An avalanche of shame: How social media went from becoming a site of abuse of women to a platform where women outed their abusers

How it all began

I remember about a decade ago I had chanced upon Orkut, which now seems Facebook’s pre-historic ancestor. I started basking in the azure Orkut skies with considerable glee because it was a chance to reconnect with friends I had lost to their IT jobs and their consequent dread of sending emails after doing it at work all day, even if to a long lost friend. A few days into the e-socialising I was warned by well wishers against putting up my photographs online. They had chosen to replace their own display pictures with white cherubs, celebs and tulips. Their unsolicited, solicitous advice came from what they had heard about the misuse of data and pictures online, especially when it came to women. Their was talk of morphed pictures, theft and blackmail in the cyberspace.

What they feared was not baseless but I still chose to live my life, online and otherwise, on my terms, rather than let unknown villainous forces determine my choices. I took the stand to fight those who stole and misused others’ data. It was the same as believing in asserting my claim over the physical public space and going out prepared to confront those who challenged this right of mine, instead of giving in to them and shrinking my world to my home.

I got a chance to put theory into practice soon enough when, not through Orkut but through Yahoo messenger, an anonymous blackmailer sent me messages threatening to tell my family I was dating someone. I was young and taken aback for a moment but was immediately seeing red hot rage in the presumptuous texts. I was outraged to think that a stranger could make so bold as to believe that he would have so much power over me because as a woman I was flouting a societal norm by dating. I had no intention of handing over my self-respect to him. I refused him what he was looking for – attention – and did not respond to the message. If my family received some malicious letter some day from a stranger, they certainly did not apprise me of it.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life/The world would split open”

Cut to the present day, many years later, and I find that the above lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem resonate with our reality. Looking at the #metoo movement in India, we would find many women outing their sexual abusers online, through Twitter but also through Facebook and Instagram. It is also a slap in the face of that annoying expression about women being women’s enemies. Women at the front of the movement have formed a protective wall around those who could bring themselves to share their horror stories only because they were promised anonymity in the online public space. This has been one of the most heartening examples of the women’s solidarity network that always existed but was not adequately acknowledged in the misogynist discourse. Women are trying to ensure that survivors, many having to relive their trauma in the retelling, get what they need: therapy, legal help, a patient ear. This one hashtag on social media has brought women together across the globe.

It is not that social media has ceased to be the abusive arena it has been for women, same as any other public space in which women first make their foray. Sudipti, who writes regularly for Hindi publications online and in print, and is a schoolteacher, says, “As a woman as long as you are writing on gender and other social issues, you may still be fine. Expand further into religion and politics and be prepared to witness the backlash. After writing continuously on these issues, I got exhausted handling the constant whataboutery and prejudice, and stopped.”

But digital footprints are easier to track than physical ones and women have also given back as good as they got by taking action against abuse through solid proofs like emails and screenshots, which the social media makes easier to save and reproduce. Having practised theatre in Paris, Delhi and Dharamshala, Niranjani Iyer was one of those who make their Facebook profiles due to exhortations by friends and then their digital presence gets relegated to the background. In the context of women speaking out online, she exclaims: “I never thought I would say this but I am so glad that social media exists. I would still say Twitter can be noisy but with Instagaram you can reach so many.” Theatre needs its practitioners to take on different roles and personas, and those in power take advantage of these grey areas to abuse their colleagues. “This movement has not exploded in theatre yet. But it has made people rethink power equations. The kind of things people in power have got away with . . . the impunity . . . I don’t think it’s possible now. The potential for women to come out with their stories is huge.” She talks of the notion of shame imposed on women, which led to guilt in women about what had been done to them. “Now women are speaking up and saying, ‘You did this’.”

In journalism, theatre, writing, music, films, different kinds of art spaces, in some ways it can become easier to gaslight victims because the abusers often have politically correct, progressive, masks. The wordplay they employ to defend themselves can also be that much more brazen and preposterous. Take the case of accused poet CP Surendran trying to defend himself in his statement (Firstpost, 16 October 2018): “I believe sexism is an intellectual and physical reality . . . I choose not to think in given categories.”

Social media has enabled abusers as well, by giving men an easy space for their sanctimonious declamations that contradict their acts of violations, so that victims in the beginning end up questioning themselves and potential supporters of survivors are full of doubts. On the basis of an image formation that they achieve on this fluid medium, announcing book deals and getting themselves photographed with well known faces seen in the mainstream media, their stream of “friends” and “followers” who believe in that image also grows.

When such a personality, a well known poet, was called out on Facebook by another poet, the survivor was met with both support and disbelief. Poet and scholar Semeen Ali was one of those to come out in the survivor’s support and, with other poets, sent a letter to Sahitya Akademi. The letter demanded that the accused step down from the editorship of a prestigious anthology in the making, which many of the signatory poets had been selected to be part of.

