"Are you not entertained?" Or, the summer I became slave to television

"Are you not entertained?"Rang out the voice of Gladiator's Russel Crowe, mocking me on a drowsy summer afternoon as my dilated pupils momentarily focussed to see myself turning into a television debaucher. I first stood witness to the goggle-box’s sorcery, which has the power to change humans into zombies, when I was in Oman in the early 2000s. I had a month-long break from college, but my father’s teaching at his university was on so I tried to keep myself occupied when at home. In the living room sat a black box, and a remote control which deluded me into believing that I was running the show. 

My conscientious self first turned on the news. But it usually left me ragged as I tried to go through the national news and then wanting to know about the regional bits, then moving on to BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, for tales from other spots on the globe. At moments when I was off guard and forgot to remind myself about the futility of regretting the past, I realised frustratingly how much I had missed knowing, learning. I cursed myself for not having paid enough attention in my school days when my grandfather had tried to drum into me the conscious-of-her-rights-and-duties citizen’s habit of newspaper-reading. Motivation had failed me after the first few days, as I got busy with staring deep into the soulful liquid eyes of Dickensian heroes ensconced within the biscotti pages of my novel.

My father’s cable network also came with Pakistani channels, which offered better and more realistic soaps than what we had on the domestic menu in India. I found that the class divide still existed for our neighbouring creative heads, unlike in most present-day Indian soaps, which create a lot of bubbles for its audience. And then, of course, were the movies. Fox, MBC 1, MBC 2, MBC 3, MBC 4, Dubai One, City 7. Besides the regular Star Movies-HBO stuff, they also featured content that was non-mainstream but surprisingly intriguing. Or maybe boredom made me inept at distinguishing the good from the bad, as long as I had a roomful of people speaking in a frame.

Perhaps the reader would be more sympathetic to my charmed state if they knew I did not have access to cable TV all of my school life, for my family’s (not entirely misplaced?) fear it would hamper my studies. So when my classmate made a humongous card of patchwork photos and sent it to MTV’s Most Wanted Shenaz, all I had to offer was a Mickey card my friend had been sweet enough to draw in order to compensate for the artistry I lacked. I sent it to Vishal Malhotra on Disney Hour, hosted by DD Metro, a channel which was Doordarshan’s half-hearted effort to add spice to the life of its viewers). But he never flaunted it as a sign of all the love the show had been getting from its tiny tot viewers.

Anyway, during that vacation, duly wired into adulthood and satellite, the other thing to have become quite a hit with me was CSI. Thank god for re-runs. One didn’t have to wait for a week for the follow-up. One could cover the whole CSI range in a day — ‘Miami’, ‘NY’, ‘LVPD’, the whole lot. I also bumped into Bones, whose existence I was sinfully unaware of until then. I never thought I was much for blood and gore but I admit I couldn't help a mean, satisfied smirk when I noticed the grimaces of my co-spectators, on the days I had some. No matter how fictitious the contents, it was the fascinating picture dictionary I never had: “And look Dad, it talks, too!”

Indoor evenings were spent watching Munnibai’s ghazal recitals, the mention of whose gharana still makes people touch their ears in reverence. As she voiced the pining lover's ostensibly self-effacing-but-actually-narcissistic taunt-laden entreaties, it was easy to see where the effusive wah-wahs of the audience came from. After reading Naguib Mahfouz and Abdel Rehman Munif, it was one more step towards furthering my conscientious, hangdog — mea culpa-enclosed-herewith — project of privileging the Orient.

I tried to delight in all of it, hoping I was going to grace my couch less often in the future unless I planned to practise total self-abhorrence. The me-tube alliance was welcome for some time but its best-before date ultimately arrived. I could sense in myself anxiety that had been building because of feeling divorced from reality, an apprehension that I would find myself unequipped if suddenly I were to face the world outside. What takes place in the virtual world occurs at a speed that far outpaces the happenings of our comparatively humdrum existence. In order to experience in about two hours and twenty minutes a host of happy endings and complex issues that take years to truly understand, it would have to be not just an out-of-the-telly-box experience but an out-of-body one. And, therefore, pulling the plug seems such an arduous task. The minute we stop gazing at others’ lives and turn to examine our own, the oranges we were viewing on screen get rapidly muted into rust and soon mutate into dull browns. It becomes that much tougher to tolerate the monotonous and (as it appears to us) slow progression of time as part of life, after having become accustomed to gazing at animated colours accompanied by spikes engineered to shoot up at short intervals (think canned laughter).

