THE RECENT Michael Arrington post on why women mustn’t blame men for their lower numbers in technology is eliciting reactions, fast and furious. While I don’t think Arrington’s tone helps, I am not going to get into the subject here. Instead, I’d like to refer you to Shefaly Yogendra’s excellent post, “Women in tech: What gives?”, where she puts forth many actionable ideas on what we can do to get more women into science and technology. [Read More]
THE DVD OF LOVE, Sex aur Dhokha has been lying around at home for some time, but it was only over this weekend that I got around to watching it. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (of Khosla ka Ghosla fame), LSD is actually three stories in one, with peripheral links to each other.
The first one is a mushy love story, the second an MMS sex scandal and the third, about the media’s voracious appetite for ‘stings’. It is the second and third stories that really hold your attention; the first one is slow to heat up and I almost forwarded a little of the first 10-15 minutes. Yet, my mind keeps going back to it. (This post isn’t a movie review though.)
GOOD GIRLS DON’T TALK to Boys. And vice versa, although an exception may be made for good boys who are simply lured by bad girls.
Recently, I came across this new item that talked about a young girl in a Chennai engineering college who killed herself because she was ticked off for talking to a boy. It wasn’t just the scolding she received which precipitated the suicide, but the fear that her parents would have been informed of her heinous crime – talking to a boy.
ALL I KNEW WAS that this non-profit group called MARAA was organising some sort of performance on gender and sexuality. A friend told me about it and even offered to pick me up. Work lay unfinished on my table, but what the hell, I decided, I could always catch up later. And that’s how we found ourselves at Jagaa, which calls itself “a community space created to serve the arts, technology and social change communities in Bangalore.” We climbed up two flights of metal staircases to find a fairly large group of people, sitting, standing, leaning on the banisters – and listening attentively to the performers – a group of people variously called hijras, transvestites, transgenders or Aravanis (The Indian concept of third gender is somewhat different from Western conceptualizations – read here).
LAST SUNDAY, we had a couple of close friends over for lunch. As it happens with close friends whom one has not met for a long time, it turned out as a long, rambling lunch where we were still sitting around at 5 o’clock. By the time they left, it was late evening, and somehow both Mr. B (the hubby) and I were feeling a little tired and coming down with headaches. Probably a result of the hectic, 6-day week we’d both worked and while Sunday had been fun, we hadn’t had any time to relax. And here were all the utensils still lying around, plates to be rinsed, delicate crockery to be put away. I got to it while Mr. B continued watching TV and then joined him, grumbling that he hadn’t helped me one little bit. I grumbled that I had to do it, I couldn’t possibly leave stuff lying around until the maid came in the next morning.
And that’s when he said, ‘You’ had to do it, I wouldn’t have, which got me thinking. What is it about housework that even the most liberated of us women continue to willing wear it around our necks like a millstone that we are proud of?
LATELY, I SEEM TO BE hearing a lot about the break-up of marriages and subsequent divorces. There was the Hiphop Grandmom writing on incompatible alliances and how they’ve led to the breakdown of marriages. Then, today, over at the F Word Blog, I read a piece on how British Tory party members want a provision for a ‘three month cooling off’ period in divorce cases. If you look at the comments section on HHG’s piece as well, you will see one line of thought that couples are getting divorced “too easily” or for “frivolous” reasons.
In the last 3 years, I’ve seen a number of people in my own circle applying for divorce. Now, the plural of anecdote is not data, but considering the friends I’ve seen and human nature and Indian society, I feel that people who are going in for a divorce are not doing so for frivolous reasons or on a whim. You may not agree with their specific reason, or you may think they should have tried harder, but whatever it is, I feel divorce is still a very hard route to take, not the easy way out.
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LAST YEAR, when I read Lotus’ review of The Road of Lost Innocence, just the review was enough to send shivers down my spine. I doubt I have the stomach for the entire book. The Road of Lost Innocence is a survivor’s account, the memoir of Somaly Mam who survived the brutality of the Cambodian sex industry and lived to help other girls caught in that hell. Closer home, it is common knowledge that many, many Nepali and Bangladeshi (as well as Indian) women find themselves sold into sexual slavery. What kind of world do we live in where girls as young as 10 are viewed as commodities to be used for a man’s pleasure?
Yesterday, I chanced upon a Polish/English movie, ‘Your Name is Justine’ that explores this subject using a focuslight on one young Polish woman’s ordeal as she is betrayed by her boyfriend and sold to a ruthless and brutal pimping gang in Germany. Mariola is held in captivity while her captors tell her that she is now “a piece”, and try to break her resistance through rape, beating and starvation. [Read More]
WHERE EVERY FAMILY wants a hundred sons, but not even one daughter, where infant girls are killed using many ingenious methods, or even simpler, not allowed to be born, in such a land, what is the future of womankind?
Manjula Padmanabhan’s recently published novel, Escape is the dystopian vision of such a society where the no-girls policy has been taken to its extreme; for now, it is not only individual families that conspire to kill women, it is the government itself that has officially outlawed and exterminated women.
In this “world” (a country masquerading as the whole world, even as the rest of the world ostracises it for its crimes), a coup by clone technology wielding generals has eliminated the ‘need’ for women, since they see women primarily as ‘breeders’, and weak breeders at that, who cannot compete with the perfection of clone technology. What then is the fate of the lone girl who has survived in this world, not knowing even that she is to become a woman? [Read More]
THE HADEES he had read yesterday talked about how it was Shaitan who always tried to corrupt us. If we escaped his attempts, we would surely go to Heaven. In Heaven, rivers of milk and honey flow, thousands of Houri women serve the men and make them happy. As she remembered this, she wondered, if there were Houri women for the men, wouldn’t there be Houri men for the women too? (From Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadai by Salma; my translation) [Read More]
BACK FROM THE DIWALI break, I was chatting with the elderly lady who comes to sweep our street everyday. Though she is employed by the municipal corporation, the wages are paltry so residents usually help her with small tips in cash or kind. As I handed over her Diwali tip and a small box of sweets, she blessed me saying, “May you have male children year after year!” Quite apart from the fact that overburdened India doesn’t need anybody producing children year after year, what is with this obsession with the male child, that simply refuses to go away? [Read More]
