Casual Misogyny

I was told by a new reader of my blog that my latest post was the one about the ways in which shame and shaming work in our culture. 

I winced. Wasn't that was nearly 2 years ago? To be really precise it was about 35 months ago.

What on earth! Did I not experience anything or watch anything that made me feel that urgent tug to write and publish in more than a year and a half! 

Well, no. I did. Many. Not for this forum though.

This space helps me in two ways: I get to articulate some new ideas or delve deeper into some older ones. And I get to share thoughts on which I would love feedback from readers who actually read my blog. So, here we go: A new one that pushes the envelope a little bit from the last one from 2023!

A version of the anger-inducing experiences I shared in August 2023 happened early last week. 

There I was-- happily driving to work early in the morning. Not much traffic. Good old Mohammed Rafi crooning from the sparkly new audio system fitted into my ageing automobile. And all those who are Rafi fans will know that he's not in the least speed-inducing or even the opposite-- sleep-inducing. Mostly, he is either gently coaxing a sweetheart into some minor indiscretion or mourning unrequited love. And all of this in a world before MTV and Channel V made words like yo, hip, and sexy casual among young people. And I was at that moment listening to one from that period when even the most radical feminist will have hummed "Mang ke saath tumhara..." with a very young Asha Bhonsale. All of which means that I am not even truly distracted by the lyrics or the familiar tune and music. It is helping me feel happy that I am driving to work early in the morning on a day that will turn drainingly humid soon.

I am probably at 25 Kmph (because I am still on the second gear). I know full well that unpredictable appearances can be made by any of the following on the road ahead:

• A young person dashing across to catch the attention of an e-rickshaw parked on the other side
• A middle-aged woman finding a gap in the road-divider to throw a polythene bag of trash on the dried-up riverbed which will soon turn into another landfill near my locality
• Cattle that are finding their way to their morning feed in these 'pastures'
• A pesky biker who wants to take advantage of the narrow gap between the two lanes of three or four wheelers to get ahead

One specimen from the last item in the list above starts moving alarmingly close to my car. I honk to let him know that I exist. Yes, sometimes, you need to scream or let your tool scream, when you are a woman driver on the roads. 

Ah! Wrong move. The biker is irritated as hell that a woman dared to honk at him. He stops in the middle lane of a road that is getting increasingly busy. And starts yelling and gesticulating at me. I roll down the window.

Second wrong move: I actually pushed that window down and said "sorry"! So that he will go away. (Will I never learn!!!)

His reaction: "Tujhe dikhta nahin hai kya?" Can't you see, you!

Now here comes the moment that makes me cringe when I recall the incident-- I go: "Bhaiya, maine horn bhi bajaya tha". Brother, I had honked to warn you that you are veering too close.

His verbal abuse begins: "You think your sorry will have helped if I had had an accident. Blah, blah, blah".

All of which I blanked out by sliding the window up and driving on.

One big change from two years ago-- other drivers just told him to stop with all of that and get going.

The second big change from that last time-- I gave a damn to that incident.

Until I walked into work and had another annoying experience within half an hour of that. This one is typical of my city. It is a version of this: in a public space and that too a work space, a co-worker can let another co-worker know that because she is a woman he can make unprofessional, subtly loaded remarks that seem like they are doing you a favour because you are from a different gender to which they have declared their attraction. All of this while they might actually be doing, or not-doing in this specific instance, a minor part of the work they ideally should be doing as part of their job profile on any given day at work. 

How do you deal with that? 

Being someone that knows my legal rights, I know that this sort of thing, if it becomes a recurring thing, is something I will have advised (and actually have, multiple times, as part of my job) to report, if it makes them uncomfortable, to institutional mechanisms of grievance redressal.

Having been someone who helped in some of those redressal mechanisms, I know how truly heart-wrenching many of those meetings can be-- for all concerned. And sometimes a wasted exercise too!

Because, you see, much of legal defence works with finding a flaw in the law. And in many such redressal meetings the blurry line between my legal rights and the social perception of my rights weakens my case; especially because the law can typically be enforced only when a case is proven with evidence.

Remember all those unsolved cases that all of us followed through 24 hour new channels when we weren't drowning in work and could actually watch TV? And in moments of puzzlement while skimming through the morning papers wondered-- well if someone was harrased or abused or grievously injured or died, how come they never managed to find out who did it and how?

Here's how: The same incident looks radically different from different perspectives -- of that of the victim; of the suffering parties; of the alleged vicitimiser; of the onlooker; of the casual passerby; of the concerned and not-really concerned person who hears a report of the event; of the prosecutor, and of the defender.

Lets' look at a few perspectives in the two instances share above:

The perspective of the staid-looking, middle-aged biker: Here's a younger woman driving to work in a car (wearing sunshades) when he is diffidently steering his way through narrow gaps, peering out of his spectacles. A travesty. Shouldn't he be driving to work in a car? And shouldn't she be sweating in a kitchen, packing her family's many lunchboxes at about 8.15 AM?

For my co-worker, the situation is somewhat like this: Isn't it too early for this woman to come over to remind me that I am not doing the work I should be doing? I know why I am not doing it and I can't tell her that. I feel bad already and she's making me feel worse. Won't I feel better by just making her feel good about herself? By suggesting subtly and in a non-threatening (for me) way that you look too well-prepared for the day ahead for me to spoil your mood with dry professionalism so, here, I will throw a little light-hearted pleasantry at you. I know you will not mind it because you know that I am not flirting with you. Come on, woman! Every man that talks to you pleasantly is not getting fresh. Get a life!  

Oh! None of them are thinking this consciously! In that very moment they are probably not even thinking of gender and sexuality.

Gender is a social construct. And socialisation begins when you are in the womb. At least in our culture-- remember the forever skewed sex-ratio, to begin with? And let's not go into all the related horrors in that realm. 

These people -- most of them middle-aged, educated, gentlemen are performing their gender. And I bet they truly believe that my culturally bestowed rights are to be loved, cared for and protected by the men in my life -- husband/ father/ brother(s). And they assume that all or at one of them are part of my life to be the knight in shining armour. Given my gender and the perceptions of it in my culture they have done nothing wrong. Au contraire. Therefore, they are not bad men. They have not broken any legal or even social rules that govern gendered interactions in our culture.

I agree that the biker was rude. But of course, he was! Everyone concerned for my health and happiness -- ranging from family to friends to colleagues and my students, of all genders and sexual identities -- tried to kindly explain to me in August 2023 that I should have noted that angry and abusive biker's nameplate number and/ or called the PCR van. Some of the above also let me know that I had hurt his ego by being gentle and civil with my unnecessary apology in the face of his boorish behaviour. And as is evident I didn't learn anything from their well-meaning advice. Not because I didn't appreciate their concern or wanted to reject their well-meaning suggestions. It's because I have gained that Pyrrhic victory of becoming a person who will be polite and non-confrontational if the matter can be quickly resolved that way. 

In the larger scheme of thinks that moment with the biker doesn't truly matter.

Those discomfiting moments with co-workers do matter. And I do nothing about it.

Why?

Because.

I truly understood, very recently, why and how the millenials use that word. Because of too many minor reasons that seem like non-reasons but become this big reason that sits so heavy on the chest that the lips and hyoid bone just about let out a sigh that sounds like because.

And that is how casual misogyny gets perpetuated. 

By everyone -- by me, by you, by all those who pat the back of the down-in-the mouth sufferer and utter that wonderfully light-hearted dakkhani phrase "dil pe mat le yaar" (don't take it to heart, dude) or some local variant of it, by those who don't see why many of those moments are misogynistic or sexist, by many who perceive them as flattering, and by the multitudes who really don't get why and how expressions of gender and sexuality should not find any space at all in any professional situation.

Because, you see, if we are to work on reducing the rampant misogyny in real and virtual spaces we need to start by acknowleding that casual misogyny is an actual social phenomenon. And that it should not and need not be tolerated by anyone. 

Typically, we react with rolling our eyes, or sigh, or shut down the few women who articulate -- through words or gestures -- the variants of: It's not my job to be pleasant to you at this moment out here; I don't see why I should keep smiling all the time; I will frown at the helpful stranger who will give directions to the man in the passenger/ backseat of my car and not to me the driver; I get super-pissed at the waiter who assumes the guy in the group will pick up the tab each time; and many more such.