Semeen recalls the series of events to have unfolded after that: “There were people who signed the letter and backed out. They did not want to ruin their equation with him [the accused]. The Indian poetry scene is really small and many do not speak up as they are afraid they won’t be published in anthologies.” Of these, many were later invited to readings organised by the accused, while some places that used to earlier invite Semeen’s poetry distanced themselves from her. Semeen is also a book reviewer and, after this incident, refused to review books written by the accused, knowing that possible consequences could include her being “blacklisted” as a reviewer as well by some renowned publications. “And that’s ok”, she says, “I could not keep silent knowing what had happened, also considering my personal experience and those of other poets as well when it came to the behaviour of the accused on several occasions.”

The loss of conditional friendships and spaces for career advancement have not deterred other women. Like Niranjani, who started her own theatre company and did physical theatre in India at a time of dialogue based plays, believes, “What are spaces, after all? Spaces can be created.” In cases where an accused has been first named on social media, many other women have come out with their stories of him. Others came out to support the survivor and her case. There have also been women who started putting out their stories anonymously, sharing their identity details only to one or more of the women who were ready to listen and to share these stories further with permission. Some of these anonymous tellers later revealed their identities, which gave their narratives even greater credibility but also added to their vulnerability.

Their life on social media was scrutinised by naysayers. Women with a “low” follower count online were accused of sharing their stories of abuse to gain more followers; they were asked again and again to repeat lurid details of the harassment, blamed for “harming” the reputation and career of the men who had ruined the women’s reputation and career, and left them with enduring trauma. Actor Tanushree Datta’s account of harassment by co-actor Nana Patekar when she refused to enact certain scenes for a film was mocked by trolls who circulated video clips showing her kissing on screen in other films.

It was the usual scene of trolling and abuse that women face when they speak up. Only this time they were not alone. They were standing up for each other; they were educating, agitating, organising, through letters demanding investigations to organisations the accused were a part of, to the police, the court and the National Commission for Women. The Network for Women in Media in India kept taking regular cognisance of these accounts and pushed for action, along with providing support to survivors.

An online movement? Really?

Online movements were scoffed at in the beginning as the best one could expect of lazy millennials. However, with time it became clear that not all online campaigns lack teeth. From protests in Iran and Egypt to #Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, all over the world people have successfully used social media to amplify their causes.

Concerns have been expressed about whether the Indian #metoo movement with a large online base can be truly inclusive, whether it can reach those much lower in the rung when it comes to caste, class and patriarchal oppression, many of whom have no access to digital spaces. It would be naive to believe that the number of social media users in India represent the whole country, or a balanced gender ratio among its users. Think tank LIRNEAsia’s study, reported by Karishma Mehrotra for The Indian Express on 8 August 2018, showed that 80 percent of Indian men are mobile users, and only 43 percent women have cellphones. The gender gap in users is higher in rural areas, 52 percent, and was recorded as 34 percent in urban India. 64 percent, of which 68 percent were women, did not know about the Internet. 27 percent of those who did know mostly used it for social media.

But there is clearly potential for more in a scenario where a person in a village recharge their phone with Rs 10 to watch an entire movie. India has the highest annual growth rate of Internet users. If mobiles and the world wide web did not offer spaces of expansion to women, khap panchayats and town councils would not have advised women against those things.

Rural women reporters of Khabar Lahariya joined the #metoo women to talk of the daily harassment done by their male counterparts, and shared how men had stopped sending them porn in the wake of the movement. Garment workers, bus conductors and street vendors in Karnataka met publicly and spoke about the harassment they are forced to face at their workplaces every day if they want to hold on to their jobs. These examples are not enough.

But it is also important to remember that women from non-urban spaces have not spoken up for the first time. In fact it was Bhanwari Devi, a rural, Dalit woman, whose fight against the sexual violence done to her led to the Vishakha Guidelines and a law against sexual harassment at workplace. So the notion that only urban women can “take” the movement to the unorganised and rural sectors is also flawed, though urban, digitally educated women can certainly work to spread it. Raya Sarkar, a bahujan feminist who started the movement online in 2017 says in a Livemint interview to Rituparna Chatterjee (who has been one of those at the forefront of the 2018 campaign), published on 15 October 2018, “A lot more can be done because dalit, adivasi and bahujan women’s voices are missing from the discourse right now . . . It should include the voices of trans women, homosexual men and women and non-binary folks.” But what the movement has done despite its limitations is to remind women themselves of the power of solidarity, of the responsibility each woman has of keeping it open and inclusive, working together to reclaim the online space as well as the public domain and ensuring more women have safe access to these spaces.

Where do women stand as social media users?

Women on social media were first targeted by companies as mere consumers. The Internet is rife with video advertisements celebrating gender equality, though on television this is still making slow progress. But as women started being attacked for being political and not just personal beings online, they demanded better regulations from platforms and a zero-tolerance approach to threats and hate speech. The end result is far from being achieved in entirety but the pressure forced platforms like Twitter and Facebook to take into account online sexual harassment done through their platforms. These groups have since come up with tools to provide a safer environment for women online and collaborated with women’s rights groups to work better in this direction. At the same time, there is sometimes great disparity in how these platforms take action: a person’s account gets suspended for their political opinions while another openly abusive person continues to retain their account. These practices would need to be remedied even if companies have no interests other than business ones are heart, and it might encourage more women, therefore more “consumers”, to start using these platforms.

