Truly Nirbhaya

Nirbhaya has been on my mind since yesterday when the four accused in the December 16, 2012 gang rape in Delhi were declared guilty.

That in a system such as ours, where we have become used to law breakers getting away scot free, these four men have been pronounced guilty of murder, rape, and several other crimes is I believe, solely due to Nirbhaya's bravery, immense physical and mental strength. She had the courage to relive again and again in her mind the horrendous things that were done to her. She had the strongest will ...only this kept her alive to make sure she could give a lucid, detailed account of what happened on that bus in the late evening of December 16. Her physical strength and fighting spirit is proved by the very fact that she survived a whole fortnight with the most extreme injuries to her vital organs.

Today, September 13, 2013 brings satisfaction that by due process of law over 9 long months, the rapists have been handed a sentence they truly deserve. Today is the day the accused have been sentenced to death by hanging. The case was 'fast tracked' but not hurried in any way..... it is heartening to know that the judiciary did its job in being responsive to the needs of society but followed due procedure and found society's need to be justified.

Many thoughts are going through my mind, as I am sure are going through the minds of millions of others all over India, as I mull over the death sentence for the four adult rapists and the three year sentence awarded to the juvenile. Uppermost is this.....the rapists in this case have been awarded death because it was a "rarest of rare crime". So, is this going to deter other rapists who do not 'torture' their victim? Is the act of rape itself not 'torture' for the victim? Second, how can such rapists be deterred? Are we only going to sit up and take notice and action against gang rapists who 'torture' their victims? Third, what sentence will be awarded to rapists who just rape and torture but not kill or cause injury that causes the death of the victim? Will it be a life sentence? Will it be a life sentence of 14 years, which would be ridiculous for a young person? (And in this context how incredibly irresponsible of our juvenile judicial system is it to award 3 years to the juvenile rapist who was not only just a few months short of 18 years of age but who is also deemed to have served several months of this sentence while being held in custody? What is going to stop him raping women again if not gang raping, torturing, killing?) To return to the length of  a life sentence, if it cannot be changed to imprisonment till death, then can sentences for the various crimes for which the accused are convicted not all be added up and applied, as is done in some countries like the US? And if this cannot happen in our system then can the juvenile not serve his sentence and leave jail with an ankle bracelet for instance that will help the enforcement agencies to monitor his movements and whereabouts?

To end my ramblings..... a few simplistic, probably naive, even slightly stupid thoughts but I'm going to put them down anyway...... when Amnesty International protests against the sentence, (and as expected it is already making the usual negative noises against the death penalty and other human rights organisation will echo these noises), do they not consider the rights to life and safety of the victim? If we allow a child prodigy, who is for instance all of 13, 14 or 15 years of age, to enter university because intellectually he has the capability of an 18 year old, then can he/she not be considered an adult who can and should take responsibility for his adult crimes?      

At the risk of sounding blasphemous........!

A journalist friend of mine who just happens to be male, was annoyed and quite incredulous when some of the nation's most respected newspapers called the July 2012 mob molestation of a young woman in Gauhati a case of 'eve teasing', a term which diluted the seriousness of the incident and trivialized it, although this was probably not the intention. Or was it?????

Incidentally, on the one  occasion I  used this term in an international setting among friends from various foreign countries, there was complete incomprehension on their faces. It would seem then that 'eve teasing' is a term exclusively coined and used in India!

So is 'eve teasing' really something exclusive to our culture?  At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I see in pure, original and physically unthreatening (though no less objectionable) 'eve teasing' behaviours (such as whistling, making catcalls, singing a romantic song as a girl walks past, passing stupid or lecherous comments about a girl within her earshot, winking, etc.) a license that the perpetrators of such acts have given themselves, thinking themselves to be clones of Lord Krishna who often 'teased' the gopis! 

