To the ‘big’ aunty wearing tights, here’s a bigger Bravo!

I was preparing for medical entrance exams in Class 12. My chemistry tutor ran batches of 25 which began at 6 am till way past dusk, in his house. He was very good! Till that morning when he looked at me, smirked, looked away at the others and said ‘Those girls who wear tight jeans never clear these exams. I can write it down for you.’ I was 16. Everyone laughed uproariously. I never went to him again. I did get a call from a medical college in Pune. 

He wasn’t that good, after all!

****

A few months back I read about Amy Pence-Brown, a nearly 40-year-old woman, who stripped down to a bikini in the middle of a busy market, blindfolded. She invited strangers to draw hearts on her body in an effort to promote self-love; to promote acceptance of our bodies for what they are. Supportive comments poured in! 

dailymail.co.uk

I quote from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a gift from a man and a most valuable one. 

‘According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking…suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated…but the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others. 

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself...manifest in her gestures, voice, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. This has been at the cost of women’s self being split in two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…from earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life… Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’

Berger wrote this back in 1977. Such were the times, the expectations from women and thus of women. Appropriate it to today’s situation. Are you too thinking such are the times, still? At least partially?

Let’s go back to Amy who began this piece for us. When she exposed every popularly-defined 'ugly, fat and ungainly' part of her body what all did she do? She erased that split within! The ‘mother’ fought away her own image of herself, through years of conditioning, to free her three children from the burden of dominant beauty discourses. And the ‘fat feminist’ reclaimed her body!

And now come back to where you are sitting and reading this. What are you wearing right now? And why?

I’m inviting you to self-talk because it is something I once used to do standing before a wardrobe which always ‘played safe’ and knocked away any ‘experiment with clothes’ or ‘lust for the latest fashion’ that tried to get in. Because, will it suit me? In school there was little scope. In college the fantasies of wearing the most different dresses materialised in the changing room, and never walked out. Even after I hit 20, maybe especially then, since the world is suddenly visible to your adult eyes, a lot of clothes, accessories, make-up and hair-dos were secretly admired on others and dreamt about later. From two pony-tails in school I had graduated to one pony-tail in college, with the latest rubber band holding it, no more.  

I was very conscious of myself, and not just because of beauty magazines, advertisements, movies and social media feeding me their standards but also those people-to-people comments politely lecturing me on ‘what is okay for you’. So you know what a battle it must have been to wear my first ever halter-neck without worrying that my bust line is a shame! But when I walked out for the first time baring my back to the world, I slowly started arriving at a point of comfort with how I look in what I wear and where. It is then that realization seeped in – all these years of growing up, the ‘will it suit me?’ was more about ‘will it suit others’ idea of me?’ 

I was trying to please, to appeal to another’s sensibility. And it wasn’t even me who was doing that!  

A woman’s self-esteem is constantly crushed. Going back to Berger, girls often grow up in an ‘allotted and confined space’ and even as women face ‘tutelage’ from surprising quarters. The pressures to be dainty, pretty, shapely, combed, graceful, ironed wrap us in layers of self-judging, mummifying what we truly want to be. Colouring our image of ourselves in others’ tinted glasses. Because on our shoulders hang expectations, of others from us and those we women tend to have of ourselves as a result of constant conditioning. 

So the ‘big’ aunty in tights, walking gaily down the chic mall or the neighborhood market, and who still in a very evolved world generates snickers, may have run an obstacle course to get herself to buy her first pair, and climbed a mountain of belief to wear it! Against her family, her husband, her kids, her magazine, her friends’ sense of aesthetics, and who knows what else to reach the finish line of confidence. A true heroine, if you ask me. One who has succeeded in leaving beauty myths behind even if to don the latest fashion (for why should a tank top be the privilege of a few?) One who has accepted her body, as your ‘warts’ but her all! And one who burns the measuring tape you take to her thighs (like that despicable newspaper printing candid bum shots or a Right winger’s view on jeans) with an enviable self-assurance!

A lot is gained when we reclaim our bodies – its bulges, its scars, its pores, its patches - one step at a time. Because what we also reclaim is our Presence; social, emotional and even political presence in the world, in its truest sense. Just like Amy owned hers, in her black bikini. 

Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder, in the Garden of Eden. And it continues to be today, in all its forms. Says Berger – 

‘She is not naked as she is.

She is naked as the spectator sees her.’

Think about it.

[Entirely my opinion, the importance of which like any other is as much in its rejection as in its acceptance.] 

Why I do not review books for free

Recently, an author with a book warm and fresh from the press mailed me. He wanted me to review it. Came down straight to the point in a two-lined mail 1 itself – ‘Where should I send you a copy?’ No, he did not ask me what the procedure is, he did not want to know what I charge as a fee and he certainly seemed to assume it’s going to be a ‘yes’ from my end, as if Richard Gere were asking for my hand in marriage! 

Is this because he thought he was sending a copy of his book, free, so which sane woman in her write mind would refuse an offer such as this?

When I mentioned that I do commissioned reviews only, he sent a shorter mail saying ‘Sorry, I’m not comfortable with paying for a review.’ If he had explained more, I wouldn’t have said a loud Punjabi ‘Hain?’ to denote anything from ‘Why in Jupiter’s name?’ to ‘What the Pluto does he mean?’ Since he did not, I felt free to call him stingy, secretly, and then sit and simmer over it. 

Simmer. Simmer over the fact that some writers, who themselves must have ranted against doing free assignments all their lives, are not ready to pay for your date with their book – reading it, reviewing it and then expectantly so, sharing it in their social media networks. They are, ahem, ‘uncomfortable’. 

Their view, I assume? If we pay you you will write a biased review. And we want an honest review. (Another assumption that the soul is sold if they pay in cash for our glass of lassi!)

Okay. But then – 

- A free book may be reward enough for someone to sing your praises?

- The possibility of a contact for a fancy literary fest could be incentive enough to call your book            a best-seller? 

- That overuse of ‘dear’ and ‘I love your writing’ and ‘lovingly yours’ may make someone fall in            love with your book as much as your nature, enough to make the love flow cover-to-cover?

- They may admire your nose and ears combination and may translate that 5 star attraction into a            10/10 review?

My story. 

When I began reviewing on my blog, I did a handful of reviews without charging a fee. I was a new name, no one had read my reviews before and I had an old-school idea of ‘let them get a sense of how I review and then I’ll charge a fee’. In short, I wanted to earn my right to ask for and earn my buck. I was testing the waters in the blogging world while giving a taste of my wine to prospective authors.