Instead of letting it slide, if all of us took a moment to ask ourselves whether we are blurring the lines between the personal and the professional in our behaviour when we participate in gendered behaviour in our workspaces or curb our urge to let gendered behaviour pass by as an inconsequential occurence when we witness it or are subejcted to in public spaces we will have taken some baby steps to counter the casual perpetuation of misogyny.

Reflections on Rage and Shame

These are some preliminary thoughts emerging from two incidents that had me seething with anger this time last week.

They are on the deep connection between shaming, rage and gender violence.

It started with an annoying phone call— I was all set to meet a friend and do some weekend chores we had each lined up for ourselves during the week. My phone rang as I was about to lock the front door. An unknown number. My “Hullo?” was returned with a “Heyylo” by a middle-aged sounding male voice. I responded with “Who’s this?” and hearing his next sentence realized that it was one of those Mujhse dosti karoge calls. As a woman in India, one just gets used to calls from absolute strangers at any time of the day or night asking if we want to befriend them. I immediately cut the call and blocked the number. Locked the door and set out to have a good day with my friend.

Mostly adult women in India are way past getting angry or exasperated at such phone calls.

We know that many men think that a woman seen to be navigating public spaces alone is construed as someone who might need a male friend. I know that sounds like we live in the early 19^th century. It does to my Gen Z students in my 19^th century literature classes. Sometimes the class acknowledges the disturbing similarity in experiences between women who moved around in the world alone in 19^th century Anglo-American literary depictions and our experiences as women in the age range of 18 to 68.

The number 68 wasn’t a random choice. The first time my mother remarked that she felt awkward outside the house was in the upper-middle class residential area I lived in a few years ago. She is an absolutely unselfconscious traditionally-attired modern Indian woman. On that day, she had walked about 250 metres alone to a nearby store or temple or to do some normal chore and thought that many men had turned and looked at her. She wondered what would explain men driving bikes and cars turning to look at an elderly woman walking confidently towards some place during the forenoon hours of a week day? Shouldn’t it be normal for a woman to walk alone somewhere during the day?

Well! It still isn’t normal for a woman, of any age, to walk alone on the road without facing stares anywhere in our country, including residential areas within the capital city.

We learn to ignore all those stares.

We also learn to overlook all sorts of unwanted attention.

And most importantly, we learn to not get provoked by men who feel entitled to annoy us with shameless stares and pushy phone calls.

We complain among ourselves and either make bitter jokes about those men or share some rage at our experiences and in extremely rare moments plan to take some solid action.

We sometimes complain to men when some tacitly agreed upon boundaries are breached. The last frontier of unwanted attention in Indian culture is touch. If we experience unwanted touch in a public place we feel sexually harassed. We might share that with the men in our lives. The reactions range from getting angry on our behalf to advise on the ways of navigating the world of men and in rare instances of acknowledgement of grave harassment to taking actions involving the laws of the land.

I have had any number of discussions – formal and informal ones – on sexual harassment in public places with family, friends, peers and students. I am a woman who has mostly lived alone as an adult in India. I teach courses on gender in literature. I research literary depictions of gender. I was part of committees for redressal of complaints, including those of a sexual nature, at my workplace.

It shouldn’t be a surprise therefore that I know my rights.

Moreover, it should not surprise anyone that I have thought of these matters for many years now.

Therefore, incidents like that phone call do not make me angry. Nowadays, I do not even register feeling upset.

This time around that nanosecond worth of upsetting emotion that had reached the unconscious at supersonic speed resurfaced due to another violent incident I experienced within minutes.

I had reached a traffic signal less than 50 metres from my apartment gate and was trying to turn right, duly signalling that my car is taking a right turn. At the very last second, I noticed a car violating the signal from the opposite direction. To avoid a collusion, I had to turn slightly right. There was a biker right next to my car and he too was ostensibly trying to turn right. Obviously, he had to apply brakes suddenly to avoid a potential crash. That crash did not happen but the man got raging angry at the risk, he, his wife and his infant child, had narrowly avoided. He hit the passenger-side window of my car with an open palm. I rolled the window a few inches down and said, “Sorry, bhaiyya”. That riled him further. I don’t quite know why. He started yelling—according to him, I had put the life of his child at risk. In fact, I had done nothing. Our vehicles hadn’t even touched. I kept starting at him, silently wondering what was making him reach a point where he was likely to burst a blood vessel. Hadn’t I just said sorry for an almost accident that had thankfully NOT occurred? Until I heard him say two things: “Gaadi mein baithi hain” and then the abusive refrain that was clearly making him angrier and happier: “besharam aurat”. Now I understood why I was making him angry—that I was a woman sitting alone in a car, driving somewhere on a Sunday morning. That was such an affront to this man’s ego that he declared me a shameless woman. Whereas he was unmindful of the risk to his family at his attempt at a precarious balance of speed and skill on a motorcycle with infant-child and wife as pillion riders on a crowded road.

And to top it off, unlike his cowering sari-clad wife, with the veil on her head and infant in her arms, I was in the ‘Western’ outfit of trouser and top and was calmly sitting at the steering wheel of a car. Clearly, being the opposite of his traditional wife who was dutifully standing next to him as he called a strange woman shameless in the middle of a traffic junction, I was the image of female insolence to that man.

This incident took place less than 60 seconds, for that traffic stop turns red for 60 seconds.

Neither did he feel that he should be ashamed of his behaviour nor was he made to feel that by the people around who wanted the traffic jam cleared. Two well-groomed young men trotted up to this scene as soon as the signal turned green and said: “We are saying sorry on his behalf, please move on. Which way do you want to go?” At which I exclaimed: “Left! My car’s indicating the signal even now. I had to veer right because of that other car, which has zipped past”. They said, “Never mind, Madam. Please move on”.

I did but the motorcyclist chose to deliberately hit the rear end of my car with his bike. I stopped again at the traffic junction and yelled out: “This is not done!” The young men ran up to my car and gestured that I move ahead while muttering, “Please, please.”

The apologies and requests of the young men were made to handle a traffic logjam. I know that they didn’t need to make them. And I felt thankful that such well-brought up young men do exist.

I drove ahead and met my friend within the next few seconds. I was angry and upset. And shared my feelings with her. A brief discussion ensued as I drove ahead. A little later, she called her husband to share her agitation over the experience I had. Perhaps, she must have thought that speaking with her husband – also one of my oldest friends – would help me seem less upset. While wondering how it would help me, I narrated again the two incidents that had derailed me a bit that morning. He heard me calmly and then advised me that I should not let it spoil the rest of my day. He also added that it is true that the angry motorcyclist would not have behaved the way he did if I were a man.

Ah well! Thankfully, I have sensitive friends who get angry on my behalf and acknowledge the unique vulnerability that women in India still face in public places.

That is probably one of the reasons I can be that ‘shameless woman’ who ‘drives alone in a car’ and manages to move on after intermittent episodes of Delhi’s notorious road rage incidents.

Nevertheless, I am still appalled that a man can get away with yelling abusive, loaded, gender-specific labels at a strange woman at a crowded traffic stop.

I don’t get why a woman who can calmly stare back at a violent outburst is a shameless woman.

Does not getting provoked into anger by abusive accusations or not becoming tearful in the face of verbal violence make me eligible for that label of shamelessness? Is my being able to afford to be a woman who can drive around alone make me a shameless woman? Or just being a woman seen alone in public make me eligible to be called a shameless woman?

I am not going to feel apologetic for navigating my way through a very violent world populated by many troubled and frustrated people.    

I am not going to bow my head down for a perceived harm or hurt.

I do not need to feel shame for a stranger’s rage at me. And cannot, or even will not, get angry or violent as a counter reaction to a stranger’s anger.

I refuse to feel ashamed that I am who I am.

Three Movies in Thirty-Six Hours

I am coming back to this space after an entire year to talk about a highly unusual experience I had recently.

About a fortnight ago, I saw three films and gave a talk about another two within one weekend.

Three movies in three days might never get repeated but what an experience that was! Especially due to the movies and the diversity they represented.

The first was a Hindi movie about a young woman who refuses to be objectified to a role. I saw this on Friday afternoon, partly in preparation for the academic talk I was to give on “Femininity and Play in Two Contemporary Bollywood Movies” in a webinar for students from two colleges that were bridging the North-South divide in India through this collaborative effort. One college is in Hyderabad and the other in Patna!

I overcame my resistance to the movie and saw it because I wanted to check for myself the depiction of Indian femininity that led to the mixed reports it got in 2020, when the movie was released.

The movie was Thappad and my long resistance to the movie was on account of the title.

