I started the Crossing Party Lines – Long Island chapter in Feb 2023. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience.
I am a filmmaker by profession and someone who craves human connection and community for sustenance. The isolation of Covid was hard for me. I had trained as a moderator with Crossing Party Lines (CPL) in 2022 and had got the experience of facilitating several on-line conversations. Lisa and I had discussed the potential of restarting CPL – New York City chapter and although I definitely desired that, the logistics of organizing & hosting a conversation in New York City felt prohibitive. Lisa connected me with Avrohom Zazac; a CPL member & NYC resident, and we started exploring potential locations that were not too far from the city but also from a bearable driving distance from my own home.
I am an immigrant to America and after moving around for decades, I had finally settled in Long Island. I had gotten quite involved in the congressional politics and had provided campaign housing to congressional candidates over the last few elections. I was increasingly worried about the bitterness & anxiety that my own friends & neighbors – from across the aisle – were sharing; I still had & continue to have friends across the aisle. My heart wanted to do something local, something that could make a difference that I could actually see.
On Dec 16th 2022, I had a meeting with Dylan Skolnick and Rene Bouchard at the Cinema Arts Center, Huntington. It was a long-due meeting with a filmmaker connecting with her local independent cinema. I was going to talk to them about my film projects and yet what came out of my mouth was my work with Crossing Party Lines; my passion about their intention, my concern about the polarization & acrimony in our own neighborhood and my desire to make a difference in our Long Island community. The next thing I knew, Rene and Dylan were whole-heartedly agreeing with me and before the meeting ended, I had a home for Crossing Party Lines – Long Island at Cinema Arts Center!
I worked with Avrohom to develop out first topic on George Santos; the Long Islander Congressman. I have since worked with Avrohom on every single topic. Avrohom and I represent the spirit of Crossing Party Lines, we often hold opposing views and come together across our differences to build a whole that is greater than the sum. One of my greatest pleasures of doing this work is our vigorous discussions when choosing the topic and developing its writeup. He is my ally and I couldn’t do it without him.
We had our first meetup on Feb 17th and was attended by more people than I had expected. We have had 10 more meetups since then on topics that have ranged from issues such as Affordable Housing, Asylum Seekers, Affirmative Action and Media Bias to more introspective topics such as Patriotism, Tolerance and Privilege where we explore who we are. There are those who came to our first conversation and come back every time – we have become fond of each other and are beginning to form friendships. There are those who occasionally drop by as their time permits. And we always have a few new faces. We start our conversations with music and food – that my friend & ally Rene organizes at the Cinema. I have seen people walk into our conversations feeling stressed & anxious about the state of our community & the country, and walk out lighter, more confident & empowered that there is another way of listening, of seeing, of being in the world. That there is a way to unlock the bind many of us find we are in.
It has not all been easy and we have had our share of challenges. We (I, Avrohom and Rakhee Kulkarni; another ally) have put numerous hours creating lists and writing emails to promote this new chapter. I have tried – unsuccessfully so far – to get us some media coverage so more Long Islanders know of our existence; a few months ago a journalist from Newsday came to one of our meetings, interviewed the participants and told me that we were doing impressive work & that it was a great story and yet the article never made it to press for unknown reasons. It takes many hours of topic development, social media postings, and other work for me to continue running & promoting the chapter. It takes energy & effort. Of course it does! Everything worth doing in life takes time & energy & effort & commitment. The enthusiasm and support I have received from the community & the allies that have shown at every step makes it an investment for me. I wanted to make a difference in my own community and I know I am.
Several members had reached out to me with topic suggestions for upcoming months and some with new ideas of things we can do together as a group that include potential book / podcast clubs, film clubs, game nights, blog posts, social media campaigns, video series etc. So, for our December meetup, instead of a specific topic, we will host a freeform discussion about where our CPL-Long Island members want to take this forum in 2024. Together we are going to celebrate our year-long journey and chart the path ahead.
Swati Srivastava is the Director of Visual Media at Crossing Party Lines and the chapter lead for Crossing Party Lines – Long Island. A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and an immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“What tea would you like?” asked the waitress as she flipped open the top of a tea box in front of us.
“English Breakfast” said I AND Mark, almost in unison. “English breakfast it is” said the waitress – as she opened two bags, placed them in our mugs, and poured the hot water, with the agility of someone who does that for a living!
“I will be back with your orders soon” she said and walked away leaving us to enjoy our beverage in the beautiful café. We were in the heart of Big Sur, California, our first vacation together. We both sat in silence for a few moments watching the steam rise from our tea, the smell of English Breakfast in the air.
It was I who broke the silence, as always ;), I looked at Mark and said “English Breakfast?”
To understand the gravity of this moment, I have to take you to a flashback. Mark and I had met about 1 year prior, while I was living & working on the east coast taking a break from my life in LA. Or I should say my life in LA had broken – such – that I had decided to move temporarily to the east coast. Previously, I had been living in LA for 5 years with my beloved sister, both of us working full-time remotely as Software Engineers and studying film part-time at UCLA. When my sister got diagnosed with cancer and passed away in a matter of weeks, my life had broken irrevocably – at least that‘s how it felt at the time. My manager worried that my life in LA, so wrapped around my sister, was a little too dangerous, and invited me to work at our head office on the east coast surrounded with colleagues. And I did.
While in NY, I met Mark and we instantly felt a connection. Over the next weeks & months, we became best-friends who came to know each other’s hearts. Mark seemed to understand the devastation mine was going through. When I told him I was going back to LA – to face my life without my sister, he didn’t try to stop me. But he did offer to come over to be with me for a few days, saying “the first few days are going to be the worst. I won’t be able to offer much relief but I can stop the house from being empty.” I accepted his offer. I came back – to my intolerably empty life in LA – but not to an empty house.
My sister and I loved Chai!. We had a box of Chai, with various kinds of Chai in it. Over the years the “Chai Box” had turned into a “Tea Box” with various kinds of other teas that we liked. And although British and Indian people have historically had “just a little bit of differences”, they share their love of tea! Their love of tea is so deep that they both think that a cup of Chai or tea can fix pretty much anything. Indeed, the British have a phrase for it, they call it “giving tea & sympathy” right? So, not long after we had both flown back to LA, and on an evening when I had been sobbing for hours grieving my sister, Mark said the words that have become legendary in our household, he said, “alright, time for some mother’s tea”- that’s just what Mark calls it. He then walked into my kitchen, opened my box of Chai or tea, and after shuffling through it for a bit, looked up at my tear-stricken face, smiled and asked “how about some Earl Gray?” Realizing that he had found his favorite tea in my tea box, I nodded.
And that started our ritual of having Earl Gray tea together. Mark flew back to Long Island after a few days, but he would return every month, our friendship deepening into love. I ensured that I had his favorite tea in my tea box whenever he visited and upon his arrival, I would make a fresh pot of Earl Gray that we would enjoy together. A year later, my heart still grieving, he had moved-in with me in LA.
And we find ourselves back to where we started, in the café on our first vacation together, in Big Sur, where we had both just asked the waitress – for an – English – Breakfast – tea.
Now you know the gravity of the moment!
So I asked. “English Breakfast?”
He looked at me a bit worried and said, “I have to tell you something. I – don’t like Earl Gray very much.”
I was aghast. “What? Then why do you always want it when you visit me?” I demanded. “I don’t. I drink it because YOU like it so much.” “I don’t. YOU made me Earl Gray tea the very first time you made me tea in my house.” I exclaimed flabbergasted. “That’s because YOUR tea box only had Earl Gray tea.”
And suddenly the penny dropped and I burst out laughing. Through fits of laughter, I explained that the reason why my tea box only had Earl Gray tea is because neither my sister nor I liked that tea so that was the only tea left, and because I had not done any grocery shopping after returning from NY to LA before Mark had arrived, that is the tea he found. And when he had offered to make it for the first time, choice of tea was the last thing on my mind.
“So the whole time we were tolerating Earl Gray tea because we thought – that the other liked it!” I exclaimed.
And that was a sweet moment as we realized how gentle and suggestible we could be to each other. Knowing this made us more mindful around each other. There have been many times since then when we would both be deferring to each other about doing something or not doing something, eating something or not eating something, when one of us will suddenly stop and ask “Are we having an Earl Gray moment?!!”
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience.She is a loved wife, a sister & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children. She is also an environmentalist and an immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
I would like to preface my story with an excerpt from the poem “How the light comes” by Jan Richardson.
I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining.
That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us. That it loves searching out what is hidden what is lost what is forgotten or in peril or in pain.
That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.
I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does. That it will.
(You can read the full poem at many places on the web, one of them is here )
“You are the red in my painting, the color in my life.” I said to my sister.
“And you are the light in mine”, said she to me.
“This little light of mine, I am goin’ let it shine”, we both sang together and giggled – until Didi winced. She was in pain. She adjusted her position trying to make herself comfortable, as comfortable as one can get, in a hospital bed. I sat tall, as tall as one can possibly sit, in a hospital bed, so she could rest her head on my shoulder. She would be gone in a few weeks. But we didn’t know it then.
Didi meaning elder sister in Hindi, was 5 years older to me. My childhood was wrapped in her stories; she was one hell of a storyteller! When we were kids, she would read me stories from books she borrowed from the school library; in both Hindi & English, in English – stories of Amelia Jane, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and Nancy Drew. As we got older, her stories changed; she was in her mid teens and I was only 11 or 12 but it didn’t stop her from telling me romantic stories she would read in novels; the romantic Mills and Boon series was all the rage in India in those days. I think she sanitized them a bit for my young ears! We got older but never stopped reading stories together; so much world literature & mythology and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings; our favorite stories were those of heroes and heroines who fought great battles and somehow found their way home.
