In Dettol We Trust

You know the old nature v/s nurture debate? I always thought the nature is what you are born with and nurture builds over it. Like the fact that I have always had my dad’s nose and his toes. Or like the fact that my handwriting has been like my mother’s forever. But what I didn't know is that genes can set in late as well. They are funny that way.

So never mind that I never thought of myself as a germ-a-phobe. And yes I did find it weird that my father imposed a mandatory two minute hand wash on us for all purposes (All Sabuns are slow. Lifebuoy is lying). It didn't matter. Because a year back, my genes attacked and I ended up with a hopeless case of germ-o-phobia. Six months back, my germ-o-phobia was only second to Mr Adrian Monk. It was like being at war. All the time. Do you even know the number of surfaces you touch that have already been touched by millions before you? Like the knob to pull down a window in your taxi cab. Or the arm of a seat in a theatre. Or the keys atop an ATM machine. It’s enough to drive a woman mad.

And then there is stuff in the air. And the water. And the food.

And my only savior in this world of pain was Dettol. Dettol was my shining beacon of liquid light that could swat every nit-picking disgusting piece of vermin stuck to near about everything. I looked up to Dettol like that squirrel in Ice age 1-4 looks at that nut. And Dettol isn't  just an antiseptic. It is so much more. Do you know you can use it for dandruff? Or for gargles? Absolutely amazing! And you can dunk an amazing variety of stuff in it. Toothbrushes, clothes, mugs, buckets, straws, pencils, etc. etc. etc. You ask me a synonym for versatile and I am most likely to say Dettol (apart from aloe-vera…that’s a story for another day )

Anyway just as I was about to match Mr Adrian Monk and hole myself up in a “clean” room (the kind you find in those watch making factories), something happened. I ended up on the dusty streets of rural India.

On my very first day I gingerly entered one of two “decent” hotels/PGs available in a town which was a district headquarter but looked more like a dusty cold village with lots of auto shops. I took a deep breath in (one of the advantages of rural india, air tends to be rather clean), exhaled and set about the task of comparing one sub-optimal hotel room with the other sub-optimal hotel room. The basics couldn't be helped. There was the bed, the loo (let’s not even talk about it), the dirty jug with the “clean” water, some neelkamal chairs (seriously you can find those anywhere!) and the overall dharamshala feel.

I took another deep breath in and ran to the closest grocery shop. 

God bless you, Reckitt Benckiser for your distribution’s reach.Equipped with all my standard cleaning supplies, I finally chose a hotel with a TV in each room. And so I spent my first few days in this town in “relative” comfort. Then the actual rural visits started. This is when things started getting a bit out of hand.

Don’t get me wrong. Villages can be wonderful. Except when you are doing a project on organic manure and pesticides. You see things tend to get a bit, well, organic.

So I started with a thorough after-village-clean-up routine. And I resorted to dunking everything in Dettol. Except food which was a bummer. And slowly as I tried to clean everything up, nurture raised its ugly head. It paired up with that other trait it had planted in me – laziness and slowly set on its work to overcome my genetic predisposition to cleanliness. You know the story of that man who literally chipped off a mountain to make a tunnel? Laziness tends to work more like dynamite and this machine when it comes to chipping off my clean up routine.

Every day I learned to care a little bit less. I would want to report that this was rather tough but regrettably the word “lazy” describes me considerably more than “germ freak”. (check out the aint-no-transformer-better-than-me, Bagger 288 above for further proof).

And so here we are today. My monthly consumption of Dettol products is down by a regrettable 80%. 

Nurture 1 Nature 0

The feeling of being useless

As MBAs we often think that our skills are indispensable. Pick practically any activity conducted on planet earth and we will be sure of our abilities to improve efficiency, increase growth and in general be the greatest gift to mankind. You give us a restaurant kitchen and we think that we could make the front-of-house and back-of-house run much more efficiently than the chefs and waiters. You give us a school and we are already mapping out ways to improve attendance, school ratings and academic scores with our ppts and excels.

