Heena tattoos, fridge magnets & more: A little bit of fun at the Columbia Journalism School

Know the feeling when you have been wanting to do something since long and it finally materializes? Well, I wanted to put mehendi on people's hands, spread the crafts stuff I make, and share Indian trivia with people.

Questions like, "What's this dot on your forehead?" or "What's this tattoo paste made of?" can lead to conversations that go deep into Indian cultural roots. So, this little Spring Fest celebration on the college walk of the Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, was worth sitting in the sun for hours on a lazy Friday.

The Society of Professional Journalists helped me put this together and the proceeds I could raise went to the SPJ. I will remember the excited girl who was delighted after putting a bindi on her forehead, or the old woman who loved the salwar kameez as the sweet highlights of my *Fulbright experience.

Putting Mehendi on the hands of an Australian exchange student 

For those who have been following this blog for long, you probably know I love to spend midnight hours with scissors and papers, glue and threads, beads and needles. This time around, finding time for my pet passion was an ambitious juggle between school assignments, long readings pulped with statistics on the poor, the homeless and the drug crisis of the 90s, a Harvard Business School case on LinkedIn and professional networking sites, job hunting, and more, and more. But it was worth it. This is the kitchen table in the wee hours of Friday:

That colorful table with scissors and scraps :) 

 I made fridge magnets, something I have wanted to do since years after I saw hobby ideas on How About Orange's site. Then, there was the staple bookmarks and cards. I love to mark my readings with these bookmarks; in school I used to copy-write stunning paragraphs and poems by my favorite authors on the back of the bookmarks and get high on good writing just by flipping the bookmark over. Don't you think bookmarks are perfect little non-intrusive presents for friends young and old? And the cards, they liven up the long letters sent by snail mail.

 Some bookmarks and fridge magnets

I got mehendi cones from - no two cents for guessing - from Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights. They have a mind-boggling range of Indian products, so many desi items, sometimes I feel even a store back in Ahmedabad, India, would be put to shame. These were very good cones, it was an absolute pleasure to put mehendi with these. And Lyuda, who's a graduate Biology student with an interest in neuroscience, she loved it. In fact, she was the first person to come by the table, go back to get cash, and actually linger around while I finished decorating someone's hand. Time is such a precious commodity in NYC and that patient wait really meant something to me.

  

Lyuda loves the mehendi!

Starting with the artsy stuff, I plan to go the tummy route now. What better way to make India come alive in NYC than cooking some spicy (OK, not-so-spicy, to suit the taste buds here) Indian food? Next week I plan to make deep-fried pastries with potato-peas filling: samosas :) 

*The DEADLINE for the 2013 Fulbright scholarships is July 15. Go to the USIEF site for details.  


 

Raghubir Singh: Catching the Breeze*

Photo taken in Hathod village, Jaipur, Rajasthan

The first reaction is disbelief. It takes time to absorb the simple, delicious freedom in the backdrop of an impoverished Indian village. Two teens are touching the sky. A faithful old Neem tree and a trustworthy jute rope is all it takes to forget that they are women.

As they race against wind, their neighbors, siblings and friends find no novelty in the dizzying heights these women have reached. They look disinterested, as if they cannot determine what makes this trivial breather so interesting to a city man.

But this is as high as the two women swinging on the makeshift swing will perhaps go in their entire life. For Hathod, in Rajasthan, India, is a village where strict caste and class rules still apply. Someone else – the society, their husband, or their in-laws will soon begin to dictate the heights they can reach.

Raghubir Singh took this photo in 1975. The girls, from an assortment of ages between three to thirteen, perhaps even their young mothers, might have yearned to go to schools. Their parents might have entertained the idea for some time, too. But, in such villages, where Hindu women of certain castes are still expected to follow the purdah system, dropout rates are high.

There is no money to buy the books and the shoes, teachers don’t teach, schools have no functional toilets or water, or if everything is in place, the nearest high school may be miles away. Public transport is often undependable, certainly risky for young girls. They do give it a try though, some brave ones. Many daughters walk their way to school, their parents grudgingly, but not without some faint beam of pride, allow. But it doesn’t last long, this pursuit of the dream of a better life.

After months of juggling dreams with duties, girls give up. Because they no longer have the energy to cook, clean, milk the buffalo, and take care of their armies of siblings after coming home. These are the tasks girls cannot wash their hands off in a household with a single earning member. Or sometimes parents cannot afford to teach more kids at a time, and the privilege of education is then is given to the male children. But these women are lucky. At least they are alive.

The government and the citizens (often even well-educated, so-called modern families) systematically ignore India’s female feticide epidemic because of misplaced cultural preferences, socio-economic factors vote-bank politics and illiteracy. According to Census 2011, Rajasthan has a sex ratio of 926 girls between ages 0 to 6 for 1000 males in the same age group. India’s overall sex ratio is 940.

