Woman’s Face Smashed With Beer Bottle at Posh Market

March 12, 2013 1 Comment

That’s India’s capital city for you. Or, let’s be honest, that’s India for you.

Here’s the news:

KhanMktAttack

Went out with her husband and EIGHT other relatives, and still had five ‘youths’ smash a beer bottle into her face and then successfully run away. Why? Because she protested against their ‘lewd’ verbal assault of her. Had I been the woman, I’d have turned around and smashed the faces of every craven bitch who sit back and watch this sort of thing, then congratulate each other on having the ‘civility’ to stay out of it.

As I told my local friends via Facebook, you’d better protest if you ever see me being harassed, people. Or pray that the vultures get me completely. Because if I survive the assault, I am going to come after you, come after you bleeding and studded with shattered glass and iron rods.

And it won’t be pretty.

Take the easier route. Stand up to bullies. Stand up for each other. Stand up for your own bloody safety.

 

Filed under Culture, Divided India, Politics, power violence, Riminess, Spaces Have Tales Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Hello, Tigress

March 11, 2013 3 Comments

As you may have heard, Bengali women are occasionally referred to as tigresses. This may be because of our relative proximity to the Royal Bengal big-cats desperately clinging to existence in the Sunderbans, but I suspect it is rather more because of our famed temper and tongue. Bengalis may be patriarchal to their driest bones, but their women are a far cry from the standard-issue third-world stereotype — veiled, quiet and submissive.

Ka-ching!

So, last Saturday, out in the scorching sun visiting my tailor,  my foot caught a wooden stool left on the footpath by street vendors. I stumbled magnificently. Upbringing kicked in at the same time as pain, however, and I fulsomely apologised to the vendor for having hurt my foot on his carelessly-strewn property.

The vendor took the apology a little too literally. He and his five nearest neighbours promptly surrounded me, and began ripping me to pieces, asking me to shut my mouth and watch where I went. Opinions about fancy airheads who thought they owned the world were floated, and two male customers informed the vendors that they were too lenient with such uppity females.

This, as you can imagine, left me with only one course of sensible action. I picked up the stool, walked till I came to a gap between vendors, and smashed it on the ground. It broke into four unequal pieces. Then I sauntered calmly down the length of the footpath, to a flatteringly astonished silence.

What can I say, I have a temper. Everything you’ve heard about Bengali tigresses are occasionally true.

Filed under Anecdata, Obligingly Flippant, power violence, Riminess, Spaces Have Tales Tagged with , , , , ,

The Perils of Biology

February 26, 2013 1 Comment

Friend to me: Biology is ruining my marriage.
I to f: Whut?
F, distinctly: Biology. Is ruining. My marriage.
I, with a touch of asperity: By ‘whut’ I mean, ‘I’m amazed. Please explain’.
F, with a deep sigh: I’m stronger. I have a far higher pain threshold. I’m laid-back, easily adaptible and take orders better. On top of that, I’d *love* to do it — I wouldn’t be scared or anything, I’d revel in it!
I, sternly: Darling. To repeat myself, ‘whut?’.
F, impatiently: *I* should be the one having our babies. Not her, poor thing. And I’m not letting her do it, either, not with such nervousness  But had it been me being preggers… Rims, I tell you, we’d be doing it like a shot!
I, gently: But sweetheart, you’re a man.
F: I know! I *said* biology was messing up my marriage, didn’t I?

Filed under Anecdata, Obligingly Flippant Tagged with , , , ,

Women, Indian Television and Idiot Writers

February 20, 2013 7 Comments

Over the last few years my parents have become rather fond of pathetically scripted dramas on the telly. As a consequence, I now have to listen to the louder dialogues every evening from the next room. I am, therefore, well equipped to make cruel fun of them — they’re sitting ducks, really, entirely wrapped up in their own consuming vapidity. But I shall desist. Not because my heart’s pure gold and I respect the creative freedomof commercial art, but because these serials have frankly begun to alarm me.

As a favourite author of mine said, in Bengal the women may be aw-bawla, but never aw-bow-la (weak but never silent). Our culture is deeply patriarchal, but expectation of female behaviour does not follow the norms of, say, middle-class United States in the 1950s (or frankly, even now). Bengali women, generally, are strident, assertive, and decidedly unafraid of confrontation. The national stereotype is that they make wonderful lovers but very poor wives — they’re (relatively) uninhibited and adventurous, but their meekness quotient is in the negative.

