Skip to main content

For my baba, the everyday commitments of care



Reflecting on my baba in gratitude.

As a young boy, I would look at my baba in wonder. My baba, ever-so-brave, prepared to place his body on the line for the various struggles of the Left that spoke to him in his youth.

My ma would tell me the story behind my name, an alias baba took up in doing resistance work. In the years of the emergency in the 1970s, this resistance work placed his body, and the bodies of many union organisers in the line of risk.

The risk of losing a job. The risk of being incarcerated. The risk of being made to disappear.

In those years, the party would place the trust him to place his body in the struggle, to offer safety to party leaders, to offer safety to landless peasants laying their rightful claims on land they had been denied across generations, to offer safety to comrades needing a passage amidst right-wing repression.

As a long-term union worker and party worker, my baba spent so much of his life in working-class struggles, in the organizing of landless peasants, and in the difficult work on the front lines of the Left.

His commitment to his joint family meant giving the whole of his salary to my grandmother, Nana, who held the family together.

To build part of our joint family home so the family had a place to live, he took out a loan against his provident fund, which he kept repaying for over a decade. This infrastructure sustains the family and offers it shelter amidst the torrential rains and floods.

My baba has long retired. Yet, he continues to give the major proportion of his pension to our joint family. This support sustains the family.

The everyday work of organizing the union for my baba was nurtured by the care he placed in sustaining us. The dreams he weaved alongside us cousins in our joint family enabled us to envision the pathways of education.

For many of us cousins, my baba’s commitment to making sure we had an education built the infrastructure that sustains us.

Learning that participating in doing the everyday labor of household chores such as cleaning, washing, and ironing formed the basis of our everyday pedagogies.

And he continues to live his life this way, for a larger collective and its good, in a way that is so inherently giving and full of care.

My baba teaches me that the organizing work of the union and the Left is deeply intertwined with the everyday labor of care.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

The Suit Walks the Corridor

  The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more