The Man behind your 'elegant ears adorned with earrings'.

A point shaped jutti, an old, black bag with a scribbling in white, a buttoned bandh gala kurta paired with white pyjamas, white beard growing on his chin, wintry white hair and rotten teeth that display a childlike smile. He is happy to have been offered a seat. Meet Mr. Sukhram, your neighbourhood man who has been engaged in the work of piercing ears and nose since 1965. This work might seem trivial to you, but for him, it’s art. The cheerful smile that adorns his face never wanders away as he speaks to us about his life and work.    

Mr. Sukhram carries a black bag that reads “Nak kan chedne wala; bina dard ke. Sukhram." (The one who pierces your ears and nose, without causing you pain.) His eyes dazzle with a gleam of light.

The 70 year old man has been wandering the streets of Delhi for over fifty years now. He charges a mere 50 rupees (less than one USD) for a nose or ear piercing.

Upon being asked about his community, he tells us in a hoarse voice that he’s a Banjara. In the ancient times, when there weren’t any transport mode such as cars, trucks etc. available, his ancestors used to transport things from one Agra to Delhi to Jaipur via bullock carts. “Yahan toh lohe ki mang hai, vahan se namak ki.” He adds. (There would be a demand of iron here and that of salt from there.) His ancestors would tell him these stories.

He lives in Zakhira in North Delhi and is from the village Sond, near Palwal. He is happy when we recognize the place.  With one daughter and two sons, he is excited to tell us that his son works as a dentist in the village. We congratulate him. He exclaims, “Yes with your blessings!”

So, how does he manage to travel the streets every single day energetically?

Through his wrinkled smile, he says, “I like the work that I do. My children ask me not to go. I tell them, Son, I walk, my nerves work, and my blood flows. If I sit, my nerves will be jammed.”

He has so far journeyed across Kirti Nagar, Model Town, Shakti Nagar, Naraina Vihar and Raja Garden among other places. During the summers, he works till 7 in the evening. He eats his food during the morning and takes two cup of tea in the afternoon. During the afternoon, he takes a nap in a nearby park.

The equipment used to pierce
through the nose or ear. 

Women get their ears pierced in Kashmiri fashion. And these days, it’s not just women; men too have started getting their ears and eyebrows pierced following the recent trends. It’s a sum of 900 rupees for a piercing on the eyebrows.

He recalls an instance where there were foreign visitors from the US in a house in Karol Bagh. They were excited to get their nose pierced. He was delighted to have people around him. He spoke Hindi, they spoke English. They clicked his picture; clicked the driver’s picture; clicked another picture with him. He tells us that he was joyfully happy to have been clicked! 

While the birds chirp, he is excited to tell us another tale. Last month, while on his usual travels, a young girl was sitting on her porch. It seemed as if she had been awaiting someone's visit. As Mr Sukhram cried out his trade, the girl along with her mother rushed from the inside and approached him. The 21 year old, young girl offered him sweets and thanked him. She recounted her experience with the man when she was two years old. The girl had been ever afraid of the man and his cries since the time he had pierced her ears. However, as time passed, the girl realized how beautiful she looked with a pair of earrings dangling by her ears. That was how she went on to thank him for the same after two decades. That, recounts Mr. Sukhram, has been the most grateful time in his life. He was extremely happy to have heard that story! And so were we!   

His great grandfather and grandfather were all in this job. There appears a warm smile on his face as the old man recounts the experiences of his life. At the same time, we were at once transported to another place and time. The wrinkled lines on his wide forehead told you of the distance he had travelled as a cheerful man, not bogged down by the hardships of life.

Is there any bad thing that he remembers about his work? we ask.

“There is no mistake I’ve done in this work” he says with pride that reflects through his tobacco-stained teeth.

“People are happy to have their ears pierced.”  

“No one forgets me. I go on.”

Every morning, with a bag on his shoulders and a confident smile on his face, he ventures out like a Banjara, traversing the streets of Delhi with his hoarse cry, “Nak kan chedane wala!” (The one who pierces your nose and ears.) He goes on with his work even though he doesn’t have many customers left. That reminds us of a famous expression: the size of your audience doesn’t matter; keep up the good work. 

So the next time you hear such cries, do stop by to have a word or two with him and thank him for his work!

The New Moto E Gen 2!

