It’s been exactly three months since the actor Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide. In the timeline of bereavement, that is not long, barely enough time for the shock to settle for those who actually lost him. Closest among these people was his partner, Rhea Chakraborty, also an actor. Chakraborty is currently incarcerated, reportedly in a cell without a bed or a fan. Officially, she was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau on the charge of purchasing recreational drugs for the deceased. Unofficially, the arrest follows a crescendo of character assassinations against her. The unofficial charges, fanned by TV channels and social media, include murder, embezzlement, sorcery, infidelity and domestic abuse.

Chakraborty arrived at the NCB office wearing a black T-shirt with these words: “Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s smash patriarchy, me and you.” It’s tempting to assume that she carefully selected this outfit that day, knowing that paparazzi – who’d been hounding her, without regard for pandemic-related social distancing, let alone her right to personal space – would be watching her every move. Or maybe she was exhausted or frightened, and didn’t give much thought to what she threw on. Either way, the rhyme made an impact. That she owns that T-shirt at all shows cognizance about what’s happening to her, and why.

That it’s other women, some of whom knew Rajput well (including relatives and a former partner), who lead the charges is a whole set of case studies on toxicity and guilt. That people at large seems to have accepted this narrative, though, is entirely about how comfortable India is with vilifying women.

It’s a mistake to hold Rhea Chakraborty up as some sort of feminist icon of the moment. By now, we should know better about cycles of pedestalisation and dethroning, which ultimately don’t move things forward collectively and also unfairly place too much on individuals’ shoulders. Chakraborty is not in a position of power. She is not where Natalie Portman was when she walked the red carpet in a cape embroidered with the names of women directors who weren’t nominated for Oscars. She is not where Princess Diana was when she strode stylishly into divorce, in a number considered so risqué it was dubbed “the revenge dress”, immediately after her spouse admitted to infidelity in a televised interview. 

She is, literally, in a dire situation. If we complicate victim-hero binaries, we’ll see that yes, Chakraborty is a symbol of how this is not a safe country for women. But she is also just one person, whom multiple institutions have scapegoated. “Justice” for Rajput – better phrased as peace with his demise – will require seeing the same: he was also just one person, who found the weight of the world too heavy to bear. Forcing his partner to bear this now, in a time of grief no less, will not bring him back. Fixating on either of them when thousands of farmers and dozens of students – and untold numbers of people, trapped within aspects of patriarchy, including unequal marriage, gender discrimination, toxic masculinity and various stigmas – have also died by suicide, due to systemic inadequacies, brings justice for no one at all.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 15^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

We need things to feel good about right now. Such balms are scarce at this time, for the international pandemic and the national economy have had negative effects on nearly every one of us. It’s too early to count our unhatched hopes, as well, even though it helps at many moments to remember resilience, count lucky turns, consider what it means to have advantages, weigh up blessings, celebrate small wins, and so on. A privilege I enjoy and am thankful for daily is my entertainment streaming subscription (just one this year, yes, thanks to that metaphorical tightening of the belt), Netflix, which sparked up my screen last week with Masaba Masaba. The series stars the actor Neena Gupta and her daughter, designer Masaba Gupta, playing themselves, referencing their lives’ events within the framework of fiction.

The can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her gorgeous Masaba Gupta is such a natural that you wonder for a millisecond why this talented woman didn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps earlier, but you know the answer: how often do we see someone dark-skinned and not thin star in Indian productions, especially without fetishizing those attributes? To play herself isn’t a conceit; it’s the ultimate gambit in an industry that has never looked kindly on anyone who doesn’t fit certain conventional models. 

Indeed, the overall unconventionality of the Guptas is given a refreshingly breezy treatment. There’s no drumming up of Neena’s decision to have a child out of wedlock in the 80s, Masaba’s mixed heritage or divorce, or other angles that a different show, one that tried too hard, would have milked. Even the humiliating experience of seeking to rent a home as a single woman, or the hurtful one of being disrespected after a booty call, are shown matter-of-factly, but without pressing for pathos. It’s not just a feel-good show, but also one that doesn’t talk down to us.