And perhaps we are a little right. We are of course highly intelligent and know how to structure problems impeccably (For instance: a pictorial/graphical representation of this article would take me all of 5 minutes to make. Writing this article, on the other hand, is taking its own sweet time.)As you can see we are a bit in love with ourselves. And so we assume that our skills can always make a significant difference.

Until they don’t.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that at the start of my rural stint three weeks ago, I had a grand vision of helping NGOs. Three weeks later, I have come to the painful realisation that my skill set will never achieve what these NGOs have in the backward Bundelkhand region. Perhaps I thought that I would find out a new problem or solve an old one. All that I have managed to do is gape and have my jaw drop with scintillating regularity at the gritty realities of rural india.

Three weeks back, I expected to visit villages and look at poverty. A pretty basic expectation. The urban indian isn’t insulated enough from slums and the like to have no exposure to the destitute. But what I didn’t expect to find was a whole different country. And so when last week a colleague asked me what was the strangest thing I had experienced so far, I was really hard pressed to choose one over the rest. So wide and absolute is the distance between India and Bharat that Bharat might as well be a pink fluffy unicorn.

And this unicorn lives by its own unique rules.

Rural india still observes many rules which would appear the stuff of historical cinema to us. When I was told to observe the caste based discrimination, I thought it would be particularly odd to go around asking people’s castes. But rural india made it so simple, the patels live in one part of the village, the pandits in another and the harijans in another. All you need to do is walk into a street and you know everyone’s caste. Caste forms one of the most basic and perhaps the most imposing block within the structure of an individual’s identity.

Women still practice purdah. And from that I mean absolute purdah, the kind you read about in those century old hindi stories in your 8^th standard textbook. Of the 40 odd women I have met so far, I only saw the faces of about 10 or so. That too was only made possible through a decade or more of concentrated efforts by the NGOs in this region. Being a woman is a caste of its own. A caste which bears the greatest brunt of social stigma across the board.

Women don’t leave the home. And I mean that literally. I met a woman who spent 13 years inside her in-laws house. The only time she stepped out was for some occasional fairs. Women don’t join the menfolk in wedding processions. In some villages if a woman comes alongside a baraat to the bride’s home, she is assumed to be a prostitute.

The upside is that in some villages women don’t have to buy groceries. It was heartening to find that men do all the household shopping including bangles and “lip-i-stick”. That is because no one wants a woman out of the house haggling with shopkeepers and everyone treats a woman like a 2 year old who can’t possibly be trusted with money.

There are hardly any toilets. The ones that are there are not used. It seems they are not as comfortable as the open fields. “Hum do hamare do” makes no sense in a place where  6-7  children seems to be the norm. Child marriage continues to prevail. Pregnancy before the age of 18 is acceptable.

All of the above would make one think that Bharat is too lost in the 16^th century to be brought into the 21^st. And this is where Bharat starts to surprise you.

The distance of 500 years is being made up in 10-12 years in some of these villages. NGOs working across Bundelkhand have been able to better things one village at a time. All of them are uniting the villagers to form groups and using these groups to build a new bharat. And it’s in villages like these that Bharat shines. Because despite all its evils, Bharat is the most welcoming place you will ever visit.

It’s a place where people welcome you into their homes and their hearts. It’s a place where people get offended if you don’t stay long enough for a cup of tea or for a meal. It’s a place where people will pluck fruits from their trees and crops from their fields and insist you take a kilo or two. It’s a place where the food is as fresh as it can be.

It’s a place where the smallest gesture of kindness or “apnapan” is rewarded many times over. Its a place which everyone should visit once in a while to see just how simple life can be. It’s a place which sometimes has no use for technology. And more often than not it’s a place made up of the stuff of desktop wallpapers.

 It’s a place whose people needn't migrate to the cities. Whose people can come together, form small communities and improve each other’s lives. All that is needed is a little knowledge and a little help. And when this help reaches these villages, the clock starts ticking on this slow but sure process of change.

It’s a process that is heartening to see. And it’s a process that is humbling to experience. Because my ppts and my excels will not fasten this process or make it better. But the determined volunteers who walk these dusty streets , will.

