Letter to Santa

My dear Santa,
I know this is a bit abrupt at this time of the year when you have just begun to settle down after a long tour. Hope you enjoyed your stay in our corner of the world and stayed long enough to learn to sing 'Kuttanadan punjayile'. I can imagine you cruising along the lake and singing 'Jingle Bells...'.
Did you hear while you were here that like you, Kerala too has an annual visitor? An ideal king, Mahabali, of yesteryear. As the much celebrated song about him (Maveli naadu vanidum kaalam/manusharellaarum onnupole) says, someday at Christmas, we hope all people will "live out the true meaning of the saying that all men are created equal... Where no one will be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character... Where our nation will be lifted from the quicksand of prejudices...." Sorry, I got carried away by Martin Luther King.
Thank you for spreading cheer in trying times like these. Christmases in the past few years have reminded me of the story of the First Christmas when hundreds of children were put to the sword by Herod. The weeping in Ramah seems universal; you hear that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, our own India, where children are the worst affected by war, tyrannical regimes, natural disasters or economic policies. I know your little gifts comfort them, give an island of respite in their world.
Why is that your bundle never grows small even after distributing all the gifts? I like to believe that you trade their worries for gifts. That is why I don't mind Santa remaining the one universal comforter. (I am against any homogenisation of culture. But maybe your acceptance comes from the fact that your ancestors date back to pre-Christian days and you contain diverse myths and cultures.) That is the miracle of Christmas.
There are times when I want to be like you. The other day, a young boy approached me on the busy Sixth Avenue of Anna Nagar, Chennai, lined with Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald's, Hi-Style and what not, where the well-dressed turn their faces away from the poor (because they are scared to look into their eyes). He had a small bag in his hand, and wanted to sell me 'vathi petti'. I did not understand what he was saying in Tamil.
But I heard within my soul, like you do almost always, what he was trying to tell me. He wanted to pay his school fees of Rs.150. Western media translates anything like that for their readers to comprehend. It is close to 3 dollars. Well, I too walked away, partly for not wanting to dehumanise him by doling out some money (he did not ask for alms) and partly because I was a bit sceptical of him being a deceptor (I take cover under the fact that scepticism is a philosophic view).
Later, I gathered that what he was trying to sell me was a box of wicks (or incense sticks) to be used in pujas. I smiled at the irony of it. All the wicks for others to propitiate their gods! He would need a lesser offering for a lesser god! I wished I could go Santa-like to his house or change his circumstances with a magic wand.
But he is only one among the thousands in India who work hard for a living. I suggest you visit Sivakasi, Moradabad, or Kashmir, where children are employed in match and cracker factories, small industries making locks and carpet weaving units. Or any of the brick kilns in the hinterland or eateries in our towns and cities. India has the largest number of child labourers under the age of 14 in the world.
Recently I was reading about the children of Basera-e-Tabassum (meaning Abode of Smiles), a home for girls in Kupwara in militancy-ridden Jammu and Kashmir. They know more about lost childhoods than we can probably imagine. But these children got the gift of a camera, and the world got to see what they shot -- with love.
I didn't intend to sound too negative. I am optimistic. Every Christmas brings joy and hope for a better world. I appreciate your role in making the world a better place with your small gestures. I appreciate you for realising that for a child, today matters more, not tomorrow.
But I have one request. Please bring Mama Claus along when you come next. I am sure she must be helping you pack all the bags to go on your long journeys to the end of the world. At least that will help subvert the whole idea of a male benefactor. Our girls are burdened--they need to please their husbands before their marriages with fat dowries and then they have to serve them every day (cook, wash) and live their lives for them. It will be a great inspiration for our girls to see Mama join you in person in your mission to help people in need.
That will be the perfect symbol of new beginnings each Christmas bring. We, at God’s Own Country, shall be her perfect host.
See you next Christmas.
Sam

‘Please, sir, I want some more’

