stay in the Coloniser’s good books. The walls still adorn a few embalmed heads of wild pigs and a Bengal tiger. It is funny that we’re the only species that hunts for fun. But sometimes nature has a way of, quite literally, striking back. As it did to this man from Texas in August 2015. The said gentleman, threatened by an ant-eating armadillo, rushed to his backyard waiving his First Amendment Rights and shot the poor creature. But the armadillo’s outer shell being the kind of thick that it is, rebound the bullet and hit the man back. When the news made it to the papers, British comedian Ricky Gervais commented on it saying ‘Karma-dillo’. I left the building with a bitter aftertaste, quite like the generations before me had done, every time their basic rights were denied.
I came back to an early dinner, bid goodbye to my favourite people and left, bound towards the city this time…
IV
The urban dictionary is fascinating because it houses words for emotions you didn’t know you wanted to express. Take sonder, for example. “Sonder”: the realization that that every person and thing around us has a life and stories as complex and diverse as our own.
It is a miraculous word, and a forgiving one. Once we realize that every imaginable thing around us has a story, we also stop expecting stories to ever be told in completeness. I have never expected any form of mass media to adhere to a miniscule portion of the universe that is information. But it is undeniable that the media holds a constitutional right to tell the stories of the people it represents. Over time though, this right has been manipulated to encroach into people’s privacy, commercialize their vulnerabilities, and ridicule their position in the society. That I spent years running after the gossip of T2 every morning makes me as much a consumer of said adulteration. I have laughed my heart out at Alia Bhatt’s knowledge of Current Affairs. I have, with elation, used the term ‘rape’ to publicly describe my football team’s victory over its rival. I have shared videos of brawls in the Parliament on social media, Lok Sabha members falling asleep while democracy is being debated on the floor and have been hopeful of mass-murderers leading the country. News can, and probably at times should be, ‘hatke’. It is not always possible for the mainstream to reach, hear and understand the subaltern. Un(fortunately) humor is often the way because it takes away the need to be socially responsible while still being socially relevant.
The excursion to Khedail was not an eye-opener. Rather, it was an affirmation of the many times that my own privilege has risen to meet me in the eye. As I went through my day, I was visited so many times by the spirits of my past, trying to reconcile my imperfect worldviews with the realities that were made apparent to me once more. So, when I try to recount my experience, I end up reminiscing every spontaneous reaction I’ve ever had and breaking them down into their absolute primal forms – from a hungry seven-year-old at a get together to laughing at the contents on Tik Tok. Remember how threated a few social classes had felt when they realised that the subaltern comprised of human beings too who have the right to express and even garner more fans than the former ever could? The argument could very well have been on our dwindling attention spans. Instead, it took on an ugly classist battle around sophistication and aesthetics. Archaic, conservative, and orthodox practices fall under the canopy of ‘culture’ in South Delhi, but the same in Darbhanga, Bihar is blasphemy.
Yet, for all my indignation, – this piece I write is not meant to be a rant. It is, rather, a note-to-self. A reminder that while masquerading grotesque humor as innocently ‘weird’ news is both easy, and tempting, once in a while it pays to dig deeper and look for the stories that are waiting to be heard. This is a realization that no matter how “woke” I believe myself to be, there will always be a day at Khedail to show me how far the roots of privilege truly stretch. Unlearning, you see, takes a lifetime.