Sometimes – often, in fact, though not always, not when secretiveness is deliberate – you can tell when someone is smitten. The volcanologist and science journalist Robin George Andrews certainly is, writing in The New York Timesabout that “beautiful volcanic pearl in the sky and its mystifying moonbeam”. He isn’t the only one – he quotes Sarah Luetgenn, a scientist studying the moon’s tail, as saying, so simply, “It almost seems like a magical thing.”

The moon as a volcanic pearl – the moon as magical – such delight when science and poetry dance together. And yes, it appears the moon has a tail, comet-like: discovered after the Leonid meteor shower of 2008 intensified its brightness and carefully studied ever since, it is made of sodium dust. The planet Venus appears comet-like at times too; its ionosphere billows out in a teardrop-shaped tail when solar wind density is low.

I, a poet who is not a scientist, have turned the thought of that pearl over and over in the palm of my mind, pondering it. Pondering its comet tail. Poetry always comes, or returns, to the smitten.

A beloved who was born under a sting-tailed moon, whose star chart and mine entwined, collided and imploded supernovically, came back. The shape of the constellations revealed themselves to me again after many nights of artificial light.

The moon’s sodium tail cannot be seen by the naked human eye. But it’s there, hundreds of thousands of miles long, a lingering. Because of the moon’s orbit, over the course of each month the Earth becomes encircled by its beam of scattered sodium. This makes me think of a mandala of salt, a sphere of protection and belonging.

There is a type of moonlight that is called earthshine, faintly illuminating the orb within which a young crescent grows or recedes in the evenings after or preceding a new moon. Words intoned under the dark moon become incantations; one makes a choice between shadow or ashen glow. Both are ways to name the area of earthshine, that phenomenon when the hidden whole decides to claim its place.

A hundred years before the astronomer Johannes Kepler brought planetshine into scientific understanding, Leonardo da Vinci – who held imagination and the measurable in perfect symmetry – wrote in his notebooks about this phenomenon. He believed the moon to be oceanic, and he knew that at least some of its light, at least on certain memorable nights, came from the earth. 

Even NASA doesn’t retreat into technical jargon, letting the grace of language – of old, old ways of seeing – describe what is. The waxing crescent is “the old moon in the new moon’s arms”. The waning crescent is known as “the new moon in the old moon’s arms”.

There’s a cradling in the sky that we are fortunate to behold, when we look up at the right moment, some configuration of place, time, instinct and opportunity that makes us pause in our tracks. If we’re sensible, we’ll know this is nothing special – it comes around every month. If we’re honest, though, we surrender: to love’s lunar pull, happenchance’s centripetal force, the heart’s hard-to-see but not invisible preordained and chosen trajectories.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 18^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Women’s Day, the popular rose-and-chocolate-scented contemporary spinoff of the revolutionary International Working Women’s Day, has just passed. Thank Goddess for that. Just a few days before this year’s occasion, a traffic constable in Chandigarh who took her baby to work caught the attention of many, and the gamut of reactions to her illustrated well why considering Women’s Day as a celebration is to completely miss the point.

Identified as Priyanka, the constable had just returned to work after six months’ maternity leave. As her spouse and in-laws were not in town, she had been forced to take her five-month old baby to duty with her. A local resident who had spotted the constable at work took a video of her – in uniform, wearing a surgical mask, directing traffic with her right arm while her child was held with the left. This subsequently went viral online.

Some glorified her, some criticised her, and a few asked the right questions instead of doing either. This is where the connection to the typical misconstruing of Women’s Day comes in. To glorify a woman who is performing multiple roles because of a lack of infrastructural support is simply to brush under the carpet the many systematic and societal problems that force her into doing so. It’s a kind of gaslighting to applaud someone’s courage, strength or resilience without recognising that they should never have been in the position of being forced to express those qualities to begin with. To criticise a woman who is performing multiple roles because of a lack of infrastructural support is simply to force her into a corner – in this case, the “choice” to leave the workforce and become a homemaker. 