A letter to an Indian woman

Dear anguished Indian woman

I have always been a feminist.Basically I have always believed that men and women are equals.Maybe this is because I was brought up in a family where my being a girl made no difference. At school I saw that the sports competitions differentiated between the sexes. And so I learned that men are physically stronger. But everywhere else we were equals. So when I started realizing that there are people in the world who think it isn't so, I was greatly amazed. And then I found out that the life and rights I had taken for granted had been fought for. That made no sense. Because when I figured out what 2 plus 2 was, so did the boy sitting next to me. There were no extra classes for girls. We weren't slow or anything.

And yet as I kept growing, I learnt that this is a world that hates women. As a teenager I learnt what rape was. It was a devastating thing to have to know about. That’s when feminism became anti-men for me. Men were stronger. Men had penises. Men were responsible. Men had been doing this for centuries. And with this ideology I felt utter helplessness. Because what could I do now? How could I make things better? And then there were questions. How is female education gonna help? We gotta cure the men somehow. And there was disgust. And there was anguish.

And then in the second year of college, my view of feminism changed completely. I met a girl, a smart competent girl and she honestly believed that men were intellectually superior. Here was a girl in an NIT on the cusp of a corporate career who honestly believed that half the population was smarter than her! And the more I tried to reason with her, the more insistent she became. That was just absurd. Personally I have quite a healthy sized ego and I just couldn't understand how she got this way. And slowly I figured it out. She believed it because somewhere in her upbringing this is what society had communicated to her. She believed it because her family had somehow taught her this. And then I started thinking. And what I realized is that if your parents say you are an ape, you sort of start believing that you are an ape over a period of time. Whatever the mirror might say. Because our parents define the world for us. And we love them so much and we owe them so much. We can’t discard what they say. It clings on.

How could I , some random girl she met in college, wipe over what she had learnt from the people she loved more than life?

And suddenly it wasn't the men anymore. It was society. And suddenly education made sense. Because education may make you question. When I added 2 and 2 and so did the boy next to me, I might, might just wonder, hey, I am not slower than him after"all. And then when I join a job and I work and get results, I might, might just wonder, hey, I am not so bad am I?

And so ladies, A girl would grow to respect herself. A girl would earn the respect that society has denied her for centuries. And so my only solution to what we face today is : Study and then work.

Work even if it drives you nuts. Work even if you can’t take the stress. And work most of all for the sake of your children.

Children,you say? The ones who you feel you abandon every time you leave the home to work?The one who you have this whole guilt trip over?

Yes, your children. (Oh btw I have got a working mum so please reserve the nasties)

Firstly, your children will not require in the exact same way throughout their lives. Your one year old needs you physically present 24/7 but can you say the same about your 9 year old who goes to school, has football practice and friends to play with in the evening? And what about your 15 year old, do you see him/her before dinner time anyway? But what your 9 year old needs is that you know what is going on his/her life, that you know hows school going and who his/her friends are. Will your job come in the way of this especially in this age of mobile phones soon to be video phones? Most probably not. Also Your children will always love you. Unless you really really screw things up. The love that you feel is a two way street. Your working and not spending your afternoons with them will never change that. See the way my mom is my idol. 

Secondly, your son and daughter need to see you as an individual. They need to see how you can earn money, lead people and achieve things. They need to see this so they learn to respect you. They need to be proud of you. Because the way they think of you, is how they will think of women. Your daughters will see your strength and follow suit. Your sons will see your strength and learn to see women as individuals not sex objects. You will raise a good man and good woman by setting an example

Thirdly and most importantly, motherhood is a full time job. It doesn't end when your kid is 15 or 16. It lasts for life.

I started working less than a year ago. And I am a novice trying to make sense of bosses, office politics, projects, stress- all of it. But the one support I have, the one mentor I have is my mother. Because I may bitch about office to my friends but they are all like me : new. But my mother has lived through every thing that I will experience in the next quarter of a century. And of course she loves me in a way that only she can
.

So please work. Work so that you are not just loved. Work so that you are respected. And some day little by little your children will set this horrible imbalance right. Someday all this “battle of the sexes” stuff will end. Someday there can be peace. Because we should live peacefully side by side. Man and woman. The way it was intended.