The story I miss the most was the one she told me many times; of the night I was born. Apparently a stormy night, I was born just after midnight. The hospital my mother was at, had run out of some urgently needed medication (yes this used to happen in India) and my father was asked to find the medication at a local chemist shop (like a miniature CVS). So my father, who rode a motorcycle in those days, took my 5 year old sister on his bike and went around looking for a chemist shop that was open on that stormy night. “Amidst thunder and lighting, we finally found a shop that had a little light on” – Didi was a bit dramatic. “Papa asked him if he had the medication, he looked hesitant but asked us to wait while he checked. We stood waiting in the pouring rain, papa trying to shelter me as best as he could under his raincoat. The man finally came back with the medicine. And we went back to the hospital”. She would continue, “The next morning, I went in the room to visit mummy and she asked me if I would like to hold my little sister. I said yes and very gently she put you in my arms. And this is how I felt.” At this point, she would break into song, singing a few lines from a classic Bollywood song “kabhi kabhi mere dil main khyal aata hai, ki jaise tujhko banaya gaya hai mere liye. Tu ab se pehle sitaro main bas rahi thi kahi tujhe zameen par bulaya gaya hai mere liye” “Sometimes often this is the thought I have, that you were especially created for me. Before this moment you were residing amidst the stars, you were brought down to Earth especially to be with me.”
She & I would always cry after she finished this story. Because we knew in our bones it was true. It was true the day I was born and it became truer the day our mother died. Although we grew up in a two-parent household, we found ourselves suddenly parentless that day; our father too consumed with his own grief and incapable of handling two teenage daughters. Soon after we were saddled with a step-mother who as my sister put it “was so loving to us that the day she arrived in our lives, we both magically turned into “Cinderellas”!” So we looked after each other and stood for each other, at home and as we carved our path to the US – first to NY and then to LA to follow our heart and to make our mother’s dreams come true. We had always been close but our shared grief and struggles of those years made us one whole person. That is, until death did us part.
The diagnosis of cancer came out of nowhere. The memories around that time are sharp and blurry, but I will never forget the words – 4th stage, rare, aggressive. We took the news in stride. We were just not the type to be fazed. “Beeee Positive!”, she would say, when asked about her blood group, with a naughty glint in her eye and a cheeky grin on her face; her gorgeous dimples deepening on her gorgeous face. We were not fazed when we were given the schedule for her Chemotherapy sessions. When she mentioned she might lose her long, lustrous hair to Chemo, I told her. “I will shave my hair too and we will both look cool, like Samantha and Smith in ‘Sex and The City’”, “We will both be ‘Bald and Beautiful!’”, she had quipped back joking about the famous soap on TV from the 90s “The Bold and Beautiful”. We had laughed through it all – until laughter itself became too painful for her. We never said goodbye, it was not an option.
When Didi died the color vanished, the only color I knew & felt for years was black. I thought the light vanished too.
And yet.
There is a saying in Hindi that roughly translates “as long as there is life there is world/light”. Incredible as it is, I found love again. I became the light in someone else’s life. And slowly, very slowly, the color returned. I do not know if I will ever know Red like I knew once, but I know I have seen a few rainbows.
I also do not know HOW the light comes, but I know that it does. Somehow.
I do know a way to seek it. As Didi would sing “this little light of mine, I am goin’ let it shine.”
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience.She is a loved wife, a sister & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children. She is also an environmentalist and an immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“Delhi Burning” screamed the headlines of a major newspaper. It was November 2nd 1984, and riots plagued Delhi, after the then Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards. When the news of her assassination broke, mobs of Hindus filled with rage took to the streets in Delhi, seeking vengeance & killing any Sikhs they came across. Two days after her death, most areas of my city were under total curfew as the flames of communal fire erupted in neighborhood after neighborhood. It was found later that the reigning administration had willfully turned a blind eye dragging its feet on re-establishing law & order with the intent to teach the Sikh community “a lesson” leading to the murder of thousands of Sikhs. But we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that there weren’t enough cops to patrol every town effectively. All we saw was the smoke coming off the fire raging in our very own neighborhood; a bus had been set on fire along with its Sikh driver. All we heard were the police sirens and the recorded voice on a Megaphone telling all families to keep a packed bag in case the situation worsened such that we had to evacuate our homes.
I grew up in Delhi in a moderate Hindu family. We lived in a predominantly Hindu neighborhood in an apartment complex with 6 flats in each apartment block. I was just a little girl then but I remember those days clearly – my elder sister glued to the TV for news updates, and my mother navigating the challenge of being the only parent in our home as our father was away on a business trip to the UK. I saw her watch the smoke from our balcony; her face grim as the reality of the danger set in, packing our evacuation bag and spending the nights awake & on-guard, yet telling my father when he made an expensive long-distance call from the UK that everything was just fine, protecting him from further anxiety. Everyone alive in Delhi during that time breathed the air of hate & fear, with friends & neighbors turning against each other in every neighborhood.
We had a close relationship with all the neighbors on our block- except one. I remember all the neighbors except that one family meeting at our home that evening to discuss the burning bus; our area was no longer safe and if a mob showed up, things could quickly become lethal. The one family not present was a Sikh family. People exchanged their worries – some blaming the Sikhs for being the culprits, others faulting the lack of adequate police protection as the cause of the havoc and yet others shared what they had heard on the grapevine – Sikhs were going to take every chance to kill Hindus in order to take revenge on what was happening to their community. Everyone looked at my mother at this point – she was currently alone with her kids and living directly across “unknown” Sikhs. The day after the assassination on November 1st, a Sikh family had moved into the apartment right across ours. We had barely said “Hi” to each other when the riots erupted and since then that family had not opened their front door.
I saw my mother, who had been mostly listening till this point take a deep breath and say: “If we are feeling so afraid of the one Sikh family living in our block, just imagine how afraid this poor Sikh family must be to be surrounded with five Hindu families.” There was dead silence as people processed her words. And then came a pivotal moment in my life. My mother proposed writing a note signed by all our Hindu neighbors welcoming the Sikh family to the community and telling them that no harm would come to them as any Hindu mob looking for Sikhs would have to first deal with the five Hindu families that would form a human wall. I saw the faces around us soften as her voice of reason, love and hope resonated in each heart. My mother proceeded to pick up one of my notebooks and wrote the note. A few minutes later, I saw that small woman with a large spirit open our front door, walk across to our Sikh neighbor’s flat and slid the note under their door.
—
It takes courage and a deep sense of conviction in the goodness of others to do what my mother did that day – choosing love & hope over fear & despair, building a human wall of hope and humanity. And by doing this, she planted the same seed in me. Through my work, my writings and my life, I have chosen & committed to be part of this human wall. As trained moderator and Director of Visual Media for Crossing party lines; a non-profit that is founded on choosing hope, I facilitate conversations among Americans across our political divide, so we can be reminded of our common humanity. To counter the mainstream media stories of hate & division, I am creating a video series called “Choose Hope” featuring stories of regular folks sharing a moment from their lives when they or someone they know – like my mother – faced a situation when it was easy to give in to the status quo of fear, hate & despair yet they CHOSE to take the high road of love, hope & goodness.
YOU can become part of this wall too. If you are interested in telling your own hope story – or hope song or another form of hope art – reach out to me at Swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
Together we can build this human wall – if we can find in ourselves a way to “Choose Hope”.
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“I want to come home to Bay Shore”, says our daughter; our exchange student-daughter to be precise – on video call with me. She is crying as she tells me that although she has been back to her country nearly 2 months, she feels out of place in the very place she had called home all her life, a place she left last year to come to America for one whole year. She expected many things to happen during her exchange year – to make new friends, to visit new places, to have an adventure and to return a more experienced person who had seen the world. She got all that! What she didn’t expect was to fall in love with her exchange family and have her sense of home expanded & transformed forever.
I want to say something to help her. But words fail me. There is nothing I can say. She is no fool. Indeed she is wise beyond her years; she knows the logic, the reality and the logistics of her life. She also knows she can’t say this to anyone else but me – who she started calling Mummy & my husband – her Dada, she can’t say this to her family or friends or she risks hurting them, and she is not the kind to hurt people.
Instead I just look at her beautiful face that I have come to love so deeply. Tears sting my eyes too. I let her cry. She writes to me later on chat “Thankyou for staying strong for the both of us.” My wise girl, she knows how much I miss her. That I too found home with her. And now she is gone & we are both a little lost.
Home – what a simple word. A four-letter word. A 1-syllable word. A not-so-hard to learn or pronounce word. No matter what language one speaks, home has a translation in every language – well, at least I think it has!
I Google words that begin with the word “home” – Homeland, Hometown, Homemade, Homebody, Homebred, Homespun – Homesick, Homeless – Homework! I stop – IT IS true that we all have to do some work to find home, and especially to find our way back home if somehow we have lost it.
In his brilliant Ted Tak “where is home?” Pico Iyer shares how the meaning of home changes based on the type of question one is asked. For e.g. does it mean “where you were born and raised and educated” or is it “where do you pay your taxes, and see your doctor?” or “where do you try to spend most of your time” or is it “which place goes deepest inside you”. I think for many of us, and I could be bold & venture that for most of us, especially in this country of immigrants, the answer to those questions even though it is technically the same question, is varied.
I think of the refugees in the world who are forced out of their homes & homelands; trauma that lives in their minds and plays out on their bodies, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
I think of the down-on –their-luck who because of an ill-fated hand lose their homes & become homeless. My husband & I once gave shelter to a homeless couple who had been living on the streets, to help them get back on their feet. After we told them they could stay with us, Nicole & Anthony slept for almost 36 hours straight in our home, their bodies decompressing from the fatigue of sleeping in unsafe conditions for months.
I think of the immigrants who willingly leave home, their valiant spirits dreaming immigrant dreams but not yet fully aware of the cost those dreams are likely to exact. An Argentinean friend once told me a saying they have in Argentina. “Once an immigrant, always an immigrant” I have felt the truth of these words my entire life. The words that now apply to my immigrant student-daughter.
And I think of all those who don’t fall into the dictionary definition of homeless – people going through other forms of trauma – ancestral, societal, familial; traumas that lives in our cells and manifests in anxiety, depression and dis-ease, medically called “disease” – the world is brimming with people who don’t feel at home with their own selves, their own bodies, minds and spirits.
So ok – there are way too many forms of homelessness and feeling not at home with where we are and who we are. Surely there has to be a way back home? As my beloved sister used to say and my student-daughter has now learnt by heart – “If there is a way in, there is a way out.” Or in this case it would be more appropriate to say “If there is a way out, there is a way in!“
I sit with this for a moment.
