Today I went to Ramlila Grounds in Delhi for a Dalit Sammellan. I had gone last year for Anna Hazare's propagandist protests to the same. My friend and I had then stood on the roads and talked about the dichotomies of revolution. We watched drunk men in the streets scream incoherent slogans ('I quote: Pepsi humaari Ma hai) and tsk-tsked at the poor state of Indian politics. Then we went to lunch. 

Today I was meeting an English photographer, extremely gifted and insightful and humbling, at Ramlila to help her with her work and 'collect stories' so I could get out of my mental iceberg. It was dusty and the first thing I did was look down at my feet and silently whine about how my new jootis were getting trampled on by mass protests. I walked around for a while, being followed by many, and spent some time at a bookstall, listening to the (National Coalition for strengthening SCs & STs Prevention of Atrocities Act) NCSPA conveners talk to the Dalit pilgrims about how we lived in a society completely devoid of freedom. I was still smug. This wasn't different from what I had expected. I had read my news, I had known that this was the formula followed at Ramlila every time I was here, and I cynical tsk-tsk-ed some more in a corner. What could you do about a struggle of millions, I thought. Did Sitaram Yechury really mean that he could help or was this another CPI scam? Of course it's a scam, I told myself, the government is on no one's side. We live in a system of evil, of atrocities, of continuous power struggles, of unfair heairarchy and priveleged reason. 
Ramlila Grounds was just a big, muddy farce. 

A cop, Parmod Kumar saw me wandering around, taking notes pretending to be a reporter, and came up to me. He asked me if I was from the media, I asked him if he would take a photograph for my British friend. He asked me what I did, and I told him. 'Hum chamaar hain', he said, grinning at me. I grimaced a little, and smiled at him weakly, telling him I came from a family of Brahmans. It was the first time caste had been thrown in my face. Here I was, standing in front of a policeman, talking brahman to chamaar. It was the first time that I realized a system to jump out of my bookshelf and take a three dimensional form. I also realized that my cynicism and indifference was because of being outside the system. It was an advantage that could be afforded to none of the others surrounding me. Parmod Singh was not here to un-become chamaar, he was here to sort out a confusion. One that came with wearing a vardi, and being of the lowest class in the ladder.

Then I met Sanoj. He saw me reading a book at the bookstall and came up confidently, sweater slung over shoulders and heels digging into the ground. 'What you do Madam where you come?', he asked me. I told him I was from Delhi but indulged his English. In October, Sanoj's mother, in his village in Bihar, was cleaning the verandah. An upper caste woman was passing with her son, and some dirt from the sweeping entered her nose. The woman's son promptly returned with a bottle of acid and attacked both Sanoj and his mother. He smiled at me stiffly, through the scars on his face. He had the air of a war hero, he showed off his bruises as I held back tears like the upper-middle-class apathetic fool that I was raised to be. Sanoj came from Bihar with more than 50 Dalit brothers and sisters. Amongst them were women who had been raped because of their social standing, boys who had been beaten because they shared the same name as an upper caste boys, men who had limbs cut off because they dared to buy a motorcycle.

By now I was very awkward. I was half in tears, and I stumbled around, trying to find my photographer friend, who though English, was much more hard-core and less feeble than I. She patted me on the back, and made me feel like the foreigner. We drank some water and I strolled off to find her some more subjects to click. 'Find someone with sad eyes', she told me. I walked around, doing the strangest thing I had ever done, looking for sad in a sea of lost, confused, hopeless, optimistic eyes. I found my saddest pair hurriedly walking around with a bunch of papers in his hand. He saw me, and thinking I was a reporter, came up to me and handed me a piece of paper with a letter typed out in Gujrati. 

Mahesh's son was gunned down, along with two other boys in a district in Gujarat by three policemen last year. He was simply walking the streets when he was stopped and asked his caste, his jaati. When he replied honestly, he and two friends were shot through the head. Mahesh's son was Mehul, and he was sixteen years old and very much in love. He also spoke very good English and was going to go to college. Mahesh's wife, the most educated in the family, has been writing letters and campaigns in Gujarati, and pasting them all over the city. He handed me photographs of his son, begging me to write in my newspaper about him and his wife. I told him I wasn't a scribe but took his campaign anyway, promising to translate it into English and Hindi, and send it to him by post. I thought about my own father, and how he worried about me driving drunk on the roads. I imagined him awake in his bed, worrying if a car full of men had stopped my car and shot me down.

I don't know how to help Mahesh. I don't know how to be there for any of these people. Men who get run over by tractors when they ask for their wages, men who get their legs cut off for looking at an upper caste woman, women who get drowned in lakes for marrying the men they love. 

I have no idea what I am supposed to do. 

I remember being told by my grim editor at the Magazine I worked for, was that the most we could do was know the truth and live with it everyday. That we woke up everyday, knew that millions were being slaughtered around the world, that women were being raped and babies were being thrown off buildings. That forests were dying. That God still created wars. That there were still people who wanted to change the world. That it desperately needed changing. 

I have no idea what to do yet, except live a complete cliche, of waltzing into political situations once in a while and feel my abilities lacking and my brain ignorant. I have no idea what to do, except wonder if my over sentimentality about today is just an evening of indulgence to interrupt my otherwise meaningless existence. 
But I do know now, that I don't want to hide behind lazy curtains and wear an invisibility cloak to the real world. Because there's no spell to ward off these demons.

I still have no idea what to do, but maybe I'll figure it out.