A thappad, a slap, is more often that not construed as an act of violence perpetrated on one person by another and holds within it a sense of inequality in the relationship. Having heard that the female protagonist of the movie is a homemaker, I made the error of thinking that it was a movie about domestic violence and had avoided watching a movie on such a grave topic when we were grappling with the worries emerging from a global pandemic.

Although the movie did not contribute much to my talk on femininity and play, it made me realise that finally some voices in the large realm of Hindi cinema are representing women as people who see themselves as people—not as mothers, mother-in-laws, wives, sisters, girlfriends, lovers. And all of this through a series of potent shots and actions that would be immediately understood by any regular viewer of Hindi cinema. This was more than worthy of the three hours I spent on it on a week-day afternoon. And will probably lead me to a more academic examination of the crux of the movie very soon. Fingers crossed.

I can safely say that the Saturday night movie is one that I will not engage with academically. Though it was totally worthy of the really expensive IMAX ticket and I happily thank my friend for picking the perfect seats for that movie—absolutely the centre of the hall—this one got stored in my head as a one-liner my higher secondary school Physics teacher used to repeat fairly often, not just during the Solid State Physics module of the syllabus. This excellent teacher would remind us that "when Physics ends Metaphysics begins", and managed to get young adults like me to think in terms of the enigma and ethics of science. Thanks to my teacher, I realized that the makers of the film expected the viewers to have about as much knowledge of quantam theory as we would need that of kinematics to enjoy a James Bond movie. Nolan did with more Hollywood elan what the makers of Pathan did in true Bollywood fashion six months ago—make a stylish movie bordering on the absurd about an unlikely national hero who suffers pangs of conscience for ‘saving’ their nation through warfare.

Sunday’s movie stands on even more ethically shaky terrain, for it talks of feminism through a very glamourous object of a world steeped in consumerism. But it was a very intelligently made movie that has also become a global hit – Greta Grewig’s Barbie.

I had to see Barbie for many reasons. The most important one was that I research childhood and have recently published a monograph on the child-toy link in literature and in the cultures of childhood.

As a researcher of childhood, I have observed that children really do not need any store-bought toy to play happily. However, I was also curious about this record-making movie of the most famous doll in the modern history of toys for girls.

It's equally true that as an 80s child in India I had never played with a Barbie.

The first time I saw a Barbie was when I was in middle school.

A friend smuggled in her younger sister's Barbie – a gift from a Dubai-based relative – into our Jesuit convent school. She passed a chit among the girls in class that she has something exciting to show us during the short interval. A bunch of us crowded around her and she brought out a doll dressed in a parrot green sari with a zari border with tiny chilli red ambis (paisley) motifs on the border. The doll was inside the box that it had come in and she did not dare to take it out of the box. All of us – preteen schoolgirls in small town India – admired the absolute beauty of that very tall doll and thought it was extremely glamourous. But it was definitely not a doll! What can anyone do with it but keep it on display? Would our friend's little sister be allowed to play with it? Or would it go on the top shelf of the mantel piece of their home? That was the discussion for the day during the lunch interval.

This was the late-1980s. We hadn't heard of terms like liberalisation and globalisation.

The Barbie did not mean anything to me as a child.

It was a toy that didn’t even have the shape of a child and therefore seemed like a fairly useless doll for a child to identify with to the researcher in me in the early 2000s in India.

However, I have been recommending the movie to all my friends who have young daughters. We are in a globalized, neo-liberal, consumer-centric world. It makes total sense to use a toy they are familiar with to learn the basics of self-actualisation. Depsite all my reservations about the doll and all that it represents, I salute Greta Grewig and her team for appropriating the many shades of pink in Barbieworld to let growing-up girls know that pink too can be cool if one chooses it consciously with all the challenges it throws up at people growing up in a post-feminist, post-LGBTQA+, globalised world.

Although I enjoyed Oppenheimer and Barbie in two different ways, the movie that will stay with me for the depth of message it conveyed for my fellow countrymen/ women/ non-binary adults and young adults is Thappad.

It told us that no one has a right to the body and being of anyone in any sort of intimate or co-dependent relationship. And that for love to sustain through the complexities of marriage each partner needs to respect the others personhood.  

Thappad is a movie I will recommend to everybody I know.

 

Why I enjoyed Agassi’s Autobiography

 

Agassi chose to call his autobiography Open. When I had heard the title of the book, the year it came out, I wondered whether he was talking about opening up to his fans or he meant to talk about the open era of tennis.  Having spent five years of my early teens as a keen viewer of cricket and tennis on TV, I had my favourite players in both those games and Agassi is among the top of the list. Although, it took me the next decade to spot a copy that I could borrow, even as I read it, I knew I would be blogging about it.

Agassi was a sensation in the tennis world through my childhood and early youth. This was also the time I was absolutely fascinated by Steffi Graf and to this day I strongly believe she was the best tennis player from the 1980s to date. Friends would find it amusing that I follow sports or have personal favourites among cricketers and tennis players, for no one has ever seen me play any sport with any aptitude or ability. However, the early years of live telecast of sports coincided with my TV-viewing years as a child and pre-teen. Having been introduced to the joys of watching sports on TV through the Benson and Hedges World Cricket Championship of 1984/85 as a young child, one of the few things I have truly enjoyed watching on TV is sports.

I must have watched more hours of sports on TV in 1988 than I did ever before or after. One evening in 1988, a friend of my parents, a university professor of Physics, noticed me keenly watching a tennis match on an old Black and White TV set in our living room. The match was between a young man with long light-coloured hair, wearing some dark cycling trunks under a pair of very short denim tennis shorts and an older player who clearly seemed more in control of the situation. I was silently rooting for the young man. This friend wondered why I was watching the game with such fascination and asked me what I knew about the game and why that particular match interested me. I had no intelligent answers to give. He then asked which of the two players I was backing. Upon being told that I was backing the younger player, my interest was dismissed as a pre-teen’s passing fascination with a young and attractive sportsman. I neither knew the game well nor could I actually pronounce the names of the two players.

This was a match between Andre Agassi and Miloslav Mecir and as a young child in a small town in India, I truly didn’t know the correct pronunciation of either of those names.

However, my best friend and I had, by then, spent each morning of an entire school year watching half an hour of badminton practice that my school’s sports teachers put the badminton champs of the school through before the day’s schedule began. Additionally, I had rather unsuccessfully tried to put into practice some of my observations from the early morning sports ‘class’ during our evening playtime, on a strip of grass in front of our building. I am reasonably sure that even now if someone gets me to go onto a badminton court and ties a net in front of me, my serve would not go above the net. I am probably confessing to being a spectacular failure at learning to play a sport even after focused watching of training for many hours. But that did work as a negative catalyst to my watching badminton on TV—the rare exception was the spectacular one between Sindhu and Carolina Mari recently.

Why then do I enjoy watching sports on TV?

It is not the love of sports or any interest in watching any live event from the comforts of home or even a typical couch potato’s escape into reveries of alternate realities through TV. I love watching sports because it leads me into thinking about the amazing ability of the human body and human mind to reach unimagined heights. Watching it shows how will, grit, discipline and creativity can be put to good use to turn the dream of achieving a goal into a reality.

While that young man there in that tennis match was being dismissed as an undisciplined teenager, on account of his hairstyle and unusual tennis outfit, by two middle-aged successful men, I knew why I was rooting for him. He was displaying grit and was clearly determined to do his best to not let the Olympic champion give him a thorough routing. The match went on and on for 5 sets and the younger guy was clearly making the older champion sweat it out. Beneath that American teenager’s demeanour was a young person playing to prove that he had it in him to be a champion, if not now, then soon.

Obviously I could not explain all of this to the two men who were quizzing me. In 1988, neither did I have the cognitive ability to process my thoughts this clearly nor the articulation to explain it to the grown-ups who seemed intent on dismissing the young man. All I knew was that I wasn’t watching the game because it was a young and attractive man playing an older but also attractive man. I was watching it because I wanted the young man to win. I wanted the grown-ups to understand that beneath the projection of teenage rebellion there was someone who was trying to put his training and knowledge to win a match in his own way. The late teen’s struggles spoke to the atypical pre-teen I was. Here was someone who was not towing the line but was successful enough to be right there with the biggies—playing in the professional circuit. Over the course of the next 5 years of watching a few matches, mostly the big matches during the US Open and French Open, I could sense that he was hardly the enfant terrible the newspapers described him to be. Only upon reading Agassi’s autobiography, all these decades later, I realized that the long hair and denim shorts were just his ways of saying that he will be disciplined and determined on the tennis court because that’s his day job but he will do it as Andre Agassi, not as a replaceable ideal called the tennis champion of the year or the decade or the epoch. He was an original.