In several mythologies around the world, there seems to be an emphasis on the importance of labyrinths. In the Indian story of “Mahabharat”, in the great battle of Kurukshetra, the villain clan creates a labyrinth that the Pandava brothers – the heroes of the story have to crack. The objective is to get in, to reach the heart of the maze, to fight the enemy at the core, and then to find a way back out. In the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, the hero Theseus needs to get inside the labyrinth, slay the monster and return safely back. It is a near-impossible task and myriads have died at the hands of the monster and Theseus who is brave & sure he can slay the monster, is still lost at how to come out of the labyrinth, how to find his way home.
One of my favorite quotes says – “Whatever the question is, the answer is LOVE.” And so it is for Theseus as the answer comes to him in the form of love. Wise Ariadne, who has fallen in love with Theseus gives him the “clew”; the Greek word for “Thread” and asks him to unroll the thread on his way into the labyrinth and use it to guide him back out. Theseus follows her advice and rest is history or I should say rest is Mythology!
We make this journey of life looking for a home – which actually appears to me is the place where we are loved – fully, wholeheartedly, just as we are. It doesn’t mean we don’t do the work – because finding home or love requires “home-work”. As Kahlil Gibran said “When love beckons to you follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.” World breaks everyone as almost everyone has to leave the innocence & safety of home someday either willingly or forcibly, but some return strong at the broken places. I think they are those who understand that our cracks are where light shines through. That nothing in this world can be perfect and all homes are fleeting. But the love that we feel remains the true shelter.
So maybe the only right response to my immigrant student-daughter saying “I want to come home” is simply “I love you too.”
Swati is a loved wife & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children. More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and an immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“Hold it gently – and then let it go”, my father said to me as he handed me the string of the kite he had been flying.
It was August 15th, Indian Independence Day; the day that thousands of Indians take to their roofs to compete in an unofficial kite flying competition. I looked at the sky – full of colorful kites in different shapes, patterns and sizes. The large terrace of my apartment building was full of kids – some accompanied by their parents, some with friends their own age – flying their kites. Most girls were standing on the side & watching the show. But for boys – it was serious business. They were in it for the kill. The cotton string of the kite called “Manjha” is coated with powdered glass or a similar abrasive & designed to cut the strings of rival kites. Every now & again I would hear a big cheer & applause which meant a boy from our terrace had successfully cut the string of a kite that belonged to a boy from another terrace. And then there were groans when “our side” lost; which meant the string of a kite belonging to a boy from our terrace was cut off by someone from another terrace, this was usually followed by loud voices as senior kite-fliers; the experts if you will, schooled the young ones on making a losing maneuver. Kite flying requires skill and August 15th is the day when Indian kite-fliers go to their World Cup!
I was a novice when it came to flying a kite. I seem to recall I was fascinated by the sport and wanted to learn. Just like I had wanted to learn Cricket. But in 1980s India, girls were taught neither Cricket nor Kite-flying – those were boy sports! My father who did know how to fly a kite seldom flew it; he was not very interested in sports – maybe because he was the intellectual kind or maybe because he had no son to teach sports to but only daughters. I had occasionally summoned courage & approached some of the older boys to teach me but the best offer I had been given was to hold the spool of string while a boy flew the kite. This was the first time anyone was offering me to fly the kite, I was excited and eager to show my father that his daughter; a girl could also fly a kite. So what if I had had no training?
“Ouch” I exclaimed as I enthusiastically tried to grab the string from my father and promptly got a nasty cut on my palm from its abrasive coating. The wound drew blood immediately. “I told you to hold it gently. Now look what you have done.” My father took the string back from my hand, annoyed at my inept handling of the string. “Now go downstairs and ask your mother to put something on the cut.”
Ashamed, in pain from the wound and with tears stinging my eyes, I ran down the stairs to my apartment. My mother busy in the kitchen turned to me & saw my face. “What happened?” she asked. “I tried to fly the kite but I didn’t do it right,” I responded and started crying. “Oh poor thing, it’s ok, come here, come here. “ My mother dropped what she was doing, grabbed a pain ointment from her first-aid closet and took us both to the dining table. There she sat down close to me and applied the medicine to my wound while singing a little Hindi poem she used to sing often “Come my darling, come my heart, you are my silver, you are my gold, you are my key, you are my lock, you are my heartstring, you are my everything.” Words that neither rhymed well nor made much sense but somehow always managed to make me feel better. Words that I had almost entirely forgotten in the 30 years since I have been motherless. Words that somehow came back to me this year as I became a mother myself – for the first time – to our two exchange student-daughters, Sophie & Iara, who through the course of their year with me & my husband became so close to us that they started calling us Mummy & Daddy.
I have never remembered my mother as much as I have in the past couple of years, nor have I missed her as much, nor have I channeled her as much. Both my husband and our student-daughters look at my mother’s photos and tell me I look just like her – a compliment to me of course since she was a beautiful person – both inside and out. During the course of this year my own student-daughters have looked at me – their host-mom for love and support, for calming their anxieties and healing their wounds, for wiping their tears and putting emotional ointments on their abrasions. And through it all I have spontaneously channeled my mother behaving quite like her, it was as if the mother inside me lay dormant all this time and came alive when the time came. Like the aliens buried underground in their tripods in War of the Worlds! 😀
My joy was short-lived – as almost all joys are. I have heard friends say they blinked and their children turned from babies into adults. In our case, that blink went even faster. The year flew by and our student-daughters returned back to their home countries a few days ago, but not before many tears were shed, hugs & kisses exchanged and promises made to keep in touch forever. Our home is quiet and our hearts miss them. I do not know when we will see each other again. I do not know if the love that shines so bright in us right now will continue to shine even as we are separated by space & even time.
Then my friend Jennifer brings me a children’s story that I had never read before. It is called “The Invisible String” – the mother in that story tells her children that people who love each other are connected by a very special but invisible string made of love. We can feel this string deep in our hearts, and we somehow know that we are connected to the ones we love even when they are physically not with us.
And I remember the kites flying high in the sky and my father’s words reminding me to “hold it gently – and then let it go”.
Swati is a loved wife & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children! More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“How on earth are we going to find any men if we never go on any dates?” “The doorbell will ring, we will open the door and there they will be…”
My sister responded to my frustrated question with a grin, the gorgeous dimples on her cheeks deepening, her arm dramatically making the wide gesture of opening a door. She winked at me and added in her usual know-it-all attitude “….when the time is right.“
“Of course!” I said, rolling my eyes. “100% true,” she responded, adding “ If I am lying, may my tongue fall off.”
Then – after waiting a couple of seconds, she slowly stuck out her tongue at me. I laughed, there was no way not to, she was cute & funny & an insufferable wise-ass all at the same time! Didi (meaning elder-sister in Hindi); which is what I called her, was always sure. She was sure we were going to find our destiny in America. She was sure we were going to be Sister-Directors; the first in the world. She was also sure we were going to meet two brothers – and they would somehow appear when the time was right.
And I believed her. I had no reason not to. After losing our mom as young teenagers growing up in India, we had learnt to depend on each other, stand for each other, and trust each other – implicitly. Together we had crossed the oceans to get to America, together we had driven cross-country to get to The City of Angels and together we were studying at UCLA so as to become the aforementioned “Sister-Directors”. So involved and busy in our ambition were we, working full-time at our jobs during the day and studying film at nights & weekends that we had no time for dating or putting ourselves out there! Thus my question. Thus her answer. And even though it didn’t quite make any sense in the logical world, deep down I knew Didi was right.
I was wrong.
I understood I was wrong as I sat outside the ICU and the phone rang announcing the end of my sister’s battle with cancer. She was gone. No doorbell was going to ring, there would be no brothers. Nor Sister-directors.
Francis Underwood ; the lead character in The House of Cards famously said, “There are two kinds of pain. The first is the sort of pain that hurts but makes you strong. And the other is the useless kind- the sort of pain that’s only suffering.”
Losing my sister was definitely not the first kind of pain. It was suffering – of the kind that feels like a live amputation, the kind that shatters your heart in so many pieces you know you will never be able to put back together, the kind that threatens to destroy your taste for life itself.
And yet. Someone once said to me that life wants to live. Perhaps that is the reason why I went on living. And my heart which had learnt how to love found love again. I met the most wonderful man who held my hand through years of heartache. We were best friends before we fell in love and so I actually never had to go on any dates to find him…! After 7 years of companionship, we got married. It took us so long because my heart was still in mourning and not ready to celebrate a wedding. And when we did get married it wasn’t a double wedding – the elaborate affair with two sisters marrying two brothers – quite the opposite, a simple wedding with two people committing to take care of each other’s hearts.
My husband & I occasionally talked about having children. But that conversation almost always ended in tears. Memories of my sister & me dreaming about raising our kids – 2 children each – raising them together remained sharply vivid. “They would all call you Choti Maa and me Badi Maa”; she would say– Choti meaning Younger and Badi meaning Elder in Hindi. “You will be responsible for raising them and I will be responsible – for spoiling them!” She would add, laughing her wise-ass dimpled-cheek laugh.
Another thing she was wrong about.
Last year, I came across a post on nextdoor.com from a woman – let’s call her Barb – looking for families to host international exchange students for a few weeks. I was recovering from a major illness and seeking companionship & community. I responded to her – Yes, we could do it. Barb wrote back – could we host someone for the entire school year? Ummmm.yes??!! Before my husband & I could over-think our way out of it, Barb came over and held our hands as we filled a loooooong application to become host-parents for a year. It was Aug 31st – the last day to apply, we submitted our application at 9pm Eastern. Within a week we were driving to JFK; welcome sign in hand. We met our “student”; a courageous young woman who had just flown half way across the world to spend a year with strangers she had never met. Over the next few weeks & months I came to know of Iara’s heart, her hopes, her fears and her intense zest for life that reminded me of my own when I was her age. Before I knew it, we were falling in love with each other. Before we knew it, we were becoming family that had somehow known & loved each other forever. The “student” was turning into “daughter”.
