The Wrongs of Racists

February 2014: An exploration of Indian and global racism.

Racism is caused by the misplaced belief that members of a certain race share certain common characteristics that result in that group being superior or inferior to others. For the past couple of weeks, our news sources have been screaming about it and hate crimes every day. In India, we participated in the global social media backlash at the social media outrage against the multilingual Coke ad celebrating America’s diversity that aired during Super Bowl. We also reacted to the killing of Arunachali student Nido Taniam in a racist attack at home, in New Delhi.

We are complicit in his death, of course, and it's amusing that global racism against Indians, lumped with other non-white, non-Christian ethnicities, surprises and offends us, when we’re happy doling it out ourselves. We stereotype and are wary of anyone in a different group than us, and show deference to anyone we believe is better: guards in Chennai would always salute my Punjabi father who they believed was a white foreigner. Those we perceive as lesser than us in any way—people who are of a genetically different human phenotype, but especially those darker than us, of a different religion or ‘lower’ class and caste and ethnicity than us, who speak an ‘inferior’ language and have a dissimilar culture and history, non-heteronormal, poorer than us, with eyes squinted more than ours—are discriminated against, shown their inferiority in no uncertain terms. We are supremely conscious of our ranking on the sociocultural hierarchy, and while we appreciate being allowed to climb it, succeeding on this comparative scale means being, and staying, higher up than scores of others.

At the beginning of our feminism classes in college, a recurring question was about why mothers-in-law would perpetrate dowry and hate crimes against their sons’ brides; having been victims of patriarchal mores themselves, shouldn’t they be more empathetic, we wondered. The answer is apparent—when allowed to participate in patriarchy on the stronger team, why would these women refuse the power? Same-same with racism in India.

So a bunch of shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar beat a ‘ch***i’ to death for reacting to racist taunts, generously aided by police stupidity. Stereotyping those from the North East for their mongoloid features and Western fashions is deeply engrained in our culture. Only recently, my grandmother recounted how she and a group of friends were chased by a Chinese vendor for taunting him with “Cheeni-Meeni Chuha Kha” as five/six-year-olds in Undivided India. Today, my Assamese friend Prerna is propositioned and taken to be a prostitute more than most other girls.

Within the country, we discriminate against small subsets on micro levels—people from the North East, the tribals, Sikhs, Muslims; the Marathi manoos against others in the state. This divisiveness and internal strife begs the question: what unites a nation’s nationals, and on what basis are its borders and boundaries drawn? Marina Nido, the mother of Taniam, is quoted in India Today as saying: “I'm proud to be Indian. But where should we go? Should we be sent to China?” Since we don’t seem to acknowledge its natives as fellow Indians, would we honestly like to see Arunachal Pradesh gifted to China, which already claims it on some maps.

We exult in the achievements of NRIs, unashamedly and proudly claiming the successful ones as our own (even when the person doesn’t particularly agree—remember the excitement when Norah Jones, the daughter of apna Pundit Ravi Shankar, became famous; and our collective disappointment when she didn’t acknowledge him in her Grammy acceptance speech). Growing up, I wonder how often Satya Nadella was reminded that he fit the IT geek stereotype of an average kaala Madrasi.  

We have laws against religious and cultural intolerance and hurting others’ sentiments, are taught ‘Unity is Diversity’ in school, but those who divide and rule, who incite and propagate divisiveness for political, religious and social gain, are allowed to do so. And then, how far should these factions be indulged, each with demands for newer states, special rights and statuses, like Telangana?

Globally, on a macro level, the flip side of national and patriotic pride is a belief in superiority and a race towards supremacy. While it is riddled with internal racism, USA’s quest to protect the interests of its nationals has resulted in the deaths and human rights’ violations of scores of civilians in other nations. The belief that we are dramatically different from and superior to Pakistanis, and vice versa, has led to 65 years of bloodshed.

But we’re not; human beings are the same everywhere. In this past year, this is at least the third time I’ve written about racial discrimination and stereotyping. My agenda is not born from feeling disempowered: I have never really been discriminated against in India, socioculturally positioned as I am; abroad, questions about my English are, I believe, not simply racism and arrogant Euro-/white-centricity but also curiosity and ignorance. It is because anyone who believes in equal rights can see the dangers of labels and the consequent discrimination.

As always, the solution is an open mind willing to acknowledge and shed conditioning in the face of knowledge, understanding, empathy and rights. The Prejudice Tracker, a soon-to-be-launched app that offers real time crowd sourced reports on worldwide incidents of discrimination, is an interesting development for countries with high internet penetration.

