The Venus Flytrap: Do Not Be Daunted

All around the world, political currents which seemed to some to only be undulating, just mildly threateningly, on the horizon have not-so-suddenly arrived onshore. Those who warned about what could come or tried to stop it were not able to keep bigotries, anti-democratic actions and sectarianism at bay. If this moment is historical, it is not only because people in the future (if humanity has a future, although climate change experts predict otherwise) will speak of it and trawl through records of it, but also because it has happened many times already. Such times – in which vast tides of populations turned towards destructive ideologies – are a part of known history, both recent and distant. In such times, Bertolt Brecht – who lived in exile away from Germany when the Nazis were in power – wrote, we will have to “keep singing”. To quote: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times.”

This could be read as a moral imperative – that there must be singing, so to speak, no matter how bleak the larger reality we live in. We can understand “singing” as including all manner of arts, all modes of study, and all acts of creation, including abstractly the raising of children, the tending of plants and self-care. But that final line – “About the dark times” – holds a standard for that imperative. Again, everywhere, the question arises of what the artist’s, teacher’s (or in our particular time, influencer’s) responsibility is in bringing awareness to injustice, helping galvanise change, or recording events.

Many hold this responsibility incredibly seriously, which we need. But to chastise those who don’t is correct only when it comes to those who refuse to, who support the status quo and prefer the different forms of denial that allow it. For there are those who create joy as neither denial nor distraction, but as salve and reviving agent. Beauty and sweetness are powerful healers. We cannot give in to the idea that there can only be grimness in “the dark times”; we must not lose our sense of melody, and of the many ways to strike a chord.

The Talmud – a legal compilation sacred to Jews, who were persecuted by the Nazis (our modern benchmark for democratically-elected evildoers) – offers possible instructions in the form of these beautiful instructions: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” The last line is the most resonant. It’s simply not going to be possible to be a torchbearer, a teller-of-truth-to-power, at all times. Exhaustion, personal circumstances, self-doubt, reasonable fear and difficulty will happen to even the best among us. Perhaps one more way to interpret that directive, and use it well, is to understand that it’s not necessary to be hopeful, or imagine that we must behave as beacons of hope, but when hope comes, we must honour it. In this way, little by little, we will still do what we can to resist, record – and rise above.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 19th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Feminist Pishachinis

Before I sat down to write this, I was sure that almost every woman columnist in the country has written, will write about, or is currently submitting a file on the same topic at this time. We were going to repeat ourselves and each other, I thought, overlapping in our grief and our jargon. And we had to: we had to reinforce what’s important, spread the message in different circles, be a chorus of resistance. Then I sat down, and found my heart in my mouth and no words at my fingertips. There have been years and years of words: words in whispers, words in affidavits, words in screenshotted conversations, words in editorials, words out loud (even scream-loud), words swallowed but turned to choices, words that echo. And yet.

A few months ago, a misogynistic NGO in Karnataka organised what they called a “Feminist Pishachini Mukti Puja”, a year after their Kanpur chapter organised symbolic funerary rites for women who had left their marriages. One organiser called the experience “cathartic” for the ex-husbands who performed these rituals. They consider themselves activists for men’s rights. Such events gave some of us well-deserved memes and humour breaks, but it was sadness that reminded me of them. Both to laugh at and to perform the spell-casting are to lose the point: no magic is needed to make women suffer in India. For that, we have: patriarchy, politicians, police, people in our homes, people in our workplaces, people who are complete strangers, people in public, people online. They may be, and are, of any gender. They may be, and are, of any affiliation. What they have in common is that they hate us so deeply: women, other women, some women, women unlike themselves, any woman, all women. That hatred manifests as everything from protective measures to punitive measures.

I looked at the faces of the men in photos of that puja to eradicate women, and at the faces of the men in the photos of a celebration of the extrajudicial encounter in Hyderabad in which 4 suspects in a murder-rape were killed. Both sets motivated by the same violent impulses and beliefs. Any woman they had in mind was theoretically theirs to destroy, or avenge. The divorcees had been abusive, as their participation ascertained. Those cheering the fatal encounter – having left their wives, daughters, mothers, women co-workers and friends somewhere “safe” – were, statistically speaking, also more likely to be than not. Besides, violence is not only physical.

