Women's Education

These are a set of thoughts that I had after reading the book “Educated” by Tara Westover. The next two books I happened to read were “I am Malala” and “Agnisakshi” by Lalithambika Antharjanam. Some of the comparisons I have made here are a result of reading the books around the same time - it seemed to me that they were all detailing the same patterns.


Tara Westover’s book details how the author was raised without attending school with parents who considered anything that the government did as undermining their very existence. What struck me was how the author was unable to see through the things that her father taught her - such as what was considered modest and what was not; what religious observances were required etc - until she had left the household in pursuit of an education. As she progressed with her education, she became increasingly at odds with the values and beliefs that her family held; at some point it becomes clear that the family expects her to choose either them or her education.


Regardless of the choice she actually made, I think the sequence of events described in the book provide a useful framework with which to understand the status of women in many parts of the world. Take for example, Kerala before Indian independence: The more popular prevailing wisdom about women in Kerala states that the status of women in Kerala was exceptionally good - the example that is upheld as proof is the tradition of “marumakkathayam”, which is a custom where the family property of Nair (a caste within Hindus in Kerala) households were always inherited by the daughter’s children rather than the son. The word “marumakkathayam” literally translates into “the custom of inheritance by nieces and nephews”. If one looked at the custom from the outside, it appears amazing that the Nair households had established such a custom where the male heads of the Nair households decided to give their property to their sister’s children disinheriting their own. This is the popular version of the story; one that is fed to uphold the view that the Hindu women of Kerala enjoyed special status and rights when compared to the rest of India.


Painting a picture of “everything was great” by showing isolated pieces out of a mosaic is not only misleading; it is also a disservice to the suffering that many women had to go through at the time because of strict social laws that were imposed on them.


I believed much of what I had heard about Nair women to be true, and was always a little disappointed with the sharp contrast in treatment that the women belonging to the other religions faced - Christian and Muslim women (which came to roughly 30% of the total population when combined) had very different lives - they inherited nothing, and their status was tied solidly to their husbands. They had little say in anything, including who they got married to and where they lived. Compared to that, clearly, the Nair women seemed to be liberated until I took a closer look at the roots of this custom that is supposed to be illustrative of the high status they enjoyed.


The matrilinear system came into place because most Bhramin men had relationships in which their children could not inherit property - only the eldest Brahmin son was allowed to actually marry a Brahmin woman and have children who could inherit property. His younger siblings were only allowed to have “Sambandhams” (translates into “relationships”) - instead of the more specific term marriage - with Nair women. The Nair women with whom they had sambandhams did not come up to the status of a wife; the children born out of these relationships could not inherit anything from the father, including his caste; they inherited their mother’s caste. In order to make sure the children got some type of inheritance, the Bhramin men brought in the system of “marumakkathayam” or matrilineal heritage, whereby they ensured that the Nair women and their children inherited property from their families, rather than the Brahmins having to provide for them. All of this was done to make sure that whatever wealth the Brahmins had was not divided among too many descendents. It is pretty easy to see that the entire system was set up to ensure that the Brahmins remained an exclusive and small community who were wealthy and powerful. That they did so at the cost of disinheriting their own children seems extreme - but such was their thinking at the time, and it eventually led to their downfall as a community.


Even though marumakkathayam is now touted as a system in which women were allowed inheritances, I think it is important to also see the background by which it came into existence.


In sharp contrast to the supposed well being of the Nair women, the Brahmin and lower caste women were treated with horrifying contempt. The Brahmin women were called “Antarjanam”, which literally translates into “those who live inside”, and that was what they were expected to do - stay inside. They were not allowed to leave their homes, and the sun’s rays were not supposed to touch their bodies. They were not allowed to go to school or learn to read. Also, because only the eldest son of a Brahmin family was allowed to marry a Brahmin girl, the number of Brahmin women who got married were few. Many of them led a life of hard labor inside their “illams”. And these were high caste, privileged women who belonged to families with wealth and power.