We align ourselves, or are genetically aligned, with a subgroup, then measure ourselves and are measured against others. We aim higher, and disdain and protect our own against the feared other… At final count though, who exactly is the ‘us’ and who is the ‘them’?

---

An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in February 2014.

Private, Public, Political

January 2014: Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor’s death brings up questions about the private lives of Indian politicians.

The masala Twitter war between Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor and the Pakistani journalist she accused of having an affair with her husband erupted around the same time French President Francois Hollande’s affair with actress Julie Gayet was revealed by Closer magazine. It got me thinking about certain civilisations’ preoccupations with the sexuality and sex lives of their politicians—and India’s lack of it.

Think about it: in the late '90s, the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was making global news, enticing passionate headlines and arguments, and almost had him impeached. The Indian prime minister around the time was an old single man with an ‘adopted’ daughter, known by all to be the biological child from the first marriage of his long-term live-in partner—but the media didn’t particularly care, neither did the people.

Let alone sex life, implying activity. We don’t even like to acknowledge that our politicians, like us, are sexual beings. Perhaps it is because, at the media explosion in the dotcom age, Rajiv Gandhi was long gone and most of our political leaders since have been octogenarian men, and that aspect of their lives is best left unimagined—no dishy Kennedys or Obama for us. Sure, there is the odd paternity suit and sting op CD, but surprisingly, even now, references to Rahul Gandhi’s (alleged) Colombian girlfriend are few and far between. What proportion of this silence from the media is fear of or complicity with our politicians?

Or it’s because we tend to deify the people we look up to, and would rather revere unidimensional gods than multidimensional men. A friend tells me that evidence of Jinnah’s non-Muslim wife, and his smoking and drinking have been removed in the official telling of Pakistan’s history; like the Father of Our Nation, he was retrospectively idealised. (This also explains why, in the South, the transition from movie star to politician appears effortless, a seemingly illogical transference of heroic attributes and popularity.) Note the way our female politicians drape their sarees, with not a sliver of sexy stomach on show—this when quite a few are former actresses. What the so deified and their audiences don’t acknowledge is that these constructs breed hypocrisy, because they are people: flaws, sex lives et al.

Leaders of liberal democracies sans dynastic politics—America, Australia, Britain, France—are not valued in isolation, but alongside their partners and families, and for conduct in their personal lives. Despite our family-centric society, whereas Michelle, together with her husband and as an individual, is in the public eye, Mrs Manmohan Singh shuffles quietly behind, nary a Femina article about her. It’s also noteworthy that, despite their far-right politics, many of our politicians have unconventional (if not downright sleazy though perhaps not Gaddafi-extreme) love-sex lives, much like men and women in power the world over, and details long suppressed about Gandhi’s strange sexual habits are now being outed in books.

Whatever its cause, into this agendered pseudo-genteel environment entered Sunanda Pushkar, as the third wife of one of our most suave new-breed politicians, who was also her third husband. With her looks and flashy dressing; public persona, PDA and personality; and businesses and dodgy mysterious past, she straddled many worlds. In Delhi circles, I am told, but I speak as a media consumer—loved her, hated her, you couldn’t ignore her. Together, Sunanda and Shashi made an ‘It’ couple, a veritable first in this generation’s political class.

And then came reports of her failing marriage, and the Twitter war with Mehr Tarar—juvenile? Dirty linen in public? Unnecessary? Her death soon after, fodder for a generation of conspiracy theorists. Natural? Unnatural? Murder? Suicide? Mistake! What about those bruises? Is this the birth of our very own Marilyn Monroe death conspiracy?

Despite Sunanda’s turbulent stardom and sad end, I think there was more about her and Shashi to admire than we give them credit for. Culturally, we need strong spunky female role models, women who will forge their own in environments where they have been silent before. “She behaved more like a flashy Bollywood trophy wife than an ambitious politician’s well behaved, soberly dressed spouse,” writes Shobha De. In many ways, by refusing to be, or let his wife be, typecast by her past, Sunanda was an interesting multidimensional female protagonist, and Shashi an inspiring, liberal man.

I’ve written repeatedly about the importance of love and its displays, most recently in ‘The Power—& Fear—of Love’. Notwithstanding the end, the couple showed an equal partnership, freely displayed their love and stood by each other in tough times. They were also handling a low point in their marriage with relative dignity (until the Twitter war)—I think this is important too, given that we suffer from unrealistic ideas of marriage, with our Cinderella Complexes and other unreal influences on mass culture, ranging from mythology, Bollywood and daytime TV. Marriages, even the happiest ones, have tough times, and sink or swim, it’s important to know how to deal with them.