On that day in 1988, when I turned an Agassi fan, I didn’t know that he would go on to win the Golden Slam and don’t yet have the technical knowledge to say whether he was the best player of his times. As a completely uninformed tennis spectator, all I can say is that I have admired the unique way in which he held his own in each match I had watched, no matter whether he finally won or lost that match.

As it turned out, he managed to pull an Agassi with his autobiography too.

Not only did he begin the book at the moment where he ended his professional career but also completed a full circle of a life spent as a professional tennis player by ending it with the same match. This might seem like he talked only about tennis throughout his autobiography. He did and he didn’t. Although the book didn’t make me more informed about the technicalities of tennis, I got to see the human being who worked as a professional tennis player, became the number one player in the world, created a few stunning records in the game, grew into a responsible young man who remained close to his natal family, found love and made a stable family of his own with the best tennis player in the world, chose to remain a professional tennis player as long as his body let him and finally found his vocation in running a school that facilitates under-privileged children to aspire to a college education.

Reading his autobiography was like watching him play—being unique but with a single-minded focus on his goal to make the best of everything that was coming his way. During his tennis matches he would use his years of training and discipline to engage his opponents in long and involved games whose outcome he definitely didn’t always have control over. Similarly, in his book, he draws his reader into his life by opening his thoughts and emotions and bravely putting them out there to get his reader to realize that the man put his sweat and blood to become a contented person. 

Here is a unique tennis champion who seems prouder of his educational institution that helps under-privileged children complete school than of the world records he made in the sport he devoted his childhood and youth to and reached the pinnacle in it.

Doesn’t it make sense that someone who never hit a tennis ball in her life but has watched at least two dozen tennis matches would thoroughly enjoy Andre Agassi’s Open (2009) and would want to write about it?

Remembering Professor Sudhakar Marathe

 

For the past couple of days I have heard and read many wonderful memories people have shared about my teacher, Professor Sudhakar Marathe. He passed away this Thursday evening and hundreds of people, whose lives he has touched in deep ways, have been writing messages on various new age portals to connect with each other and express their loss.

To me he was the most observant and altruistic teacher I knew.  

The first time I was helped by Professor Marathe was when I was an anxious twenty-year-old scribbling away at a desk in a large hall in a strange city, attempting to write an impressive essay during the entrance exam for University of Hyderabad. Suddenly I saw one of the invigilators holding out his wrist watch to me. I looked up from my paper and he indicated that I should note the time. He repeated that action three times in the next hour and a half. I felt immensely grateful that an invigilator during an entrance exam noticed that I wasn’t wearing a wrist watch for an examination and wouldn’t be able to keep track of time.

That was the beginning of a long association through which I gained much. Not only did I find the affectionate guidance of an extremely generous teacher who selflessly gave his time and energy to his students to help them become good readers and writers but also a person I knew I could call and consult whenever I felt the need for wise counsel.

The picture below is of the books he had edited and/or translated in the first decade of this century and given to me during my visits to him after I moved on to a different city and a different educational institution.

He was also a great upcycler of every imaginable piece of paper. That bookmark placed on the cover of his translation of R R Borade’s Fall was made by him using a part of a used reference card and some sketch pens. He gave it to me some twenty years ago when he I went to his office to discuss my latest draft of a chapter of my M Phil dissertation and he got to know that it was my birthday that day.

Almost all his students who knocked on the door of his office knew that he will find a way to help, either by hearing the person out if he had the time or by setting up an appointment to meet later and give the issue his full attention if it wasn’t urgent.

I have been dealing with his slightly nasal drawl, “Come on in” going around in my head for the past few days, coupled with the regret that I did not call him up for years. I have been in touch with him through other new age ways of communication, including a newsletter he painstakingly composed and sent every Sunday to some of his friends, urging them to look around and learn from the natural world around us. I received the last one on 30^th of January, which was a heartening account of a rescue of a lake in Pune by a group of nature-lovers. I had read it late evening that Sunday and had planned to write to him to thank him Monday afternoon after my class because I felt an upsurge of positivity upon reading that extremely optimistic account of the success of perseverance towards an altruistic cause. My email remained unwritten, for I received news of his hospitalisation from Mrs. Marathe— a very warm-hearted and generous lady who welcomed any student who rang their doorbell most work day evenings for decades on end. I had truly believed that he would solider on through this obstacle too and promised myself that I will go to Pune to meet them during the next break I get from work. That was not to be.

In all of this, I have surprised myself by reacting like a child. I don’t care whether it was in a childish manner or a childlike manner—after all it was Professor Marathe who also led me to the realization that adults are being very judgmental when they use these terms pejoratively or otherwise. He was my first guide into the world of research and into childhood studies.

I began my journey as a teacher under his firm supervision and Mrs. Marathe’s gentle support and no one could have wished for a better apprenticeship. If I manage to find it in myself to give half as much as he gave to his students I would think I have been a good student to a great teacher.

Flashback of a Janmashtami in Mathura

 

My usual Monday morning tizzy came to a brief halt when I thought there was something out of sync. The girl at the door to pick up the laundry was particularly well-dressed for a work day morning. Then the house help remarked in passing that her teenage daughters are doing ‘vrat’ today. Suddenly it dawned upon me that it’s a holiday due to Janmashtami and that I can actually recalibrate my pace of work—no classes or work meetings. Amidst these thoughts, I suddenly felt that surge of joy one feels when one knows it’s a holiday. That feeling reminded me of the days of early youth when one could genuinely enjoy a sudden break to the week’s routine.

Close to two decades ago, as a young adult in a college hostel in Delhi, I sauntered down for lunch to the hostel mess one Janmashtami day. Spotting two of my friends tucking in the Janmashtami feast, I joined them and remarked on the special fare that day. I also added that I had heard it was an established practice in student hostels in Delhi to serve a feast on a day when most of the country is fasting to mark the birth of Krishna. None of us minded that we were feasting when many were fasting. After all we were young people living on mess fare.

The conversation suddenly became interesting when my friend remarked that it would be wonderful to be in Mathura on Janmashtami day. Being young, energetic, curious and mildly adventurous I suggested that we could attempt that. Within minutes we managed to convince each other that we should actually set out to find out what it would be like in Mathura that day. We bolted down the food on our plates and rushed to our rooms to check whether we had sufficient money to travel out of Delhi. This was the pre-ATM era in India. To our dismay, our combined resources was less than two hundred rupees but that would not stop us. We started knocking on the doors of our friends to borrow some money for our plan to work out. Most of them dismissed us as crazy creatures who are asking them to finance the risky venture of dashing down to a pilgrim town on the day when it’s likely to be hosting millions of people. Finally, a sister soul decided to lend us around three hundred rupees but politely refused our offer of turning it into a three women adventure.

And we set out for the New Delhi station, armed with the knowledge that most south bound trains are likely to stop at Mathura. All we needed to do was get tickets for one and we will be in Mathura by late afternoon. That was not to be. We managed to get tickets for a train called Janta Express, which took close to six hours to finally release us around dusk on the milling platform of Mathura station. Although it was chock-a-block with people looking for vehicles to go the main temples in Vrindaavan and Mathura, probably we stuck out in the crowd—two young women in khadi kurtas, cotton pants, and flat sandals with tiny knapsacks on our backs. If I were a tour guide or a tout or a tempo driver who wanted to make some good money without the hassle of haggling with the regulars to the temple town, I would definitely have picked that pair of young women who seemed to be calmly checking out the scene. It was not at all astonishing that a young autorickshaw driver made a beeline for us and told us that he could take us for darshan to the Baanke Behari temple and deposit us at the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple within two hours if we agreed to pay him Rs.200/- We definitely did not want to spend that princely sum on a ride into Vrindaavan from Mathura and got into a crowded open rickshaw that should seat seven people but already had nine people sitting on three seats. Along with the driver, we made a neat dozen dashing through the crowded streets.

Not for a second did we feel any apprehension or anxiety as women travellers. It wasn’t that those were safer times. However, I feel we were sure about two things—we had no expensive goods on our person or in our knapsacks and that no one would dare commit a crime in a pilgrim place on the most important day for the worship of the reigning deity of the place.

