More Women claiming the Road : Chennai

Fire work out of sweetcorn coal machine at Besant Nagar Beach.

I often don’t upload many of my photos which I click while traveling because I feel I can’t write the appropriate caption to explain what I felt at that moment. I can’t assemble words as perfectly as they deserve to draw the artistic, cultural and social semblance of that place at the moment. But I will try.

So about Chennai I have alot to say as I am born and brought up in North I haven’t seen so many Normal progressive things that I see whenever I travel anywhere in South. In Chennai, I have seen female auto drivers, stalls at beach managed by women alone with utter confidence and control. I have seen female toll collectors and parking ticket collectors. Grown up, mature women, doing their jobs without being uncomfortable of the society around. It should be normal but when you look at North India where police is more dangerous, Casteist, Misogynist than criminals themselves, you will realise why I felt the need of writing it down.
On road. More women. I never felt better.

This picture is of Besant Nagar Beach, I saw this sweet-corn making coal machine for the very first time, the breeze at the beach help the sparks to blow in one direction. It looks so beautiful in dark complimented by crashing of ocean waves in the background.

No love without Revolution : Che Guevara

From one of the major love affair of my life :

1) At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

2) If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.

3) And then many things became very clear… we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

4) The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

5) If you can find ways without any obstacles, it probably leads nowhere.

6)Be realistic, demand the impossible.

7) One must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses.

8) We have no right to believe that freedom can be won without struggle.

9) I don’t care if I fall, as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.

10) I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

Composed by : Niharika Singh

Zen : A permanent tattoo

ZEN : I got this word permanently tattooed on my body not in some hurry.
Everything that I get painted on my body, is somehow the part of me, what Plato called ” The Essence”.
I decided to get a Zen tattoo after read
Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig and I quote :

1) The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton.” …and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It ‘s a ghost!”
Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. it’s that only that gets me. science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. or ghosts either.”
Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Law of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts.”
…we see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.

2) In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

3) When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

4) But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

5) We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

6) The pencil is mightier than the pen.

My 10 favorite Romantic Communist quotes

Ten of my favorite romantic love quotes :

1) When I give food to the poor, they call    me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

2) The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

3) An army of the people is invincible!

4) It’s not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it’s your friends.

5) Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

6) Are you a communist?”
“No I am an anti-fascist”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.

7)The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face.

8) From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

9) For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

10) How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Complied by @misha.thakur (Niharika Singh)

The rooted Misogyny in right:

It’s actually shocking to that the so called great thinkers from right degrading women, an entire race, Gender, community, half of the human specie as second class citizens. Such irrational, insentive, misogynistic sentences are not new for women.
Some other shocking examples are :

Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man wrote: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is [shown] by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain–whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.” He added, “Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”

Aristotle in his book “The Politics” said : “Citizens, but second class”. In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women’s differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive.

Balgangadhar Tilak: This discourse argued that educating women and non-Brahmins would amount to a loss of nationality. The nationalists, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak during 1881-1920 consistently opposed the establishment of girls’ schools, the imparting of education to nonBrahmins, and implementing compulsory education.

Rousseau: view on the nature of the relationship between men and women is rooted in the notion that men are stronger and therefore more independent. They depend on women only because they desire them. By contrast, women both need and desire men.

I mean are these people for real ?

Agrarian crisis is equally ours.

My eyes are wide open, not because of insomnia but because I feel what if I sleep and capitalism conquers my consciousness when I am unconscious? How the farmers deal with this daily? All her life she ploughs the fields and yet not considered to be a farmer, he who walks 180 kilometres from Nasik to Mumbai in the calmest way possible, is again mocked as his timidity rather than civility. Do we wait for crisis? For rape? For disasters to happen so that we should get a purpose out of our Existential lifestyle where we are worthless.
Why? It will not take much time to accept the fact that there are serious life issues than your third world crisis.

We have time and again protested through online petitions for not banning porn, or getting sanitary napkin tax free but why we miss upon this on-going farmer agony? Just because it is not hampering you and me directly or because you are a classist and farmer issues have no class? You demand for free water but forgot about people suffering acute water scarcity, why?

Election 2019, research and design your own manifesto, put top 3 crucial topics and DEMAND through online/offline petitions, call for action. Do you know anything about Swaminathan Commission? No, it’s okay read now. You know everything about Game of thrones right? There is this very basic conceptual dialogue there — “You want to save your throne but for whom, when there will be no people?”
It’s never to late to think, Please. It’s all about collective consciousness which we are lacking, let the newspapers demand the manifesto of “we the people of India” on their front page.

Photographed and blogged by – Niharika Singh(Misha).

Apathy as therapy, what?

Vidharbha is the cultural capital of Maharashtra and it’s unfortunately biggest farmer suicide zone of India as well, ironically apathetic no? How can people romanticize poverty? Kids deprived of education, selling their hunger for amusements….

That day, kids were distorting themselves in some alienated expressions of art and I saw the crowd laughing on it, they twisted hard, people laughed harder. There I was imagining what level distortion it will take for people to stop laughing and start hiding their faces?

What they were even laughing at, cheek bones falling apart? ribcages floating all over their skin? Their eyes screaming misery of underprivileged? Numb I was, trying to look deeper, no not philosophically but as another human, there was no fun in sighting them like this for sure. Apathy yes may be. What am I suppose to conclude? Weirdness? Define it? Crisis art? Tribalism? Folk? Guilty Art? Somber thrills? Poverty monochromes? Hypocrisy? Parities?

Photography and caption- Niharika (Misha)

Breaker of chains or makers of chains ?

