Thursday 20 November 2014

Breaking the Dark Silence : Child Sexual Abuse

20 November, marks the day on which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. This is the silver jubilee of the anniversary of the convention and on this occasion the ambitious Indian polity needs to deliberate where it stands on the issue of child rights.
Out of the world’s 19% of children who reside in India, 53.22% have been victims of sexual abuse. This data comes from the Study on Child Abuse: India 2007 published by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, India. The study also points out that 50% of these cases identify victimisers as either known to the child or in those in position of high trust.
The Prevention of Children against Sexual Offenses (POCSO) Act, 2012 has been a welcome move by the then government towards taking a note of rising crime against children. However, much needs to be done to take this initiative to its intended denouement.
Currently, the Act within its purview reiterates its commitment to the Convention on Child Rights by the UN General Assembly acceded to in 1992, comprehensively defines the ambit of cases under child sexual abuse and acknowledges the need for privacy and confidentiality of the child during judicial process. The act also details the procedure for reporting cases and recording the instances of abuse. The quite comprehensive Act ensures that a complainant and aggrieved in a child rights’ abuse case is at ease within the legal and judicial framework.
However, beyond the intent of this Act, the practical aspects in addressing the menace of child sexual abuse needs to be duly considered. One of the parliamentarians, Rajeev Chandrashekhar has been speaking about the need to amend this Act. In the two focus areas he earmarks, he speaks about third party liability and need for speedy justice to be incorporated in the body of the Act. While, these legislative interventions are important, an awareness and activism based approach towards dealing with this issue is crucial.
Reports after reports have reiterated that the need to talk about the issue of child sexual abuse is a must. A seminar concluded yesterday in Tiruchirapalli had experts talking about the need to discuss the issue at hand as the first step.
Shame, embarrassment and a false sense of family honour associated with cases of child abuse happening within very close knit family and friend circles makes it all the more necessary to vocalise instances of child abuse.
Schools, crèches, kindergartens and places of recreation for children need to become more vigilant and most importantly need to be held accountable for any instance of child sexual abuse. School curriculums should necessarily carry tailor made modules for students at various ages to make them aware about this heinous trend. Workshops to sensitize parents, teachers, all kinds of staff employed in children-populated institutions must be organised.
The central government’s intention to ban pornographic sites may be debated within the larger framework of its infringement on the Fundamental Right to Freedom, but a blanket ban on all sites encouraging child pornography will be a much welcome move.
India – a country that houses a huge chunk of the world’s children population – must wake up to realise the growing threat to its human resource.

