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Ever been to Ishu's special world?

28/5/2011

19 Comments

 
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Ishu
10 years old Ishu is impatiently pacing up and down the sitting room of his house with long wobbly steps, a half smile on his face. He cannot balance very well and excitement is making him even more nervous, causing him to run into pieces of furniture. He runs his hand over his face, feels the sharp edge of his teeth and laughs to himself. No one knows what he is thinking. Except, to an extent, his mom. “He can’t wait to get to school. He loves being with other children,” says homemaker Ritu Negi, 35, Ishan’s delicately built smiling mom. She’s right. The moment the school bus comes around the corner and stops at the gate, Ishu’s eyes sparkle. Pushing the door open, he eagerly makes his way to the mini bus that will take him to Tapovan Government School for Special Children, Ganganagar.
 
Ishu is special. And not just because he shares his name with Isa Maseeh or Jesus Christ (he was born on Christmas Eve in a hospital run by the Missionaries). Not even because he is one of India’s 3 per cent children who are born mentally/ physically challenged (government statistics don't even bother to distinguish between the two). Ishu is special because he does not feel malice, he does not judge people from the way they look or behave and he does not bear a grudge against those who look the other way because they are not willing to accept him the way he is. There are very few others like him in this world and we the not-so-special need to respect that, even if we cannot emulate it.
 
Though physically Ishu is 10, he suffers from MR (mental retardation) and autism that brings his mental age down to a year and half. He cannot feed himself, clean himself, express his feelings, read a book or even understand a bedtime story – normal stuff that most other kids his age do. Yet, in many ways he is just like any other child because he loves Maggi, enjoys spicy chicken curry, likes having guests over, misses his grandparents when they are away and likes to fiddle with the television switch, giggling at the screen light going on and off at his little act of naughtiness. He has not learnt to say Mummy yet but his dad is a happy man because only recently Ishu called out to him and said “Papa”.
 
“That’s the first word he has started saying and he understands it means father,” says a very proud Ritu, who generously takes time out of her busy schedule to open a window into the life of a special child for us. According to statistics released by CRY (Child Relief and You) 3 % of India's children are mentally/physically challenged. As many as 20 out of every 1000 rural children are mentally/physically challenged, compared to 16 out of every 1000 urban children. Out of this staggeringly large number only one lakh children are getting special education. Teachers at Tapovan, the school Ishu goes to, make him do speech exercises, hand coordination, physiotherapy, get him to practice sitting in one place since he is hyperactive and help him to colour using crayons.  
 
Why we need integrated education
 Avenues for integrated learning – schools where special kids interact with other normal kids their age – are limited and Ritu points out that often parents of normal children don’t want their children mixing up with those suffering from MR or autism. Sometime back when she had put Ishu in integrated hobby classes at Dehradun’s Latika Vihar, many of the other parents objected to having their children interact with special kids. “They feared it was something contagious which their kids would catch,” says Ritu. Very unfortunate, not just for special children but society as well. Special kids need to be with normal kids because they learn better and pick up faster by example. And normal kids need to be with special kids because integrated education sensitises and educates them about special needs and helps in making them more humane members of society. This is the only solution to a world that cruelly alienates special children and their parents because it cannot be bothered to understand them.
 
They need acceptance
When her neighbour Pinky hugs Ishu or takes him to her own house, it makes Ritu feel accepted as a friend and as a mother whose child is different from other children. It also gives her time to finish her  chores or just read a long pending book. “Life becomes so much easier for parents of special children if they find acceptance from their families and friends. Otherwise, they end up getting isolated since they cannot participate in social functions like visits to the temple, marriages, parties etc. They have to be babysitters all the time,” says Meera Ramchander, principal of Asha School for Special Children, Bangalore, also a specialist in child development and psychology. If families and friends pitch in and help by taking care of the children for a few hours so that the parents can go for a movie, or shop or even have dinner together, it makes a big difference to the quality of their life. 
 
