2014: The Year of Do

December 2013: It’s time for New Year resolutions. Let’s make this a year of action.

Hey, Happy New Year. Symbolically, a new year ushers in a renewal, and it is in the belief that you can reinvent yourself and aspire to be the person you want to be at the start of every year that we all embark on our respective resolutions. Me too, though my 2014 resolutions are—and I’m ashamed to admit this—exactly the same as last year’s. When I shared my ambitious list on Facebook last year, I did it because I read somewhere that you are most likely to stick to your resolutions if you share them, and I had concluded with “And maybe, just maybe, when Facebook says 'See Your 2013 Year in Review' next January, I'll have achieved some, if not all, of these goals...”

Epic fail. This year too, I have to lose weight; stop nail biting; reduce smoking; learn cooking; finish the two massive writing projects I've started; be a strict pescetarian; learn to use my Mac, iPhone, Word and Excel optimally; do accounts regularly, and save, save, save; have more sex; and (maybe) learn InDesign.

Perhaps you too look at your resolutions’ list from last year and feel this sense of failure. But we mustn’t be too hard on ourselves—unless we’ve wiled this year away, we’ve been busy doing other things that have kept us from our resolutions. My year, for one, has flown by. I haven’t lost weight or been a strict pescetarian, but I started playing badminton. No progress on the nail biting or the smoking, but I have cooked about 40 times (up from last year’s zero). I haven’t finished my writing projects—instead, I’ve been writing almost two columns a week while also art directing to pay the bills. I have learnt my technology better than last year (though no InDesign). Our accounts and finances are in much better control, but far from ideal (of course). The sex—well, what’s enough sex, right?!

So here’s what I propose. Let this be The Year of Do. Let us each action our resolutions, especially the ones that have been deferred from one year to the next, to be happy and whoever we want to be. And then, let’s Do Some More.

The Time is Now

During history at school and college, we’d read about all these radical student revolutionaries—Bhagat Singh and his friends participated in the freedom struggle when they were in college, Che Guevara was radicalised while in med school, there are heaps of examples. Sitting in a girls’ college in New Delhi ensconced in middle-class ennui, disinterested in politics and governance, writing love letters in the backs of our books, knowing most of us were destined to be married soon, I remember a moment. I was in class, daydreaming out of the window as usual, when a feeling, best (but not entirely accurately) described as despair, washed over me. From where I was standing at that moment, in Independent India where women were in college and bombs weren’t exploding in the near vicinity, a lot of the real revolutionising seemed to have been done already. How could one have a large, game-changing life?

This is far from true. Everywhere around us, beyond our personal and interpersonal lives, is scope for change. In our buildings, in our neighbourhoods, in our cities, in our countries, in the world, there are enough wrongs and injustices that grate our sensibilities, if we let them. And I really think it’s time we should be stirred out of our apathy.

Pick something that matters to you, anything at all. No cause is too trivial—when I mention my interest in animal rights (among other things), I’ve been told on occasion that there is enough human suffering to address. To this I say: there are enough causes to go around, it’s important to pick the ones that matter to you. So it could be garbage or honking, starving children or education, community or governance.

All I’m recommending is that we take one more step, get just a little more involved than we currently are… like this diet I was once on that prescribed half an hour more exercise than you already did, whatever that was to begin with. So if you’ve thought about something, start talking about it.

A few weeks ago, I had said that social media has reduced us to being armchair activists with ADHD and goldfish memories. As much as there is latent criticism in that statement, I believe strongly in the power of words—I would, I’m a writer. Very often and for various reasons, we lament that, in this country, those we refer to as the ‘vote bank’ vastly outnumber us anglicised liberals seeking a new order. We have small numbers but big voices, and on the internet and social media, our opinions are heard, ideas are circulated, dialogues are ignited, networks are formed and, yes, we cause and participate in the ripple effect. Let’s break our culture of silence, and talk.