And before we knew it we had another one! Our second “student-daughter” arrived without even filing forms. One day while at work I got a call from Barb that another exchange student needed a home urgently and I said yes. I came home that day to find Sophie standing in my kitchen waiting for me. This time it didn’t even take weeks. Our hearts already opened from the love of our first daughter swiftly fell in love with our second. That was not the miracle. The miracle was that hers did too. The miracle is that both our daughters call us Mummy and Dada and mean it. The miracle is that we all recognize this extraordinary thing that has happened to us.
A few weeks ago I found myself telling Sophie the story of my sister and the brothers and the doorbell. As I was coming to the end, I found myself laughing. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be the brothers. Maybe it was meant to be daughters.“ I said. “And you didn’t even have to open the door; I was already in your kitchen!” Sophie responded cheekily and in perfect sync – just the kind of thing my sister would say.
So maybe all of it was true – BUT in its own unique way. Love finds us in unexpected places. Life knows how to break our hearts but how to mend it too. Maybe things just fall in place as Didi said – when the time is right. Maybe – Didi was right.
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. Her work has been shown on national TV in the US and in India, at film festivals across the world, and won many awards including the “Most Important Video of the Year” award from CNN-India. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
“Go back to your f***ing country” — the words hit me like ice-cold water. I stared unblinkingly at the speaker, unable to process the words directed at me. My face still wore the awkward smile it had when I had rolled down my window to better understand what the passengers in the car next to mine were emphatically trying to tell me. We were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Hackensack River Bridge, New Jersey, just a few miles from the gaping hole and smoldering embers of what used to be the Twin Towers. It was Sept 18th 2001.
I have never understood why when I need them the most; all my witty repartees vanish like a fart in the wind! I am a writer for God’s sake; I should know how to be funny in the face of first degree insult! Nope, never happens. Instead I stared at the 5 Caucasian teenagers — 3 boys and 2 girls gesticulating at me as if I couldn’t comprehend their verbal bullets. They seem to take this as further proof of my being a foreigner who didn’t understand English, so they did what any smart person ought to do — shout louder at me! “Go back to your country!”
I remember feeling pissed and horrified and ashamed all at once. I remember my mind racing with several logical replies — “You morons, I am Indian, and no Indians were involved in the heinous attack last week” and “I worked my ass off to earn the privilege of living in this country and all you kids had to do to earn the privilege of shouting at me was to be born here” and “I am with you in this, I feel your pain too.” But, none of the aforementioned thoughts took shape in my mouth.
Instead all I did was quietly roll up my window. “They are just kids, and they are hurting for their country,” I thought. I could hear them still shouting at me — their entire rage directed towards one small brown woman, who looked like she might belong to a geographical area close to where the terrorists originated from. “I promise I will do as you say if you could just point out my country or the one you are so pissed with on a freaking map!”, I muttered to myself. Besides, how could they know where I was from — for all they knew I was born & raised in friggin’ Hackensack! I breathed deep and tried to tune out their clamor, forcing myself to look ahead, blinking away tears that had formed in my eyes for then unknown reasons.
I had arrived at JFK in the year 2000 on a bright April morning, a wide-eyed young woman on a decidedly one-way ticket, with a heart full of hope and a head full of impossible dreams. I believed, like so many 1st gen immigrants do, that I was going to find my destiny in America. When I arrived at the immigration desk, the officer checked my documents, flashed a big smile at me and said “Welcome to America!” I will never forget how warm those words made me feel inside…ok, the guy was really handsome, so that may have something to do with it too! But it’s not the entire reason, promise! It really means something when the first person you interact with at the border treats you as a welcome immigrant, it validates the story of America; one that is broadcast on a loudspeaker by the Hollywood dream factory to the world, that America was made by the sweat & toil of immigrants, that it is a country of, by and for the immigrants, so hey you, keep coming to America!
Sept 11th changed all that. Almost overnight, I saw the mood shift and darken. People’s personal boundaries hardened. Borders started turning into walls. INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) ashamed of having granted easy visas to terrorists, reincarnated first as BCIS (Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services) and again as USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), all in the name of “improved efficiency” but also, it felt, to remove the stain on its reputation. With each iteration, the rules for acquiring and renewing visas became tighter and more tedious. Potential immigrants became potential terrorists. Welcoming America became Fortress America. Traveling abroad and returning became a pain in the rear. Instead of smiling faces of immigration officers, you were (and often still are) greeted by TSA security agents holding back fierce looking German Shepherds. What used to take 5 -10 minutes at immigration now took several hours. And when you thanked your lucky stars to have made it back inside the country, you still had to deal with kids who couldn’t keep their shit together!
Over the past 20 years, I too have had several incarnations. Through various life transitions that entailed exhilarating wins, excruciating losses and everything in between, I finally received my US citizenship three years ago — yes, it took me 18 frickin’ years of paper-work, fingerprinting, more paperwork, and more fingerprinting! I could have raised a kid all the way to college in the time it took me to get an American passport, and it felt similar, with its countless moments of pain & uncertainty such as one associates with raising children, only none of the joy!
As I prepared for my oath of citizenship, my own swearing-in ceremony if you will, I thought about the day those kids swore at me, and why it had stung so hard — besides the fact that they were frickin’ swearing at me! And I realized it was because the day I arrived in America, on that decidedly one-way ticket, in my mind I had become an American. I didn’t pine for my “homeland” as many in my community do and I didn’t ruminate on the possibility that I should return “home” to India. As far as I was concerned, when I arrived in New York that bright April morning, I had come home; that handsome immigration dude might as well have said “Welcome Home.” When the towers fell, I wept for weeks and mourned alongside my fellow Americans. It took those kids’ fury to expose to me how I could be viewed by others — a foreigner, an outsider, even a potential terrorist. Those tears I blinked away were tears of not belonging.
So, this year, on the 20th anniversary of Sept 11th, I plotted my own final comeback; my own “Return of the Jedi” moment- I am a dramatic filmmaker after all! It appeared that the world was hell-bent on mourning, and sure, mourning is appropriate, for reasons far too many to count. But, we can’t mourn everything forever. Instead, I decided to throw what I called a “Melting Potluck”, inviting friends of multiple nationalities, ethnicities and hyphenated identities. I asked them to bring a dish that represented their heritage and a story/song/ poem to share their own American story. Some of us were born here, others naturalized citizens, yet others still on visas or Green Cards — but we all belonged to the American melting pot. Together, we celebrated the American spirit of inclusion and resilience.
And I thanked those poor, ignorant, hapless, rude, hurting kids for inspiring me to do exactly what they had asked me to — Come back to my country!
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. Her work has been shown on national TV in the US and in India, at film festivals across the world, and won many awards including the “Most Important Video of the Year” award from CNN-India. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
It waslove at first sight. There she was, walking surreptitiously across the garden, up the steps of our deck, watching every movement around her; ready to scuttle away if I so much as breathed. She was tiny and I guessed no more than 6 weeks old. She was also skinny and wet and bedraggled, but her eyes had a fierce look to them, her demeanor of a warrior resolved to survive against all odds. All my life I had believed and told the story that I was a “dog person”, and definitely not a “cat person”. But, in that very moment, I knew that my heart was making a special place for this warrior feral kitten that had showed up on my deck.
I bought my first ever cat-food and started putting it out for her. Notwithstanding my growing affection, I did not want to separate a kitten from her mother who I expected would show up for the food as well. She didn’t. I put the food out every day for the little warrior, getting increasingly worried for her safety; it was late October, the weather was getting cold especially at nights, and if a raccoon, opossum or another feral cat attacked her, she didn’t stand much of a chance. I waited with baited breath every day and thanked life when she showed up each morning & evening for her meal, tiptoeing up my deck with the stealth of a Navy Seal!
The mother never appeared. I called up the local shelter and was advised that if the mother hadn’t showed up in two weeks, the kitten had been abandoned. I drove around to the shelter to pick a humane trap. That evening the kitten walked defenselessly into the trap my husband and I set for her.
Even before we brought her in, I had chosen the name for her – “Grace”, in appreciation of life’s grace to have bestowed another being upon us to love and care for. So imagine our surprise when we took “Grace” to the vet for her first visit, only to be told “it’s a boy!” Why on earth did we think it was a girl? My husband says he did that because people often refer to cats in the feminine. I think I did it because I had always wanted a daughter. So, this “pet-baby” who had miraculously showed up in our garden and walked into my heart at first sight; my little warrior had to be a girl!
Well, I was already head over heels in love with her– I mean him! I asked the kitten what he wanted to be called.
Mummy: “my sweet little kitten, my lovely little fur-ball, what shall Mummy call you now?” Kitten: “meowwwooo-oo-oo-oo!”
I decided to let the name come to me. In the meantime, the kitten; my gorgeous little tabby with his luscious brown coat dotted with specks of gold, this mini-tiger who a friend suggested we name “tiger”, had decided I was his mother. He was “picture-perfect” cute; the kind that you see on pet calendars and go “awwwwww”! the kitten had decided I was his mother. His favorite spot in the house was the little gap between my butt and the back of my chair, so while I spent my days working, he spent his days sleeping behind me, nestled up in the warmth of his human mommy’s body. When he awoke, he would jump on my desk and sit on my keyboard demanding I play with him – which I was only too happy to oblige! My husband who was still warming up to the idea of being “daddy”, jokingly called me the kitten’s “Human No. 1” and himself “Human No. 2”! The kitten spent most of his time with Human No. 1 and occasionally went to play with Human No. 2.
I do not remember exactly when the roles changed. Maybe the kitten understood that having conquered mummy’s heart, he had to do some “cute-work” to convert Human No.2 into “daddy” to secure his position in the household. Or maybe it was a “boy” thing, you know, “sons & fathers” hanging out; watching a game or doing their “thing” together, which in this case, happened to be the kitten scratching his chin against daddy’s stubble. Or maybe it was the cat just being fickle. Whatever the reason, one day I saw the kitten waking up, stretching himself, jumping off the couch and walking straight past mommy to daddy’s desk, jumping up to daddy’s lap to first rub against his stubble and then sat there comfortably. Over the coming weeks, this behavior became the new norm. Daddy was well on his way to becoming the NEW Human No. 1.