There are groups studying the intersection of gender and technology, fighting for a safer and more equal space for women online, organising trainings for women on digital security and on dealing with trolling and cybercrimes. Tactical Tech Collective’s XYZ platform, Internet Democracy Project, Feminism in India, Access Now, Digital Empowerment Foundation are some of the various groups involved in doing and supporting similar work.

One way social media has offered a safe haven to women is by connecting them to support groups that they do not always find in their physical lives: there exist groups for domestic violence survivors to single mother groups. These are safe spaces for the women to share their experiences, seek out advice and be connected to experts, legal and health professionals as required.

“The meek shall inherit the earth”

What happens on social media does not necessarily remain on social media. The multiple accusations against ex-Union minister MJ Akbar have now turned into a defamation suit against one of the accusers, journalist Priya Ramani. When this made news, women on social media started pledging all sorts of support to Ramani. There were several who wanted to help with the legal expenses; others kept reassuring that all of them would back Ramani’s fight in whatever way possible. Most of these people were unknown to the journalist herself. Amidst everyday articles about social media leading to loneliness, there were hordes of women assuring each other of solidarity and support.

I was recently sitting in a room with other writers and poets, all men, when a poet was asked to recite something in particular. The poet refused, looked at me and said he would rather avoid it in this /#metoo phase. I quietly corrected him to say that it is not a phase, it is here to stay.

Twenty-years after her demonisation, in the US Monica Lewinsky is finally appearing in a docuseries (made by a team with women in majority) on The Clinton Affair. In a piece by her in Vanity Fair titled “Who Gets to Live in Victimville?” (13 November 2018), Lewinsky writes, “Bye-bye, Lewinsky scandal . . . I think 20 years is enough time to carry that mantle.” She remembers that when Clinton got quizzed about why he had had this inappropriate relationship, his answer was “Because I could”. Responding to questions about why Lewinsky would go through the trauma of participating in the series that demanded digging up of painful memories and unsavoury news articles, she states she participated because “I [she] could”, to ensure that what happened to her “never happens to another young person in our [her] country again”.

Herein also lies the reason why it has not been easy to dismiss the Indian #metoo movement as a social media “fad” or “trend”, though many used these frivolous terms to denigrate the movement. It is because women are speaking up not just for themselves but for those who fought before them and for the ones to come after. Statement after statement by survivors echoes this thought . . . that they are doing this for others who suffered and took the risk of speaking up, or so their sisters and daughters and any other woman does not end up believing that silence is their only recourse. These are women who have often and repeatedly been failed by due processes instituted by official committees and laws. In fact, their voicing themselves on social media has exposed the inefficacy of many of these systems and organisations and also shown that power does not lie in the hands of a few people at the heads of committees and institutions. Women have used social media to create spaces and platforms that had been consistently and unapologetically denied to them, and those who robbed women of these rights would now have to contend with their complicity. Those who have been holding their breath for the movement to “fizzle out” should instead take a deep breath and prepare for the long haul. The day of reckoning that they thought would never come is finally here.

First published in The Equator Line, Jan-Mar 2019.

Whatsapp blues

There are friends who get upset
If they learn you’ve seen their messages
But did not respond.

One would think they must have gotten used it to it by now.

After all
There’s so much we witness,
So little we respond to.

The trick is not to take these things personally.

First published in Ethos Literary Journal, November 2018.

Reboot

We click
To make the red
Go away.

It does.
Attaches itself
To us.

We become
A quivering minefield.

Do not touch.
We will disintegrate.
Take you down
With us.

***Memory of being still
While being held
Successfully erased
From disk***

First published in Peacock Journal, May 2018.

Multiplex

Where the restlessness of our narrow gullies finds respite 
As we breathe in the wintry air locked inside the cinema screen 
Lulling ourselves

Into believing that we, too, residents of the third world,
Struggle with the doubts and dilemmas of the first world,
That beyond scarcity-illness-religion
We are part of the subtle nuances of fine sentiment and existentialism.

First published in Peacock Journal, May 2018.

मैं और देश

630 रुपए के होटल के कमरे में एल.सी.डी. टी.वी. थी,
रजाई नहीं.

अपनी चादर को पांव जितना फैलाने की कोशिश में
बंद एल.सी.डी. निहारते मैं सो गई,
कुछ समय के लिए
मैं देश हो गई.

First published in Sadaneera, 21 Apr 2018.

"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.

U,IDidn't

I waited for the day someone would ask me my number
Until the state did, and I smirked,
"I know you've used that line on a million others."

At that it should have left,
But it persisted,
Insisted it would give me one,
If I did not have one of my own.

It didn't take no for an answer,
And now I have fingerprints instead of handholding,
Iris scans, while I wait to be seen,

At least I would be safe, I tried to tell myself,
Until yesterday, when I found myself exposed,
Every single digit of me, up for sale as data porn.

First published in The Wire, 6 June 2017.