I was putting in everything I could to review in my own way. To be different, successfully or not. And to be independent of popular schools of review methodology, very successfully. But ‘different’ is not an idea which gets accepted too fast. While writing the reviews was enjoyable, hearing ‘your reviews go over my head’ or ‘who are you reviewing for?’ or ‘give a star rating, please’ from readers was so discouraging I would feel conscious simply thinking about charging a fee. 

Till some friends (and one husband) took me by the shoulders, shook me awake and told me to not do any book reviews for free, or any writing either no matter how much you enjoy it, you idiot! Not in the name of friendship or family friends; not in the name of their God or your dog. This is your work. This is what you do! So, there were 3 and a half people who pushed me off the sagacious cliff of ‘let me earn (read justify) my buck’ to the waters of ‘you have earned your buck, crazy!’ And that was that!

Looking back, I thank them for that plunge, even though the first time I mailed my fee to a commissioning author I didn’t breathe for a while. I am glad for the push because subconsciously I was becoming what so many authors and publishers want book reviewers to be – Professional but unpaid means of publicity, which they politely call ‘feedback’. 

They convince you they trust you, implore they value your feedback, they assure you they cannot do without it before their next book and then they knot their brows in incomprehension, clear their throats and shuffle off if you say ‘Okay, I charge 1 million dollars per review.’ Or so the numbers seem to them. ‘We’ll find someone else. There are plenty around’ or worse ‘I thought she was my friend. Sob sob’. 

A friend who should not dare to contribute to her family income, or collect funds towards her next hair cut? Hm. 

Why I do not review books for free?

1. Time – Just like you, I don’t have a big slice of this cheesecake just to myself. Of course, I have no office to go to, but there is a reason I work from home, right? A book review typically means reading the book 8 am – 11 am (apart from bathing, minding house, managing maid, getting ready for school to pick up my kid) and then 3 pm – 5 pm (fighting bone-tiredness, sleep, heat, lethargy, season’s vagaries, empty stomach sometimes since after feeding kid who wants to cook for oneself?). I have tried to read post-dinner, but I have a family. And I never can extricate myself from the bed-TV madness that we like to indulge in. It's valuable "personal time" to me. One book may take three days to read and another three to write review. Weekends included! That is a lot of time, considering I could have written a few articles for my column, done some posts for the blog or simply trimmed my nails, shaved my head or joined a meditation camp and laughed my lungs out. I did not. I had a book to review. And I spent a good amount of time at it. 

2. Effort – c.f. Point 1. Add a few thousand units of Horse Power to it.

3. Respecting another’s worth – And this is the most important thing we are missing in our lives. Even if we recognize another’s work’s worth, we don’t want to respect it. Yes, I am linking respect to money because a fee acknowledges your talent and encourages it too. Some authors who mail sing my praises, but zip it up when I say ‘all reviews are commissioned’. They go away, feeling ‘uncomfortable.’ There are many who do not even respond to the mail mentioning the fee. Why do we want services for free, when we ourselves wouldn’t sit on a television panel like a famous authorial voice on human liberty without asking ‘Do you pay an honorarium?’ Is the idea of availing cheap/free labour so built into our systems that we cannot acknowledge worthiness over nothing? Or is it, rather disturbingly, that we have created invisible pyramids of socio-professional hierarchies in the writing world too where the author is just below the publisher but far, far above a puny book reviewer. And grass can’t be a tigress, how dare she roar and decide to be a chooser!

[I look at that poor sarkari driver my neighbour feels comfortable to call, even on Sundays, assuming he has nothing to do with his own family, but take the officer's out for a picnic in the Lodhi Gardens. All day. Assuming he doesn't need personal time. And then, what compensation can suffice for taking a husband or a dad away from his chutti at home, or a man away from his bed? I look at him, and I empathize. He's not expected to ask for that compensation. It rings a bell.]

Authors are putting in sacks of money to promote their books. They forgo royalty, pay literary agents to polish and pitch their books, hire digital media experts to promote it and sell a few family heirlooms (or wear them) to stand behind their books like a mother would behind her chick running the first race in KG. I can understand that pride, and wish someday my pen gives me the opportunity to feel it too, but I cannot fathom the ‘discomfort’ in paying for another’s time, effort and worthy work to do with something so dear to them.

Am I trying to convert those book reviewers who, like me once, are too afraid to ask for a sum? No. But do I wish them to get converted to this side of the fence, where remuneration for writing and reviewing should reflect the effort, time and even talent that they put in? Yes! 

The season’s or its end’s sales are in the malls. Your souls won’t read ‘sold’ just because you asked for a fee. Let there be no ‘discomfort’! 

On either side of the fence. 

'No Boring Babu'; Outlook's Irresponsible Journalism

Exactly a day after the world witnessed the humongous response to #SelfieWithDaughter, seemingly joining hands to support daughters in particular and promote gender equality in general, I read this piece in Outlook India’s Deep Throat Column, by a female journalist. Read:

“No Boring Babu

The portfolio of a junior bureaucrat, who is posted in the Telan­gana CM’s office, is a mystery. She used to be posted in a district earlier. But things changed all of a sudden after the elections. The lady is present at every meeting and seen in almost every official photograph sent out by the CMO. But what she does exa­ctly is a puzzle. She makes a fas­h­ion sta­tement with her lovely saris and serves as “eye candy” at meetings, admit leading party politicians. In fact, it’s this burea­ucrat who calls up other officials in the CMO and asks them to come for meetings. She knows exactly what time the CM will arrive and leave the office. The lovely lady, known for her ethnic style, recen­tly stunned all by appearing in a trendy trouser and frilly top at a fashion show. And for once, she wasn’t sitting in an official meeting. But this appearance too made for a great photo op.”

It also carried a cartoon, which was later removed.

Do you too think this is troubling, sexist and full of insinuations? Made more shocking by the fact that it is Outlook India printing this? (Alas! Like fools we cling to the hope that some reputed media houses are free from the scum of sensationalism.) 

The young IAS officer under question, Smita Sabharwal, had qualified in the UPSC exams with an AIR 4 back in 2001. (Yes, that means she’s been in service for 14 long years, something that the journalist would not have called ‘junior’ if it was her own profession being talked about.) Presently she is Additional Secretary to the CM of Telangana, Hyderabad. Over 2.5 years the district she was collector of, before coming to the CMO’s office, saw visible changes for the better. Residents of Medak and Karimnagar swear by her honesty, her dedication and her work. They responded to this piece of irresponsible journalism by talking about programs and processes she initiated and executed. 