When liberal lifestyles are on display by famous people, it is inspiring and culturally game-changing; this is how I feel about the Suzanne-Hrithik divorce as well. And when these famous people are policy-makers, who can be held accountable on a practice-what-you-preach front, this bodes well for cultural governance in the long term.

The public spat and Sunanda’s subsequent death, and reactions to both, could, hopefully, serve as a cautionary tale, if we choose to see it that way. Where does one draw the public-private divide? What about balancing impulsiveness and consequences? And what, if anything, is worth taking ones own life for? Suicide, if indeed hers was one, leaves nothing but pain, heartache and questions, as the media coverage has shown, and everyone should live to face another day no matter how bleak it may seem. For themselves, and the people left behind.

My condolences to Shashi and Sunanda’s son Shiv. And to Mehr, who won’t live this one down.

---

An edited version of this column appeared in Governance Now in January 2014.

The Question of Stereotypes

January 2014: Probing pigeonholing from my experience as an educated urban Indian.

Conceptual image courtesy Sahil Mane.

I'm brown skinned, and that, along with my features and fusion dressing style clearly mark me as being from the Indian subcontinent. I travel to the ‘First World' a fair bit, and spend a lot of time in Australia, where most of my family live. More often than not, when I have conversations with locals there—on the street, at the post office, paying for groceries—a standard, unanimous response when I tell them that I'm only visiting, that I live in India is: "But your English is so good!"

I realise that this is not simply racism and arrogant Euro-/white-centricity—it is also curiosity and ignorance. Whatever it is, for the longest time, I didn't know whether to be all WTFed about it, or simply amused at their ignorance. And I certainly didn't know how to react—was I to justify this with: "I studied literature/Worked with the BBC/Was a magazine editor" and/or "Where I come from, English speakers are the norm, honey"? How about: "Your English is not bad either." Or should I have mentioned Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth…? And then storm off (not!) or smile or be condescending? How does one react to racial stereotyping?

Holes for Pigeons & People

They say that every stereotype exists for a reason. Within India too, there are ‘typical' traits we attribute to people belonging to different communities—Gujaratis are wily and money-minded, as are the Baniyas; Punjabis are both passionate and obnoxious; Bengalis are intellectual but slothful; Goans are drunken, fun-loving buggers who don't do much work; the Christian community is often represented by a ‘Sandra from Bandra' (a suburb in Mumbai with a large Christian population) wearing a long, flowing skirt and speaking terrible Hindi. These typecasts exist in the mainstream and are readily caricatured in Bollywood films.

From the outside, for the most part, Indians—with our vast population, lack of homogenous culture and religion, and many realities—are hard to pigeonhole: we have and are everything and nothing. The macro India, and view of it, is a complicated hotchpotch of Slumdogs and Millionaires; Maharajas and sadhus and snake charmers; uneducated masses, cab drivers and revered IITians; The Party's Hrundi Bakshi and Shah Rukh Khan; dancing beauties and Bollywood; colour and kitsch. That we speak good-ish English (with Indianisms, of course) is just one of the things that surprises people abroad about many of us urban Indians. There are many others: we live in houses, not huts; don't go to school on elephants or horses; Chicken Tikka Masala is not our national dish (but is Britain's—it doesn't even exist here!); etc.

Perhaps some of the cultural stereotypes about us are justified. For instance, we are known for our lack of personal space, quick intimacy and intrusiveness, born of years of sardine-canning in local trains and living in overcrowded cities. Many years ago, as an 18-year-old, I befriended an older man on a long-distance train out of Washington. We spoke for hours, and I thought it time to ask him about the small pits on his face. "You know what," he said kindly, "I've had these on my skin since I was born. Only two strangers have ever asked me about them—and both of them have been Indian!" We also seem to have a complicated relationship with simple rules, like traffic and housing societies, given our colonial hangover, and jugaad (loosely translated as ‘find a fix') and chalta hai ('anything goes') way of life.

Then there's the label of being dirty. My beautiful aunt Alice, who has lived all over the world and is one of Asia's premier experts on cross-cultural communication, tells me of this incident with a real estate agent in Dubai when looking for a house to rent (on a generous budget, might I add). Discussing desirable neighbourhoods over the phone, the agent dissuaded ‘Alice from Australia' from living in an Indian locality. "You don't want to live with the dirty Indians," she said, not realising that Alice is brown and of Indian origin. Needless to say the face-to-face encounter didn't go very well!