Those who’ve been talking, let actions speak louder than words. Recently, my friend Divya from Chennai shared the cat-kicking video-gone-viral on my wall. Jordyn shared it as an update; and soon we had a barrage of information from various animal rights activists in our friends’ circle—the psychopath is Pratik Hota, he lives in Versova. An FIR was filed; the media was stirred. Jordyn, along with Ankush and Zahra organised permissions for a peaceful march… and we did. A bunch of us carried signs and sloganeered, distributed pamphlets and shared ideas. Ditto with the protests after the recent Supreme Court’s verdict on the draconian 377—if I weren’t drowning in work, I’d have been there. Next time I will, and hope you will too.

For those so inclined and able, a long-term commitment, like teaching underprivileged children or fighting things to their conclusion, is beyond awesome. Philanthropy is a great way to go as well. Studies have shown that Indians are notoriously disinclined to give up our money for causes. We hold it close to our hearts, pile it away for generations to fatten on and exist in a flashy nouveau riche collective consciousness. It took a foreigner to point out the “obscenity” of Antilla to me. “How can they live in the world’s most expensive home in a country so impoverished, with beggars outside their windows?” he said. Each to his own, of course, but it’s time we reconsidered our priorities.  

Maybe you’ve opted for the ‘None of the Above’ option for my The Year of Do to-do list. Fair enough, I can be preachy and overwhelming. But there is one thing I implore… insist on, if you will.

We let Jyoti Pandey lie naked in the middle of a busy locality in the Delhi cold with her entrails hanging out a year ago. We let a biker slashed in a road-rage scrap bleed to death on a Mumbai street a few weeks ago. We are a country with heaps of curiosity, and no concern. Ask anyone who rescues animals, or the girl who eventually helped the bleeding slashing victim—she screamed and begged for help, and had to smash a rickshaw’s windscreen to get the driver to stop. There will be a huge tamasha, crowds will come to watch. But no one will help. Many years ago, a friend was gang raped and left in a gutter in rural Noida, bleeding, unconscious, barely clothed and, of course, without any possessions. When she came to, she tried for hours to get a lift. No one stopped.

So if we do nothing more this year, let us at least decide to stop and help, to intervene. To bajao a ghanti, call the cops, take someone to a hospital. An opportunity to help doesn’t come along very often, and in the grander scheme of things: come on, you can be late for work, stain your car seats and deal with the bureaucracy just this once!

If you do nothing else revolutionary and for greater good this year, promise at least that you’ll stop the next time you see an incident.

And, on that note, have a great New Year! Spread the cheer.

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

Clothes & Fashion, Feminism & Other -isms

December 2013: Exploring the impact fashion has on women across the world, and the question of striking balancing dynamics in personal style.

Conceptual photograph courtesy Sahil Mane.

That clothes and, by extension, fashion, are a feminist, gender, class, financial, social, political, psychological, cultural, historical, ageist, religious, lookist, etc issue is a given. Our ability and reasons to wear, or not, the clothes we do is charged with individual choice rooted in environmental dynamics, and is remarkably telling of our who, what, where, when and why. Though Abraham Maslow does refer to “differences in style of hair-dress, clothes” in his important hierarchy of needs theory as “superficial differences in specific desires from one culture to another”, clothes themselves would probably rate from basic needs all the way up the pyramid to self-actualisation.  

So I start with a few caveats: I’m not talking about the sartorial ‘choices’ of women living in places of the world where religion and/or laws determine what to wear—the burka is beyond the scope of this column. I talk of sociocultural environments where people can wear what they choose for the most part, despite traditionalists expressing varying degrees of disapproval, though even here I leave out those who, in Maslow’s words, “live by bread alone”.

My premise is that this demographic of people the world over taps in to and is influenced by global fashion culture rooted in Western styles in various ways and degrees, consciously or sub—either directly on the internet or through more traditional media feeding off the internet, either fresh off the international runways or through its influence on their country’s own fashion convention. And these Western styles continue to incorporate global influences, making for a hotbed dynamic with exponential possibilities.