In the last few days, many women have managed to say – through the mire of renewed heartsickness and anger – exactly how this makes us feel. This is how we feel all the time. Each time something horrific happens, we aren’t reacting with shock. There’s a fear we live with constantly, a fear of something that’s like a pollutant in the air. We breathe it in every day. Some days, someone dies because of it. If there is a day at all in India in which that doesn’t happen (just because it doesn’t become a headline doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen), it’s still a day on which someone – no, many – survived an attempt.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 12th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: False, Or Incomplete?

Last week’s column was spurred by reactions to a potentially false sexual harassment allegation, but did not delve into the catalyst for the same: (potentially) false allegations. Over the past two years, with more women than ever sharing their experiences of harassment and assault, the question of veracity has come up repeatedly. It’s a fair one. But it’s also a good-faith practice to acknowledge that very few people stand to gain from such fabrications. Outliers (or plain liars, if you prefer) who do benefit are outnumbered by those who risk, and face, consequences for telling the truth. We can objectively accept that a tiny percentage of fraudulent cases exist, but that they should not cancel out the rest. We can also attempt to talk about what falseness means.

Firstly, there’s a difference between potentially false and incomplete, and the latter is often tarred with the same brush as the former. An incomplete story can have complicated factors, like: being in love with the perpetrator, being pressured by sources other than the perpetrator (like their “cool” friends) to go along with a situation, and so on. It can be difficult to respect people who distance themselves from their earlier allegations, especially if they’ve made it challenging for others to come forward afterwards in the same environment. But our private character judgements should not cloud principled stands.

In certain uncomfortable situations, wherein I did not have a good intuitive reading of the accuser or their desired outcomes, I’ve found it possible to consider the spirit of what was being said, if not the letter. This has been true in cases in which an unreliable narrator blew the lid open on a well-connected and gregarious accused, who had long been protected. What we can believe then is not the speaker’s testimony as much as the many crusted layers of silence, denial and complicity that allowed the perpetrator to carry on as they had. Within these layers are the stories we’d quietly known all along, always whispered or implied, as well as our own secrets – such as how prided ourselves on being street-smart enough to escape, or how we had experienced trouble too, but mollified the situation, or how much we liked the alleged perpetrator.

A series of particularly gruesome rapes and murders were reported in India last week, and some will wonder why I’m still writing about sexual harassment when “more serious crimes” are happening. But it’s an obfuscation to place crimes on a continuum of violence without acknowledging how a continuum functions, how actions increase in violence the more we allow leeway for what we perceive as minor infractions. Ribald jokes in the office aren’t on the same scale of egregiousness as assault, but both are wrong. We must see how they are related: how being okay with one wrong leads to the next worse thing being possible, and then the next worse, until… The webcomic Sanitary Panels said it best with a cogent new take.  “This is horrific! Why don’t women talk about sexual violence more?” says a stick figure holding a newspaper. “We do. But you don’t believe us if we’re alive…” responds the other.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 5th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: #MeToo Messiness

Let me be the first to admit that I don’t really have a good understanding of the latest Twitter-based scandal involving a man accused of sexual harassment, audio recordings in which an advocate purportedly tries to conceal evidence, and one of the more social media-visible participants of the #MeToo movement in India. I came to hear of it through a dramatic pronouncement by a heterosexual male friend, whose “all of metoo is false” text message I responded to with a slew of eyeroll emojis. It is simply not possible to discredit an entire, complex, global, multi-pronged movement because of a potentially false allegation. But people are certainly trying to, which is a kind of telescoping of the larger context. The context is cultural, not individual.

Similar to my disinterest in the intricacies and daily-shifting loyalties in this case, others who are unable to keep up with the tide and who don’t have grounding in social justice ethics or praxis are liable to slip between the cracks ideologically. We do not live in times in which we think for ourselves, and a great deal of the vocabulary and framing now available to us is new to common parlance, and requires a certain degree of privilege to understand and employ. The demand that we quickly form opinions, without deep engagement, means that some people default into the easiest stance – which in this case is that the entire anti-sexual harassment movement is a mess.

We would do well to acknowledge that it is messy, though. A few days after sending me that message, the same friend seemed to have a mini-crisis. It began with him saying he’d been lusting over someone but was afraid of flirting due to “cancel culture”, then a segue into whether mental health issues should be accepted as blanket absolutions, and finally an admission of feeling conflicted about having to mediate harassment-related issues in a workplace. All these issues had collapsed on themselves, and led to a confusion which was most expediently cut through with dismissal.