And sloppy dressers, who wear Western clothes badly and don white sneakers with everything. Partly in response to this prejudice (and also because she likes looking her best) Alice is always impeccably turned out. When I first went abroad as a youngster, she told me how important it was to dress carefully, more so than I do (or did then) at home, lest I get typecast.

Limiting Labels

Anyway, somewhere, in all of these impressions, hides the individual.

On the surface, stereotypes are innocuous, busted or validated upon closer one-on-one interactions. A bit like star signs and horoscopes, we go ‘Aha' when the shoe fits, and put differences down to individual atypicality. In actual fact, though, stereotypes are insidious and very dangerous.

Stereotypes dehumanise people, making us make assumptions about them based on their colour, race, religion, gender, sexual preferences, whatever—lumping them together based on factors often not of their choosing. When you ascribe certain characteristics to whole groups of people, all is well as long as those characteristics are positive. The problem arises when you find faults with this group… Not all Muslims (and residents of Muslim nations) are radical terror-mongers, those from the Heart of Darkness are not all savages and dimwits, and women are not all less capable than men. In the dehumanisation through stereotypes, one can see roots of great injustices, of Orientalism and anti-Semitism, of the philosophies that have justified the perpetration of social inequality, persecution and oppression, wars and genocide. Shakespeare's Shylock's famous 'If you prick us' speech is an eloquent appeal against being stereotyped as a Jew... It also raises the point that one who is so labelled reacts to the labelling—in internalising and adopting the characteristics a member of his/her set is meant to have, or in going against the grain.

Breaking Borders

Every one of us is indoctrinated with stereotypes of some sort or the other from childhood, whether positive or negative, and it is important to revaluate these prisms as one grows. If one can see people as people sans prejudice, as individuals beyond their macro- and even microcosms, one will find these casts either reinforced or broken—but never a one-size-fits-all.

In believing that one's history determines who we are as individuals, stereotypes completely discount individual agency. Naval Officers' children do not end up being Naval Officers, (a Muslim) Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verses... Names, cultures, histories, families' religions come with prejudice that may just not apply to who we are! Like Zappa said: "You are what you is"—and people, everywhere, are all similar in that we are all different.

Bottom-line: the world is not a small-enough place yet. We are still so ignorant about other peoples and cultures—in India, all whites are assumed to be rich (which is why our building's security guard would hassle my American friend Jordyn for money, and none of our other friends). The solution is an open mind, knowledge, travel and an expanded worldview.

Me? I'm still looking for that sucker-punch answer to use the next time sometime tells me my "English is so good"!

---

This column appeared on 3QD in January 2014.

For a Rainbow-Coloured World

January 2014: The recent recriminalising of anal and oral sex has huge repercussions on LGBTIQ rights in India. Us optimists believe knowledge is the counter to bigotry, and I seek to evoke the empathy of the religious, political and cultural right wing by narrating, commenting and contrasting the life stories of a few gay men.

First, let me say this: Section 377 criminalises not only gay sex, but also all intercourse against the “order of nature”—a culturally and religiously coloured perception of ‘nature’ that believes sex is for procreation only, in humans like in other animals, not one that considers the complex scientific, emotional, psychological, sociocultural, etc. roots of human sexuality. Anal sex and oral sex are criminalised, even if you’re a couple (or threesome or whatever) of hetero consenting adults. Nonetheless, given that Section 377 criminalises ALL of the sexual intercourse of gay and lesbian people, and only some of the heterosexual sexual experience, the drama around the Supreme Court’s reinstating it by overturning the Naz Foundation’s win at the Delhi High Court is being seen as a gay rights issue. (Fair enough, but I’m outraged for myself too… I didn’t know I’d been breaking the law since I was 16!)

In my late teens, my closest friend was a reed thin man-woman with a big smile and a raspy voice who I met at a cyber café. The depth of experience in this person’s life made her fascinating and fun, an empathetic listener and mature advisor, and we became friends immediately despite our age gap. I took the fact that we could become friends for granted, in retrospect I realise I took the liberalness of my parents for granted.

Because, from her, and others since, I’ve heard just how hard societal and familial acceptance can be, how much internal and external strife comes from having an alternate gender and/or sexuality. While gender colours all our lives, having an alternate gender and/or sexuality means being an alternate gender or sexuality—it doesn’t just involve who you love and fuck and live with, as it should; it consumes your life and life choices, makes your experiences and interactions more complex and nuanced, and automatically sets you aside as different.

Unlike those that choose to join the Hijra community that congeals in to a family, most LGBTIQs live in the mainstream, as about 10% of the population. Within this environment, each LGBTIQ has to carve out his/her/hir/their own identity, often a lonely journey full of strife; negotiate puberty, adulthood and sexual shame; and, hopefully, find love.