Dubious Deities

If you go to the Aadhar centre in Delhi,
You'll see, on the board where UID has anointed itself,
That the department of electronics and information technology
Has fondly acronymed itself "DeitY",
And they aren't entirely off the mark.

Queues at the centre
That wait for Godot
With nowhere else to go to
Will attest to the fact.

Denied pensioners
Losing-their-pay-daily wage labourers
Made-to-return-seven-times householders . . .
All will confirm
That they are up against the wrath of a deity,
Though they had done nothing to invite it,
Whose mysterious workings they know nothing of
But whose shrine they've to keep visiting, lining up in the wee hours of the morning,
Where they'll submit their prayers
But can never be sure of a hearing.

They know their deity like Shakespeare knew his:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport."

First published in Women's Watch, 2017.

What #ResistCapitalism says about our place in the system

Last week #ResistCapitalism trended on Twitter. Twitter’s naughtiness in offering a misspelt C-word set the facile tone of the debate when the opposers of capitalism were accused of not having their spellings right, a sad example of the elitism whose slithering glove capitalism uses to cover its strangulatory hands. Distorting things to this simplistic level went on when those forming the resistance chain were stereotyped as no-questions-asked bouncers for communism and socialism, quoting *yawn* the examples of Russia and China. One does believe that many of these people genuinely want a better world for all and more’s the pity then that such limited approaches’ paroxysms killed the chance of conversations around alternate systems, visions of other isms.

A ‘comeback’ to #ResistCapitalism that kept reappearing with the smugness of a Jack in the box was that the resisters are using advanced technology to tweet and therefore, “haha gotcha”, were actually standing up to a system they were operating within. This arrogance that technology can only be birthed by capitalism negates human intelligence and the entire history of humankind that evolved through discoveries and preserved itself by relying on communal wisdom. Even if capitalism facilitates technology, if we are committing ourselves to saying that the users of technology have no right to oppose capitalism, and that those who do not have access to it should reach out for the gag tape themselves, then the American presidential elections must have seduced us into hosting the death wish that manifests itself as bulldozing brazenness.

Shaming each other for complicity in a system we are trying to resist is not new to us. But it is important to differentiate between a preacher who does not practise from one who is in chains but can see them and is trying to move, between questioning and damning. If shame does not come externally, we take to self-flagellation, which is the masochistic version of navel gazing. Both kinds of humiliation, the type that is externally imposed and the one internalised, divide us and distract us from our collective struggle, for the self can be centred both on the notion of one’s greatness and diminutiveness. And this throwing of punches at the mirror suits our captors just fine.

We lose ourselves in theories, trying to defend the ‘high’ education we had believed in and repeating what it had taught us about ‘merit’-based growth, by first making itself a rare ‘commodity’ and then presenting itself as an award that we hadn't just earned through hard work but had received from a generous benefactor for being the loyalist who suffered many undeserved punishments silently. We use what was supposed to empower us to disenfranchise others, though our own power boosts us only to the extent that we learn to fool ourselves as well as anyone else.

And all this while, the only questions that needed asking were, “Do you feel happy and fulfilled in the present system, no matter what the system’s scientific or household name may be?” If even one voice answers in the negative, it should be cause enough to take another look at the structure.

Who Takes My Salute?

It is easy to play 'spot the evil' when working with mutually understood and long-established signifiers. As a street theatre group, we create many of our productions on an oppressed-versus-oppressor premise and, though struggling to maintain political correctness and avoid stereotypes, we sometimes end up with some sort of a caricature who exhibits a particular inflection of the tone; unrelenting eyes; the cold, even calm, cruelty that comes from the smugness of presupposing the limitlessness of one's aggressive capabilities. In everyday life, putting one's finger on the spot and pointing to what exactly goes into the making of an evil leader is harder. Even harder is to know what crazy salad goes into the making of an Evil Leader.

                                                                     Often we tend to attribute evil in leaders to some kind of madness in them, a psychological condition that makes them a freak of nature. One usually hears the term in context of someone like Hitler. Yet, in Erica Goode's New York Times piece 'Insane or Just Evil? A Psychiatrist Takes a New Look at Hitler' (17 November 1998), psychologist and neurologist Dr Fritz Redlich says that Hitler 'knew what he was doing and he chose to do it with pride and enthusiasm'. Goode summarizes, 'And while the Nazi leader was afflicted with a variety of physical ills, both real and psychogenic, he suffered from nothing severe enough to take the blame for his crimes.' We also know that he was an artist, a kind of person traditionally associated with beauty and gentleness.












                                                                                            Evil cannot be said to be the product of a particular political ideology either. If we have violence of the right wing, including in our own country, we also have leaders like Pol Pot who actually claimed and believed that they were going to make a communist haven through their brutalities. Similarly, in the case of Stalin, it wasn't communism but his blind arrogance, suspicions and attempt to concentrate all power in his hands that sent thousands of people to Siberia to serve undefined terms for indeterminate reasons. Gulags became a metaphor for lives wasted. Of all the brutal killers to emerge from the twentieth century, Lavrenty Beria, the dreaded head of Stalin's secret police, was one of the most malign. 'Show me the man and I'll find you the crime,' he had once remarked. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a historian who spent thirteen years in the camps and later wrote a book about Beria, told the Daily Telegraph of London, 'The gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale. He industrialized the gulag system. Human life had no value for him.'