This is a very common phenomenon. It’s critical to address why many men and women do not feel like the language or actions of this vital movement speak to them or for them. The reasons will be manifold. Personal apathy is only the tip of the iceberg.

We are being dishonest if we claim that we had this level of empowerment even four or five years ago, or if we claim that we truly know what we are doing now. Performative activism that doesn’t contain practical elements, long-term vision or self-reflexivity is challenging for even die-hard feminists to navigate through and counter. It is even harder for those who find certain concepts (which we may smugly think of as “just decent behaviour”) to be new. Rather than shame, how can we build learning resources, hold meaningful space, and improve access to both – while also discussing restitution and justice? Can we not fixate on famous cases, and focus on improving the culture at large? I have more questions than solutions because that’s where we still are – and because the answers should also be manifold, diverse and anything but individual.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 28th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: To Create Rather Than Produce

It takes a long time for Shashi Tharoor to get onstage, even in the recorded and edited version of events. First, there’s another comedian’s set. Before and after, there are glimpses of him getting advice from the more experienced, references to how there are just 24 hours in which to rehearse, time spent within a vehicle in traffic, him looking at his notes backstage. By the time the politician, novelist and now stand-up comic’s turn arrives in the Amazon Prime special he features in, there’s the sneaking suspicion that the producers added as many buffers as possible around his gig itself.

They didn’t need to. Onstage, Tharoor is unexpectedly genial. He consults notes (“Panama Papers”, he quips) unselfconsciously. He grins when he thinks he’s done well. He mostly does, because whether or not the punchlines come as a surprise, there’s something strangely sincere about his whole attempt. It doesn’t come off as something quirky to do on the campaign trail, and neither does he seem out of place. No, he seems like he really wants to be there, at a comedy club in Noida, trying to make an audience of mostly millennials laugh. It’s all quite unlike what we are used to politicians doing, and yet exactly what they should be doing: hoping to please us, versus the other way around.

What I admired about Tharoor’s foray, at the age of 63 and while still at the height of a public (and controversial) career, is that he made that foray at all. In an era in which anyone can become a meme, when cruelty masquerades as incisiveness, it takes courage to try anything new.

One of the many, many chain reactions of our productivity-based, capitalism-driven world is that it’s much harder for us now to just attempt something. Instead, we must monetise our efforts. We must create an illusion of having mastered new learnings and skills while we were also accomplishing other things. Failure both isn’t permitted, and is permanent. “Failure” is also defined by people who hold their opinions on another’s work to be more valuable than the risk, time and energy put into creating that work itself. It doesn’t take even a second to hit the thumbs-down button.

Nowhere is this more evident than in careers in the public eye, particularly in the arts. Tharoor’s stand-up comedy set was mostly well-received. What happens next? If he doesn’t pursue a full-length show, he’ll be called a one-hit wonder who didn’t dare go further. If he does, and it flops, he’ll be castigated. This is partly where the pressure comes from. Success is expected to be repeated, formulaically. If one withdraws for a while to immerse in intensive knowledge-gathering, skill-honing or art-making, they do so at the risk of courting obscurity.

All this has a detrimental effect on culture itself – on what becomes culture. Perhaps if the consuming public wasn’t so intent on dismissing everything out there as mediocre, while simultaneously demanding more and more, it would be possible for those who create culture to actually to do so. To create rather than to produce, that is. For its own sake: applause or no applause.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 21st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Breaking Down In Berlin

Eventually, the only explanation I could find for the despair the city dredged up in me clicked into place: Berlin, post-partition Berlin, was younger than I was. Four years younger, to be precise, which meant that a vast number of people in the city carried the memory of when and where their city had been divided. They held that demarcation within themselves, a hidden knowledge. Perhaps some raw nerve in me had been tapped by, or tapped into, this.