They would like to be accepted in the discourse of ‘normal’, under the cover of cultural and legal sanction, towards a world where they are not first defined by their gender and sexual identity. In that you can replace the words ‘gender and sexual identity’ with ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘femaleness’, ‘disability’, etc the rights of the LGBTIQ community are clearly a human, equal rights issue. The world over, we’re being all politically correct and apologetic for racism, classism, misogyny, disabled-bashing—all persecution for things people didn’t choose but were born with—so one must be mindful that that new research claims homosexuality is biologically determined. And even if isn’t (such a view is too simplistic methinks), there are loud calls from the growing liberal brigade for being tolerant of individual choice—to practice a religion of ones choice, to be cultural or not, for women to wear the clothes we want to, or to be gay. Gay rights are human rights.

And you don’t need to be gay to empathise. You just need to not be a bigot.

Same-same but Different

In the little bubble Sahil and I inhabit, comprising, for the most part, anglicised liberals in the media and arts, we have a lot of friends proud of their LGBTIQ identity. Two Australian gay couples who’ve had a child each through Indian surrogates are dear friends.  

In the midst of all this sermonising for and against gay rights recently, I reached out to several of them. A common belief is that the only barrier to accepting homosexuality is education and understanding. "There are so many misconceptions about gay sex and life,” one friend told me. “We are not a stereotype or crazy, an infectious disease or predatory. We are just people.”

The Difficult Journey

Even for us heterosexuals, sexual awakening in the teen years is a complex time. It hits us in a blaze of hormonal changes, stimulates our bodies, colours our minds, all the while leaving us to negotiate our cultural mores and environment. This is when, emotionally and socially, the heterosexual journey is not fraught with nearly as much loneliness and strife as ‘coming out’ is for those of alternate sexualities. 

On a long Skype call as he got ready for work, Ashok Bania, 32, tells me that he realised he was attracted to men at adolescence. “I used to get tingly when I saw guys,” he says matter-of-factly, and enjoyed what he calls a “single isolated event” of sexual experimentation with an older teenager boy.

Ashok Bania.

Ashok, an IIT Madras-IIM Lucknow alumnus based in San Francisco since June, is the son of an Assamese IPS officer and comes from humble beginnings. He grew up in and around Guwahati, before finishing his bachelors and masters in Chennai. “No one spoke about gays in Guwahati. A little information in a book in my convent school library and an article in the Reader’s Digest were what made me realise I was not alone.”

In college, Ashok was popular, and fit in by overtly talking about girls and watching straight porn with the boys in an environment where gay stereotypes (from The Wedding Planner and Father of the Bride) were ridiculed, all the while indulging himself in his “accurate sexuality” in private. It was 1999, when chat rooms were all the rage, and in these he learnt more about being gay, hoping nonetheless that “this is a temporary phase that will go away: it’s a fad, a hormonal imbalance.”

It was at IIM, at age 23, in love, for the first time, with a (straight) close friend, that his long-standing deception first started gnawing away at Ashok. Depressed, he ended up in media houses, first in Delhi for six months, and then in Mumbai for two years—“I heard things about gay life there. But being gay meant you had to be underground, and that scared me.”

And despite a few people asking about it, Ashok could never admit he was gay. He would be guarded when he drank, lest he spill his terrible secret. He had resolved to carry his burden alone, and never practice homosexuality. “In college, I had a friend who introduced his parents to his girlfriend. That made me cry… I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do that.” Ashok didn't even start reading about living a gay life until he came out, as he “didn’t know that was even an option.”

He laughs as he tells me his story now, but can you imagine the pathos of this isolation and sexual repression?

In fact, he didn’t tell a soul until he was 28, when, after a couple of years of resisting pressure from friends to get married and rejecting prospective brides this parents sent his way, “this amazing girl appeared”. She came down from the US to meet him in Bengaluru, where he was then working with AOL. “I felt trapped. A line from Dexter (the anti-hero from the eponymous TV series), ‘You cannot be honest to someone if you’re not honest to yourself’ played on my mind. I couldn’t eat or sleep for five-six days; I lost weight. I’d have palpitations when I’d meet her. I was playing out scenarios about getting married and having kids, and panicking at the thought of having sex!”

At this nail-biting now-or-never juncture, Ashok finally called his sister at 3 AM to tell her the truth: he was gay. And then he told the girl.

Onwards to Happiness

When he awoke the next morning, though, Ashok’s thoughts weren’t with the girl whose heart he had just broken. Instead, he felt elated, like a demon had left him, and says he felt so free he “could have walked naked to the office!”

