Interviews: Five of the World's Best Chefs

December 2013: What and where do the experts eat? Five of the world’s best chefs—“we're absolute food fanatics”—reveal their favourite restaurants and food experiences, and what they love about Indian food.

September in Mumbai is a muggy, mundane month. The monsoon has just ended, and the festive season is just about starting to simmer. So when Harper’s Bazaar called to ask whether I’d like to meet not one, not two, but several of the world’s top chefs, it seemed like just the spice my month needed.

This month, Gary Mehigan from MasterChef Australia was in town promoting Melbourne, the sunny city he chose over gloomy London. Sydney’s Mark Best, London’s Alyn Williams, Buckinghamshire’s Laurie Gear and the Isle of Skye’s Marcello Tully were among those participating in the Creative Services Support Group’s CSSG 2013 Summit—Food & Art Edition. Chefs Gear and Tully were also here to launch Taste, a curated cookbook in collaboration with five other Michelin-starred and celebrity chefs from around the world.

Gary Mehigan, MasterChef Australia

Five minutes into a conversation with chef Gary Mehigan, I feel I’ve met him before. It’s no wonder: on MasterChef Australia, one of the world’s most watched cooking shows, the loved trio of hosts-judges was told, early on, to just be themselves. “George (Calombaris) and I had worked together for a long time; we’d known Matt (Preston) as a food critic for 10 years, his kids went to the same crèche as my daughter. The conversations we have, the way we interact with contestants, it’s all natural.”

Gary was born on Hayling Island on the South Coast of England, to an engineer father and artist mother. Food was always an important part of family life, and his mother cooked everything from scratch, not pandering at all to the boy’s hankerings for popular pre-packaged food. “I want to rekindle an interest in cooking at home, cooking for family, for love, for health,” he says about his cooking evangelism.

It was his grandfather, a chef and teacher, who helped him embark on his journey with food. Having trained in world-class restaurants, including The Connaught and Le Souffle in London in his early years, Gary and his wife Mandy moved to Melbourne in 1991. “It’s not so much the cold but the darkness of London that got to me. I’d be in the kitchen all day, and would barely see sunlight for nine months of the year.” On vacation, sitting in Fitzroy Gardens on a crystal-clear, cloud-free Melbourne day, Gary and Mandy decided that the city was it!

Since, he’s opened two restaurants, award-winning Fenix in 2000 and The Maribyrnong Boathouse in 2007; written several best-selling cookbooks including Gary Mehigan’s Comfort Food and Your Place or Mine with George Calombaris; and progressed in this television career from doing “the odd appearance spots on daytime TV to the first series of Ready Steady Cook, then Good Chef Bad Chef, which all culminated in Boy’s Weekend. And that got me into MasterChef.”

As a discerning foodie, I ask Gary to list his favourite restaurants and foods. “There are quite a few places in the world where you can spend a lot of money on eating exceptionally well,” he says dreamily, listing The Fat Duck in the UK, French Laundry and Shake Shack, NYC, in the USA, Mugaritz in Spain, Le Chateaubriand in Paris, and Antica Corte Pallavicina in Italy as his favourites. “The food served at the Corte, a 700-year-old farmhouse, is all made from the produce of the farm. They serve this divine pork cured for over three years under the house. It’s quite an experience.”

Gary says he loves “the coconut base, curry leaves and light flavour” of South Indian food. “You mean Kerala cuisine,” I suggest. “Yes, I love appams, and recently drove 40 kilometres to get myself an appam pan from an Indian shop.” I tell him that my mother is a Melbourne-based Keralite. “Maybe she’ll make appams for me?” he asks hopefully, making me laugh. He also loves gulab jamuns, which he equates to donuts: “Not the fried donuts you get everywhere, but good ones. I’ll make them for you sometime."

Mark Best, Marque, Sydney

For a much-awarded chef, Mark Best started his career as an electrician in the gold mines in Western Australia and didn’t move in to hospitality until he was 25. “If you’d ever been down a gold mine in Western Australia, you’d know you don’t need any incentive to get out of there,” he laughs. Like many people, Mark had a pipe dream of running a café. His concerned flatmate, a chef of a well-known bistro in Sydney, told him he was a “complete idiot”, getting in to an extremely difficult industry without knowing much about it. She made him work in the kitchen for a day.

And there, on that day, Mark had his first culinary epiphany. “It was like being stuck by lightening,” he says. “I thought: ‘My god, this is it!’ This was what I wanted to do!” Thus commenced his apprenticeship at the Macleay Street Bistro, Potts Point, in 1990. Five years later, he opened his own restaurant, Peninsula Bistro, Balmain, with his wife Valerie Best, which soon became popular and drew rave critical acclaim.  

Through travel, Mark had fallen in love with France and regional French food very early on. In 1998, to further his study of French cuisine, he worked at Alain Passard’s three Michelin Star L'Arpège in Paris and Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, UK. He returned to start Marque in Surry Hills in 1999.

“I’ve come to realise that Australia is a Western nation, but it’s geographically part of Asia. I don’t like the term ‘fusion’, but embrace the influences of the multicultural population.” Lots of travel through Asia opened his eyes to the local street food and the cooking styles of the region, and informed the food at Marque. From Chinese cuisine, he learnt explore texture. “Many things in Chinese cuisine don’t have much of a flavour, but an interesting texture, like shark fin which is gelatinous.” But it’s important to be subtle about your influences and “careful that your menu doesn’t read like a map of where you’ve just been.”

A food experience that’s clearly important to Mark—he mentions it twice—is eating stir fried chilli potatoes just under the Great Wall in China. L'Arpège and the famous bistros of Paris are his absolute favourite places to eat, as is Narisawa in Tokyo.

For someone so influenced by Asia, it is no surprise that Mark loves the diversity of Indian cuisine—“like the language, the filling of a samosa can change every ten kilometres. It looks the same, but it changes”—though this is his first time in the country. His introduction to Indian cooking was when he was still an electrician, through a cookbook by actor-food-writer Madhur Jaffrey, and his favourite Indian food is something simple, something he’s eaten for a long time: masala dosa. “I love that food is so deeply engrained in the Indian people and culture.”

“At Marque, I’ll use Indian spices like cumin, coriander and turmeric to season.” On his whirlwind trip, Mark looks forward to spending time in local markets, looking at spices, and seeing how and in what combinations the locals use them. “But people say you can spend 300 lifetimes exploring India, and I’ve got 10 days!” he says as he hurries off.

Alyn Williams, Alyn Williams at The Westbury, London

A Michelin Star chef, Alyn Williams admits he wasn’t a child prodigy, but developed a palate and appreciation of food early through his father, who was—and still is—a very good cook. “Dad used to grow his own vegetables in the garden of our home in London, and would cook for passion and pleasure on Sundays.” He could still eat his father’s minestrone every day… “It’s delicious, it reminds me of him, reminds me of my mother who died 14 years ago. Food in our house was all about family. It was all about sitting around the table and eating and talking and enjoying each other’s company.”