My dreams too had been taken over by telly characters. I soon realised that whether it is televised or not, my revolution will surely not be delivered by television. I then became keener on delving into the off-screen unedited version of ‘The World As You Know’. Bill Hicks was right: “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” And I wanted my third eye up and running, as slick and in-form as Shiva’s. One must be careful not to become a passive content consumer. The more we get ensconced in the treacle of TV, the hypnotic opiate of visual entertainment, the more tenuous our tether to the real world can get.

This goes for the Internet as well, where our senses are first jolted into feeling too much and then become comatose as we float from one news piece/picture/video to another, trying to take it all in. Doing it for long and continuous hours makes us feel smaller and smaller in the ever widening web of the world. It becomes the perfect trigger for existential angst: what is the significance of our life and work in this Goliath of a universe? We start wondering about what we could do to bolster our presence there, as we become less and less present in the real world and for real people, divorced from our most immediate communities.

Years later, having learned to watch TV with a timer on, I came across little boy Jack in Emma Donoghue’s book, Room, talking about how his mommy does not let him watch too much television because it had once turned her “into a zombie that’s like a ghost but walks thump thump”. I wanted to say to him, “Well, boy, just listen to your mother on this.”

First published in thREAD, The Hindu, 13 Apr 2018.

Extra

Fidelity is a narrow construct 

Made by insecure humans.

Should I really be worrying about it,

About when you are thinking of another?

Because when you do, 

You wonder why you're thinking of an else

And not of me,

And thus think of me more than usual.

You get me flowers that day,

More than usual.

First published in Bonobology, Aug 2017.

Agatha Christie’s unassuming sleuths: How Agatha Christie’s leads broke the stereotypes around detective heroes

Sherlock Holmes, as sired by Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, is a character that is terse, dashing, and looks as competent as he is. His aide, the poor Dr Watson, has difficulty getting past the “elementary” with him. Holmes seems to rely upon little else other than mysteries to provide him the joie de vivre of life.

With this bowl of curd hung tight in the background, Agatha Christie enters the detective novel scene and starts stirring things up. Her Belgian egghead sleuth Hercule Poirot doesn’t inspire face-value confidence in his clientele. The local sheriff is prone to shooting himself when he spots Poirot’s waxed moustache twitch at the scent of evidence invisible to the cops’ naked eyes. Hercule is as particular about his egg as about his tie, and is allergic to asymmetry. Other characters take these apparent peculiarities as a mark of Poirot being out of focus, when he is actually the precise opposite. He believes in maintaining the order of things, and is greatly perturbed when a crime sets the world in disarray. With his clear goal of restoring this lost order, he proceeds through backward design and succeeds in shining the spotlight on the wrongs done and the culprit behind it.

Christie achieves a brilliant stroke in drawing Poirot’s character, because with it she proves that the hero is the chap with the “little grey cells”, not the fine grey suit. This immediately makes him more relatable to readers, makes him more human.

Poirot isn’t the only sketch, which makes look pale detectives to have come before him. Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is also the genius behind Jane Marple, in many ways an even more radical conception than that of Poirot. A frail, old, lady is not someone a person usually imagines when thinking of a nimble private eye. Christie knows this and dear Miss Marple unapologetically exploits this typecasting to her advantage. Looking for clues, she wanders into bedrooms and apologises for being lost when someone spots her. People around her expect her to gossip because she is a woman, and she doesn’t let them suspect she is onto something as she lures them with her wide eyed wonder into sharing confidences and rumours.

Tommy and Tuppence, two young investigators also produced by the author, rely on wits and not weapons. They are fallible enough to have started their careers with blackmailing.

All of these characters devised by Christie are trained by her not just to conduct a mechanised unravelling of the case but to probe into the very heart of human condition. Parker Pyne, the hero of some of her novels, “investigates” but calls himself a “heart specialist”. His advertisement is an advisory: “Are you happy? If not, consult Parker Pyne.” In some of the books, the person who decodes the mystery is not a detective at all.