One would expect that such a culture, or at least a culture perceived as such, would reflect these beliefs in its chart-topping television shows. Apparently not.

Who are our prime-time TRP stealers? They are, in theory, strong — even eponymous — female characters from women-centric shows. And yet, and yet, these  ‘strong’ characters are ones that embrace servile or secret marriages, abusive families-in-law, have scream-fights only with other women usually about a man, compulsively follow religious portents and rituals, deliver incredibly regressive speeches about gender roles and duties, and cry rivers in every. damn. episode.

Look. If you want to pull a con on the idea of strong women so you can have a perfectly satisfied yet thoroughly under your thumb woman at home, you won’t hear me objecting. I mean, popular media does it anyway, and if people are sheeply enough to take their cues from carefully orchestrated hegemonic cultural production, well, there’s very little I can do to heroically dismantle it. However, I’d plead you to show some discretion while you go about your evil nefarious plans. Please, abandon the trash currently in your service. Employ me instead. Allow me the privilege of being a gender-enemy (and if you like, a class-enemy too). Show me the colour of money, and I’ll do SO MUCH of a better job that these obvious, blatant idiots.

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Divided India, Institutions, Obligingly Flippant, power violence, Riminess Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

A Memo to Your Academic Husband

February 16, 2013 3 Comments

You think you want an intellectual wife, who can discuss your work with you. But it wouldn’t last. After a while you’d start expecting apple pie instead of articles, and then you’d want me to quit work, and if I got promoted and you didn’t, you would sulk, and then if we had a baby you wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and change its dirty diapers.

Of course, if your academic honey is peaches and cream — or happens not to gender-identify as a ‘husband’ — don’t look daggers at me. Elizabeth Peters said this stuff, not me.

Me, I’ve just started reading her Vicky Bliss series in the middle of chasing yet another deadline. It’s the sort of thing you get to do when you don’t have a husband lying about, tripping you up and gobbling all your unfree time.

Thank god for singledhood. Go (slightly historical) mysteries!

Filed under Anecdata, Books, Institutions, Obligingly Flippant, Politics, power violence Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

‘Working Women’

February 12, 2013 1 Comment

Via my Facebook acquaintance SM and the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya (the Unstoppable Women’s Association):

Roma Debnath, a member of the Binodini Sramik Union (a sex workers’ collective) has been selected to be the joint convener of the Working Women’s Council, West Bengal. This is the first time that a prostitute — euphemistically termed ‘working girls’ for decades — will represent all employed women, and address harassment and discrimination at the work place, and matters related to it.

Binodini Sramik Union (loosely, Entertainment Workers Union) is part of the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), which is the first of its kind to recognise prostitution as a profession and are, apparently, trying to ensure and protect the rights of its workers.

An excellent move, I think, and I hope it isn’t a purely symbolic one.

Incidentally, if you’re bothered by the use of the word ‘prostitute’ and want to jump up and say, “Say ‘sex worker’! Show some respect!”, then I suggest you stop awhile and reflect upon why you think ‘prostitute’ is belittling, while sex worker overflows with progressive glory.

Filed under Calcutta Notebook, Development, Divided India, Institutions, Language, power violence Tagged with , , , ,

A Valentine for Her Gay Ex-Husband

February 11, 2013 Leave a comment

My country is mired in blood and secrecy at the moment. None of it has touched us personally — for we are the invincible urban middle-class, flayed by the market and government and social systems every day but alive till the end like cockroaches — except the fear that our streets might suddenly burst into riots.

Speaking of love in such circs might reek of pink escapsim, but speaking of this love isn’t.

This love speaks of people whose very existence was mired in blood and secrecy. It speaks of friendship, loyalty, dignity, and freedom. It is beauty carved of steel, and decorated with hope.

Read the full article here. If it makes you want to cry, let yourself. Some things deserve the validation of your tears: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-newton/gay-husband-valentine_b_2641159.html

It was the middle-sixties, and homosexuality was still widely regarded as a neurosis, and my own ignorance was profound. But most importantly, I wanted to believe that therapy would be the “cure,” because I felt with him what I had longed to feel for most of my existence — happy, valued, loved, secure, at home.