Alyn learnt his craft at a wide variety of establishments, both in the UK (Les Alouettes in Surrey, and Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham), and in Colorado and California in the USA. In 1998, he joined Teatro in London as sous chef, working alongside head chef Stuart Gillies and consultant Gordon Ramsay. He then moved to Ramsay’s Pétrus for just over two years. After working with celebrity chef Marcus Wareing for more than eight years, he is now chef/patron of Alyn Williams at The Westbury.

“I was classically trained and use a French lineage, though it’s hard to categorise absolutely what a cuisine is anymore,” he opines. “Your horizons have broadened. The ingredients you use are different. At one time, you used to buy off-the-shelf products from generic markets. Now, my vegetables come from organic farms in the South of England; meat from three different farmers around the UK; shellfish from divers off the coast of Scotland. It’s a different world, led by quality ingredients, abundant knowledge and creativity.”

Alyn also points out how much eating out has evolved in London. “It used to be that when food was expensive, it was often quite good. But if it wasn’t very expensive, you were almost sure it was going to be quite poor. Whereas these days, you can eat very well at all levels—from pub food or snack-bar food all the way through to fine dining three Michelin Star restaurants.” He counts Medlar, Kitchen Table and his own restaurant as having fine food in London, and at the top, he mentions gourmets like Alain Ducasse.

When the Williams family travels, it’s not in a culinary way, but Alyn has a hundred restaurants on his wish list including L'Arpège in Paris, French Laundry in the USA, Quay in Australia, and the food of Brazilian chef Alex Atala. 

He calls his visit to India 25 years ago, when he was 21, “life changing”. Though his father had a mortar-pestle and would grind spices, and Alyn had tried Indian food—stuffed paratha, uttapam, samosa—courtesy the Indian and Pakistani population where he lived in London, he admits having a “plain palate” when he arrived. In six months, he had eaten “spice beyond (his) wildest dreams.” Since, he has eaten Indian food every week—his favourites include something called chicken Madras (that he’s convinced doesn’t exist in India) and prawn vindaloo (that he first tried in Goa). “I’m not a very good Indian cook,” he says. “But I really love the food!”

Laurie Gear, The Artichoke, Buckinghamshire

Awarded the Michelin Rising Star prize, chef Laurie Gear is largely self-taught. With a baker father and school cook mother, he has always found a feeling of comfort in the “noisy, hot, dirty, smelly” environment of a kitchen.

Laurie started by washing dishes at the local hotel at 14 in the coastal town of Lyme Regis in Dorset. “I come from a very humble background where the concept of pocket money didn’t exist. So if you wanted anything—a skateboard or BMX—you had to earn it.”

He recalls going to a wealthier friend’s house for dinner, back in the '70s when he was 12 or 13. “They had a glass coffee table, and I was thinking: ‘My gosh, that’s posh!’” Then his friend’s mum brought out a bowl of spaghetti bolognese. “I didn’t know how to eat it at first!” he laughs. “Scared the hell out of me, the wriggly worms.”

“It got me thinking, got me excited. I’d never tasted a bay leaf before, though they grew wild where I lived. It sounds simple now, but canned tomato puree had been used. Parmesan was grated on—I thought you only had cheese on toast!”

At the hotel, he was inspired by the way the chef picked the salad leaves; he’d see fresh fish coming into the kitchen to be stuffed and made into something beautiful. After a two-year course at Weymouth College, he apprenticed at Combe House, Gittisham. In an all-girls kitchen, singled out for his background and accent, a “terrified” Laurie immersed himself in the disciple of the kitchen. He analyses group dynamics: “Once you can run with the wolves, they will accept you.”

Though his early grounding has been in the classics, Laurie is mindful of the pros and cons of never having had a mentor. “Being tainted by others’ styles has never been a fear. My mistakes were made trying to learn on the job.” From Combe House, Laurie moved to Gee’s Brasserie, Oxford, then as head chef at Pinewood Film Studios, where he worked with his wife Jacqueline. He further honed his culinary skills with stints at The Fat Duck and Gordon Ramsay on Hospital Road, both awarded three Michelin Stars, and at Sally Clarkes.

Jackie and Laurie opened The Artichoke in 2002, and it was wildly popular until it closed in April 2008 due to fire damage. During this sabbatical, Laurie worked at the world-renowned Noma in Copenhagen. The Artichoke reopened in 18 months to many awards and much glory.

Food is all about the experience and the feeling, and can work for so many different reasons: celebration, comfort, memory. “Sure, sometimes it’s great to be pampered and have a Michelin Star meal. If the moment’s right, you could be having fish-n-chips, sitting in the car with the windows down, looking at the sea, and that’s a three-star meal.”

Laurie knows little about Indian cuisine—“For the most part, we in Britain know only bastardised shabby imitations.” He expected it to be overspiced, like curries in Britain that don’t appeal to his sensitive palate. But he’s been blown away. He likens idlis to a “Scandinavian sour dough”; and is pleasantly surprised by the precision of the spicing of food, akin to the “finest of French cuisine in terms of marriages of flavour and seasoning”. Who would’ve thought!

Marcello Tully, Kinloch Lodge, Isle of Skye

At 14, Brazil-born Michelin Star chef Marcello Tully was serving tea and coffee part time, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Within three-four months, he was put in to the kitchen of the restaurant, where he worked for about three years. Post professional training, he joined the legendary Roux Brothers for six years in diverse Roux establishments including the restaurants Le Gavroche, Rouxl Britannia and La Boucherie Lamartine, and Home Rouxl, the first sous-vide processing plant in the UK.

Marcello then left the restaurant industry for food manufacturing and development. He met and stayed in contact with food writer Lady Claire Macdonald, the wife of Lord Macdonald, the chief of the Scottish Clan Donald. “She rang me out of the blue one day in 2007, asking whether I knew anyone who would go to Skye to take over the restaurant at the Kinloch Lodge. I said: ‘Me.’” he says. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

Since, he has won several awards, making the Kinloch Lodge on the Isle of Skye a sought-after food and hospitality destination in Scotland. “It’s been a lot of hard work, making the hotel, and not just the food, bigger and better.” Though he’s in a remote location, what’s exciting to classically trained, Brazil-influenced Marcello is being in a place where he has access to the best product and ingredients in the world.

Though he says he likes “any food that has been done well”, given a choice, Marcello would only eat at the best restaurants in the world, those with Michelin Stars (there are 16 in Scotland, including his). “I’m a chef,” he asserts. “If I eat something, I will know immediately how fresh the ingredients are, how skilled the cook is. Eight out of the ten times I’ve been to a restaurant without a Michelin Star, I have been disappointed with the food.” He follows this by confessing to liking a McDonald’s hamburger. “People are shocked when they hear me say this,” he says, reading my mind. “You bite in to a cheeseburger, and think, ‘Umm that’s really nice.’ But when you eat each component by itself, it is disgusting. The burger is bad, the bread is dry… but somehow, together, it works. It’s very well to be snooty and call it cardboard, but look how many burgers they sell!” He also surprises me when he says that he can have an aeroplane meal and think: “Wow!”