Inspired (to my mind) directly by the good Lord Krishna, Bollywood of the 60s, 70s and 80s carried this indigenous 'eve teasing' or 'chhed-chhaad' culture to the level of physicality by having the hero roughly manhandle the coy and unwilling heroine who by the end of the song almost invariably became willing and pliant. Unfortunately, the above Bollywood formula has become romanticized, amusing, acceptable, and is considered playful and harmless even though it sometimes borders on violence as in shoving and pushing and arm twisting (immortalised in song as baiyyan marodna)! It has given the stupid 'roadside romeo' the stupid idea that this is how even real women want to be wooed....and who knows, perhaps at one time they did, because it probably seemed appropriate for a good Indian woman to be falling in love 'unwillingly'! Given our addiction to Bollywood films, is it surprising then that this celluloid sanction sometimes acts itself out on the streets in the form of violence against women?

Today the manhandling Bollywood hero sometimes gets a dose of his own medicine from the less than coy, and often man-eating vamp cum heroine cum item number girl. At other times he is a true metrosexual and tries less rough, more cerebral or simply, openly sensual wooing tactics.

In these confusing times, what is the pea-brained romeo on the street to do? He does not have the wherewithal to be cerebral, the finesse or experience to be subtly sensual, or the looks, attitude or means to be metrosexual. So he uses crude physically sexual overtures, and because the sexily dressed, immensely desirable object of his unwanted attention is not only no longer secretly elated, but openly contemptuous of him and resists his advances, he uses violence, telling himself she needs to be taught a lesson or alternately convincing himself that she like her sisters of yesteryear wants it, but only as a fait accompli and if she can appear unwilling.

And that's what he gets completely wrong - that when a woman says 'no' (at least today if not in earlier times as well), she means NO, that any kind of unwanted attention is a crime, that 'eve teasing' and rape and molestation are all as bad, no matter how physically threatening or unthreatening each of them may be, no matter how she is dressed or how she behaves, and no matter what the cause or level of his arousal may be! On a parting note and again at the risk of sounding irreverent, in order to rid our dictionary of this 'eve teasing' euphemism, it may help to stop and think that maybe even Krishna's gopis actually really did not want to be eve teased or harassed or molested (call it what you will) at all, and that all we hear to the contrary was wishful thinking on the good Lord Krishna's part!

             

Remembering with smiles....

Remembering with smiles....

how you got mad at the Mills & Boons I read and exhorted me to read and watch 'real' love stories like  'Waterloo Bridge'
how I read your favourite book 'How green was my valley' and loved it too
how I trusted you more than myself to give my newborn babies their first manicures
how your knotty, almost workman's hands could be that gentle and tender and careful
how I loved to listen to your stories of wartime Britain and postwar Germany and your favourite quote 'history is written by the victor'
how you got mad when an admirer from college called up every evening and hung up the minute he heard your deep, deep voice
how you always thought such boys had something 'hanky panky' in their minds or they would not hang up
how I wanted to say "yes of course they do", but did not
how my girlfriends loved your deep, deep voice on the phone
how you invariably caught me running out of the house without an umbrella on a rainy Mumbai day and pushed that infernal umbrella into my hands
how you always said "OK, OK, you are looking beautiful, now move away from the mirror", when you caught me looking at myself in the mirror
how you tiptoed into my room and smeared my sleeping face with stinky Odomos because I did not do it myself and you were worried I would catch malaria
how you said I was old enough now and handed me my first glass of wine at 16
how you loved to make even tone deaf people sit down and listen to your Tchaikovsky symphonies
how you loved to dance the foxtrot, the waltz, the cha cha cha, the quickstep and all those 'oldie' dances
how I regret that I did not learn from you
how you and I shared a love of that king of fruits... the alphonso mango and could polish off half a dozen in one sitting
how you bought me kilograms and kilograms of the choicest seedless grapes at exam time because I needed to keep plopping them into my mouth as I studied
how you could be trusted to wake me up at 3 am on exam mornings with a sprinkling of water if I did not heed the first half dozen calls
how you loved a house full of people, music, jokes and laughter
how people you helped find a job almost worship you to this day
how you loved taking the family for post dinner drives to Marine Drive
how nervous you were when I had my Cesarean deliveries
how proud you were when at 16 I wore my first saree to a family wedding and your mother thought I looked like a  'princess'
how you wore your uniform with such pride and insisted on washing and ironing it yourself
how you did not trust washing machines because they ruined your shirt collars
how paranoid you were on Diwali nights when I went out to light firecrackers and you personally made sure I changed out of silks into safer cottons
how you taught me to always compose a picture before unthinkingly clicking the camera
how you loved to drive but drove so safely (and slowly) that we laughed and called it 'royal speed'
how you trusted only yourself with our safety on those long road trips (on 60s and 70s roads) from Bombay to Delhi or Bangalore
how proud you were of me when you and I were the only ones standing upright in a cyclone at sea that had veteran sailors retching and heaving
how you always took the best, most expressive pictures of my babies
how you insisted that people with 'shifty eyes' were not to be trusted
how you hated Bollywood movies with a passion and never forgot to ridicule them, especially when the heroine had several changes of clothes in the course of one song
how we all still benefit from the goodwill you left behind Baba .......
and how a million little things a million times a day still remind me of you ......          

