September 29, 2008

Mediation, dialogue and negotiation

Here at Meta-Culture things have been pretty crazy! Another 2 interns- a British guy and a local lawyer, have recently joined the team. I feel like I have been here forever and its strange to see them floundering and finding their way around. Its great, though, to have so many interesting people around. I think the Meta Culture staff span almost all continents at the moment.

Along with Open Enrollment, my project for Meta-Culture Consulting, I am currently also part of the team that is setting up Meta-Culture's Community Mediation Centre. I had no idea how much work and planning goes into setting something up! I am in charge of the Administration and am project managing the planning of the Basic Mediation Course which will be conducted mid November. The Basic Mediation Course is the foundation course for anyone who wants to become a mediator. We are hoping to be able get a few people from this course to continue on as apprentices and finally train them as mediators for the Mediation Centre. Having had no experience with administration i am having to read MANY MANY manuals regarding the set up of mediation centres in the US primarily, which we are modeling this mediation centre on.

Other than that, Bengaluru Speaks was held again on Friday. This time the theme was Violence in Urban India because of the current events that have been cropping up all over the country. The dialogue was intense and even volatile towards the end and on the whole a success because we got people talking about their opinions on a very real and honest level. NDTV was actually present at the event and they are doing a piece on Meta-Culture which will be screened at 9.30 on 2nd October.

Im entering the last month of my internship here and I am seriously considering extending it for a little while so that i can finish my projects and tie up loose ends. Hope all you other interns are learning and having as much fun as I am.

Mihika

September 26, 2008

Ophelia's Complaint

To continue my discussion with Catherine Filloux’s collection of plays that I have proof-read, I am taking up her play Mary and Myra. It is different from the three previous plays discussed because it is not about genocide. But the common thread of oppression links it to the others. Nineteenth century USA, 1870s to be more precise is the backdrop of the play. Mary is Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln and Myra is Myra Bradwell, the first female lawyer of America. In 1875 Mary had been institutionalized by her only living son on the grounds of insanity. Myra, a good friend tries to get her released from there. The play is based on the few visits that Myra pays to Mary in the asylum where they discuss and argue about myriad issues–from a mother’s hopes and disappointments around her offspring, the position of a woman in that society, to the constant obstacles faced by a woman trying to practise law which was seen as an exclusively male profession. The dialogue between these two very sharp and intelligent middle-aged women is absorbing.

Mary has a peculiar problem. She is not mad but has to pretend to be so to keep the doctors appeased who diagnosed her so-called madness, and almost anything she says is construed as a further evidence of her mental instability, so that she is coached and reduced to repeating parrot-like just one reply–‘I think this fair and right’. Imagine repeating this calmly over and over again as one injustice after another is hurled upon you! It requires a lot of patience and self control, attributes incompatible with the notion of madness. So I thought—what is after all insanity? Sanity and insanity are concepts coined by men in a patriarchal society where a woman is labelled insane if she goes against the role defined for her. Is it a tag to cover up non conformity? For quite clearly, Mary is not mad. She is rather a woman with a personality who is eccentric and quirky at times. In the nineteenth century such women were considered wild and unruly and put into asylums by husbands and sons who could not control them. This was also only incidentally the easiest way to usurp their properties, as in the case of Mary. What Filloux has done is to question the presumptions on which sanity and insanity are based. Insanity here is not determined by the state of mental health but by the whims of the dominant male voice. Therefore it becomes a fluid concept based on perspective. Through her intelligent and perceptive protagonist Mary, she is showing us that it is actually Mary who is sane and the society outside the asylum who are suffering from a peculiar kind of madness in their desperate, insecure need to suppress in women all freedom of expression. The technique that Filloux uses to drive home her point reminds me of Shaw. Shaw at the turn of the twentieth century used the technique of reversal in his social plays. He would begin his play with a dominant, prevailing and accepted idea and then through logical discourse between his characters would slowly dismantle and invert that idea and replace it with his socially revolutionary idea. Take for instance Shaw’s Arms and the Man where Raina and Sergius are cured of their romantic notions by Bluntschli, or Candida where Morell’s assumption of being the master of the house is shattered by his perceptive wife Candida, the real master of the house. Similarly in Mary and Myra Mary turns upside down the conventional notion of madness by her logical arguments. Thus Filloux has taken up two historical female characters to raise a number of pertinent social issues which are sadly still relevant in our times— be it professional prejudices faced by women or the unequal struggle to control property and inheritance. I feel that the appeal of the play lies in how we can identify and sympathize with the plight of the protagonists while being separated by centuries.

I had wanted to discuss the last remaining play The Beauty Inside in this blog as well, but did not realize that I would have so much to say about Mary and Myra. Well, I will take it up later.

September 20, 2008

On September 14, Writeherewritenow organised a 'Doodle and Decipher' Workshop for its members. Because it is examination time, only 6 members showed up which was quite a disappointment. Megha, Richa and I had come up with the module, mailing each other and brainstorming over telephone conversations. The idea was to get the children to draw and then exchange their drawings with one another and write a story based on that. Each child was given two blank sheets. One blank sheet was divided into four squares where the child had to draw a human character, a scenery, an image and an object. The children were then told to exchange their papers and they came up with stories ranging from humorous to gruesome.

Today, we went to Frank Anthony Public School. 60 children took part in the Workshop on story starters. On 27th, we do a journaling session with the Frank Anthony Students and see how they respond to it.

September 18, 2008

Genocide and Literature

I had mentioned Catherine Filloux’s play Eyes of the Heart in my last blog. I was citing it as an example of the problems faced in translating native colloquialisms into a foreign language. In the meantime I have read four more of her plays and have been deeply impressed by her commitment to socially relevant issues. It has been a great learning experience as well since I started researching on the net for finer details and related topics and unearthed very shocking and disturbing instances of human rights abuse.

