Joyous Devi

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Writers must serve a social purpose More reason why people should refrain from commenting on areas that they have little knowledge of....

Joyous Devi: Ma! Let Me Be Born...

The trip to Jhansi nearly didn’t happen. Relying on  the self proclaimed largest  radio taxi network in the country Meru cab, was not such a great idea I realized, as I stood waiting  for the taxi to show itself,  vacillating between the extremes of anger and nervousness and feeling the biting cold seep through all my insulations. It was 5:30 in the morning, and despite frequent  calls to the cab’s control room, I didn’t see the cab anywhere in sight, until it arrived, tearing through the surreal fog like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, with barely 20 minutes to departure time. But make it I did, thanks to the energy levels of  two coolies who appropriated my  rather small pieces of luggage between them as soon as my cab drove into the station ramp. They  ran, like twin heroes in a Hindi film, undeterred by  baggage checking  machines or the crowds on the platform or even the inexorable tick tock of the clock ...

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Salman Rushdie & India's new theocracy

Ejected from the aircraft, the walk across the tarmac terminates into a swanky, building - the Raja Bhoj airport in Bhopal. Its clever architecture and clean lines, make one take a double take, for it’s a vision of modernity most unexpected in anything other than the A 1 class cities; in Madhya Pradesh even more so, a state associated with many kinds of unflattering data. But it makes a statement, political as well as an aggressive bid to woo the tourist and capital. The drive from the airport unveils a city, which breathes easily with its past when a succession of four Begums ruled the city from 1819-1926, and its contemporary avatar – green and spread out, the waters of its two lakes uncluttered by polythene or other refuse. It’s an example other cities in India could well emulate. And while a BJP ruled state, which has very recently passed the rather hair brained order of according seven years imprisonment for cow slaught...

And as the current year runs its last stretch before it can expel its final shuddering breaths to become: the Year that Was, a reference in the past, a collection of wooly memories; everything within us - the human parallel to the animal instinct of marking territory – invents ways of marking this time. Time intrinsically linked to our sense of our chronological existence, which at a deeper level is an uneasy acknowledgement of our mortality. So that the very celebration of this ‘ time’ holds a kind of quiet keening, a sense of loss, which we try every which way to subsume under a collective , concentrated kind of forgetfulness. This induced amnesia is expressed best through a party and any invented excuses for a celebration. And so we have imported some, concocted some, traditionally followed some, while some remain with us as a hungovered presence from our colonial past, specially while marking this time of the year. There is, to begin with , a mad rush of...

My visit to Chindwara was rife with mixed feelings, an anticipation not unmixed with a certain uncertainty ( what an oxymoron!). It was a project that had been on the burner for all of a 365+365 plus some days and now that it had been tossed into my lap or rather our organisation’s, it came with the rider that it had to be done in x number of days, starting NOW, with not a minute to be expended on wasteful activities such as drawing a deep shuddering breath and getting one’s addled thoughts into some order. My trepidation of course had a history to it. It was an intervention amongst weavers, where the weaving tradition had all but gone into a comatose state and what remained was a stale whiff of nostalgia amongst the old hands, who harboured dim memories of a glory, which in many ways continued to shine rather brightly in their imagined perception of it. And what touched me very deeply during my various interactions with them, was the hope that still made their eyes sparkle as...