Clothes, Models & Visual Imagery

In the very fact it presumes that women have the choice to wear everything—and nothing—they want to, the fashion industry owes a huge debt to feminism and other equal rights movements. In turn, the clothes, models and visual imagery put out by the Western fashion industry combine to have a series of repercussions and change the norms of what is acceptable.

Pretty much all the haute couture clothes on the international runway are over-sexualised to a fault. Of course, one can choose to see this as a celebration of a woman’s body, empowerment to show skin and be lauded and paid millions, let alone stoned to death, for it on a mainstream platform, etc.… Or, dig past the dermis, in to the discourse on pornification, new enslaving expectations and the male gaze. This inherent contradiction, that also conditions the feminist arguments for and against the mainstreamisation of pornography and the issue of the participants’ choices, runs through my piece.

Haute couture is made for a one-size-fits-all, and that size is a homogenous, inhumanly skinny and impossibly tall woman with a beautiful face. It’s made for the aesthetically perfect—or at least what the fashion industry believes is ‘perfect’—and fabulously wealthy, and remain in the realm of the highly aspirational for most of us mere mortals. The inspiration trickles down to ready-to-wear ranges, from the high-end designers to the humble departmental store, from boutiques to flea markets. Take here, for instance, how couture and prêt, high-street and low, traditional, modern/Western and fusion fashion in India has embraced the fluorescent-neon trend wholeheartedly. And the interesting story of Ikat, a handcrafted textile technique seen in many native cultures, that galloped across runways and reentered our fabric and fashion markets digitised and refreshed, passing through the likes of Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger.

Us multisized women and our wobbly, scarred, well-lived bodies are left with pedestrian concerns of adapting these often flimsy, impractical, unflattering runway trends to our own personal style in a meaningful way. We must negotiate the context, what looks good on our bodies and skins, what works within our cultures, what image we’d like to project about ourselves. We must commit to consuming our time, effort, money, space and mindspace—I mean, if one of us was to wear a straight-from-runway look without these thoughts, we’d end up on People of Walmart. One can choose to make a statement through fashion; choosing not to is a statement in itself, though fashion seeps in to the clothes chosen even by the most uninterested. Love it, hate it, you can’t ignore it.

Not as a woman, at least. A while ago, I was helping my mother organise her wardrobe. We both use a space- and time-optimising system I learnt from her, and were segregating her clothes in to ‘party’, ‘office’, ‘daytime out’, ‘home casual’ in to ‘tops’, ‘bottoms’, ‘dresses’, plus ‘gymwear’ and ‘sleepwear’. (Lurking somewhere in this system is a colour parameter.) Accessories: belts, hats, stoles, bags, other knickknacks were being rearranged; jewellery was being checked and sorted; shoes were being put away in boxes. The bras (regular, sexy, cross-back, strapless, nude, black, white, coloured) and panties (dailies, frillies, tummy control, seamless), garters, pantyhose, etc. were finding their homes in a few large drawers. The sarees, which she rarely wears as an Indian in Australia, and their associated paraphernalia, were being tucked away. There was also winterwear and swimwear, resortwear and Derbywear (and I’m sure I’m missing more). My mother caught my eye over the bed piled high with this jumble of clothes. “I wish I was a man,” she said, “this is so exhausting.” It’s no surprise that the scenario of a man waiting as a woman gets ready is a joke across cultures. For men, it seems, groomed and ‘decent’ is all anyone asks for, though sharp dressers with individual style are always welcome.

Because the standards women look to, and are held to, in the fashion and beauty departments are the genetic anomalies on the runway, and the absolute flawlessness of made up and Photoshopped models and actors in the media, with a little plastic surgery thrown in to the mix. Photoshop has also allowed celebrities, those famous for things other than their looks, to grace magazine covers, as they can be youthened and beautified. It appears that, whatever else they may have achieved, they are also gorgeous.