As for the right questions – those all pertain to access to childcare across fields, the recalibration of family dynamics and the wider recalibration of what community and kinship mean, and accounting for gendered nuances in the workplace and beyond. They are not about an individual who was just doing the best she could on a given day.

Priyanka is now facing a departmental probe. Whoever took the initial video of her perhaps inadvertently contributed to the significant personal and professional stress she was already under.

Priyanka’s situation calls to mind Nazia, who had been taking her four-month old Jahaan to the Shaheen Bagh protest last year. Jahaan passed away from a cold, and Nazia faced immense criticism from privileged quarters who did not care to ask the right questions then either, about the family’s living conditions or access to healthcare.

This was a month before the first case of COVID-19 was reported in India. If Jahaan had died just a few weeks later, we wouldn’t have heard of him. He was weaponised against his mother; not entirely dissimilar to how Priyanka and her child were tokenised as inspiration or public advisory.

In the year since then, we have seen or experienced how people with choices have chosen to behave, and we have also seen or experienced how that affects others who may or may not have an equal amount of agency. How have we still not understood that societal structures undergird everything we do?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 11^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Sometimes, the heart is so weary that the hand can barely bring itself to click on a newslink. I feel this hopelessness often these days. Active outrage is not necessarily an empathic emotion, just as immediate quietness can mean exhaustion or contemplation, or observing before opining, not only callousness. No social justice effort that demands constant engagement, with neither rest nor reflection, can sustain itself long enough for a meaningful outcome. Horrible things happen every hour (as the statistics show); terrible things capture the headlines every day; every week, our sense of shock is renewed. No one has that kind of unflagging energy, to keep shouting. Those of us who want a better world must learn how to take turns, which is not the same as passing the buck.

So when I saw the latest misogyny reported on a judicial level – the latest today, which may not even be the latest by the time you read this – I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to look properly, let alone respond. Then I did begin to look into it, and realised that there were in fact not one but two Supreme Court cases in the headlines, with related sentiments. The Chief Justice of India himself, the Honourable Sharad Arvind Bobde, asked the rapist who attacked a minor in one case: “Will you marry her?” On the same day, the CJI was also quoted as having said in another case, in which a woman alleged rape by her live-in partner, “When two people are living as husband and wife, however brutal the husband is, can the act of sexual intercourse between them be called rape?”   

Behind both statements are echoes and echoes and echoes, centuries of evil that have seeped into and become a part of – even a proud, sanctioned part of – the culture. Each time such a scenario catches our attention, we must touch base again with this big picture. Otherwise, we are incomplete in our appraisal. This is one of the reasons why the weight of resistance is so wearying. It’s never about just one incident, even as we must be careful to not blur into that big picture the person or persons currently in the crisis spotlight. But the magnitude of it is mind-boggling.

What is there to say, really, when feeling crushed by this collective weight? The disgust and anger when a case is still being fought, when someone has survived, is unlike the disgust, anger and sorrow when someone has not. Some place names become codes for crimes: Unnao and Hathras, for example, each with multiple horrors that its name itself evokes. I open my browser briefly as I write and already there’s another case, another case in which a Dalit girl has been found murdered in a field, in Aligarh this time.

So forgive me: today I have nothing pithy or sharp to say, nothing that will amplify the noise. Anger is only one way to look this in the eye. The quietness – and for others who don’t even say this much, the silence – of contemplation, the space it creates for restrategising, is not the same as looking away.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 6^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Tetsushi Sakamoto is Japan’s first Minister of Loneliness. This new cabinet post is an acknowledgment that loneliness, exacerbated by pandemic-related isolation and stress, is a serious issue.

In October 2020 alone, Japan recorded 2153 deaths due to suicide; by contrast, the total number of people who had died from coronavirus in the country up till then was 1765. When announcing the new Ministry, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga commented that women were at higher risk. This is interesting since the “gender paradox in suicide” is a known occurrence, wherein men’s attempts are likelier to be completed even though women may have more ideation or a higher number of attempts.