On the other side of the spectrum are the lower caste women, who were not allowed to cover their upper bodies. They were forced to walk around topless and ordered to show their upper bodies to upper caste men as a show of “respect”. They also had to pay a tax for having breasts!


It is clear when you put all the facts together that most of these laws were brought in by upper caste men for perpetrating their intentions on the other communities. Why no one else opposed these laws or fought against them until the 1950s is surprising to me.


Perhaps the answer to all that is that most people did not question the rules that they grew up with - asking questions requires one to be curious - and I am beginning to realize that most traditional societies discouraged questioning, because some or the other form of social order on which the social order rested would not be able to withstand questioning. Most of the time people start questioning things when they become educated - and that is when they start to see through the hollowness of some of the beliefs they have upheld until then.


This is readily observable in Tara Westover’s case - she went to university, saw people who were Mormon but who lived more normal lives than she did and then she learned to question the wisdom of her father’s viewpoints. She eventually came to the conclusion that her father had a mental disorder. The thing that really allowed her parents to make her stick to their form of life was by suppressing information about any other possibility. Once she had access to more information, it was only a matter of time before she saw through the holes in their reasoning and started establishing her own truths. And the same is observable in Lalithambika Antharjanam’s Teetikutty too. She becomes educated and starts to question the framework in which she was brought up, leading to her eventually abandoning the customs that defined her existence.


In nearly all cases where some sections of society are disadvantaged, there is a severe lack of awareness and education that comes into play. This can be seen in the case of the Hindus in Kerala. The Brahmins were the only caste that was allowed to learn anything. Even among them, only men could learn, effectively sealing the fate of Brahmin women. This allowed the Brahmins to establish the rules they wanted and to bend social structure to their liking.


So the key here is this - suppressing education to a specific segment of people can facilitate their systematic suppression. Worse, the people will start treating the suppression as a normal way of life, and will not know to question it until they are educated.


Now it becomes clear why some societies try hard to prevent women from being educated - it helps to prevent progress and maintain status quo, which are advantageous to some of the parties in such societies. And in that lies the ray of hope - education seems like the answer to all the ills that can befall society.


Just yesterday I was reading about minors who are trafficked into brothels from Bangladesh and West Bengal - more than 50,000 minors are thought to go missing each year, and they end up in the red light areas in various cities in India as well as the rest of the region. Many of these girls have similar stories - they “fall in love” with someone who offers them gifts - phones, clothes, makeup and the like. They eventually make a decision to run away from home, and their boyfriends smuggle them into India where they are illegal immigrants. They are afraid to go to the police, and they find that their “boyfriend” has sold them. They find themselves held captive and forced into slavery in a brothel all too often.


What is common among these girls? They are almost always poor and uneducated. Many of them are from families where the parents cannot afford education for their girl children. They drop out of school early, and either work to make more money


Where does education come in? Narrate such stories to other girls in such groups. They incidence of this happening is much higher in some states, so hearing stories in itself can be a good warning. India is a society that functions a lot around shame - shame for the victim prevents them from speaking about their experiences. Not speaking up however can result in others falling prey to the same type of devious behavior, perhaps from the same people.

Where am I from?

There is a question I usually dread answering when I meet new people - no, its not devious attempts to figure out my age :) The question I dread is "Where are you from"? I have trouble coming up with a consistent answer - I usually change my answers depending on who I am talking to. If the person is non mallu, I usually reply that I mostly grew up in Bangalore and end the matter there. If I get to know them more I might add details about me spending my childhood in Kerala and the rest in Bangalore. It is the mallus I have real trouble with though - here are some samples of what those conversations look like..

I  used to answer that I am from "Pala" which is where my father is from. I have no knowledge of the place, except having visited the house a few times. I dont even know how to find my way to his house on my own...And yet I used to feel obliged to say that I was from Pala when someone asked me where I was from... This is how those conversations used to go:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Pala..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Pala?"