We were hurled through the town to reach the Baanke Behari temple in Vrindavaan while our driver-cum-tour operator told us the story of Krishna’s miraculous birth. I silently wondered why he thought travellers to Mathura on Janmashtami day would not know that tale. But it’s always fun to listen to a local burst with pride about their town and its history. I am yet to figure out how our guide managed to lead us to the temple, through the milling crowds and how we got out within half an hour of joining that ocean of human beings inside the huge hall of the temple. I have no memory of how we got back to Mathura and found ourselves outside the Krishna Janambhoomi temple. It's highly likely we rattled through the roads in another overcrowded autorickshaw.

It was utterly impossible to do anything but follow the crowds into the main hall and bow our heads in the general direction where the idol was placed in the temple. I am not sure whether I managed to get a glimpse of the idol but the devotion in the hall was palpable. After exiting the temple, we followed the crowds to the Dwarkadhish temple, to watch the enactment of the birth of Krishna being performed in the large inner courtyard of the temple. The midnight hour when the baby Krishna was declared to be have been born was the high point of the trip for me. Amidst the celebratory cries and appeals by the management committee to not crowd the stage to pay respects to the new-born infant god, I sat spellbound. I was trying to comprehend this experience of being a witness to guileless bhakti—a moment when the performance is forgotten by thousands of people and they unite in a mass suspension of disbelief. While I was wrapping my head around this magical experience, my friend whispered that we should be heading out towards the railway station before the thousands of pilgrims around decide to head in that direction.

Stepping out of that zone into the biggest annual fair of the temple town reminded me that we hadn’t had a bite since we gobbled down the Janmashtami feast in our hostel’s mess. We walked among the sparsely populated shops, had thick creamy milk and the famous Mathura ka peda for dinner and took a tonga through the dimly lit lanes to the railway station. We managed to buy sleeping berths for a train to Delhi which was scheduled to arrive at Mathura station around 3.30 AM. Being among the early ones reaching the station that night, we managed to plonk ourselves on one of two unoccupied benches to wait for our train. While my friend nodded beside me, I held on to a book and watched the station master working really hard to ensure that there were no squatters on the platform that night. I quietly wondered why we were allowed undisturbed access to that bench.

A couple of years after that trip my friend got married and left the country. The global uncertainty of 2020 brought her back into my life. When I reminded her of that Janmashtami trip on Janmashtami day of 2020, she remarked that the trip and those times now seem like they were from a different janam. This morning I was reminded of her remark and wondered whether it was possible to travel back in time by jotting down a memory of an impulsive trip.      

To leave or not to leave...

I saw Ijazzat (1987) once again! I resisted it for years, despite strong recommendations from many people, and finally saw it for the first time around three decades after it was made. Then I saw it two times in three years. It wasn’t fascination that led me to a second viewing. It was befuddlement.

I must have resisted the movie because of its name. A movie called ‘Permission’ wouldn’t really be my choice for leisure activity. Otherwise, a movie with Naseeruddin Shah and Rekha directed by Gulzar would have been an easy pick, especially after discovering that some of my favourite songs are part of that movie.

After watching the movie twice, I can confidently declare that I intensely dislike this movie.

I do acknowledge that there are many reasons to like it. And here a few: excellent songs, outstanding acting by almost all the actors, aesthetically appealing sets, some lovely handloom saris worn with élan by the beautiful Rekha, a camera that captured the jitteriness of the characters, such care for detail in the screenplay and direction that there was a moment when I could smell the musty odour of a moist towel of an eternal wanderer. Very visceral cinema. Wholesome too, in its way.

Why, then, do I dislike it?

I believe it’s because I feel betrayed. In its presentation of three complicated people, it seems to promise that it will dwell into the existential issues of each of them. The commitment to good cinema, seen in almost every shot, raises the expectations of the viewer. However, as the movie progresses the viewer understands that the narrative has only one protagonist – the man, for it’s his existential anxiety that seems to resonate with the auteur. 

This is good cinema perpetuating the age-old neglect of women’s desires that Hindi cinema has been propounding from the beginnings of time.

The first time I saw it, I thought that Sudha touching Mahender’s feet as a leave-taking gesture made me see red. But then, if I had totally switched off at that disconcerting gesture by Sudha I wouldn’t have registered anything after that shot. However, I had noticed that it was ten minutes to seven on the station clock when the relieved husband gently escorts his wife out. I also remember thinking that this hero will have to stand there frozen for the next forty minutes for the train scheduled for seven thirty to jolt him out of that state.

Of course, I felt bad for the poor chap—losing chance after chance to find emotional stability. Moreover, I had also noted that Gulzar had invoked Devdas, Hindi cinema’s favourite lover, when the hero calls himself Devdas and wants ‘Paro’ to let him into the bolted waiting room after stepping out to find some food. This wasn’t a nonchalant reference to the most popular Hindi cinema trope of unfulfilled desire. It was Gulzar’s experiment with the Devdas trope, albeit a bungled one. For the one who left a “stamp” on the lover – an echo of the original Devdas’s mark of ownership of Paro – was a woman in this movie. It was an awkward transferring of the affect memories of one woman invokes in Mahender when he meets the other woman of the two significant women in his life.

 Probably among the most interesting characters in Hindi cinema, Maya was a rare depiction of a free-spirited woman who lives by her own rules without intentionally meaning to hurt or harm anyone around her. Why ruin such a courageous portrayal by calling her Maya – an illusion – is quite incomprehensible! Does the name indicate that the truly free woman is an illusion? And why was the composed and mature woman called Sudha—invoking the calming effect of moonlight on fraught nerves? Doesn’t the naming of the two women reveal the ways in which they are to facilitate the man?

Mahender man can simply take his tangled web of desire to his wife for her to sort through while he continues to remain a connoisseur of artistic illusions. And when the wife strongly indicates that she will not participate in the mess that he’s made of his love life, he gets a heart attack! Such self-indulgence and sense of entitlement! Leaving an open and messy suitcase in a railway waiting room is an apt metaphor for the night long conversation the two of them have. At the end of it all, he doesn’t get closure. However, he is seemingly not even seeking closure. He’s a will ‘o’ the wisp, a wanderer—he doesn’t live in contained ways for him to feel the need for closure to get on with his life. On the other hand, both the women who were his emotional mainstays are shown to be explicitly asking his permission to leave his life. The artist does it through the most popular song of the movie and the wife does it with an age-old convention— touching the feet of an elder, seeking blessing, before parting. So yes, that ghastly gesture is a very significant reason for my dislike of the movie. However, that is not the only reason.

On watching it the second time, I gained more clarity on why I disliked it so intensely. The narrative’s perspective is such that while there is an empathetic gaze towards the injustices life metes out to all the three main characters, we are expected to shed a tear or two for the lone guy stranded on the platform of an isolated railway platform. We are to stand next to Mahender while he watches a proud gentleman gently take away his best chance at feeling anchored in life. We are to feel his pain at this fresh blow in life. Where there was such empathy for the man’s loss of love and emotional stability in this movie, there was very little empathy for the losses of the two women.

That accusation might seem a tad unfair to some connoisseurs of Hindi cinema because it is actually one of those rare movies in Hindi cinema that fleetingly presents, through two songs, the two women as desiring subjects instead of merely remaining objects of desire. However, I felt that this attempt was half-hearted at best, for these women’s desires were overlooked or thwarted throughout the narrative. Maya dies a violent death within the narrative and throughout the narrative Sudha continues to be the wife who often morphs into the motherly facilitator, suppressing her needs. Additionally, she shows every sign of not getting closure in her relationship with Mahender until he explicitly gives her permission to leave him and be happy in the life she had built for herself.

Sudha had so easily slid back into caring for Mahender within minutes of his walking into that railway waiting room that it was difficult to process that there was a fissure in that relationship. Mahender having to borrow her suitcase keys to open his suitcase marks the beginning of their reliving of coupledom. Sudha is at her best as the efficient homemaker who knows enough to make room for the man in her life to play the adult every now and then. The man, too, does full justice to these opportunities— cycling down in the rain to fetch food, gamely accepting the appreciative laughter at the wasted effort and cleaning up a minor wound after displaying some charmingly possessive anger at the woman’s clumsiness.

If both of them are capable of displaying such adult maturity in their relationship why does each of them seemingly need the man’s permission for the woman to move out of his life? Absurdly enough, she seeks permission to leave his life during a chance meeting a few years after marrying someone else. Does that mean she wasn’t truly emotionally connected with her current husband until she receives due permission from the previous one to desire another man? I would say then that the poor chap deserves to be pitied and not envied by our hero.