The term Dickensian refers to poor social and economic conditions as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens. The Industrial Revolution had brought about major changes in 19th century England. Wealth grew, but so did poverty and hunger. Fashionable areas grew up, but so did debtors’ prisons and workhouses.
There is no striking picture of the Dickensian world than that of the half-starved Oliver Twist with his bowl saying, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ Strangely, this holds good in an “increasingly populous, urbanised and environmentally challenged” 21st century world.
Even as I write this, 17 children have reportedly died of malnutrition in nine months in Mumbai. It is said that 55 per cent of the city’s population live in slums side by side with some of the wealthiest people in India.
Hunger is an unwelcome guest in many more homes in India. In 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which brings out the Global Hunger Index (GHI), constructed the India State Hunger Index (ISHI) after analysing hunger levels in 17 major states covering more than 95 per cent of the population.
The results were shocking: Not a single state fell in the ‘low hunger’ or ‘moderate hunger’ categories. One state—Madhya Pradesh—fell in the ‘extremely alarming’ category.
Well, that sticks out like a sore thumb in the great India story since 1991 when GDP has doubled. In the race ahead, one report says, India seems certain to miss one of its key Millennium Development Goals: halving malnutrition by 2015.
There are other ways too in which children’s lives are wrecked. Six-year-old Parthiban is the son of the watchman in our apartment. Till a few years ago, his father, who worked in a ration shop, lived in a one-room shack. But when the rent became unaffordable, he opted to moonlight as a watchman so that his wife and son will at least have a roof over their heads; Parthiban sleeps, eats and does his homework in the common area between our flats and stairwells.
But Mohammad Manan Ansari, now 15, of Samsahiriya village in Jharkhand, could not even think of that. He began working in a mica mine at the age of eight. Thanks to the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, he is at a rehabilitation centre in Jaipur to study.
India is said to have the largest number of child labourers who are under 14 in the world. The ostensible reason is always poverty, but there are other factors such as parents’ attitudes, discrimination, and social exclusion which are responsible for child labour
Last year, Ansari narrated his story at the International Labour Organisation on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour. He has a new mission in life now: to defend children’s rights.
In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for children. While great progress has been made on child rights in the past 20 years, a UNICEF report says “many of the world’s children will never see the inside of a school room, and millions lack protection against violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination and neglect”.
The most vulnerable among them are girls. In many places they don’t even get essential healthcare.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (in a novel by the same name) is the face of a young woman who learns at a very tender age that the world she lives in is a blighted one. The novel’s setting is the impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. It begins with Parson Tringham informing John Durbeyfield, a peasant, that he has noble lineage. He says “Durbeyfield” is a corruption of a great family name, “D’Urberville”. To the inebriated man, the piece of information was another intoxicant. (All of us, Saint Thomas Christians, will understand easily how heady lineage can be!)
Now it comes on the shoulders of Tess, 14, his eldest daughter, to take the goods loaded in a cart to the market the next day. Little Abraham, her brother, accompanies her.
The sun had not yet risen when the children set out on their journey, Abraham still groggy. …As he began to wake up slowly, Abraham, as little children would, got fascinated with silhouettes made against the sky by trees and clouds, “began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head”.
Suddenly, he stopped to ask his sister:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
There is another story from long ago, when a young woman and her husband, looking for a place to rest, knocked at the doors of several inns. They had no money, and were exhausted and cold, and she was pregnant. Later that day, she gave birth to a baby boy in a manger.
Time had some more bad surprises in store for the family. The parents had to flee to another country to escape the wrath of the king.
There are many reasons why people choose to migrate, including poverty, armed conflict, social strife, political turmoil and economic hardships. All such migration destroys human dignity, worst of all of children.
It is our collective responsibility to ensure every child’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation. In Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s words: “We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’
“His name is ‘Today.’”