I come from a broken family. I had lost my mother to stroke as a teenager, and my sister to cancer as an adult. The fractured relationship I have with my father; my one living relative in my immediate family, and his preference for his other family with my step-mother harbored in me a certain kind of lonely knowledge that I was now first for no one. Although if I think this through for just a minute, this is actually not true at all; I am definitely FIRST for my very loving husband (and also I am told now by my very loving exchange student-daughters)! BUT emotions are not logical and family trauma shows up in unexpected ways. And so it was, that one day as my warrior-kitten walked past me to nestle himself in daddy’s arms that I burst into tears that stung with rejection.
Mummy: “mysweet little one, are you angry with mummy? Did Mummy do something wrong?” Kitten: “meowwwooo-oo-oo-oo!”
My husband, being kind and considerate, tried to re-establish Mummy as Human No. 1 by occasionally ignoring the kitten when he meowed at Daddy for attention. They say that it’s the only way to train or re-train a cat. I say “occasionally” because daddy is a softie, and finds it hard to ignore the kitten. Besides, you ought to have a heart of steel to be able to ignore the sweet sound of a kitten. The ignoring works sometimes and then it doesn’t. Time passed – the cat following his new routine. He definitely knows I am mummy, comes to me when he wants food rubbing his body gently against my legs, and often blinks softly at me offering me what is called the “kitty kiss”, but when he wants a real cuddle, Human No. 1 and No. 2 seem to have reversed, for now anyway.
One of the remarkable things about life is how transformative seemingly small events can turn out to be. A little kitten can become a mirror that shows the wounds of one’s childhood. But it can also be a conduit for healing and emotional maturity. Loving my furry boy is a reminder that love is a gift, not a transaction. And having heard numerous stories from friends about both their furry and human children’s fickle whims, at once endearing and frustrating for the parents, I have come to believe that there is much in common between human and furry babies. Both are bundles of joy who rule our hearts. And both tend to break it from time to time.
I finally decided to name the kitten “Evan”; Welsh for “God is Gracious.” So, “Evan” is the masculine form of “Grace”. Because no matter which human Evan prefers on any given day, I am thankful for life’s grace to have brought him into my life, he will always be my Cat No. 1.
Mummy: “So, little one, what do YOU think of your new name – ‘Evan’?” Kitten: “meowwwooo-oo-oo-oo!”
Swati is a loved wife & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children, whose given names are Sophie & Iara, but to Swati they can all be called “Grace”! More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
I am listening to my brilliant and menopausal acting coach as she goes through another one of her hot flashes. “For a couple of minutes my brain shuts down. All I can think of is I am on fire. And I am panicking because I am in the middle of an audition which makes me feel even hotter…“
And I am thinking of “Ginger Rogers” – the woman who not only did everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in heels, but also while menstruating, cramping, menopausing. How the hell did we forget to include all that? How the hell did we agree to compete with men at their level, on their terms, at their speed? By pretending of course and hiding and lying. By pretending that periods, and cramping, and hemorrhaging and peri-menopausing and hot-flashing and menopausing are aberrations to be ignored or sidelined as we go through the “real” business of – taking care of “business”. By hiding our aches & pains in order to look desirable, competitive, perfect. By lying to everyone that we can do it all despite our gender, despite our bleeding/ sagging bodies begging for a reprieve. By lying to ourselves that we can be just as fast, just as productive, just as equal. We can be men, please pretty please, just let us in.
We women can be great liars. It’s not surprising, given that our survival often depends on it. Some of us pop pills to stop the cramping and migraines that come with our periods, in order to finish the shift on the factory floor or deliver the corporate report on time. Because having a period-migraine or PMS is not a valid excuse. Others juggle the demands of work & family with IUD appointments, D&C and endometrial ablation, omega-3 & estrogen supplements to stem the non-stop bleeding that often accompanies peri-menopause. And yet others put on fake smiles in the board-room and sit through meetings never breathing a word about the night sweats, the hot flashes, the bodies & brains on fire. Because God forbid we paused the meeting for a few minutes while we let the hot flash pass. Will the board stop and wait for us to recover? Or will it decide that women are a burden, a drag, a liability? Women need too much time out. Women hold “’productivity” back. A woman’s place is in the house!
I look around at the NY Subway station – at the women rushing about, multi-tasking, hyper- achieving, ignoring the cries of their bodies. My eyes mist as I see ALL women as super-women. Learning to suffer her pain in silence is almost a design feature of being a woman. We don’t dare complain because we are afraid the grip on our hard-earned seat at the table is slippery as it is. We are guarded and on-guard because our victories in the world are new & fragile. We are scared of being pushed back “for our own good”. So, we try to compete in a male world, shaped by male bodies, on a male idea of time and productivity. We try to survive in a world shaped by the male gaze, such that even our blockbuster heroines like Wonder Woman and the new Captain Marvel are masculine in every way except the shape of their bodies, which is dressed or shall I say, half-dressed, in clothes that fulfill male fantasy. Never once is their femininity with its messy problems even hinted at. Does Wonder Woman’s large breasts ever interfere with her arrow-shooting skills – Amazonian women were said to have cauterized girls’ right breasts to solve that problem, but the movie never mentions it – afraid the problems of female reality would be too unpalatable to a hyper-masculine society? Does U.S. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel or “I am no man” Éowyn in Lord of the Rings or the time-traveling nurse Claire in Outlander menstruate when she is hanging out with an army or brigade of men? Forget the women in Game of Thrones; that hyper-masculine orgy of sex and violence, its heroines are much too larger-than-life to contend with the mundane problems that come with actually being a woman.
Growing up, I used to love reading stories of adventure whose heroes were invariably men. On the rare occasion when there was a heroine involved, she was often pre-occupied with dressing up like a man, pretending to be a man, mingling with men. This often left me un- satiated as I found myself wondering – what if she had bigger breasts, how would she strap them down? What does she do when her time arrives each month? Does she have an ever- lasting supply of pads/ tampons in the middle of the forest? And what about peri- menopause? Even daring to imagine any of these effervescent ever-youthful heroines to be older than 40 is a heroic act! But if through some sheer miracle the heroine does live to be over 40, does she ever go through what many of us go through; bleeding straight for 10 – 20 – 30 days, being at our wits end? Never mentioning something doesn’t make it disappear but it does trivialize it, as if the concerns & pre-occupations of an entire gender can be something worth easy dismissal. It’s sad how our society loves hyper-sexualizing women’s bodies but actually never tries to peer beneath what it feels like to be inside one. As a result we dwell in fantasy and hide the actual nitty-gritty of life, when the real marvel of story-telling, as the great writer Aaron Sorkin puts it, is in exploring “how does it happen when it really happens”. I am still waiting for one of these modern day rendering of heroines to lay it out for us.
Back in real life, I wonder why is it that my doctor has been recommending Colonoscopy and breast self-exams to me for years but never once mentioned how to prepare my body for the onslaught of my peri-menopausal years? Why is it only now when I ask my girlfriends older than me that they share stories of their bodies’ trauma and their struggles juggling the balls they always juggled but with the added pressure of “the change”? Why is it that the only solace my doctor had to offer me about the sudden anxiety and struggles that have beset my life is the statement “Welcome to your 40s” and a wink? Why are such profound changes treated as afterthoughts? Why are such enormous challenges dismissed as mere inconveniences? Where are the women’s circles to initiate and guide? Or for that matter, where are the men’s circles?
Overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all, I am overcome with the feeling that all men are complicit in the state of affairs (women too of course but mostly not by choice). The best of men are compassionate to their own wives, and give massages and make tea. It is a great start but not enough. The needle needs to be moved; it requires having a dialogue with others, and influencing others. It requires questioning the status quo of maximizing “fake productivity” that constantly threatens to leave behind the gender whose perceived slowness stems from being the carrier of “real productivity” – the productivity of life. After all, much of what makes us different from men and shapes our lives is because nature made us the bearer of children. And whether we bear those children or not, our bodies tell us where we are in the circle of life far more acutely than do men’s bodies. Besides, what has this quest for fake productivity, this insistence on being fast and hyper-competitive delivered us? A race to the bottom? A devastated planet? A growing disconnect with our fellow beings? Tech-bros?
One could argue nature itself is unfair, it has no interest in the individual well being or personal achievement or happiness, all it cares for is evolution. So, as far as nature is concerned the female gender is simply the vehicle for the next generation – her personal dreams and happiness be damned. But as a society the male gender has long claimed to care about fulfillment of dreams and the pursuit of happiness. It’s time we as a society include the happiness of all genders in the conversation. It’s time to slow down not just so that one gender can take a breath & walk through life with grace, but so all of us can breathe & walk through life with grace. It’s time to have a conversation about what it really means to be a woman.
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience.She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
I stood in the corridor of a Delhi hospital watching the live feed of a Colonoscopy in progress. My sister; the love of my life, the red in my painting, the bread on my plate; was in the exam room getting a Colonoscopy. For the first few minutes of the procedure, everything had looked as it should as the probe made its way through a moist, pink passage into her large intestine. And then came the moment – you know the kind which splits your life into “before” and “after”, that moment came for us when the probe found an obstruction in her colon, the size of a child’s fist, blocking almost the entire passageway. The probe stopped, it couldn’t proceed any further.
My sister often used to say that she & I were born twice – first the biological way, a few years apart from each other; and a second time, the day our mom died leaving her two teenage daughters behind, we were re-born as spiritually conjoined twins, forged to look after each other. Even though we grew up in a two-parent household, we found ourselves suddenly parentless the day our mom passed away; our father consumed with his own grief and incapable of handling two teenage daughters; and soon after saddled with a step-mother who was so loving to us that the day she arrived in our lives, my sister and I magically turned into “Cinderellas”! It was an abnormal way of growing up in India at the time – no one other than us had lost a parent to death or divorce, we knew no other children with step-parents, every family seemed to be a picture-perfect postcard of parental love and devotion, it was as if they were all trying their damndest to star in a Bollywood movie; you know the kind where the entire family dances together on the same fucking beat? We were the odd ones out. Our family was the only messed up one we knew. We were the special ones, but in all the wrong ways. Into this chaos, my sister and I were re-born, alone but together, unloved but loved – by each other. We had always been close but our shared grief and struggles of the years that followed made us one whole person, that is, until death did us part.