Every day that I was in Berlin, I woke up and wept and wept and dragged myself out of the attic room my friend Nawaaz had generously let me stay in during his own summer in the city. I had to fill the hours somehow, so that I would not collapse, so I did everything. I consumed beauty and pillage in museum after museum; admired the verdigris that crowned the architecture; pronounced currywurst to be unimpressive – like any tourist. Puzzled by my state, Nawaaz was extraordinarily kind, taking time away from his own plans for me. We went to a gorgeous Afro-Cuban musical performance and drank – oh, I wish I remembered what it was; in those nights I never imagined I would ever stop raising liquor to my lips. We went to the Philharmonic and listened to a youth orchestra. We went to Potsdam with another friend, where we walked improbable distances and I posed with sunflowers twice my height on Friendship Island (bless the act of portrait-taking, the act that stakes a claim to be seen, to scratch one’s presence in a moment into a tangible surface; when I see that photo now, I not only think “I was there”, but also, “I am still here.”). New and old acquaintances took me under their wing: took me boating on a lake, filled the seats at the table where I blew out the candle on my birthday cake that year, told me fantastic stories from their own lives and travels, eased those hours for me. I avoided the Holocaust memorial. I couldn’t risk that fragmentation.

I was in the throes of a mental health crisis, and perhaps it heightened my sensitivity to the place, to its underpinnings. Yet Berlin was followed by a few days all alone in Paris, when I was nothing if not suffused with light. It was that respite that convinced me that the older ruptures in Berlin and the newer ruptures in me had spoken to one another. But empathy is not trauma, as overwhelming as it can be to experience it.

This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had visited its remains, now a gallery of murals, and gotten my passport stamped with the motif of a standing bear at Checkpoint Charlie. Seven years since that trip, I turn my theory around in my head. Is there every really a clean selvage between self and situation? I do not blame Berlin for the bewilderment I felt. I am grateful it showed me that I had been unwell. I send love to its invisible borders, place my warm palm on them, somewhere in the ether.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 14th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Veils Between Worlds

It is said that there is a veil between worlds that allows us to believe that we inhabit only one completely, and when that veil thins – or perhaps only flutters lightly, as though stirred by a strange wind – that certainty dissolves. At dawn, at twilight, when the body is creating life or shedding it, in certain seasons – this is when we are in liminal space-time. We can sense or see the gossamer. Some of us know the borders and thresholds better than others, dwell in them, while others cannot believe in their existence. All and none of these things are true and untrue at once. That is the nature of liminality.

This time of year is one such interstice, for some cultures. The ancient Celts had Samhain, when costumed performers known as mummers would enact a play involving wounding and revival. They would be dressed to look like spirits, perhaps to confuse those very same spirits who would be wandering at this time, and for whom offerings would be kept. Many believe this festival contains the origins of the American holiday, Halloween. In Mexico, only days apart, is Dia de los Muertos, when the beloved dead are welcomed back and cherished with feasts, their graves strung with marigolds – that vibrant flower so closely associated with Tamil funerals as well.

There is fierce discourse that demands more depth from those who celebrate Halloween for fun. People’s heritages are not costumes, no matter how attractive their traditional attires are. The occasion’s underlying spiritual and cultural beliefs should not be erased in favour of capitalism, or candy. Such concern should travel wherever Halloween has travelled. Here in Chennai, there are parties for children now, and different parties for adults – no more than another reason to dress up, get a sugar high or a liquor buzz, and revel. This is okay, provided cultural sensitivity is observed. Halloween isn’t quite like Thanksgiving, an occasion that glorifies genocide, and which has bizarrely been refashioned by Indian influencers as a #gratitude moment. But still, there’s something beneath the merriment, an engagement with our mortalities and our pain or curiosity about the same, which for those who dare to pause and hold their breath for a moment will dizzy, disquiet and ultimately teach.

Entering, and being touched by, the liminal is not limited to certain times. Those are only the times when it seems to be easier. Those who misunderstand liminality impose taboos that create fear, and it’s this fear that – when ritualised, whether people like that word or not – becomes a scary costume or a supernatural film. The greatest fear is reversed into comedy (cheesy taglines selling Halloween-centric anything) or catharsis (video games in which we kill zombies and feel the blood-rush of our bodies reminding us of our aliveness).

My grandmother died on a Halloween, many years ago. The experience of losing her was ethereal. It deepened me into belief – whereas before it was as though I had only held strings of words under my tongue and in the crevices of my heart, but did not yet have language. Grief was only a part of it; the other part was illumination.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 31st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Jealousy With A Halo

Of all the emotions, named and unnamed, the one that is most rarely admitted to is envy. The more we destigmatise talking about mental health, the easier it has become to admit to persistent feelings of sadness and fear. Wrath is a tricky one – how it is expressed can determine others’ reactions to it, but admitting that one feels it on occasion is largely acceptable. You can be angry in a whole range of contexts, and even say that you hate someone, as a corollary of this first emotion. You can say you hate a professor, a parent, a parking lot attendant – people you may encounter just once or perennially – and few will blink at the harshness of the word. But envy? This powerful emotion that’s so easy to detect (and judge) in another is the last one that most will confess to feeling, let alone being motivated by.

