Work is looking up! We had a Youth Resource Centre group meeting yesterday here in the guesthouse meeting room presided over by Chandrika. Attending were representatives from all six YRCs [Youth Resource Centres] including Haider from Delwara.
It was interesting to hear about all the YRC programmes – community radio training, self-defence training, endless sport and debating programmes, as well as the things I have been more involved with, such as livelihoods and skills training courses. It would be easy to write this off as superficial and cosmetic, not quite “real” development work, but taking this view fails to recognise that so many steps of a development mission (in this case empowering youth to face a rapidly changing world) do seem like so much dross until you take a step back and look at the overall tapestry of benefit derived from these steps combined. In this particular case I feel that the tapestry may not have been considered very deeply, although I may be guilty of gross injustice here. And maybe the YRCs do need a trial period where different ideas and programmes are experimented with, paving the way to piecing together a vision by gauging the problems and aspirations and – oh I don’t know what exactly… I’m not simply struggling for words but also for concepts, although writing this helps to clarify what I think and what I don’t yet know how to think.
In more personal terms, yesterday’s meeting was a success because it allowed me to voice a few ideas. The principle one was that it is all very well to send these kids on training courses (the Dalit Shakti Kendra in Ahmedabad included, but also a whole bevy of other courses which are being considered) but we really need to keep tabs on what happens to them afterwards. Do they find jobs in the field in which they are trained? Does it help them? Does it, put simply, work to send them on these courses?
To that end, I have spent today setting up a database and accompanying survey sheet, which take into account certain characteristics of the individual before training (age, education, economic status, employment history) and details of the course they went on and, importantly, employment details three months and also one year after training.
This leads to another question I have been considering a lot recently: what, if anything, is the right approach to this issue of livelihoods? Should we be promoting skills training, or indeed higher-level education that is going to (almost inevitably) lead people away from the centre of intervention (Delwara in this case)? Or should we be doing our best to develop livelihood opportunities within the centre of intervention? The latter, if feasible, would have the effect of curbing further migration, but I wonder how feasible it really could be. There seems to be an innate distrust amongst the Delwarans of home-grown skilled labour, and people have told me that if they wished to get a piece of hardware repaired they would take it to Udaipur, even if it could be done in Delwara, as they had greater faith in the Udaipur market. The former, meanwhile, would promote a new breed of skilled or educated migrant who will be far less vulnerable to the kind of exploitation generally cited as one of the principle evils of migration. I suppose we are dealing with a case of prevention versus cure. Or not really cure – that would be remedial work with migrants who have already suffered health problems or human rights abuses after going to work in a city – not a cure but a different method of prevention. In any case, this higher level of migration should also have the effect of sending money back into Delwara, if at the cost of family life (for a while at least).
Family life was the subject of an interesting conversation I had with Shiv’s family, whom I met for the first time this evening. His brother Piyush seems nice, with a slightly harder edge than Shiv. His father is moody and surprisingly shabbily dressed, while his mother is a wonderful, extrovert character, with a hysterical guffaw like Shiv’s, slightly grubby and full of strong views about all sorts of things, including the superiority of arranged marriages over love marriages. We all sat in the parents’ bedroom and compared family matters across cultures. I pointed out, not at all provocatively, that while in India it is perfectly normal that Piyush, thirty years old and married with a child, lives with his parents, that would be seen as very unusual in England, where children are encouraged to leave home in their late teens and early twenties. “Do you think this is a good thing?” asked Shiv’s mother, and I said that yes, I thought it was great thing for us to gain our independence and live our lives away from parental constraints while still maintaining a close relationship with our parents.
“But what happens when the parents become old?” asked Piyush. “Who looks after them?”
“We do – we go and visit them –”
“Even if they live far away and need somebody with them all the time?”
And I felt horribly ashamed. How could I look him in the face and tell him that there were always nursing homes and residential homes and ask (even though I might have no intention of banishing my own parents to one of these homes) if people can really be expected to sacrifice their jobs, their lives, for their parents? In India the right thing, the expected thing, is so obvious that it leaves no room for doubt. Parents devote their lives to bringing up a child, and when the parents become old, the child, now maybe a parent himself, looks after the parent. Jobs, loves, lives fit round this fiercely strong parent-child bond.
“In London,” said Shiv’s mother, “a mother and son’s relationship is only something-something. In India it is from the soil.”
I don’t think they were right to argue (as effectively they were) that family is stronger in India than in England, because the way family is treated is so different between the cultures. In India it feels like some solid, immovable mass that one could not contemplate questioning, even if one’s experience of family is actually pretty miserable, or at least full of fear, repression and lies, which the peculiar forces of Indian expectations and social mores sometimes engender. In England we take family for granted in different ways and even if, to borrow from Larkin, parents can fuck their children up as much as they can in India (or in Russia, or Haiti, or East Timor!) I think there is sometimes more willingness to acknowledge and discuss problems, and perhaps more genuine desire to engage with fellow family members and indulge in “quality time” that is not just an artifact of ritual and proximity. But these are crass generalisations that any sociologist would demolish in minutes!
Next Post - Wednesday 10th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Tuesday 10th January 2012)
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