A couple of days after I finished the series, I realised what the intangible thing that I’d especially liked about it was. Masaba Masaba ends on what would usually qualify as a television cliffhanger, but the lightness of touch that makes this show so effervescent means the conclusion settles rather differently. In a time during which nothing can be taken for granted and nothing is guaranteed, it’s nice to feel like one has actually fully experienced something, without a residual pang of any kind. It would certainly be delightful to see the Gupta women onscreen together again, but it would also be perfectly alright if another season didn’t come around, soon or even ever. You know how sometimes all you need is one little cupcake, and you don’t have to reach for another? That feeling – of, to put it simply, a kind of self-containment that doesn’t have to mean finality, but also could – is this show’s endnote. 

This is what makes this show so perfect for pandemic viewing. There’s not only a wholesomeness but also a wholeness to it. In this time of losses and longings, so many unfulfillments, it doesn’t leave us craving. In any other year, this would be a backhanded compliment at best – but this year, it’s anything but. It’s peak satisfaction.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 7^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Bloomsbury India will no longer be publishing a non-fiction title on the bloodshed that took place in Delhi in January, following protests that the book is not only factually unsubstantiated but also promotes a skewed and dangerous perspective.

This response over one book, in a country where Mein Kampf is a consistent bestseller while most new works find very few readers, needs to be understood in terms of context, not just principle. Right from Bloomsbury’s decision to publish it, to the clashing waves of opinion against and for it, to the withdrawal of publication (not equivalent to a ban, a legal measure that only a government can take), the industry has walked right into major chaos for future books. Especially ones that challenge the powerful.

The day after the withdrawal, another publisher stepped forward to release the controversial book. Online, supporters of the book’s ideas discussed digital self-publishing, which showed an incongruous victim mentality, since there’s enough infrastructure available to the right-leaning to establish brick-and-mortar publishing companies. The language of liberal ideology – terms like “marketplace of ideas” and “freedom of speech” – were repurposed to suit an anti-liberal agenda. All this happened while on the liberal side of things, anger against one publisher and declarations boycotting them were the main event.

Some ideas are more dangerous than others, but this is not so much because of an idea itself but because of the machinery that pitches that idea forth. The machinery around propaganda narratives has gained a firmer footing because of this incident. Books have been withdrawn because of pressure before (titles by Wendy Doniger and Salman Rushdie immediately come to mind), but not usually because of pressure from liberal quarters. This feels more like falling for a trap than a victory. With this precedent, fighting the next round, especially if suppression and censorship really are involved, will be harder.

The dissemination of ideas – including manipulations, fabrications and smokescreen-suppressions – happens in more dynamic ways today than ever before. With a cellphone, internet and a couple of apps, a layperson can easily create, forward and receive (mis)information. Then, there are more sophisticated and frightening uses of technology. The social justice and intellectual sectors have no handle on the speed at, and new shapes in, which it’s all happening. Books still have a place in this scheme of things, as knowledge repositories for those wanting to engage with a subject in more than a cursory way. But most people aren’t exploring any concept, even what they live or die or kill or swear by, at such depth.

The ways that information – false or true – explodes or trickles into public consciousness, and results in individual and collective actions for better and for worse, does not require something as time-intensive (both in its production and its consumption) as a book for propagation. The core message can be conveyed in a meme, a text, a few seconds of video. This is the larger context of this controversy. To fixate on one offensive book that no one beyond the already-convinced would have read is to not be on the same page at all with what is happening in the world at large.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 31^st 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

If you don’t already know it, you’ll just have to go look up what the acronym “WAP” stands for, in the new hit song that carries that title. You see, I can’t tell you. Two of the three words might not be print-appropriate, and the other one is highly suggestive. The song itself isn’t suggestive, though. It says what it means, wants and needs upfront. Written and performed by rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, the track is unabashedly about female sexual desire, and how exactly to elevate that desire into pleasure.