Figures of speech

Rightly or wrongly, I had little patience for people who called me a ‘brother in Christ’ until I met Immanuel. I won’t say that I have fully grasped its meaning, but that was the day I wised up to such an expression.
My work had once taken me to a football club, which offered free coaching to young boys in an urban slum in Chennai. Some of them moved on to professional clubs every year. That encouraged dozens of boys to come every day to the football ground in a crummy corner of the city to practise shooting, heading, passing the ball or goalkeeping.
It was impossible to be run down by the stench from the nearby dumpyard that hung in the air like smog on a windless day. It was as much a symbol of the everyday reality of the boys who lived in one-room tenements just across the dumpyard as it was of urban decay. Most of the boys were Dalits and from extremely poor backgrounds. The club gave them reasons to dream.
Immanuel was the honorary treasurer of that club. He was my translator, my guide. Every morning, Immanuel, who must be in his early thirties, joined the boys. He was passionate about the game. And he arranged the refreshments that the club provided the boys.
Immanuel said the club had a loftier aim too; infusing discipline and encouraging the boys to study. In a decade of the club’s functioning, he said, there were fewer school dropouts. Just about 5 per cent of the people who lived there have had an education beyond Class X.
As we warmed up after a couple of meetings and telephone conversations, he told me he was the local pastor of a church, an international Christian denomination. (Though at the ground, the only religion was football.) One day during conversation he said, “So, we are brothers in Christ.”
Brothers? That meant we had a common father. ‘Our’ father.
Our father in heaven....
Is that not how Jesus asked us to pray?
In Theology of a Classless Society, Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathios says how the second person singular (YOU) is used in the Lord’s Prayer to refer to only God. The rest of it is in first person plural, that is, ‘WE’ or ‘US’. Thus, the prayer teaches us to ask “provision [of resources], pardon, and protection and preservation for the whole of humanity”.
Jesus, no doubt, had a way with words. He used many figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to make a point. For instance, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field”, he was drawing people’s attention to the similarity between a hidden treasure and the kingdom, both of which are valuable.
There is a marked difference between ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘kingdom in heaven’. So, what do we make of ‘let your kingdom come’ in the Lord’s Prayer?
In the words of N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham: “‘God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven . . . give us this day our daily bread.’ You cannot pray this correctly unless you are mentally putting your arms around people in Afghanistan who are literally eating grass as we speak….”
That makes it imperative to put my arms mentally around all the 925 million people, whom the UN estimates will suffer from chronic hunger in the world this year. Or the child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems.
That makes it necessary for me, as Mahatma Gandhi told us, “to recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?”
Would Gandhi have allowed such a thing as grain rotting in godowns when millions went hungry? Would he have agreed to a 10-day, Rs.20,000 crore plus extravaganza for the Commonwealth Games when, according to some reports, 250,000 people were rendered homeless because of it?
“Every single bit of the Lord’s Prayer is radical because every single bit of it challenges our assumptions about who we are and who God is and what the world is like,” says Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. “And what it’s praying for… is the most revolutionary change you can imagine in the world we live in. A change to a situation where what God wants can happen, to a situation where all the hungry are fed, to a situation where forgiveness is the first imperative in all our relationships.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/prayer/lordsprayer_1.shtml)
The challenge for you and me is to live the prayer. In other words, the prayer becomes meaningful when all our brothers are fed, clothed and have a roof over their heads.
I mailed Immanuel the other day, but I am yet to hear from him. I need to find the courage to pray ‘Our Father’.

Wealth and well-being

Gaviotas sounded like a never-never land when I heard of it six years ago. The State of The World Report 2004, brought out by the Worldwatch Institute, had a box item on ‘the Gaviotas experience’ in a chapter titled ‘Rethinking the good life’.
For beginners, Gaviotas is a tiny village tucked away in Colombia in South America. According to the report, its 200 residents (nearly 50 families) paid nothing for meals, medical care, education or housing. All adults had work, and music and other cultural events were a regular part of life in the village. What’s more, the community had had no police force, jail, or mayor for three decades since its beginning!

