Of Hands - Visible and Invisible

The drooped flower had blossomed again - and I had gone and kissed her goodbye and asked her a favor.

'My letter which was signed by the dean is with Khurshid didi who is apparently out and I need to get a photocopy of it and give it to the mess' --- could you do that for me please?' I had asked with a bit of hesitation.

She smiled reassuringly and said aloud 'Sure!'

'Thanks...'

' - now that's what I don't like --- why do you have to say thanks for little things...???'

'...I guess I don't like asking favours - it makes me feel dependent - I have always been independent'

'...hmm' she moves her eyes in a reflective manner and enunciates, 'Markets cannot always work independently - they also need intervention.'

It reminds me of a supply- demand cross diagram and market failure that occurs when efficiency and equity see a tradeoff.

'Yeah, that's correct...you are my Government', I quip.

With that beautiful realisation, we part.    ***

NANDINI’S LITTLE TALES

‘You know, that teacher at my school?’

…Which one? I ask.

‘The one who takes her hair like this from the side and then puts a ‘chimta’ at the back…’, she tells me with a lively movement of her hands describing the hairstyle of her teacher. ‘I don’t know how she does it though’, she continues. She looks up from the drawing sheet she is coloring to find my face unsatiated by her detail.

She continues with her description of the lady who teaches her everyday in the classroom, trying hard to remember her name which I happen to enquire. Nevertheless she is determined to make me form a mental picture of her teacher’s appearance in my head. ‘She puts ‘lalli’ (lipstick) on her lips before going back home in the afternoon and then some person comes to pick her up in a car’.

…Oh! Waah,  I smile at her with an exclamation as she gets busy coloring the house she had drawn with the pencil. A damp smell of mustard oil spreads in the room. Her grandmother must have lovingly oiled her hair in the morning before sending her to school.

‘Paper acche se karke aana – fir hum bahut si parhaaeee karenge aur bahut khelenge’, I hear myself telling the little girl building castles in the air before her, of days ahead full of fun.

Every time I come home, these little kids are excited and they blush and do all sorts of movements to express their love. I know they miss me. I miss them a lot. And then we have a nice little fun class in the park. These classes come to end very soon, as I leave for Delhi everytime, to jump into another world – a fast paced world with lots of deadlines, a place choked with competition and ambition.

At last, I always smile back at myself for short-lived moments like these, at least I could treasure them for a lifetime and see the fruits of a little effort done two years back maturing every time I come back. Nandini is enrolled in an English medium school nearby. Her mother and grandmother work as maids in the colony and her dad is a painter – the one who paints real houses. It had taken persistent and pressing effort to convince her parents about sending her to school. The ladies in the colony had contributed a share in her school fees. Unlike kids of other migrant laborers, her parents have not yet migrated from this place from two years. Settlement has somehow ensured the continuity of her education.

Justice

I have been thinking of writing about JUSTICE as I see the concept influencing my life and those of people around.

I define justice as ‘rightful quid pro quo’ – I get back what I deserve. If I contributed 50% to a project, a test or in organizing an event, I should get back AT LEAST 50% of the credit.

Credit, I understand can be a subjective term subject to individual egos and expectations of rewards. But I guess it would not be wrong to say that assessment of an individual’s worth, if transparent can turn out to be more acceptable and less debatable.

I had high opinion of the World Lung Foundation and its DU arm DUSFI (Delhi University Smoke Free Initiative), may be because of the creative names and the impact it would leave on a first time listener, until yesterday. At the essay competition organized under the initiative, a series of events and organizational mismanagement left me with a bad taste about WLF.

Surprisingly the judgment criteria at the Essay Contest reminded me of those old school head masters, one often reads of, who exist in backward schools in remote areas. Consider the marking scheme at the contest which was supposed to be an ‘essay writing contest’ – 30 for written essay, 30 for summary presentation of the essay and 40 for an interview with the candidate. Impressive!

Now consider how the latter category induced such level of subjectivity into the judgment criteria to the extent that the ingenuity of the essay received no credits at all.

Although the essay dealt with ‘the social, economic and environmental implications of tobacco consumption’, the interview related to none of the aspects. Neither did it try to assess the degree of sensitivity of the candidate to the issue. The kind of questions asked at the interview were the following:

1.       Name some of the chemicals that tobacco is composed of.

2.       What is the Green Tobacco Sickness caused by tobacco? How can we prevent it?

3.       Give me the date on which this act on tobacco was passed.

4.       Why is eucalyptus planted along with tobacco crop in farms?

It is precisely these kinds of questions which reminded me of those boring school EVS textbooks which we were encouraged to learn by heart to vomit out in the exams at school. The very difference between knowledge and education is that the latter is composed of stuff that cannot be googled. Education of a person is a cumulative sum of years of experience amidst knowledge.

I fail to understand how the real worth of a person would be gauged by mere factual interrogation which even a parrot could recite without hitch. Not to mention, the experience brought old school memories back.

                                                                 

I expected the initiative to be an eye-opener for students, something that would elicit our opinions on tobacco control and assess us on our ingenuity to think BEYOND the obvious! That is what most college level initiatives are supposed to be.

Alas! The school-headmasterly clichéd mindsets were hard to change, I realized – in fact, when I communicated the above views to the Director present there, he told me, “Everyone has copied the essay from the internet, so this interview is actually gauging how much you have actually retained” – he enunciated as if he was on the lookout of worthy parrots who could recite dates, figures and facts.

Strangely, at my interview I was told in candid words – ‘Miss Kaur, let me congratulate you at the outset because you are the only candidate who has written the entire essay by herself – rest all, as we have read, are fascimiles’

I felt as if I had bumped into a wrong place, being congratulated for the mere fact that I had composed an essay of my own and not through a ‘Ctrl C - Ctrl V’ act!

As it turned out in the end, the interview had greater weightage in the sum total i.e. factual rote learning was given credit over ingenuity and people who had shamelessly copied stuff and signed their names off it, were crowned as the 'best'.

What I argue here, is that the parameters taken into account compromised justice. Different people can give differential weights to different parameters - but the same if revealed beforehand in a transparent manner, can confer greater likelihood on the fairness of decisions.

I participated in my first British Parliamentary style of debate in my class 12 at school. The thing I liked the most here was the way in which adjudication was done. After the candidates were done, the judges would come to the podium and justify - 'you get x credits since you mentioned a, b, c, and d arguments which no other contestant could refute'. And usually the credits would be proportional to the number of arguments so that the question of subjectivity would not crop in. Each argument thus was given a default weightage of 1. An additional defense of the argument could attract another brownie point.

From a variety of experiences, I guess it would not be wrong to conclude that injustice happens behind closed doors, windows and curtains. It is corrupt practices specifically which undermine the fairness of decisions taken - be it in the bureaucracy too. The reason why people protest against corruption is that it compromises proportionate rewards to an individual for his effort and levies undue penalties on those who do not even deserve them - say waiting in line for days to get a simple work done in a public office.

And that is why RTI is so dear to us. It makes things transparent, makes the stakeholders conscious of public gaze and ensures speedy and effective justice. :)