Anything that is suppressed manifests somewhere else. There’s a cord of envy that runs beneath so many opinions and choices, be they personal, professional or political. Those who cannot recognise how it provokes them are condemned to expending their energy on dragging others down, sometimes very self-righteously. “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo,” as the author H.G. Wells put it.

About a decade ago, the German term schadenfreude, meaning “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune”, became popular among English speakers.  It turns out there’s a corresponding English word, epicaricacy, but this hasn’t entered common parlance. Before the whole world (wide web) decided that wokeness was aspirational, it was hipsterdom that dictated culture. Back then, dropping obscure words from many languages was one way to signal how cool you were (now, some would die of shame – ah, another negative emotion – if they did something so privilege-revealing).

The trendiness of the word schadenfreude allowed for people to explore and even express their envy – provided that its object had experienced some failure. It did not bring into the light the more insidious, painful kind of envy borne of another’s good fortune. That’s the kind that holds the risk of twisting the one who feels it into both personal bitterness and detrimental actions.

A similar contemporary moment might be the author Roxane Gay’s list of anonymous nemeses, whom she dramatically refers to as such on Twitter, with unveiled resentment. As a result of her candour, having a nemesis or several has become a part of online repartee. Some suggest that it provides a flippant way to channel ambition. At the very least, it’s honest. It doesn’t pretend that jealousy doesn’t exist.

But where is the space for useless, acrimonious, incurable envy? Why do we – we whose homes are broken by lies and secrets, whose careers have contained moments of sabotage, whose hearts have harboured poison – act as though this base emotion belongs only to the worst of people, and not our beloveds, our associates or ourselves? But it’s a human emotion, as human as love or disgust. If we didn’t deny its existence, if we didn’t conceal our envy from ourselves, perhaps we will find ways to dispel it – and the destructiveness it is known to spur.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 24th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Karmic Footprints

So Ellen DeGeneres, a beloved pioneer of queer visibility in the media, has shady friends. At least one that we know of: former American president George W. Bush, a conservative politician who was in office during the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 and subsequently waged wars in West Asia, thus creating a poor human rights record – something he shares with many who have held positions of power. The revelation that she had hung out with him at a recent sports match disappointed so many of her fans that she felt compelled to respond to the outrage. DeGeneres said, “Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say, ‘be kind to one another,’ I don’t only mean the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”

Here’s the thing – most of us have shady associates. DeGeneres’ capital and cultural weight mean she mingles in circles which wield power; all of us mingle in circles which confer and reinforce that power through votes, purchases, retweets and other personal choices. Power isn’t the only factor – cruelty happens in myriad, sometimes little, ways. We maintain rapports with people whom we’d abhor if we knew only their actions and opinions, but not them. We have trauma bonds, pragmatic enmeshments or happy memories with some; we can’t stand our loneliness without a few; and sometimes there’s a love that trumps all. The ugly truth in all cases is that the harm they do doesn’t affect us deeply enough.

DeGeneres was wrong to conflate this special consideration with goodness. To say that having friendships with people who wittingly create harm for others shows kindness is deliberate obfuscation. Such friendships may be convenient, unusual, meaningful, uncomfortable, symbiotic, resolved, or more. But not kind. Being kind to a malicious individual annuls kindness as a way of being. A friendship is not an act of charity, so the argument that we can be altruistic to someone who did past damage but is now in severe need isn’t relevant.

In the TV series The Good Place, a demon conducts an afterlife experiment on four condemned humans, creating a version of heaven that proves playwright-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s line, “Hell is other people”. In the latest season, the now-reformed demon is determined to fix the system. He visits a living human who – having received knowledge about the afterlife’s workings while on psychedelics – is committed to as wholesome and unhurtful a life as possible. The demon discovers that this hermit is a profoundly broken person, obsessed with what we could call his karmic footprint. He doesn’t do anything good or useful. He’s too busy avoiding doing bad.

