The thing about dreaming

He served me tea every day for months, barely saying a word, arranging the papers on my untidy desk, doing everything with a smile, and staying back late when he sat in some faraway corner of the office.

Doing what, I often wondered.

What on earth could Satish Kumar, the cheerful, 26-year-old peon in the light blue shirt, be doing at 8 p.m.? Secret girlfriend on the phone? Office gossip factory?

“I am trying to learn web designing, Sir,” he said one day, sheepishly. “Will you let me make your web site?”

There he was, standing before me with the plastic cup in his hand with hot coffee, ready to throw this version of his life away, hold himself by the scruff of his neck and yank himself out of his beverage-delivering drudgery and seek a gentle foothold in white-collardom.

He is still officially a peon, but a year on, Satish uses a computer, handles complex Right to Information petitions, fights in towering red sandstone government offices with clerks who refuse to accept the applications, and recently stunned me by popping up on Google chat, where he now routinely asks me for work and is assigned tasks.

This is the face of the young Indian living out a new freedom – to dream, to aspire, armed with the reassurance that it is now OK to dream bigger in the new India – and those dreams could well come true.

With three-fourths of Indians under the age of 35, I find these dreamers at every corner when I travel across the sidestreets and village squares of this country. They are the stories of the changing India. They are India.

And age is, it seems, only a number. She was 35 quite some time ago, but Rama Dey has at 61 elbowed out a little island of existence of her own in the New Delhi suburb of Noida. Abandoned by her husband, she arrived in Delhi looking for a job in 2001 from Kolkata, with a bag that had a pair of cotton saris, a soiled bed sheet and a small pillow. And three hundred rupees. She worked hard as a nanny, accumulated a bank balance of Rs. 1.5 lakh, and has enrolled herself in a neighbourhood school to learn English and Hindi. She helps others now, buying bicycles for faraway village youth in West Bengal so that they can go to work.

Now she wants to join the government’s old age pension scheme, and buy a mobile phone and a TV.

But the world of mobile phones and TVs is what a 27-year-old young man called Karan Dalal decided to give up on when he landed in the real India this week, flying from Mumbai to the remote village of Kunaura in Uttar Pradesh. He will now live there in a village school and try to create computer engineers out of curious and stunned children who had never seen a computer in their life until NIIT donated 15 of them last month.

Not too far away from that village in the rural town of Babagunj in Uttar Pradesh, Dinesh Kumar, a 27-year-old Dalit man, grew up with mental subservience to the Brahmin priest who was his only connection with god when people died or born or got married.

Then a sudden, silent coup happened.

Armed with a small book of rules of everything from weddings to funerals, Dalits in parts of U.P. have now fired the priest.

“We don’t need him. We can do everything ourselves. If he can read the holy book, why can’t I?” Kumar had asked me.

That is India’s new mantra: Why can’t I.

Hundreds of kilometres to the southwest in Gujarat’s Sikka village, 30-year-old Praful Gami shocked me as I walked out after a series of interviews. Gami, a member of the village panchayat (council), had decided to move up in life and has set up a computer repairing shop in Mumbai using the rising income from Gujarat’s agricultural boom.

“It’s called IT Akash (sky), a software company,” Gami said optimistically as village grannies looked on, cool breeze blowing in from a small check dam. “My income was rising here, I thought I should go on a bigger scale.”

It’s raining aspiration in India.

At the history-steeped campus of Allahabad University, Syed Mohammed Zeeshan stood near some fellow students, leaning against his motorcycle.

“Along with studies, I want to be associated with a political party,” Zeeshan told me as others looked on. “We, the youth, want our own identity.”’

In Loni, a cooperative hub in Maharashtra, I found young men and women from villages give up farm labour to learn to weld and make machines, learn fashion designing, and trades that will overnight change their life. On the highway from Ahmedabad to Baroda, young men from the smallest of towns learning to be firemen at a private college, so that they can go and work at industrial hubs in India and the Gulf.