What Marcello finds beautiful about Indian food is the passion poured into it, something he respects. “It has a wonderful balance of ingredients, so I love cooking the food, and enjoy eating it too.” He likes curries, but not too hot, and would rather have a couple of roasted chillies on the side than have them cooked into the food. “My food is very versatile, I have a lot of different cuisines going on, some Oriental sauces.” He has a curry on the menu at Kinloch Lodge, that he’s called a Brazilian coconut and lime curry—“But it’s not!” he chuckles. “It’s got very Indian influences, with all the ingredients: ginger, chilli, garlic, and even a bit of Madras curry powder.”

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An edited version of these interviews appeared in Harper's Bazaar in December 2013.

Tarun. Tehelka. Turpitude

November 2013: The King of Sting is stung by allegations of sexual violence. I take stock.

That Tarun Tejpal is trending on Twitter is an understatement. The last time I remember being glued to the TV like this, for what seems like minute-by-minute updates on a twisty-turny case, is when my city was terrorised that November five years ago. What reality TV, even news of sex on camera in the Big Boss house, can hold a candle?

Media Trials

Naïve then to media motives, political conspiracies and Tehelka’s alliance with the Congress, at 18 I admired Tarun Tejpal and his tenacious team for what I simplistically saw as watchdog journalists taking on political corruption headfirst. Years and street smarts later, I continued to admire him for at least talking about (albeit sensationalising) a huge national problem. Especially when a close common friend told me of the trials his family and the Tehelka team endured as fallout, he emerged almost like a martyr—and one who had laudably endured.

This close friend is also the one who warned me about Tarun’s roving eye (and hands) before e-introducing us for work. My interviewer was not this legendary sleaze, I wrote a few pieces for the magazine and that was that about seven years ago.

The King of Sting, Tarun’s ‘Tehelka School of Journalism’ heralded the era of TV sting ops and has been the greatest proponent of the media trial (and Twitter and Facebook and trial by the internet at large). Though it is something I have a problematic relationship with, here’s what I think. I think Tarun Tejpal did it. I think he did and said every sick thing detailed by this scared but brave young journalist in her letter to Shoma Chaudhury, Tehelka’s Managing Editor. He abused his physical power, the trust of a girl who looked up to him as her best friend’s father and father’s friend, and his authority as her boss.

After, he issued the apology that reeks of arrogance, judging that self-flagellation and a self-imposed six-month paid sabbatical would be enough. Since, he’s flip-flopped, lied and backtracked, alleged a “political conspiracy” and whatnot, and left a bumbling trail of evidence all over the place. (You’d think he’d know better, right?) Now, the victim has accused him of intimidating her family. In short, he has done everything he has appeared to stand against all these years. I think he’s worse than scum.

In a 2012 piece on the conviction of Bangaru Laxman, the subject of Tehelka’s Operation West End, Shoma had famously written: “If the vindication of Tehelka’s story sends out a message that from now on politicians will at least eschew knee-jerk reactions and meet exposure with dignified responses, the dark hours may have been worthwhile.” Funny, in light of her universally panned email brushing the incident aside as an “internal matter”, and how the magazine management has behaved when the shoe is on the other foot.

Will Tehelka Survive?

The interesting part about being in the public eye in these times is that you are compelled to embody what you preach, live your job. Just as film stars feel the pressure to always look and act a certain way, always under the gaze of the omnipotent camera, the actions of the founder and face of a magazine that encourages you to ‘Read It, Heed It’ hold a lot of significance. In the words of Maheshwar Peri, the Chairman at Careers 360: “Tarun is a victim of his own façade, fantasies and greed. He was never what he was portrayed, then and now.”

With two of the biggest pillars of the magazine that promised to be ‘Free, Fair and Fearless’ severely discredited and internal strife in the team, one wonders if it will weather the storm. (Especially in light of the blatant commercialisation of THINK, which, many felt, was the last straw in the selling out of Tehelka.)

This is a pity, I have to say; what an inglorious end it will be. Though Tehelka.com is woefully silent on the recent events, I feel that the only chance the brand has to survive is if new management manages to pull off an unbiased investigation as per the Vishaka Guidelines. It should then publish an honest story as it has always purported to do, even if it does reinforce the guilt of its Founding Editor. It’s a long shot; nonetheless, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater in hindsight, and acknowledge that the magazine has nurtured some great journalists who have done some extraordinary work.

The Tables are Turned

There are many reasons why Tarun’s claim of a political conspiracy is complete hogwash, not least is the victim. She’s a spunky, supremely intelligent woman, not one who would trade her life as she knows it for a political party or money. Heartbreakingly, media irresponsibility has meant that even I, with my rudimentary investigative skills, have figured out who she is—there have been too many details published about her. Now and always, even when the immediate frenzy dies down, she will be The Girl of The Tarun Tejpal Scandal. Aside from the personal emotional trauma and PTSD, of course, hushed whispers will follow her into rooms. Though not all from the Old Boys’ Club of senior journalists has supported Tarun, she will face hostility and guardedness from the outset of her career. She would not choose to be thus defined forever. She would not choose to make this up.

Frankly, I think she needn’t fear and could even, if she’s up for it, reveal her identity and speak up. There is no shame or blame, not hers anyway, and, as a journalist who writes on gender, she knows this. While none of this must be in accordance with her life plan, as they say, when life gives you lemons… If she could bear the burden of the spotlight and turbulence, she could become an inspiration for all women to stand up, speak out, pooh-pooh shame and seek justice against a mighty Goliath. As she heals and blossoms in front of the nation’s eye, her lovely boyfriend by her side, she will give other women hope that there is life—and love—beyond sexual assault. Much like Sohaila Abdulali, who, in 1983, published an account in of being raped in Chembur three years before (with her name, photo, et al), and has gone on to become a world-famous gender activist and writer.

Though equal rights activist Harish Iyer, who was a speaker at THINK and is the victim’s friend, too believes she should go public, he says that “the choice is hers, and it is not for us to intellectually masturbate upon.” Even if she doesn’t want to go public, I hope she will at least fight the legal battle till the end. She has enough and more support for the asking. From what I hear, the office of the Shakti Mills gang rape victim has handled the aftermath in a beautiful gender-sensitive that gives me hope—that there are enough mature individuals and organisations, particularly in the liberal media industry, who will be proud to back these women and to know them for their braveness. Among the chorus of outrage on my Facebook newsfeed, only two people have apparently sided with Tarun; at the receiving end of much backlash, one commented: “So this is what a lynch mob feels like.” 

Will the Irony Never End!

What’s fascinating about this story are the players, of course, but also the liberal doses of irony it has presented. Life sure does repeat itself: in 2001, Tarun and Tehelka were the Davids; the BJP and Laxman were the Goliaths. Today, Twitterati wonders whether Tarun has connections that can influence this case; I am quite hopeful that, aside from the loss of his brand, public humiliation and strained socio-familial ties, jail time too awaits. I feel very sorry for his family; the girls and his wife didn’t deserve this.

At the time of going to press, the Goa Police has taken suo moto action, and has initiated investigations. It will speak to the victim today and to Tarun’s daughter too, before summoning the man himself. Tarun wants the case moved to the CBI. (Here, it is necessary to write ‘at the time of going to press’—this article is, literally the last one in for the absolute final print deadline, waiting as I have be for any new news.)