This rendering of the man as the one who wields power to permit women to love him or leave him, displayed through the title, the beloved song and the climax, reiterates Hindi cinema’s propensity to depict women as caged beings. And as a double whammy in this movie, both the women are made to go through the full cycle of emotions for desiring subjects – expression of their desire through beautiful songs, feeling desired, and finally feeling that they are no longer desired by the man in their life. To add insult to injury, they also have to seek his permission to stop loving him. But the audience’s gaze is firmly focused, through that of the auteur, to empathise with the man’s losses!

I truly don’t see how women viewers of the movie could have found this acceptable.

Some thoughts on Devdas

While doing the dishes one afternoon during the severe lockdown this summer, a song in a language I barely know floated into my thoughts. It starts with a sweet young male voice telling a woman that he sees her: "Ami chini go chini..." This song, actually this movie is the only Bengali one I can claim to have seen rather thoroughly. It was on the course list of a translation studies course I had done. That was more than two decades ago. But the song stayed in my head, not just as a lovely tune but as a beautiful song. Here's a young man telling his benefactor's wife something like, "Here's looking at you kid." Yes, from Casablanca -- that poignant tale of star-crossed lovers. In a Keatsian way the love is within reach but forbidden. No wonder generations of young Indians have loved Keats's poems. We, whose lives are controlled by cultural rules, feel the pain of consciously giving up love. Although it feels like it is just within reach, we also always already know it never was. We do, in some way, understand why such painful decisions are taken. In Charulata it is societal restrictions, in Casablanca it is ideological choices. What was it in Devdas or Pyaasa? In Kagaz ke Phool, limiting oneself to a very straightforward interpretation, it was society that was keeping the auteur and his muse from becoming lovers. And we can't overlook the fact that the fictional film they were making was an adaptation of Devdas. But no, really, coming back to the one that inspired all these other tales of unfulfilled love: I have often wondered why couldn't Devdas rise to the occasion. Yes, I will let that phrase stay there. The italicised one, I mean. Unintended though the obvious pun was, what's the point of reading so much Freud if I edit that phrase?
As a nation, we have loved and celebrated Devdas for over a century now. During the course of some research on it, one of my students found out and informed me that the book did reasonably well as soon as it came out. We know that there are any number of movies made based on that book. There are three directly adapted, with the same title, in Hindi. The latest witha slightly altered and new age title, Dev D, seriously challenges the idea of the love being star crossed and suggests it is something else that prevents the union. Riveting though that one was, my personal favourite remains the one with Dilip Kumar. I saw bits and pieces of a very bad print of the first one with K L Saigal and that must have ruined the experience for me. And I also suffered through the gala that Sanjay Leela Bhansali called Devdas. My suffering was not out of empathy or identification. It was due to the loudness of it all. The movie is just titled Red in my head. He does seem to do colours, not stories! One colour per movie. This one was red. There was a lot of beige and off-white too but the dashes of red remain in the mind's eye. Probably there is something to be said for that sort of film-making too. Not my preference for cinema, though.
Also, Shahrukh Khan as Devdas! The one who has mastered the act of a quintessential go-getter cast as a helplessly pining lover! What were they thinking! Shahrukh Khan was the best at being Amar in Dil Se. And Amar is as far removed from Devdas as is possible. Amar's a guy who plunges into the unknown, chasing an engima, tries to reason himself into living by rules but is inevitably drawn into the vortex of his desire to finally get consumed by it. Let's not overlook the name-- Amar: Immortal. Immortalised by his love. That was a reworking of the Romeo-Juliet story. Not at all a story of a man who will pine but will not face up to his desires.
I have also, to clarify my thoughts around this national obsession, had any number of discussions about Devdas with many people -- friends, family, colleagues and researchers. I supervised a graduate level dissertation taken up by a young person who seemed committed to crack that enigma-- the pining lover who had willingly given up the chance for union. That young researcher conducted a committed exploration and turned in a rather well-written dissertation. My role in that was to push the envelope-- in terms of thoughts, chasing existing research and in meeting fixed timelines for writing. I am hoping that the said researcher will turn it into a good academic paper and send it to a decent journal at some point. So, I will not go into the thesis arrived upon through that exploration and offer a few of my thoughts over this love our culture exudes for an unfulfilled love. Specifically that. Not unrequited love. That is a totally different bitter-sweet emotion endlessly explored through literature and art. But Devdas is not that.

It is a deeply internalised external, probably cultural, element that disallows the person from accepting their desire. And truly worthy of serious academic engagement, which I do hope I will take up some time in the near future. For now, a small exploration of that beautiful song and here it is: 

Now, while doing that course on translation studies, with a professor who had a deep engagement with Bengali literature and culture, I learned that this movie is based on a Tagore novella titled "Noshtoneer" and very recently I also found out that the lyrics of the song are actually a poem Tagore wrote for Victoria Ocampo.

Despite my limitedness in comprehension of Bengali, I can hear that Tagore is pointing out that the consciousness of his attraction should not just be sublimated but also censored. He gives very rational reasons for this act of censorship -- that he belongs to a different land (thereby a different culture) and that he's a guest (who he seems to feel should not 'betray' the trust his host has placed on him by desiring a woman from the host's land) and that, added to all this, would be the undeniable fact that he's only temporarily there in that place and in her life. To me all these reasons and the very act of rationalising is very annoying. Simply because it's really not talking about the emotion as something that needs to be felt, reflected upon and made actionable by two adult individuals. It's talking about a man trying to tell himself, in a language that was probably almost completely incomprehensible to his muse, that he forbids himself this woman. How about letting her into the equation? That would really mean that he's treating her like an adult who can take a decision for them to act upon. But I'd say it was also a bit of a personal clash between the Indian man and the Universal man out there. And anyway, it really was written at least a hundred years ago. So, one can say it emerged from a context and a cultural milieu. 

The cinematic adaptation, though, of this Tagore poem, was done in the second half of the 20th century. A decade and a half after India became an independent democratic nation with universal franchise, which means that every adult man or woman, at that time agreed upon to be 21 years or older, could exercise their right to vote to choose who represents them in the decision-making body of the nation -- the legislature. And here's a beautiful movie, set half a century in the past, in which a beautiful young woman who is indicating, in unambiguous ways, that she appreciates the fact that he "sees" her is being serenaded with a song of rejection! He sings a song where he tells her that although he sees her, he's must also reiterate that he's a guest, she's exotically beyond his reach and seems to imply that he cannot betray the trust another man placed on him by giving him free access to his zenana. Somehow that reminded me of the anger that surged through me when my literature teacher in one of the earliest classes of my first year as an undergraduate student passionately quoted from Dr Faustus to talk about Helen of Troy's beauty. The quote goes: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ and burnt the topless towers of Ilium/ Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss". Oh well, yes, the end of that quote is the absolute opposite of the intent of the song and also the climax of the movie. But to cut to the chase, the two instances do reiterate the notion that the beauty of a woman can start a war between men. And that is supposed to be a compliment to women! It can only be a compliment if all concerned accept the underlying objectification as a 'given' in a culture. Well, ancient Greece did, if we were to base our understanding of its ways on its representations in literature. Renaissance Europe sure seems to have. Looks like even 20th century India did -- given how well-received the song and Ray's movie was. 

I was spellbound by the beauty of the movie when I saw it for the first and only time, yet, in the late 1990s. I don't think I blinked even once through the entire movie. It was not just the worry that I might miss something and, therefore, fail to do justice to the assignment set on the movie in pre-YouTube days when students solely relied on the one screening done in the class. It was simply that the movie was breathtakingly beautiful. It led you through corridors and stairways into the cloistered lives of the upper class women in late 19th century women. It showed that clad in those beautiful Bengal cottons and lacy Westernised blouses, surrounded by late Victorian furniture and modern toys, like Charulata's binoculars, these women were suffocating. They were possessions of the zamindar and were traditionally expected to act out their deemed roles in his household. They were either the fairly young wife or older dependent relatives, at least I remember only these two categories in this movie. While the zamindar was navigating his way through a changing world, the women spent their entire lives in households shackled by traditions. Left to their own devices in the zenana, with not much productive work to occupy their time, they seemed like extremely well-facilitated people. The "bahu-thakurani" definitely did seem to be so. We do tend to forget that the song ended with her objecting to that moniker from Amal with a "huth". No, I really don't remember that from my only viewing of that film. I saw the song again, on YouTube, this summer when it floated into my head at my kitchen sink. Her seemingly playful objection holds her concealed disappointment at Amal's placement of her as the lady of the household while he's a lowly passerby. I don't need to reiterate what Charulata expected from a young man who's singing "I see you" about her. But we must give it to Tagore that he named the guy Amal, which means "Expectation" -- I learned that through a quick Google search. And he deliberately falls short of her expectation. There goes another Devdas, for all of us to shed quiet tears about and love. What is it about this sort of self-effacement that tugs at out heartstrings? Is it that we recognise the choosing of duty over desire as an appreciable act? A willful sacrifice of pleasure at the altar of civilisation. Isn't that how civilisations are built? By sacrificing pleasure and channeling all the pent up energies into constructive work. Sounds wonderful. If only we can forget Charulata's heart-rending cry, her palpable fear when she hears the gari's sounds and her correcting her nervous welcome into a slightly flirtatious one to invite her husband back into her quarters!