Thank god for that. Else, I may have lapped up Deep Throat’s journalistic innuendos verbatim over dinner tonight, creating my very own version of this soap-y "truth"!

Which, actually, is a habit we as people are coming to enjoy; that of swallowing-without-chewing news which at best is half-concocted and at its worst fully false and even defamatory. Three humour pieces, 30 status updates and 300 tweets on any issue of socio-political import are created and shared only by looking at the breaking headlines. Who has time to wait for the real news to come in, which, when it does after a few days of replayed tamasha on TV, is something no one is interested in? Of course we need the press. But it’s time we asked ourselves - Are we giving the media too much importance? Are we laying at their feet the thinking caps we were all born with? And, are we killing with it our ability to critically examine, argue and really draw out a thought-process instead of hammering on tables because apparently the ‘nation wants to know’ and it’s always comfortable to take a #tag’s side? 

The nation does want to know. It should. But from whom? Now that is a question. 

What is the nation if not the people who inhabit it? That’s another question. Look at the language contained in the few lines of this article. By a woman, for a woman, sans proof, sans responsibility but with an over-dose of sly insinuations. (If the journalist was playing Taboo and was not to use the word ‘slut’, she’d had won with flying colours!) It isn’t Smita making for a ‘great photo-op’. It’s the ignoble parade of most media houses which slut-shame even as they try to be pillars for exposing unfairness and injustice. It disturbs me that educated professionals from a sex we’re trying to uplift have no qualms deconstructing clothes and provoking lines of thought based on invented reasons. Would this have occupied news space if this Additional Secretary was a man? The journalist didn’t feel the need to do her ground work before talking about another woman. All she needed to do was ask politicians about this ‘not boring’ “eye candy” and create mystery around a woman who ‘knows exactly what time the CM will arrive and leave office’. And it gets published! 

What role is journalism playing here, really?

I do wonder why this surprises me and angers me still - this gall, this utter lack of respect towards public servants, for instance, and a fellow human being at large. If it isn’t already fashionable to misread, mock and malign them with each passing prime time, it will be. Just like it is already in vogue to find the easiest scapegoat, the government, to disown our responsibilities as citizens . Please tell me how we as a collective seeking services motivate the ones who are working up good in the yellow corridors? By playing with their dignity, with as much liberty as we use to make police uniforms dance to item numbers in movies? Does few-and-far-between mean naught when it comes to good officers? 

And if it’s their job to serve you, pray, what is yours?   

I don't know Smita and know not how this story will unfold, but at a larger level I do know that no matter how many like her, #DespiteBeingAWoman, work their years away in public service, popular journalism will read and look like exactly this above. Because as a nation what we don’t want to know is where we as people are responsible, or even where we are being irresponsibly spoon-fed tasteless food 24X7. 

Our taste-buds have been that dumbed down, and our antennae for Trending News always on alert. Not a good combination, don't you think? 

Balls!

Have the balls?

Okay, here, have the balls!

There’s this rickshaw puller I know because he is usually standing outside our society’s B-Gate (the one near the Mother Dairy with the seller who never, ever parts with his change). I know him as much as you know yours. Which is to say, I recognize him, I am sure he never charges a penny extra and also he’s usually standing free. No, I don’t know his name but I know he’s missing a thumb. Guilt at wrinkled hands clutching the rubber handles of a rickety rickshaw keeps riders at bay. Guilt. Or maybe they are in a hurry and those battery autos are faster, cooler and cheaper than yellow-green ones. Today afternoon, he was taking me to the other, farther Mother Dairy because the guy at this one (you know who never gives change) also never kept packet-wala-dahi – cheaper and better for raita. The rickshaw had just squeaked alive and started moving when hot, hot winds slapped my face. Looked down to escape the burn to see two pairs of burnt, dark, toned, hairless legs pushing pedals with the might of sweat. And blood. I don’t know what made me but I asked him something which meant ‘Till when will you do this?’ as I asked him to wait. His wide smile told me two things – 1. It was a silly question, a naïve one, coming from someone who has a family back home. 2. He has only three teeth on the top and one below. He said – ‘Till I fall asleep in this rickshaw, madam. Akele akele savari kaengey phir.’

And we still think Fortitude comes from a brown, crinkled, ultra-sensitive sac of the male organ. 

A 60-year-old woman, mother to my maid, had a uterus she should be proud of. It took so much battering and pounding! Oh, you know, the B/W movie reel of three girls, then equal number of miscarriages, then one boy and by then a simple fever of the boy being attributed to the weakness of the womb and all that by a husband who drank, and drank, till he had sex with her, peed and slept. Wanted another kid, a stronger idea of a boy who suckled less. You must have heard that a zillion times over. Same story, different setting, different husbands, same weak-wombs. You know what she did? ‘Enough!’ she must have silently screamed one day when she stole his drink money to go get a Copper T inserted. ‘This is it, you swine!’ I imagined her screaming, when I heard this story over left-over aloo-kachori my maid was enjoying on a stool, under the fan. Then, what happened when he learnt? ‘Phir kya thaa. Bachha-daani bhi bach gayi, aur aurton mein izzat bhi badh gayi.’ She lived like a Queen. He slapped her, of course. But rumour has it that at the commons that night he cried like a baby. Like a baby boy.    

And we still think Courage is born in a brown, crinkled, ultra-sensitive sac of the male organ.

Nope. 

Neither got away from the drudgery, really. So clapping at this point and assuming a “happily ever after” would be silly. Like the hands of a clock they were stuck to a point, forever damned to go round-and-round, keeping time mostly for others, that too. Hm. 

You know the Myth of Sisyphus? The holy Gods decided to punish him, one day. (Let’s not go into details. Just know that mostly punishments are unfair!) So, this Sisyphus, he was doomed for eternity to push a rock up a mountain. On reaching the top, the rock would roll down again, leaving Sisyphus to start over. Sisyphus knew this would happen and yet he would begin all over again. Silly, sissy, stuck man. Oh, the absurdity of life! But what was he really doing by beginning all over again? One, acknowledging that a better life, truth, comfort, respect would come in one day because it does exist. Two, accepting what is, but with the strength and hope to push the rock back up again, despite knowing his own and the rock's fate. What must it have taken, imagine. Imagine!

Nah. Even this philosophical, fate-surpassing, looking-Gods-in-the-eye, I’m-fine-really idea did not emerge from the sac under question. 

It all really comes from some place else. And we’re still at ‘Have the balls!’ to show your might. 