Christie’s characters and their methods tell us that heroes are not extraordinary in themselves but become heroes because of what they are able to make of the ordinary with their wit, presence of mind and understanding of human nature. Neither are villains manifestations of evil descended upon the earth, which is why the author writes: “There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.” Christie shows us our potential and our possibilities through her detectives, and warns us against some of our frailties and foibles through her villains. She reminds us that it is we who make the choice each time, oftentimes by a narrow margin.

First published in Distinguished Magazine, Mar 2018.

Those who did not die

Five years after Nirbhaya's gang-rape and murder in Delhi on 16 December 2012 that made headlines all over the world, what does her village in eastern Uttar Pradesh look like? And how has it been for other women around, those who, not unlike Nirbhaya, dare to dream?

Preliminary encounters

‘Are you looking for bitiya’s [daughter's] house?’ a vegetable vendor asks as I and a writer-lawyer, my contact in Ballia, try to navigate our way into the dark alleys of the Medaura Kalan village, quite far from the highway. In this part of eastern Uttar Pradesh, the evening is scary, unrelieved by lit-up shopping centres and street crossings. People here have no idea of the evening one talks about in a city.

Named Nirbhaya (meaning "fearless") by people, the 23-year-old student whose rape and murder in December 2012 triggered huge protests all across India, was from here. In her familial village people still fondly recall her as ‘bitiya’, their daughter who had gone to the big city to pursue a career in physiotherapy but did not come home.

Instructed by a village elder, a boy of about 10 escorts us through a few narrow lanes till we reach the house, of the village chief, the pradhan. It’s here that we hope to have our initial conversation about life in the village in the shadow of a daughter’s death. The pradhan is expected to tell us where exactly to go to meet Nirbhaya’s extended family.

A boy opens the door. The ground floor is a cowshed from where we are led up the stairs. Walking up, we can hear the television belting out programmes in Bhojpuri. There’s a cot in the living room where we are asked to wait for pradhan-ji. A while later, of the two men in the inner room, one comes out to meet us.

When I start noting down his name, he protests hesitantly: ‘I mean I am not the actual pradhan, it’s my wife.’ Reservations for women in the Panchayati Raj institutions has facilitated their empowerment at the village level. In many cases though, they become mere signing authorities overshadowed by their husbands who act like the village heads. When I insist on meeting her, the husband hedges: ‘But she is not that smart, you know, in speaking and all.’ I persist saying it really doesn’t matter. His reluctance is visible. The wife, he tells me, stays in another house preferring the anonymity of the inner courtyard; this place is meant for receiving visitors and entertaining guests. But before we meet her, we have to meet the members of Nirbhaya’s family.

Bitiya’s home

Nirbhaya’s parents live in Delhi and visit their ancestral village from time to time to be with their clan. The family of her father’s brother here represents what could have been her home. Lalji Singh, her father’s uncle, is here with us. We start talking about the political parties that had come to the village after the 2012 incident. ‘The hospital that Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had promised came up,’ the elderly man says recalling how the village landscape changed in the years since. ‘But there are no doctors. We are not sure about the qualifications of the two who come to dole out medicines for cold and cough. Well, now very few medicines are left. The doctor’s quarter is still unfinished and the floor – still kutcha. The water tank is empty and there is no electricity.’

There was also talk of a school. ‘But there wasn’t enough land for that so nothing came of it.’ Lalji looked disappointed and at the same time conscious that the big focus on the back-of-the-beyond village was because of the brutalities perpetrated on Nirbhaya, her death turning into international headlines.

By now Nirbhaya’s aunt, along with the actual village head, and some other villagers, have gathered around us. People of the village remember and keep counting the promises that had been made, like a road connecting the village to the primary school. ‘That’s right,’ Lalji says. ‘But the people who came to build the road messed up. They started laying the road at one place and the building material landed up in another village.’ He recalls that the district magistrate at that time, who had come with an engineer, asked what the village needed. The collector had taken the responsibility of starting an inter-college in the area, but he got transferred before he could set up the institution.