Delhi 2020: A Reflection on Violence and Vulnerability

Delhi is burning or at least large parts of the metropolis were throughout this week. The entire country knows that. It was in the newspapers, on online news portals, on social media and most definitely on an infinite loop on TV news. I try to stay away from sources that give news updates by the minute. What I see and get to know is more than enough to bear. That photograph of a young man in a red sweater striding down a barricaded road, pointing a pistol at someone, completely oblivious of the presence of a policeman close to him, is going to haunt me for a while. It reminded me of a picture of a young man in a blue windcheater with a gun at VT station more than a decade ago. The horrifying aspect of both those pictures was the ease with which arms invaded the frame of a routine day. They suggested that there is no way one can absolutely avoid straying into a dangerously violent incident. I admit that I try to emulate the proverbial ostrich, yet, I live in Delhi, in 2020 and I am intensely affected by the sudden volcanic eruption of violence in many pockets of the metropolis.

Through two decades of active engagement with Delhi, I have arrived upon the belief that regular letting out of violent emotions in small bursts– through callous stereotyping, cuss words, everyday misogynistic acts, and regular road rage – ensures that the quotient of latent violence remains low in this city. Violence is framed by the quotidian out here, making it one of the various aspects of its unique culture. There are some wonderful aspects too that make Delhi’s culture unique. Some of those are vivaciousness, generosity in actions, emotional reactions to practical acts, confident pragmatism and a true appreciation of leisure. It is almost as if Delhiwallahs are singing along with that young person who’s energetically advising, “Duniya mein aayein hai to love kar le, thoda sa jee le, thoda mar le”, probably conflating “love” in that line with “live”. A full blooded plunging into living life, the way Delhiwallahs know best would necessarily involve navigating through violence and making peace every day. When violent thoughts and emotions get dissipated every single day, there is no scope for bottling it up for it to explode.

Living in Delhi never seemed like living on a volcanic mountain.

I know that I live on shifting tectonic plates. Every time I ‘imagine’ I felt an earthquake, I quickly get to know within hours that the plates did shift and that there was an earthquake in Afghanistan or Nepal or at some other place thousands of miles away. Mostly this information reaches me through calls from family and friends outside Delhi, enquiring about my safety. These calls also tell me that when these people hear some unusually threatening news about Delhi, they think of me. And to think that I didn’t get a single call regarding my safety in the past week! A series of volcanic eruptions of violence and, aside from my parents, not one person I know and care for wants to know whether I stayed out of the scalding lava! Either I have been completely forgotten by all who care for me or they don’t think that this large scale violence was ever a threat to me. Being confident that it is not the former, based on other kinds of evidence, I am inferring that it is the latter – they don’t think I am in danger. That is a rather disturbing thought! How can anyone think that a person who lives and works in Delhi is not at risk when there is a riot situation? Did we not make frantic calls to friends and family during the Mumbai terror attacks in 2009? Did we not queue up outside STD phone booths to get across to friends and family in Bombay in 1993? Did we not worry, across the country, about the lives of even absolute strangers in 1984? Didn’t we shudder in horror at the thought of all those people stranded outside the safety of their homes during all these violent disturbances? How, then, is this different? Why are people not panicking about their family and friends in Delhi?

People who care for me would think that I am sure to be safe when they absolutely know that I am not part of the demographic which will be affected by the violence. Although they live outside Delhi and their palmtops are buzzing with news and images of a burning Delhi, they are quite sure that I am not a target of this violence. Clearly, people outside Delhi understand that there are specific targets for this violence; a random denizen of Delhi is not a target. None of my Delhi friends have shared with me that they are getting frantic phone calls asking them to stay safe. Middle class India seems to be quite clear about the target of this violence. It is not a middle class person – man or woman – who also has a Hindu name. It is not people who are protesting against a bill – those protests have been going on for weeks now and it’s been business as usual in Delhi. A look at the names of the people who died in the violence reveals that one out of three dead has a Muslim name. Middle class Hindus located outside Delhi revealed through their nonchalance that they knew the targeted demographic of this violence on the very first day it erupted. It took three days of observation, reflection and theorization for intellectuals and activists in Delhi to reach a realization that the rest of the country already, almost instinctively, understood.

We, Delhiwallahs, didn’t realize something the rest of the country seemed to have known all along. We are confused. We don’t understand large scale violence because we navigate through small provocations of violence each day, cobble together some sort of peace and go through the day. We do, sometimes, hold protests at India Gate or Jantar Mantar. Some of these protests lead to volatile situations that are swiftly handled by the machinery of the state. We see that Shaheen Bagh was different from most other Delhi protests. The protesters are right there in the middle of the city, for us to notice. We just skirted around, if we were not drawn to join them. We have witnessed many instances of communal clashes and have handled the trauma and destruction they cause. But we have never before seen a chain reaction of localized volcanic violence co-existing with large chunks of the metropolis living through a regular Delhi day, with its minor outbursts of completely manageable miniscule violence. We don’t know how to make sense of this cognitive dissonance. It leaves us helpless at an emotional and intellectual level. We summon our pragmatism, confidence and generosity to see ourselves through this incomprehensible situation because we cannot let Delhi burn. We are doing our best to douse the fires but to piece back some sense of normalcy we also need to ask ourselves why Delhi is burning and courageously face the answers to that question.