Mother's Day Musings

Mother's Day Musings

 I sat within easy reach of my phone all day long that day,  only to be deeply  disappointed ....my two boys had forgotten to call me.....how could they....was it even possible to forget Mother's Day in the US, where all around you that is all you see for several weeks in the run up to the second Sunday in May.....Mother's Day sales, sales, sales and more sales .....well they had forgotten and that was it.....swallow it and move on I told myself ....

My husband and I went out to dinner with friends, the hurt of not being remembered by my sons even on Mother's Day still uppermost in my mind. At 11.30 pm I went online after getting back home, and almost instantly there was the 'ping' of an an imcoming skype  call  ....

"Hi mom, Happy Mother's Day from both of us",  my older son typed....
"Hmmmmm......thanks.......you almost forgot didn't you......." I said, secretly elated but still a little grudging and hurt...."Mother's Day is almost over in India you know."
"No mom, we didn't forget, we just woke up" , he typed.  It was Sunday afternoon in the US and they had woken up after noon as usual! That much was entirely believable and made me feel a little better.

A week later Vikram my younger one came home for the summer.  We got talking and I ribbed him about how he and his brother would have been in deep trouble had they not managed to squeeze in their Mother's Day wishes to me just before the day was out. To which Vikram surprised me by saying "Mom when was Mother's Day?" "Don't you remember it was last Sunday? Don't you remember you and your brother wishing me late at night just before midnight?" Turns out his older brother had included him in his wishes to me as he himself  lay asleep,  blissfully unaware of this very important day! In his own defence Vikram said, "Come on Mum, don't you think it's stupid to remember to wish you happiness on just this one day of the year?" "Hmmmm....interesting thought" I said quite touched and left it at that...

Equally touching to my mind was my other son's lie about his younger sibling joining him in sending me Mother's Day wishes. It was just about the most beautiful white lie in the world ......he understood just how much it meant to me to be wished by both my kids on this day...that understanding and the desire to avoid causing me hurt was worth a million Mother's Day wishes...  I swore to myself then that I would never again be stupid enough to peg my kids' love and thoughtfulness to the ridiculous ritual of wishing me Happy Mother's Day!

And to think that our kids never asked to be born....why impose on them and expect them to express how thankful they are that we gave birth to them by wishing us and showering us with presents on Mother's Day?

 Instead, if we women shower each other with Mother's Day greetings (which we do), that is exactly as it should be....it seems the perfect thing to do to celebrate the great privilege we have of bearing children and of  enjoying the joys of  motherhood!

Sadly, to completely convince me about the unnecessariness of this day, it so happened that the very next day  after Mother's Day this year, I paid a heartbreaking, gut wrenching condolence visit to a couple who had lost a 23 year old son in a road accident just days before Mother's Day.  And then recently I received the completely shattering news that a colleague had suddenly and unexpectedly lost a 41 year old son to a massive stroke.