For now, Tarun Tehelka Tejpal, one of India's loudest campaigners for truth and transparency has been anything but. To quote his book The Alchemy of Desire:

“Men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral.
It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men.
Not animals, not gods.”

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in November 2013.

Crack the Whip

November 2013: It’s about time India bans firecrackers. Here’s why, and what you can do.

The last time I touched a firecracker was when I was 11, and that’s almost 20 Diwalis ago. When I was 15 or 16, for a children’s drawing competition my mother’s office was hosting for Diwali, I submitted one of a menacing, whip-wielding firecracker factory owner forcing child labourers to make them. (Much in contrast to the saccharine 'Shubh Diwali’ happy-happy joy-joy ones the other angst-free kids had submitted; needless to say, I didn’t win.)

I subscribe to neither religion nor festivals, but I do understand the appeal they hold for certain people. Whatever; there are all sorts. Liberal, educated, rational middle class ‘people like us’ are constantly made to accept the masses' will on these fronts... we grin and bear religious processions blocking traffic, accept the illogical immersions that kill our fishes and pollute our seas, pander to the mobs of men on their celebratory rampages. All the while being persecuted for our 'foreign' culture, clothes, music, choices.

But I don't mean to turn this into a class debate. One realises that the lives of the majority of the people who make up our country are indescribably hard, so let them have some fun. Plus, noise level markers show that the most upmarket neighbourhoods in Mumbai and Delhi are the noisiest during Diwali, indicating that it’s the wealthy and, presumably, the educated that burst all the crackers they can afford. The one thing this does bring into focus is that there are many Indias, and reaching and teaching all of them are not easy.

Crackers are not a mere inconvenience, to be ignored under the live-and-let-live rule for greater good/religious tolerance. Where once they were burst only on Diwali, they are now used to celebrate everything—from other festivals to marriages and cricket victories. In their making, they endanger scores of workers, often children, who inhale the toxic chemicals, or perish in fires at firecracker factories. (I don't even entertain any suggestions of safety gear here and in China, the sources of our fireworks.) They similarly endanger everyone who handles them along the supply chain. But if people choose to manufacture, distribute and burst (or let their children burst) firecrackers, and fall ill, go deaf or burn because of them, well, that's their cross to bear—though I am not certain what ‘professional choice’ or knowledge the poorest of poor workers have.

A firecracker vendor told me: “How are you saying they’re dangerous? They’re killing all your dengue-causing mosquitoes, aren’t they?” This mass fumigation exercise is doing a lot more than just that. The idea that one moment of pleasure for some generates enough noise and air pollution to be terror causing and even life threatening for so many more is just not a fair equation. Mumbai is the noisiest city in the world, and I'm sure India as a whole is one of the noisiest countries. Noise pollution kills. So does air pollution, and not just asthmatics like me. Firecracker debris and litter ends up in water bodies, polluting it and killing the ecosystem. Plus there's what crackers do to animals. Pets are terrified, of course; dogs, cats, cows and other animals on urban streets die of the stress, panic, wounds and displacement—the little puppy we were fostering for an animal NGO got so startled when a loud firecracker went off that she woke up, ran in to a wall and bolted in to the living room; which would have been funny were she not bleeding all over the place from a wound in the mouth. Wildlife, including small mammals, birds and butterflies, is deafened, disoriented and distressed, often leading to death.

I would rather be a killjoy than a killer. I think the government should issue a blanket ban on firecrackers for the public, with regulated State-controlled displays on festivals.

“You’re talking from an ideological point of view,” laughs Sumaira Abdulali when I tell her this. Abdulali is the Convenor of the Awaaz Foundation, an NGO that works to protect the environment and prevent environmental pollution, and has been petitioning against firecrackers for years. “You can’t ban things suddenly, if people aren’t ready, the government isn’t ready to take such a step. One has to gather support.” She expects to take a longer route, though she was one of the first to ask for a blanket ban of firecrackers during a TV interview last year.

“We don’t even need new laws to reduce the impact of firecrackers, we just need to have the current laws enforced,” she says, rattling off the list of pre-existing laws that will keep the worst of the firecrackers off the streets. The Supreme Court issued an order in 2005 stating that all ingredients be stated clearly on firecracker boxes. Awaaz’s tests on firecrackers this year revealed that many contain Schedule 1 chemicals of the Hazardous Chemicals Rules. “These chemicals are so dangerous that the government has clear rules about their manufacture, storage and transportation,” she says, “yet, through firecrackers, they are handled and ingested by children and the general population. We keep talking about ‘air pollution’, but we need to talk about the dangerous chemicals that comprise that air pollution owing to crackers.”

The chemicals in firecrackers can be used in homemade bombs: “What’s to stop someone from transporting a bomb as firecrackers? The Explosives Substances Act defines firecrackers, but many in the market today can be classified as explosive devices outside this definition,” Abdulali asserts. This is why it is mandatory for all distributers of firecrackers to be registered with the police. “Firecrackers are not allowed on the street, not allowed in housing societies, not allowed in silence zones; crackers louder than 50 dB aren’t allowed in residential zones. Noisy ones aren’t allowed between 10 PM and 6 AM.”

These laws are not enforced. I believe it might be easier to enforce a blanket ban than have the police deal in technicalities, and qualitative aspects like noise levels, chemical composition and location. It just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do so.

Every year, Awaaz pens a report on the decibel levels through Diwali. This year, it notes that “the noise levels, which have been reducing for the past three years, were further reduced and this was the quietest Diwali in a decade.” More and more children are refraining from bursting crackers through teachings in schools; in Mumbai’s Lokhandwala, residents came together to celebrate a noise-free Diwali with sky lanterns. Over the Diwali holiday this year many people, celebrities included, have taken to social media to appeal for quiet celebrations and to reclaim the beautiful festival from the obscene showiness of crackers; and heaps of anti-cracker memes, comics and one-liners have been doing the rounds. A popular news channel ran a show exploring whether firecrackers can be banned altogether. Mumbai’s Arrshie Singh has petitioned the Environment Minister on Change.org to enforce this ban.

There is enough support, and there will be even more each passing year. The problem with environmental concerns is that educating the many Indias is not easy, and this will never be a populist measure. But it can be done, slowly. Say the government sets a date for this ban to take effect in three-four years. In the meantime, public and private agencies try to educate the masses about the ban, with a focus on why it is taking place. The government starts its pyrotechnic displays (à la the world-famous artistic Sydney fireworks that go off at various points in the city at 9 and 12 on New Year’s Eve) and their logistics and marketing, in all state capitals, perhaps. ‘Dear citizens, when we’re spending to give you pleasure, why watch your own money go up in smoke, why risk fires and injury’ it could say (forget the part about sensitivity to others, environment and animals). The eventual transition needn’t be an absolute law-and-order and vote-bank disaster, though there could be mass arrests and protests for a few years.

There is the peripheral question of employment; of rendering so many people involved in the industry jobless. To this I say: if the Mumbai government saw it okay to ban bar dancers, whose profession impacted no one but ‘culture’, I'm sure there are ways to get people out of a profession that’s killing them and so many others.