Wednesday 19 November 2014

It takes all kinds of artists to change the world: Ellie Cross

Ellie Cross is an artist from Seattle. After a formal training in art, she got interested in using art as a medium and a tool for curating solutions in order to create a better and just world. Ellie has worked in almost 10 countries and worked with local communities in Malaysia, Thailand, Guatemala, India, El Salvador, Ghana, Nicaragua, Tibet, Cambodia and the U.S.
Ellie, along with the local teams at all these places, created mural paintings on wide array of themes like environmental concerns and sustainable development, gender injustice and a strive towards equality, crippling poverty and art as a medium to learn and express, human trafficking and being salvaged from flesh trade among many others.
In a skype conversation with newsroompost.com, here is what Ellie revealed about her art and her commitments:
Newsroompost: Ellie, thank you so much for joining us. Art, in India is not considered a lucrative vocation and artists abandoning everything and embracing just art for their livelihood is a very brave step. You are from the US and have worked a great deal in various continents and countries. Do you think this kind of marginalisation when it comes to looking at art and giving it its due is a universal phenomenon?
Ellie Cross: Of course, yes. Art is not really a lucrative career option anywhere which is unfortunate given the immense possibilities within art. But i feel, one should follow one’s passion most definitely.
Newsroompost: You have done so much within such a short span of time. How is it that you fund your activities and your work? You were in India for a fair bit of time, for example.
Ellie Cross: I work for a bit, save, travel and work again. This cycle continues to run me and my passions. In India, i was teaching for three years. So, that kind of kept the kitchen running and allowed me to do my work.
Newsroompost: Your concept of marrying social commitment with art is a very beautiful and unique concept especially in times we inhabit where art either exists for ‘art’s sake’, is abstract or is vociferously polemical or political. How and why do you see art as this medium for social change?
Ellie Cross:  Art was always my calling. I knew that come what may, i will invest all my energies in art and work herein. It is so wonderful how art grapples with realities all around. You know, you don’t create anything anew. It is all interrogated by what you see around, what you feel and how you respond. Therefore, for me , it is almost impossible to dissociate art and reality or social commitment as you put it. Therefore, art has to and must invade meanings and help create something for a better world.
Newsroompost: So, you feel that art is political? Do you think art should send out messages for world – from the eyes of the artist as poet P.B. Shelley said that ‘poets(artists) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’
Ellie Cross: You are right. Art can not be a vocation in vacuum. It is very political. In fact, i personally feel that art should always be coupled with acitivism. That it should and must pave way for what’s happening around to what should happen around. Having said that, i also feel that it takes all kinds of artists to change the world. One common formula does not fit in all. Only activist artists can not be credited with the beautiful changes that we see or will see around. So, to go back to what you said, ‘art for art’s sake’ is also important just at Shelleyian idea of art is.
Newsroompost: Ellie, you have worked in 10 countries and have interacted with so many people, cultures, realities, responses and art forms. What do you think has been the most challenging situation by far? And what do you think are the challenges common to working in a dynamic space like this?
Ellie Cross:  Cultures, as you said, are different.  They created a beautiful dichotomy in my work space. On the one hand, it was amazing to know and absorb so much working with communities in all these different spaces. On the other hand, there was this huge language and cultural barrier that needed to be dealt with – broken and forged – before taking up the work that i envisaged. It took up a large part of my time, to form relationships with people that were conducive enough to come together for work.
Art, the kind which i engage in, is all about community coming together for a common good or goal or reason, or however you put it. For me, creating that condition to be able to create something new was the most challenging. Language, in that respect too, creates a problem.
I remember, in my first project at Mahim, Mumbai, i was so ennerved by the sheer size of population that came up that it was difficult to imagine completing that work(chuckles)…but we did.
Newsroompost: Ellie, you worked in India for a year. How do you see our country and what did you think of its potential, as an artist and acitivist?
Ellie Cross:The one thing which absolutely amazes me about your country is the sheer connectivity within communities. It is a culturally connected community. So, the kind of work i tried to do in India – its potential is huge and unique.
Look at this. The murals in slums and railway stations of Mumbai are now a community asset. It is great to discover that the community took care of its own creation by adding fresh layers of paint to it at regular intervals. That is the reward for community, its power to own and appropriate its space. So, in terms of potential, it huge – this kind of an ownership that incidentally happened through art there.
Newsroompost: Isn’t it similar to your experiences in Tibet?
Ellie Cross:  Yes, it is. In fact, Tibet showed me a microcosm of understanding art and how and what it means. I went to Tibet with a preconceived notion. I was cynical and thought that the western influence is consuming the Tibetan world and that it needs protection and preservation. But i was amazed and humbled to find how beautifully they had appropriated the western world view to their own advantage. Tibetans, being the smart people they are, are not just using art forms to preserve their culture but armed with the western ideals are forging new and creative bonds.
Newsroompost: What are issues that are close to your heart. I know you have worked a great deal on various issues and concerns, but what is that one thing that resonates with your commitment?
Ellie Cross:  I went to an all girls college. So, for sure, feminism is important to me. But i also feel quite strongly about environmental concerns.
Newsroompost: At the risk of asking you a very political and therefore a personal question, Ellie, i hope you do see some problems that are generated by the US and that has made this kind of ‘grappling with art for a better world’ a necessity. As an American, how do you see this politically?
Ellie Cross:  I disagree to what Obama has done in many ways. However, one has to understand that the real problems are structural – Obama or no Obama. Within the US,  immigration reforms, prison reforms are very important and need immediate attention. And you are right, the foreign policy of the government which is, by and large, based on aggression, is deeply problematic.
Newsroompost: What projects are keeping you busy these days?
Ellie Cross:  I am working on a poetry book that makes use of illustrative art and am working in Chile for murals called Window on the wall.
Newsroompost: Ellie, thank you so much for this beautiful conversation
Ellie Cross: The pleasure was all mine.