                                       In India the Aam Aadmi Party rode on a wave of popularity that partly came from the reassurance that the outfit is composed of common people, as underlined in its name, and therefore they would be most sympathetic to the interest of the masses. As citizens, this logic appeals to us and also shakes repetitively ineffectual leaders out of their complacency. However, like international theatre practitioner, academic and author John Britton says, having worked with communities of varying backgrounds, 'I keep hearing politicians talk of ordinary people. I am yet to meet one.' It is a naive assumption to view the entire populace as a common mass with no particularities, the rulers' victims who, once they come into power, would be extremely sensitive to the needs of their fellow beings. Mussolini said in an interview, 'I come of peasant stock. My father was a blacksmith – he gave me strength. And my mother, she was sweet and sensitive – a school teacher – a lover of poetry – she feared my tempestuous nature, but she loved me - and I loved her. Being 'one of the people' did nothing to incline him towards democracy; fascism was his unequivocal choice. 










                                                                              Likewise, in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's extreme poverty of his growing years did not make him the poor people's messiah, though it appeared quite contrary in the beginning. In the nascent years of his leadership, Hussein assumed a clear stance against orthodoxy and worked for the modernization of Iraq. It was under him that the National Campaign for Eradication of Illiteracy and the Campaign for Compulsory Free Education took off. His socialist approach made possible subsidies to farmers, redistribution of land and free hospitalization. He posed a challenge to the West with his nationalization of oil companies. Electricity reached outlying areas. Going beyond primary health care, he brought in advanced and specialized medical advancements and hospitals. Culture, theatre, literature and language were encouraged. Women were declared equal under the law and their liberation seemed the government's goal. Women's partaking of the universal education greatly benefited them and their number amongst the employed started rising. Equal pay and perks could be availed of. A year of maternity leave and public day care centres further facilitated their entry into the paid workforce. They voted and contested elections, and a number of them were elected to the National Assembly. They had the right to own property. This was the Saddam who declared, 'Pay attention to citizens’ demands and grievances and do not feel weary or bored by the persistence of these demands, because if you save a wronged person, partially or totally, you will be doing a great service to the people and the principles of your Party. The sense of injustice is a serious thing. There is nothing more dangerous than a human being who feels he is wronged, because he will turn into a huge explosive force when he feels that no one in the State or in society is on his side to redress the injustice.' In a case of double irony, in the following years he went on to blatantly contradict his own advice and meet the consequences he had warned others against. He became the symbol of repression, war crimes, systematic torture, non-judicial summary killings and ethnic persecution. The sense of injustice in people had indeed become 'a serious thing'; it was almost as if Hussein had provided the ladder to them himself, on which the people were to climb and pull him to the ground.













                                                                          Despite their excesses, many of these statespeople often made what are usually seen as those little kinds of kindness – eating with hutdwellers, accepting flowers from children. But clearly tokenism or even momentary lapses into kindness cannot make up for the countless heads that were made to roll. And therefore we know that in its external manifestation evil does not really come having borrowed the devil's horns and tail.















                                                                  Going through the gory pages of history, one likes to believe that such tragedies were a thing of the past, that with time we naturally start becoming more 'civilized', more humane. But have we really been successful in leaving evil far behind? Have genocides, ethnic cleansing, religious riots, executions stopped? Are we not using our technological advancement to create elaborate instruments of torture? One shudders to admit that these are the very products of our own fantasies and 'vision'. Even the past is kept alive in those of us who extend support to the above-mentioned leaders, who loudly wonder whether they were 'really that bad'. Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi feels like standing up for Mussolini; in Iran a filmmaker is put under house arrest and banned from pursuing his artistic activities, which, as far as the director is concerned, is the same as banning him from being. 













                                                                                          We brand a man Mahatma and when called upon to practise his teachings, we roll our eyes and plead that he is an 'extra'ordinary creature and, in all fairness and pragmatism, we cannot be expected to emulate him. It is not about whether one likes Gandhi or his opposed to him or worships some other hero. The example is to show what we do when we make someone a hero. We put that person on a pedestal, divorce ourselves from them except to raise our hands in salutation and rescue ourselves from having to follow high ideals and goals. We forget that the hero is an ordinary person trying to do something more. The same psychological pattern is at work when we see one individual as the repository of evil and forget that they weren't born with a dark shadow looming over them. They chose a certain path and were strengthened in their designs by a lot of people, people like us. We should remember that while many were coerced to follow, several others chose to heartily accept such people as their leaders because some of the promises they held out made perfect sense to the 'lunatic', the 'freak', the 'evil' in us – the promise of exclusivity, the reward of being the chosen elect replete with privileges. Then we start supporting leaders who eliminate millions simply because they, with the support of some other millions, can. This is how most people's oppressor became a few people's hero. This darkest face of evil is best portrayed in the film Inglorious Basterds when 'the hunter', adept at sniffing out Jews, gives the matter-of-fact spinechilling statement that they want to end the race simply because they do not like them, just as one dislikes rats. 













