Image politics and the child fleeing Mumbai

A family I have known through my cousin's wife, is shifting base from Mumbai to Bangalore. At first I thought it was due to professional reasons. The family, wife, husband and their daughter, are well-off at Mumbai and he runs a business with great turnovers.

Considering people love to live in Mumbai if they are the `moneyed' type, I was rather curious thought not entirely surprised. The husband, has his company offices at Mumbai and Bangalore, and shuttles between the two cities rather frequently. He spends half a month in one city and the other half in another city, not to forget the trips to his office in the US of A once a while.

The girl, in her mid-schooling years, is mature for her age and has some achievements to her credit. And the wife, is a happy housewife.

What my cousin's wife just revealed has baffled me. The family is shifting base to Bangalore, solely for the daughter's sake. Culture clash.

For once, not language as a direct tool of oppression and isolation, but inflicting of a different culture and something I feel is racism in its own subtle way.

The child misses her father because of his frequent business trips and longs for his physical presence, in a way, the security he provides. What's hurt her tender mind all the more, is that she has no friends.

Apparently, she told her aunt, that her classmates refuse to be friends with her if she wears a bindi. I have heard about the discrimination based on wearing that red mark on the forehead several times. I have also felt that it is not something that needs to be imposed on children, anyone for that matter. But that we as a society have created a sense of isolation for the little child, on the basis of her traditional values!

She mentioned to her aunt, that her classmates were corrupt, that she hardly has friends because she learns Bharatnatyam, the classical Indian dance form and not the Hindi film numbers that they are taught in their dance classes. With a sufficiently southern upbringing, it is understandable that she was conditioned to learn a classical Indian dance form, and she loves it too.

She performs at various functions, places and even wins accolades for them. Sadly, her neighbourhood, her peers and her school teachers refuse to understand this. Obviously, if they had, they would have taught the children to respect the differences.

The trouble: anything classical is looked down upon in this city, unlike in the South, particularly Chennai, where girls are taught classical art forms with ease.

For these reasons and more, her family too is not ease with Mumbai, despite living in a neighbourhood with many South Indians.

The child's plight reminds me of those little remarks I hear from my neighbours' children, who have become conditioned to believe that a pavadai and blouse are clothes that are blasphemous to their peers, and so, are somehow `bad' to be worn. They would rather wear western clothes that will keep them their friends. They would rather sport gadgets that will make them a favourite among their snobbish lot of friends!

For once, I have had to rethink my own views about tradition. I have always believed tradition should not be inflicted, that conventions should not be imposed. The bindi bit for instance - As a teenager, I had picked up a fight with my friends when they removed the sticker bindi from my forehead once. I thought I had lost something big, for I had to answer my mother for it after college hours. Years later, I began to discard it, in protest, or rather because I hated something of the sort being inflicted on me as a person.

Should I rather go back to wearing it with a vengeance now? Considering there is so much politics of imagery dictating our children's thoughts against tradition?

Today, I find myself at the other end of the argument, where what is perceived as `modern' by the society so influenced by `Bollywoodised' TV shows, inundation of films and an misconstrued influences of the West. Somehow we seem to pick up the wrong lessons from the West.

For, most Western TV shows I watch give me the feeling that family values and traditions are not after all taboo in the West, where homemakers are not exactly looked down upon, and where tradition is still something many people hold on to.

I advocate modernism in thought rather fiercely. But racism in the name of modernism? A strict no. We cannot discriminate someone who hails from a region, practises traditional art forms of that region or thinks differently only because we as a city culture, are obsessed with anything film-based.

What causes such scorn against tradition? Is it just imposition, that my generation went through in its growing up years, or is it the mindless aspirational imagery laid out by our media monopolies in the name of entertainment? When serials are nothing but repackaged film storylines, replete with pancake make-up, younger and sexy looking middle-aged mothers and films cannot be complete without that sculpted-body heroines again oozing oomph, how can one expect children not to be influenced by such imagery? Or get affected by it?

Is splashing a serial with fancy work sarees and a film with item numbers going to help our next generation in any way?

And how can one ignore the fact that if you hail from the South and have learnt values differently, you are still an Indian? The little child's hurt shows me that Indianness is being taught lesser and lesser in our schools, while class based discrimination is ground into children's minds rather effortlessly.