Eyes of the Heart deals with how the genocide in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime continues to affect and change lives forever. The protagonist Thida San has become blind after seeing her teenaged daughter being beheaded and burnt in front of her. Her brother has arranged for her to take refuge in the US where she is undergoing treatment for the blindness. In reality there are at least 150 Cambodian women living in the US who have experienced ‘functional blindness’ related to what they saw during the Khmer Rouge rule. I tried to imagine seeing something so terrible that I would become blind. I failed. Two of her other plays also revolve around genocide: Lemkin’s House and Silence of God. Lemkin’s House is based on Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who fled from the Holocaust and spent his entire life trying to get a law against genocide ratified by the UN and US. We all know the meaning of the word ‘genocide’ but I didn’t know that the word had been coined by Lemkin: ‘genos’ from the Greek meaning race or tribe and ‘cide’ from the Latin meaning to kill. That long after he died the UN still hesitated to use the ‘g’ word for the Rwandan and Bosnian genocide of the 1990s. Filloux’s play begins at a point when Lemkin dies of a cardiac arrest while continuing with his efforts to enforce a treaty against genocide. After dying Lemkin wakes up to find himself in a house where he meets a number of people such as Congress Senators, UN officials, victims of rape, human rights abuse victims as well as his mother. Lemkin realizes that though his efforts may have led to the passing of a law, that law is nothing but a joke as human rights violation is rampant all around. Lemkin died in 1959. By bringing a dead Lemkin back on stage, Filloux is raising a very pertinent point. She is looking at the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, the Bosnian and Rwandan genocide– but from Lemkin’s perspective. The perspective of a man who selflessly devoted his entire life to at least recognize genocide as a crime, to ensure that if it is repeated in future its perpetrators will be booked and punished. The play made me think. As did the other play Silence of God. This is about Cambodia and Pol Pot. The protagonist, Sarah, is a journalist who is dedicated to the cause of finding out ‘why evil flourishes, why it can’t be stopped’? She is in love with Heng, a poet, who is a victim of the Pol Pot regime, when he lost his wife and children in the infamous ‘killing fields’. The focal point of the play is a build up to an interview of Pol Pot by Sarah which turns out to be a total let-down. The play ends on a pessimistic note when Heng commits suicide. He was trying to overcome his trauma and start life afresh with Sarah but when he returned to an apparently liberated Cambodia he saw that that his brother is working for a man who in turn works for someone who was once Pol Pot’s right-hand-man. The realization that not only have the guilty not been punished but that they are flourishing (the former right-hand-man is now a business tycoon who plans to set up the largest hotel in Cambodia on the most beautiful part of the river-side), hits him hard. The point that Filloux is trying to drive home–sometimes subtly and sometimes forcefully is that injustice is continuing. No matter how many laws are passed. We cannot undo the wrongs of the past. But surely such works are a reminder, a warning to act judiciously when such atrocities happen again. And they are happening all around us. Just because they are happening in another country and we do not want to get involved in a wrangle over international politics, we cannot look away.

What I liked about these plays is that they are not propagandist literature. Filloux has very beautifully woven human elements into the causes she is dealing with. So that at the primary level one is touched by the story. And then one is moved to think of the larger issues she is giving voice to.

Two other plays remain to be discussed. I will take them up in my next blog.

September 14, 2008

Bal Vividha.

It's been a month and a half since I started working at Comet Media Foundation. I am working with them specifically for their annual fair which promotes alternative education. The fair is called Bal Vividha and is scheduled to take place in December this year. There will also be a series of workshops in October, strictly for children. So far, I have been involved mostly in planning workshops. We have included workshops on Human Rights and Writing this year. I am also trying to design an interactive corner dealing with art and therapy. It's still in it's formative stages. We have also been getting in touch with schools, NGOs and other organisaions for confirming participation. The fair will also be held at a rural level. However workshops there are related to a greater understanding of subjects within their curriculum, whereas the ones to be held in October and December have a large number of workshops that will cultivate interest in areas other than acdemics.
The last month has been one of endless planning of workshops, for funds, contacting schools etc. I will elaborate on the workshops that I am trying to/have introduced gradually. So far, so good.

September 13, 2008

Diary Writing Session




Aparajita, a Voices Co-ordinator with the Statesman, makes notes while the girls are busy writing



The Modern High School Students at the Workshop





All smiles after the Workshop


In my first post as a Choice Intern, I had discussed the importance of the Arts and the concept of Arts as Therapy. The idea originated from " The Diary of Anne Frank"- a diary read and acknowledged the world over. Anne Frank was only thirteen when she began to write and she wrote during times of war. As an adolescent,she had to come to terms with internal strife while also negotiating her way through the Holocaust.

The group of children we addressed at Modern High School for Girls today were from classes six,seven and eight.

The session started with Megha telling the children about conflict and how it is important to explore one's feelings and to put those thoughts down on paper. One child said that the diary was like a "friend" to her, while another thought it was important to write a diary because it helped her to implement the vocabulary that she had acquired from her favourite books. Megha went on to tell the children that in interpersonal human relationships, a certain degree of expectation is inevitable. However, as far as Diary Writing is concerned, a diary can be a non-judgemental friend.

Richa took over from here and told the children to write about themselves. She asked them to introduce themselves on paper, but in an "unusual" manner, assuring them that they would not have to read out anything that they had written. The next exercise was called the "cheering up" exercise where the children had to list five things that made them happy, sharing any two of the five things if they chose to do so. The next exercise involved writing about fear and memories of humiliation.

The idea of this Workshop was to help children put down their thoughts down on paper and delve into the process of self-discovery.