I believe the time is ripe to bring about a ban and for the Environment Ministry to take the higher hand, and for us to support it. As they say, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in November 2013.

The Eye of the Camera

October 2013: A sociocultural understanding of how the proliferation of photography today impacts women.

Cameras are everywhere. They’re in our pockets, in our palms, on street corners, in our faces. Photographs are everywhere. They’re on our minds and in our mindsets, up our skirts, under our skins. 10% of all of the photographs made in the entire history of photography were made in 2011. And in a recent presentation by Yahoo!, it was claimed that as many as 880 billion photos will be taken in 2014.

What has this proliferation of still and moving images meant for women? Well, let’s just say it’s complicated.

In the Mainstream

The fillip that the cheap and easy access to image making has given to the world of advertising has led to more lenses being trained on the female body than ever before. Inch by inch, photo by photo, advertising and the media are changing norms of what is acceptable—in a recent piece, Veena Sajnani, Miss India, 1970, recalls how the contestants then were photographed in swimsuits, and judges looked at pictures backstage instead of the actual swimsuit-clad girls, saving them the “embarrassment” of the parade. Today, our eyebrows rarely rise over increasingly pornified images that sexualise and objectify women: one need only look at the posters of Grand Masti to see this. Jean Killbourne’s Killing Us Softly series focuses on the impact such advertising has on the way women view ourselves, and the way men view us. According to her, the concept of ideal female beauty, absolute flawlessness achieved through makeup and Photoshop, impacts women’s self esteem. And since women’s body language in ads is usually passive and vulnerable, it propagates an unhealthy idea of ‘normal’. It changes the way men feel about the very real women in their lives, and the objectification and dismemberment of women’s bodies and passive body language creates an increasingly “toxic cultural environment” that propagates violence.

Long before Facebook became the online window to the world (it is estimated to be home to over 4% of all photos ever taken), Susan Sontag, in her 1977 work On Photography, wrote that people are developing a "chronic voyeuristic relation" to the world around them. Where once only the most important events and people got photographed, now the meaning of all events is levelled and made equal. Again, through social media, people see and present a carefully constructed ‘normal’, with beautiful selfies, fashionably posed ‘candids’ never sans make-up, and only the best, funnest photos (promptly removing or untagging any unflattering ones). It is no wonder that we, women in particular but also people in general, are upholding and comparing ourselves to an artificial idea of ‘normal’—how great we should look, how happy our lives should sound, how Bollywood our love stories should appear, how glorious our babies should seem. Research has shown that passive browsing, as opposed to active content-creation on Facebook increases envy and impacts self-esteem. In a recent review of Facebook’s effects, psychologist Beth Anderson and her colleagues argue that constant comparison, with others within ones own demographic, can lead to a resentment of both, others’ lives and the image of ourselves we feel the need to continuously maintain.

It seems that even in advertising and on social media, mainstream phenomena over which we retain a modicum of control on the eye of the camera and what we project, we end up doing women a disservice. Campaigns for media literacy, pictorial comparisons before-and-after makeup and Photoshop, uncensored celebrities’ candids (wrinkles, et al), all work towards undermining the harm mainstream images are doing to men and women’s psyches and the cultural environment.

Encroaching Lenses

Photography is so much more insidious and problematic where women don’t have control over their images—when they are taken or by whom, and what becomes of them. Notice how you can’t turn off the camera sound on most phones? This industry standard (and US law) was set to make it harder for voyeurs to get away with photographing unconsenting targets, like the upskirt photographs that are ever so popular.

In his art project Send Some Candids, Mumbai-based photographer Fabien Charuau trolled the internet for images of Indian women taken without their consent by the “encroaching lens” of the camera-phone. “I see how, as a regular woman, it would be difficult to live under the all-pervasive gaze and scrutiny of the Indian man. The gaze of the voyeur, direct or peering through a viewfinder, leads women to have a problematic relationship with their bodies. From an early age, it determines where they’re going to go, what they’re going to wear; they fear being molested, raped, photographed,” he says of the thousands of images he found of ordinary women doing everyday things, unwittingly pornified and titillating. A woman who found herself being filmed on a mobile phone by an x-ray technician inside the changing room of a diagnostic centre in Mumbai made headlines this August. “The images represent the often-skewed gender power structures, where men are predators, and women must forever be on guard. Taking these photographs is sexually invasive, it is a transgression.”

Worse, perhaps, is men taking photographs of themselves perpetuating sexual acts with consenting or unwilling women. Apart from personal gratification, of course, not all, but some of these pictures are circulated, and are used to blackmail the women for further sex acts or money, or to subjugate them in to silence. A few weeks ago, a 19-year-old student of Delhi University complained to the police that a friend had taken a secret video of them having sex, and was using the obscene clip to extort money from her. The perpetrators of the Shakti Mills gang rape had gotten away with it before, and expected to get away with it again, assuming that the threat to reveal photographs of her nude and violated body would ensure the victim did not seek justice. She did, and the very photographs that empowered the men will now incriminate them.  

Shooting Straight

It’s important to recognise that cameras can be incredibly powerful tools in the hands of women, and in their defence. Though Sontag argues that photography fosters an attitude of passive anti-intervention, compelling the photographer to choose between documenting and reacting, in the simple act of documenting a visual truth, photographs can play a strong positive role in women’s battle against intrusion. Couple with the reach of the mainstream media, internet and social media, and you have a winner!

In mob situations, were men are on a rampage, it is not always feasible or possible to intervene when a woman is being harassed. Neither is it always possible for a woman to fight back. Creating a visual record of the crime is often the next best thing to do. A Mumbai stylist’s picture of her harassers hanging on to her auto spread on Facebook and even reached mainstream news a few weeks ago. Bystanders’ cameras captured the two NRIs getting molested on New Year’s Eve 2007 outside the Marriott; a news channel’s camera caught the 30-minute-long ordeal of a 17-year-old being group-groped outside a Guwahati pub last year. In all these cases, the visual record was incredibly helpful to the police and some of the culprits’ identities were even crowd-sourced. Our vast population and shallow internet penetration may not make crowd-sourcing identities as simple or powerful as it proved to be after the 2011 rioting in London and Vancouver, and will undermine the success of online facial recognition when it becomes a mere click away. Nonetheless, a visual record is always better than only an oral one.

Smartphones, with their intrusive cameras, can be empowering for women too, and it’s nice to see that men are now afraid. The group of incensed bikers who broke the windscreen of a couple’s car in a recent incident of road rage in Mumbai, left only when the wife tried photographing them with her cell phone. Train your camera on a stalker/flasher/creep-at-large, and watch him flee. Trust me, I’ve tried it, it works.

So far, the fear of the camera has served to exacerbate the gender divide and underscore its power structure in the public and private realms. As the beholder instead of the watched, women can stop feeling victimised by the eye of the camera, and can successfully reappropriate it as a tool of control. Take a photo. It is time.

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An edited version of this article appeared in The Sunday Guardian in October 2013.

