Thou shalt not blog publicly ...... (who knows what people might think)

I study in a small desert town, and the first proper rain of the season is always intoxicating. When the grass turns a lush green, and the ground is coloured in a multitude of deep reds and browns. The sky is washed a brilliant blue, and the scent of water on the ground hangs everywhere. I wish I could bottle this scent, wear these colours and feel this way forever, Wet Earth.

My two best friends and I woke up to this earthy yet ethereal feeling last evening, and decided to enjoy every minute of it. We went to a close by dhaba frequented by our College students, sat outside, enjoying the rain, the weather, the glorious feeling, good food, ourselves and the company.

Did we do anything wrong? Apart from smoking in a public place (I’m sorry, I apologise for that, allow me to put out that cigarette) I can’t think of anything, yet popular public opinion seems to be that we did a very stupid thing. We ought to think before we do things like this!

There was the guy at the dhaba who followed us into the city, fell at my friends feet, begged her not to take him wrongly, that he considers her his sister and asked her not to smoke openly. I honestly thought for a second that he meant it for her health, when I remembered that he’d been smoking too. He asked her not to travel publicly and not to eat at hotels or else her reputation will be spoiled and presumably no one will want to marry her. We ought to have thanked him for his concern, promised to be good little girls and quietly moved on. But there’s a reason the two of us are best Friends, and both of us immediately launched into an incoherent argument with him, “you were smoking! What if we were boys? No we won’t!” He got more agitated, we got more incensed. Finally our third friend had the sense to tell him, that we had heard what he had said and would consider it, he let go of my friend’s feet and we drove of fuming.

There were the guys at college who told us we had it coming and that girls should never got to Dhabas on their own. You have no Idea what people might think. There were girls who agreed. There were friends who were surprised that we went to the Dhaba on our own without manly men to protect us. There was my mother, who very thoughtfully pointed out that the new flexible and accepting me, might actually agree with him ten years down the line after reconsidering and re-evaluating what he said.

Let’s give the guy at the dhaba a break, he doesn’t know better. I’ll pass on my mother, I think she was trying to be funny or making a point. But I refuse to listen to the Big-Town-Kids-Stuck-in-a-Small -Town, with their bored, utterly condescending attitude, they’re worse than the guy at the Dhaba. They pretend to know better, they ought to know better, yet they don’t. They are the ones who need to be the change they keep saying they want to see. They’re hypocrites who think it’s OK for girls to party with them, get drunk with them, sleep with them but not OK for girls to go to a dhaba on their own.

I’ve been told I need to stop reading books, and learn to be a good human being instead, that girls should leave swearing to boys, I’ve been told by guys that they don’t believe in feminists so I better keep my mouth shut. That if I keep spewing feminism, I’m going to die sad and alone. I intend to die screaming my head off, so what if I’m alone and no one else can hear me, I’m doing it for me.

Not Tacky......... It was Disturbing

2.5 Hours. 120 Rupees. 1,000,000 Brain Cells. This is what it cost me to watch Kambhakt Ishq. But writing is therapeutic and hopefully by the time I finish writing this post, I will have stopped fantasizing about inserting a grandfather clock which chimes the hour and half hour up Akshaye Kumars ass.

I think the biggest problem I have with this movie is that it starts out with the “hero” calling the heroine a bitch and the turning point of the movie comes when the heroine realizes that she is, in fact, a bitch (because she doesn’t believe in marriage and true love). Other highlights include the song where a whole gaggle of blonde haired bimbos thrust their boobs out (of their dresses) in retaliation to guys who were, well.... just thrusting, the scene where Kareena sits and cries her heart out because she (thinks she) had drunken pre-marital sex with Akshay Kumar and of course the operation where Kareena wears her lucky-mantra-chanting watch over her surgical gloves. There is also the scene where Akshaye Kumar is cavity searched by a big black woman, I didn’t see that scene, I had my eyes shut. But I’m sure that had I seen it I would have found it offensive, racist and included it among the highlights.