Three years ago, when the U.K. announced its Ministry for Loneliness, I wrote in this column about how loneliness is interlinked with structural oppressions, even though people across positionalities experience it. I wrote: “In order to address loneliness, then, we must address everything.”

I learned something I hadn’t known then about the U.K.’s Ministry. Its creation was based on the findings of the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, which was established by an MP who was murdered soon after. Cox was murdered by a far-right extremist who presumably opposed her beliefs, which favoured refugee rights and other humanitarian concerns. Her involvement with the issue of loneliness was probably an extension of her compassionate worldview.

Maybe Cox’s killer is lonely as he serves out his life sentence without parole. Or maybe he had already been so desolate in his life that he found comfort in a supremacist philosophy.

Since its inception, the U.K.’s Ministry for Loneliness has had much reshuffling. It cannot be simple work, dealing with an intangible element that dominates so many lives. While the Ministry has initiated various campaigns and awarded grants, there is scarce information online about what it has been doing during the pandemic. But there is a video dated March 2020 with a small selection of recordings of calls to them. The “loneliness epidemic” preceded the pandemic. Japan’s decision to address this formally is important, and will hopefully create strategies that can be employed widely.

Hopefully. Loneliness is a profoundly subjective experience, even if vast swathes of a population self-identify as lonely, or other supporting data indicates this malaise at large even if self-identification is not reported. I like the idea of such Ministries mainly because they can help destigmatise that self-identification. 

Can I help with that too? I am a deeply lonely person, and I always have been. I’ve been alone on most of the best and worst days of my life. My skin hunger was so bad this month that I cried once from needing to be held. My circumstances, my history and my choices may be unique, but my loneliness is not. Yet I am grateful every single day to not be in denial about this essential aspect of my being. Denial leads one into unhappy relationships, into being pawned by sinister ideologies, into transient gratifications and their inherent risks. In naming myself as lonely, I hold myself safely and wholly. I honour the truth of my heart, and I find ways to soothe it without distraction, without deceit.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 25^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

A few weeks ago, the TV host Padma Lakshmi used her hand to mix ingredients for puliyodharai and people had Reactions to this. I don’t know what those Reactions were exactly, because I didn’t care to look, but I knew they were happening. You see, every time Padma Lakshmi does something of note, “of note” being relative of course, I find out because someone out there finds it a teachable moment in which to share my critique of her 2016 memoir, and tag me on the same. The memoir reveals its author to be openly casteist and highly problematic in ways that disprove her progressive reputation in the West.

It doesn’t bother me to see these tags, but it does make me wonder why my piece seems to be one of very few, if not the only, one that discusses those issues. I must admit I sometimes also wonder if more people have read my review than her book – I say this not to be snarky, but because every time someone shares it, others express shock. Lakshmi’s bigotry is not common knowledge. 

People who’ve made smaller infractions, or whose views have traceably evolved, are discredited for far less. But, also, others who’ve made significant infractions remain celebrated.

I have a theory about all this: in order for a cancellation to snowball, the first detractor must aggressively drum up a wave. They must gear their criticism to galvanise mass condemnation. As I never had an interest in getting Lakshmi cancelled, and do not believe in that highly punitive approach at all, I did not invest my energy or time into this. So no wave. On social media, most people get pulled into waves, and do not long observe ripples – or pacificity.

I see this theory substantiated in a few ways. Firstly, there’s excessive traction for pithy and sometimes reductive hot takes. Nuance is inconvenient, especially when one has already made up one’s mind (or has decided to have their mind made up for them). People like to agree or disagree in broadly painted strokes. Secondly, there are those who build clout through takedowns: misconstruing statements to trigger engagement, picking a target then working backwards on an attack, swift and damning disavowals when even the slightest difference of perspective is present. Thirdly, there’s a particular kind of chameleonic social media user who waits to see what the consensus is, and then aligns with it – even if that means contradicting what they aligned with a few weeks prior. The necessary mix of objectivity, subjectivity, reflexivity, curiosity and good faith that enable learnings and solutions is missing.