Motorola

It's was a moment of excitement to receive the new Moto phone as a gift! This white, sleek phone is a beauty wrapped in white. It comes with a combination of economical price and great features. It supports 3G connectivity. With a fancy Android Lolipop operating system, the user interface is very interactive. #MotoE

My previous phone was a QWERTY phone and as I switched from a QWERTY to a touch-screen phone, it was a new experience. With a storage space of 8GB, there well a hell lot of apps I could download! The 4.5 inch screen gave me a new reading experience. Added to that, a 5MP camera was brilliant to click the perfect photographs for an amateur photography enthusiast! The 1.2 Quad Core Processor and the 1GB RAM combination allows me to multitask uninterruptedly. The high definition screen display is wonderful as it provided me with a brilliant viewing experience.

       

This was a beautiful gift from Motorola! I am very happy to receive this gift !

Thank you Motorola for a wonderful, new experience!

Book your Moto E exclusively at Flipkart

The Four Walls

                                                     

“Sitting by the window” in her “atrocious nursery”, the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper clearly confides in her readers in a communication that is impermissible and forbidden. “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word.” The narrator’s husband has diagnosed her with a “temporary nervous depression” and she has been warned by him “not to give way to fancy”. This confinement to the four walls of the room in the rented house makes her develop a great fondness to not only the “big room” but also the “horrid paper” on the wall. As she begins to confide her thoughts to the “dead paper”, she gives a safe passage to her thoughts. She constantly asks her husband to provide her with another room and he makes a “bargain” to let her have the cellar to herself. She soon begins to obsess with the pattern and color of the wallpaper and finds women crawling behind the wallpaper. In order to liberate the woman that the narrator feels is imprisoned and trapped inside; she begins to tear off the wallpaper. She finally gathers to courage to liberate herself. "I've got out at last, and I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back" The narrator is finally able to liberate the woman creeping out the wallpaper.

Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is locked up in the attic by her husband, Mr. Rochester on grounds that she is “mad” and belongs to a “mad family; “idiots and maniacs through three generations”. Her life is filled with oppression as she is locked away in a hidden room in Thornfield Hall. This is one way to keep her madness locked away from the world outside.

In Kate Chopin’s Story of an Hour, as Mrs. Mallard goes “away to her room alone”, she sits on a chair that faces the open window. The open window gives way to “a new spring life”; “the delicious breath of rain”, “the notes of a distant song” and the “twittering” of birds all symbolizes freedom for her as she had heard the news of her husband’s death. The “subtle and elusive to name” freedom and liberty that came crawling to her as she sat facing the open window is the very same “joy that kills” her in the end. The “powerful will” that had dominated her life is no longer present and she is now “drinking in a very elixir of life”. The open window displays abundance of life and the opportunity for Mrs. Mallard to escape the walls of the house. In contrast to the open window, the walls of the house represent her old life where “men and women have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow- creature.”  

An example from the Restoration Drama of the shield of the confined space provided to women would be the garden scene from Aphra Behn’s The Rover. As Florinda steps out of the house and roams around in the garden, she is no longer under the protective shield or cover of her brother or father. Hence, WIllmore, the wanderer, mistakes her for an “errant harlot” who has her “cobweb door set open to catch flies”. This walled space was like a shield to her that showed her as a maid of quality and honor. The stepping out of that shield meant her to be tagged as a harlot.

Ismat Chughtai explores the female sexuality in her short story The Quilt. The story shows how Begum Jan was a “possession” who was installed along with the furniture in the house by Nawab Saheb. “Having married Begum Jan, he (Nawab Saheb) tucked her away in the house with his other possessions and promptly forgot her.” This lack of emotional and sexual fulfillment in marriage results in the freedom of Begum Jan and Rabbu within the four walls of Begum Jan’s room that is well portrayed by the narrator as “an elephant struggling inside” of her quilt and the “slurping sound of a cat licking a plate”. Chughtai presents this intimate relationship as one woman’s way of overcoming the vacancy of the unfulfilled sexual and domestic needs by her husband. The four walls provide her with a liberty to express her sexuality.   

Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper was diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression, Bertha Mason was “mad”, Mrs. Mallard “was afflicted with a heart trouble”, and Begum Jan “was afflicted with a persistent itch”. They are all diseased and are confined inside the house.

However, the four walls can be both a means of confinement and one of liberty. As Virginia Woolf puts it in her A Room of One’s Own, “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.”

Woolf admires the differences between men and women, and centres her essay on why women have not been able to develop and enhance their own personal technique and design in the sphere of fiction. For Woolf, a room will help women to liberate themselves through their writings and be able to reach out to a large world.

I’d like to conclude by saying that even in their confinement, women have found a way to liberate and release themselves.