Then there is the other small issue about the objectification of and violence against women (I lost track of the number of times they got pawed, mauled, kicked, kissed and verbally abused) the fact that sex is portrayed as OK for men and great for fun but that true love and women must abstain from sex (the “Heroines” are virginal and Akshaye Kumar stops just short of having drunken pre-marital sex with Kareena because sniff* he realizes he’s truly in love with her as opposed to the other harlots he was just stringing along .... wipes away a tear). Akshaye Kumar gets all the insults, punches and one liners in, while Kareena is left staggering from drunkenness, being kissed against her wishes, being chased by a (politically correct, racially integrated!) street gang (she is rescued by Sylvester Stallone who hearing her maidenly shrieks for help and the sound of ka-ching decided to appear in this movie and save her), leaving a watch in Akshaye Kumars Stomach, realizing her mother was a bitch (Mommy dearest refused to take back philandering hubby despite his honest and earnest plea that he had changed and wanted things to work out between them) and that she is a bitch (for not believing in true love and marriage and believing in the fact that all men and Akshaye Kumar are jerks).
I did however like the first proposal scene, it was thoughtful, romantic and everything the movie wasn’t. If I ever get proposed to, I too want to be dumped overboard a yacht into a coral reef from which my proposer will pull out an oyster which will open to reveal a handful of pearls and a 24 karat diamond engagement ring. I did not care for the second one, the one where Akshaye Kumar shouts at Kareena and orders/forces her into a car after leaving Denise Richards (playing herself, and who obviously doesn’t understand any of the hindi dialogue insulting her but can recognize the phrase “you come before camera with less clothes and we give money to you” in 37 different languages).

This movie was essentially written by a dick, a dick which managed to wrap itself around a pen and move it across paper. The audience seemed to enjoy the movie. As for me..... Does anyone have a grandfather clock they’re not particularly fond of?

The Extra Sister

When my twin sisters were born, the world-wise nurses consoled my mother; they told her not to worry, that she would eventually come to love her two extra daughters. The concerned doctor asked her whether there’d be any problems at home. And there were. My grandmother refused to come to the hospital to see her two new grandchildren because they were girls (however like the nurses had said, she came around to love them, within the next 24 hours). Not-so-distant relatives landed up, offering to adopt one of them. They were childless and my parents had too many girls, it made perfect sense to them.

We’re in this beautiful hill station. “We want to go for a nice gentle trek, breathe in the fresh air, reconnect with nature, far from the maddening crowds. Preferably some place with a stream we can splash around in” The guide listens, nodding his head thoughtfully. He looks over the five of us and after assessing our needs and wants proposes that we go to Mata Betapakkahogas Temple. “It’s only a 1001 steps, you can do it, you can stop in between and drink nimboo paani at any of the 2002 tea shops that line the cemented staircase leading up to the temple, the hundred other people also climbing up with you will give you strength, and once you reach the top all you have to do is buy and plant a Trishul at the steps of the mandir and all your wishes will come true. My brother’s wife’s nephew’s daughter just had a son, only through the grace of Mataji. Of course once your wish has been fulfilled you must come back to thank the Mataji and that time you must stay at my sister’s husband’s niece’s son’s hotel.” Of course there was the guide at Jaisalmer, who philosophically shrugged and told my father that what happens will happen and who knows what gods will is.

Growing up as one of three sisters we’ve had to deal with sympathy and incredulousness all our lives. The three of us have perfected the “No, just three sisters, thank the good lord” line which we repeat, often several times, to the same person, heads bobbing vigorously, smiles plastered on our faces until it sinks into their thick skulls that we are perfectly content, thank you very much. We’ve learnt to deal with friends who try to convince us that we need a brother to balance out the family and my parents have learnt to deal with the well-wishers who try and introduce them to support groups for parents afflicted with too many daughters.