Unless we choose social media absence, we participate in all this in some way or the other: alternating as stone-casters, targets, pawns and cohorts. Perhaps also choosing to be observers, energy-rationers and listeners will help dissolve the toxicity of the spaces we participate in.

It cannot be overemphasised that social media is an argumentative and unforgiving milieu. Optical gains and on-the-ground productivity often vastly diverge. If it’s true, as I feel, that mass social media activity does not happen organically, then, collective brushing-under-the-carpet is also not arbitrary either. There’s more to ponder…

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 11^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Let me tell you how debauched and vain I am. A great artist made an illustration of me, more accurate a likeness than even photographs. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. So I stared at it for ages, admiring her talent and by extension admiring myself. After say three or four hours of such self-absorption, I suddenly felt like there was something phallic about what I had thought was my hand in the image. “You idiotic girl,” said the friend I showed it to, not unfairly. “That’s a parrot.” I looked again, and so it was.

Another time, I showed a different piece, one I had found charming, to that friend. “Isn’t it cute how the mommy cat has boobies?” I squealed. They were paws, of course. Paws. So I felt quite relieved when the same friend recently shared with me one of her own creations, in which the feminine divine was unmistakeably rendered in a vibrant, semi-abstract style that emphasised Her distinct anatomy: heavy bosom, yantra-style yoni and all. I was quite relieved that there was no room for me to misinterpret those symbols with the ramblings of my dirty mind.

All this occurred to me when, for the first time in many years of being a customer, I saw the Myntra logo in a way that I could never again unsee. The e-commerce retailer has long used a stylised letter M, in orange and pink hues, as its branding. It still does, except that the exact placements of the colours have now changed. One person who looked at the logo and perceived the M as a naked woman with her knees open (that’s the can’t-unsee image that everyone who’s heard of this case has now seen, mostly for the first time) decided to file a lawsuit.

Why Avesta Foundation’s Naaz Patel decided to invest her effort into going after this logo instead of into, oh literally anything else, is baffling. Joining activists who are working on getting marital rape criminalised, having the Nirbhaya fund be well-utilised, pressuring online platforms to take cybercrime more seriously, and other major issues? Nah. An innocuous, colourful M was the problem more “offensive to women”.

That’s not a dirty mind. That’s an idle one.

 Like I said earlier, I totally understand how she saw what she saw. But some things simply lie in the eye of the beholder, and knowing the difference between when something is offensive and when one’s mind is just making a Freudian joke is important. Not to mention time-saving and energy-efficient. 

There’s also an un-funny, even frightening, component to this entire incident. It shows how progressive values can be misrepresented in opportunistic ways. Patel’s conservatism should not be mistaken for feminism, but it will be. 

The pettiness of a case like serves as a distraction from what truly matters. I would rather have the old Myntra logo back, even if I will always see a provocative image in it, than a new one that is nothing more than a symbol of how regressive thinking was given such weightage in India’s courts, while much more meaningful battles, legal and otherwise, continue to languish unattended.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 4^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Bombay High Court has ruled in a case pertaining to an attack on a 12-year old girl by a 39-year old man that he was not guilty of sexual assault because no skin-to-skin contact took place. He had groped her breasts, without removing her clothing. He was only deemed guilty of “outraging a woman’s modesty”.

On www.livelaw.in, which breaks down notable cases so that laypeople can understand them, lawyer Ashok Kini notes that “Neither the POCSO [Protection of Children From Sexual Offences] Act or any other laws in India define what is ‘touching’ or ‘physical contact’”. On the same website, lawyers Radhika Roy and Harshita Singhal broach the precedent case Ravi vs State, wherein holding the hand of a child (with sexual intent) was ruled as sexual assault, writing that this judgment has “shrunk the scope of sexual assault”. This has frightening repercussions for future cases, involving either minors or adults.

The phrase “sexual intent” bothered me, and I was (as a layperson) unable to find a legal definition, at least in India. But, according to the United Nations’ General Recommendation 19 to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, sexual harassment is the “unwelcome sexually determined behavior as physical contact and advances, sexually colored remarks, showing pornography and sexual demands, whether by words or actions.”