 It’s the music video that really ups the ante (and upsets some anti-feminists, but we’ll get to that later). Women writhing and twerking, explicit lyrics, outfits that parade and demand praise for the body (I’ve always wondered why revealing apparel is said to “leave little to the imagination”, when the effect it can have is to pretty much conflagrate the imagination) – nothing new. We’ve seen them in a thousand music videos before, and sometimes we’ve found them hot and sometimes we’ve found them distasteful, but quite rarely do we encounter the sheer exuberance that “WAP”’s visual depiction achieves. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like it’s objectifying anyone, or pandering to anyone else.

I can only chalk this up to the amount of creative control that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion must have had over its production (safely shot during a pandemic, to boot). The video shows women in control, who look like they’re having fun, and even ends on a note that made me laugh out loud – because sexy play is about all kinds of things, humour included. I hear there are censored and uncensored versions, and I’m not sure which one I watched, but – and this seems to be the point of the entire audiovisual endeavour – I really enjoyed it.

Some of the people who seem most offended by the song must have rather enjoyed it too. One can always tell, especially when the gentlemen doth protest too much. Conservative American political commentator Ben Shapiro remarked that he thought a perfectly natural bodily function signifying arousal was probably a medical condition, substantiating this claim as his doctor spouse’s professional opinion. Entertainer Russell Brand, who has opened up about receiving treatment for sex addiction in the past, released a judgemental video (four times as long as the song) about how he thought it wasn’t doing much at all for women’s empowerment.

Again, nothing new – people of all ideological stripes everywhere have real problems with women enjoying themselves. Remember the uproar over Swara Bhaskar’s masturbation scene in the movie Veere Di Wedding? Trolls who hate the actor for her vocal views on democratic rights still don’t fail to bring it up while condemning her.  Desire is a complicated thing, full of frustrations that sometimes transmute into flimsy rhetoric, shaming others, moral policing, or in this particular case, misogynoir (when the prejudice is about both race and gender; the principal artists in this song are both African-African women).

Which is why, all the more, the sheer fulfilment expressed by the dancing, desirous, sated ladies in the “WAP” video is such a thing of joy.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 24^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Ceres spins between Mars and Jupiter, tiny in relation to the planets but with a gravitational force that rounds out its celestial body, larger than other asteroids. For the last five years, the Dawn probe has been doing a reconnaissance in and around the dwarf planet. Here’s what we know, newly: there is water there, the rumour of subsurface oceans, the prospect of sustaining life.

Ceres was named for the Roman goddess of the harvest, who was one of the deities who expressed her displeasure with a ‘prodigium’, punishing humans for their offensive behaviour. A prodigium was, binaristically speaking, the opposite of a miracle.

There are other dwarf planets: Eris, named for the Greek goddess of discord, who tossed a golden apple and incited a petty feud that escalated into the Trojan War; Haumea who shines somewhere beyond Neptune’s trajectory, named after the Hawai’ian goddess of childbirth; Makemake, named for the unpartnered fertility deity worshipped by Easter Island’s Rapa Nui people; and of course, the formidable Pluto, which shares its name with the Roman lord of the netherworld, who holds Ceres’ daughter Proserpina (Persephone, in another tongue) hostage for half of each Earthly year, causing the stark variations between seasons in some parts of our planet. Unlike Pluto, who suffered the indignity of losing planet status, Ceres went from being a 19^th century asteroid to becoming a dwarf planet. Unlike all the others, Ceres is moonless.

Moonless, without the company of a satellite to count the orbits of short days and long nights by, and holding reservoirs of saltwater, which seep from its fractured crust, containing the memory (or at least the implication) of an ocean once. Ceres may, still, have an underground ocean, a carefully withheld secret. We cannot see her – oh, there it is, the anthropomorphisation I was scientifically trying to resist – with the naked eye, but even on the nights when we don’t think of her, which are more often than not, surely somewhere in our subterranean consciousness it helps to know she is out there. Not all saltwater is the sea, not all saltwater is tears. But in our search for meaning in this lonely universe, there is solace to be scrounged from a metaphor, or in any shared symbol in which we sense something like ourselves.