More than 1,500 kilometres to the north in a small town I shall not name because he asked me not to, former Kashmiri militant Mohammed Zameer, 36, wants to dream as well as he sits anonymously with me in a cyber café. It is part of the nuances of his low-profile existence, abandoned by both his militant group and the government.

“I do want independence, but I regret I lost at least 20 years of my life,” Zameer had told me. “I was in BSc (Bachelor of Science class) at the time. My classmates are now superintendent of police, doctors, engineers.”

Far away from Zameer’s shadowy existence, back at the office in New Delhi, a message pops up on my computer screen. “Sir can you please check the RTI applications?” shakti8040@gmail.com -- Satish Kumar’s virtual alias – asks me.

Look him up. Make him your friend. The bespectacled former peon who now takes on wily government officials in red sandstone offices.

The guy who will teach you a thing or two about dreaming.

(This article originally appeared in the Hindustan Times)

Picture Postcards

Friends,

I take so many pictures and I realised I don't share them here enough. Part of the reason was that I have been agonising over the logistics -- will people like them? Will they think they are trash? And they don't, will my intellectual property be protected?
You know what, I don't care.
I am publishing these pictures, taken on my Nikon D-80, and I plan to share more over the next few weeks. I also intend to do a coffee table book early next year on my travels and the faces I meet. Please write in to say if these are any good, and if they aren't, I shall stop dreaming about that glossy.
Be honest, but not too brutal.

PS: The top two pictures below, in which I figure along with my colleagues B. Vijay Murty (left) and Rahul Pandita, were taken by my colleague Manoj Patil, Chief Photographer of the Hindustan Times in Mumbai. The rest, ahem, are mine.

Postcard from Kashmir

Ten minutes after he landed at Srinagar airport, Chris Terry felt he was in a Will Smith action flick. The Canada-born musician who lives in New York was dazzled by the sight of the guns, the armoured cars, the camouflage, the nervous organiser shouting to the driver, “Go! Go! Go!”

The next day was better. Terry, bassist of the Pakistani band Junoon, was on the stage and he had a familiar sight before him: thousands of youngsters screaming and cheering, singing along and swaying to popular Urdu numbers. What was unusual was the setting.

In the heart of a ‘war zone’, the rat-tat-tat of the AK-47 was replaced by the thump of percussions on Sunday evening as something unimaginable until now played out: a Pakistani band playing in Kashmir by the Dal Lake in the presence of a frenzied audience. In the crowd there were also people from outside Kashmir who have experienced conflict — and worse: former Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Afghan Minister H.B. Ghazanfar.

There were schoolgirls in headscarves; young women in jeans and designer glasses. There were students in school uniforms. Behind them, the Dal Lake looked dreamy in a film of mist, flanked by the lofty Zabarwan range. It was as picture postcard as it could get in the Kashmir Valley.

One young man laughed and said, “Why didn’t these guys come 20 years ago? We wouldn’t have had had to take up guns!”

It was a joke many in the front row would take very seriously, of course.

Was this part of the peace process? Nope.

It was just an enjoyable concert for youngsters craving for popular culture in Kashmir. Did people on ‘both sides’ — and Junoon itself — try to wrap the event up in the complex politics of the region? Oh, of course. Everything is not politics in Kashmir, but everything becomes politics here.

Read the rest of the piece, which appeared first in the Hindustan Times.

Postcard from Naxal country

Red terror just an excuse for lazy officials
Neelesh Misra
Gitildi (Jharkhand), March 21

Sometime in the middle of the night, the widower got up, stole past his four sleeping children, and hung himself from a nearby berry tree with his late wife's sari.
Fighting crushing poverty in his Gitildi village in Jharkhand, 40-year-old Turiya Munda killed himself last month because he had not been paid his wages for months under the ambitious rural employment guarantee scheme - the world's largest social security programme.
Munda had worked for 48 days digging a pond a kilometre away. He kept waiting for months for his money - Rs 3,360 - then gave up, becoming a tragic milestone - the first NREGA death.
The state government has recommended action against local officials. When government officials sleep on their jobs across one third of India, they often love to blame the militants.
True enough, Gitildi village is in the militant heartland where squads of rebels have come by often, asking villagers to support them. But Munda gave up his life (see adjoining story) because of officials' sloth, not Naxalites - the rebels are not creating roadblocks for the implementation of the rural jobs law here, or elsewhere.