Anyone who has kept a secret a long time, let alone for years together, will appreciate the happiness and liberation that comes from truth. As a culture, we have a complicated relationship with truth. On the one hand, our culture studies classes in school teach us not to lie, we are taught to look up to Mahatma Gandhi the apparent paragon of virtue and various swamis; on the other, we propagate a culture of silence and hypocrisy to conform to society and tradition.

“You have to be true to yourself or you will always be a liar. It is not what you should have to chose for your life.” Slowly, Ashok started telling the people closest to him—his friends, roommates and sisters—in what he calls the “coming-out disease”. His father, who he told on an evening walk, said nothing more than “Oh” at first, but later told him to be safe and careful. Telling his mother, the closest person in Ashok’s life, to whom he had lied for many years, was a different matter. She went through stages of grief and denial, proffering jadi-bootis to cure the disease. It was only in six months that she broke her silence on the topic, and began to follow stories about LGBTIQs in the Assamese-language press.

There is no new argument to offer to upholders of culture and religion than ones heard before—the choices of consenting adults, the fact that homosexuality is natural or that it has been accepted in our culture from times immemorial. (I don't believe current laws and social conventions should derive from ancient culture, mythology and history, but these people certainly do, hence this point.) A few mornings ago, I had a conversation with one such person from my dreaded and amusing ‘other’ messages folder on Facebook—because I have a 'one idiot at a time' philosophy; besides, I was writing this column, right, so wanted to explore the other side's POV.

Quotable quotes, almost verbatim saving for correcting his English:
“Sex is only for giving birth to a new life not for enjoyment.”
“Always private things must be kept in a private place… So making it an issue is making no sense, no one is going to check in everyone’s private life who is having homo sex.”
“If we start these sex issues in public then god knows what will happen in the next ten years… Making these issues public can badly affect kids and teenagers. Just tell me whenever someone thinks about sexual matters, what does s/he feel?”
(Me: “When you think about sex, you feel aroused. When you think about sexual rights, you don't feel aroused. Is that your concern, that the law will turn people on?!”)

The culture they seek to preserve is not one of greatness or happiness, but of falseness and hate. To make something natural against social mores can only mean more people living unhappy lives in enforced hypocrisy. Case in point: as a parting shot, the culture protector who had declared: “For me sex is not so important, love emotion is much more important than sex,” said, “I am looking through your pictures. They turn me on."

The paranoia about the spread of a gay pandemic is not actually about more people becoming gay; it is about more people admitting to being gay. Says Ashok, “I never had any role models. If I had known just one person—someone’s uncle or brother—retrospectively, I might have had enough courage to say ‘Hey, I’m different.’” While laws and cultural pressure are essential to prevent things that are truly horrific from happening in society (rape, sex crimes, murder, communal violence), let it not stand against the happiness of two consenting adults.

In contrast to Ashok, Rohan Rita Agnani, 23, a Mumbai-based fashion designer from Vadodara, Gujarat, who comes from an “open-minded network”, never tried to mask his sexuality through his growing years. While he faced problems, including severe bullying at school, for not moderating his behaviour, it made coming out to his parents “the easiest thing”. They had “social concerns”, about how people would behave and react towards him, but said, “As long as you are happy.” When I opine that his coming-out story is the simplest and least angst-ridden one of all those I have spoken to, he says it is confidence from family and friends that has made it so.

Rohan’s partner of a year and a half, 31-year-old Avil D’souza is a senior manager at a media company. The couple met online in 2012, in the second month of Rohan’s two-month internship in Mumbai. When he returned to college in Gandhinagar, Avil visited him almost every week until graduation. A bisexual who had never had a long-term relationship before, Avil only came out to his mother eight months ago, a month before he entered into a stable domestic partnership with Rohan. “Not all of the family knows. With many, it didn’t need to be said out loud: now, they just invite me over saying, ‘Come with Rohan.’ It’s accepted in so many words.”

Avil D'souza & Rohan Rita Agnani.

It is no surprise that Rohan and Avil have had less tumultuous journeys into sexual adulthood than Ashok, owing to their more exposed and liberal backgrounds. About a decade ago, I met two guys from Meerut, roughly my age, while rescuing a calf on a Delhi road. They were in Delhi to give entrance tests for medical colleges, and one ended up in Russia instead. A few months later, he sent me a pained email—about how he was attracted to boys and sexually active there; how he could only confide in me, an empathetic stranger, and no one else; how he was terrified of coming home to social expectations he would be unable to escape. I replied but we lost touch, much before Facebook existed to tether us together, and I often wonder what became of the boy whose name I cannot remember… Did he stay on in Russia to face persecution under its anti-gay laws? Did he return and tell the truth or run away, or is he married with children somewhere in UP, living an unhappy lie? Who knows.