Both mothers never got to meet their sons as they lay dying. Both mothers will never receive Mother's Day calls and visits and presents from their sons ever again. Would these mothers care if their sons miraculously came back to life but never ever remembered to wish them on Mother's Day? We all know the answer to that one, don't we?


"
  

Selling our warts for big bucks

This has been on my mind ever since that night after the Oscar Awards ceremony in 2009 when I was asked "So how do you feel about Slumdog's clean sweep at the Oscars?"

I was at an informal dinner at the home of the envoy of a developed western country. Fortunately  I was prepared for the question.  I was attending without my husband, and hence probably more candid than I normally am in diplomatic circles. I launched into my answer, "It is not an Indian movie, and the only thing I can think of to be proud about is that the concerned Indian authorities who give permission to foreigners to make such films about India reflect the openness of our system. Can you imagine a country such as our giant northern neighbour for instance, giving a free hand to any film maker to depict it in such poor light? I think not."

I must confess here that the import of  my response notwithstanding,  I have nothing but the highest respect  for a thoroughly  uncompromising stance in this matter. I remember being truly enraged at the scene in which a slum kid lets himself drop into a pile of human shit because he is locked into a makeshift toilet, and because that is the only way he can get out to get a glimpse of his Bollywood heartthrob. I can fairly confidently say that not a soul in India would willingly use this escape route to get a glimpse of God himself, let alone a Bollywood actor! As such, the scene was a misrepresentation and a falsehood and I would have loved to see Mr. Danny Boyle sued for it! Admittedly, if the Bollywood superstar was replaced by a few thousand dollars in the scene, the shitty escape route  would probably not be such a far fetched idea, though it would be no less damaging to a country's pride.

While this was just a frivolous opportunity  for Mr. Boyle to inject humour into his film, the collateral damage to India's image was plain unfunny. As  I remember it, this scene was not even that crucial to the film! So why was it in the film? The answer simply is that Mr. Boyle did not even think about what light it showed India in and how it would hurt Indians (why would he?), and worse, if he thought about it, he knew no one in India would object to it.

My calculated and evasive response to the question asked to me that night was precisely that - an embarrassed evasion and pretty weak damage control.  In the company of other Indians I would have said that it is stupid,  for want of a better word, and of course greedy as hell on the part of whoever makes money out of this, to allow our warts to become capital, off which  foreign film makers get fat and rich. To use a really bad analogy,  it is like poverty stricken parents lending their deformed child to the circus company to  make a  living!

This is is not to turn a blind eye to the shameful fact that millions of Indians defecate in public because they don't have decent public toilets, or any toilets at all for that matter. But the point is, do the Danny Boyles of this world help us to do something about it? Then why give them carte blanche on what they depict in a film made on Indian soil about Indian people, without retaining some form of control either before or after, or better still before and after the film is made?

With Kathryn Bigelow and others rushing to India to shoot their films, I don't honestly know how India can safeguard her interests, but it seems imperative that some sort of  control  be instituted, perhaps in the form of  conditions and clauses that will prevent the depiction of scenes that are objectionable to our sensibilities and sentiments.

If it were left to me, I would put our slums out of bounds for vultures posing as film makers. Maybe then the positive aspects of this country  would inspire some foreign films.  It is not a crazy idea, believe me. Other countries have been known to simply erect walls around unsightly neighbourhoods to keep the foreign media out during international events and such like. Frankly, the Bigelows and Boyles will do what they have to do by whatever means are available to them, so in the end this is not about them;  this is about us and about what we have to do and need to do, even if it means no one will want to film in India at all!

Deja vu?

Ever flown with a budget airline in India? Ever been hungry and willing to pay crazy amounts for crappy food on board a flight? Ever gone hungry (or thirsty) for one of the following reasons on board a flight: no vegetarian meal available/no non-vegetarian meal available/no more food (or drink) available?

If your answer to any of the above is a yes then read on for ideas on how to react to this shameless and brazen abdication of all responsibility and accountability on the part of several budget airlines towards paying customers!