While I can’t claim to the fact that I never let any of this get to me (I am rather high strung and my sainted mother has often been at the receiving end of tirades directed at these friends and too defamatory to publish), I can very confidently assert that I never understood what these people were going on about. Until this summer that is. This summer when the two of us who are now living in hostel returned home, we were given a space of 5 square feet, in which we were expected to keep our suitcases containing all our possessions and a rolled up mattress. The sister who was still living at home, not content with taking over our room and converting it into her room had launched a successful offensive against the rest of the house as well. By the time I came back home the drawing room, living room, guest bed room and tiny store room had all fallen. Alex the G would have been envious of her strategy. Which is why if this post is a bit ranty or whiny, excuse me. Sleeping scrunched up on a lumpy mattress never did anyone any good and I am a person who needs her inner-beauty sleep even in the best of living conditions. I have finally begun to appreciate and understand the sympathy out there for families of three sisters. However I am still confused about how an extra sibling in the form of a brother could make things any better.

Twilight Review

Wanted: Male, aged 109 years, with looks of a twenty year old Greek god, raincoat model, for a clumsy, plain girl not good enough for his godlikeness.
Apparently that’s the personal millions of women and teenage girls all over the world want an answer to. How else do you explain the success of twilight? The writing sucks, the characters are characterless and the story is trite.
I daydream a lot, about the books I want to write, about the movies I want to make, and the things I want to do (awww.........hell even about the blog I want to keep). I wanted to write this book, it was buffy inspired and it was going to be brilliant. An ordinary girl falls in love with a vampire, a vampire who while also attracted to her must fight his temptation to suck the blood and life out of her. The girl was going to be kickass, the vampire suave yet tormented, sexual tension would abound, there would be witty repartee. It would not end in the conventionally happy way, the girl would eventually realize that vampires and vampirism (which are obviously subtexts for some deeper gender issues) aren’t for her, but she’d emerge a better, more confident and stronger (emotionally and physically!) person from her experience. I was going to write that book, it was going to be a best seller. My heroine was going to be the heroine to match. Millions of girls all over the globe inspired by said heroine would dump their idiotic boyfriends even before they reached the last page and millions (minus a few) of the dumped boyfriends would wonder what the entire fuss was about, a few sensitive boyfriends would get it and change themselves accordingly, the world would become, all in all, a better place.
Then Twilight happened, apparently Stephanie Meyer a mormon housewife, mother of two in America also had the same dream, and instead of daydreaming about it and writing her booker acceptance speech (they do let you give a speech right?) like I did, actually wrote the damn story and then a sequel and then another one and then another one. So there they were, four gorgeous black books with mysterious symbolic imagery and seductive titles like Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, what could I do? I bought them, all four in one go. Went home curled up in a sofa glad to have an excuse to not put the more feasible of my daydreams into action (if I went ahead now, Stephanie Meyer could sue me) and started to read, tried to read and then ultimately after several pages of descriptions of Edward “looking more like a greek god than anyone should possibly be”, and finally “so beautiful that he looked like a raincoat model standing in the porch in the rain in a raincoat” I gave up, of yeah I was about thirty pages in. Thirty pages of how beautiful Edward is, of how plain Bella is, of how clumsy Bella is and how graceful Edward is, of how dull Bella is and how interesting Edward is. I gave up! The dumb ass heroine was one of those perfectly irritating girls who say they’re skinny and whine about their pallid skin (translation: I am slender and have great porcelain skin, all the “nerdy” boys keep trying to talk to me, and I’m too nice to put them down! Boo hoo poor me). Do Bella and Edward find true love? Yes they do, does Edward display signs of an obsessive abusive possessive husband? Yes he does, are the books a success? Yes they are, and now millions and millions of girls all over the world have dumped their un-godlike boyfriends who are incapable of modelling raincoats. They sit around being perfectly dull just like Bella, waiting for a Vampire who looks like a greek god to come and bite them and control their lives completely! Millions (minus a few) of the dumped boyfriends wonder what the fuss is all about while a few who catch on go from being nice normal blokes to utter jerks a la Edward and his masterful ways . I weep. And wish that I hadn’t been so lazy. If only I had written my version first! Lesson Learnt: fuck up your Ideas before someone does it for you.