Thankfully, I have none! 

Phew!

Cuss Fuss; My Storm in My Tea Cup

The debate around the AIB controversy has at least three distinct levels of discourse that many commentaries have confused. 

1. The first is how one judges the use of language, gestures, humour, etc. (of the kind the show used) in one’s personal lives and the levels of moderation or excess that go with it.

2. The second is how one judges the content as that of a stage show or internet video. This is quite different from the test of use in personal context. To explain, one might thoroughly enjoy watching murder mysteries on TV without being in the habit of going around town slaying people or being too fond of getting butchered either.

3. The third is, where one draws the line on the right to free speech. One may not, while disapproving of a certain content, subscribe to the belief that others should be deprived of the right to access it or even approve of it. People may also have different opinions on when curbs on the right to free speech should kick in, or whether they should at all.

This post does not aim to defend the ban or support the FIR filed against AIB, nor is it about how I like or dislike the show per se. While the show and the ensuing discussions have been a catalyst for this, this is in defence of my personal preferred idea of language use and abuse. To be clear, this is only about point 1 that I mention above. The views were arrived at much before the show and its controversy came about. In tragic irony, I have to splatter this post with the choicest expletives. Forgive, or enjoy, as your personal taste may be. 

First.

No. No. No. Preferring communication sans expletives does not mean an attempt at holiness. Why should it, unless those who like speaking a different language take their own ways to be banal? Thus, just like there is nothing immoral in cussing, so is there nothing moral in not cussing. After all, a loud ‘Hai Ram!’ and a face-palm ‘Hey Bhagwan!’ have expressed many generations’ frustrations, rather successfully. So, if one is making a choice about how they like to speak and be spoken with, wherein comes the need to undo your blessed loincloth or wrap it around another? 

Fun and funny.

Mine is what you proverbially call a big, fat, Punjabi family, with branches in every corner of the world and roots going as far back as swinging primates on trees, just like yours. The family is so scattered that any get together is bound to be teeming with equal measure of excited loudness and shared ranting. To be fair, I pick one aunt from my maternal side and one uncle from my father’s side to express my point that it is possible to vent frustration and be humourous, both, without necessarily going  dirty.

Uncle’s favourite rant-phrase was ‘Batao ji?!’ coupled with both palms facing Heavenwards in front of his belly, a perfect sphere responsible for keeping his arms out-stretched when he gestured thus. His phrase was spoken in the angriest of times, say when a fake insurance company swindled some lakhs off him, as well as in humour or even mock-ire. That as children we giggled on both is a different matter. That as an adult I realize the successful grown-up reaction it received remains the point now.   

‘Kee dassaan’ (What to say) is what aunty was heard using in fun and serious times. How these two Punjabi words came to change in intonation decided how they were received. In her most troubled times as well as in her angriest she would say this with necessary amount of force combined with the whole story. She expressed, was understood, taken seriously and helped in return too.

These people’s dates of birth and the use of archaic expressions show they are very old, but the expressions they chose to vent or celebrate give them a unique timelessness that a ‘Chutiya’ punctuating fool can never boast of. 

Fuck you. Fashion.

Interestingly, ‘Fuck You!’ is a magic phrase. It is malleable, ductile and still enamel-hard to withstand as many contexts of usage as are known. It can be used as any punctuation mark, article, adverb and in some cases as a middle name too. Obviously then, one would think a person like me a fool to not want to use it in its various intellectual avatars. But I do want to keep it at bay. Not because I hate sex (I love it!) but because there is enough of it, in all the wrong forms, transpiring around in shady corners of cities. 

At a subliminal level most expletives are not simply sexual but carry a violent imagery too. A well-expressed ‘Fuck you!’ no matter how much stress it relieves, is disposing of the other’s presence by a threat which attaches disgust to the very act which got you into the world from your mumma’s ‘choot’. Its translation into an action, hyperbolically, will probably be a synonym of rape? 

I asked myself – Do I want to attach significance to something that is so difficult to see apart from the most common head line in India’s rape capital (Behen chod and madar chod are real people)? Will I take it calmly if not my elite best friend but a stranger on the road uses it for me? And, am I so far gone in the ability to use a language that I cannot recall any other way to express anger, frustration, happiness, sadness, anything except a ‘Fuck you!’ or versions which bring into the limelight genitals of humans, cows, etc? Phew. No.  

At a larger level, are we also promoting the same social and sarkari hypocrisy we want to do away with when we “encourage” a peer to use it to and then go home to his and our respected parents with a finger on our lips?

Futility.

What does a foul-mouth get us? Of course, it shows the world that we are either anpadh-ganvaar or cool-dude, entirely depending on the class and status of the user. Because we are like that only and Hindi gaali users are just lowlife roaming the streets and we are just good family people keeping up with the times chill yaar. Okay. Good for you. But what else? 

Don’t know about you, but I am unable to take chronic expletive users seriously. Poor dears could just be bemoaning how their wives left them but somehow I cannot stop myself from counting his ‘behen ka land’s while he narrates his story. While I manage to offer my sympathy I also wish to send them to a Dolly Bindra or Masterchef’s Krissi, who would have big shoulders to lend in understanding – well-versed in cussing through loud mouths, often making people de-recognize their talent and beep their presence away. 

So, not always do expletives make you seem cool. Often, they make you misunderstood.  

Family.

I want the government to understand that I should be allowed to watch what’s coming on TV. But equally importantly I want the people to understand that there is a certain way of communication that I find more effective, and enjoyable than others. Because, while I can turn off the noise on the idiot box, how do I turn off the idiots around me? 

My idea of family values, culture and even debauchery is quite different from my parents’ – not just because I live in a different time but also because I arrived at newer values to follow in conference with those who I live with now. But we have chosen to live a certain way, just like some others have embraced their own ways. Neither is one way ancient nor the other modern. It is a choice, a basic choice that all are allowed to make. 

Goody Shoes

How important the idea of Family becomes.

Every night when we polish these shoes we repeat to our child something that was repeated to us, and which we see no need to reject even though times have paced on - that the part of the shoe that needs to be most polished is the one that stands inside it and that one need not follow ‘friendly fashion’ or even the authorities’ ‘forced discipline’. One needs to follow what is most important to oneself, away from the glamour of clamour.

One day, my child will move on and beyond our umbrella and follow the latest on the communication vine. He will ask of me to grow-up with him. I plan to. And so I will try. But something tells me that I will never grow up enough to have the heart or the hypocrisy to accept my son saying ‘Fuck off!’ to me, without cringing and crying inwardly.