More about special children
Even though we don't understand them, just the way they don't understand us, special children accept us more easily than we accept them. Ishu and others like him have their own sense of fun. Ishu likes it if his mother sings to him, he likes playing with musical toys or those with blinking lights, and he likes going to the temple and folding his hands to do “jai”. He likes walking around his house and fiddling with new things he discovers. He has a 90 per cent disability and will not be able to learn more than one or two words but every new word he learns is a big achievement and it is remarkable that he understands instructions like sit or stand and words like “paani”. Children like Ishu are difficult to train, and it takes many years of love and patience for the rewards to come. “If his requirements are met, I doubt he will miss me. He lives in his own world,” says Ritu but when his father comes back after a long absence Ishu is so overwhelmed with happiness that she sometimes doubts her own words. “God gives special children to special parents, who - he knows - will take care of them. When Ishu responds to what we say, when he is happy to see us, that’s enough for me as a mother. I love him for what he is. I never think of how it would have been if he had been born normal,” says Ritu. When she looks at him and smiles, you know she means every word of what she says. And in her brave and positive outlook, there is a lesson not just for other parents of special children but for all of us. Particularly those parents who don’t want to understand the limitations of their children and are so driven by ambition that they push their kids beyond their capabilities and refuse to accept them for the unique little people they are. 
  
 
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Ishan with his doting mom
19 Comments

Named after some chap called Lansdowne

20/5/2011

 
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Trishul peaks lie in the Garhwal Himalayas. You can see them on a clear day if you get up early enough. Pictures by Col YS Rawat (retd) who lives in his ancestral red roofed bungalow in Lansdowne
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Yes, the orchids still bloom
Long time before I found my way to big city Delhi and discovered a slice of cake called Black Forest at Nathu’s Pastry Shop in Bengali Market, I knew another Kalu Danda (that’s black forest in my native Garhwali). 

It was the name of my shady pine forested hometown that the British came and “discovered” many decades back when great grandfather was a burping baby. Since they couldn’t pronounce Kalo Danda, they promptly renamed it Lansdowne after some guy back home in England, totally ignoring the fact that 99.9 per cent Garhwalis in Lansdowne had never been formally introduced to him (actually, I’m not even sure about the remaining 0.1 per cent). Since the native Garhwalis had heard gruesome stories of the English chopping off heads of people (or was it wives?) who didn’t agree with them, they decided to accept it. The angrier ones did mutter “kanda dharin” (rough equivalent of ‘burn in hell’) under their breaths at this act of impertinence but the name stuck though most of us locals continue to deliberately mispronounce it as Lansi-dawn just to convey our displeasure regarding that chap Lansdowne, whoever he was. 

To those of you who haven’t been to Lansi-dawn yet, I would suggest book your tickets now. With the way the Indian population is growing (1.7 billion soon says the depressing WHO, shaking a grave head)  you can savour the sheer absence of people, even if you fall in the category that doesn’t get much impressed by lush forests, orchids cascading down trees, blooming red rhododendrons and white daisies by the roadside. You get to see plenty of red roofed British time bungalows too and if you are really lucky you may even run into the ghost of a headless British officer who patrols the cantonment on his horse and wakes up sentries sleeping on duty. Coming back to the British, they made pretty good cantonments even if they could not cure themselves of this penchant for “discovering” already discovered placed and renaming decently named towns. A towering statue of what we Garhwalis stubbornly insist is rifleman Gabbar Singh, Victoria Cross (in effect it is the statue of a fighting soldier that was made in France and then gifted to Lansdowne), overlooks the parade ground where the Army hold attestation parades for smart young recruits with crew cut hair, tarred roads form deep arches into the hill, pine trees drop friendly cones on walkers’ heads and fallen leaves carpet hillsides down which squealing kids take breezy rides in wagons made from broken planks of wood.

You meet runny-nosed boys with apple pink cheeks and school girls with fat pigtails and big red ribbons in their hair. You spot impish local lads by the roadside contemplating the deep questions of life (mostly on the lines of : who could the new tourist in town be, where could he/she have come from; also, where would they be going). A very interesting way to pass the time. Try it sometime. If you walk all the way down to the forest side on the route to Jaiharikhal, you cross on the road cheerful alabaster complexioned local women with sparkling nose pins, carrying loads of grass or wood precariously balanced on their pretty heads. You pass luxurious deodars with spiky edged leaves and clumps of rhododendron trees that sprout bright red blossoms every summer. You hear the ear splitting “kaafal pako, meil na chakho” (the kaafal fruit has ripened but I haven’t tasted it yet) of the shrill and whiny hill bird, you sting your fingers on thorns from the Hisalu bushes on the roadside trying to get at the juicy orange fruit. And if you are in the mood for it, you sample a thali of almost home made lunch of roti, sabzi, dal and tangy raita at one of the two restaurants in the market.