In another part of the state, a group of villagers stood in the sun in Dundu village with some eloquent proof of that: pieces of blank paper. The villagers were digging to build a pond in the insurgency-wracked Latehar district, under the rural jobs law that guarantees 100 days of employment each year.
The blank papers were job cards - the equivalent of a bank passbook. They showed how villagers had not got a single day of employment last year, even though Naxalites have allowed the project to run unhindered.
In some areas of Jharkhand, local Naxal units even put up posters urging villagers to claim their right to employment. "The Naxalites do not oppose NREGA. They ask us to work and demand employment," said Ram Avtar Singh, a 50-year-old Dundu villager, as he set aside his spade and fetched his blank job card from his home across the road. "If the officer at the district headquarters says that 'I cannot do this because the Naxal will shoot me', then that is just a good excuse for not doing their work."

It is a crisis of governance that resonates in tens of thousands of villages across insurgency-affected India, the very villages where sincere implementation of the jobs law is perhaps needed the most. One-third of the country - at least 200 of the 600-plus districts from Jammu and Kashmir to the Naxalite-affected dozen-odd states or the northeast - is currently under the shadow of armed movements.
Government officials in New Delhi as well as the states often say that that is the reason why the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has not reached a huge section of people in areas like these. Dundu village lies in the Matlong region, a medley of steeplechase-like mud roads flanked on all sides by hills.
The SUV rolls past quiet villages, where men and women watch the strangers. No outsider comes to these parts any more.
So when NREGA was announced in 2005, it seemed like the godsend that would lift the villagers from crushing poverty.

"We are desperate for employment. If we got work here, in our village, are we mad to go to the cities for work?" said Daroga Singh, standing outside his home in Dundu. Villagers wondered whether Naxalites would attack those taking part in NREGA programmes. But the rebels also wanted to know more about the law.
"They came to me one night and I was asked to explain the detailed provisions of the NREGA - then sought my help in preparing a write-up on it. I think they also made some posters locally and put them up, asking people to take part in it and seek work," said a local NGO official in a district near Latehar.
He declined to be named, citing fears of police action. In Dundu, platoons of Naxalites, both men and women wearing green uniforms and carrying guns, frequently walk down the mud road next to the pond project.
They watch the pond building project with curiosity, but the villagers know that this is one government project that is not at risk. "When their squads passed by this road some days ago, they asked me: 'are you getting your wages?' I said 'no'," said Ram Avtar Singh. "They said 'You must take your wages, it is your right'."
Insurgents do not oppose the ground-breaking NREGA because it touches the everyday lives of the poorest - and targeting it could mean a popular backlash.
However, this comes for a cost - they are known to take levies or taxes from NREGA projects running in their areas. But villagers say this is no reason why people should not get employment. "The Maoists take five per cent levy here, we know that. The government official takes much bigger cuts. Both do it," said Peshkar Singh, standing in the shade of a tree as others looked on.
By the end of January, one member each in 29 lakh families in Jharkhand had job cards - but out of these, only 13.5 lakh had demanded employment from the government, Jharkhand's NREGA Commissioner Amitabh Kaushal said. Even going by the government's figures, it was unclear why 15 lakh families in the state living in abject poverty would not demand employment guaranteed to them.
A central government official monitoring NREGA projects said Jharkhand's estimates were under a shadow of doubt. "According to their figures, everyone who demanded a job got it within 15 days.
But that is not turning out to be true," said the official, declining to be named. "The record keeping in Jharkhand is abysmal - and it suits them."
Officials never inspect records on the ground in Naxal areas, and the unusual visitors are also interrupted in their interviews with a phone call as they approach the edge of the dense forest that holds Naxal hideouts.
"You have come too deep - so far so good," a voice says in a phone call to HT's Latehar reporter.
"Please turn back with your guests.".
(With Vishal Sharma in Latehar)
(This story first appeared in the Hindustan Times on March 22)