That will be another story. Another day. Maybe. Fuss about cuss, yet again, but still entirely my storm in my tiny tea cup.

Run! It’s a keloid!

Leaving a woman’s body alone is the single most difficult task that the world is faced with. If it isn’t about dictating how much skin they show or commenting on how dark the colour of that skin, it is about the marks on it. You know, scars, spots, scabs, specks, stains, and all those tiny-to-big announcements, that a woman’s body is imperfect in some way. Um, defective is another word that comes to mind, especially if I recall their expressions on looking at my keloid.

Heard of keloid? Sounds deadly, doesn’t it? It isn’t, but if the common man’s gaze at my upper chest is to be believed the butterfly shaped keloid there is but the very disease that will bring mankind to its end and let them cockroaches rule. Some withdraw their hands as soon as they see it, disturbing the handshake midway and whispering something like ‘What is that?’ as if they see an alien perched there. Some others, because they like to be right even if rude, pronounce a kind ‘Ugh!’ before they ask me to ‘get it removed, ya!’ Very few have directly asked me (though everyone must have thought of this), with bated breath and the adrenal gland ready for flight, ‘Are they contagious?’ The list of those asking me to ‘keep it covered, why show it’ is the longest, but going by the dimwitted gaze my butterfly invites I guess they must mean well. Plus, how confusing I used to find it once to figure out what exactly they were staring at! 

Only one asked me to get a funky tattoo around it and flaunt its exclusivity. Him I married, even though the idea was ‘preposterous!’ according to a medical doctor (Of the tattoo, not the marriage!).

In short, if my keloid had eyes it would either be squirming with all the unwanted attention or have been a properly spoilt brat by now. Except, it isn’t anything more than collagen cells out camping under a shiny, red ‘tent’. In summers the cells hold a BBQ party and gosh it itches whereas most other times they hate to be disturbed and prick at the slightest rub of a necklace or seatbelt. Funny ones, these guys, who have successfully baffled doctors I consulted as to their mysterious appearance. No injury, no surgery, and I’m not even from the highly pigmented ethnic groups which are 15 times more likely to get them. Anyway, some suspense in life is good!

What isn’t good? This obsession with perfection we seek in others. 

Remember when the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai put on baby weight and we went ballistic creating humour around her more-rounded personality? We had so much time on our hands, yet not a second to spare to give a second look to our own loving mothers’ girths at home. With puckered noses we pronounce ‘Madhuri looks so old now’ and with equally crinkled noses we say ‘What has Sri Devi done to her face!’ Why go Stardust? Look around in your park! Someone’s baby has unfortunately got his mother’s wheatish complexion, someone’s daughter-in-law has hair like a broom, someone’s daughter needs to mind her weight and yet another’s needs to put some on around her thighs or else ‘they will say your parents don’t feed you’. One was pushed for Lasik to get her spectacles removed the other is struggling to hide her acne under a ton of concealer. And in the process, the little girl who got a burn mark on her arm because she was keeping her kid brother from getting hurt by the hot iron is gradually feeling ashamed of having got it! 

Some scars can have stories. No, actually all scars do!

I remember reading at a popular handloom store how every missed knot in the knit, an extra print or a change in the thread’s sequence is not imperfection but simply a part of pattern which need not fit convention. Like a break, a breather and a point to celebrate. Much like marks and scars on our bodies. African American writers have celebrated those in their works and on their characters as symbols of not just struggle but also survival. A fading whip lash on the back, slashes near the lip where the bit was used or wounds on shoulders carrying the white man’s harvest.

Remove layers of your own clothing and make-up. Bare your own shoulders and tanned backs and look closer at your stretch-marked legs. You will feel so free you will wonder if we really need to cover the countless signs our lives and roles have left on our very human bodies. Is there reason to feel ashamed? Even more, is there reason to make others feel ashamed, enough to scar their minds?

I had no idea when I first spotted a tiny red mound near my neck that it wasn’t a spider lick or a mosquito bite gone wrong. I had no idea it would grow and grow and eventually ‘grow wings’ and become what they call a butterfly keloid for the world to see. But most importantly, I had no idea how an inch of collagen on the neck could become my personal touchstone to know real concern from fake reactions, and real people from all the rest. Perhaps that is why it is called a Butterfly Keloid. If helped fly my mind away from the unabashed and limiting gaze that women’s bodies live surrounded with and find reason to accept and be proud of my own skin.

So saying it once and for all, yes, I love to bare my keloid to the world! Want to know more? I’m thinking of wearing a boob tube and low waist pants to walk around flaunting my C-sec mark, among others. Is there a 6-stitches long surgery keloid there too? Hey, does it matter? It’s a scar.

A SCAR!

Just run for your lives, will you?

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was  - Tattoo … you? - Do you have a tattoo? If so, what’s the story behind your ink? If you don’t have a tattoo, what might you consider getting emblazoned on your skin?]

The fault in our laughs, on Karvachauth

Let me begin this post by a status update Sfurti Sinha shared on the morning of the Karvachauth fast. 

‘Whether I am fasting or not - NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Whether my husband is fasting or not - NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. My life is mine, not yours. You are not in my marriage. Freedom and equality in true sense means choosing whatever I want to do, whatever makes sense to me. There is a fine line between having an opinion and sounding judgemental. Your opinions should be the basis your life, they shouldn't sound like a judgement on others.’

On a day when she had much else to take care of, Sfurti was ‘driven’ to vent publicly thus. If I wasn’t around in the same place last year, I would not have understood why. But I was. So in a way, I have been meaning to write this post since a year now. I waited because I wanted to see if rituals other than Karvachauth garnered loud amused laughter too. Not that I noticed any and certainly not equal in magnitude to the humour that surrounds a woman observing a fast for her husband. 

Here is me now, thinking aloud.

Humour is important. We have all read its various forms in different genres of different media. For instance, Theatre has used ‘uncomfortable laughter’ in the audience as a way to hold a mirror to their lives – political, social and even marital. Slapstick comedy shows a man slipping on a banana peel with similar intent; it could be you up there. Scatological references make us laugh because shit and spit is best seen on the other’s person. On television, we see stand-up humour including in its funny tentacles commentary on the government, the news channels and the entertainment industry.

While humour in the various arts was named and came with a larger purpose, the picture in the tweeting-updating social media is often like a mock-epic of what was once classic. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is no crime, but then really, what may be the point? Except wondering at the end of a virally-sharing day - whose line was it anyway?