Down Lansdowne’s clean roads, the friendly Whistling Thrush hops down, always a few annoying steps ahead of you; colourful butterflies hover around brilliant blue hydrangeas and Army officers sometimes spot leopards when driving back late from parties. And then there is something that you will seldom see. Locals take pride in the fact that there is no garbage blowing in the breeze. You won’t find empty wafer packets dumped between the daisies or used paper cups chucked into bushes, which is unfortunately how things are in most other hill stations in our country. In the small but neat marketplace, polythene is conspicuous by its absence, the friendly Garhwali bhulla hands out your jalebis and samosas in newspaper bags. And if you happen to run into school kids, it is quite likely that their excitement is about the saplings they have planted to make sure their town stays as green as it has always been. A recipient of the India Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar, Lansdowne is one of the most environment friendly towns of the country. This is one hill station where the air has just got cleaner, the water bodies have increased and the flora and fauna have only multiplied. The Army has constructed a beautiful pond with boating and picnic facilities and populated it with dozens of noisy ducks. Remarkable for a town where water was once a scarcity. Some extensive tree plantation has also been carried out on the surrounding slopes making them greener than they were a few decades back. As for the local people, they have always followed an environment friendly way of life. Over the years children have walked to school. Now, as grown ups, most of them walk to work. Individual cars are few and even these are mostly used for travelling longer distances. Almost everybody walks in Lansdowne.

Perched ethereally on a green hillside that hovers above a vast stretch of pine and oak forests, the pretty little town cuts elegantly into the pristine blue of the Uttarakhand sky. You go to sleep with hundreds of stars shining in the darkness beyond your bedroom window. You wake up with the first rays of the mountain sun and “Om Jai Jagdish Hare” blaring from Gyarasi Lal’s movie hall in the marketplace. Or, you fix an alarm and rise even earlier so that you can slip into your jeans and a sweater, grab a flask of tea and brisk walk all the way to Tiffin Top to watch the sun rise slowly from between the cleft in the mountain peaks, lighting up the ranges with a fascinating white glow that turns to orange as the light spreads across the sky. And there you loll on the bench outside the old stone church, listening to the twitter of the birds. You reach out for the flask and pour yourself some steaming hot ginger tea and you pinch yourself to make sure all that stretches out in front of your eyes is for real. If you are in the mood for conversation, you strike one with a lone early walker (if he is in the mood for conversation too). Or you just enjoy your own company and discover that you’re actually twice as nice as you imagined yourself to be. Spend a few days in Lansdowne and you realize it’s the stuff perfect moments are made of. Oh yes, and if you’re happy enough,  please do us prickly Garhwalis a favour and call it Lansi-dawn. A few times at least.  


 Getting there: Lansdowne is around 250 kms from Delhi. It is named after Lord Lansdowne the then Viceroy of India who is said to have visited the place in 1884. National Highway 119 runs from Delhi all the way to Lansdowne and will take you there in about 6 hours. Kotdwar is the nearest railway station and from there it is 40 kms/an hour drive uphill. Buses and taxis are available at the Kotdwar railway station. Jolly Grant at Dehradun is the nearest airport.

This piece was written for Unboxed Writers. You can visit the website by clicking here: http://unboxedwriters.com/2011/05/some-chap-called-lansdowne/
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Winter view of the imposing Garhwali Mess gate
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This is the road that takes you there
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Another shade of blue
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Ever had the Empress of Blandings blocking traffic?
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Rhododendron
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A view of the twin town of Jaiharikhal
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Perfect sunset, seen through the oak trees
Pictures by Col Yashwant Singh Rawat (retd) who was born and brought up in Lansdowne. He has travelled the world since but has returned to where he belongs.

Victims of terror

13/5/2011

19 Comments

 
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A littte girl in Qazigund, known as the Gateway to Kashmir. According to a Reuters report (2008) more than 42,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since the emergence of militancy in 1989

For a mother, it is heart-breaking when you hear it the first time but, in Kashmir valley, you soon learn to accept that your four-year-old understands you can’t take him out to buy a toy “because a terrorist can kill us”. You slowly get used to the fact that Bob the Builder no longer fascinates him as much as his new-found game of militants and guns. Of Army salutes, identification cards and strange men with live bombs that lurk behind toy cupboards and have to be dragged out at gun-point. 

You get used to living with this loss of innocence the same way you get used to living without multiplexes and shopping malls, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut; and casual drives decided on the spur of the moment, just because it’s a lazy Sunday, the man you love is smiling into your eyes and and the rain clouds are adding the right amount of romance to  your life. 