Do they deserve these chains? I feel so small when I look around in a zoo, self centric, hedonistic, extremely mean as a human being who needs to consume upon other species’ freedom to explore the liberties of it’s own. Whenever I visit monuments and amusement parks the most absurd thing is that it never amused me, it just made me feel guilty, extremely sorry for being the most advanced and intellectual organisms on Earth. I can’t blame you but I can confront ‘us’, all of us together for such cruelty. The capitalism controls, the performative end of money, power, entitlement of our desire to rule makes us the victim of humanity. We the most sophisticated creatures on Earth having no image in the eyes of animals, I imagine what if all of a sudden animals start talking, nobody will be a sacrosanct, nobody would bear their eyes, for it is naive or too silly to imagine, to notice. You digested it, you are okay with it now, worst part is you now justify it, encourage it, promote it. You are no more conscious, There is where i differ. I am a vegetarian but not a vegan hence I am no one to scrutinize a non-vegetarian but I vehemently look into the eyes of people who say, “Oh you should try non-vegetarian, you don’t know what are you missing in your life” well, I know what are you missing, the very essence of organic and conscious benevolence.

Photographed and written by me. To contact, read the bio of my blog.

Location : Melghat tiger reserve.

“Her cost is just 20 rupees”

She was barely having any clothes to hide her scratch marks, my naked eye of humanity got ransacked encountering the vehemently punished sense of Humanity. She was a 14 years old girl sleeping unconsciously in a bathroom sized room on a raucous mattress shrinking her arms and legs into one. She suddenly woke up and asked in her chocked voice “Kya chahiye?”

In India prostitution is the new untouchability. 2018 I decided to visit to
Delhi’s most infamous area GB road and Chawri Bazar at night. Me and my friend who is also a budding journalist from Noida planned one Saturday night to actually go and observe how distressful it is to see the
sexual disparities of women in the national
capital like Delhi. Before getting into the
emotional distortion of my non-fiction, the
position of prostitution in India should be
quantified yet it is one of the most stereotyped, tabooed and hypocritical narrative to debate around. There are more than 657,000 prostitutes in India in 2016 data, cities like Bombay, Delhi and Kolkata are disguising massive markets
regarding this.

Prostitution exists and everybody knows that, still unmoved. There are no social laws to guide the mentality. Dismantling the hierarchal hypocrisy, we need to find whether Prostitution is legal in India or not? If it is legal then why child trafficking? If illegal then what about those brothels who treat women as commodities.

Why so obscure? Why pimps and brothels are shabby and shady ? In December 2009
Supreme Court touching the most sensitive
question asked the government that if they
cannot stop, why not make it legal? The matter boiled up in newsroom debates and condensed there only. Again the questions were raised when Lalita Kumar Mangalam former chairperson of the National Commission for Women said that she will make Prostitution legal in India, many women activists raised their voices against it. Destitution of this debate is either way women have to suffer as there is no permanent solution to patriarchy and
growing capitalism where power and money rules and regulates.

Now let’s look up to what will happen if we legalize prostitution in India, proposed submissions are highly optimistic saying it can stop human trafficking human
trafficking, sexual exploitation of women,
can save women from the violence and cruelty of Police and society for being a prostitute, can help modifying the
prospective of sex and woman, can keep check on STDs and HIV infections, can improve the living standards of women working in such areas, can provide better education to their children, can normalize the idea of women with sexual desires as men, can ask the customers to take accountability and lastly can improve the safety and security of a women working In such fields. Similar fundamentals where also supported by Swati Maliwal chief of Delhi commission of women in 2018 where she said that the only possible solution
to end prostitution is to make it visible through legalizing it in Delhi. But
the whole narrative seems idealistic and without structure as India is no Utopian society. There are many laws already made and never regulated like child labor.

Criticisms against legalizing sexual trade
seems more powerful as it shows the sides of sheer nakedness and animalism of Indian society. Prostitution is not one problem but an inter-connected mess of social issues. When you say legalization of sex will improve the living standards of women working in that sector, the question ‘How’ demolishes the debated as there were never absolute independent and honest regulators in India for already existing laws like child labor and free primary education. Even in the most posh societies of South Delhi, child labors can be easily found in homes. Hence
the irony is that there is hardly any regulation followed correctly regarding the
most visible evils like child labor, child
marriage, female feticide etc so how can we say that making laws will make it any better rather it can boom the pockets of sex racketeers and child traffickers and dooms the whole concept of consent.

Arguments having criteria questioning what about emotional health ? Depression and mental isolation from the society as we can see clearly in European Nations where
prostitution is legal women are more
addicted to drugs to escape psychological
introspections and guilt. There is no bottom line for now, there can’t be a black and white solution to it as for now in India 70
percent of sex workers according to ground level activists like Nandita Rao are the result of child trafficking here prostitution is not consensual but forced.

India where sex education is judged and
demoralized, sex workers will have to face
philosophical vacuum for ages to mix. The idea of prostitution shouldn’t be like “ A man can pay to consume a women’s body sexually”. This change in narrative will take time, the legalization of sex is still a political question where it should be societal and physiological. But what about that 14year old girl I left in the brutalities of that brothel and escaped, her eyes still haunts my nights, I can’t forget the smell of the room full of used protections all over the place, it smelled like someone died there, actually she dies there daily. I was numb and looking towards her, fumbling upon my helplessness when suddenly I felt an unforgivable and unforgettable grip over shoulder, I turned back and a lady with cold eyes asked my friend how much money he can pay, I was unable to understand the damage of the whole situation and there I heard her manly rustic voice announcing “20rupay ek raat ka” for the girl terror haunted in the corner of obscurity. My friend and i somehow managed to run away after giving all our money to the pimp lady. Later i got to know that even the autowalas and local policemen are involved in this whole dystopia.

But I am not scared,
I will go there again.