A Unicef report says fetal sex determination and sex selective abortion by unethical medical professionals has today grown into a Rs. 1,000 crore industry (US$ 244 million). The act that targets doctors and technicians who offer illegal ultrasound tests gathers dust in legal jargon, social connivance and corruption. Till May 2006, as many as 22 out of 35 states in India did not report a single violation of the act. (1)

While they were waiting for medical science to catch up, they devised other ways to kill their infant girls. My grandmother told me that in olden days, a euphemism was used to identify people who killed their newborn girls. Gujarati for “Doodh peeti kari,” roughly translates to “We started feeding her milk.” This essentially meant a newborn girl child was drowned in a big cauldron of milk.

In India, if a girl is lucky to be born, she becomes a woman sooner than in any other part of the world. Till then, they let her swing on a tree and touch the rainbow.

Gauri Gharpure

* This is another assignment for Michael Powell's class, Writing about life along the poverty line. I loved this homework, it was to select (or shoot) a photo of a neighbourhood / person / process and write about what emotions, ideas and issues the image evokes. This piece is my interpretation of the visuals, it is personal, and may be completely different from Singh's rationale for taking the photo, or being drawn to the scene.

Links and References:

1) The Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act: UNICEF India: http://www.unicef.org/india/media_3285.htm
2) http://f56.net/kuenstler/raghubir-singh/raghubir-singh/
3) Raghubir Singh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghubir_Singh_%28photographer%29
4) International Humanist and Ethical Union: http://www.iheu.org/female-foeticide-in-india
5) Census 2011, India: http://www.census2011.co.in/states.php

Clarence Page: Giants at J-School

Clarence Page responded to the email within minutes and gave some suggestions for my notes. I have re-numbered the points he mentions in the email (excerpt below), but his message makes sense if read with the PDF.

Here is what Page said:

I'm back!
I read through your notes and congratulate you on your good job.
I would only make the following suggestions for clarity:

I would replace lines 10, 11 and 12 with this:

Politics is all perception, in that sense, all political speech is code. Liberals, for example, like to speak of “have’s and have-nots.” But the conservative governor of Indiana told the nation, in his State of the Union address, that America is “a country of haves and soon-to-haves.” The nuances of difference speak to their different perceptions of opportunity in this country and what government’s role should be --or not be—in reducing income inequality *..........
......... Let me know if you have any other questions and, please, enjoy your weekend!
Best,
CP*

How can you avoid marginalizing yourself, pigeon-holing in a certain niche?

1) Try different things. For example, I wrote a lot of obits. Obits have the essence of everything and you have the last word! Get the name right, get the age right
2) Once you are recognized as good, you have very good chance of not being pigeon-holed
3) Then you have a platform, start writing about politics, social change, then move to Op-Ed
4) When I started out on general assignment, I really wanted to be an entertainment writer. For a year in my early days, I covered the religion beat by day and reviewed rock music concerts at night. I used to say that I was the only “rock-and-religion reporter in Chicago.”
5) Always be curious, always be ready to see

*Point 4 above is in Page's words, as sent in the email.

How important is it for a reporter to be an extrovert? Or can an introvert be a good journalist? I asked this question :)

Like anything else in life, like cliff diving, with journalism, know your own capabilities. We had an excellent reporter. She was not just an introvert, she was timid. She once went to cover a story on elephants in the circus. And in all the photos, she was visibly scared. She wrote a story about how difficult the assignment was for her. But the editors wanted something fun. They asked, “Did you not enjoy at all?” “NO!” But she eventually wrote a happier story and we found a photo where she seemed to smile. She was never comfortable being a reporter, she hated talking to strangers, calling up people. But she was excellent. Eventually she asked to be moved to the desk and she’s doing great. So, it doesn’t hurt to be extrovert, but if you are not, be true to yourself.

Do not use photos, drawings or text on this blog without permission.

Audio profile of a New York street-seller

This is my first audio project.

Being in a different country, a different climate and among people who speak the same language with a different accent, reporting is not the same. Sometimes it takes nothing to approach people and talk to them, sometimes you get cold feet and just can't talk. As I was walking in Harlem scouting for my subject after an unsuccessful recording with an African woman at a hair-braiding saloon, I saw Sean Shawney. He smiled at me and asked if I would buy his tee shirts, pins. The spread looked interesting and we started talking. I found my subject.

Gharpure Audioprofile 0818 Final by Gauri

Shawney's spread of pins. Figures of African leaders and artists



And this is what I bought:



PS

Something about the process:

We had to make a two-minute profile of any person. The process included transcribing the audio, then picking out portions (called actualities) to include in the tape, and to write a narration. Then, in the lab I selected parts of sentences and edited some actualities using Final Cut Pro. Also recorded the narration. The audio levels are high, forgot to adjust. In September, will learn to use Pro Tools for the Audio Storytelling elective that I have taken. After what we learned for the audio slideshow class, I will also try to take more horizontal shots from now on. Indeed, that makes optimum use of visible space.

A new country welcomes me

An update: I earned the Fulbright scholarship and am now studying journalism at my dream school: Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, in the city of New York.

It's humbling how many "dream" milestones God granted in 2011.

I assume I shall be hard-pressed for time as the semester rolls on, but this blog is too dear a place to let it remain quiet.

See you with more posts, more musings. And soon!