The F-word Rant

Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, she doesn’t even like them. When asked to speak about them in an English Class years and years (think two) ago all she had to say was that She was not one, that her friend Ramsub is one and that feminists are crazy, out of control women who muddle up their issues by running after dogs in Calcutta. (Another classmate also speaking about his distaste for feminists had compared them to the always overzealous PETA and Sindhu had muddled up the issues by hearing that it was the feminists who were chasing dogs).
So there you have it. Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, Feminists muddle up Issues and lastly I am one. I agree with 2 of the above suggestions and disagree with one. Firstly I agree with the last statement, I am a feminist. I also agree with the fact that Feminists muddle up issues and lastly I do not agree with Sindhu about her status as a feminist.
Perhaps Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist because the definition of a feminist is muddled and confused, but anyway this post isn’t about why Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist but rather about why and how I think I am one and my muddled views on what feminism means to me.
Feminism for me is about correcting the cultural lag. Years and years ago (think hundreds) physical strength was a rather important quality for anyone with ambition or a family to provide for to possess. A job on the battlefield entailed wielding 100kg swords and wearing armour which weighed 200 kg (sourced from Fort guides across India) and at the same time being able to lift your hand and legs to strike and run away respectively. A job on the field also required strength, as anyone who has tried to guide an obstinate 200 kg Bull to plough a field will tell you. But find me someone who has guided an obstinate bull across a field, hah! You can’t! And therein lies the rub. Tractors, technology have made physical strength on the field redundant. Machine guns and tanks have made strength on the battlefield redundant. Technology has progressed and levelled the battle err. Playing field for the sexes, we, humans haven’t progressed quite as much.
Ok farming and battling don’t remain preferred professions anymore, so why are and why were women blocked from the remaining and now more popular professions. You see years and years ago (in the hundreds again) women spent most of the productive part of their lives producing – children, they spent 9 months of a year pregnant and another 3 months breast feeding and trying to cheat the infant mortality rate of that time. This ravage on her body continued from puberty to 27 when in a tragic but routine miscarriage she passes from this hell on earth to better things in heaven (for having fulfilled her duty as a woman on earth so admirably I presume). No wonder women were confined to the house – being a woman was a full time job, it involved being pregnant, facing off day after day with an army of brats, the household chores and to top it all off, they were routinely risking death. It’s no wonder they weren’t allowed to work outside the house, who wants a hormonal pregnant lady looking after their accounts? And which employer wants an employee who might die just as the 50 foot elephant palace commissioned by the Maharjah is about to be completed.
But you know it’s not like this anymore, we have contraception now, there’s a little piece of rubber out there which has done more for civil rights than any other person or thing in the world. Today women in the “quiverfull” (what god gives we will accept – it’s a sin to use contraception) movement make headlines, “Denver woman gives birth to 18th child” and there are debates about what she’s doing to her body, her life, her children and the global food crisis.

So you see the technology is in place, yet the attitudes haven’t changed, that’s your cultural lag. Technology has freed women from the house, given them time (both within their lifetime and by extending their lifetime) and they have nothing to do, can’t they be allowed to work outside the house? Technology has blurred the lines between the genders, and yet age old thoughts, stereotypes and functions of gender continue to apply.
It’s no answer to say that giving birth is a divine right or the divine function of women, and that women are acting on their basest jealous natures by coveting what is rightfully the men’s domain. To that you need to refer to the bible, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, they were both given punishments, Adams was to toil and Eves was to give birth. Men have helped alleviate women’s punishment, it’s only fair that women return the favour and help alleviate some of men’s burden.
Feminism to me is about allowing men and women to do what they want – stay at home, go out and work, enjoy random sex, enjoy a secure marriage. It’s about helping them to do what they want - Men supporting wives who want to work, changing the laws for a more egalitarian society, raising awareness. It’s not about raising girls like boys but about raising Boys and Girls alike, by teaching both daughters and sons the same values and skills and valuing them the same. It’s about women enjoying the same freedoms as men and men being subjected to the same standards as women. It sounds like equality talk and is equality for the most part, but feminism for me is also about recognizing how far we are from the above utopia, it’s about being aware as a woman woman of the problems I might face, learning to be independent and proud of my gender. Occasionally it even means acknowledging my weakness as a woman and need for help and sometimes it means revelling in my superiority as a woman.