Me: "Er... near the Holy Family Hospital..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. dont you know so and so.. "

Me: "Er... no, I have only visited Pala a few times in my life, and I have never lived there...I grew up mostly in Bangalore "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I just cheated them. So I changed my tactic after a while and started saying that I was from Cochin. This is how those conversations went:

Them: "Where are you from..."?

Me: "Cochin..."

Them: "Oh really, where in Cochin?"

Me: "Er... Thrikkakkara..."

Them: "Oh, I know the place.. near the temple right?.. "

Me: "Yes.."

Them: "You know my cousin lives right there... they have lived there their whole life.."

Me: "Er... I was only there until I was eleven or twelve, after that we moved to Bangalore. Never heard of your cousin.. "

Them: "Oh.. Bangalore aanalle.." 

and then they look like I cheated them, again. So I changed this tactic too, and these days I just tell them I grew up in Bangalore and that my parents are from Kerala. When people really pick on my answers I sometimes divulge that my father is from Pala and that I was in Kerala until I was 12. 

And now that I have spent more than a decade in the US, I have spent roughly the same amount of time in Cochin, Bangalore and Jersey City. When you have lived for just 3.5 decades and spent one decade each in a different city, how do you define where you are "from"?

Home

Each time I land back in Bangalore, I get all nostalgic about what it used to be like. We moved to Bangalore in 1996 - it was quite green at the time. I spent most of my time around the Malleswaram / Yeshwantpur / Mathikere area, so changes to those three regions is what I really take notice of .. Sampige and Margosa roads definitely were lined with trees, perhaps the same trees whose names they have. My entire trip from home to school and back were on roads that were lined with trees on both sides. There were some mom and pop shops and a few eateries on the way, but mostly Malleswaram, which is where my school was, was a nice and quiet residential area. It was easy to simply walk home from school if my auto driver did not show up for some reason. Even a few years later, when I changed schools and joined NPS in Rajajinagar, we could still enjoy a long walk home on relatively uncrowded footpaths that were still tree lined. In fact me and some of my friends used to wait till the last day of school to walk back home on foot so the cramps that came later wouldnt be a problem the next day :)

Twenty years later, things are so drastically different. I would not attempt to walk from where my school sits to where my home used to be anymore - the trees are all gone; there are large shops everywhere, and the number of people who still reside there has reduced vastly - most folks simply sold their houses and moved to flats since it made financial sense.

Even the IISc campus, which is where I used to live, is no longer the same. They have added a lot more buildings, and the trees are all covered in dust from all the construction around them. There used to be an entire field full of trees with yellow flowers on it - it used to be one of my favorite places to walk by. Those trees are all gone, and it is replaced with a bunch of buildings now. Even Bumgalow no 7, where we lived for about twenty years has now changed. The lovely garden than my mother painstakingly made is almost entirely gone - the plants have been almost entirely replaced with cement. All the flowering plants are gone, and only a couple of the big trees we planted remain now. All we have remaining of the place are pictures we took while we were there. Oh, and memories.

I think sometimes about how differently my children are growing up - there are some trees around, but they only have leaves during the summer :(.. we have no garden of our own, so we cant talk about the trees that the children planted. And we certainly dont have any flowers around. Nor do we sit outdoors and read books or play while watering the plants. For the longest time, I was against buying a home - I felt they made no financial sense. After all the interest and mortgage you pay, plus the commute you add, it makes little sense to actually buy, if you are logical about it. But lately I have been wanting to create a sense of being rooted somewhere - of creating a place that we will always think of as home, where we can plant our trees and memories and little family traditions. I guess having a home is an emotional thing. Maybe that is obvious to everyone else. Guess the understanding came to me only now :)

Hillary Clinton and the Filter Bubble

I was reading the book "What Happened" by Hillary Clinton. Its a book about her failure during the 2016 elections - she relives pretty much every excruciating detail of that election but at the end of it, I got the sense that she did not quite understand why she lost.