Medaura Kalan had been declared a Lohia village, giving its development issues a new focus under the programme named after the socialist icon and freedom fighter Ram Manohar Lohia. Interestingly, the Samajwadi Party, ruling UP at that time, reveres him as its ideological guru. ‘The contractors who had started work here did not complete it,’ Lalji grumbled. ‘They did not even pay the bills of the local shopkeepers, rather took away 500 bricks and a truckful of sand that we had brought for the family’s use.’

The young men in the family had been promised jobs. ‘Six of our boys should have got jobs. Vacancies are there. But the Chief Minister only asked them to fill up the forms.’ Lalji says he does not care so much about the jobs as for some genuine work for the village community. An efficient primary health centre or a girls’ school. ‘Our daughters must not cycle 12 kilometres to school.’

At the mention of girls, Bhagmani Pandey, Nirbhaya's aunt, raises the issue I have been hesitating to raise. ‘We want justice for our bitiya, and punishment for the culprits. After the incident, girls are even more afraid to step out of home for their courses.’ She speaks of the corruption in the system and deplores that there is no proper road connecting the village to Ballia town. I turn to Savita Devi, the village head, for her opinion. After a lot of reluctance, she says, ‘You people know better.’

A silhouette of Nirbhaya's aunt in their familial house

Lalji shakes his head in disapproval over what he calls a ‘toothless law’ that does not deter criminals. The National Crime Records Bureau shows Uttar Pradesh as the state with the highest number of murders in 2016, and a 12.4 per cent increase in rape cases from 2015. After Yogi Adityanath took over as Chief Minister in 2017, he announced the formation of ‘anti-Romeo squads’ for the safety of women. Singh is dismissive of the step: ‘Those squads end up harming the ones they are supposed to protect. In such conditions how can women work alongside men? Where is the support from the government that would have given confidence to women about their safety? I admire the women who are working outside their homes because they risk everything to go out.’ He sighs. ‘So many media people have been here. I know you are doing your job. But I wish it could change the way things are.’

Returning from the village, we come across a wedding marquee – bustling, all lit up. A few metres away was a field plunged in darkness; little boys are playing there. Girls of the same age have huddled up in the arc of the light near the entrance, slipping out of their parents’ cautious circle under the marquee. But they do not move any farther from the entrance, clinging to each other in the security of the festive lights. Some distance ahead, police barriers display emergency phone numbers in bold – to be called when a girl is facing sexual harassment.

Then and now

It has been five years since Nirbhaya’s tragic death following her brutal gang-rape on a moving bus one winter evening in Delhi. The incident had sparked protests, anger, debate, schemes, funds . . . What has all this meant for the other young women in Ballia? Have they felt strengthened by the voices demanding justice, or has the memory of what Nirbhaya faced made them warier? Has it changed anything about the way men look at women, behave with them?

On 8 August 2017, the accused Prince (Aditya) Tiwari, who had been harassing Ragini Dubey, slit her throat when she was going to school along with her sister in Bajah village in Ballia. The 17-year-old’s savage killing made headlines and has got considerable attention from the local media. Journalists here say this might not have been the case a few years ago, considering violence against women is accepted as the norm and not the exception in this part of the country.

The village of Bajah where Ragini’s family lives is not far from the main road. The men standing by the roadside direct us to the house after making sure we know her father.

In the courtyard, two men sit under a newly pitched tent; one of them is shaving. They get up from their chairs and ask us to sit. We learn that they are policemen posted there for the family’s security.

A makeshift post for the policemen guarding Ragini's house

Ragini’s mother, Vandana Dubey, angrily recalls the pradhan’s threat to the family. Kripashankar Tiwari, co-accused in Ragini’s murder and father of Prince, had bragged to the family after the incident that he would ‘buy’ those who mattered in the local police setup and the administration. Vandana is distraught that Prince has still not been brought under the National Security Act. In the middle of the conversation, her 11-year-old son comes in and gives vent to his sense of outrage. Looking grave, his voice urgent, the boy adds bits of information he fears his mother is forgetting.