Since I cannot even write a sentence these days and it makes me sad and doubtfull and infinitely restless, here is a children's story I wrote in July for a creative writing workshop that I attended.
I had to write a story about a historical event using a blue box that was given to me.
The workshop was the most fun I've had all year.

Subhadra used to tie her hair in two staunch pigtails that stood above her head. He grandfather used to say that she looked like a small giraffe. Whenever she came into the room, he used to chuckle at her waving his rolled up newspaper at her. "Here comes Grumpy the giraffe', he used to say, as Subhadra jumped on his lap and tickled his beard. 'Do you know where giraffes come from, my child?', he asked her once. Subhadra nodded her head solemnly, her two horns bouncing against each other. 

'China! Maybe one day we'll take you there so you can meet your real dadaji', he grinned. 

Her father hated her two pigtails. He would glare as Subhadra used to run around the house like a reckless cat, breaking things with every step she took. He had told her once to start behaving like a lady before it's too late. Subhadra didn't understand. 

Subhadra's father worked for the famous Bharat Bats, Ranchi's famous bat manufacturers. He was tall and thin, with a smiling mustache and an unsmiling mouth. His eyes were hard and Subhadra hated to meet them. Sometimes he used to take her to work, where her eyes would drop into her lap as she looked at the shiny new bats all lined up. 

'One day I will have my very own', thought Subhadra, and then 'I will hit sixes and fours and twelves and make centuries and double centuries and triple centuries. I'll show that stupid Sonu and Dadaji will be so proud of me.' Sometimes when she walked around the factory, she would touch the smooth handles of the bats, and feel their new wood against her small fingers. 'Subhadra, what have I said, don't touch anything!', her father used to shout from a corner. 

Today, Subhadra stood against the pavement of her house, watching Sonu bat as his little minion Pappu, gave him easy throws. Sonu's father and Subhadra's father were brothers, but she remembered overhearing that they didn't get along. Six years ago, when Subhadra was four, she had heard her grandmother weep near the kitchen door, saying how she wished her sons could see 'eye to eye'. 'But they can see eye to eye', thought Subhadra, confused. 

'Remember Pappu, I am a batsman and you are a bowler, that means I am better than you!', said Sonu. Subhadra hissed with disgust. 

'It takes batsman and bowlers to make a team, Sonu. If every just batted, there would be no game. Dadaji was a bowler!' 

'Keep quiet, girl! What do you know about games? You're a girl!', Sonu grinned at her, his round face red from standing in the sun.

Subhadra toyed with her blue box as she looked on jealously, watching the boys play. 

'What's that', asked Sonu, eyeing the box with a greedy look in his eyes. 

'It's a box Ma gave me, isn't it nice?'

'Give me it.'

'Only if you give me your bat and ball' said Subhadra, smirking at her cousin's sweaty face.

'NEVER!'

'Have it your way, Sonulal', cried Subhadra, sticking her tongue out at the boy and pleased that she had had an effect on him.

As she pranced inside the house, she could hear the radio announcement and her eyes glittered with excitement. 

'Kapil Dev's team reaches the World Cup Final. In a few minutes, we will have Mr Dev himself telling us how it feels. Don't go anywhere'. 

Subhadra jumped up and down in front of the radio, she couldn't wait to tell Sonu. 

SONULAAAAAAL', she screamed, running out of the house in search of her cousin. He mother smiled from the window as she saw the cousins doing a choreographed jig. 

'Are you excited about the final Papa? I hope the radio doesn't give us trouble again', Subhadra asked her father, as she was sent to bring him his tea. 

'No, what have I told you, cricket is a waste of time, and I will not have you distracting yourself from your studies. Do you want to be a doctor or not?'

'Ummm', Subhadra hesitated, 'I don't  know?' 

'Well it's what you have to be', said her father, curtly. 'When you're old, like me, do you want Sonu to have a bigger house than you? Do you want him to have a car and you to run around on your bare feet like you do now?'

'He already has a bigger house Papa, they even got a color TV yesterday. Sonu says there are only ten in Ranchi!'

'Don't waste my time, go tell your mother to pack my lunch, I have to leave for the factory.'

Subhadra glimpsed from the window, Pankaj, who her mother thought was a 'handsome young man', and his friends race around in a tempo, waving India flags madly. Their faces looked like they were torn apart by the wind, as they shouted and screamed.

'You better study, or you'll end up like that', grumbled her father. 

Subhadra didn't think that was so bad. She picked up Kapil Dev, her newly acquired puppy and walked into the house. 

'Two overs left! Oh no! Come on Kapil dev, come on Sunil Gavaskar, come on!', she thought out aloud. The radio was always troublesome, it always disappointed her right at the end, at the crux of every match, She had of course, asked her father if she could buy a new one, but had without doubt, been refused in a second. The radio buzzed and stuttered, and Subhadra was shaking so hard that her little giraffe horns moved almost in circles. 'What is happening, what is happening!', she cried.

Unable to take it anymore, she ran out of her house, seizing her blue box. She ran to Sonu's house, where the whole family was crowded around the new Colour TV. 

'Hey Subbu!', Sonu said, 'Look at our new TV!'

'I don't care. Give it to me'

'What?'

'Your bat.'

'Why? Where's your pretty blue box?'

Subhadra spotted the bat lying in a corner. She raced to it, picked it up, and threw the box on Sonu as she ran out. She could hear Sonu shouting after her. 

'Subbu, we WON!, we just WON!' 

Subhadra stood outside the house, breathless with her sudden outburst and her newly acquired possession, as she heard the town erupt into happy chaos. 'I knew we could do it Kapil Dev', she said to her little puppy peering up at her in fright.