The Freedom to Be

Once Ashok came out, tingeing the liberation and happiness was an increased expectation from life. Where once he was resigned to lonely celibacy, he was now wondering where love was.

While engineer-MBA Ashok works in the IT sector, Avil works in a media company and Rohan as a fashion designer in a big corporation (“a cliché,” he laughs). Ashok has been openly gay in his last two workplaces in India, AOL and Yahoo! in Bengaluru, and says he faced a little gossip but no discrimination—a factor of the American culture of these companies and the education levels of his colleagues. While Avil has told his boss, other colleagues are on need-to-know basis. I start to say that the media is a more liberal industry, but he cuts me off… “Even here, there is discrimination against feminine men; those who fit the gay stereotype of the limp wrist and girly voice are subject to childish high-school jokes.” (He doesn’t.) Rohan admits that a corporate environment is never easy. “Of course, prejudices and preconceived notions are not as bad as they have been in the past. Communication breaks barriers.”

Ashok had considered moving to the US straight after his stint at IIT-IIM, something I imagine would have been easy for the genius-type that he is. In retrospect, he says, life would have been much better had he done so. Cities like Berlin in Germany and San Francisco in the US are mecca for gay people, with liberal political and cultural environments, and frequent work visits to SF since 2007 when he joined Yahoo! in Bengaluru exposed Ashok to gay partners, husbands and a couple married for 25 years, though when he first saw men holding hands and kissing on the streets, his heart would skip a beat out of fear. He finally moved within Yahoo! six months ago.

One of Ashok’s mother’s primary contentions was that he would die alone, with no partner or children, and had even suggested that he have a ‘lavender wedding’ with a friend—a sex-free marriage for children. For four months now, he has been with Christopher Contos, a 40-year-old Greek from Milwaukee living in SF for 15 years, who he met on a dating site. “There’s no rulebook about falling in love,” blushes Ashok. “I’ve met his parents, he’s spoken to my dad. We talk about our future.” Ashok, who has a strong maternal instinct, also wants children.

On his way to a happy ending, I ask Ashok whether he saw this happening in India. No, he says, “The pool of gay guys who are out in India is so small that everyone practically knows each other. In Bengaluru, those who are out are either very young, 17-18 years old; older ones are closeted, complex and weird.”

I see his point. While in a manhunt stage of life, I would often lament that, despite having access to a majority, the straight male demographic, I was still hunting for the right guy, seeking minute specifics. While I understand that living an alternative gender/sexuality is a uniting ‘otherness’ experience often stronger than other sociocultural, economic, class, etc dissimilarities, being alternately inclined seemed to be the only criteria uniting the limited pool on the Delhi gay party circuit—I met a flamboyant cross-dressing tailor from a village near Jabalpur (married, with three kids) at the same party as I saw one of the country’s most famous designers. “Like straight people, gays too have ‘types’!” Ashok stresses, giggling.

The love of Rohan and Avil, on the other hand, continues to be limited by the laws and culture of the country they have not escaped. Rohan describes an odd sense of insecurity, even on a normal day: “Avil and I were celebrating our one-year anniversary at a club in Andheri, and kissed at 12. We were pushed out of the place and had to defend ourselves, and were followed by eight bouncers.”

While Ashok acknowledges the hate crimes against LGBTIQs in the US, he says, “In India, I could not have had a legitimate life. Here I can introduce my boyfriend, have a structure. And being able to have children is something I don’t see happening there.” Avil would love to marry Rohan, and lists the advantages—to celebrate, validate and publicise a partnership; for the ease of looking after each other; and for the practical things like life insurance, home loans and joint accounts. “But marriage means migrating,” he says, laughingly dismissing the possibility of legal marriage for gay people—something that is a taken-for-granted reality for us heterosexuals—in India in our lifetime.

Section 377: Bigoted Wrongs & Human Rights

Avil says the recent Supreme Court verdict “technically, doesn’t change anything” in his life—“we’re not really having sex in the open!” But the recriminalising of gay sex impacts the right to love and live legally, and the law as well as the dialogue it has sparked has huge sociocultural ramifications.