When she woke up after the Colonoscopy and after I had helped her shit out little specs of blood from the wounds caused by the biopsy; her first but not the last experience of shitting blood, I told my sister they had found a “mass”, a “growth” in her colon – the word “tumor” stuck in my throat for unknown reasons. I shouldn’t have bothered, she was not fazed. She was not the type to be fazed. She was not fazed when her biopsy came back a couple days later as positive for cancer. She was not fazed when she was told she needed several blood transfusions to help her prepare for potential surgery. “Be Positive!”, she would say, when asked about her blood group, with a naughty glint in her eye and a cheeky grin on her face; her gorgeous dimples deepening on her gorgeous face. No, she was not fazed through any of that. And honestly, neither was I, at the time. We were not fazed when we were given the schedule for her Chemotherapy sessions. “I will shave my hair too and we will both look cool, like Samantha and Smith in ‘Sex and The City’”, I joked with her when she mentioned she might lose her long, lustrous hair to Chemo. “We will both be ‘Bald and Beautiful!’”, she had quipped back. We had laughed & laughed, with her in my arms, both of us lying together in her hospital bed that was designed for only one person, laughed until she had spasms of pain in her gut, those awful & literally gut-wrenching spasms that wrecked havoc on her increasingly frail body. Ever since our mom died, we had shared everything – our grief of losing the one person who had selflessly devoted her life to us, and we shared our dreams; of flying to America; the land of opportunity, of traveling across oceans, of studying film, of becoming the first “Sister Directors” the world had ever seen, and of finding “the brothers” who were made especially for “the sisters”! We would say that we were two halves of a whole – both 50-50. We shared everything 50-50. But when it came to the most important battle of her life, that hypothesis failed miserably – I could neither split her cancer 50-50, nor share her physical trauma 50-50; she went through all of it on her own, while I stood on the outside watching helplessly.
Extended family members; well-meaning relatives who had never given two hoots to our well-being all those years we had lived in India, struggling to survive in a motherless, struggling, broken family, now suddenly came out of the woodwork, visiting us in the hospital, asking us how & why it took us so long to find out my sister had cancer, and especially when we now lived in America. I would wince with guilt & shame, as I repeated the same answer – my sister had never exhibited the classic symptoms of colon cancer, no bleeding from the rectum etc., she had had trouble digesting milk for the previous year which an American doctor had diagnosed as a simple case of “lactose intolerance” and recommended Lactaid that she took for several crucial months as the cancer grew in her gut. More recently another American doctor had recommended an endoscopy which had come out normal. He had mentioned Colonoscopy in passing, but had also said he didn’t expect to find much since there had been no history of cancer in our family and my sister was a healthy young woman in her 30s. So, technically our genetics fucked her, in the wrong way. And so did the fractured American Medical System that misdiagnosed her twice.
Yet – while this was the truth, it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was that we could have pushed the doctors more to investigate if something was seriously wrong with her, especially when she started feeling tired and losing weight, but we hadn’t. Why the hell not? Because we believed with our might & souls that we were special. Like Harry Potter – our favorite fictional character, whose mother had given her life protecting him, and in death, watched over him and shielded him from harm. His story was our story. We were Harry in flesh and blood. We had learnt how to light our Petronus through years of darkness. And believed that like Harry’s mother, our own watched over us and would shield us from any real harm.
I thought of her – J.K.Rowling I mean, as I sat outside the ICU when the phone rang. One of my childhood friends answered the phone. I didn’t have to be told what was said. I knew. Over the past few weeks, I had first fought with death, then prayed at his door, then begged at his feet to spare my sister’s life. But the asshole wanted her like a cat in heat. So he took her. And all I was left was a hole in my heart the shape of her gorgeous face and a lifetime of coulda-woulda-shouldas.
And the thought that somehow it was all J.K.Rowling’s fault.
Swati is a sister, storyteller, a filmmaker, an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
Our mindset is still locked in old forms of warfare, but a new form of war is right at our doorstep.
Albert Einstein famously said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” We know now that a key weapon in World War III is disinformation and the enemy is Climate Chaos. While our mindset is still locked in old forms of warfare, a new form of war is right at our doorstep, and we are grievously unprepared.
Due to its sheer magnitude, the havoc that climate chaos will wreck on the planet is going to be far worse than any war the world has seen. What does a war do? Kills people, destroys cities, creates refugees, crashes economies, and causes widespread damage & suffering. Climate chaos is going to do all this and more. It is going to threaten humanity’s very existence.
Whether its sea level rise, extreme weather events, water scarcity, food shortages, mass extinction of species, humanity’s future is under attack. It’s immaterial whether buildings get knocked down by bombs or flooded by rising seas; they still become uninhabitable and make people homeless. Several coastal cities and some entire nations are destined to disappear from the map giving rise to an avalanche of suffering and creating an unprecedented wave of climate refugees.
A quarter of humanity faces looming water crisis. From India to Iran to Botswana, countries around the world are under extreme water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have. Groundwater is going fast and rainfall is becoming erratic. What happens when major cities such as Cape Town, Delhi, Sao Paolo, Chennai etc. run out of water? The scope of impact on regular folks’ everyday lives strains the imagination. It would also lead to an unprecedented migrant crisis and social unrest.
Nineteen of the twenty warmest years have occurred since 2001. Every year previous records are shattered and new ones made. The hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic Circle as well as the hottest temperature reliably recorded on the planet occurred in the last few weeks. The planet doesn’t heat up evenly across the board, so some places are going to become punishingly hot on a constant basis and the rest would experience extreme spikes. At the current trajectory, temperatures in parts of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and South Asia could eventually exceed 130° Fahrenheit (54°C) making it life-threatening to be/work outdoors, straining power grids, and bringing whole economies to stand-still. Add to this heat extreme humidity and just 95° Fahrenheit (35° C) would be lethal even for the fittest of humans, even under shaded and well-ventilated conditions. The only refuge will be in air conditioning but no grid would be reliable in such extreme conditions, and power cuts would mean death. Besides, how many people in the global south have air conditioning?
Extreme weather events are the new normal; super-hurricanes such as Maria that devastated Puerto Rico and other Caribbean countries, droughts followed by floods that have impacted several countries in the Horn of Africa, massive wildfires that spawn “firenados” (fire tornadoes) as in California or in the case of Australia where successive droughts, fires and floods have caused disasters of biblical proportions. Add to it the plague of locusts stretching from Australia to East Africa devouring scarce food sources, and large scale famines start to become the new reality.
Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we’re now leaving. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to flee their homes resulting in the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In just another decade, two billion people will live in slums with little water or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos. Governments of nations that suffer from a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, could topple as whole regions devolve into war, in what the US Defense Department refers to as a “ threat multiplier “.
The planet is undergoing a “mass extinction” event, defined as a loss of about three-quarters of all species in existence across the Earth over a “short” geological period of time. While such events have occurred before, this crisis is a direct result of the planet’s exploitation by humans, leading scientists to coin a new term for this Geological era; “ Anthropocene “. Biologists warn half of Earth’s species could go extinct by 2050 and scientists predict collapse of all seafood fisheries by 2050. By underestimating our inter-connectedness with other species, we are paving the path for our own eventual extinction.
Humans are typically bad at understanding exponential growth, we tend to think linearly. However living under the shadow of COVID-19, most of us now have some experience of living with exponential growth; not only in terms of a virus’ infection rate but also how such events impact the economy. Much of climate chaos will also be felt on an exponential basis.
Every war has its allies, adversaries, and collaborators, so does the war against climate chaos. The allies are the global scientific community, the renewable energy industry, NGOs and activists tirelessly fighting on the frontline challenging the status quo, regular folks making conscious choices and sacrifices in their lives for the collective good.
Most of the Fossil Fuel industry is an adversary; its interests invariably linked to the collapse of our ecosystem. Another adversary is Russia; one of the few countries that will benefit from climate chaos, for it will provide Russia access to new trade routes, fresh oil deposits in the Arctic, a more hospitable Siberia etc. Russia harbors ambitions to be a super-power again, the demise of Europe and United States is considered a gain by Putin. No wonder the Russian state has become the purveyor of global disinformation; a disunited world presents more opportunities for its resurgence. The world’s loss is Russia’s perceived gain — at least in the short term, until one or more ancient virus comes to life in Siberia due to thawing Permafrost.
No conversation about the adversaries in the war against climate chaos is complete without mentioning the direction the USA has taken under President Trump. By withdrawing the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, opening up vast swaths of public lands such as Alaska’s fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, supporting coal, undermining/ reversing hundreds of Obama-era environmental regulations, and going so far as brazenly deleting the words ‘climate change’ from websites across the federal government as part of its widespread effort to delete or bury information on climate change programs, Trump’s administration has an absolutely abysmal environmental record and has cemented its legacy as one of the worst perpetrators and enemies in this war.
Besides the USA and Russia, China and India are the other two top emitters of greenhouse gases in the world. Decades of rapid economic growth have dramatically expanded the energy needs of both countries. Both also have a muddled report card when it comes to efforts to combat Climate Chaos. While China is the world’s leading country in electricity production from renewable energy sources, it is still increasing fossil fuel use as well, its grid becoming only about 1% cleaner per year, similar to the US. India has self-proclaimed ambitious targets for clean energy yet the reality is that like China, it is still increasing fossil fuel use, the clean energy mix of its grid also improving by only about 1% per year. Improving by a meager 1% per year is simply not enough; at this pace it will take 70 or 80 years to be where we need to be. The war would certainly be lost by then.
The collaborators in this war are the climate deniers refusing to acknowledge the facts. Certain media such as Rupert Murdoch’s Empire, that have done unconscionable damage by sowing doubt and disinformation about this settled science. Akin to Nazi propaganda films that fueled doubt about the nature of concentration camps, Murdoch’s media empire continues to fuel doubt about the causes and repercussions of climate change, and has turned a scientific issue into a divisive political one, making it a deliberate collaborator.