Jean Killbourne's Killing Us Softly series, Naomi Wolf’s iconic ‘The Beauty Myth’, etc focus on the impact such media imagery has on the way women view ourselves and the way men view us. It is almost as though the ‘norm’—women who don’t look ‘perfect’—is no longer the ‘normal’.

If fashion is the most glamorous of all creative pursuits, the visual imagery of the fashion industry is also cutting edge, and leads the way in pushing creative and cultural boundaries. Be it the runway stage, adverting or editorial, creators of fashion imagery work at cutting through the clutter with newer ideas, influencing and being influenced by media and culture. Nestled in the pages of a high-end glossy, already full of beautiful women, made up and Photoshopped to perfection, in the best and skimpiest clothing, what could Tom Ford do but nestle his perfume in a vagina to draw attention to his ad, right? And Vogue has stirred other -isms with fashion shoots inspired by oil spills and dressing up Indian poor in high fashion.

In this clamour to stand out, imagery is getting more sexual and ads are getting more outrageous. Today, our eyebrows rarely rise over increasingly pornified images that sexualise and objectify women. Killbourne notes that since women's body language in ads is usually passive and vulnerable, it propagates an unhealthy idea of 'normal', and the objectification and dismemberment of women's bodies, like in photographer Bela Bordosi’s work, and passive body language creates an increasingly "toxic cultural environment" that propagates violence.

Of course, there are those standing out by creating inclusive imagery, against the grain, like Gap’s new campaign with a Sikh model, Benetton historically and little voices like the plus-size lingerie store Curvy Girl, whose Regular Women campaign has been well-received. Every day, I see one photo/art/advocacy project or another addressing the Photoshop-body image issue, like the recent one with mannequins of disabled people in Zurich. Campaigns for media literacy, pictorial comparisons before-and-after makeup and Photoshop, uncensored celebrities' candids (wrinkles, panty lines, et al), all work towards correcting this balance—which is great, although this mindfulness is slow to enter the mainstream. Though calls for realistic portrayals of women are getting louder, few magazines are willing to institute a no-Photoshop policy the way Verily has done.

(I’ve written more extensively about photography and the media in my piece for The Sunday Guardian.)

Where Do You Draw the Hemline?

Apart from having to evaluate whether fashion does or doesn’t imprison us in a sparkly new golden cage by the same ol’ masters, there is another essential dichotomy that colours feminists’ relationships with our personal fashion choices. On the one hand, feminism encourages us to escape the dictates of our bodies and gender, and explore our talents, minds and careers beyond being ‘pretty’ and consumed with female frivolities, the stereotype of the bra burner. On the other, it urges one to be the best one can be, enjoy everything one wants, irrespective of whether they were ascribed to your gender or not, more in line with Alice Walker’s ‘womanism’ and newer age feminist theory that prioritises choice. This is the same ‘different but equal’ tightrope I see in many women authors struggle with: at once wanting to be celebrated as women but troubled with the pigeonholing. Ask 10 feminists what they thought of Miley Cyrus’s twerking (I did) and same thing: let her do what she wants to do, it’s empowering that she can vs she’s pandering to patriarchy and male sexuality, pressurised in to over-sexualising to stand out.

The answer to personal style lies in a balance, and that is for each woman to strike for herself. My own journey has been complex, starting with an Indian military upbringing that could be described as ‘genteel poor’. Unlike my peers in my cultural environment, I had strong Western influences from my mother and family abroad and female modesty wasn’t part of the gender discourse at home, so, in shorts, tees, tights and skirts, I stood out for my sartorial choices. Taller and bustier than most girls my age, and pretty and unabashed, in retrospect I realise I was over-sexualised by my environment before I was even 13. Negotiating the attention was complicated: I enjoyed it and let it define me and my relationships, but felt trapped by the constant judgement by the kids, their parents and our teachers.