Not Utopia, but a real place.

If that seems like yet another example of ideal community living, hang on. Gaviotas is self-sufficient in energy, making use of solar and wind power and biogas. All agricultural activities here are organic. The people here are also engaged in the reforestation of thousands of hectares of the savannah. The villagers extract and sell resin from the Caribbean pine grown here.
Gaviotas is known worldwide for its many inventions too. This includes “a water pump that village kids work as they ride their seesaw, windmills designed for the gentle breezes of the Colombian plains, a pressurised solar water heater, and a pedal-powered cassava grinder”. None of these inventions is patented; there are hundreds of Gaviotas-model water pumps or windmills all over South America.
In 1989, the United Nations’ Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty published a set of three volumes containing details about appropriate technologies for developing societies. Gaviotas accounted for more than 50 of them!
Gaviotas is the brainchild of Paolo Lugari. He was joined by the likes of Dr. Jorge Zapp, who left the “priesthood of science” in which experts deliver knowledge to “the masses” and involved ordinary people in developing their own solutions.
It was never Lugari’s intention that other societies should copy the Gaviotas model. Instead, he wanted to show the world that it was possible to live sustainably by drawing on local resources.
In the beginning, many felt that Lugari’s was a pipe dream. “It’s just a big, wet desert out there,” he was told repeatedly. “The only deserts,” he would reply, “are the deserts of imagination.” (www.friendsofgaviotas.org)
Closer home, a village called Elappully in Kerala has become an oasis of imagination and hope.
Till a few years ago, farmers in the tiny Palakkad village were on the edge of survival. Many had left paddy cultivation, the mainstay of the village’s economy, because of the high cost of farming and low returns. The panchayat pushed dairying as an alternative option and assisted women in the village to set up dairy units.
A detailed study conducted to identify the factors leading to the low production of milk was revealing. One of them was shortage of fodder. The panchayat’s next initiative was to grow fodder on 50 hectares of land. The Elappully Government Higher Secondary School students too pitched in by growing fodder on two acres of land. That was proof enough of the positive attitudinal change in the village. The panchayat also set up a model veterinary hospital.
In two years, the production of milk was doubled. Last year, the production increased fourfold to 10,000 litres and the combined turnover crossed Rs.7.5 crore. “Elappully Farm Fresh Milk” is a new brand now!
Dairying had a beneficial effect on paddy cultivation too. From 1,830 hectares, paddy cultivation has spread to 1,870 hectares now. The panchayat solved the shortage of farmhands by leveraging the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The crowning glory came when Elappully won the best panchayat award in Kerala in a social reality show (www.greenkeralaexpress.org).
That is another great story. Titled Green Kerala Express, the daily 40-minute show hosted by Thiruvananthapuram Doordarshan was a welcome break from the usual mind-numbing reality shows on TV. All the local self governments in the state — (then) 999 grama panchayats, 57 municipalities and five corporations — were invited to join a competition by producing a 10-minute video on any sustainable developmental model in their respective places; 150 panchayats were shortlisted from among 200 applicants.
The programme was in the format of a travelogue, with anchors taking the viewer on a tour of the village on a bicycle. (What better motif than a bicycle to promote sustainable living?)
The visiting teams came back and produced two short films on the basis of their impressions. One of this was on the cultural and historical profile of the village. The other was on the developmental model itself, but in a modified form. The films were screened before an eminent jury who, based on their interactions with the selected panchayats, chose the winners. Viewers were also encouraged to send SMS votes.
Elappully bagged the Rs.1-crore award from among the 15 finalists while Akathethara from Palakkad and Adatt from Thrissur district came second and third respectively. Ottapalam came first among municipalities to win Rs.50 lakh.
All this leads one to believe that there is a growing awareness among people on what is meant by the ‘good life’. Does the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country reflect the standard of living of its people? What is true wealth? Is it just economic capital? What about other forms of capital — the health and biodiversity of the natural environs, the strength of communities, the well-being and happiness of people?
What is wealth without well-being?