On Karvachauth day, it doesn’t take much to realize that loose laughter is not just directed at the patriarchal ritual of fasting for a husband. The butts of the jokes become the women following it. Those laughing? The women who do not believe in it, of course. While what’s between the husband and the wife stays where it is supposed to, between them, everything else associated with Karvachauth occupies centre stage and space in the minds of those who have half-baked ideas about the ritual and none whatsoever about the fasting woman’s idea of it.

Thinking …

Is poking fun the best way to ‘guide’ a woman out of a deep-rooted patriarchal discourse? Isn’t it as unfair a ‘peer pressure’ as was given to her by those who made her embrace those traditions in the first place? How does our lackadaisical ‘promotion’ of an antithetical thought-process towards a redundant tradition differ in lack-of-substance from the stoical one of far Right. Are we, in our fun and games, creating but a poorer alternative even if at the other end of the spectrum? It is for this reason that I liked #FastForHer movement. It did nothing to do away with the day. But for now, it got men into the fray. A constructive step towards re-examining the necessity of it all by being a part of it. From inside the circle. A much better, more understanding way, to reverse trends. More sensitive too. 

Because …

We are not providing that line-towing woman sensible alternatives to a symbolism codified over generations, one she has believed in and which provides her with comfort. A kitty of jokes may get us a few giggling followers, but nothing more. The shell we want to break is built on three very thick layers – obedience, belief and comfort. If we are so desperate to break it, we'll need to know more about it.

But, why do we laugh?

Are we, in the larger scheme of things, trying to show her sense or poke fun at what we see as obsoleteness that she surrounds herself with? A bid of one-upmanship and modernity, maybe.  At the same time, furthering lines of difference based on our ideas of modern and ancient, tradition and revolution. Disservice is what we are doing, by making her feel outdated, conscious, stuck and worst of all outcast in lobbies which don’t fast. When the idea of feminism grew this mocking army amidst all the painstakingly-built theories and practice I know not, but I wish we remember what the movement we so glibly use essentially stood for. One word – Choice, as Sfurti’s status above signifies. 

Interestingly …

The tray that a woman carries for her Karvachauth puja holds a few symbols of matrimony. Most of those objects are found in most women’s dressing drawers that you and I anyway may use as a matter of routine, or during festive times. The difference is, she wants to spend a day with them while you may freely reserve the biggest bindis for your designer saris or Durga Puja times. (Yes, you may include that idea of a parlour visit in this, which for so many is one of the greatest social outlets in a year). To not eat is not so much of a suffering as it is made out to be, that too by those who are eating their three meals anyway. Concern doesn’t mock. It helps. But first, it has to try to understand what is wrong to understand the ‘victim’ of it all.

Did you who jest know … 

We don’t have to dress up as brides on Karvachauth. We don’t need to use sieves to look at the moon. Henna is not compulsory and neither is touching the husband's feet. I blame popular media for propagating limited understanding of this tradition. Which does mean, more groundwork needs to be done before the laughing party decides to become a mouthpiece carrying the cause of fasting women on its shoulders.

Manjulika did this for her mother-in-law.

Tanya created 'American Karvas'.

I think … 

Humour cannot alone help cut through years of nurture. Not even shake the idea of obedience to elders and fear of Gods; especially for rituals created around husbands’ well-being, because they are based on a relationship. It also will never stand ground against the idea of Choice, which women like me make when we decide to fast or not fast. If we are to liberate minds, we need to show them how our freedoms are worthy of emulation. In all the mindless cackling, the voices of sanity who seek to deliver women from coerced and oppressive rituals get drowned and lost. 

We need to question traditions to see how they affect gender narratives and we need to reinvent some of them to better suit the changing times, or do away with those which we no longer agree with. How we do it is the point, and the key to it is in each one of our hands or in our homes.  Read these lines shared by Hrishikesh Bawa:

“Fasting does not lead to anything … Love and respect for each other is more important," said a woman’s mother-in-law to her. I think a hero is not just the guerilla rebel. Sometimes, she is the one who is a part of the system too. Likewise, the one who impulsively jumps out of the ancient window might just have been a hasty fool.

This was probably my last year of observing this fast. My husband’s tank of patience with it is full. I no longer have to give company to my mother-in-law – in deed or in spirit – by not eating with her and enjoying the evening katha too. Next time, I will probably go to the other side of the fence, well aware of what made me follow the Karvachauth ritual and promising myself not to forget it. Perhaps, that will help me remain sensitive towards those who wish to do as they please.

Because you know as well as I do how private choices get played with on public trampolines all in the name of jest.

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Community Service - Your entire community — however you define that; your hometown, your neighborhood, your family, your colleagues — is guaranteed to read your blog tomorrow. Write the post you’d like them all to see.]

The Stat Connection is Opinion

I have been actively blogging for just over a year now. It was in the spring of 2013 when weather-happy fingers found a topic a day to pore over and then pour out and onto my online space I call ‘Between Write and Wrong’. I was so regular with writing whatever came to mind that some months down I wonder if it’s age, stage or a combination of both that has made my posts' flow go from a broken barrage to one which is manned and optimized to about two posts a week. Be that as it may, this is my 180th post. And after writing on whatever became visible under the shining Sun, today I sit for the first time to see why the top posts on my blog are the ones which are. Should be quite telling about what readers like to read, or what I am good at.

In descending order of popularity, here they are:

1. Sounding the Red Siren Against Sexual Abuse – this post was written to add my voice to Protsahan and Unicef’s fight against sexual abuse. I had shared a personal experience of meeting a sexually abused girl in a Jhuggi Jhopri Shishu Mandir I taught in while still in college.

2. Oh Chetan Bhagat! Read what you write – A rebuttal post to Bhagat’s published opinions about women, men, work, home, cooking, marriage, children, you get the drift! Yes, I was disagreeing with him.

3. Book Review – Sita’s Curse by Sreemoyee Piu Kundu – This book review of a feminist erotica was written a few weeks back but seems to be grabbing enough eye balls to be the third most popular post. Not just sex, talk of sex sells too, it seems.

4. An Open Letter to Educated Indians – One of my favourite posts from my pen. An opinion editorial as a civil servant’s wife, talking about how the rot is not just in the bureaucratic “system” but within us as citizens seeking services too. As honest as it could get!

5. The Tamasha of Birth and Death – The most spontaneous post on my blog. Ringing true like a personal rant and talking about the circus (of rituals and superstitions, terms and conditions) Indian society surrounds birth and death with.