My identity as a feminist was born when I was 10 when my mom gave me “the talk” about sex. Not the Physical act of making love or procreation but the more insidious, the much more delicate one – of sex as a stereotype, as a mental block, as a societal imposition. Bred and raised on Enid Blytons’ (Betsy may to the Five Find Outers) I thought I had grown up on a steady diet of boys and girls having adventures, but that wasn’t so. My mother casually pointed out certain glaring gender stereotypes (too many to enumerate, but the gist that comes out is that Girly things – bad and boyish things – good, only girls who want to be boys have adventures or do things, the rest stay home and hold hands). My whole world came crashing down and I had to rethink my identity as a girl, this grew into awareness about gender stereotyping, restrictions, and finally my identity as a feminist.

Being a feminist is something intensely personal to me, I have never read any feminist manifesto or books or even Wikipedia articles. I don’t know of the history of feminism or the various brands of feminism, My feminism is guided by me, what I see around me, what I hear around me and what is happening around me. It’s guided by my gut, the discussions I have with others and the occasional editorial or blog I might read.
The Enid Blyton episode showed me how the books I read and the movies I watch can influence me and others around me, so I started critically analysing gender roles in them and forming my own opinions. It means that I wait eagerly for the next Tamora Pierce Novel and pull my hair out at the success of Stephanie Meyers inane Twilight series. It meant that I began to notice the 2 sisters , (several aborted sisters) and 1 much younger brother pattern, realized that as a family of three sisters we were rather unique in India and wondered what my paternal grandmother thought of it (she came around to it eventually). I supported abortion and was thrown for a toss when I realized that a beautiful poem that was my mother’s favourite was actually anti-abortion, female foeticide began to trouble me and I became passionately pro-life. Today the right to abortion, contraception and washing machines are the most important rights a woman can have in my opinion (my mothers’ poem was reinterpreted). I am inspired by women all over the world, and saddened by their mistreatment. My grandmother, my aunts all serve as examples I want to follow and when I have daughters (adopted of course!) I’ll point out the strong women in my (and their) family, just as my mother did for me so that they too have close examples to follow. I agree that there is misuse of the dowry acts but I still want them to exist so that that one woman who wants to use it rightly can. I object to stereotypes and got infuriated (and slightly hysterical) when a classmate told me that girls shouldn’t swear but it’s Ok for boys. The quiverfull movements give me bad dreams, the Taliban, LDS in Utah, The Ram Sene and VHP give me nightmares. The men over at saveindianfamily make me laugh with their Rama-Sita-Ravana analogies. The Ramayana enthralled me at age 9 (story!), infuriated me at 13 (agni pareeksha!), and leaves me wondering at age 20 (Sita refused to come back to Rama, Rama had only one wife!). Lastly I get upset when girls say they aren’t feminists, there are so many definitions of feminism out there (all muddled up as Sindhu Shankar would say) that every woman with self respect, dignity, independence, or striving for it, is a feminist. When a girl says that she is not a feminist or doesn’t like feminism, to me it means that, that girl has no identity as a woman, it means she is ignorant or indifferent to the problems that women face, it means she is content and willing to conform with the stereotypes that exist. I think Sindhu Shankar is a feminist.