Saturday 15 November 2014

Family matters and the unreliable maps of memory

Ira Singh's The Surveyor is a coming-of-age narrative trying to negotiate the realities of a recently decolonised nation. Weaving a panoramic view of social, political, literary and personal histories of the mid-20th century India through the characters of Ravinder and his daughter Natasha, Singh tries to grapple with the contradictions and binaries overriding generational shifts in the novel.
Ravinder joins the Survey of India as a cartographer at the historical junction of India's independence and the subcontinent's partition in 1947. Much against the wishes of his father, Ravinder marries an Anglo-Indian, Jennifer Robbins, and is blessed with two daughters, Anushka and Natasha. Natasha, the protagonist of The Surveyor, inherits the passion for cartography and reading from her father, Ravinder. In The Surveyor, she creates a cinematic portrait of her life, from households scattered in small towns, to the larger world of the city. The novel in that sense is Natasha's cartographic exploration of freedom and a search for her identity.
The almost sombre existential questions in the worlds of Ravinder's parents, Ravinder and Natasha, are negotiated in violently contradictory fashions. There is a fiercely savage grip on tradition and religion on the part of Ravinder's parents, Ravinder's own absolute rejection of ritualistic tradition and unstinting love for cartography and finally, a calmness shown by Natasha as she makes her peace with the bits and pieces of these previous lives that she encounters. And through the novel, one begins to gradually align oneself with the natural simplicity of being.
Memory and the act of surveying, remembering and chronicling form the essence of the book, in terms of plot, structure and form. A free narrative shift of physical location from Punjab to Dehradun to Delhi is akin to cartographic curating. It denotes moving on as a snap from one world to the other. Indeed, the strength of the narration lies in the organic tectonic shifts that Natasha's story takes. While lost in the rich dream-like narrative sequence of Dehradun and its hills, a reader reaches the end of a chapter. The very next moment, a chapter starts off in an upmarket Delhi space, jolting the reader as it quickly absorbs her into its enchanting fold. From one chapter to the other, one feels the narrative sliding away into wistful pasts, transporting the readers into a world of sharp images and moments punctuated by elegiac pangs.
The moments of lengthy, lisping almost relaxed recounting of details — as simple as remembering the almost forgotten Cherry Blossom shoe polish and Pears soap — have the ability to transport a reader to the real world of lost fantasies and memories fast fading into oblivion. The Coleridgean Kubla Khan experience of imagining and feeling a part of that makeshift dream which The Surveyor creates is so sensuous, delightful and rich that one genuinely wants that imagery to continue — without even a punctuation marring the effect.
Long, well knit, carefully carved and chiseled phrases and sentences mark the length and breadth of the novel. The preciseness of each word, the force of each phrase and the sensibility of each sentence is indicative of a careful craft.
Perhaps it's the conscious decision of the author to use memory as a trope to interrogate various themes. Memory builds up the story. Memory constructs characters. Memory conjures up historical and political details of Emergency years. Memory constructs and deconstructs the larger notions of nation formation, re-formation and deformation. This flirtation with memory glosses over a few important details of events in history, but one can see that this is mostly by design.
The novel could have said a little more about the time it encapsulates. Just as each character in the novel is well rounded and well formed, so could each moment in history and politics have been crafted. Perhaps, that is the limitation of memory or this kind of memorisation. Through cartography, memory, fleeting landscapes, polyphonic voices and a language rich in historical allegory, The Surveyor provides a dream-like experience. But like a lot of dreams, it also ends up being vague at certain places.
Dreamy, brimming with lingering memories, intense, rich and fleetingly sensuous, Ira Singh'sThe Surveyor is a recommendation for anyone who lives life with simplicity, honesty and adaptability. It's a book that seeks resonance in (and provides nourishment to) all those who search for their identities in their homes, families, work, solitude, desire and freedom. Ultimately, though, it's also about the price one pays for these things.