                                                             Many of us who may still believe in sound logic also falter when we give in to stereotypes of how a leader should be. We dismiss their repressive policies as a much-needed measure dealt out by a strong hand. It's not much different from how some parents would still believe that a spared rod is tantamount to a spoilt child. Of course we do not acknowledge such manifestation of evil in ourselves till some of us are arrested, our acts finally labelled as crimes, for torturing our children and some, for violating our domestic help. 













                                                                    And when we know this, when we know that evil lives and thrives among us even today, we also have to deal with the fact that we, the 'common people', are also hosts to it. As aam junta, we would never admit that we have anything to do with evil. We would say we have foibles, yes, but we mean well, and we are merely trying to eke out an honest living for ourselves while indulging in the occasional charity. We would be plaintive that if at all, we are at the receiving end: inflation happens, murders and robberies occur in the daylight, and yet we plod on, determined in our struggle. 













                                                        But let us first examine how we often behave in groups, deriving our power – when it has not been officially sanctioned to us – from numbers. Khap panchayats, which hardly compare to the other more formal and organized leaderships, easily order rapes and murders to perpetuate the evil of patriarchy. A protest against rape takes place and some nameless, faceless men make it an opportunity to grope and molest some more, again taking refuge in numbers and blending with the crowds before they can be caught. 













                          If we find ourselves wincing at these associations, let's poof away these crowds and face the looking glass as individuals, many of us, 'decent' folks who may not believe in the authority of khaps or engage in direct violence, still participate in patriarchy from the moment of chalking out our daughter-in-law's functions in her marital space to the time of fixing our daughter's 'age limit' for marriage. Why does a parent and a rapist have the same question to ask of the girl, 'What are you doing outside so late at night?' Why are blackmailers so snug in the knowledge that a woman would choose to succumb to them because otherwise she is sure to be punished, even ostracized, by her own family and community? If we cry out foul that the police is deaf to women's complaints of harassment, why do we shush them up when they report exploitation within the home? Are we going to be outraged at these connections and turn away? Will we be hurt and say these are harsh and cruel labels for pure-hearted souls? Or look ourselves in the eye and decide that we do not just wish and mean well but also do well, not just assume we are pure but are also capable of identifying the impurities that creep in and weeding them out, preparing to understand these connections and disallowing ourselves from cradling evil?















                                                                        Evil grows because of the passivity or paucity of goodness. We have to be as, if not more, firmly assertive and proactive in carrying out 'goodness' in order to give stiff competition to the aggressive directors of operations of evil, or to ruthlessly scrub off the traces of it inside us. It is fitting that the book V for Vendetta by Alan Moore is now being suggested to be made part of prescribed curriculum, in which the protagonist states, 'Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so they took our power. By doing nothing we gave it away.'












                                                                                                                                                                                                                 First published in The Equator Line, April-June 2014.

Half the Sky: Endangered on Earth

Primetime television commercials and full-page newspaper jackets zoom on fresh young faces and sleek new gizmos stressing how technology has moved forward since the time of Ambassador cars and HMT watches.  If you have any memory of the Licence Raj economy, when stifling entrepreneurship was the raison d’etre of the system, the brave bold today ads flaunt a brash, happening India.

We are made to believe that because of a new car model hitting the road every three months or the screen of our television getting bigger and bigger, we have been able to usher in a new dawn and leave behind all that was old and stagnant. But modern machines do not make modern people. Technology is most certainly a major route for reformist change, but its role as an instrument of change depends on its users and so it can be as potent in propagating stultifying stereotypes. Technology can help us grow in the direction we want but may not be able to help if we are misdirected. Just think of the supercomputer which can be used to trace the footprints of an erratic monsoon and – and develop nuclear weapons as well. 

Moreover, when newer electronic avatars threaten to throw asunder the old order, the keepers of the crusted establishment know a thing or two about protecting the status quo. When a Khap panchayat in Uttar Pradesh banned the use of cell phones by women, the diktat of the male-chauvinist kangaroo court sought to put an end to the many possibilities technology held for women in those remote villages, because the holders of power saw a definite threat in the little device. The exclusively male group was afraid that the SIM in the hands of the ‘onion peelers’ could shake the ground beneath the smug footholds of patriarchy.  (You see, all it takes is a missed call.) At such times, it is not technology but its users who would have to intervene. What would need to come into play are something as basic as the human values of courage and empathy. These cannot be substituted by technology.

The other aspect of the date between gadgetry and youth has been that while access to knowledge has never been easier, while participatory platforms have never been wider, these alone are not sufficient to pave the way towards a more egalitarian world. Yes, we now know a lot more; yes, we now are more on talking terms with more of those like us . . . But has all this ‘increased talktime’ helped the urban, privileged lot to reach out? Has it helped us be more sensitive to those that fight the survival battle in Other India, the vast tribal hinterland unvisited by the laptop and fast-food culture?