[...]

After he began his sexual journey, we both fell in love with other men, but within two years, we were living as roommates and would continue to do so for the next 10 years. “If ever two people were made for each other,” we said, “it’s us.”

He met another man; I met another man too. Mine came to live with me. And Dick. I married my new man — with many second thoughts — and the three of us moved to a three-story Victorian house, ideal for sharing. When my daughter was born the following summer, life felt complete.

[A year later] On Thanksgiving morning, as we held hands, he died. [Of AIDS.] He was 46.

Perhaps the story of our love belongs to the 1960s, when everything seemed possible, a spirit we never lost. Had we come to each other in the 1970s, our marriage might never have taken place because in the 1970s, the lines between gay and straight were strictly drawn. But had we met in the 2010s, who knows? Genders, sexualities and modes of attachments have multiplied and blossomed and anything is possible today. In honor of him, I want to celebrate the day of romance with a Valentine that honors the many kinds of love that are in the offing — if we are flexible and creative enough to make them work, and if, in the end, we are open to possibility.

 

Filed under Culture, Development, Institutions, power violence Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

The True Marriage Mill

February 3, 2013 1 Comment

My last post was really intended to be a slightly padded quote from Mill, whose writing I found personally appealing rather more for the cynical component than the ethical aspects.

To be clear about my meaning, as one must be these days, I hasten to add that of course I value Mill’s contribution to political, social and therefore gender theory, and accept with alarcity that his work is a document of immense historical import. However, these are not aspects I find myself chuckling at when I read him. That honour, such as it is, goes to the occasional caustic pronouncements sandwiched between earnestness and stern moralising.

Yesterday’s post was originally meant to be built around one such pronouncement. Finally, here it is:

Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort… their opinion must evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations.

And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid… lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else… rather than marry.

You must admit, for a man born in the first decade of the 1800s, he had more insight into the marital state than do several of its commentators in the putatively progressive 21st century.

Filed under Language, Obligingly Flippant, power violence Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Marriage Mill

February 3, 2013 3 Comments

Do you know how, once you noticed something new around you, it keeps popping up everywhere you look? My friend Dhruva Ghosh is the epitome of this phenomenon. Once you’ve met him, he will pop up everywhere you go. Most of the new people you meet will know him, and references to things he did and said will jump at you from conversations.

The same happened to me yesterday, with the matter of gender-equity and the way girls are treated in our society. It began with a few people of my social media friend warmly recommending a video on Facebook. The video was called ‘the Girl Effect‘. It’s a well meaning piece, sweet, but considerably less than impressive.

Informally called ‘The Clock is Ticking’, the video makes the same assumption a recent Hillary Clinton quote on maternal health does. It assumes that people treat women horribly in direct and subtle ways simply because they know no better. Once you tell them how criminalising abortion or raping a poor (as in poverty-struck, not ‘aww, the poor dear’) 12-year old ruins her entire life completely, they will all be terribly contrite and draw their paws back in shame, and swear to rear female children, and treat women all-growed-up with respect and care. And everybody will live happily ever after, under a mango tree with their honey.

Perhaps the project seeks to infuse gender-rights activism with hope, that elixir for existence in the long, dark, dank tunnels of despair. Or perhaps, like so many people in the world today, it prefers to trades the complex enterprise of understanding for the happy-making illusion of efficacy. More power to its intentions. However, it misses the point of gendered deprivation in a very crucial manner.

Overt sexual violence, while alarmingly wide-spread and often debilitating to the victim (and in a different way to those in the victim demography that observe this regularity of violence directed at their kind), is not the worst a poverty-struck pre- or post-pubsescent girl has to face in our society. That distinction goes to the structure of her entire life, which consists chiefly of resource-deprivation, lack of control over her life’s decisions, lack of control over access to her body, lack of control over her fertility, anda lack of security so pervasive that most girls adopt strict self-censorship of movement, clothes and speech as a form of ‘safety’.

