Last night after dinner...

M says: It's a pity that there are always people out to dole free advice when you don't need it and there's no one when you actually need help.

I say: It's a pity we can't run down to the liquor store nearby to get a couple of breezers cause my waistband feels too tight.

If someone's told you to get a life recently, I suggest you go here to get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEWkFJVd0k&feature=youtu.be

Drown it all out, people!

Bloody Hell.

"Action is the antidote to despair" - J.B.

Joan Baez is my hero! Listen to this and fall in love with her

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcaZi_G3xVs

and this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbe0ha3-ycI

I woke up this morning to some incomprehensible news.

Katy Perry apologized to a little known rapper who threatened to assault her, apart from sending her other sexually explicit insults on twitter, because she wasn't impressed by the subject of his song titled "I hate being sober".

Let's try and make sense of this. Katy Perry didn't like a song very much so the 'artist' threatened to beat her up and she tried to pacify him by apologizing.

This is very alarming on many levels. I've never expected Katy Perry to be the role model of our generation nor do I have her songs on a loop. I didn't expect a woman with millions of dollars and a security entourage to buckle before a seventeen year old teenager with too big a head and too little talent even if he's known to be a violent lech.

I remembered an incident that happened to me only two weeks ago. Every now and then, among all the creeps on the road who are out trying to x-ray every girl that walks, is one who will actually follow you around and hiss obscenities at you till your nails are digging into a can of pepper spray and trying to find the pointiest part of your keys. I was accosted by my 'admirer' just outside an ATM and even though I got scared, it made me more angry at being messed around with like this. So, I turned back and yelled at him until every one in the vicinity had heard me. I didn't win. I couldn't compete with him in choosing the vilest words but I know I would have felt thoroughly ashamed if I'd just slunk away without at least letting him know that he couldn't simply walk away with his stupid grin, congratulating himself on making me uncomfortable.

I don't have a career as grand as Katy Perry's. I'm sure she's a very brave person to have made her life as large as it is but I am quite disappointed. I know I'll never be a fan.

Look what I gawt!!

I feel rather relieved today after a very long time.

If we removed all the trappings that accompany God, would he/she still exist?

If everyone were to wake up tomorrow realizing that there's no heaven or hell, would they behave worse or better? Imagine how many institutions that thought would bring down. You wouldn't be able to pay or fast for your seat in the pleasant afterlife cause nobody knows what that would be like. It would be chaos, I think. There will be people who won't be able to cash in on other's fears of God's retributions. Imagine, having to start living your life doing some real work.

If God does exist, he must feel terribly used and abused.

P.S. I'd like a gender-less God, wouldn't you? Enough with the he/she/it nonsense!

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