Ceres intrigues scientists because any celestial object that bears water offers, at least until proven otherwise, the possibility of habitation. By us, human beings, who have almost destroyed the bounty of our own planet and intend to colonise more. Which brings us back to the mystery of Ceres’ aquatic geology. There’s another possibility, another intersection at which myth maps on fact: what if Ceres, a small planet once ocean-surged, had homed a sentience that resembles us in its intellect and sentiment? Neither intellect nor sentiment have kept us from tormenting Earth and its beings, after all. Perhaps, in this interpretation, the mystical and the terrestrial met, and Ceres unleashed a prodigium on that dominant lifeform. Perhaps what that lifeform had in common with us, every other imaginable marker aside, was greed. What happens next, then, is not so much fate as it is choice.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 13^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

At first, monochromatic photos of women who frequently share their visages filled my phone’s screen – familiar and familiarly attractive. I was used to double-tapping a heart on them, perhaps even used to their beauty. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly challenging about the latest Instagram trend, despite the caption “Challenge accepted”, and the women’s empowerment hashtags alongside seemed random. Then, slowly, a different category of photos trickled in, posted by women who rarely shared photographs of themselves solo. I would not be so cavalier as to say they hid; rather, they usually just allowed different aspects of their lives to speak for them. They regularly shared their art, photography, food choices, friendships and leisure, but didn’t often place their physical appearances front and centre.

There are stories in those images, from the women who rarely pose. The halo of a hooded winter jacket around one face implied an adventure, the quiet side profile perusing documents hinted at intellectual pursuit, a selfie in a dirty mirror from one who usually prefers to remain unseen conveyed a powerful declaration. The automatic glamour and gravitas of monochrome aside, the portraits that some women have been choosing to post cannot be called superficial. The captions remain as minimal as ever, yet – at least in some images – I had the sense that there was something more to all this.

We’ve seen a fair share of so-called challenges that are rightly called frivolous: from belting a pillow to one’s naked body (#quarantinepillowchallenge) to posting a photo for just 24 hours and deleting it (#untiltomorrow), and more. Saree, “glow up”, makeup and other fashion-related “challenges” also persist; and indeed, create real challenges for women whom stalkers find through them. As for the hashtags, we see trends like #womensupportingwomen all year round (and especially on International Working Women’s Day, March 8^th, when every brand on the planet wants a woman to fill their coffers, oops, I mean pamper herself). But something differed…

Finally, I learned: the lack of details in the captions belies the origins of #ChallengeAccepted, which was begun by Turkish feminists reacting to the brutal murder of a young woman by her ex-boyfriend. She was one of over 40 women killed in the country by a partner or relative in July alone. The Turkish government has plans to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, a human rights treaty that deals specifically with gender-based violence. Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia have already rejected or withdrawn from the same.

Perhaps most of the women responding to the challenge worldwide have little idea about all of this, and are just enjoying a moment to bask in appreciation. But I’d like to think that something about the spirit of true resistance – battle-weary, not very pretty resistance – spoke to them before they picked out that desaturated filter, meant originally not to invoke glamour but to symbolise how newspaper stories reporting crimes are often accompanied by black and white photos of the victim or survivor.

Even not knowing all of this, however, it’s true that any woman who posts any image of herself – ever – in the quotidian environment of hostility and harassment online, is being brave. Every time.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 3^rd 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

In the new reality show Indian Matchmaking, there’s a telling little parable in the fact that the matchmaker Sima Taparia (aka “Sima from Mumbai”) believes herself too conservative to handle one of her clients, a career-minded young woman. She sends her to another matchmaker who puts on all the airs of open-mindedness, but tells the client point blank that women should not consider themselves the equals of men. Nuggets like these hold up a provocative mirror, in this show that audiences either love or hate, but seem to binge on either way. This is what India is, and it’s true for enough of its diasporas too. The studies and statistics speak for themselves: notably, the soaring rate of women who leave the workplace after marriage or childbirth and the miniscule percentage of inter-caste marriages. Is the show colourist, sizeist, casteist, sexist, classist, divorce-stigmatising, ableist, heteronormative? It’s honest. It’s Indians, here and abroad, who are all those things.

