End game

I was speaking to my professor about the deep despair I have been feeling about the media reports regarding "in-fighting amongst leaders of the Idle No More movement" and what one fears are tokenistic, opportunistic support positions. She  remarked that I had got it right when I spoke about 'divide and conquer'.

How do we know what we know? How do I know what I know? Having read India's history through school and having seen the deep scars that are scraped regularly by people and groups with vested interests to keep the pot boiling and bubbling, this realisation is testimony that I am a product of colonialisation and thereby my epistemology stems from that journey, lived or observed, heard or witnessed.

We have websites of newspapers and also websites to 'teach students news'. Here is one more. 

Now the question is, do we have the courage to share this with those who will suspect our motives?

That's the litmus test of critical pedagogy. And it always begins with me. 

http://canadiandimension.com/articles/5139/

That's it then...

Without as much as a whimper, without even a farewell, my course calendar heaved its last breath. Through a series of text messages, a late night phone call, and some posts to Moodle, I gathered that there are no more classes now, we are done. 

Goodbye, good luck, the end. There is a certain anticlimax to this arrangement, somehow. Perhaps, I had expected fond farewells, much back slapping and many hugs. Maybe I have been schooled to think of goodbyes and see-you-laters to be a production of sorts. Yet this is not always the case.

Sometimes, it is a gentle letting go of the hand once held, a drifting off of the binds once held dear. Yet that is not to say that there is no connection. Heartstrings are invisible and like cables lying buried deep under ocean floors, they buzz with thought and thoughts. They keep us connected and they keep us in discomfort, that is a good thing.

What have I learned?, I wonder as I settle into another phase of writing, submission and the anticipation that will come with a thesis proposal being submitted for review. 

I cannot list the many things that have made me who I am today, yet I know that there has been a change, a transformation in the way I think, see, interact and speak when I address inequities. Much of it due to the ideas shared and the wisdom of many that has percolated into my being.

When I hear negativity bring directed to the absent through comments such as ' these kids have never been shopping to the Bay' and 'OMG, these parents have no Canadian experience', I no longer charge in to make it okay: I merely sit with the words and write them down in the pages of my mental space. Someday these words will find the literature to name the sentiments that are being voiced. Someday, those other minds who have toiled long and hard to dig deep, will stand beside me as I go deeper. 

And until then, I continue to celebrate a phase of moving on: after many take out dinners, after countless, text messages to children left at home on their own, and a dream chased over 25 years. 

In my Konkani, my mother tongue, we don't that we are leaving: We say " yettaaan", that means, I will be back , I shall return, I am right here, round the corner. I shall come back.

In this sentiment of my Elders, who taught me to think in many tongues and speak the truth with courage, I say Khuda Hafiz to this time at York University. 10 years since applying for the B.Ed programme, it's been a great voyage.

Heartbeats lead to my many homes

Like Google Earth the idea zooms in from way up high. Western hemisphere, North America, Canada, Western Ontario, Greater Toronto, Markham or Downtown Toronto. Finally at street level, the idea finds me: 5 feet tall, in my 4th decade, woman, Indian by birth, Canadian by passport.

And here I am, walking with people in the dark of the night to enjoy something I had heard about but had not ventured out to explore until this year, 2012.

No more waiting, no more 'next year maybe' thoughts. It is now and I am leaving: with you or without you, I say. My son comes with me, his father does not. Strolling is not something everyone has time for.

I hide behind the permission of the Academy and say that it is for a school project. I do my mothering work and then cajole my son to go with me as leaving him all alone that entire night with his busy father is asking for trouble. Food is a hook and it works. Adventure is another, and that works too: in my favour.

"Are we safe" he wants to know. "I know what I am doing, I am a Mumbai girl" I declare and I see him settle into a comfortable zone. I take refuge in the 'street cred' earned in another urban space, popularised in North American consciousness through films and Bollywood stereotypes.

"I know this bus route", he declares, more confident as we approach the bus stop. My TTC warrior is following in the footsteps of an illustrious sister who has left for greater heights into another urban space, knows about tickets and transfers.

Yonge Street and he is a little boy again, 10 years ago. He recalls those times when he had to sit on my lap then to be able to look out of the window. Now I scramble to the window as he is taller than I am and can block my view. Time flies.

My son has realised that he does not need a male protector to get him to a place far away from his suburban home and back. His mother is enough. More than enough.

Amin, A (2007): Re‐thinking the urban social, City, 11:1, 100-114

Grassroots Canadian

I have always been a Flaneur or shall I say Flaneuse? I just didn't know it then. Until I was given the elite title with the blessings of the Academy, I was just another grassroots observor.  I literally observed grassroots, collected rocks, feather and leaves. I still do.