What is common to all these posts? Opinion. About society hiding faces of sexual abuse or about citizenry bribing the tax collector while cursing corruption at India Gate. About a book which talks of sex or a man who talks about everything cooking in his head and serving it semi-baked. Opinions, all. And they seem to be read the most on my blog. Liked or not is a different matter, but then, that is the power of any opinion – it sells, nonetheless, takers or no takers.

We all have an opinion about anything that can be opined about, which in turn means everything. And why not! Free speech, free thoughts, freedom to express and free air time are some of the molecules that complete the structure of free will. It is good to have an opinion. It means, primarily, that we can think, we can reason, we can look in all eight directions, raise the grass in pincer clasp and release it to know which direction the wind is blowing from. And then, tell the world that it is blowing from the right or blowing totally wrong. Our opinion is like our gold star on a popular pavement, not as unique as our fingerprint, but ours.  

However, is it that easy to be pregnant with exclusive opinion? To be able to turn down the volume of screaming masses around or disconnect the social headphones altogether and think on your own? In an ivory tower, or at your desk, reading-researching-recording the real stories and our thoughts removed from the voices spoon feeding our heads?  Feeding – in the name of fashion or populism, conformism or revolution, nurture or membership, rebellion or discipline? It’s not easy, perhaps almost unnatural to even expect so from our own selves. They say nothing in this world is original and also that man is a social animal and …

… and a complete animal sometimes in how he dispenses with these opinions, some formed mostly borrowed – in words or through action. Over drinks in a drawing room with body language going down the flush or discussions on Twitter with Arnab in the background and 80-120 threatening to burst open the aorta, while the art of “gathering” an opinion has been honed to perfection the artistry (also called civility) of speaking it out is fast receding into loud chaos. Almost as if we cannot let another speak, because we do not want to hear a different point of view or even our own point of view from a different mouth, for how dare he echo me! It is becoming increasingly difficult to be challenged in our thoughts, because we think "we opine, and therefore we are". That opinions make us, form our complete identity. But then, doesn't how we spread them seem important too, as does the intent behind the cussing? Such a strange thought comes to mind and says the ‘how you say it’ is the shoe and the ‘what you say’ the man standing inside it. And the whole arrangement needs to be polished. Know what I mean? 

And look how I opine, about opinions. I am no less. So now, laying the blame on the top 5 posts on my blog and the yarn of thoughts they spun, off I go to switch on the television and see who slapped whom, and who all are slapping each other in celebration of it. I promise to sit through it and try to chew my own cud. Sometimes, I too cannot swallow it and call it 'opinion-I-ate-it' but itch to spit it out in the form of another opinion post and a tiara we all proudly wear - called 'opinionated'!

Maybe it will make it to the top slot too, one day?

[WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - The stat connection - Go to your Stats page and check your top three-five posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it.]  

Advert-ently wrong? Honda City’s latest advert

Remember Cibaca Toothpaste? I do. Not the paste’s taste or how it helped make my pearly whites even whiter. I remember, as a child, I used to open the box for the tiny rubber animals that popped out as freebies. Despite the fact that all animals looked like dinosaurs even when they were meant to be something else entirely. Still, till the offer was ‘open till stocks last’, my family used Cibaca. Two members out of four were hooked to it, after all.

And that phase of 7Up challenges? You collected a certain number of those rings inside the metal caps, snail mailed and claimed goodies like magic coins and fancy straws. What a rage it was! I don’t remember drinking that much 7Up, but I do remember managing a museum of ‘collector’s items’, the biggest one in the colony. But Maggi I ate, all of it, for the empty packets got me fish stamps to feel like an unbeatable philatelist.

But today, my perception of the consumer’s world has changed. I view things differently, not because I am no longer a child but also because I am a mother to a child. And when you bring that role in, just about anything in today’s times transforms into a big warty ogre out to gobble up your little one’s mind. This, mostly through the crystal clear high-definition TV sets that make life flash before our kids’ eyes. And most irresponsibly through the strange advertisements that occupy a large chunk of our viewing time.

Today, it’s Honda City’s latest advert ‘Masha Allah – The Greater Drive’, which amazes me and scares me – for its nonsensical premise and its intent to influence my child’s mind, respectively.

[To read more, please click here.]

Beating the Written Word to Pulp

When I was a child, I would see my mother giving Mills and Boon to my older cousins. They would banter about the ‘stories’ and I would look at the cover, and blush. A man and a woman in a semi-hug, eyes half closed and expressions of physical love. ‘Why were they reading this?’ I would wonder. In school, surrounded by Patrician Brothers and all things disciplined, the library was a “holy” place. And Blyton to Drew to Wodehouse to maybe Robin Cook to Quiz books to perhaps Jeffrey Archer to definitely Limca Book of Records a traditionally set way. Sidney Sheldon exchanged hands between friends and Harold Robbins only in the inner circle. Blush and hush remained, somewhat. I read the classics, felt safe and sane. And a prudish Miss Muffet too.  

It was on the very first day of pledging 5 whole academic years to studying Literature that I was made to grow up. A professor distributed ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, aghast that we had not read it. Suddenly, the sword meant the male organ in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and all references to ‘pen’ and ‘orbs’ in ‘MacFlecknoe’ were exactly those too. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was a political satire and George Eliot was actually a woman, writing under a male pseudonym. So many wrote hidden in attics away from all eyes, and an equal number put sex and their sexuality out there just as they deemed fit. I was amazed.

I read Literatures from all continents, and I gradually grew. Not just away from the blush but into a woman who now realized the importance of that Voice – behind the printed word, and in between the written lines. The politics of Silencing too! Reality unfolded, and not just the art of expression but the Right to Express took on a new meaning. And the right to be Read. Just like raising your hand and getting a chance to answer was important to a child’s evolving mind, so was picking up that pen and letting it write for you what the mind held inside. For so many, that moment between the pen and the paper meant reclaiming a sense of Self, true bits of it that social norms and graces often stole away.

And I was introduced to the idea of a ‘Banned Book’, much like the letter ‘A’ in scarlet an adulteress was supposed to wear on her lapel once...

[To read further, please click here.]

Season of Light - AAP and Us

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.’

Who would have thought that Dickens’s opening line for ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ written during the French Revolution would reverberate with such topical relevance so many centuries later. Today, a revolution of sorts is brewing on our home turf, with its epicentre in Delhi but with ramifications far exceeding its geographical boundary, or any boundary. While it digs its heels firmly into the ground to prop itself up fully, there continues a coexistence of hope and despair, wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity. You read that right! Hope, belief and wisdom have made a comeback in the political sphere. And you know why.