Perhaps many are embarrassed by the show because it hits very close to home, paralleling conversations they’ve had with their families without cameras rolling. To be fair, perhaps some are triggered too, having experienced the toxicity of the process. Ultimately, that’s what the show neatly underlines. It doesn’t glorify marriage, arranged or otherwise. It merely presents the institution for what it is at best, which is not so attractive at all upon scratching the surface, and leaves it to us to judge it, as we should. There are enough single parents, painful backstories and villainous archetypes represented in it that complicate any superficial cutesiness.

“In India nowadays, marriages are breaking like biscuits,” says Taparia. Whether or not she thinks it’s a good thing, it is. People are freeing themselves from bad decisions.

Subtle, hilariously presented socio-political critique aside, what Indian Matchmaking captures well is the loneliness of its subjects. Arranged marriage has long been regarded as practical, sensible, devoid of whimsy, downright algorithmic. The fear, isolation, disappointment and manipulation that send many hurtling into it are swept under the rug. But here, the subjects speak of these components openly. 

In one scene, a headstrong woman pins her hopes on an astrologer’s prediction, and this surfaced a specific reminiscence for me. I’ve never come close to the vicinity of having an arranged marriage, for many reasons. But someone I loved had one. In the month I was predicted to get engaged, that person secretly became betrothed. There was a wedding in the year that my stars aligned, and it was not mine. Since then, those who cast my horoscope say, “You turned down a marriage in 20XX? It’s indicated here that you were married then.”

It’s there in my chart, and I have the scars in my heart to prove it, but I’ll never know how my destiny was thwarted, or stolen. Here’s what I do know: the other person changed theirs. We do have that power. That’s what I loved most about Indian Matchmaking. The first season leaves most of the storylines deliberately incomplete, which is as it should be. We should all know by now that Happily Ever After is only one way to end a story.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 23^rd 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Let me try to write this without taking any names at all, since – allegedly at least – a missing epithet was what started it all. Sometime last year, a Mumbai-based comedian took a jibe onstage at the way in which Indians exaggerate about their idols (in this case, a literal idol – a statue of a historical personality). Superpower-attribution was the punchline, as is evident from the video excerpt of one minute and six seconds that made the rounds last week in an organised effort to attack the comedian. She received violent threats; two of her abusers have been arrested. Yet the comedian was not only pressured into issuing an apology, but a venue she’d performed in was also vandalised, and further action may still be taken against her.

Some say that the fact that she pointedly did not use the honorific title for the historical personality was the problem, that this was disrespectful. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for the personage doesn’t use it either. Yet a little-known entertainer became the deliberate object of ire.

No matter how small-minded some are, and how they condemn those who believe in fundamental freedoms, including of expression and speech, there is a force of goodness in the world that rises in solidarity. Ironically for those who seek to crush and erase, those they attack invariably become more celebrated. The comedian who many of us hadn’t heard of before last week is now a name we’ll recognise sympathetically and with respect. We don’t find it hypocritical that she apologised, understanding it was a gesture of placation that protects her. We may encourage her next work in a bigger way. And if – like so many who went underground to stay alive with some measure of peace, or worse, like the journalist shot on her porch by an assassin who didn’t know who he was murdering, like the social media star killed by her brother, the jailed dissidents, and others – she is permanently suppressed, she will still be among the names we won’t forget.

There’s a new translation of a novel by a Tamil author who experienced similar persecution some years ago, and is now internationally renowned in part because of the outpouring of support that he received. In it, he seems to compassionately rue the bitterly limited lives of those with intolerant perspectives. He seems to wish freedom from their insularity for them.

