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My Dear Daughter

By Aparajita Sengupta

07 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Hope Without Wisdom: A Letter to My Daughter On Her Future in a Mad Planet

My Dear Daughter,

You turn two tomorrow. I don’t think you will start reading any time soon—I even hope you don’t until you see and feel and listen and breathe and take in the world in a thousand other ways. But I decided to write to you because wanted to tell you how I feel today—about you, and your future. I hope in the mad rush that your life will be, you will have time to read this someday.

Even though I love you more than you will ever imagine, I sometimes regret bringing you into this mad world of ours, hurtling towards its end in mindless hurry, where hate and greed show no signs of disappearing any time soon. What I regret most, however, is the social position I have predetermined for you through my background and my so called education. Being my daughter not only removes you from the only actual treasures of this earth—the soil and the sunshine, it also automatically enrolls you into the section that plays a role in the destruction of the earth and in the pain of people without always intending to do so. This is the section we lovingly call “ordinary people”, people who fall into a pattern the moment they are born, and do certain things because everyone else does the same, and sometimes because they have no idea how to break the vicious cycles. They might, sometimes through extraordinary “merit”, and sometimes through sheer luck, join the rank of the people who are the actual orchestrators and perpetrators of the destruction of the earth and misery of helpless human beings—people who have successfully led the world to believe that the merit of every single human action is to be determined by monetary profit alone. But the possibility that you will be one of them is really slim—even with the mantra of the rising/shining global South buzzing in your ears, you can only go so far as a daughter of second generation immigrants from Bangladesh, a family of clerks and professors and small business folk. You are not the daughter of business magnets, or CEOs, for that matter. Even if you zoomed through top business schools and had the best business ideas, the chances that you will create a Monsanto or a Pfizer are still very slim.

So what will you be? What will you do for the earth? If you were the executive deciding to ram through your plan of setting up a bottled water plant somewhere in South India, ignoring the pleas of village people demanding their right to the underground water tables, bribing state officials to sign the deal or policemen to disperse the dissenting mobs, if you were even the state representative accepting the bribe, then I would have known what to tell you. But what can I tell you if you get out of your 8-7 job, and roll down your car window to pick up a bottle of that water? How can I point out your compliance in the crime if you are convinced not only of your innocence, but of your part in bettering the world because the bottle says the company gives .5% of its profit to saving dolphins? So you will be the “ordinary woman”, apolitical because politicians are corrupt, unaware because awareness will not help, and move and eat and dress the world wants you to, because asking for untainted food, not wanting to burn fossil fuel EVERY step of your way, and wanting to wear non-sweatshop clothes are impossible demands for your generation. Even as you shudder at the statistics of ecological destruction, or hide a tear on your birthday when you see the toddler getting soaked in the August rains asking for alms, even as you write off checks to charities (because I taught you well, you are not hardened), you will still be ordinary, my child. Your monthly paycheck from the MNC or the private hospital you work for might be cramped for space for the zeroes, but you will not realize why the world seems to be crazier and bleaker and dirtier by the day, even though you seem to be doing all the right things.


What will I teach you then, my daughter? Shall I, in compliance with the global North’s obsession with “freedom of choice”, let you be with the cozy belief that you are indeed free to do what you want to? Let you live the myth that you are not connected to anything or anyone, especially to the earth, and that your decisions are only yours? That what you buy is only yours, and does not have a history or a future in this world? Or shall I, according to the culture of the South that I so identify with, smother you with ideas of how you could be “successful” in life, and find the keys to the treasure chest that was once ours, and would be ours again if we only got a fair chance in the global game? Teach you to look the other way as people suffer, and look to charity as the only way to ease your conscience? Shall I tell you, as I look around for the educational institutions that would guarantee a prosperous future for you, that 50% of our city’s children do not go to school?

I have been ordinary all my life, so I don’t think I have much to teach you. I have hurt people and the world in ways unimaginable, even though I did not want to. I still do that, and no matter what small steps I take, I have done nothing to erase the mark that I am leaving on this world—depleting its resources, cluttering it up, and letting people suffer because it makes my life easier or cheaper.

We will plant a tree for you today. I bought a sapling, and even though I talked to the seller for quite some time, I have no idea where it came from, or who planted it and took care of it. But what I really want to do is to plant an idea for your generation. May you undo what we have done here--reach out, touch and heal, my child. I have no wisdom for you, but I have a lot of hope. May you understand that you are of the soil and the sun, may you find your place in the circle of eternal life on our beautiful planet.

Love,
Ma.
8th August, 2011.

Aparajita Sengupta, PhD is Assistant Professor, English at Sri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata

 

 



 


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