A Period of Protest

It was one year ago today that the actor Raj Kumar passed and Bangalore went on full lockdown: eight people were killed with many hundreds injured; companies, shops, and offices were forced to close as the city was torched and came to a standstill. For a couple of days. Today more than one thousand extra police were on duty in the city, in case of repeat protests, and people were being asked to stay calm and remember the actor in a peaceful way. As if Mr. Kumar is trying to keep us indoors, we find ourselves in the middle of a thunderstorm and the rain is coming down in buckets. It's the first time it's rained here for about four months and it will serve us well as the State faces a water crisis, an electricity crisis (it's off and on every five minutes), and a petrol crisis, with the pumps all closed tomorrow in protest at something or other. In fact, sometimes it's a little hard to keep up with what everyone is protesting about! I'm not sure how far it gets people at all, but here's something I'd protest about: Indian women civil servants are now being asked to reveal details of their menstrual cycles in their annual appraisals! Here's the BBC report. You know that it's not so they can give their female employees a little extra TLC at certain times of the month. No, here periods are still taboo; women who are menstruating are often made to eat and sleep away from the rest of the family and many are not allowed to take part in normal daily life, like going to temple. Shockingly, the number of women that use manufactured sanitary protection is still in single digits. And if I were to go on a protesting spree I could have a field day.... take today's Bangalore Times: it showed an artist's impression of how MG Road will look in five years, when the monorail is built. That's great, and shows real vision, but where will the kids who beg and urinate on the barely passable sidewalks go? It's hard to cover up some of the grime with a bit of glitz. In just over a year here, I've seen the coffee shops with outdoor seating closed down by the State for fear that drug deals were going on there (the ones indoors were okay though...); a licensing law enforced which closes all bars at 11:30 pm, even on New Year's Eve, in what used to be known as the 'pub city', for fear that an extra half an hour or so would send the city wild; and now they're trying to shut down the Bangalore Turf Club and ban horse racing to stop gambling. All in all there seems to be a lot of attention paid to things to stop people having fun when it's the people that don't have the money or the lifestyle to have fun that 'they' should be focusing on . Clean up the slums, educate the kids, stop the female children from 'disappearing', tackle the loan sharks... the list is endless and what's more, it's full of things that are really worth protesting about.