By Sonia Faleiro
 |
| Sonia FaleiroKajal, four-year-old performer from the Nat community. |
Raja, age 16, is banging on a dhol, or drum, hanging around his neck, while the younger children begin a series of slow somersaults.
Kajal, 4 years old, wears a shrunken red T-shirt and matching pants.
She throws bright smiles. Her performing partner, a pony-tailed 7-year-old,
wears a serious expression and a short-sleeved dress over gray jeans. Contrary
to the child’s feminine appearance and behavior, he is a boy named Ram. He’s
wearing a wig.
“People pay to watch girls, not boys,” explains Raja, who is their
minder.
Raja has a minder of his own, Barsaati, who says she’s in her 20s. She
sits in a corner of the traffic island chewing gutka and holding a child.
Barsaati is listlessly banging a tin plate as musical accompaniment to the
performance unfolding before her. Next to her is a thali, a metal plate, that
Kajal will shake in front of the passersby who stopped to watch her perform.
That day she and Ram will earn 150 rupees (about $3) for a full day’s work.
The children and minder are Nats, a low caste that like so many
others, have traditionally been confined to a single occupation. These days
such restrictions are believed to be compelled less by caste rules and more by
poverty, illiteracy or a lack of modern skills. Communities or individuals that
are given the opportunity or have the skills to pursue an occupation outside of
the one dictated by caste, often do so. Traditional occupations of low-caste
communities can be low-paying and unreliable and marginal.
The traditional occupation of the Nats is any work that can be
classified as “entertainment.” This includes dancing at melas, or fairs, sex
work, and the acrobatics Kajal and Raj are performing.
Although based in North
India , at least half the Nat
community lives a nomadic lifestyle. They travel to cities across India
While they perform on traffic islands, outside malls, and in parks,
nomadic Nats live on the outskirts of cities in tents. They prefer construction
sites, because it’s easy to find water and electricity there.
Nats often shun education and conventional employment, as well as
interaction outside of their community.
The children perform a short sequence of stretches and acrobatic
maneuvers. Then, first one, and then the other, squeezes through a hoop until
both are lying for a few seconds peacefully atop each other, their eyes tightly
closed.
Wriggling out of the hoop, Kajal scampers off while Ram, still
unsmiling, heads toward a rope strung six feet above the ground between wooden
poles. He has the most difficult task.
These particular Nats are from Chhattisgarh, and are at the end of a
long stretch of travel and work. “In two days we return home,” says Barsaati.
“We’ll meet our family, relax, eat and drink. Everyone is waiting to welcome
us.”
Also waiting to welcome the group is the rest of their troupe. They
are waiting in a tented camp on a construction site in the suburb of Mira Road Mira Road
Once in the camp, the children eat and sleep early to save their
energy for the next day’s performances.
There are 40 adults in the camp. They spend all day inside their tents
to protect themselves from the heat. Every once in a while a woman will pop out
of a tent to help herself to a bowl of rice from the clay pot in which food is
cooked first thing in the morning. The pot remains in the shade for the rest of
the day. The men go for short strolls to smoke beedis, thin Indian cigarettes.
There’s not much to do, and the adults do little. There are no children in the
camp because they’re scattered across the city performing, each group of three
or four children is accompanied by two minders.
“The children work for the community,” Barsati’s brother, Manish,
tells me. “We did the same thing when we were their age. But once we grew big,
around 13, 14, we had to stop. Who gives big children money? So what could we
do? We stopped working, we married, we had children, and our children started
to perform. Now we move with them, protect them. When they come of age they’ll
stop and be like us. This is our tradition.”
I ask Manish if he has considered the possibility of another kind of
life. For example, was there a school in his village he could send the children
to?
He beams. “One school? There are three schools in our village. That’s
how prosperous our village is!”
And they’re government schools? I ask. The education is free?
He nods. “But what is free education to us? We are not supposed to
study. We are khelwalas, supposed only to entertain. Even if I wanted to send
my child to school I couldn’t.”
“The Jaat Panchayat would throw us out of the village,” he says,
referring to the council that regulates the lives of members of his caste. “And
if they did, our family would side with them. Then what would we do?”
Back on Colaba Causeway, as Raja bangs on his drums, Ram walks swiftly
across the rope, balancing in his arms a thick bamboo pole no less than eight
feet in length. On one side, the road is full of oncoming traffic. Beneath is
the hard ground.
The audience holds its breath. But Ram doesn’t seem to notice, to look
either right or left. Instead, he stares intently ahead, to the end of the rope
noosed tightly around the bamboo pole.
CHINA
[In the coming year, officials plan to repeat the unmanned exercise with astronauts as part of its mission to reach the moon and to launch its own space station by 2020. If all goes according to plan, China
By Andrew Jacobs
 |
CCTV, via APTN, via Associated Press
A still image from a Chinese broadcast on Thursday of
the docking of the Shenzhou 8 capsule with the
Tiangong 1 module |
The
docking of the Shenzhou 8 capsule with the Tiangong 1 module was broadcast live
on national television. Prime Minister Wen Jiabaowatched
from the control center in Beijing, and thousands of citizens expressed their
pride through Internet postings in what many referred to as the country’s first
“space kiss,” remarking how far China had come since its more impoverished
days.
In the
coming year, officials plan to repeat the unmanned exercise with astronauts as
part of its mission to reach the moon and to launch its own space station by
2020. If all goes according to plan, China
American
and Russian aerospace engineers perfected space docking in the 1960s, but Wu
Ping, a spokeswoman for China’s manned space program, said that Chinese
scientists had come to this moment largely on their own, having domestically
produced hundreds of components and instruments.
“This
makes China
Some
Western scientists, however, said the successful mission provided stark
evidence that the 20-year-old sanctions that limit cooperation between American
and Chinese aeronautical engineers had failed.
The
policy, imposed by Congress shortly after Beijing China
In the two
decades since it was frozen out of the world’s elite space club, China China
In an
ominous turn, in 2007 Beijing Washington
Gregory Kulacki, China Cambridge , Mass. China
Conversely,
he and other scientists say, cooperation has a multitude of benefits,
especially in an era of trillion-dollar deficits. For one, the prohibitive cost
of NASA’s dreamed mission to Mars would be better shared by other nations, as
John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser, has said in the past.
In
testimony before a House panel on Wednesday in which he defended his contacts
with Chinese officials, Mr. Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, tried
to tamp down Congressional opposition to White House efforts that seek expanded
scientific exchanges with China
He pointed
out that 30 years of cooperation had brought a multitude of benefits, from
physics to pest control. The exchanges, he said, “strengthen our hand in the
effort to get China
Many
members of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee, however, were not impressed,
citing Beijing
The snubs
may sting, but the restrictions do not seem to be holding back China China China China