Idea 1: Icy politeness.
Situation:
The stewardess asks her practised "What would you like to eat Sir?"
You reply, "What do you have?"
She says (shamelessly), "Cheese sandwich".
You say (icily), "Then I don't really have a choice, do I, my dear?"
She says (very shamelessly), "No sir."
End result: You eat a lousy cheese sandwich.

Idea 2: Play the religion card.
Situation:
Stewardess - Would you like a cheese or vegetable puff Sir?
You - No I want a chicken puff. It's on your menu.
Stewardess - Sir we are out of chicken puffs. We only have the vegetarian puffs. Can I get  you one?
You - No it is against my religion to eat vegetables and cheese. I must have a chicken puff.
Stewardess (stumped) - Oh!
End result: You get your chicken puff and eat it piously as you wonder how the stewardess produced it........reached out of the window and plucked it out of a puffy fluffy cloud maybe!

Idea 3: Depend on a good Samaritan!
Situation:
Myself (knowing from the dialogues between the stewardess and the passengers before me that what I want to eat is not available, and resigned to the situation): I'd like a cup of tea please. How much is that? (fishing around in my handbag for money to pay)
Stewardess (believe it or nuts): I'm sorry Ma'am, we don't have any tea bags.
Myself: WHAT? I DON'T BELIEVE THIS. ARE YOU KIDDING OR WHAT?
Veteran Passenger from two rows in front of me (sympathetically): Here Ma'am use this three -in- one tea bag. Just ask for a cup of hot water.
End result: I make myself some much needed tea in about half a cup of lukewarm water which is brought to me extremely grudgingly, but placed on my tray table with a flourish and a hoity toity, " Here you are Ma'am. Enjoy".

Idea 4: Shame the shameless! (maybe this one's only for bold women passengers).
Situation:
Stewardess - What can I get you to eat Ma'am?
My girlfriend - A chicken kathi roll please.
Stewardess - I only have a paneer kathi roll Ma'am.
My girlfriend (sullenly) - Ok, I'll have to take it then won't I?
My girlfriend eats her rock-hard paneer kathi roll, then takes a walk to the lavatory which is at the pantry end of the fuselage. As she waits for the lavatory to become vacant she spots the entire cabin crew chomping on kathi rolls. She makes idle conversation with them until a chunk of succulently tender chicken falls onto the floor from one of the culprit rolls. Her mouth falls open for a moment before sheer and loud indignation takes over. "You said there were no chicken kathi rolls!" she shouts accusingly at the lying stewardess whose mouth has fallen open and remained open through this entire surreal episode!
End result: My girlfriend is applauded by the rest of the passengers as she walks back to her seat.

Idea 5: Drop names.
Situation:
 Hungry, starving, but very polished looking passenger ( who's just been told there is no more food available) on a Kingfisher flight for instance: Hmmm.........(scratching his distinguished beard) ......must talk to Vijay about this when I meet him next week...........
End result: Not known but certainly worth a try!
  
   

Yin, Yang, Yosemite

If there is a Yin and Yang in Nature, and I know there is, then I felt its perfect balance in Yosemite. Where the Grand Canyon was pure testosterone, the tranquil meadows, the wild flowers, and the sometimes placid Merced found their perfect jigsaw fit in the crashing falls and the treacherous rock faces of Yosemite Valley, in much the same way the Yin and Yang spoon into each other so seamlessly.


Bridalveil Waterfall


Where I cowered away from the edge of the Canyon's South Rim, I stood and gazed and drank in both the awesome and the awe inspiring in Yosemite, the one always making me thirsty for the other, so I never felt I had got too much or even enough of either....


And then there was the Merced, moody as hell....unable to make up its mind between Yin and Yang, mercurial and manic, mellow and meandering.....If the river was fickle, the meadows and their wild flowers were dependable in their soothing, calming ways..... And what can I say about the giant Sequoia trees ....that they are an infinitely patient woman, or that they are tall hunky men? Check out for yourself the true Spirit of Yosemite......




                                                                               



Good old Half Dome