The truth, if we examine it, is that dogmatists are fuelled not by pride but by insecurity, not by faith but by envy. They cannot bear the idea that anyone else should feel the liberty they won’t permit themselves to have. This is why they project wildly onto icons and insignia, and organise in mobs. They feel inadequate on their own.

No wonder they hate anyone who can be their own person. All by herself, with a mic. There’ve been at least two more concerted attacks on comedians since last week – on someone who defended the original target, and through the insidious leaking of personal contact details of another. The attackers go after all that opens the heart or mind. It’s no surprise that laughter is anathema to them.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 16^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

So much happens in the penumbra that the pandemic casts; so much that takes place when our attention has been averted – rulings handed down without our awareness, or at best, in the guise of necessary constraints on civil and other freedoms. Changes in international immigration laws, particularly in the USA, are about to leave lakhs of Indian students and workers stranded, facing deportation or forced into major decisions that may permanently change their trajectories. In the meanwhile, the former colony of Hong Kong has swiftly been politically reabsorbed into a country it does not necessarily want to be a part of any longer. Non-human beings – plants and animals – are losing their habitats to quietly passed decrees. With and without our common knowledge, more like this is happening everywhere.

To return to those people who will now be forced to come “home” – how sure can you be that this is their home? 

I have held Indian citizenship my entire life, despite never having lived in this country until I was an adult. I grew up, first, for a few years, in a nation that has yet to reckon with the long shadow of a civil war. And then, for not a few years at all but for almost eighteen of them, in another nation where I was, for all legal purposes, (you guessed it) an “international student”. At the very end of my time there, I was so desperate to stay that I lived on a tourist visa that required me to perform an emotionally and legally precarious border-crossing every month, until I couldn’t. Every year I’ve been here since then has reinforced my sense of unbelonging. My story isn’t unique.

The stories you think you know – about how only the privileged travel or migrate, about the ignorance and entitlement of the diaspora, and pithy condescensions that one can be at home anywhere in the world – aren’t realities as often as assumed. Life’s vicissitudes are personal and vast. No one is only the document they hold, or don’t.

Let’s bring our attention back “home”, then. Trespasses of physical landscapes are but abstractions, and distractions, in relation to what happens within borders to those presumed to not belong there. While the pandemic can make envisioning broader pictures and possible futures hazy, it’s important to remember that only a few months ago, the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens were blazing issues. They still are, to those who have been or could be personally affected by any similar legal rulings. 

In fact, the pandemic has highlighted just how volatile and arbitrary it truly is to technically be from a place, but have no foothold there, even while within it. The plights of lakhs of “migrant” workers – meaning here only those who’ve moved between states within the same nation – who underwent or undergo special peril during the lockdown should have already taught those of us who haven’t experienced it personally just what a capricious concept belonging is. Some are sheltered within borders, some are held captive, some are exiled beyond them – and most do not know which it is, until the unpartitioned sky feels like it’s falling on their own lives.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 11^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Chinese are credited for having invented – among many other things – movable type printing, tea cultivation, mechanical clocks, bristle toothbrushes and umbrellas. Plus several other items that are quite debatable in their utility, depending on your perspective of course, such as gunpowder and silk. Why, the oldest known residue of alcohol was discovered in a 9000-year old artefact from Henan province. So if one is really serious about boycotting anything of Chinese origin, the list is exhaustive. Why stop at momos and mobile phones? The same would be true for almost any other region or culture. The weft and warp of human history has many interwoven threads. To try to pry one apart would require an unravelling of the whole. 

Boycotting silk because of its cruelty to silkworms, or because of the exploitation of weavers (this, I personally do as much as I can)? Boycotting tea because of the horrible legacy of colonial tea estates across Asia (this, I can’t give up completely yet – I’m truly sorry)? More power to you who make these meaningful choices. But boycotting noodles made of raw materials from India, manufactured at an Indian factory where Indian people are employed, with the product itself filling the tummies of (yep) Indians? Praising a ban on an app that offered many Indians platforms for their creativity, brought joy to millions more, and gave employment to everyone who worked at any level at their local offices? I’m not clapping for you.