In a serious fall from grace, I grappled with weight and acne through my teenage years, and our family moved from liberal Mumbai to conservative, patriarchal North India. It took my mother and me a while to internalise that the clothes I was used to wearing were not flattering on my new (but not improved) body. Where once my clothes, and the ability to choose them, were liberating, in Delhi they only meant being molested all the time. Cringe-worthy photographs evidence that I worked the large tent look as well as an unguided teenager could! For their social acceptability and cover, Indian clothes made an appearance in my wardrobe. Looking unmemorable if not actively unattractive, I missed the attention I had grown accustomed to.

I lost weight and started developing a personal style from pickings at roadside stalls and departmental stores in college and through my early 20s, a dumpy-Indian-fusion-meets-culture-defying-sexy look I have completely evolved away from. But there were more serious issues, like square meals and a career, a dying father and complicated romances, to prioritise. It was at 25, a big year in my journey on all fronts, editing a magazine, making more money than I had ever seen and in a empowering relationship, that I had the luxury and confidence to become an active participant in fashion culture, and not just a passive receptacle.

Today, I have a better-rounded equation with my clothes and body. Whatever my weight (I yo-yo), I will always be a big girl. It is hard, even for the most aware of us, not to be influenced by the fashion and media imaging of women, but I try not to let it affect the way I see myself. Beyond the skin-deep, my reasons for wanting to get in shape are health-related.

Perhaps it is the aftertaste of sour grapes, but I carry a disdain for exorbitant fashion brands. I’ve had a friend regale me with stories of battling limits on her three credit cards at the LV store on a foreign trip; I refuse to pander to blinding consumerism or have it determine my aspirations. I still shop cheap for the most part, though I can afford a lot more. It takes me 30 minutes from bed to ready-to-go, from bathing to wardrobe and makeup, on a normal morning; dressing for a party takes a full hour. I am willing to spend time and money on this, the monthly beauty saloon ritual and occasional shopping. Beyond a point, fashion and looking good is not a priority.

At 30, I have learnt to adopt fashion trends in to my wardrobe in a way that flatters me, brings out my legs and hides the bulges and cellulite. Looking my best, often on the more daring side of sexy on a night out, makes me feel confident. As a personality type, I like being heard, popular and famous, and I found these are harder to achieve as a wallflower in work, social and media milieus. As an intelligent woman writer who is also fashionable and unconventionally beautiful, I enjoy challenging the pretty-or-smart stereotype. Though I realise I will need to address the ageing issue in the future, I hope it is not all downhill from this fashion and beauty peak, as suggested by a survey in Allure magazine.

There’s this bumper sticker I once read: ‘Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, everyone driving faster than you is a maniac’. While I do wonder at women who spend more time, money and effort than I do on the way they look, I also find myself cringing at those that don’t. Everyone’s equation with fashion and individual style is different, intensely personal and evolving—I have read accounts of some women finding the burka liberating. Do you find fashion fun, freeing or fatiguing? Are your body and beauty expectations realistic, or deeply coloured by the media? Do you look good for yourself, for the way dressing up makes you feel and what you project, or do you feel subjugated by stilettoes and Spanx? Till what point is it worth it? Where do YOU draw the hemline?

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This column appeared on 3QD in December 2013.

Women of Wild Words

December 2013: Today, expletives have entered the mainstream and more women are swearing than ever before. I explore the pro-profanity phenomenon.

When my friend Jordyn Steig posted on Facebook the video-gone-viral of psycho Pratik Hota kicking a kitten, another animal-loving friend Ankush went ballistic: “Son of a bitch motherfucking bastard,” he vented. Below on this comments stream, a girl called Priyanka asked him to keep the colourful words for later. “Those words insult me as a woman.”