From years of habit of being told "look here and see that, and what does that remind you of, that strange cloud over there", growing up far away from Mumbai, I developed what Gardner calls the Naturalist Intelligence.

Everywhere around me is data: EQAO, DRA, PM Benchmark. And with it the botanisation of people as 'below grade level, at-risk and level 2'. No one says underserved; I plan to say that at the next staff meeting whenever it happens.

My students walk with the Terry Fox Run flag, taking care to turn themselves so that people and cars on the road can see the writing and pay homage to the memory of a man they know only by name and in books. The kindergartens who think that we are all dressed in red and white as it is Canada Day are laughed about and once again I hear the words " these kids, they lack Canadian experience".

Critical theory guides my path and I am in elite company: Socrates, The Frankfurt School sociologists, and more recently Friere et al.

And as we walk back from the 5k, I see this beautiful little maple leaf, lying in the grass by the side of the road. I am steeped in metaphor, yet I don't write, until now, almost three months later.

Good writing is hard work says a certain thinking dog who sleeps atop his house.

Real writing is soul work, I know. It has to marinade in angst before it can be shared.

As I walk with myself, I ask: "Whose land am I on?" And I tell those stories as I go.

Haig-Brown, C. (2009). Decolonizing diaspora:whose traditional land are we on?. Cultural and pedagogical inquiry, 1(1), 4-21.

Azaan- The call to namaaz

An unfamiliar word
on a blog created
to track my academic routes, you say.
An unfamiliar word
in 'mainstream' Canadian vocabulary,
you remind me.
And I continue to decolonise,
even by refusing to spell my word with a 'z'.

I, whose sister, raised in her father's faith
Was unable to travel freely in the city of her birth
and now the frowns at hijabs and nikaabs, and beautiful souls
labelled "the other"
by the ignorant

the danger of single-story worldviews
is creeping up on many
and the flight continues
as children continue to be raised with their own
and others are asked to transer schools to be with their kind

and I push
and push
with many
one stone at a time
to reduce to rubble, that un-knowledge
that we are all dust, together
sooner or later.

Regan, P. (2012). Unsettling the settler within. (1 ed.). Vancouver: UBC Press

I am human capital

It was Diwali week and I was off to pick up a little this and that for the festival. With each passing year, as the distance from my roots increases and one more family member has either passed on or moved to a distant place, I find myself caught in the middle. Somedays the torrent of memories threatens to wash me away into a space so unfamiliar that it is hard to drag myself back At such times, I don't write, I don't think even. I don't dwell on what was and what is not.

Yet, breathe, I must and with each breathe comes the fragrance of woodsmoke, so dear and precious from a life left behind. Winter in Goa, growing up in quiet, verdant villages has made me appreciate the signs of community kitchens on open fires or flames dying down softly under huge brass pots fo water heated for Diwali's ceremonial baths.

I doggedly shake my head and walk on to the next aisle as I try to pack those memories away for a time when course work will be done, reports written, child fed, kitchen cleaned and I can once again transport myself down the lanes that beckon in my dreams.

Until then, this will have to. 97 cents, that's a deal! I am aware that my memories lead me to buy and my buying behaviour that leads to economic transactions lead to cash flow. So my presence here and that of 'these people' as newcomers are often/sometimes referred to, is essential, nay critical to fuel the economy.

The mothers who work at the coffee shop down the street also pay to run schools and light up streets.

Did anyone do me a favour by opening doors? Something to think about...

McLaren, A. T., & Dyck, I. (2004). Mothering, human capital and the "ideal immigrant". Women's Studies International Forum, 27, 41-53.

Cosmopolitanism, Om and I on Yonge Street

This is supposed to be the holiest of sounds within which reverberates the rhythm of silence and chaos, creation and deconstruction. My Elders started all their journeys by uttering this word and I have this word imprinted in my mind since times gone by.

On Yonge Street, as the Go bus turns in to the Richmond Hill Centre and swings out again on its way to York University, I see this temple: The Vishnu Mandir with its om touching the sky.

Perhaps it wishes me well, perhaps I seek a deep rooted peace. All I know that my eyes seek out this Om, every time I pass that way.

Yet to many on the bus, it is an unfamiliar symbol of something 'out there'. As am I, the silver haired woman, weighed down with bags, who bows her head as the bus turns.

In the land of my birth it is already morning as I make my way to York University.

And one day at a time, I reclaim my Om, as I become another regular sight in a land far away.

Beck, U, & Sznaider, N. (2006). Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 1-23.