Lost men and missing women

One of Rembrandt’s famous paintings is 'The Return of the Prodigal Son'. It is a moving depiction of the younger son kneeling before the father, who has his arms clasped around him tenderly. One of his sandals is off, perhaps to show that he was running to meet his father. There are some who believe that, contrary to what we read in the parable (Luke 15:11-32), the elder son is also present at the scene, yet cold and aloof. Modern retellings of the parable have always posed the question as to who is the lost son.
The parable (and the painting) throws up yet another question. Where is the mother in this great homecoming story?
Rembrandt’s painting inspired Dutch priest Henri Nouwen to write a novel by the same name. The painting bothered him as to which of the sons he identified with. Nouwen says: “Looking into myself and at the lives of other people, I wonder which does more damage, lust or resentment? There is so much resentment among the ‘just’ and the ‘righteous.’ There is so much judgment, condemnation and prejudice among the ‘saints’. There is so much frozen anger among the people who are so concerned about avoiding ‘sin’.”
Perhaps we need to know a little bit about the economy during Jesus’ time to understand the elder son’s resentment and the mother’s absence.
1. According to the laws of inheritance prevailing then, it is said, a man’s wealth got divided among his sons after his death. The firstborn received a double share of what his brothers got. That is, if a man had two sons, the elder son inherited two-thirds of it. By law, even the father could not change the laws of inheritance.
The prodigal had already inherited his property before his father’s death and squandered all the wealth.
In other words, though he gained his relationship back with his father he could in no way regain his property. His brother had to be his keeper now!
That is reason enough for the elder son’s anger. The father has to remind him that, “Everything I have is yours, but this brother of yours was dead and is alive again….”
Many of us have this feeling that we have earned “the good life” with our hard work and that poverty is due to “lack of self-discipline”.
We hear this morally superior talk at other levels too. For instance, when developed nations blame developing nations for environmental degradation and carbon emissions and price rise (caused by over consumption). Is it the rich man’s burden or his moral obligation to help the poor?
2. According to the law of Moses, daughters inherited property only if there were no sons. After their father’s death, the five daughters of Zelophehad of the tribe of Manasseh raised the issue of their right to his property (Num. 26, 27; Josh.17:3). Moses took their case to God, who told him that their plea was just.
Later, the family heads of the tribe of Manasseh appealed to Moses that if Zelophehad’s daughters married men from another tribe, their share would be added to the portion of the tribe into which they married. So Moses instructed that the girls could marry only from among their own tribe.
Every daughter got a dowry from the father’s estate, but the husband had the right of its use. In short, women in first century Palestine had limited access and control over the resources. They only had the ‘silent’ role of taking care of the family members and home. Like, perhaps, the mother in the parable.
There are many women ‘missing in action’ in 21st century too. This gets reflected in contemporary narratives.
A book, Women in Malayalam Cinema: Naturalising Gender Hierarchies, I read recently speaks about how by and large films still tend to portray “woman as someone ‘who loves to cook and clean, wash and scrub, shine and polish for her man’.” Kerala, no doubt, has made rapid strides in terms of socio-economic status, health conditions and general standards of living. Yet, the book says, “education and social grooming have been kept at conservative levels with continuing emphasis on the ‘feminine mystique’ teaching girls that they are essentially wives and mothers”.
What about the news media? The fourth edition of the Global Media Monitoring Project, a research and action initiative on gender in the news media coordinated by the Canada-based World Association for Christian Communication, says “the news presents a skewed picture of a world in which women are almost absent in positions of authority or responsibility outside the home” (www.waccglobal.org/en/resources/media-and-gender-monitor.html).
It needs no gender monitoring initiative to find that Jesus’ ministry was very inclusive, much more than what we would have it now. He always challenged patriarchal assumptions.