I dont think anyone understands precisely why. Normally I would have been very uninterested in a topic such as this one. However, this general election was fought on a new turf - the internet. It was extremely interesting to me how much of the war was actually information warfare. Clinton, by her own admission, is not very technically savvy, and I am guessing she did not understand the complexity of what was going on around her during election time while it was happening. Most likely, none of us did, at that point. 

True, Russian interference might have been a part of the problem. This is one of the problems listed out by Clinton. However, I think that the filter bubble would have amplified the problem as well - once Facebook or Google gets even a minor (or even erroneous) signal that you are interested in negative coverage about Hillary, it will bombard you with such types of items. Worse, it is also likely to show you positive coverage about Trump, because other readers with such tendencies are consuming more such articles. In short, it creates a vicious cycle. 

Dont believe me? Here is an example:

I once happened to click on an article regarding Kareena Kapoor. It was something about her and losing weight after she became a mommy. I was pregnant, and wanted to know what she had done to lose weight afterwards. I am not a fan of hers, never have been, and am unlikely to ever become one in the future. My interest was just in her fitness. However, since reading that article I started to get a daily dose on Kareena Kapoor from Google Now. I did not observe the change in frequency right away. And without thinking I clicked on some stories and ignored others. Soon enough, more and more stories about Kareena Kapoor started to appear, until half my newsfeed was about this lady. By now I realized what was happening, and then started reversing the trend - I completely stopped clicking on the links, started clicking on items that were more interesting / representational for me etc. Also I tried to make sure all my searches were in incognito. Slowly Kareena Kapoor  stopped dominating my feed. I still get about 1-2 stories about her everyday. I dont click the stories, so the algos mustbe figuring out that I dont care anymore.

Now imagine someone who doesnt even know what the filter bubble is. And this person sees some disparaging remarks about Clinton and clicks on it. Soon that person will start getting a steady stream of such topics - and very likely they will keep looking at those feeds because they are interested in knowing whether or not Clinton made mistakes. The fact that they click on the news items will reinforce the "personalization" algos, and they will crank out more stuff that makes Clinton look bad.

Clinton losing the election was very much a result of how the internet works today. I wonder if the folks who wrote it thought about these far reaching consequences when they first implemented Personalization. I am guessing a few engineers who wanted to squeeze out better performance from the search engine (and who probably wanted a promo for themselves) never thought about the adverse effects it will have on the US elections.

It seems to me that I notice such unintended consequences around me w.r.t. nearly everything - antibiotics, for example. Whowever thought it would start getting used so much for raising chickens and cowns? And who ever imagined superbugs that were resitent to antibiotics?

Maybe I am noticing such things because I am getting older. Age gives you perspective.  

A silver lining for the Manifesto

The past few weeks at work have been eventful, to say the least. Much has come out in the news about a doc that a now ex-employee wrote, and much discussion has happened about the doc internally as well.

A lot of my women colleagues feel angry, depressed and hurt by the doc (To be fair, most men are against it too). Some men on the other hand dont see anything wrong with what the doc advocates. And thats leaving the women even more hurt and angry, because that proves this is a general notion that men have, rather than the author of the doc being an isolated case.

I am writing this down to clear my own views about the contents of the doc. I dont agree with it - as a woman, its only natural that I feel that way.

But I am not hurt or angry about it. I was a little surprised by it, I will admit to that. I did not think that men from developed countries thought this way - I had associated these types of ideas with men from countries like India. It was eye opening to see that this was not quite the case.

Personally though, I think the doc helped me.

I am pregnant with my second child, and I think often about whether I am prioritizing the right things.. I wonder if am I being a selfish mommy who wants to have a serious job when I could sit at home and be with my children all day long. I wonder if am I being selfish to pursue my own interests. I wonder if I am neglecting my children by not spending every waking moment with them. I wonder whether it would be better for me to quit.