If you live in the beautiful valley, you soon learn there’s a price to pay for it. The bogeyman in your baby’s life is as real to you as it is to him. You can no longer urge those little feet to enter a dark room by looking into those trusting brown eyes and saying “terrorists don’t exist” just like you once made him do it by saying “ghosts don’t exist”.  You can’t explain to a little boy why someone who doesn’t even know him might want to hurt him. Even if you believe in it, you can’t explain to him the intellectual concept of how one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; and why people want to kill each other when there’s only one life to live.

In the lush green hills, where pine trees carpet the slopes with their fallen leaves, colourful birds sing in the trees and wild flowers splash the landscape with what appears to be a sprinkled palette of pastel paints, you get used to eyeing every bearded man in a phiran with involuntary suspicion. You start weighing every casually draped shawl on a stranger for the possibility that it could be hiding the outline of an AK-47. You jump at every loud crack because you fear it might be a gun shot and you don't want to pick up a ringing telephone because you're scared it might be bringing bad news. You are so consumed by the desperate desire to live that you actually stop living. 

At night, when the lights of distant hill villages sparkle in the dark like a hundred fireflies, the wind whistles through the trees and crickets call in the yellow moonlight; what makes you hold your breath is not the sheer beauty unfolding before your eyes but the thought that one misguided act of violence might suddenly take it all away.  

And that brings us to the reason why this little piece was written. Only those who live in terrorism affected places understand that it finds its victims, not just in the people killed or maimed by its cruel hand; in the families it destroys; or in the brave but dead boys in uniform whose pictures appear in newspaper remembrance columns almost every day up north. Terrorism finds its victims in all the nations rich and poor that spend precious time and resources, first promoting and then trying to stifle it. It finds its victims in all of us whether we live in villages on the Indo-Pak border or a high rise in New York. Because it teaches us to live in fear, in distrust of another human being and another culture. Rather than enjoy and revel in the charming novelty of difference, it makes us eye with suspicion anyone who doesn’t look or behave like us. It takes away reasonable thinking and makes us hate a religion, a country, a person who dresses and talks a certain way.

Terrorism finds its victims in all of us and not just Kashmiris like old and greying Parveena Begum, who ran away from Doda many years back after seeing the bodies of four young village boys shot in an encounter and, after a failed marriage and three children, now works as house help in Udhampur. Not just milkman Salim who takes a yearly holiday around Independence Day because he’d rather live than be killed delivering milk when bombs are expected to go off. Or, sixteen-year-old fair and fragile Kanta who does pedicures for a living and cannot understand what the Kashmir problem is about when in her tiny village near Srinagar, Hindus and Muslims live together in perfect harmony despite eating meat cut by different butchers. And, yes, little children who don’t understand the reasons behind an act of terrorism yet. But whose lives fall under its extremely ugly shadow.


Phiran: A long woolen robe worn by men and women in Kashmir.
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Nobody lives here anymore. There was mass exodus of Kashmiri pandits (Hindu Brahmins) from Kashmir in 1991 when militants unleashed ethnic cleansing and threatened to make it an Islamic state. They are are now being asked to return
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The crystal clear waters of Manasbal, the deepest lake in Kashmir valley (42 feet).
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A Bakkarwal boy with his herd of sheep. Bakkalwals are nomads who keep moving with a change of seasons. They are getting increasingly marginalised as the world considers itself more "civilised"
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Pashmina goats that are indigenous to the high altitudes of the Himalayas
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Anywhere for a fine dining experience
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Waiting for peace to return
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The poppies still bloom
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Saris, sneakers and a kiss on the cheek: When I stepped back in time to an India of many years ago

6/5/2011

12 Comments

 
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The rain falls softly and unendingly. In the dull sunlight that filters through the grey skies, I see old ladies walking around the littered streets of Belgrave Road, Leicester. The streets are messy even by Indian standards. In their easy to wash and dry synthetic saris, tight hair buns, gold bangles and maroon bindis, these ladies look familiar. But not quite. It seems as if I have stepped back in time, to an India of many years back, maybe the year I was born, 1970.

These frail-looking women with bent backs and colourful umbrellas came to Leicester in the late 60s and early 70s, I soon find out. They were married to men they had never seen before, who needed them to cook the rotlas and dal they were missing in a foreign land. The ladies brought with them the India of the 1970s – along with those fragrant spices, the familiar smells of which still waft out of their kitchen windows 40 years later. 