‘Season of Light’

The Aam Aadmi Party stands for change – an ideological one that has been brought about already when voters gave them 28 seats, and more that is to follow as they proceed on their promises. After ages, democracy is being spoken about in a language that befits the idea. The electorate is looking for direct participation in the running of our country. This, combined with the anti-corruption platform AAP offers, is what brought the hope back in our political lives. AAP emerges as our mouth piece, voicing our age-old concerns and issues and promising to deliver in the real world, rather than the world that (mal)functions behind closed doors marked VIP or that which refuses to go beyond futile rhetoric of election speeches. 

As grand and often unrealistic as the ideas of AAP sound, we sit today wondering, almost hoping – is this the beginning of a new way of functioning of politics, in a larger context and for all times to come? Terms which adorned books on administration are now being mouthed generously – governance, accountability and most importantly, citizen politics. And urban India is sitting at the edge of its chair, with an excited mind and of course, hope for clean and citizen-friendly governance. All this, even as it cheers a party free from any caste or class based propaganda. One which promises a crackdown on corruption across party lines, a Lokayukta with teeth and the dream of ‘swaraj’ in its modern concoction and after years of it being used for the first time. 

Indeed, this is the Season of Light. 

How, what and ‘Winter of Despair’, still?

Incredulity breeds questions, and unanswered ones lead to cynicism. Cynicism equals the feeling that we have nothing before us. A feeling that the season of darkness is here to stay, and no amount of light can shine Hope’s way through. AAP and its ideologies continue to keep a school of thought a little distant from rejoicing just as yet.

AAP’s agenda remains blanketed in confusion. Many feel that even as AAP promises clean governance, it offers nothing very concrete by way of an agenda for governance. Transparency is a way of working, not the work itself, the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’. Then, is it an easy promise to keep, that of a spotlessly clean shop? More so since cut-in-stone party ideals may not match well with every party member’s personal list of principles? What next, except rubbernecking media and powerful opposition parties swooping down on them the moment they smell a scam. The very expectations of aam junta which sat AAP on a pedestal will withdraw its hands. And we know that is something we do not want to consider as a possibility.

Doubts also abound with another aspect of ‘how’ the party intends to function - AAP’s stress on consulting people to reach decisions and forward the idea of grass root democracy. The debate of Local level versus national level (Yes, the CM is a few days old and we are thinking of a bigger tomorrow already). While implementation of health and public order can be achieved at local levels, macro issues like inflation and national security cannot be handled at local levels. Sceptics say consulting people all the time hampers rather than facilitates governance. Referendum upon referendum may turn out to be a jog on the treadmill, good for keeping the democratic mood healthy, but sans any movement ahead. 

And then, the perpetuation of the culture of subsidies, as free water and subsidized power tariff please the common man but burden the exchequer for short-term benefit, has generated mixed responses. Calling privatization ‘just a grand theft with official collusion’ has not helped either. 

Some have gone as far as to compare Kejriwal with Mamata Bannerjee, foreseeing a Bengal of Delhi, with leaders who are pro-poor, simple and connected with people but impulsive, aggressive and limited in their knowledge of how the field works. Where direct intervention for solving people’s problems is given priority over sitting and chalking our systems to be put in place for all times to come, the revolution seems to carry the tendency to burn itself out, or be forgotten in oblivion.            

Let it remain a ‘Spring of hope’ 

AAP with its 28 became a sea to reckon with, and if whispers and announcements are anything to go by, the bigger wave is yet to reach the shore of our political lives. Perhaps, to re-write that which has been documented in the colour of a dynastic quill, or one which stands clothed in saffron and not far behind. Blake said ‘without contraries there is no progress.’ Well, good to hope so, and certainly better to remember as we, on a daily basis, receive and perceive the changing face of Indian polity and assimilate our views in times where perceptions live as impulsively as they are born.

The last winter of despair need not be forgotten completely. Doubts may continue to remain, and raise newer heads each passing day. But we need to accept that things are a changing. Smell the change in this spring of hope instead. AAP has shocked us all, even as it took its own members by surprise, by sweeping to power with a unique model that challenges the traditional party system. Something that we collectively wished for has come about, thanks to you and me. Yes, thanks to us. We asked for it written all over placards and in candle marches. We found a role for ourselves in protest mode, and then as voters. 

And it does not end there. It should not! 

Even as Kejriwal and AAP continue to awaken our dormant social forces, we need to wake up to our responsibilities too. Meaningful ways to bring about social change need to be found and healthy dialogues that break accepted but obsolete norms need to be regularly held. Even as we mail the CM our complaints and lay on AAP’s shoulders the responsibility to deliver all that we desire as part of our idea of ‘change’, we need to start working on it at our own levels too. We voted the broom in, time to clean our own houses too. 

Then and only then can parties like AAP stand on their own feet – confident and inspired enough to promise and deliver, both.   

Willing-to-Work Idealism has an official address today. Let’s not fritter it away!


[The post was published on NewsYaps. It is originally written for the Project 365 aimed at posting at least once a day, based on the prompts provided. The prompt for today was "Call me Ismael - Take the first sentence from your favorite book and make it the first sentence of your post."]

To Tarun Tejpal: The Alchemist of Desires?

Mr. Tejpal,

The cat is out of the bag. While they still try to ascertain if it’s black in colour or white, the crow has certainly flown away, never to return and sit as honestly, fearlessly and with as much dignity on letters which stood for all three – TEHELKA.  

Since news is all about numbers circled in red and flashed till the lights go off, let’s begin with what your site shows me. On searching for stories on ‘sexual exploitation’ covered by Tehelka, this is what I find. What a big number! More than 500 times, you have told us the truth and nothing but the truth, be it on trafficking of little girls or the ‘saint’ Assaram losing his halo. Losing his halo. Why, makes you think, does it not?

First – What you did, allegedly 

A woman journalist has accused you of sexually assaulting her on two occasions during a media event organized by the publication in Goa, earlier this month. Let’s put it differently. A woman whose father was your colleague once, and who is good friends with your daughter – someone who ‘had so deeply respected and admired you for years.’ If you fail, it will not just be at a professional level but at a very personal level too. You also know how shamefully that failure, if at all, will come about, for it would be proven beyond doubt that you assaulted someone who considered you a ‘paternal figure … responsible for offering me my first job, and always just a phone call away whenever I needed his advice on a story or life.’ 

After the first episode of what you call in your conversations ‘a drunken banter’ ... 

[To read further, kindly click here.]