More than we acknowledge, laws have the power to guide social mores. For instance, when Sahil and I started living together, my family did not say much, though I know they were uncomfortable. Then the courts started issuing verdicts in favour of live-in relationships. In this subtle statement, my grandfather expressed everything—his previous discomfort, the fact that he must have grappled with it in light of my rational arguments pro the arrangement, as well as how the legalisation made him feel better and comforted: "Theek hai," he said at the end of a 'shaadi kab kar rahe ho' conversation, "Aab toh Supreme Court ne bhi live-in relationships ko legalise kar diya hai."

“The people who do get affected are those who are not out at their age and stage in life. A confused 14-year-old will feel socially and legally outcast, and the government endorses and condones their isolation and persecution!” continues Avil. Ashok too emphasises that it is important to reach out to the individual in the closet, as well as families and societies. In an interview to Gay Star News, Aditya Bondyopadhyay, a lawyer and director of Adhikaar, a LGBTIQ human rights organisation based in Delhi, says that there has been a recent spike in violence against members of the community, both by the police as well as by plebeian folk, “a direct outcome of the wide debate and news that followed the Supreme Court judgement.”

An environment that forces people to remain closeted affects the individuals, their families and spouses, of course, but the inability to reach MSM (short for ‘men who have sex with men’) also cripples work towards AIDS prevention, a key point in Naz Foundation’s petition.  

Most important in this culture versus laws debate is the acknowledgement that the legal system of the country should pick the side of justice and reform, as it has done before. Once upon a time, it chose to outlaw integral practices of our culture and religion, sati and dowry. As it should, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, triumphs in conflict with Muslim personal law, that allows the age of puberty to be considered marriageable age. The system should also prioritise individual choice: if Baba Ramdev and his ilk are allowed to practice a patriarchal lifestyle that is offensive to certain demographic groups in a democracy, others should be afforded the same respect.

The Way Ahead

After the Supreme Court’s verdict, the English media has been pointing out how the stand against consensual homosexuality has united the right-wing bigots across religions, cultural positioning and political affiliations. What it has also done is unite the rational liberals with the LGBTIQ community across the country, lead by pretty much all the English media...

This is a powerful positive collection. Despite the liberals’ deriding, I realise that the anti-homosexuality stand of those like the BJP won’t hurt them much at the vote bank at the moment. But it’s interesting to note that our numbers are not insignificant and are growing, and we’re certainly not a quiet bunch, as noted at the anti-377 marches and social media uproar. I don’t know about you, but I died of shame last month, when a US court granted a gay couple from Haryana asylum for fear of persecution and imprisonment in India. Is this really where we want to position ourselves on the culture and human rights’ map? India has a dynamic young population, coming to metros, seeking education, questioning things of the past, and changing themselves in a changing world. An open world is the way of the future; it is time our leaders embraced it.

To my mind, the most important change brought about, first by the Delhi Gang Rape and now by this regressive ruling, is conversation. If Anna Hazare and then the AAP have mainstreamised the battle against corruption, these events are reversing the apathy we’ve had towards sexual oppression in our country. As noted before, every single person I spoke to from the LGBTIQ community believes the only reason for homophobia a lack of awareness, and, individually and collectively, each of these openly gay men has decided to increase communication, if not overt activism.

Equal rights activist Harish Iyer, considered one of the most influential gay people worldwide, has “stirred quite a few conversations and created quite a few ripples” with the recent Placards for Change campaign, carrying and encouraging others to carry short pro-LGBTIQ messages around Mumbai. When I spoke to Rohan, a day after the heart-breaking verdict, he was trying to stay positive. “No battle fought is easy. Even if we were victorious today, people are not going to change—the majority of India wouldn’t still support us. It’s better to convert people than the government.”

In some senses, there is activism inherent in simply living an openly gay life. By setting an example, these courageous men and women are changing the way an entire population thinks and acts, and partaking in its emotional evolution. Rohan says, “I make people understand that I’m not different. My school bully recently called to apologise to me. People change.”

Ashok, who describes himself as a “bubble-gum pink, happy person” (a far cry from the angst-ridden and depressed man guarding a big secret methinks!), says his version of activism is to go around telling people: “I’m gay. You love me. So why should it change right now?” He believes not everyone supports 377, only a few powerful people do—when he recently talked about his sexuality on Facebook, he was surprised at the support and congratulatory messages. Most people are uninformed, not bad.

“I have been lucky,” says Ashok. “My coterie is from IIT-IIM, and has been open to talk about homosexuality. I got a chance to move out of India because of my career. Not everyone can.” He believes people in India must be exposed and sensitised. “Make yourself heard. Tell ten people. Spread the message.”

The preservers of our culture of silence better watch out.

---

An edited version of this article appeared in Governance Now in January 2014. 

Ashok and Christopher got married in 2016. Avil and Rohan are still living together.

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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