Then there is the question of those who do try to use modern media and technology to change warped mindsets. A social campaign against rape by a Bollywood personality comes to mind. The heart of the campaign may be in the right place, its intentions noble. But the principle of gender sensitivity is carried only halfway through. So while its aim is to end gender violence, the logic is flawed. It does affirm that women have their own identity and that they should not endure violence but these right noises get lost in the absence of a sharper focus. It reminds men of the many roles women play in their lives and how, therefore, they should be respected. Maybe inadvertently, but it ends up encouraging the notion that women have to be related to men and their lives in order to be deserving of this respect. It talks of what ‘real men’ do, thus solidifying gender binaries and stressing that there is something quintessentially masculine and feminine instead of an all-encompassing humane bracket. It is naïve to say that as men would take time to come out of familiar categories and would feel lost if old certainties are taken away, first one should expect them to become better men and then better human beings. The gender binary in our society is hugely skewed. One cannot take five hundred years to achieve step one, the next five hundred to step two. We can’t apologetically shrug and say that, till then, we would have to accept the present forms of violence arising from prejudices we are wary of disturbing, while new kinds of attacks each day continue to take place. This is precisely why the more things change, the more they remain the same.

At the same time, to achieve a fast solution, one ought not to pluck a half-ripe principle. Even if we forget the ideal of honest means for an honest end, this is not sustainable. If a man tries to be a ‘real man’ by not hitting his partner, he may also have some expectations from her that he thinks should be fulfilled by a ‘real woman’. So, at its very inception, such patchy logic is ridden with holes.

The sellers and propagators of technology, companies offering new technological ‘solutions’ every day and swearing by the notion of ‘progress’, cannot operate in a value-neutral vacuum. If women are threatened with rape on Rediff chat or Twitter, the portal and service providers cannot throw up their hands at these ‘non-technical’ issues. They are being run by people, not machines, who are a living-thinking-feeling part of our society and they cannot but address these violations in the strictest manner possible.  Such contradictions are also blatant when ‘new age’ IT companies practise gender-based wage difference and evade putting women in top positions notwithstanding their merit.

On a personal level, I have felt this yawning (literally) gap in the modernity of a techno-savvy blooming glowing shining dining young India and the way we lead our lives and make our choices time and again. A year or so back, when people I know had not started chiding me for the pounds I had gained, I got a call from a friend in advertising. A couple of actors/models had backed out at the last moment, and my friend had been assigned the task of looking for replacements. I have problems with something as commercial as product endorsements. But this was to be for a publication and promised a ‘public interest’ message. I love doing different things; this was something I had never done before, and I got all ears for the details. She described the scene to be shot to me.

Two women are in a public space, a man tries to harass one, the woman is nervous, the other woman intervenes, thus lending strength and solidarity to the first one. It seemed simple enough. It wasn’t. The two women could not be just any women. They had to be a particular sort. The target: thin, preferably fair. The intervener: someone bigger. 

I had to be the target. Always allergic to stereotypes, I asked to play the latter. My friend went back to the director and asked him. He said he couldn’t flip, that he had visualized the scene a certain way and couldn’t play with the aesthetics of it, and that it wasn’t about stereotypes. I wasn’t convinced, and my two minutes of potential fame went down the archetypal drain in less than two minutes.

My first job involved working on the Right to Information. A journalist friend informed that her magazine’s next issue was on young activists and for a change they wanted not models but activists for the cover. I appreciated the nous of the magazine in wanting to have real, ‘flawed’, and not airbrushed people on the cover, something that most mainstream magazines are loath to do. As for being on the cover, I felt I was young enough but not activist enough. I asked her if I could pass the brief around, thinking I’d ask a young friend who had been engaged with activism longer than I had. My journalist friend asked her editor. She reverted to hesitantly inform me that while the magazine was looking for activists, they wanted someone thin, and preferably fair. I stated that I wasn’t up for it if such were the criteria for selection. But I told my other colleagues about the opportunity. (Looking back, I felt I shouldn’t have passed the word around for a shoot that ostensibly chose people for their work but based on their skin colour and body type.) I thought I shouldn’t impose my opinions on them. Finally, someone was chosen from our group who, though not fair, was slim enough but was even newer to activism than I was.

The cover needed men too. When my friend proffered, they required him to get rid of his facial hair. He refused.

The magazine cover we eventually saw on the stands had some stiff models, except the person chosen from our organization, in fashionably ‘ethnic’ clothing. Considering that the magazine was conforming to stereotypes, it hadn’t done a great job of it. The models were more ‘model-like’ than ‘activist-like’ but, the lord be blessed, reflected enough white light and had all the right angles.

That we live in a regressive society riddled with stereotypes around gender, class, caste, race and religion is yesterday’s news. But the jab of disappointment is particularly sharp when as young people, ‘with it’ in every way and adept in playing with the toys of technology, we go back to walking on all fours the moment we are called upon to stand up for things. In the first instance, a young director, in whose hands sophisticated technology willingly yielded to enhance his creativity, felt turning stereotypes on their heads would interfere with aesthetics. I do not have his skills, experience and expertise, and I am in no position to question them. But can aesthetics and politics not go hand in hand? Does art have to be apolitical and politics unaesthetic?

