Venus Envy
  Vol V : issue 1

  Cover page
  Kaushik Basu
  Radhika Coomaraswamy
  Taslima Nasreen
  N. S. Madhavan
  Zehra Nigah
  Only in Print

Sleep, as poets have written about and Dali depicted so disturbingly, is a precarious indulgence. If the mind is weighed down with intense, personal problems, one cannot sleep. If the mind is totally idle, waiting for sleep, it does not come. It comes easily and comfortingly if one has a puzzle in one's head, which is engrossing and at the same time not personally intense. Some of my best slumbers have occurred when I have gone to bed with a research puzzle in economics and I remain convinced that some of my best papers have been written in my sleep.

I am fortunate today - I have a challenging puzzle. Dohiben's house has one latrine in the far corner of the courtyard and a tiny bathing space attached to it, but there are no taps and this is an area of acute water shortage. The logistics of how one gets through one's bath and the morning essentials constitute a decent intellectual challenge to any city-bred. Should I wake up before everybody else? But that would probably require me to get up while it is still dark and the bathroom, I have checked, has no lights and using it will be a hard balancing act. Where and how will I get water?

These are not matters to be lightly dismissed.

Years ago, visiting an avant-garde commune in a village in Belgium, I wanted to use the bathroom. My host pointed nonchalantly to one of the many open bedrooms. I went in expecting to find a door to the bathroom. There was none, but in one corner of the large bedroom was a commode. Needless to say, I bolted all the bedroom doors before using it. But on the drive back to Brussels the thought struck me, and it still occasionally troubles me, that I may not have looked hard enough and may have spoilt their Dadaist sculpture.

Puzzling over these conundrums and misdeeds, I drift into a cosy, deep slumber.

I wake up early next morning into the most spectacular dawn. As I walk out of Dohiben's house and stroll down a street, a winter mist rolls in and I remember Khosla in my elocution class in Calcutta, reciting with his eyes shut behind thick glasses: "And the first grey of morning fill'd the east/And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream." Cows and goats, still lazy from sleep, stir languorously. But all the Ahir homes along the street are — again Khosla's voice — "hushed/and still the men are plunged in sleep." Only a few womenfolk are out, in their ornate clothes and with sets of three progressively smaller pots balanced on their heads.

The women spend much of the day walking to and from the one tank in the centre of the village. The tank is filled by piped water that comes from many miles away. Piped water is a recent innovation. Earlier, a tanker would bring in water once a week and villagers would rush to fill up buckets, drums and pots, causing accidents in the melee. Before that, the only source of water was dug wells. Water tinged with salt seeped slowly into the wells. Villagers would often sleep next to their wells to guard them and scoop up the little water that would have collected through the night.

Some of these changes, like piped water, are also indirectly the contribution of SEWA. Contact with articulate, urban women has taught the villagers to make their own demands from the government. In fact, Puriben and Gauriben from the neighbouring villages of Bakhutra and Vauva tell us that when essential supplies such as electricity or water fail badly, they lodge complaints with the relevant government office, saying that they are SEWA members, and the response is immediate.

Puriben is quite an incredible woman. She joined SEWA as a member in 1988, before which she had had virtually no contact with city folk. And now, with piercing eyes and a ready smile, she is as much at ease in an Ahmedabad seminar room (though sometimes I find her squatting on the chair on her haunches) as she is among village artisans. She has attended NGO meetings in Washington and Australia. She wants to educate herself and become a professional manager in order to market village products.

We spend a lot of time discussing international trade and globalisation. Puriben and Gauriben argue with remarkable lucidity. Their main concern with globalisation is that foreign companies will mass-produce their goods using advanced technology, undercut them and then, when the local production closes down, hike their prices.

This is, of course, the well-known problem of dumping, where the country with the deeper pocket temporarily lowers prices to destroy the other's industry and once the decimation is complete, raises prices once more. Much of WTO regulation is devoted to curb such behaviour. The trouble is that, first, these international regulations have lots of loopholes still to be plugged and, second, fighting a case in the WTO in Geneva can be frightfully expensive and many poor nations cannot afford that. Hence the richer countries benefit disproportionately from these international trading rules.

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