Thursday 13 November 2014

A harsh winter awaits homeless Kashmiris

The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir saw unprecedented damage after the floods in September. Nothing was spared — houses to hotels, the high court to hospitals, government offices to private businesses, shopping complexes to universities, schools and houseboats. The financial loss has yet to be ascertained. According to official estimates, at least 350 villages were completely submerged.
Jammu and Kashmir has had to face catastrophes time and again. There was a blizzard and an earthquake in 2005, a cloudburst and flash floods in 2010, and another cloudburst in 2011 — all this in addition to the militancy that has gone out of control since the Nineties. And each time these tragedies struck, the state has gone back by more than five years in terms of development, in spite of the efforts of the government and the resilience of Kashmiris.
In the Rajbagh area of Srinagar, the state capital, Shahala Ali Shaikh, a fiercely independent and successful entrepreneur and an environmental activist, lost her house and business. Standing amid the debris, she says, “It was bound to happen. What you give to nature will come back to you!”
Along with a team of other concerned citizens of the state, Shaikh had met officials of the central and state governments to warn of an impending disaster way back in 2006. They had suggested practical measures that needed some common sense and political will to check the changing dynamics of the environment. But all fell on deaf ears.“You need to understand the topography of a city like Srinagar where you have the River Jhelum, a Dal Lake, mountains all around; it’s like a saucer, you know — very fragile and very sensitive to earthquakes and flood situations,” Shaikh says. “City planning and transport could not and should not have ignored this aspect.”
Sajid Farooq Shah, a prominent businessman who owns the now-destroyed Comrade Inn, says: “A city whose population has already exhausted the carrying capacity of land will have to rethink the outdated the Housing Master Plan 2001. The presumption that Srinagar would experience a population growth akin to Switzerland has been fatal. Look at this: the master plan does not allow residential constructions beyond 25 feet (7.6 metres) but the floodwaters rose way beyond 30 feet (9 metres). The entire city had to drown. There is an urgent need for drafting practical and well-researched housing and transport policies for the city.”
In 2006 the delegation of concerned citizens also submitted a proposal to enunciate the importance of a water transport system. They explained the benefits of keeping the waters of the Dal Lake and Jhelum flowing. The proposal, based on what London has done with its Thames, elaborated on developing a water transport system in the Jhelum and its tributaries and how dredging the river bed and having a waterfront makes environmental and economic sense. “If the government had heeded the citizens’ advice”, says my driver, as he drives me from Pampore to HMT Crossing, “and you had taken a boat to cover this distance, you could have easily saved about an hour.”
I imagine a well-developed transport system in the River Jhelum taking care of the local transportation needs and supplementing incomes. This would take care of the inter-district travels within the state from the north to the south and 70 per cent of the present transportation woes between Anantnag and Baramullah. But what I actually see as I drive around Srinagar, and along the Jhelum and the sides of the Dal Lake is something different: heavily populated pockets in a shambles and refugee camps whose residents have nothing but plastic sheets to keep off the elements, all pointing accusingly at the extreme insensitivity of the government(s) in place.
“Look at what has happened to Rajbagh, Kursu and adjoining areas,” says Shabeena, a survivor of the floods now living in a makeshift camp. “It’s all gone … forever. Whatever you do, you cannot reclaim the lost history of the area.”
All that remains of the Lalded hospital, the Presentation Convent, state museum, swanky emporiums and coffee shops are ruins. Move away from the once-posh areas of Rajbagh and there are stagnant floodwaters everywhere, sparking fears of an epidemic. Mehzoor Nagar, colonies on the banks of the Dal Lake, and countless temporary shelters house people with itchy skin and other health complaints.
As an immediate step towards relief in Kashmir, one needs to build houses for thousands of people who have lost their homes. No one seems to have an idea where the relief packages announced by the central or the state governments have been going. The recent Rs7.45 billion (Dh445 million) package announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his plan to have a central-government body oversee its implementation are laudable. But all these promises will count for nothing if the homeless have no protection against the harsh winter that will set in soon. Whatever has to be done, has to be done urgently.
Omar Shafi Trumboo, a well-known industrialist and general-secretary of the Civil Society Forum of Kashmir, has been involved in relief work in the state, especially in the badly hit south.
“Temporary shelters for people need to be built urgently as winter is almost here,” he says. “Also, conversion of these temporary shelters into permanent structures has to begin soon. One can clearly see politics and the impending elections affecting relief work. Good Samaritans from the corporate world and other individuals need to come forward and begin work.”
Sachin Pilot, former union minister for corporate affairs, agrees with Trumboo: “The J&K tragedy is a national tragedy and it should not and must not be politicised. Funds, resources, efforts should flow in from everywhere to rehabilitate victims. The government should see that CSR rules are made a little flexible, as I did during my tenure as union minister, so that people from everywhere can pitch in. In fact, the project of rehabilitation should be the topmost priority of the government after rescue and relief work.”
Organisations like the HMP Foundation have been working from day one, rescuing victims, distributing relief material, holding medical camps, stocking up medicines and food in hospitals.
Faisal Patel, founder and director of HMP, says, “We have distributed 1,500 litres of water, 3,500 kilograms of food packets [including rice, pulses, flour, salt, sugar, biscuits, etc], 2,000 kilograms of milk powder, 100 kilograms of baby food, 3,000 blankets, 2,000 pieces of warm clothing, 5,000 chlorine tablets, 3,000 face masks, 2,000 tubes of disinfectants, 5,000 packets of ORS, 5,000 strips of general medicines, 2,500 bandage strips, and other essential items for daily use. We have also organised health camps in south Kashmir and Srinagar and catered to more than 2,000 patients. We have reached out to more than 1,500 households in the state through health camps or by providing relief.”
Elaborating on his future plans for rehabilitation in Jammu and Kashmir, he adds, “We have realised that one needs to identify specific areas where one wants to work and get on with it. So, at HMP, we have decided on working towards ‘Adopt a J&K Village’ project, where we will rebuild 100 completely destroyed villages and rehabilitate their residents. These villages will be worked upon with the motive of building them better than before in terms of infrastructure, opportunities for growth and employment, and the overall aesthetics.
“We are also planning to undertake the rebuilding of hospitals such as the Lalded and G.B. Pant. Organisations like the FICCI [Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry], corporate houses such as Jindal Steel and Larsen & Toubro, are already on board in realising this task.”
Restoring normality in this beautiful land that Firdaus once described as heaven in the much-quoted couplet, Agar Firdaus bar ru-e-zamin ast, hami ast o- hami ast o- hami ast [If there is a heaven on earth, it’s here, it’s here, it’s here] will take all the goodness and resilience humankind, especially Indians, can muster.