I meet Anusuyaben Ramesh at Belgrave Neighbourhood Centre. She landed at Heathrow when she was 18, back in 1962. In her wedding sari and new chappals one of her first steps on British soil was a stumble into knee-deep snow.

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British Asian women I meet in Leicester. Sorry for the grainy picture. It's been taken from a newspaper clipping.
She immediately wanted to go back to her village in Gujarat, where the sun shone brighter and the children ran around barefoot. Forty three years she is still here with her sense of humour intact. She chuckles when I lift her sari to check out her footwear – a behavioural allowance made between two Indian women. I find a snazzy pair of sneakers. “What to do? Pehenna padta hai. The cold in this country forces shoes on you.” She still feels the need to make excuses.

The spoken Hindi draws us closer. Her’s peppered with English, I suspect out of politeness for Jim, my English escort. I’m not surprised by the sneakers. I’m surprised that shoes seem to be the only clothing change she had made. Her nose pin sparkles bright, a Sai Baba pendant nestles between the gold chains around her neck and a Bindi intercepts her wrinkled forehead. She looks more Indian than women of her generation back home.  “This is our culture. If we don’t preserve it who will?” she says, smiling at my incredulity.

At the community centre I meet others like her. Women in saris who have collected for a game of cards, naughty jokes and exercise. “They wanted us to wear track pants, but I told them women would come only if they were allowed saris,” Leelaben Doshi tells me. In their 60s now, most of these women have seen a hard life. They left friends and families, to start afresh in a foreign land, where opportunity came with many strings attached. The people looked different, spoke an unknown language, used toilet paper and obviously thought of the Indian newcomers as backward. Put on planes to a strange country, they joined husbands chosen by parents – often unrecognizable from the black and white photographs sent earlier. The men worked in factories and came back to community houses at night with just one fire, outside toilets and young wives who could cook.
“We used to queue up at Cossington Street for weekly baths,” reminisces Anusuyaben. “Those were tough days. I spent hours rolling out rotlas for the men. The cold would make me cry.”
Women like her picked up jobs at nearby factories where they learnt to dress in trousers since saris were not allowed. They also learnt to kill their egos and answer to names like Lee and Anna, which could be pronounced more easily by their new employers. “I started shopping for grocery by reading out sentences such as “I need cabbage” from text written in Gujarati by my husband,” Anusuyaben tells me. She speaks very little English even now. After 40 years of living in Leicester, one might have expected better. “I didn’t speak English deliberately because I wanted my kids to know their language and culture,” she says. For the same reason she decided not to wear dresses and trousers either.

It broke her heart when her son decided to marry a gori. She tried telling him his white girlfriend was different from them. Hadn’t he noticed she never joined his mother in the kitchen when she came home?”  “What do you know about love?” he mocked me,” she says. When 15 years later, the marriage ended in divorce it was as if Anusuyaben had looked into the future. “I don’t think an Indian girl would have done that,” she claims.
Mina Gandhi, 40, another concerned mother, tells me: “I don’t want my kids to leave home at 16, or my young daughter to have boyfriends. “Indian families stay together,” offers a quiet 16-year-old with an Om tattoo peeping from under her T-shirt sleeve. “It’s the only tattoo mum allowed me to have,” she says.
Mothers try to pass down traditions of tying the sari or doing the complicated Kutchhi embroidery to their daughters – possibly in the hope that along with those skills come Indian values and ideas of morality. I wonder if this is an instinct for self-preservation in the face of aggressive European culture.  I am surprised that these Asian women in Leicester have kept themselves so well segregated from the white world around them.

To me British Asians such as Anusuyaben are remarkable because they have held on to their cultural sensibilities despite being so far removed in space as well as time from the India they still think of as home. Picking up my bag to leave, I reach out to give Anusuyaben a hug. She surprises me one last time by kissing my cheek. It is a completely western gesture. Do I tell her that she has picked up more than she believes? Or do I start the interview all over again? 
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Baisakhi celebrations
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The Old Horse pub
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A bit of local colour
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Vegetable market
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Postbox
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That's my friend and esteemed editor Jim Matthews who introduced me to Asian Leicester and fascinating women like Anusuyaben
Pictures by Rosalind Broomhall. For more pictures and another piece on Asian Leicester you can check http://www.rachnabisht.com/leicester.html

This article has been published in the Leicester Mercury
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    Rachna Bisht Rawat is a full time mom and part time writer. She is married to an Army officer whose work takes the family to some of the most interesting corners of India.

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