A negligent collaborator is Capitalism itself. By externalizing social, environmental and human costs from its narrow definition of profits, the framework of Capitalism has aided and abetted climate chaos and continues to work against humanity’s interest. Its flawed definition of profits has exacerbated income inequality around the world, now the worst effects of climate change are going to be felt disproportionately harder by poor and marginalized around the globe.
So how do we win? During WWII, the USA emerged as the strongest economy in the world through working hard on “mitigators” to prevent the worst of the war from reaching its shores. It created the necessary tools to win that war and engaged every American in the war effort. The necessary tools to win the war of climate chaos require building a carbon-free green economy with everything it entails — wind turbines, solar panels, carbon accounting and perhaps even rationing, sea walls, sustainable agriculture and building & maintaining international coalitions such as the Paris Climate Agreement. There is no time to find a new economic model; instead we must use the levers of Capitalism itself to fix this issue, starting with a carbon tax that truly values the environmental costs of carbon pollution.
There comes a time in a war when we must all pick a side. Staying on the fence is not being neutral; it is acting on the side of the adversary because it supports the status quo. History doesn’t look kindly on bystanders, we must choose to be on the right side of history, or there may not be a history at all. We must take all the steps we can collectively and individually as quickly and aggressively as possible, in order to prevent the worst predictions becoming facts. We must find all the ways we can to stand up against entrenched interests. As Mr. Dagfinnur Sveinbjörnsson, CEO of ‘The Arctic Circle’ says “In the fight against Climate Chaos, it will not be enough to sustain scientific research and the creation of knowledge, if we do not nurture the virtues of open public discourse and defend the right to speak truth to power.”
The massive mobilization for World War II prompted an unprecedented government campaign urging the public to conserve resources necessary for the war effort. Allied citizens were asked to make sacrifices in many ways. Rationing was one of the ways they contributed to the war effort. In UK, US and elsewhere, supplies such as gasoline, butter, sugar and milk were rationed so they could be diverted to the war effort. The most important items to ration in today’s war are meat and milk as going vegan creates the single biggest impact an individual can have on climate change. Indeed, eating further up the food chain makes us an adversary.
A famous WWII American poster read, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” In the global war we confront today, we must also understand the need to act collectively. When we consume mindlessly we are that lone rider. When our choices are driven by greed, status and ego-fulfillment rather than a sense of sacrifice and collective good, we are that lone rider. We can have the fun of being lone riders for a few more years and lose the war or we can inform ourselves, gather our courage and rise to the challenge by acting decisively to win this war. The decision is up to us.
Swati Srivastava is a film-maker and an environmentalist. She can be reached at swati@TiredAndBeatup.com. Mark Bartosik is an engineer and an environmentalist. He can be reached at Mark@NetZeroEnergy.org . Rajesh Mehta is a Leading International Consultant & Policy Professional. His twitter address is @entryIndia and he can be reached at rajesh@entry-india.com .
Once upon a time, there lived a little girl who dreamt to fly, so very high that…errrr…uhmmm… yes…very high indeed.
Little did she know, the highway to the stars was bumpy, pitted and lumpy this was told in some tales, the ones she didn’t’ read.
Good.
Too much knowing could scorch her wings, squash her spirit, stomp on it, rip it, before she took off and learnt what it means to be freed.
Enroute she confronted the implacable caprices of Fate Monsters of grief, rage, hate shielded by Angels of love in times of desperate need.
Battered wings, weathered soul, wizened brow The gifts of time that brought know-how A little girl’s odyssey that planted the seed.
To live and to tell stories of worlds unseen To know that to fly is prized indeed But to walk with grace – that’s the real deed.
Swati is a sister, storyteller, a filmmaker, an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
The intersection of caste, class and gender make Dalit women the most unsafe women in India, their official rape figure of 10 rapes per day is NOWHERE near the truth.
Another day, another gang-rape story. A victim, whose biggest fault is being a woman, in a culture that regards women as lesser humans. Several perpetrators, whose biggest strength is to be men in a society where might makes right. Politicians, whose sole concern is power. TV news anchors, whose sole aim is ratings. Amidst the cacophony of agendas, a girl fights for her life; her tongue cut off, her neck broken, her body racked with pain. She probably knows she won’t make it but she fights nevertheless. She must live long enough to tell her story, to tell their names.
Can you say for sure which story I am talking about here? The Hathras gang rape case? Or the Balrampur rape case? Or the Hyderabad rape case? Or the Unnao rape case? Or the Badaun rape case? Or the Nirbhaya rape case? Or any of the myriad rape cases that never make the news, yet we are all too aware that they happen, in villages, towns, cities and communities all across India, almost always with impunity? Thousands upon thousands of stories of nameless women. If our conscience was shaken every time a woman was raped in India, we should find ourselves buried under an avalanche of conscience-triggering earthquakes.
When it comes to sexual violence, India is the world’s most dangerous country for women, with four cases of rape reported every hour. Sit with this for a second. Imagine a woman you know as the face of that number. In the time it takes for you to finish dinner tonight, four women you know would have had their lives upended; many left to die, others to live in disgrace, for in Indian society the shame of rape falls upon the victim, not the perpetrator. In almost all of the cases, those women were simply going about their daily lives — cutting grass, riding a bus, hailing a taxi, shitting. They were not trying to navigate their way in a dangerous war-torn country like Afghanistan or Syria, or as proud proponents of Hindutva would claim, surviving in a “backward Islamic state” that doesn’t care about women’s rights. They were living in the world’s largest democracy, in which the predominant religion teaches men to worship female Goddesses. And to rape female humans. The gut-wrenching story of a Hindu girl who lived in a village called “Valmiki” and was raped by four men, two of whom were named “Ram(u)” and “Luvkush” makes it too hard to ignore the cruel irony of events in a state whose leaders have publicly called for a new “Ram Rajya”.
Do Dalit Lives Matter?
Yes, the story I am talking about is the Hathras gang-rape and murder, where her Dalit identity made a poor young girl vulnerable in such a perverse way that she could be subjected to any manner of indignity, and that is exactly what happened. The 19-year-old girl lived in the lower class “Valmiki” colony; most villages in India are divided into upper caste and lower caste colonies. The men who raped her are Rajputs/Thakurs, upper-class land-owners, who lead their lives awash in an entitlement that sees those belonging to lower classes as mere objects. Dalits are forbidden to participate in village functions, their children are prohibited from mingling with upper-caste kids, often forced to bury or cremate their dead in a separate graveyard or cremation ground. In almost every meaningful way, they are treated as “untouchables” except when it comes to raping their women, then touching seems to be acceptable. Often the rape of a Dalit woman is done by upper caste men to teach the former communitya ‘lesson’, it’s unclear if this was the primary motive in this case, although the victim’s family has claimed of a family feud going back two decades with one of the accused assaulting the grandfather of the victim some years ago.
After the rape, the men having left her for dead, the family found their grievously injured daughter and went to the local police station to report the case, but their claims were rejected. This was not unusual. According to Dalit Women Fight, India’s largest and only Dalit-women led Collective, in 99 percent of crimes against Dalit women, the police hand over an acknowledgment for a Non-Cognizable Offence aka misdemeanor instead of filing a First Information Report (FIR), and only file an FIR when activists or lawyers exert pressure, or the case starts getting traction as what happened in this case. The police finally registered the complaint on September 20th, SIX days after the crime had occurred. They recorded the victim’s statement on September 22nd and her forensic samples were collected on September 25th, a full ELEVEN days after the incident, even though government guidelines strictly call for samples in rape cases to be collected within FOUR days. Yet that discrepancy didn’t stop the Additional Director General of Police, U.P. from making the claim that the absence of semen/sperm on the victim’s body in the forensic report proved that there was no rape. When it comes to protecting or absolving upper-class perpetrators, the state seems to leave no stone unturned, whether it is through delaying FIRs, impeding the collection of forensic samples or giving false/misleading statements to the media.
The indignity of being a Dalit followed the victim not just in life, but also in death. After she passed away and an autopsy performed, her body was taken over by the police, instead of being given to her inconsolable family, who were seen in photos & videos on social media, sobbing and begging for her body to be returned to them. In a shocking turn of events, she was subsequently cremated in an open field in the middle of the night, in the presence of nearly two dozen police officers and other officials, but in the absence of her own family who claimed they were locked in the house while her body was doused with petrol and burned. In the days that followed, the police seized the cell phones of her family members in an apparent bid to prevent them from speaking to the media, sealed their village and barred entry of media and opposition politicians, turning the village into a fortress. A video emerged in which the Hathras District Magistrate himself can be seen pressuring the family into changing their statement, his words a veiled threat against the family’s precarious existence in the community.
One is forced to ask why such extreme steps were taken by the state; starting with utter indifference, which was then compounded by criminal negligence, then blanketed by obstruction of justice, if not to provide protection and immunity for the upper-class perpetrators and/or the machinery of the state itself. Dalits languish at the bottom of India’s unbending and harsh caste hierarchy, with Dalit women among the most oppressed women in the world. Many of us are willing to see this gang-rape case as oppression against women, which it is, but have a hard time seeing how the intersection of caste, class and gender make Dalit women the most unsafe women in India; harassed, abused, molested, raped and murdered with impunity. According to “official” figures, 10 Dalit women were raped every day in India in 2019. However, in a survey done in four states in 2006, nearly half of Dalit women reported being sexually harassed and nearly a quarter reported being raped. The numbers didn’t add up, so I did a little research myself (you are welcome to check my math here and write to me if you think I have made an error). If the survey figure is to believed by extrapolating for the population of Dalit females in those four states alone, the approximate number of rapes per day would be about 417, a 99 percent under-reporting, which is exactly in line with what Dalit Women Fight have been asserting for years. This is not just a matter of all Indian women being unsafe, it is a matter of highly marginalized Indian women being highly unsafe and crimes against them hideously under-reported. Every report on the exploitation of Dalit women underlines how Dalit rape cases unfold, with the police refusing to lodge the case, delaying an investigation, the rape itself questioned and doubts sown as to whether caste played any role at all, with authorities often shielding or siding with the upper-class perpetrators. The enormity of the problem is often misunderstood because although 17 percent of the country is Dalit, they have hardly any representation in police or administration or media-houses, leaving their voices unheard. If we take off our blinders and pay attention, we would hear their voices screaming “Dalit Lives Matter.”