The word “unwelcome” suggests the interpretation of what constitutes invasive behaviour should firstly be from the perspective of the person who is subjected to it. Ascertaining the accused’s “intent” is problematic. The accused is not always going to express that they had such intent, especially if they’re aware of the legal ramifications of such an admission.

It should be easy to imagine a variety of scenarios in which, following a sexually transgressive experience, the perpetrator responds: “I only pulled your neckline up because I didn’t want our colleagues to leer at you”; “I only hold your waist so that our classmates think you’re ‘taken’ and don’t bother you”; “It wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t so drunk”; and the like. Sexual intent? No, no!

It should be easy to imagine these because they are intrinsically a part of the lived experience of many in this country. So is being groped, over the clothes, especially in public. I can’t speak for anyone else, but there is no way that I will ever feel that the archaic legal term “outraging a woman’s modesty” suitably defines my experiences.

If you’ve read this far, you won’t need a trigger warning. When I heard of this shocking judgement, my mind flew back to a night twelve years ago. I’d been on a sidewalk and had an intuition that the motorcycle coming from the opposite direction was trouble. I shifted my handbag to the shoulder away from the street. A mistake: it wasn’t my handbag he was after, but my breast, which he reached out and painfully smacked as he rode past. If he received pleasure from that touch, it was not from my body as much as from having and exerting the power to hurt me. Does that count as “sexual intent”? Why wouldn’t that count as assault?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 28^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

I wasn’t going to write about TV again this week, I swear, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Anna Shay.

Anna Shay – ah, heart-capturing heiress, arguably the brightest star on Bling Empire, the latest shot-pre-pandemic reality show. On the cusp of 60, with a fashion aesthetic that’s grunge-meets-diamonds, and a personality that: (a) makes you wonder if her co-stars know how lucky they are to know her, and (b) offers an attractive snapshot of a way of being, even sans the diamonds, especially for those who rarely see role models and representations of unconventionality that aren’t stereotypical or overblown. Fate dealt Shay a very nice hand, in the form of material privilege, but there’s something so down-to-earth about her, and that’s what’s positively dazzling.

 Shay presents two very evident traits during this show, both of which invite admiration. The first is that she comes across as being wise, in myriad, mostly subtle ways that don’t register quickly on a reality show’s edit style but which create an effect over the course of the season. The second is that she is clearly a private person. We find out, when her misbehaving friends meddle through her personal belongings and play rude pranks, that her life is quite colourful; but she draws a curtain so that we don’t ever have details. We don’t know who her lovers are, and running an internet search even reveals that she has successfully kept the names of her four ex-husbands firmly offstage. That curtain-drawing is an art; she just quietly, semi-smilingly, does it somehow. She doesn’t mince words, and she doesn’t always have to use them. The effect is formidable.

There’s a third trait. She is kind. Shay is not given to ostentatious displays of charity like her self-declared nemesis Christine Chiu, who doesn’t appear to notice the irony of sponsoring orphans as a party favour while also holding on to regressive ideas about bloodlines and boy successors. Rather, the kindness comes through in the way she treats people in her orbit: whether that’s non-judgmentally advising a friend in a toxic romantic relationship, helping the odd one out feel more welcome, or accepting apologies graciously. At the same time, Shay doesn’t suffer fools gladly, one of the tell-tale markings of someone who lives authentically. No saccharine, no passive-aggression. Just good boundaries. She’s not bored enough to invest in drama, even when it’s all that’s being asked for.

Who knows why this highly self-contained individual opted for the exposure of mass-marketed reality TV. If neither money nor boredom were motivators, what could it have been? The impression one gets is that Anna Shay signed up for the experience, with an open mind and an unflappable sense of selfhood, knowing she would be baited, but that didn’t have to lose her cool. (Above all else, this woman is cool). The impression one gets, actually, is that she’s not that interested in impressing anyone. As a result of which we cannot help but be more than a little in awe. It’s an effect that almost never occurs any more in this entertainment format. We’re not laughing this time; we’re watching and learning.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 23^rd 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.