Ragini was close to her grandmother, who recounts her many talents and ambitions, and her concern for the family. ‘I no longer stand outside the house where Ragini used to wave at me every morning before going to school. It is too painful.’ Sumitra Devi is a resolute woman. She repeats her daughter-in-law’s statement: ‘The pradhan bragged that he would pay off everyone who is dealing with the case. Please write this and put it under my name. What he said makes me wonder if we would ever get justice.’

She cries, much like Ragini’s mother and sister, throughout the conversation. ‘I have seen my daughters being dominated by their spouses, and I feel terrible that the children I have raised with so much love are no longer free to do what they want in their marital homes.’ That is why she decided to do everything possible to get her granddaughters educated and make them independent. ‘These girls are sometimes upset if I scold them for watching TV. But I tell them they can do all this later, now is the time to study and make something of their lives. All of them are studying for the qualifications to work, not just to get married.’

Ragini wanted to be an airhostess, ‘There was nobody like her,’ Sumitra Devi says wistfully. ‘Each morning before going to school she would take my blessings. My husband, dead now, was in the army, and Ragini would say that after her grandfather, she would be the one to make the family proud. I was hoping these girls would do even better than my sons. Now, Ragini’s life has been cruelly ended, and her dreams shattered.’

Our conversation is suddenly disrupted by the high pitch of an altercation. Shweta, Ragini’s sister, holds my hand and asks me to come inside to carry on with the conversation. The heated argument is between the policemen outside the house and someone who works at the pradhan’s house, who had come to mouth abuses against this grief-stricken, beleaguered family. Ragini’s mother goes outside and tries to dissuade the policemen from the fight. A police vehicle reaches the spot after some time and the cops offer some words of assurance to the housewife.

The incident gets reported in the local papers the next day.

The house of the accused is right next to the Pandeys’. Sumitra Devi says the neighbours keep trying to make trouble in such ways, perhaps emboldened by the pradhan’s release on bail, which has been a huge setback to Ragini’s family and dwindled their hopes for justice. When Ragini’s mother comes back in, she sounds apologetic. ‘I don’t know what all we have been saying to you, a bit emotionally charged as we are. You write what you find fit and proper.’

Shweta says to her mother, ‘Don’t you think she knows? She does this every day.’ The eldest of the four sisters, Neha, works in Banaras as a dietician in a well-known hospital. Shweta has finished her graduation. She was planning to get enrolled in a master’s course when tragedy struck disrupting the rhythm of the aspirational family. Shweta’s despair shows through, ‘We sisters are the kind of people who would always be running around, for classes, or to fill up some forms, or to know about some job opportunities.’ All that has now come to a halt. Shweta’s family is too scared to let her or the other girls out. Her youngest sister has also been pulled out of school because she was being harassed there. The pradhan’s invisible hand has been out to hammer down her daughters’ big dreams, Vandana Dubey remonstrates. The principal said that the school could no longer take the responsibility for her safety. ‘Can you believe it?’ Shweta gasps. ‘For four months we have not stepped out of the house.’

Ragini's home

The pradhan-Dubey family conflict, played out on a larger scale, captures the binary between the entrenched patriarchy and the technology-induced progressive forces in rural India. Nirbhaya, Ragini and her brave sisters stand for the new world that beckons them with its possibilities. The rapists on the moving bus and the obscurantist village heads are out to turn the girls’ aspirations into a hair-raising nightmare.

Quartz India recently carried a report about Girija Borker’s research pointing to a new trend among the young women in Delhi opting for colleges not for the quality of education they offer but their proximity to their homes. If this trend gains further momentum and travels to different parts of the country, it will deal a huge blow to the cause of women’s education. Not just that, the number of women in the premier institutions will significantly come down, resulting in a decrease in their share in higher education. In gender terms, the education scenario will be badly skewed, impacting the professional fields consequently. No wonder in the villages and small towns of Uttar Pradesh, for those like the Dubey sisters it is now a challenge to step out of their homes breaking the barrier of fear to go to class.

Shweta is tired of being scared and hiding at home because the baddies are prowling the street. ‘My interest is in computers. I came to know of an NGO looking for skilled professionals to work with children. But now everything has got held up.’ Sumitra Devi says in a remorseful voice, ‘I tell them not to go out. Even when their mother goes to meet the collector about the case, we hold our breath till she comes back. Sometimes we think of leaving all this behind and moving elsewhere. But we are not so rich.’

