Metodología de evaluación de ofertas

Besides their waged work, some of the boys had many responsibilities at home. This was usually because: 1) they had no sisters or the sisters were younger than them, 2) sisters spent much of the day away for work or studies, 3) boys had chosen to take on certain responsibilities of care. For example, there was Deepu (OBC) whose elder sister was at an engineering college so he helped out at home; Rahul Singh (UC), whose sister worked with their mother as a domestic worker, and who washed up, cleaned the house and sometimes ‘tried’ to make rotis for his mother52_{; Mahesh} (OBC)whose older sister was married and who seemed proud and happy to help his mother at home; Aalok (OBC) who only had an older brother (who did not always keep well) and the brothers shared responsibility for household work with their mother; and Akash(SC), both whose sisters were much younger than him and he cared for them after school, making them tea, ensuring they did their homework and generally taking care of the house till their parents returned from work. There was also Dilip (SC) who had a different sort of responsibility of care as his mother explained (field notes from home visit mentioned earlier):

Dilip’s mother told me about her husband's drinking and how her other two sons sometimes answer back or yell but Dilip is different. He might cry but he won't say anything. / Dilip is the quiet, sensible one who would ask the older brother also to shut up. / Dilip apparently loves taking care of animals; his mother said, ‘there was a maina earlier. She died…he has to have something [to take care of].’/ Dilip’s father is apparently quite caring and loving when he isn't drunk but usually he is. / The mother’s hopes and expectations lie with Dilip; she told me that [in] her natal family only one other kid is doing well. None of the others are. She herself attended school till Class II or III and she had never gone to her children’s school in the village. Only in Indore she goes with some other women if needed.

52 _{Excerpt from interviews with Rahul Singh are available in chapter six. He told me}

However, it emerged that IWC boys are often viewed as troublesome, uncaring, irresponsible and potential predators both at home and school; as a result, their stories are generally seen as less believable than girls’. There was an incident involving Mahesh (OBC) when he and Namit (SC) had been asked by a teacher to mind the class one day. At one point, Mahesh asked a girl to keep quiet and not laugh. According to Mahesh, she then deliberately stepped on his foot when leaving the class and he hit her back. That afternoon on their way back from school (they were from the same neighbourhood) another boy commented offensively on that girl. Since Namit and Mahesh were walking a short distance from her she used the opportunity to blame the incident on Mahesh – that he had incited the other boy to harass her. She reported this version to Mahesh’ parents as well. By the next day she had begun to say that Mahesh had been the one to harass her.

Reva: I feel that sometimes boys get caught because people start doubting boys quickly. If a girl says something [people begin to] doubt boys easily. People don’t trust boys…

Mahesh: Madam, isn’t it? At home, too…mummy also says that, ‘is that girl lying then?’ This is what she says!

Some of the boys also reported that they had to be very careful in their neighbourhoods as people yelled at them at the merest suspicion that they were even looking at a girl. Two girls in the classroom also told me that people in the neighbourhood had beaten up young men accused of harassing girls. I suggest that this fierce policing of boys is (also) a result of the fast pace of demographic and cultural changes: migrating to unfamiliar and very densely-populated cities and having to live in neighbourhoods where families are still in the process of building networks and developing feelings of belonging and community, they end up resorting to more brutal ways of policing young people. This is also a direct consequence of communities wanting to “protect” and “police” girls. Thus, under the imperatives of Brahmanical patriarchy, in a changing world boys, and girls are caught in some of the same traps, albeit in gendered ways.

Thus, in this section, I have shown that IWC boys have specific financial and caregiving responsibilities; they also face serious deprivations and worries as well as some amount of gendered constraints on their behaviour. However, at school, none of these circumstances or their effects on IWC boys are appreciated. Their

responsibilities, concerns, fears, desires and emotional investments in family or school are not valued. Thus such ethnographic work with adolescent boys opens up ways of rethinking dominant conceptions not only of childhood but what it means to be an IWC “boy” in the contemporary urban Indian context.

Though the six UC boys seemed to be financially better off, to a large extent, caste did not seem to be a significant factor in determining the kinds of responsibilities that boys bore. Among IWC communities, any emergency can immediately throw a family into a state of financial desperation irrespective of caste. The difference could be that upper caste communities, as I showed in the context of migration, may have better networks and/or be better able to work their networks in case of emergencies. At the same time, I also found that students either did not readily speak about caste, or having moved to Indore at a very young age, did not fully know their parents’/grandparents’ life histories. As discussed in Chapter 1, it is worth exploring if students will speak of religion and caste based difference and micro- aggressions more comfortably outside school.