Boycotting is a principled action that may or may not have an impact on the target, but which certainly has a positive bearing on fortifying one’s ideals and sense of personal accountability. The list of things we could thoughtfully boycott include single-use plastics and other materials that affect the environment, brands that use labour unethically, celebrities who promote discrimination or have been abusive, and events sponsored by unscrupulous organisations. For a boycott to be meaningful, it has to not only be about abstaining from something but also include long-term behaviours or short-term actions that support something else. Those who conscientiously boycott goods from another country may want to boost India’s economy by purchasing exclusively from local producers, for example. Matching what would have been spent, had one not set a personal embargo, with an equal donation to a progressive organisation or cause is another way to thoughtfully do this. 

There are plenty of Indian products that deserve our mass boycotts, while we’re on the subject. What about – just for a start – the brand formerly known as Fair & Lovely, which has revamped its name rather than taking itself off the market and apologising to the generations of people it emotionally scarred and the entire races it has insulted? Why brood vaguely on a whole other country when there are companies, institutions and systems right here that require our attention? Besides which, boycotts are only one type of solution. To dismantle with an intent to rebuild – far different from destroying without a plan or as an assertion of force – requires multi-pronged approaches. Does our rejection further the cause we truly support? Do we even know what that cause is, and what it requires?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 4^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

When an amabie rises out of the ocean (or even, as was chronicled in August 1895, out of an irrigated paddy field), it brings with it two tidings. The first is that an abundant harvest is coming. The second: epidemic will follow. But the amabie of Japanese lore – described as a three-legged mer-creature, usually either scaled or covered in hair – is both harbinger and healer. If the afflicted are shown a drawing of it, they will be free of disease. In the 19^th century, woodblock printed newssheets carried these images; today, not only are paper amulets being distributed at Shinto shrines, but manga artists have shared tens of thousands of renderings of this entity online, to ward off the novel coronavirus.

The belief that there are powers that both bestow and dispel disease is reflected in India as well. Here, goddesses including Mariamman, Sitala and Raksha Kali are propitiated, often with the understanding that the illness itself is a form of grace. The Babylonian deity Aplu, the Yoruban orisha Babalú-Ayé, and the Tibetan Parnashabari (who once held sway in India religious practices too) also hold these dualistic powers.

Folk belief, legend and religiosity tread a fluid line. When Norway suffered from bubonic plague in the 14^thcentury, the illness became associated with the character of an elderly woman. Named Pesta, she would carry either a rake or a broomstick. If she was sighted with a rake, some succour would appear in the community; if she was sighted carrying a broomstick, then all was doomed. In one tale about Pesta, a boatman realises only mid-way across a river that his passenger is the dreaded plague herself. This is when a third object in her possession is revealed: she has a book, presumably of final fates. The boatman pleads for mercy, but she consults the book and shake her head. She cannot avert his death, although she can ensure that he doesn’t suffer. The lesson: acceptance.

The German legend of the Pied Piper of the town of Hamelin is about a rat-catcher with a mysterious musical instrument that he played to bring the vermin out of their hiding places, holding them enchanted all the way to the outskirts and beyond. Despite ridding the town of the infestation, he didn’t get paid properly – so he exacted his revenge by playing his pipe to lure children away instead. Many versions of the story have tragic endings. Some believe there’s historical evidence of these events, particularly the loss of the children. Because they’d been led away dancing and singing, neither activity is permitted on the street, Bungelosenstraße (“drumless street”) where they were last reportedly seen in June 1284. The lesson: gratitude.

These beliefs and stories may find little favour with science, which does not regard pandemics and contagions as being prone to persuasions in this way. But they are vital. They honour how illnesses are largely arbitrary and inevitable, yet in the magical way of all stories, offer hope to allay the fear, like honey that helps the medicine go down. After all, if there’s one thing the myth of the amabie teaches us, it’s this: art is a remedy.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 9^th 2020. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.