How did the 16 December 2012 Delhi gang-rape impact Ballia, where Nirbhaya was from? Has the tragedy that shook the world changed this place? Sumitra Devi is not so sure. ‘What changes can you expect? Nothing. I must have committed many sins in my past life to have been born in Ballia. This is a place for sinners.’ Ragini’s grandmother is talking of the same place hallowed by the memory of legendary freedom fighter Mangal Pandey and writers like Hazari Prasad Dwivedi.

The press and the people

The locals I talk to commend the media for having constantly followed up on Ragini’s case, which, they believe, managed to build some pressure on the police and the administration. However, there is a less salutary view about the media focusing on the girl’s death in its love for sensationalism. Still, the fact remains that ordinary people joined the protests along with the family against the delay in punishing the culprits. A correspondent of the Amar Ujala newspaper who had reported a candle march, says protests were carried out in Ballia both for Ragini and Nirbhaya. Some people, reports say, also tried to raise funds to help the families to meet legal expenses. Sudhir Tiwari, in charge of crime reporting at the Dainik Jagran in Ballia, talks of the changing reporting trend, the shift in focus from victim blaming to the action or the lack thereof by the authorities.

Are things both changing and remaining the same?

Looking at Ballia, it is hard to definitely know if things have changed when it comes to violence against women. After Ragini’s killing, people invested their faith in Superintendent of Police Sujata Singh following the arrest of the main accused the same day. Yet when his father got bail and when NSA was not invoked in dealing with the case as promised, the family started losing hope. Crimes against women do not show a decline but people have started coming forward to report. Terror and intimidation no longer can push them into a shell. In Ragini’s case, people I spoke to, pointed out how Prince, the accused, had been spoilt by his affluent and influential family’s indulgence and flawed upbringing. They did not resort to victim blaming, or at least knew enough about its incorrectness when in conversation with a journalist. Families of Nirbhaya and Ragini have stood up for their daughters while in many cases girls are still scared to tell their parents about harassment for fear of victim blaming. There is pressure from the media and NGOs on the police to act. At the same time, if a woman reports harassment right at the beginning, the police often leave offenders with a warning to avoid recording the complaints and having to be accountable for it. The same offenders who are let off then go on to commit much more violent crimes.

Earlier in December, a team of girls took out a cycle rally all across UP, intending to conclude the journey at Nirbhaya’s village. The aim was to raise awareness about violence against women. Nirbhaya’s parents came to Lucknow to support the initiative. Perhaps it is in such small measures – Ragini’s sisters not willing to give up on their dreams, her mother sitting at the magistrate’s office all day to submit a petition, Nirbhaya’s parents who had wanted that the shame of violence stays only with the perpetrators, the girls pedalling along the roads that do not welcome them – that one can see tendrils of change grow, where women prove that ‘courage is not the absence of fear, it is acting in spite of it’.

First published in The Equator Line, Jan-Mar, 2018.

Men, be allies, not apostles of equality

A Facebook friend, a guy, once tagged me in a video. It showed men apologising for what women have to go through every day because they are, well, women. Several men stood by their women friends in the wake of the #metoo movement as well.

A number of men are coming out in support of feminism. They appear to understand the need for gender equality. Still at times they slip, and you draw their attention to it. You expect that they would discuss the situation with an open mind. You don’t require them to know every aspect of the problem but you have seen them being sensible and compassionate. So you assume they would agree that those regularly privileged by hierarchies of religion, caste and gender should now take a step back and listen to others in the room. But this supposition is often broken with a “now this is too much” from them.

They draw the boundaries, and decide what is enough or too much for those who have been marginalised for centuries. In that moment, they cease to be your fellow travellers moving towards a common goal. They start worrying you’re going to jump over their backs and gallop ahead leaving them behind. In that moment, they become a peeved donor and you, a greedy, ungrateful beggar.

I have faced being patronised by men who tell me how I am quibbling over small things while I should be focusing on bigger issues widening the gender gap. I would like to share a “small” example here of why we as women stand up for these apparently bite-sized issues.