The thing about such visceral violence is that it doesn’t do the evil overlord laughter from rooftops. It is normalised; made to seem like the right way of doing things. The only way of doing things, even. This results in, as it were, a self-selection for deprivation. Frequently during lunches at state schools, for example, we’ve observed that if there is a mixed-gender sibling pair studying together, then the girl picks out all the protien and vegetables from her dish and gives it to the boy, and eats just the rice and gravy (or just the rice) herself. In the most recent incident, a girl who said she had last eaten the previous day at school walked over to ther older brother to give him the egg and potatoes from her plate, and returned to her seat to eat the plain rice.

So the very basic assumption of the video — that a poor girl in a third-world country around her twelth birthday is a “healthy” child, and merely keeping her out of marriage and in school will ensure flourishing health, safety and independence — is fundamentally flawed. And damning to the entire project, because it pushes the baseline of the very variables it seeks to improve beyond their best possible projected success, making their own contribution superfluous.

It’s really a very simple sentence. “At twelve, a poor girl from the developing world is healthy”. It is also the luxury of a fairy-tale, a happily-ever-after we cannot afford. So hope is all very well, and certainly necessary to keep the camp-fires going. But today, all I feel like is John Stuart Mill’s stern moralising, wonderfully refreshing in its cynicism, stark realism, and cynicism. It certainly does away with false hope, or unfounded good cheer:

…in the existing constitution of things… it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic servant.

To make things extra-right, perhaps they could toss in a lobotomy. Wouldn’t that be peachy?

Sigh. Sometimes, I think, being a unthinking doormat would make life easier for women.

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Development, Divided India, Institutions, Language, power violence Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Those Sexy Secrets

January 11, 2013 3 Comments

There’s a lot of talk — most of it high-flown fluff — about our ‘twisted desires’ and it’s ‘inhuman’ consequences. I object very strongly to the use of ‘inhuman’ in such contexts, because it encourages the delusion that human beings are a chirpy, light-hearted number, brimming with wuvv, cuddles, and the milk of smiley kindness. But let’s stack the history lesson for now.

So then, we’ve been talking a great deal about casual brutalisation of women on our streets, and how those exhibiting such behaviour should be hanged forthwith. This is all very well (well, perhaps not the hanging bit), but ‘the nation’ — as we fashionably refer to ourselves these days — has been rather slow in acknowledging how it fosters the root of such violence in its own misguided — and almost always misinformed — convictions about ‘Indian culture’. Institutional repression of sexuality — its discussion and expression — is a hallmark of such misguided zealotry. The first thing that we (as girls, but I’m sure also as boys, if in different ways) are taught about our bodies is to keep it secret. Given the degree of sexual freedom and gender flexibility the inhabitants of our land once enjoyed, this is rather ironic. From a diverse and inclusive place, the subcontinent has become an incredibly bloated schedule of social strictures, stifling its people with farts of anachronistic indigestion.

This was driven home rather hard yesterday at a lunch, when five women of my acquaintance spent half an hour — half an hour — analysing a throw-away sentence by an absent sixth for possible sexual connotations. All thirty minutes of this conversation was interspersed with secretive giggles, gleeful shushing, scandalised exclamations of ‘ishhh!’, and quick glance-arounds to check for eavesdroppers. At the same time, however, each of those five asserted that they’re ‘normal’ and ‘properly-brought up’ people, who consequently have no attraction at all towards such ‘dirty’ subjects and ‘shameful’ acts. Indeed, they all agreed, people who obsessed about sex were incomprehensible. How could anyone keep talking about sexual matters for hours? Indeed, it shouldn’t be discussed at all! Much less in public!

The righteous distaste was unanimous (as was the lack of self-awareness).

It never fails to amuse me how the most evangelical of forswearers are the ones most dedicated to the thing they claim to abhor. So yes, I did enjoy this exchange. However, as my fellow-subcontinentors will affirm, attitudes such as this are very common hereabouts, and very commonly expressed. We’re breeding a nation of repressed, suppressed, and therefore twisted, shamed, sly, starved and occasionally violent desires, bubbling and churning inside a firmly lidded pot. All in the name of our sanskaar — our traditions — about which most of us know squat.

Healthy, isn’t it?

Filed under Anecdata, Culture, Development, Institutions, Politics, power violence, Riminess Tagged with , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 553 other followers

%d bloggers like this: