I am very excited about reading a hindi novel after a long time. I ordered a copy of Chandrakanta online and it should be delivered in a few days! Yay!

Comics return!

I love comics. Here's a link to my current favourite comic!

http://www.mysocalledsecretidentity.com/comic/volume1/issue1/cover

For me, this is just as game-changing as the yellow kid!

A mouthful of rain

It was a lovely, rainy night and I was sitting in a cafe in Koramangala for dinner with my sister. Since we are both the sort of people who enjoy the rain very well from a distance, we sat next to the large glass window which gave us a good view of the rain tearing down, on the main road, on one side of the cafe. My sister was reading a comic and I was busy attacking the amazing banana waffle before me with a vengeance. We would both look up every now and then to look at the people and cars moving in the thick rain. After a while, the couple at the table next to us started to leave and I could hear them laughing down the stairs. As they crossed the road outside in the rain, the yellow light from the overhead street lamps fell on their figures and it had almost a movie like effect with the rain beating down. We looked out just in time to see the young woman do a little jig in the rain as the man drew closer.

It was one of those moments which are not your's but make you happy anyway.

Does anybody reading this remember the name of that short story by Ruskin Bond where a young school boy is waiting alone for a train at the station and meets an older lady who makes friends with him? She takes him to the station cafe and feeds him all sorts of goodies like samosas and jalebis while they wait for his train. A little while later the boy's friend arrives with his mother and they all start talking. The unknown lady pretends to be the boy's mother.

I feel so contented tonight that I won't even write about how blatantly sexist is Andhra Pradesh's new law prohibiting women from drinking in pubs after 10:00 pm. It's so much easier to lock up the women, isn't it? But I just said I won't write about it.

P.S. What would I not give to have a detachable scalp or even retractable hair. Every year I tell myself that the winter is the worst and then summer happens!

I miss her.

It's been a long time since I've been excited about reading a book. I've had Oscar Wilde's "The picture of Dorian Gray" on my reading device for a while but somehow I haven't gotten around to reading it. I read a few pages and realized that this is going to turn out to be an exceptional book and that I won't be able to put it down or even stop thinking about it when it's over. So I've put it away for a while until I finish off other work.

Such a pain.

Baiting the feminist

Have you ever played the "Pin the tail on the cat" game? I have played it numerous times in school. Every time I, or someone else pinned the tail at the wrong spot, I used to imagine the cat give a loud, comical squeal.

The internet was full of poison for people like me this week. Well, it's usually like that but this week I probably read more sad, heart-breaking stories about women than usual. It's like some sort of barrage has broken and now we are flooded with uncountable stories of horrifying things done to women and children.

To be honest, none of those stories have prompted me to write this post. It's something much more trivial, something quite silly. This morning I saw someone of my acquaintance declare gleefully on a social network that feminists must be jealous and so they do not like Lara Croft, the tomb raider games. It was irritating in a prickly sort of a way, nothing to cause any anguish but something that cannot be ignored either. It was probably meant in a funny way and feminists are often accused of not being able to see a joke. So, I find myself, who was really upset last night from reading a deeply disturbing story about the life of the widows in Vrindavan, here on the verge of defending feminists who may or may not justly think that Tomb raider is sexist. I won't.

I don't like to get into debates about whether tomb raider or any other game, comic, movie or image is an awful, exploitative portrayal of women or not. I don't see how it makes a difference to the life of a woman who is thrown out by her family when her husband dies. These aren't the kind of families who are led by people who play or are even exposed to tomb raider. These are devout, god-fearing, hymn chanting and tradition following families who throw out their women to the wolves. I think this is about as fruitful as the bra burning movements of the 1960s. It merely keeps us and others diverted from attacking the root of problems, from reaching people who are a lot more dangerously and deeply entrenched in misogyny, and from thinking of practical ways by which women can actually get free of the chains of patriarchy. These derisive jokes on women and feminism, the perpetration of stereotypes of women in the media seem to me to be only symptoms and sometimes we get so caught up in these symptoms that we expend valuable energy into engaging with them. We have precious little time and energy left to tackle the bigger mental malaise, which produced the symptom in the first place.

It's quite tempting to give a piece of my mind to everyone who calls feminists idiotic, jealous, man-haters. But if I were to go by the experience of the earlier feminists, I'm not sure if it got them very far. We are still bound by our misogynistic, traditions and cultures. We are looked upon with suspicion even by women who truly need this movement to go on. I'd like to attack but I'd like to put my energy into an attack that will cause a little more than a flutter. I'd like to pin the tail right.

It's a lot more difficult to say how this can be done. What was that which if it hadn't been missing, would have made the life of a widow in Vrindavan different? Why is it that a widow in this age is still thrown out of her home because she is considered the most inauspicious of all things in our damned religious texts but a widower may remarry? What will become of the 21,000 and counting, widows in Vrindavan?

I don't have an answer to my questions but I'm going to think hard about this and probably do more ramble writing.

-An angry, disgruntled feminist

Butterfly

Darting, rollicking, bouncing in the wind
the butterfly made its languid way to me
I lay forgotten among the over bright blossoms,
in the earth of the garden of those gone

It wasn't beautiful, it wasn't colorful
it was a great, brown, live butterfly
flapping it's wings among the dead
finding a spot on my gasping chest

I wanted to touch its pulsing wings,
touch life here in the garden of the dead,
where no sparrows called nor worms crawled
only the bright blooms preyed,the vines prowled

Fearing it would fly away if I breathed too hard,
I swallowed my gasps and contained my sobs
It seemed content there on my chest
as my breathing slowed, my sight cleared

I'd never cared much for butterflies
until that day, when one saved my life
I lay in the black mud unseeing, unmoving
my arms slack and my mind hushed

I went to sleep with a butterfly on my heart
with the smell of trees and living in my mind
knowing I lay at the end of the garden of the dead
feeling life knocking again on my beaten chest

Someone put it quite succinctly: "I hate everybody!"

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?

As much as I like to say that girls and women should stand up for, and look out for each other, I can't say that women make this easy enough for each other to practice in real life.

Why do most women, in their private lives, not naturally inspire any loyalty or any feelings of empathy or even a 'sisterhood' among each other? Why do we find it difficult to cheer for or celebrate each other's accomplishments? We seem to do it well enough when we are in large groups but not in our private lives with fewer people around.

I read or heard somewhere recently that women are quite detail oriented but usually miss the big picture. I wasn't very flattered by such a description.

Some days ago I announced quite gleefully to my female friends that my sister was to marry soon. I expected some congratulatory messages but I must admit myself to have been quite surprised on not receiving a single such message from any of the twenty or more girls to whom I spread this news and who have met my sister personally. A few days later, someone did respond to me, not with any congratulations or with any good wishes for my sister's happiness but with questions about who the groom was to be. I wrote back to everybody quite openly describing my bro-in-law. While I know that everybody read what I wrote, nobody bothered again with expresssing any good wishes. Am I wrong to conclude that we do want the scoop on each other's lives, but we can't be bothered with niceties with each other? We don't immediately root for each other's success or happiness.

I'd like to be clear that this is no grudge trip. I know that my sister's or my happiness doesn't depend on anyone congratulating us. I can't help feeling a sense of disappointment in women, though I proclaim myself to be a feminist. I can't help but analyze this. I feel that these small things translate to a much bigger apathy for each other in more serious situations when we are called upon to support a fellow woman in our individual capacity. We seem to nurse a kind of passive hostility towards each other which comes to us too easily.

A common behavioral pattern that I have noticed is that while a woman does take fairly quickly to a woman who she believes to be no better than her, it's always difficult for her to appreciate another woman who she sees as better in some way. It just means to me that we are always competing with each other subconsciously, if not consciously. We are always trying to not only look good, but look better, sound better, come across as smarter than the other girl. When a girl meets another girl, the first instinct is to quickly size her up. Is she fatter since the last time? Is her make-up better? Are her clothes nicer? Are the guys paying more attention to her? We frequently greet each other with a "You've put on weight" rather than a "how are you". In being unkind to each other, we are also being unkind to ourselves.

I recognize that feelings of jealousy and competition are quite natural, we are all animals of the world. But shouldn't the fact that we have a more developed brain and a little more understanding than other animals mean that we should train ourselves to be less hostile to each other?

As a last note, some years ago as a teenager, in a brief moment of anger, I broke of contact with a friend from school. I was meeting her after a long time and was very happy to see her. As she was leaving, I complimented her on how splendid she looked, her response to me was that I looked 'very shabby' and then without another word, she was off on her way before I could get in another word. I've gone back to think of it many times, thinking that maybe I was too harsh or too hasty in cutting her off but it wasn't the first time she'd said something like that to me. What I want to bring out is that she doesn't inspire any good feelings in me to go back to being friends with her. I know that this behavior will be repeated because she sees no wrong in it and tells herself that this is only a joke and not any unkindness. I haven't lost any self-esteem because of her constant insensitivity, I've lost a friendship.

My intention in describing these incidents is not to nitpick or split hairs. I am not trying to criticize every woman, there are far too many great ladies around to make this a general statement for all women. However, it is my experience that it's harder to make friends with women even when I make extra efforts to be friendly with them. This is only to point out that we could treat each other a lot better. If we want to be treated well in a society which we share with men, I think a starting point is to respect and value each other. One billion rising events are a great platform to bring women together to dance but to raise it from being merely a mechanical exercise, a mindset change is needed. There is a need to self-reflect that in this world, a woman is the most natural ally for another woman. We need to remind ourselves to be as instinctively nice to each other as we are to men. Our good behaviour shouldn't be limited to those women who are either much older or much younger to us.

P.S. I wanted to name this post 'autopsy' but then I remembered that I'd named my last one 'the cadaver'.

The Cadaver

Sometimes I watch from afar
I stand by the cadaver,
watching as it stumbles,
as it crashes into rocks
drowning itself in swamps

It does not grieve me
because it did not happen to me
I leave its form behind
as the murky shadows approach

I have no part of it
This piece of flesh
which was never mine
It belongs to the early hawk
who must have its pecking

I chose to not see
when the hawk closed in
I looked away,
as the talons snapped,
I drowned out the grinding

It did not happen to me
This wasn't my being
I haven't lost a thing
and yet I am bleeding.

The other F-word

There's this F-word that's gotten me going these days. It's a rather misunderstood, misjudged word just like the people it seeks to describe. Feminism.

I remember growing up, I'd never looked it up in the dictionary but had gathered a rather negative connotation from the books I read and the people I heard talk. I always knew it was something undesirable, something not right, something shocking.

I did look up the dictionary a few days ago and it describes feminism as "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men".

Not very shocking, is it?

The thing about feminism is that the thoughts have to come first and by yourself. A lot of people who agree with everything that feminism stands for, do not like to be called feminists. It probably had a worse PR team than the Tata Nano.

When did I first start thinking about feminism?

I've always thought about it. I've always yearned to live in a society that promotes equality between all genders. I'd like to be challenged just as hard as anybody else just as I'd like the same breaks as anybody else. I'd like to live in a society where the roads aren't more unsafe for me than for a man. I'd like to live in a time where my life decisions won't have to be influenced by all the special diktats that need to be followed exclusively by people of my gender. I want neither the pedestal, nor the pits.

I've only recently claimed the word feminist for myself. Last year, I read a book by the lesser known Bronte sister, Anne Bronte,"The tenant of Wildfell hall". When it was first published, it caused a sensation introducing the revolutionary idea that a woman could leave her husband if she was not happy and still be the heroine in the novel. She could slam the door in his face if he abused her. She could earn her own living and support herself and her child. This sent shock waves in a society where at the time, divorcee women were treated like pariahs. If they left their husbands, they lost custody of their children and also all of the money that they brought themselves into the marriage.
I wonder how many women of the time read Anne Bronte's passionate book and felt compelled to reclaim their independence and to strive to make their lives better again. I call it a passionate book even in the absence of a central love story because a woman's desire to live her life and to turn it around for the better even when all her choices turn out to be wrong is quite exhilarating and probably a much higher passion.

Another thought is that you can be a feminist while not burning your bras and not laying away the shaver. Hell, you can even like men! You can joke about feminism and feminists while raising a toast declaring yourself one!

I've stormed out of the mountains,cracked the unyielding rocks to fragments
I've gushed gently by the little shrubs,cradled its fine seeds in my currents

I've been this or that,I've been one thing or the other and everything

I saw you along the way, you who feared me and yet loved me
You felt one thing or the other for me,
you thought the world of me and yet betrayed me.

-The River

Why is it that I get this sudden burst of ideas in my head at exactly the moment when I am really hard pressed for time to be able to write?

It takes years and years of personal training to not say the first angry, resentful words that come to your mind. It's as if you have to do time in jail so you can do time in jail.