“That’s prissy,” I thought. While I am, arguably, the foulest-mouthed woman I know, most of my women friends swear freely and fully, and wouldn’t be easily insulted by what was obviously a rant. But that's perhaps because I choose to surround myself with potty-mouthed women. To my mind, they are casual, fun, free and fearless, empowered, not easily shocked, (often) sexually liberated, and are unconcerned with the traditional roles and language prescribed to the demure fairer sex. To quote a New Zealand study 'What Not to Swear: The Acceptability of Words in Broadcasting': “Those that state they have no religion tend to be more accepting than those of religious belief”. These are just the kind of women I love and respect.

Needless to say, none of our families was thrilled when our tongues began flourishing—while Shibani remembers having to rinse her mouth with soap water more than once, my parents disallowed 12-year-old me from going for a class picnic because I had called someone an "idiot". Sangeeta started with ‘basket’ for ‘bastard’, and was punished for that too. And even though I’m now 30, when I recently decided to use my naturally spiced language on social media (after much deliberation, weighing my personal-professional positioning in my internet footprint versus having an ‘integrated personality’, Jordyn’s term for being true to ones self in all situations)—I had to explain my reasons to my astute aunt.

Language evolves all the time, and faster than ever before in the information age. Words are getting added in to traditional bastions of language, the hallowed Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries at a frantic pace; Urban Dictionary documents crowd-sourced new words and phrases as they enter the English language. When Rhett Butler said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," to Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone With The Wind, it was among the first uses of profanity in a major American film. 75 years later, the word ‘damn’ doesn’t raise an eyebrow, in a phenomenon called ‘dysphemism treadmill’, where vulgarities become inoffensive and commonplace. A finding of the UK study about language 'Delete Expletives?' by Andrea Millwood-Hargrave was that while younger respondents were not as concerned as others about the use of many swear words, they were particularly likely to consider terms of racial abuse as "very severe"—a clear indication that filters of what and how much is insulting and why are changing.

Language purists will be loath to admit this, but communication with profanity is particularly nuanced and complex. Expletives pepper my language as adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs; and roll off my tongue as expressions of anger, of joy, of boredom, of sadness, of nothing in particular and of absolutely everything. (Janine's contention is that abuses make our language lazy—an easy go-to instead of more complex and nuanced words.)

Lit theory 101: our understanding of each other’s language is through a universal agreement on what each word means. However, in the case of swearwords, the context, intonation, subject matter, person speaking, person being spoken to are particularly important, and can entirely determine their meaning. Let’s take the word ‘fuck’ that we hear and use all the time, to refer to sex, to denote disdain and to intensify a point: how the fuck have you been? (popular guys’ greeting), fuck my life (FML—popular website)/you/off, oh/what the fuck (WTF—Mumbai restaurant chain), absofuckinglutely, I’m fucked… the variations are endless, and are humorously described by Osho to a group of laughing followers in a must-watch video. Interestingly, as fast as language is changing, there have not been many new abuses added to the English language—the ever-popular ‘fuck’ has been around since the 1400s!

Foul language is empowering not only because us women are appropriating a male privilege (and refusing the whore/angel categorisation to boot). Lee Anne, who curses “only at 'eve-teasers'” does both: conveys her point to them and gets her anger at them out of her system. Phoolan Devi also swore like a bitch. In an interview to the New York Times, Timothy Jay, author of Cursing in America and Why We Curse says cursing “is a form of anger management that is often underappreciated.” Winners of 2010’s Ig Nobel Peace Prize found the swearing relieves the effects of physical pain—great to remember when you next wear stilettoes. 

Since expletives have so far been the privilege of men (and women of disrepute), predictably, many expletives are rooted in patriarchy and misogyny. ‘Cunt’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ are commonplace, and far more biting than if you try flipping the gender—calling someone a ‘penis’ or ‘dog’ isn’t really the same thing. Though I’m happy to appropriate a foul mouth from the male domain, these gendered abuses are problematic to me (and people like Priyanka, who reacted to Ankush’s comment), and probably why I invented the word ‘doggess’ at 13. In both, the UK study 'Delete Expletives?' of 2000 and the 2009 New Zealand study 'What Not to Swear', ‘cunt’ (a common number one) and ‘motherfucker’ were considered the most severe cuss words.

When my friend Mat visited me from Australia a few years ago, I set about translating the Hindi abuses he’d heard (and teaching him new ones, of course). He too observed that while ‘cunt’ and ‘motherfucker’ were the harshest words in English—“The only ones that mean anything anymore”—in Hindi, ‘chootiya’ is almost as bland as ‘donkey’ or ‘idiot’. While ‘faggot’ and other sexually discriminatory words are becoming increasingly unacceptable in a politically correct world, ‘gaandu’ in Hindi is par for the course. ‘Maderchod’ and ‘behenchod’ are more severe, like their English translations. Go figure: like pornography styles, what counts as taboo language in a culture is often a reflection of its particular fears and obsessions. Guy Deutscher, author of The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention, says that where the virtue and honour of women is of utmost cultural importance, “many swear words are variations on the ‘son of a whore’ theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person’s mother or sisters.”

Fuck this shit! Well-behaved women seldom make history. It’s time we loosened up, shrugged off conceptions of how we should or shouldn't speak, and embraced our colourful sides.

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An edited version of this article appeared in DNA in December 2013.

The Light that Jyoti Lit

December 2013: One year since the Delhi Gang Rape, and the case that horrified the nation continues to play a pivotal role in the discourse around gender dynamics today.

I was in Australia when my Facebook newsfeed and Twitter stream began getting inundated by news of a gruesome gang rape in Delhi. And that’s how I first heard of her in mid-December last year, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey, brutalised by six men in a bus moving through South Delhi in the evening while her fiancé was restrained, dumped on the road with her entrails hanging out for all the world to see. We have developed such a thick skin about crimes against women that nothing really shakes us out of our apathy anymore… But something big had happened; something big was happening. As she lay fighting for her life in the hospital and after she died in Singapore, India was afire with anti-misogyny/rape rhetoric and protests, our society and governance under intense public and worldwide media scrutiny.

Social media has reduced us to being armchair activists with ADHD and goldfish memories. That this incident is what comes to mind when you talk about or search for ‘Delhi gang rape’, in a city where gang rape is nothing out of the ordinary, shows just how extraordinary this particular case has been. Why? Because, as much as the cultural right wing has always tried to put the responsibility for sex crimes on the victim, this one was faultless—she wasn’t Western cultured with ‘loose’ morals, she wasn’t in a shady place at an unsafe time with unknown men doing questionable things. Also because the rape was horrific, and exposed the monsters among us as well as the indifference of the people who just let her lie there, dying on the street.

She was christened ‘Nirbhaya’, fearless, for resisting her attackers thereby angering them in to the vicious violation, and for wanting justice till her dying breath. And when her parents chose to reveal her name and, thereby, themselves, in light of the overwhelming support, they absolved her of the blame and shame we impose on victims of sexual assault. In the public (and not just media) outcry against the misogynistic statements that have become par for the course from our political leaders after any incident of sexual assault—protesting women were called “dented and painted” by our President’s son—we tried to establish boundaries of political correctness and point out attitudes we would no longer tolerate.

It was the veritable tipping point. Under public attack, the government was prompted to institute the JS Verma Committee and pass, in a somewhat knee-jerk manner, the well intentioned but over-cautious Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance, 2013, widening the definitions and increasing punishment for sexual harassment of all degrees. What’s interesting is to observe the nuanced impact the incident and its ongoing fallouts are collectively having on the public mindset.