The Gravity of ‘Gravity’

October 2013: Gravity, called both “viscerally thrilling” and “deadly boring”, has become a global blockbuster, and is being pushed as a “must-see at IMAX right now” by all and sundry. Apart from the breathtaking cinematography and technological excellence, the film’s portrayal of the female protagonist, Dr Ryan Stone played by Sandra Bullock, is one of its strongest points.

*Plot Spoilers

Us jaded media consumers can tell from a mile away when a star or star-pair is due to have a film released. As the stars acquiesce to promotional and PR tours, the interviews, general interest, red-carpet-sightings, romantic rumours swirl toward a crescendo, and reach an enduring frenzy if the film is a success. So, we knew from afar that Gravity was coming.

I also began to sense that it was bound to be ground breaking from a gender studies point of view. Sandra Bullock—50 years old, sans make-up, unsexualised—had been getting the privileged media coverage reserved for revered male stars, overshadowing the other half of the lead pair, one of these aforementioned men, George Clooney. (This was before I realised that the movie does not have a lead ‘pair’ per se.) I’ve been watching closely as she continues to hold centre stage, with an unparalleled number of interviewers taking an in-depth interest in her holistic self, going beyond the inane beauty/favourite brand/fashion sense/weight-loss regime/love-sex life questions reserved for female actors.

We saw the film a few days ago, a spectacular 3D IMAX experience that blew our minds. Once we recovered from our pacing hearts, I realised this unusual media phenomenon is because of both—Bullock as a mature person and actor, and Alfonso Cuarón’s film and the role she’s essayed in it, that has allowed her to be perceived as such. Because her role is that of the smart victor, not the sexy peripheral in this sci-fi action drama, her media strategy and portrayal is not limited to the physical dimension of her personality.

Mission Specialist Dr Ryan Stone, a first-time space traveller, is accompanied by veteran astronaut Commander Matt Kowlaski. Space debris renders their shuttle Explorer useless, and they travel to the International Space Station to try to evacuate to Earth, talking about their lives on the way.

Stone is smart, not sexy. She’s a doctor and an astronaut, and for a long time, you see only her make-up-free face through the visor of her bulky suit. Even when she does remove it to reveal frill-free, practical inners, the focus is on the physical fitness of her body, a necessity for an astronaut one would presume, and not its ability to titillate. In a global culture that puts increasing pressure on women to look flawless, whatever other talents and qualifications they may possess, prioritises thinness over health and places a high premium on looking young, Bullock’s naturalness sets a refreshing example. Of course, she’s white, thin, beautiful, but not superhumanly so.

In a capacity best described as a ‘support role’, worst as ‘eye-candy’, Clooney’s character chooses to die after these 20 minutes, to give Stone a chance of survival, in a plot device to necessitate/facilitate/stimulate the hero’s dormant heroicness. Stone battles her inexperience, fear and seemingly insurmountable odds, gets advice from Kowlaski who she hallucinates up in a bit of deus ex machina at her point of resignation, and makes human contact in an unfamiliar language over a satellite phone. She embarks on a solitary fight for survival à la Tom Hanks in Castaway, with only her smarts and tenacity, not to mention physical strength, at her disposal. Where she starts nauseous, uncertain and vulnerable, she steps up to the plate when required, and rescues herself. No man necessary, thank you very much.

Though the plot thins, the characters are a tad too cardboard for a deep exploration of their psychological progression through this trial by fire and the dialogue slackens, the film floats along on stunning awe-inspiring visuals of space, tightly paced action and Bullock’s powerful acting. Stone emerges a hero as her capsule lands in a lake and she breaks to its surface and swims to the shore. In the film’s final moments she is granted the honour of the hero shot, from a low angle that makes her look large and victorious, usually reserved for portrayals of dominant males in sci-fi, battle or superhero films. Contrast her triumphant surfacing from the water, a fit body encased in asexual ‘work clothes’ being saluted by the camera, with Ursula Andress’s emerging from the water in the iconic Dr No scene: sexy, bikini-clad, stereotyped and pandering to the male gaze.

This is the supporting role women have traditionally played in action and survival stories (and almost all other genres), shown, as Virginia Woolf noted in 1929, “in their relation to men.” At a press conference at San Diego Comic Con in July this year, Cuarón, also the scriptwriter of the film, admitted to facing pressure to change the protagonist to a male one; Bullock called him “brave” for sticking to his guns. Stone’s own father wanted a son; it is an obvious and important lesson that she’s a child that would do any parent proud.

In Gravity there is a total absence of romantic love, not between her and Kowlaski, not even in their back-stories. This also challenges the genderist notion that the emotional is women’s domain (as protagonists and watchers of chick-flicks, rom-coms and drama) and that the cerebral and the physical (science, sci-fi, action, thrillers, rescue sagas, spaces outside the domestic and emotional sphere)… well, leave that to the men. Stone is nuanced: deeply depressed and unexuberant—she’s lost her daughter and loves the silence of space; alongside, she’s inspiring, in a leadership position in space doing science. She’s a human superhero.

Motherhood and fertility are recurring themes in Gravity; according to Cuarón “there was an understated but vital correlation of her being a maternal presence against the backdrop of Mother Earth.” During the phone conversation (revealed to be with a Greenland Inuit in the accompanying short film Aningaaq by Jonás Cuarón), in what she believes is her last human contact, Stone hears his baby crying and a dog howling—reminding her at once of her loss and the sobering cycle of life. In a post-modern gendered reading, I reiterate that motherhood, nurture, depression (so-called ‘feminine’ traits) need not be at odds with the so-called ‘masculine’ territory of heroism, greatness, career, intelligence. One must acknowledge and accept people, and their individuality and multifacettedness beyond stereotypes in all divisive spheres—gender, politics, religion, race…

It is heartening to see the enormous success of the film because it pushes the audience’s boundaries, opening their palate to a female hero not typecast by gender, sexual or body definitions; similar to Ellen Ripley in the 1979 film Alien. Its success will also allow those concerned with the bottom line to explore non-formulaic non-stereotypical films. Says Bullock: “It’s about making money, and if studios see that a female brings in audiences… hopefully that will become the norm.”

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in October 2013.

NOTA Vote

October 2013: The Supreme Court has recently introduced ‘None of the Above’ as an option on electronic voting machines. How and why this will encourage people like me, a person who hasn’t ever voted, to participate in the next elections.

Growing up, politics didn't interest me at all, but I’ve made a considerable effort to get up to speed over the past few years—I’m 30 now, and it seems like the responsible thing to do.

Though I’ve swallowed my distaste, participate in the intensity of the political discussion in the lead up to the 2014 elections and nurture a strong desire to vote (getting a voter’s ID card is a start), I feel no closer to finding someone to vote for. And I’m not alone. Friends—ranging from an investment banker in Dubai to an editor of a weekly, the former editor of India’s largest news portal to a swadeshi foreigner, actors, designers, lawyers, writers—express the same feeling, of being in limbo. A news magazine’s cover aptly summed up what my little sample group of us young, urban, liberal educateds feel about the choices we face—the UPA/ Congress vs the BJP under Narendra Modi—between the devil and the deep blue sea.

We are always blamed and shamed as a demographic and generation that doesn’t vote. Party to intense political discussions these past few months, I realise it is a studied disillusionment with politics in general that is the reason, and not a lazy disinterest, as is often suggested. Politics and politicians are alienating and cater to a vote bank whose concerns we don't understand, and overall, don't have our vote of confidence. Gleaned from these drawing room discussions are reasons for the current catch-22.

Fledgling Ideas

In my simplistic worldview predating my political interest, I was a latent Congress supporter. For one, my mother was a huge fan of the Congress’s Manmohan Singh as the reform-minded Finance Minister who liberalised the country’s economy. My primary grouse against the BJP was its Hindutva agenda and links to the RSS, etc, and for a secular atheist/agnostic, religion sh/could not form the foundations of a democracy’s governance. As a nine-year-old in ’92, the demolition of the Babri Masjid—that prioritised history over the present, religion over reason—caused the first spate of communal violence that I had ever witnessed.

[Now, we know it’s not like the Congress doesn’t have blood on its hands, and just because most of us youngsters were not around to see the Anti-Sikh movement and riots of the ’70s and ’80s, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. A friend, Dimple Kaur has never seen her father, tied to a pole and burnt as he was in the riots while her mother was pregnant with her.] Nonetheless, the Congress seemed more liberal, more progressive than the religious-minded BJP, and this was the first one to crystallise of my unevolved and underinformed ideas of what I’d want in a government.

And Now

The nation’s youth has watched horror-stuck as scams after scam, failures after failure have plagued the UPA. The PM’s impassive face, subject to nation-wide ridicule, has watched as the economy nose-dives, the judiciary fails, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, Vadras prosper, nothing gets done, women get raped (and criticised for the role they played in it) and fires burn. There’s also a belief that we can no longer be an ‘elected monarchy’, supporting the murky legacy of the tainted Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, that has long since put self over service. And then, to add the insult of stupidity to the injury of a dovetailing economy is the unsustainable, ill-thought-out Food Security Bill, a mere vote-garnering tool as the elections near.

So no, not the Congress, not again.

As much as the BJP is being seen as the saviour in this unholy mess, it’s hard to buy ‘Gujarat Shining Under Modi’ as the Holy Grail of what India can or should be. Advertising for Gujarat Tourism, with a gently appealing Amitabh Bachchan, has been in full-throttle for a while now, subtly ensuring that Gujarat-the-Great is on everyone’s lips.

For starters, it is hard to forgive Modi for the role he played in the aftermath of the Godhra massacre in 2002. A Modi-supporter once told me that we attribute more control to him than he had at that stage in his political career, that the riots were spontaneous. Not true—by all counts, the systematic massacre of Muslims was definitely State-led. And even if it wasn’t, a basic rule of management states that authority can be delegated, responsibility cannot—and, as the Chief Minister, Modi bears moral and, indeed, administrative responsibility for what happened in the state under his governance. Plus, in a country that needs law and order to provide stability in an unstable political climate, Modi’s extra-judicial methods in dealing with terrorists should also raise some red flags.

Sure, when you drive in to Gujarat from Maharashtra, you notice the difference in the roads. The cleanliness. The shiny, glossy things that attract the magpies. But all that glitters is not gold, and one must be wary of the supply-side economics that favour the rich that Modi propounds. One needs only to look towards Bush’s administration to see its pitfalls.

So yeah, no BJP either. And the Third Front isn’t really a viable third option, is it?

None of the Above

So when the Supreme Court introduced the electoral reform, upholding the right of voters to reject all candidates contesting the elections, I wasn’t surprised to see Facebook updates like “Now I can vote!” Because, god knows, we want to!

That young, urban, educated people don’t vote is, in itself, a huge governance issue, because—at the risk of blowing our collective horn—we are this country’s only hope. It’s up to us to demand the basics—an uncorrupt, efficient government that has its priorities straight and keeps its promises; that teaches the poor to fish (and not simply wait for handouts at election-time); that looks at people beyond cultural and religious prisms; that respects the judiciary and upholds the law, and amends it in a relevant and timely manner beyond vote-seeking self-serving; etc.

At the base of it, negative voting may seem futile—even if the maximum number of votes cast is for NOTA, the candidate getting the most of the remaining votes will be declared winner. But, “Negative voting will lead to a systemic change in polls and political parties will be forced to project clean candidates,” said a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, P Sathasivam. Instead of election ink evading our fingers for another half-decade, we must turn out in great numbers to express our dissatisfaction with ‘the Above’ choices presented to us, to prove that we do, indeed, care, and for political parties to acknowledge us as a dissatisfied, formidable vote bank.

So far, people casting negative votes were required to enter their names in a register and cast their vote on a separate paper ballot. Apart from encouraging people like us to have a voice, the move also allows for something else—it allows those who feel pressurised into voting (for reasons of economy or fear) to, instead, go in and come out pretending to have done their pressurisers’ bidding. This is perhaps why the SC has laid emphasis on maintaining the secrecy of votes cast under the NOTA category.

“If the right to vote is a statutory right, then the right to reject candidate is a fundamental right of speech and expression under the Constitution,” said the bench. And I'm sure this demographic, accustomed to being heard, will welcome the opportunity to have a say in the workings of the country.  

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in October 2013.

I have since become much more political and politically aware. Modi's politics have pushed me firmly into the 'Not in my name' category, helping me decide what I want by knowing what I don't want.

The Power—& Fear—of Love

September 2013: Why do traditional cultures so fear romantic love? For the same reasons we need to protect it.

Two articles in today’s paper caught my attention. The first quotes the father who killed his daughter and her boyfriend in the Rohtak district of Haryana for eloping as saying, “Whatever I did was right and for honour. If others also follow the same path, such things (love marriages) won’t take place.” The other article points out that more Dalits are marrying out of caste, “in the phenomenon long suggested by social reformers as the best tool to weaken the barriers of caste segregation.” Ironically, my mainstream newspaper carried these pieces on the same page.

Jurrat: Audacity

Over lunch the other day, India’s most famous cinematographer Ravi K Chandran told me that he and Hema ran away and got married 23 years ago. “Why?” I asked, perched atop my urban liberal worldview, born of (at least) two generations of relatively easy love marriages. “Why are you surprised?” he asked. “In most of India, the only way to marry for love is to run away and do so.”

Most traditional societies and religions don’t like love. It is no surprise that in feudal, patriarchal states like Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan, this most basic of all emotions (and its sexual fallout and/or social culmination in marriage) is so scary. Love is blind, and deaf to reason, ‘honour’, society, status, money, norms. It beckons their young (daughters, in particular) away from their fold, un-enslaves them from ‘mummy-daddy’, and makes them—gasp—free-willed. It breeds in young, reckless minds and hearts, and feeds on Bollywood happily-ever-afters, romantic notions and lust. It grows in the generation gap like an insidious sapling in a wall crack. It is a subversive, idealistic idea, that disregards social, political, economic, religious, caste barriers like no preaching, media or education can achieve.

One would think that education and its spirit of questioning would rid people of some of these abstract, inconsequential and often preposterous notions. But when I found myself in conversation with a stately forty-something Rajput lady in the Udaipur palace a few years ago, I found that this is not always true.

“Of course we must marry only Rajputs,” she said.
“But why?” I asked.
“Because our bloodline has been pure for thousands of years!”
“Even if that were true and verifiable, how does it matter?!"
“It does matter!” she bristled. Hurrying away from an argument she would lose to rationality, she left me agape with her parting shot: “I tell my children: 'Have affairs on the side, that’s fine, just marry right.'”

Wealth—with the opportunities it provides to broaden horizons, travel, and be exposed to more world-views and cultures—can be a double-edged sword. Though successive generations tend to be less religious and rigid than the ones before, I’ve sometimes found that my wealthier peers have ended up surprisingly conformist when it comes to love, marriage and parents’ expectations… perhaps because they feel they have more to lose.

In Defence of PDA

A good love story makes for happy people, happy people make for happy citizens, neighbours, fathers, mothers… and in a culture of hate, one can see why that would be a problem.

And we are, globally, a culture of hate. A recent study found that anger is the fastest spreading emotion on social networks. We’re okay with Public Displays of Anger, Aggression, but—to quote a Facebook status update I recently read—“hold hands in public and the police gets its knickers in a twist!” Even in our movies: rarely does violence—senseless, stylised, raw, revolting—ever receive as much censure as the humble bedroom scene. Break that down, and one wonders what norms we’re setting: that love, lust, happy-making things are not okay, while anger, hate, dishoom-dishoom, yeah, they’re just fine, signs of masculinity, justice, society. I’m clearly not the only one up in arms against the lawyer who’d rather “burn his daughter alive” than let her have—horror of horrors!—pre-marital sex, or who notices the irony of his misplaced priorities.

Let’s Get Together & Feel All Right

For all its power, love needs to be actively supported. I was pleased to learn that the Centre pays up to Rs 50,000 to each inter-caste couple that has one spouse as Dalit. The Supreme Court has even ruled that the police should protect a legal inter-religious marriage, and has repeatedly upheld the rights of consenting adults.

In reality, though, the police and pseudo-judicial upholders of culture like the Khap Panchayats can be quite severely unsupportive of this ‘anarchy’. In the much-publicised 2007 tragedy, the police is believed to have forced Rizwanur Rahman to separate from his wife Priyanka (at the behest of her industrialist father), leading to his suicide. Kolkata’s then Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee infamously said that cases of eloping, even by adults, were morally unacceptable, so the police had always intervened in such cases in the past, and would continue to do so. The Khap and the police were complicit in the infamous Manoj-Babli honour killing… the examples are numerous.

This has got to stop. For a happier society, we need to let go of our prejudices, and prioritise people and happiness over ambiguous, archaic socioreligious diktats and divisions. We need to recognise, internalise and channelize the positives of love—of both, the Gandhian ‘turn the other cheek’ cultural kind, as well as the romantic heart-bursting-with-joy variety. Just as we need to take a foot off the violence that we proffer as a solution to small or big, perceived or real wrongs.

For the most part, our laws are clear and progressive, worthy of an evolved democracy, with an agenda to allow adults free will and choice. Our law enforcement needs to follow them, and deprioritise moral and cultural policing. Bob Marley had it right: “One love, one heart/ Let’s get together and feel all right.”

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in September 2013.

Women-Men & Public Space

September 2013: The public display of machismo at festivals leaves little space for women’s enjoyment.

Janmashtami heralds the start of the unrelenting festive season—from now until the end of the year, the spate of festivals includes Ganesh Chaturti and the multiple Visarjan days, the Navratris, Dusshera, Diwali, Eid, Christmas and New Years (and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few). Though I look upon the impending traffic snarls, deafening cacophony of music and crackers, and bursting crowds with cerebral distaste, I understand the enormous sociocultural and economic importance of festivals beyond their religious significance—for people less fortunate than us, they provide a break in the monotony of dreary everyday life, a reason to celebrate and let it all hang lose.

What they also seem to provide is an anarchical free-for-all for men and their desires. For one, male enjoyment seems to be inextricably linked with intoxication, the religious origins of the festivals be damned. Put a group of sex-complexed boys and men with diminished social inhibitions and bristling boisterousness on the road, past what would ordinarily have been their bedtime, and there is bound to be trouble—just yesterday, three drunk boys emerged from an under-construction Ganesha Pandal at 1 AM and chased our car down a narrow Mumbai road hurling abuses (until they hurtled in to a stationary rickshaw). Put multiple such groups on the road and there, you have it, a drunken mob.

Mobs dynamics are difficult for anyone to negotiate, but they pose a particular problem for women. For one, there is the cloak of anonymity the mob provides. The Gainesville serial killer Danny Rolling points out in his autobiography that when dozens of male university students were asked if they would rape a beautiful girl if they could get away with it, the majority answered yes. Although this is an American statistic and I don’t believe all men are rapists-denied-opportunity, it explains why this anonymity is so dangerous to female sexuality. Mob mentality is contagious, and sexually reprehensible behaviour can spread through a mob like wildfire. The 40-50 men who molested the two NRIs outside the Marriott on New Year’s Eve 2007 didn’t all know each other. Neither did all the men/groups of men who molested the girls who were walking to Wankhede Stadium to see the victorious team of IPL 2007; they each just, literally, grabbed the opportunity to do what everyone else was. And let’s not even talk about Holi, the most intrusive of all festivals. There’s power in numbers—and bravado that comes from believing in ones collective invincibility.

As always, the onus of self-preservation falls on the woman. No, no, no! This is not to say that women shouldn’t be careful, more than men need to be: while we all hope for a utopic society free from sexual violence, there will always be evil in man, and evil men. But we seem to be breeding mobs of rapists-in-waiting as opposed to a few rotten eggs.

The least one can expect is that there be a much more favourable, infinitely fairer balance of places/clothes/times of day/activities that it is ‘safe’ for women to be in/wear/be out/be doing. When my friend Ruchi, a 25-year-old animal activist, told a cop that she was being hassled on the road during a festival day last year, he told her, “Ghar jao. Aaj tumhe bahar aane ki kya zaroorat hai?” Public celebrations should not be so riddled with gender injustice that make them a wanton, rambunctious, anything-goes experience for one gender; a cautious, fear-inducing (if not worse) experience for the other.

There are no new solutions to offer on this matter other than the ones we’ve already heard—bettering law enforcement and developing a culture that is gender-sensitive. We need a better policemen-to-public ratio, more efficient policing and prosecution, etc. And as much as we crib about dry days, preventing men from accessing liquor during festivals and voting is an important governance tool to maintain peace.

Our men need to be taught to respect women and their space, of course, but also about inherent standards of conduct. That drunken groups in topless trucks, who hoot at every passing woman, are carrying Ganesha-the-God home or going around breaking haandis à la Lord Krishna, is laughably ironic. It is telling that both the govindas who lost their lives this year, did so in bike accidents. Neither the need to reassert our collective selves in a post-colonial world, nor the sense of entitlement of the aggrandised Indian man should result in such anarchy. We need to grow beyond equating fun and freedom with rowdiness, rash driving and free cop-a-feels. We need to grow up.  

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An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in September 2013.