A literature festival invited many authors; I was one of them. The invites and posters carried the names of the men. For the women, they had used the prefix Mrs. Anyone reading would have got this information about the men in the following order: an author named so-an-so is going to be there at the festival. About the women, they would have learned: a married woman, called so-and-so, who also happens to be an author (apart from being married), is going to participate in the fest.

I had a problem with this partisan approach, and the organiser understood and tried to fix it. But many men who heard termed it as nitpicking, and started stressing on how their knowledge of what was important should gain precedence over my lived experience.

Something similar happened around the time of my wedding. My partner and I had chosen to have a Brahmo Samaj wedding, which is supposed to be egalitarian towards the couple irrespective of their gender or religion. The acharya/priest who was to conduct our wedding was a highly placed official in a private body. His gentle smile and soft-spoken demenaour immediately put our wedding jitters to rest. He proudly shared with us the tradition of equality practised in Brahmo weddings, and showed sample scripts which had detailed the rituals. In the days to come, my partner was in constant touch with him. We modified some of the rites to make them even more uniform for the couple and the acharya readily accepted the tracked changes.

A few days before the wedding, I noticed the word “brotherhood” in the script. No matter how much thought I give to women, when it comes to such words I am unable to visualise women in the picture. I politely, and with much hesitation, talked to the acharya about it. (I was hesitating because my feminism had not erased from my mind the taught fear of upsetting men in the venerable role of elders or priests.) He was irked at my suggestion: “This is how language is. You cannot change language. If you have a better word, tell me.”

I did not say that language wasn’t discovered while it was roaming about like innocent, blitzkrieged sheep. It was shaped with a design in mind; it has its history and politics. I only tried to find a substitute, and when I suggested ‘kinship’ in place of ‘brotherhood’, he gave it his go-ahead.

Had he been upset at first because he was tired of our various modifications? Would he have reacted differently if, as usual, my partner had spoken to him?

When people announce themselves as allies to a certain movement or an ideology, they should not expect that the ones they are supporting should take it as a favour and not raise questions. It was precisely by dominating clans denying the truths and everyday realities of certain sections of society that these groups had originally got pushed to the periphery.

Allies to the feminist, or any other, movement would have to stop being imperious in order to contribute and gain equally, just as those who have faced persecution needn’t always be right about everything. The words of Australian activist Lila Watson makes sense in this context: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

First published in Deccan Herald, 17 Mar 2018.

Chhattisgarh Farmers Protest on Rail Tracks Demanding Jobs Promised by Railways

Even as thousands of farmers from Maharashtra head towards Mumbai, their compatriots in Chhattisgarh have also been protesting since March 5, demanding jobs in lieu of their land acquired by the Railways.

In Bhanupratappur, situated in Kanker district in the North Bastar region, farmers whose land had been acquired for the Dallirajhara-Rowghat-Jagdalpur rail project have been sitting on the railway tracks since the past week demand jobs promised to them. Resolved to stay put till they get job appointments,  hundreds of protesters have spread tarpaulin and durries over stones on the tracks.

The rail line project would be carrying iron ore from Rowghat mines to the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP). Rowghat had also been in news earlier because of the local resistance to the mines.

Chandrashekhar Yadu, one of the protesters, said those whose land ownership is covered by the Forest Rights Act have not got any compensation or even the application forms for jobs. “The few farmers with revenue land who have jobs have got meagre amounts in the name of compensation. More than 400 farmers are waiting to get jobs. When we met officials from the Railways, the local administration and BSP on March 8, 2018, in the office of the sub-divisional magistrate, we were told that in 2012 there was a change in the 2011 policy, which now covers only those whose 75-100% land was impacted by the project. But the public wasn’t informed of any such change. We would believe the papers we have in our hands right now, which talk of jobs and compensation for all whose land was affected to any extent. Amendments can keep taking place.”

The farmers are against the provision, as listed in the notification issued by South East Central Railway on April 8, 2011, of jobs being granted only to the landowner, the spouse or their sons/daughters. People of the 28 affected villages feel it excludes those who don’t have children but may want jobs for other family members.