Say Her Name
While we think about the voices that are struggling to be heard, let’s also take a moment to question the very idea that rape victim’s identity MUST be kept secret. In India, it is a criminal offence to disclose the identity of victims of offences committed under sexual assault. A few states in the U.S, have similar statutes. No doubt confidentiality is a human right when it comes to any victim, but an unfortunate effect of such laws is that they serve to support and perpetuate the stigma and shame of rape, so pervasive in India that the first response to rape is often silence, a close second victim-shaming. The mother of Jyoti Singh; the victim in the world-famous Nirbhaya rape case of 2012, for which the entire country came together, publicly revealed her daughter’s name stating that she felt no shame in announcing it, and her father said on record that the laws that come out of her case should be named after her, to ensure she is immortalized in public’s memory. Many countries including the United States have a history of naming laws after the victim. Family members in the Hathras rape case have also expressed their wish for the girl’s name to be revealed. Other rape victims, tired of being victimized, and feeling suffocated by the shame & silence around the topic, have courageously reclaimed their names, instead of being known as “city/place victim”.
When we name someone, we honor them as a real person with a real identity. We say their name not just so they hear it, but so we remember that the person who was raped or killed lived just like us; a flesh & blood human, we are forced to acknowledge and honor their humanity. This is the reason why there are walls of remembrance in cities around the world, whether inscribed with the names of innocent citizens such as the ones that died at the site of 9/11 in New York, or of soldiers who lost their lives in battles such as the ones inscribed on India Gate in New Delhi. We take the names of heroes; we hide the names of victims. We are proud of the former, while the latter live in ignominy. We also take their names as a call for justice; this is why cities across America and the world are ablaze with chants such as “Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor.”
The criminals that raped and killed Manisha Valmiki cut off her tongue so she couldn’t say their names, but she did nevertheless. She told us their names: Sandip, Ramu, Lavkush and Ravi. In honor of her undying courage, and as a call for justice in the names of all women and especially Dalit women, let’s come together and say her name: Manisha Valmiki.
Swati Srivastava is a film-maker, an activist, and an environmentalist, who loves to tell stories with an analytical spirit.She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
My earliest “memory” of America is of my father telling me about the moon landing. “ John F Kennedy said we will put a man on the moon in 10 years and the Americans did it. “ As a little girl growing up in India, I imagined a country called America whose presidents were visionaries, whose people believed in science, and whose spirit was ambitious.
My second “memory” of America is reading about WWII. “ Roosevelt told the American people not to fear, and it was under his leadership that the Allies won the war “. I imagined this president who had suffered from Polio himself; his determination forged in the crucible of personal trials, and I imagined Americans as a courageous lot, willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good.
My third “memory” of America is of watching the news about the first Gulf War. “ The US president George H.W. Bush is a Navy pilot himself, who flew 58 missions in WWII “. By this time, I was fascinated by American leaders — full of enterprise, conviction, and personal courage. And my heart was full of respect and admiration for this far-off place.
That America; the country of my imagination is what I immigrated to as a young woman. I came to America because I thought it was the best country on the planet, and I came to offer it the best I had. I came to America because I believed in the ideals that I thought were seeped into the soil of this great country. I am not the only one who came for that reason. Many of us who grew up in countries around the world imagined America to be a receptacle for the best one has to offer, a place where dreams and ambitions came true, a shining city on the hill.
Living in America, I came to know more about its history. I learned that the truth was far more nuanced, the country far more complex, its policies and leaders far more flawed than the little girl had imagined. Yet with all its flaws and complexity, it was a country that, to my immigrant eyes, appeared to forever strive to become a more perfect union, a place where people hardly cared about where you came from but were always interested in where you were going, a place where mastery of craft was valued over superficial achievements, a place where what you knew was more important than who you knew. I felt at home in such a place.
I saw the twin towers fall on 9/11 and cried alongside hundreds of thousands of Americans — the gaping hole in the NYC skyline left a hole in my heart too. When yelled at by a bunch of white teenagers in a car next to me telling me to f*** off, and go back to my country, I was shocked at first, but quickly understood it to be misplaced anger of young Americans who also had a hole in their hearts. I was against the war in Iraq, and so I marched alongside thousands, participating in the finest American tradition of non-violent protest — the tradition that brought India its own independence from the mighty British Empire, the tradition that had made its way from Thoreau to Gandhi back to MLK Jr. in a karmic loop between my two homes. I felt dismayed at the cacophony of fake debate around climate change fueled by the fossil fuel industry and perpetuated by the likes of Fox News. Although I couldn’t vote yet, my heart swelled with pride when Americans elected their first black president, and when that president corralled every single country on the planet into the Paris Climate Agreement, in an effort to save the world from imminent climate disaster, I told friends and family back in India — this is what American leadership looks like, it’s still alive! They didn’t need to be told, they knew it too.
Nothing prepared me for the shock of Donald Trump. I remember when I first heard Donald Trump as a candidate — I was caught speechless at the parallels I saw and heard between what he said & how he behaved, and the politicians I had grown up listening to & watching in India. Nothing about him felt “American” to me — no vision, no courage, no brilliance, no statesmanship, no building of bridges. All I heard was hate-mongering, fear-mongering, and showmanship of the worst kind. Having grown up in a deeply sexist country, it was Donald Trump’s treatment of and rhetoric on women that told me that sexism is not only very much alive in America but is now acceptable in American leaders.
I couldn’t believe what else I was learning about candidate Trump — the fraud his businesses indulged in, the thousands of lawsuits he was embroiled in — many of which he openly gloated as bullying tactics against people far less powerful than himself — when did fraud and bullying become something to gloat over in America? Unlike other presidents before him, Trump neither served in the military nor showed respect for others who did, calling John McCain a loser. He rallied his followers into obscene chants to lock up his political opponents and brandished the possibility of an armed revolt if he happened to lose the election. I was awestruck — American democracy and its political landscape were devolving in front of my very eyes.
The idealist part of me couldn’t believe that Trump could possibly win the hallowed office of the American presidency. But another part dreaded what it innately knew from having a lived experience of a far more corrupt, dog-eat-dog political system — people like Trump win, and often, not despite their hateful rhetoric but because of it. There are leaders who call for us to be guided by the better angels of our nature and not give into fear — great visionaries like Lincoln and FDR. And then there are those who give permission to act out our worst inclinations, goad us to fall for the lowest common denominator. I saw many such politicians win elections over and over in India. I thought it wasn’t possible in America — my shining city on the hill. I was wrong.
November 9 , 2016 — I knew in my bones that American democracy had been dealt a severe blow, I felt in my heart that the American promise of democracy — with malice towards none and charity for all had been ripped asunder, I saw the promise of America fade for friends & family abroad, almost overnight. I could only hope that President Trump would be a better man than candidate Trump.
Four years of his presidency proved that hope false. Every day I see a president, who refuses to rise to the stature of his office, lies ad nauseam, insults the military, denies science and disrespects scientists, surrounds himself with criminals and when they are convicted pardons them, keeps petty scores & tweets against ordinary Americans and American businesses. A president, who brazenly indulges in nepotism; his appointment of family members to cherished positions in his administration acutely reminds me of the nepotism rife in Indian politics. A president who had promised to “drain the swamp” but has instead turned the government into a cesspool of corruption like never before, with every department headed by industry lobbyists, pillaging people’s money for private profit.
Friends and family around the world marvel at what my fellow Americans bought into but I have no answer to them. I am not sure if ordinary Americans are able to see how much this country has changed in the span of 4 years. If the old adage, “united we stand, divided we fall” is something to learn from, we have fallen very far indeed. I see signs on lawns around where I live saying “make liberals cry again”; emblematic of a country full of hate and division, and I wonder how it came to pass, that happiness to some is to make their fellow Americans cry. I see signs at white supremacist rallies saying “Diversity = White Genocide” and I realize I am being told that my very existence as a brown person is a threat to theirs, that this country belongs to white people & white immigrants — meaning my white immigrant husband is welcome but I am not. I remember those kids in the car after 9/11, telling me to go back to my country. Except that this time, it is the American President himself saying those words, for that is what he tells me when he calls those white supremacists “very fine people”.
For 4 long years, Donald Trump simply refused to be my President. He refused to be my President when he refused to govern with any manner of decency or grace. He refused to be my President because he refused to inspire Americans to come together in a common purpose, instead pitting them against one another, so they are more divided than ever before since the civil war. He refused to be my President when he put immigrants — asylum-seekers & their children; the proverbial “tired, poor and hungry” in cages — is this how America treats its immigrants? He refuses to be my President when he undermines the work of medical professionals, scientists, and state governors, even as 200,000+ Americans have died under his watch. He refuses to be my President when he refuses to acknowledge the enormity of Climate Chaos, squandering what could have been another “moon-shot” moment for America, willfully pushing Americans and the world closer to the edge of disaster. He refused to be my President because he could not ascend to the stature his office behooves, warranting a spirit of humility, perseverance, and self-sacrifice. Instead, he has turned the country I was proud of, into an object of pity around the world. So much for the promise of making it great.
Despite his self-proclaimed greatness, comparing himself to Lincoln and asking for his face to be added to Mount Rushmore, Trump has left the American spirit and its moral ascendancy around the world in tatters. He is already ranked by historians & scholars, and seen by much of the world, as one of the worst American presidents ever. In its nearly 250-year-old history, America has had 45 presidents, all of them powerful for a brief period, yet most of them forgotten soon after. That’s the nature of history; it turns the once-mighty into nothing but dust, it is poised to do the same to this one.
But from the eyes of this immigrant, Donald Trump would forever be seen and remembered as the President of the Divided States of America.
Swati Srivastava is an immigrant, a film-maker and an environmentalist. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com