But the contents of that doc, and some of the responses from men who used to think like that made me realize that a lot of them grow up with this attitude because their mothers did not work outside the home. In my view, there is only one way to change that - and that is to get more women to be in the workplace so the next generation has fewer people who believe this. I think I came to this conclusion because my husband is so supportive of my work - and I think the reason he is that way is because his own mother worked as an engineer until she retired at age 55. 

So now I look at my work as not just something I do for myself - it is something I do for my children as well, in order to raise them as supportive, understanding future colleagues, husbands and/or fathers. I look at it as my contribution to society.

And that makes me resolved to stay in the workforce. So thank you, James Damore.

Office of the First Lady.

So much has been said and written already about a lot of President Trump's policies that I will prefer to keep off of those topics.

Today my topic is about the role of Ivanka Trump in her daddy's presidency. It seems to many that her (and perhaps her daddy's administration's) intention is to sweep aside Melania Trump, who seems more than willing to be swept aside as First Lady and instead create a role of a "First Daughter". A lot of comments on Twitter show that this is the popular  sentiment - some comments chide her saying "What the hell are you doing meeting with a foreign leader" and "Unelected women should not get a seat at that particular table". While I completely agree with that sentiment, what I dont get is why people think it is acceptable for a president's wife to join him in his official duties but not the daughter.

I came to America soon after Obama won his first election - and one of the first things I noticed was how much coverage Michelle Obama got on television. She seemed to go with him everywhere, her wardrobe got a lot of attention, and I also realized that prior to him being elected, she even made speeches on his behalf at the Democratic National convention (and so did his opponent's wife). Why are spouses so important to the presidency?

Where I come from, I dont think the spouses of Prime ministers have any role to play - sometimes a picture of them might crop up in a newspaper because they happened to be close by, but its usually just an accident. No one usually bothers even interviewing them, except maybe in a memoir or  an occasional magazine article, perhaps after the tenure is finished.

Here though, its a different game altogether. There is an actual "Office of the First Lady"; they are supposed to be fashion icons, and of course they better be good speakers because they are going to be making speeches all along their husband's tenure. To top it all off, there is the inherent sexism in the title itself, which suggests that the spouse will always be a woman.

It is interesting to note the history of this role. It started with the spouses wanting to be addressed as "Lady", "Mrs. President" etc - it seems to me they were trying to emulate the role of a queen in a country where monarchy was non existent, perhaps trying to mirror the social setup of other countries at the time. But as monarchies elsewhere collapsed and have given way to democracies and none of the other countries have such an "office" for the spouse of their country's premier anymore, does it not make sense to abolish this whole "First Lady" thing and move on? Like Ivanka's criticizers pointed out, they are not elected and should not have a seat at the table. If they have political aspirations, certainly, they can do what Hillary Clinton did - maintain her own political career and try her own hand at the elections.

The existence of such an office only seems to allow the president's immediate family to create a political career of their own if they wish to do so - and that should not really be the case in a true democracy.

Wishful Thinking

I learned recently that it is easier to go through pain yourself than to watch your children be in pain. Anyone who has held their own eight month old baby while a nurse was drawing blood will know what I am talking about. My baby was screaming his head off and trying to get out of my iron grip, all the while looking straight into my eyes as if to ask me "Is this what you reward me with for all the trust I place in you?"

I felt like I had let him down.
And I can tell you, its much harder than letting yourself down.
Or letting your parents down.

 And then I remembered Theranos. That little company I had read about whose founder hated to have blood drawn and so was launching this company that could stop this whole process and conduct tests with blood from just pin pricks. Just what I am looking for. Just what any parent will be looking for.

I couldnt resist looking up how much progress they had made once I came back home. Unfortunately they dont seem to be doing that well. I hope they turn around though - such a shame to have to insert needles into every baby just to have them tested :(