Where do I feature in my personal Blogs?
“Have
you come to pick up something?”
Finally someone asked me a question. After standing for twenty minutes
at the reception area of the National Press Club in the country’s
capital on a Friday morning of April 2005, I felt relieved that I was
being attended to, at long last.
Within these 20 minutes, two couples and two individual men had appeared
at the same place and they were immediately attended to by one of the
several people at the reception area and escorted to their destinations.
I remember two of them had never seen the club before and wanted to make
reservations, and I don’t recall what the rest of them had come
for. I was busy wondering when will my turn come? Logically, I should
have been the first.
It was an important morning for me. I needed to attend and videotape a
panel discussion that was being held to decide if bloggers were journalists.
No sooner I arrived, well dressed for the occasion and with my membership
card, at least three people were careful to verify my credentials. After
all, it was an important delegation of controversial journalists that
were to meet. But when someone asked me if I had registered myself, even
after I was inside the hall where the event was up, I wondered if I was
someone special or someone suspiciously unwelcome.
But here I was, after the meeting was over, in the member’s reception
room of the club. And no one bothered to ask me a question, even after
noticing that I was there for at least twenty minutes now.
Thank goodness, this lady has asked me a question. “Oh no. I am
here to renew my club membership,” I said with a fixed smile, one
of those mannerisms I learned after I reached the United States two years
ago. Smile at strangers and say them “hello, how you doin?”
and the day starts big, I was always made to believe. But it didn’t
work even this time. She went back to her cabin and asked me to wait.
Alright, I said to myself, at least I have been noticed.
After about five more minutes, another lady from a cabin hung up her receiver
and looked at me, visibly irritated, and asked “What have you come
to pick up?”
This time I got the question right. I suddenly remembered the same question
hurled at me sometime before. What’s going on? “No Ma’am.
I am an existing member of this club. And I am here to renew my annual
membership,” I said, more firmly this time. Within next half an
hour or so, as I remember, I escorted myself out of the area after doing
the needful.
This was never a solitary event of this type for me in this country, hence
not a matter of surprise for me-- be it at the MVA, where they went back
to check the computer system if everything was alright, when I passed
my test at the first go without an error, or when the store manager of
the Footlocker would not entertain my complaint about a damaged item,
with a “No Sir, I know for sure that you did not purchase it in
this condition”, or when I was denied an assistantship in an office
although after the interview they said I was the most qualified applicant
so far, but hey, “why is your website all red and black?”.
Different degrees of assumptions made by varieties of people on several
grounds. And still I could never complain aloud, because I knew what was
happening in comparison, to some of my friends coming from their social
locations of race, class, gender and sexuality.
But was it not a similar argument my Indian friend was making when he
reacted, “What are you talking about? Poverty in this country? Oh
come on, you should have stayed back in India or gone to Africa to see
the poor.” Amidst the normalized assumptions that everything was
alright here, there was an explicit self-denial of anything going wrong.
If any was ever noticed, one could just compare notes with other lesser
privileged countries and peoples, and felt the fallacious joy of “oh
at least, that did not happen to me” or like a friend observed “things
are at least not as bad as they were before.” So take heart and
forget it.
I could forget all these and more, if I had another life to live and was
promised a sense of freedom where I would not have to look at the color
of my skin and think as I so often do, “how would they have behaved
with me, were I just an average White guy?”
Unfortunately by the way things are going—and Mumia Abu Jamal and
his ilk are perishing in the US, or the outsourcing is modernizing slavery
in a capitalistic era in India, I know certain things can no more be taken
for granted. For most of us, no matter what we think we practice, are
immediate beneficiaries of existing systems of oppressions and its time
to acknowledge and act.
My blogs, then become one of the outlets for both my frustrations and
anger, because I need not take things for granted any longer and I want
to connect with those who are on the similar path. For, I am not alone
in this world where freedom is granted in installments by the ruling class.
I am with the groups of people who seek freedom for all, or freedom for
none—who believe that the limited freedom, that better than thou
freedom in effect, should be reserved for none.
Saswat
Pattanayak
blog@saswat.com