In Delhi earlier this year, I was driving home from a friend’s at 3 AM when I noticed that I had a flat tyre on the Delhi-Noida Toll Road. As it is, the city brings out a primal fear in me, a remnant of the horrors I faced living there for six years as a free-spirited young woman before leaving a decade ago; now, my worst-case scenario is imprinted with images of gruesome rape. Along came a manager in a patrol car, who not only arranged for a puncture-walla but stayed by my quaking side until he arrived and the deed was done. I thanked him profusely, and told him that I felt doubly unsafe since the rape. “Uss ghatna ne shehar ka naam bigaad diya,” said this lovely gentleman, refusing a tip, “Aur aadmiyon ka bhi.”

He is right, on both counts. On a recent holiday to Israel, my sister-in-law Ami met a man from Bethlehem in the war-torn West Bank, who said he would like to visit India “but it is too dangerous”! And that men are under siege is obvious, as noted in Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s eloquent piece on the Tarun Tejpal issue. Not only are accused instantly and easily presumed guilty as per the law, but men in general are also demonised, leading many lovely ones to scurry about, ashamed and defensive. “I wish I could do something other than just trying to be an example,” lamented my friend Vishal Mohandas. “Though I am tired of being tried for crimes I would not commit.”

Although this is a pity, my counterpoint is this: while any sociocultural paradigm change is in progress, it is natural to veer the other way, to err on the side of extreme caution, before water finds its level. Take the anti-dowry laws, for instance. Necessary though they have been, in the last decade the Apex Court has repeatedly acknowledged their misuse, and the Law Commission of India has proposed amendments to dilute them. Besides, such a miniscule percentage of sexual harassment actually gets reported, let alone punished, that it’s unfortunate but a few good men may bear the brunt of a skewed legal environment that assumes their guilt. ‘For greater good’ is not apology or explanation enough for such wrongly accused men whose lives are essentially ruined, but there is solace in the fact that, eventually, a guilty verdict requires proof (and I am inclined to trust our judiciary for the most part).

At the time the country was in the throes of hysterical anger last year, a few people involved in the discourse on rape wondered whether the incident would actually do a disservice. Rape is rarely this dramatic, perpetrated by strangers or horrifically fatal. Henceforth, would anything less be considered insignificant, culturally and to the unenlightened officers manning the neighbourhood police thana? Would the fatigue of watching and hearing about increasingly graphic assaults deaden our palates to the more mundane?

Perhaps. But no amount of mundane 'eve teasing' or train groping, that is a regular part of our lives and our newspapers, has succeeded in outing the country’s sexual harassment pandemic in a significant way. This case has provided impetus to the problem-solving cycle: more than ever before, we’ve been actively engaged in identifying and defining the problems, and forming cultural and governance strategies to deal with them.

Of this upheaval and introspection is born Nirbhaya, a play by internationally acclaimed playwright and director Yael Farber. In the weeks after the incident, Mumbai-based actor Poorna Jagannathan asked Yael to create a new work that would continue to shatter the silence on sexual violence in India. “The Delhi rape was the catalyst,” says Poorna. “I had a huge epiphany: it is silence that contributes to violence.” We are told not to speak up: “We’ve got to do and say something to create a culture of accountability and be a part of the solution.” The seven-actor play premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2012 to rave reviews, and is expected in India next year owing to a super-successful crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. Ankur Vikal, the sole male actor in the play, asserts: “There is a healthier dialogue now, people are speaking more honestly about the gender dynamic. Understanding the perpetrators—who they are, why they do what they do—is an important step.”

There are many takeaways from the Delhi rape. Ankur is most inspired by Jyoti’s heroicness, her attempt to seek justice even in the ICU. But, like all sexual violence in a culture that puts the onus of her safety on the woman alone, my friend Ruchi laments that the fear psychosis has resulted in parents who are ultra-paranoid when she’s out at night. As for me: if we retain the momentum, continue this conversation that we started a year ago and follow it through to its logical end towards a non-toxic cultural environment, I feel Jyoti wouldn’t have died in vain.

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

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.