The 2011 notification also doesn’t take into account the fact that many elders own the land so it would be their grandchildren, and not their sons and daughters, who would be in the right age group for jobs. The prescribed age bracket is 18-33 years, relaxed by five years’ for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, and for three years’ for other backward classes.

The farmers are demanding that the affected people should get appointment letters first and then should be sent for the technical training required. They do not want the candidates to be first sent to pass the training in an industrial training institute (ITI) and then kept under training again in BSP as they say the actual appointment in this case takes years.

Nandlal Jaiswal, a participant in the protest, said, “The government talks of sabka sath, sabka vikas. But how is this development for all? It is only for the government. It is also unfair that the Dalli-Rajhara farmers in Balod district were given jobs and we have been discriminated against.”

First published in The Wire, 11 Mar 2018.

Modern-yet-traditional: The fantasy woman of matrimonial dotcoms

A friend registered on a matrimonial website got a call from a man looking to get married. Their conversation went like this:

Man: What will you do if I get a promotional transfer to another city?

Woman: I think if one partner, be it the man or the woman, gets a better job opportunity in another place and the other partner can move without adversely affecting her/his career, the shift can work out.

Man: Suppose the domestic worker hired for the house doesn’t turn up one day. What will you do?

Woman: That’s ok. Both partners can get together and finish the housework.

The next day the man’s mother called my friend’s parents to not-so-regretfully convey that my friend was too modern and won’t “fit” into their family. The man’s family had sought a “modern yet traditional” woman. In matrimonial parlance, modernity is like red blood cells whose presence in the body is essential but their count should fall within a certain range for a person to be healthy. My friend, according to the wife/daughter-in-law seekers, had scored too high and, therefore, negatively, on the modernity barometer.

What are these traditional values which our modern women have been failing? To be kind and empathetic, caring and considerate, are not traditional values. They are (timeless) values a decent human being has or aspires to develop regardless of their gender.

But to expect the woman to do all the housework or to jeopardise her work-life to make way for the man’s is unjust, regressive, hypocritical and discriminatory. And therefore a lot of the over 70 million single women in India are choosing to reject such propositions. A neighbour had once suggested a match to me. While I wasn’t interested, I decided to humour her and continue the conversation. I said I hoped the man’s family knew there would be no dowry. “But your parents will give something, right?” She meant that the amount of money to be given as dowry would be negotiable. For her, it was tradition; for me, a crime, not only a legal but a moral one.

My friend’s father, who had been disappointed that the match didn’t work out, had raised his daughter to be an educated woman with a career. He had often given her examples of trailblazing women to take inspiration from, no matter what their marital status. Yet society’s spectre of marriage being an essential rite of passage loomed over him when he couldn’t “get” his adult, perfectly capable and independent daughter married. He had encouraged my friend to grow throughout her life and then, frustrated with the matrimonial scene, had advised her to shrink, which she could not do, and rightly so.

What needed to be cut to size were the unreal expectations of the man and his family, who had raised their son to believe that somewhere a woman was being brought up with the sole purpose of fitting into his life. If it weren’t so outrageous, it would be amusing to observe that these men manage to live in a bubble for the greater part of their lives. I have known of prospective grooms who assume that the woman would be more than happy to leave her job and join him for greener pastures (read cards). One guy was taken aback when his online match wanted to discuss with him the subject of children, for he had grown up thinking that all women have their maternal instinct handy, and would love to turn the tap on and spout forth cherubs at the first chance they can grab. Another character insisted that he can get the woman a job through his illustrious connections and networks, while she repeatedly asserted she was perfectly happy in her current employment. When it comes to appraising each other for matrimonial symmetry, such men’s being out of tune with the women of the world leave the former confused and gaping in wonder, and the latter pulling out their hair in exasperation.

Perhaps that’s why a report found that a “high percentage of men with higher-education degrees are looking at profiles of women less educated than them”. Such people would do well to know that my “modern” friend and women like her, who refuse to be gaslighted into believing that to want equality is to be selfish, are setting up a new tradition. Our hitherto cloistered dotcom men would urgently need to bring themselves up to speed.

First published in DeccanHerald, 16 Feb 2018.