The Personal in Public

I have come back to this space after a very long time. It has been left alone so long that I don't know whether it has stayed a public space anymore. That is the most important reason for my coming back to this space -- to express myself and to clarify my thoughts on the personal in public. It provides me space to type out my confusions on communicating personal anxieties in public spaces and it is a space which blurs the public and the personal in its very conception.
I remember starting this blog when I was utterly amused at watching someone talk animatedly on a mobile phone which was hidden from sight. The first post in this blog records my thoughts and impressions of that experience. It looked like this person was inhabiting a completely different space while we were actually sharing a rather cramped physical space -- a lift in an old government building!
I was amazed at the ease with which the public space was being personalised by this co-rider in the elevator. There was no thought given to the reactions of the neighbours, for the neighbours did not really exist. I think the last decade has made that mode of communication so pervasive that the most well-adjusted person blanks out her surroundings, invisibilises her immediate neighbours and inhabits mind spaces which are miles away from the physical space she is occupying. She doesn't have to worry about hurting her neighbors. For her neighbors don't exist. Not really. Not for her to connect with that moment.
In my childhood, one of the crucial tasks I had to learn in 'civilising' myslef into society was to understand that my words and actions can cause emotional hurt just as much as they cause physical ones. Part two of that lesson made me aware of the spaces in which liberty to hurt can be taken and the extent to which that liberty can be taken. You can sometimes say or do things which may cause some form of hurt to immediate family but you should stop yourself from doing that to people outside your family; of course, family can also mean friends who become family. If you do, it is called a tantrum. And tantrums are bad. I suspect this lesson is not part of upbringing anymore; especially because even adults have forgotten it.
Nowadays, even newspapers regularly carry features in which personal hurt is expressed in public spaces. Any why should they not? After all, there are any number of blogs which do that and are among the most popular ones in cyberspace. Also, reality television probably has the maximum viewership in the world governed by TRP ratings. However, when I had begun reading newspapers, in high school, those personal features reminded me of my grandfather. I imagined  V. Gangadhar as a contemporary of my grandfather. As it turns out R V Smith actually is! They can write rambling reminisces with mild doses of humour and the reader will indulge them just as all good-mannered children listen to a story Grandfather is repeating the thirtieth time. Feature articles were light reading, along with film and food reviews. They were spaces for the reader and the newspaper to relax.
Having said that, there is a serious danger of a feature article, even a film review, getting spoilt when the personal comes in. I do not mean the destruction caused by prejudices, I mean the destruction caused by grief. Case in point is the latest by my favourite film critic, Baradwaj Rangan. Do compare this one with that one Quite often, I reserve Rangan's article for the last on Sunday mornings, the best for the end. I like his critical engagement with cinema, his style peppered with mild humour and the ease with which he displays innocuous disapproval. The former of the two articles referred above had none of those. It thoroughly alienated all readers who are not extremely well-versed with Tamil cinema and its use of Carnatic music. If I knew the man, I would have called him to say -- Listen, it is alright to mourn.  With people whom you trust. Even when you are mourning the death of a public figure do you trust the public to mourn with you? For, the first recollection the article brought up was a call during rush hour in Bombay from someone very dear to me saying in an uncharacteristically flat and grim tone, "Listen, something has happened. It seems Michael Jackson died last night." Immediately I knew the loss he experienced with that death. It was the loss of the person who showed the capacity of the human body to create beauty. It was the loss of the man who drowned the noises in our head with his music when we were growing up. This person's friends and family who understood his loss called him to pay condolences till late evening that day. There was some form of closure to that loss, while mourning with near and dear ones. Obituaries are feature articles which mark the public end of an era; they hardly provide closure to an emotional loss to the writer of the obituary. Unless there is some distance already traversed in the lessening of emotional investment in the relationship.
One of the best contemporary writers of features seem to have blurred the difference between personal grief and public marking of the end of an era, in one of the best mainstream newspapers today. This should indicate that modes of communication are changing. The personal can be brought into the public and it is being brought for the public's notice. Spaces like this -- blogs -- started this and the trend is making inroads into newspapers of record. We witness displays of this trend in academia nowadays. In conversations -- personal, semi-official or official -- we are smoothly blurring the distinction between personal hurt and public grievance. And we are hurting and getting hurt in the process. Some recent events at work let to intense, emotionally charged exchanges over email, phone calls and a public meeting of a collective of thinking individuals. One of the emails sent to a large group at work started with a brilliant use of the first paragraph of Sudhir Kakar's autobiography. I interpreted it as the attempt to tread the razor's edge between denial and drowning in loss. Kakar had no choice but to work towards learning to walk on that razor's edge. His dead father will not come back. There is no alternative. He has to show the "courage of helplessness".
We were surely not at a funeral in our workspace. Our loss is not a permanent one. It is an instance of loss of perspectives on who we thought we are and who we think we should be. If it is not permanent it can be resolved. Probably through good communication. We might have to adapt the new ways of communication, the ones in which the personal and public get interspersed. That does not mean we cannot learn to do it without hurting ourselves. After all, we know as teachers that we are perpetual students too. If we have to lean this new trick, I am sure we can. At least, I mean to start. And that is why I am back in this space which blurs the personal and the public.

Do Urban Young Women need Empowerment?

I have been thinking of women empowerment quite a bit lately. In a steering away from my usual academia oriented thoughts on this issue, of late, I have been wondering about issues of theory and praxis in gender studies. Random conversations with people from various segments of society have made me wonder about the penetration of theories of empowerment into the lives of women.

A few minutes before I sat down to write this, my barely literate domestic help was sharing her troubles with me. She is not at all an effusive person. On the contrary, her silent but efficient presence for about three hours every day in my house reminds me of the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves. I wonder if any of my readers are aware of this story for children but it has stayed with me through the vagaries of time, especially due to its dubious message. I never could figure out why those elves, under cover of darkness, did the thankless work of creating those lovely shoes that made the shoemaker a reasonably rich man.  I now know why my elf is here rather than in her village about which she gets so nostalgic on those rare communicative days.  She has had to migrate, lose the familiar environs of her village, forego the support structure of the village community, turn into a semi-skilled worker from an artisan and regularly worry about her children’s future in this big bad city, to ensure that her husband breaks out of the habit of gambling. She has all her losses tucked in her armoury to throw at the husband each time he shows signs of steering towards gambling. And she puts them to good use. Recently, she used all of these and, for good measure, added the threat of a stick. This woman is totally entrenched in patriarchy but has learnt to negotiate her space within it.  My instincts, training, and experience have taught me to fight patriarchy and to be wary of women who try to work from within the patriarchal structure but I have new admiration for this woman, especially when I compare her with the young girls I meet in this huge metropolis.

Recently, while travelling in one of those wonderful air-conditioned DTDC buses, I saw a young man sitting on a seat reserved for women while a girl stood, struggling with a huge bag, clutching the too-high handle. I walked up to him and pointed out that the seat was reserved for women. He vacated it without a murmur. As it turned out, the passenger sitting next to him debarked at the next stop and the girl sat on that seat. Striking a conversation with her, I asked her why she had not demanded her right for the seat. There was a strange and poignant vulnerability in her, “what could I do, he was sitting there?” I didn’t know if I should empathise with her vulnerability or get angry with her. Here was a young girl, obviously a college student in this metropolis, who feels she cannot demand a right for which hundreds of her predecessors fought for years. The idea that the reserved seat was a safe and comfortable place within a crowded public space did not percolate down to this urban young woman while her need to come across as an amiable, independent and physically strong young person was overwhelmingly there within her.  What’s more, she was not thinking of her sisters who might need this space and of doing her duty towards them by reiterating women’s right to a reserved seat.

What’s with young people nowadays?

This question has been haunting me quite a bit of late. Regular interaction with the young adults I teach begs this question rather often. One such instance was a debate competition that I judged with two other colleagues. The organizers of the youth fest, in their wisdom, thought the topic they announced in advance should generate some excitement. The topic for the day’s debate was: “This House believes that live-in relationships are a threat to Indian Society”.

I will focus only on the contents of the debate that day and ignore my analysis of the form and structure of the presentations.

One would have thought the team arguing against the motion would win hands down, especially due to the demographic representation of the house; it was overflowing with urban young people in their late teens.  The motion was not put to vote but the arguments for and against the motion indicated the direction the wind took that day. 26 out of the 27 young people who spoke that day were envisioning marriage to be the ultimate goal for each romantic relationship.  The ones speaking for the motion were probably using this premise to build an argument, I thought, but why would the ones speaking against the motion shy away from alternatives to marriage, I wondered. The 14 participants who spoke against the motion were unanimous in deeming a live-in to be a trial run for a marriage.

Apart from the glaring lack of research on the institution of marriage, on the definition of the term and on the various forms of marriage, there was not a thought spared to relationships among the LGBTI people. Not one of the participants critiqued the mores of patriarchal, heterosexual marriages. No one worried about the situation of women enduring abusive marriages while there was a great deal of worry over girls getting “dumped” by guys in live-in relationships that go bad. And the best one of them all, the participants as well as the interjectors from the audience kept asking, “What will happen if the girl gets pregnant?” I really wanted to yell, “Go figure that out” but being one of the judges there I had to maintain a grave demeanour.

I mean, what is up with these young people?

Are these their real thoughts? Are they that dumb? Or is this their idea of politically correct thought that should be presented from official platforms such as the lectern? Apart from the maddening lack of research, why is there such resistance to new avenues of thought? Is this urban complacency speaking? Have they fallen hook, line and sinker for the consumerist propaganda of Hollywood rom-coms and Bollywood cinema that celebrate the big, fat, expensive wedding as the ultimate dream of every individual?

I got some of my answers that day, in the form of one of the participants. The 27^th participant, the one exception who acted as a foil to foreground the lack of depth in the thinking of this young crowd. She had fire in her belly. This agrarian metaphor fits her perfectly. She could barely speak English, was far from an advertisement for MNC brand names in her attire, did not flaunt a chic hair-style, and hardly had any make-up on. This girl kept trying to divert her peers’ attention towards alternatives to marriage, to the oppression within marriages, was asserting the need to look beyond marriages. Here was a girl who battled with the very real threat of being pushed into a patriarchal marriage and was building her ammunition against it. And on the other side were all those urban young kids who think that they are way beyond the machinations of patriarchy. They believe they need not worry about reaching their dream destination of the grand consumerist wedding to the one they love or will learn to love, a la the Bharjitya movies, however, they sure are worried about unwanted pregnancies and getting ‘dumped’.

Is it time courses on gender studies were rethought? Should we teach them Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone? Would it help them? Or should we figure out new ways of empowering them to face the crises in their 21^st century urban lives?