The newspaper and the Bible

Imagine we had the chance to give an emoticon for every article that appears in the paper. It would be a smiley for the story on Saina Nehwal’s win in a Super Series tournament. Or a winking smiley for the story on Aamir Khan travelling disguised for the promotion of 3 Idiots. But I know I would give a frowny face for the story of Shanti Devi and Fatima.
Shanti Devi, a Scheduled Caste woman, died minutes after giving birth to a premature baby girl. She had not eaten for three days before her delivery. A year and a half earlier, Shanti Devi, pregnant for the third time, had a miscarriage; the foetus died in her womb. But four different hospitals turned her away because she could not pay the bills….
Fatima, another young woman, gave birth to a baby girl under a tree in the crowded Nizamuddin locality right opposite the Commonwealth Games car park. Her mother approached a maternity home run by the corporation but was turned away. (www.civilsocietyonline.com/may10/may107.asp.)
Haven’t we heard of another woman who had “no room at the inn”? Has the smiley Christmas story of a “prince being born” overshadowed it? Let me try to “report” the birth of Jesus:

Bethlehem
December 25, 3 B.C.
By Staff Reporter
Mary, a poor young woman from Nazareth in Galilee, gave birth to a baby boy in a manger in a crowded locality here yesterday. She and her husband, Joseph, had just arrived from their home in Nazareth, about 150 kilometres south to Joseph’s ancestral home in Bethlehem in Judea, to register in the Census of Quirinius when she went into labour. Joseph is said to be a descendant of King David and Bethlehem is David’s birthplace.
The couple knocked at the doors of many inns, but was turned away. Finally, a kind innkeeper offered them a stable for the night, where Mary delivered the child.
The baby is said to be healthy. “It is an event of great joy,” said one of the shepherds who came visiting the family after they heard the news while guarding their flocks in nearby fields. The child was swathed in white cloth when they saw him.

The nativity story gives us a picture of the society into which Jesus was born. The fact that Mary and Joseph brought a pair of doves (not the lamb of the wealthy) to the temple for sacrifice shows that they were indeed poor.
This is not to say the situation in Jerusalem 2000 years ago is anywhere close to what it is in India today. But you can draw shocking parallels to it from contemporary society. That, to me, is the relevance of the Bible.
Jesus’ preaching reflected the obvious socio-economic tension of his times. So, the parable of the labourers who receive the same wages (Matthew 20:1-16) brings to mind the sight of unskilled labourers who wait at street corners not knowing if they will get work for the day. The minimum resources required for a person to support his or her family are the same.
I am not discounting the spiritual meaning of this parable. But Jesus used everyday problems to illustrate a point.
The gap between the rich and the poor were wide, as it is today. There were landowning farmers and absentee landlords who lived in cities at one end of the spectrum and labourers who worked for them and wandering shepherds at the other extreme. Then there were the high priests, the temple administrators and taxmen who lived fairly well and craftsmen like Jesus and his fisherman friends.
Under imperialist Roman rule, there were questions of identity and political unrest too among people, as our country has been through.
Other Bible narratives too hold a mirror up to contemporary society. The episode of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21:1-16) is the story of the abuse of authority. King Ahab, Queen Jezebel’s husband, wanted to own a vineyard near his villa at Jezreel. Its owner, Naboth, would not sell. Jezebel gets Naboth killed so that ownership of the vineyard was passed to Ahab. Farmers and tribals are still helpless against the mighty and powerful.
Dear friends, if you are indifferent to news around us, think again. You and I are part of the structural violence that makes all this happen.
Here are more killer facts. According to the multidimensional poverty index of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 421 million people in eight states of India live in extreme poverty. This is more than the total number of similarly impoverished lives in the 26 poorest African countries put together.
The National Crime Records Bureau states that 199,132 farmers in India killed themselves between 1997 and 2008. That makes it nearly 45 farmers a day.
So, if we are far too complacent with the everyday reading of the Bible, it is time for a rethink. As the great theologian Karl Barth advised, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”