When I ask my friends in advertising about why commercials still try so hard to conform, they say that while they are dying to do brave new work, their clients are afraid of taking risks and have no romantic notions about traversing the road less taken. So on screen, we hardly see men changing diapers and women being the breadwinners, though such real-life instances have been around for quite some time now, even if they aren’t the norm yet. Technology, claiming to deliver things ahead of our times, fails when as popular media it cannot even keep pace with the times.

Of course, there do exist some young people discerning enough to acknowledge that this is not how it should be. Having studied literature, my friend went for an advertising course hoping to introduce to that world the gender sensitivity and non-conformity she had always believed in and absorbed even better in college. Upon joining the new course, it did not take her long to grasp that advertising expected her not to use her previous education but unlearn it. She tried to change things, came up with exciting presentations of her ideas but nothing budged. She ultimately decided to quit and got back to academics, instead of doing something that flew in the face of all she stood for.

There are also some who stay but keep trying to create a dent instead of allowing themselves to get completely co-opted. An editor I know ensures that the primary school textbooks she handles have Ravi and Sunil fetching water and doing other household chores, apart from studying.  ‘No Malti or Susheela would ever wash utensils in by book, while Ram goes to school,’ she promises. While publishing is a business, she ensures that being responsible for the content she does not lend a hand in planting gender stereotypes in young minds.

If there were more such who insisted on pushing against the wall instead of predicting it won’t give way, or resisted becoming a part of something they did not believe in, if we did not let ourselves be a supine mass of wood floating in any direction that wind or water would deign to carry it, undoubtedly the tectonic shift one had never dared to hope for because of its scale would have happened. Still can.

In the case of the magazine cover, we had a well-established publication for the youth trying to do something different and real. But the media house was trying to be radical in a halfway, conditional manner, not confident that their young readership would be welcoming enough of their initiative. When I was in the Film and Television Institute, Pune, we had a guest lecture by young film-maker Dibakar Banerjee. He has contributed gems to the Hindi film industry like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Love Sex Aur Dhokha and Shanghai. Among other things, his films often expose middle-class hypocrisies. In each of his works, he has shown brilliant film-making and has got his politics right, thereby answering the question of the compatibility of politics and aesthetics. Speaking to us, he shared his frustration over how young couples ‘modern’ in every sense of the term would say that they cannot marry each other because one of theirs is a no-onions-nor-garlic family. No different are our matrimonial ads where the young gleefully participate with their parents in a caste-based elimination-selection of prospective partners.

In Love Sex Aur Dhokha, we witness an India which is abreast with technological advancement but is actually using it to fulfil its greed, creating a divide between the doer (the user of technology) and the done upon (the ones against whom technology has been used). One example shown in the movie, and something rampant in recent India, is the use of hidden cameras for pornography and blackmail. The employment of technology to commit crimes like foeticide is also common amongst the middle class. At the other end of this lie our daily soaps where they reveal that girls are valuable indeed and, of course, the best way to understand this is to see them performing sacrifices and participating in trials by fire, all in order to do what they do best – ‘keep the family together’.

All these issues are related to the young inhabitants of India, who know their iPods like the back of their hand but are shy of breaking free of the old dogmas on which they base their lives. The old principles – honesty, truth, standing up for ourselves and others, sharing our privileges – lying forgotten are the inconvenient ones. Even as I wrote this, it came as a small shock to me that I paused to think of whether there are ‘cooler’ substitutes for these words; words that should have been basic to our existence now sound ‘loaded’, ‘outdated’, ‘moralistic’, as if human values also come with an expiry date, and all rights and wrongs have become perspectival (unless we are at the receiving end of those wrongs). Those of us who have discarded all ideologies need to find them back. Those who think who they have them need to probe deeper to practise them with complete scrupulousness. The young, technology-driven India is an India privileged like never before. But on the other side, there’s the underprivileged India, some of whose young members are fighting brave battles on their personal and societal fronts. The privileged India cannot simply be the benefactor of a modern India and refuse to acknowledge its accountability. If a girl from a family where ‘honour killing’ is a threat runs away to escape a fate imposed by her family, she is of huge inspiration to me. People like us are clearly better ensconced and do not run risks so dire. In comparison, and also in deference, to that girl if we do not even shake ourselves out of our stupor to assert to our (surely, more understanding) families a right as basic as that of choosing our partners, we should shed all pretensions of modernity. One expects this young India to raise the right questions and find some answers, and if the process causes discomfort or inconvenience, to kindly deal with it.

After the 16 December rape case in Delhi, we had cried ourselves hoarse asking the state and the police to deliver justice and had sworn that we would not let this go on. To fulfil that promise, we ought to do justice to our own lives as conscientious beings. We have to use technology and all the privileges we have received as part of the modern world package to seek and destroy whatever is rotten in the state of India. There is no other way we can allow ourselves to go on.

First published in The Equator Line, August-October 2013.