Like a carbon footprint, a karmic footprint too is an inescapable fact of the human condition. While we can control to some extent the pain we personally cause, we (sometimes subconsciously) justify our loved ones’ actions so as to justify our relationships with them. Doing so isn’t kindness. It’s merely compromise. The least we can do is hold this self-awareness as we try harder to keep our own hands clean.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 17th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Decolonising Language

In the 19th century, a woman named Uvavnuk was struck by a meteor, lost consciousness after experiencing a vision of the bear-human spirit of the meteor, and came to with a song on her lips that has fascinated scholars of spiritual experience ever since. The language she sang, spoke and lived in (we inhabit languages, as they inhabit us) was Inuktitut. The legend about her mystical encounter is longer than her song; Europeans collecting what they called folklore documented and translated both. Until colonial contact, the Inuit languages were oral, and at least nine scripts were developed across the vastness of Canada for functional purposes after this contact began. Now, a new script that will consolidate and replace the others has been formally accepted. Called Inuit Qaliujaaqpait, it uses the 26 Roman alphabets. Natan Obed, president of the cultural non-profit Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, was quoted as saying, “It’s the first time we’re exercising our own self-determination to implement our own writing system.”

Several Canadian press outlets carried the same story, verbatim, and I was intrigued by one particular line. Devoid of quotation marks, the exact words – “Inuit have decolonised the alphabet” – are not attributed to Obed, but are implied as being the summary of his opinions. The term used recalls the 1986 manifesto Decolonising The Mind by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in which he declared that with that text he was bidding a final farewell to writing in English, having already ceased to produce creative (as opposed to non-fiction) work in that language some years prior. His political assertion was instrumental in expanding the body of work originally created in African languages, including Gikuyu and Kiswahili.

Ngũgĩ wrote of how schoolchildren were faced with two Gikuyu orthographies – rival ones, developed by different missionaries. Imagine having nine, as Inuit peoples do. The Gikuyu scripts were eventually integrated, and like Inuit Qaliujaaqpait, shares the alphabet with English (without certain letters). The use of the coloniser’s alphabet, while rejecting the coloniser’s language, is a striking way of accepting history but charting the future anew. There are others: they may require learning or eliminating, but always imagining.

“Decolonising” is a buzzword now, lending itself enjoyably to hashtags and T-shirts. Someone gave me a set of stickers recently which say “Decolonise this place!”. I accepted them with glee, but realised they’d be best used in an act of protest vandalism. I’m not opposed to such gestures, but what would their context be? If I stuck them on, say, railway signage, hostel gates or temple undials without deconstructing that big word, would their intent still be conveyed? Or would nothing happen but self-congratulatory wokeness? I think I’ll pass them along, to inspire someone else. Perhaps they’ll know how to incorporate them into their activism meaningfully, while I’m unable to.

The same 26 letters can be assembled in a hundred million ways, after all. And the same words have different effects, depending on the recipient as much as the presenter. I believe we can have the courage to request translation, and to love without guilt the complicated privilege of many tongues, whether sinuous or rusty. Those are powerful decolonisations too.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 10th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The 37% Rule

Since I’m house-hunting yet again, a friend who has a head for these things told me about the 37% rule. She said that if I fixed the mindset that I would only check out 100 flats, right around the 37th one was when I would say “Yes”. Or, more honestly, “Okay”. Statistically, that’s when people cave and decide the search is over. As I have no such mathematical sense at all, my only immediate deduction was “Oh god, I have to see 37 flats?!” The scary part was whether it’s even possible to find 37 landlords in this city who don’t mind single women, non-vegetarians and people who refuse to live in spaces painted in lurid “vaastu colours”. 37 chill, tasteful landlords? May their numbers flourish, whether I can keep count or not.

My friend went on to say something that I couldn’t shrug off, however: the 37% rule also works in romantic relationships. If one decides when they start dating that they will see ten people, the third or fourth suitor will be the one they decide to settle down with. I could see how this might apply to someone with a goalpost in mind. For instance, someone entering the arranged marriage market could, based on hearsay and practicality, decide that they’d choose or stop trying after ten birth chart appraisals. They’d arrive at their tipping point motivated by the need to close the deal.

Except, those kinds of numbers had long vanished into the distant past for both my friend and I, and if someone had told us right at the start that we needed to set a target, we would have said – with all our hearts – just one, please.

The 37% rule, despite being percentage-based, does also yield a dramatic number. The age of 26 is the optimal age to marry, according to this rule. As a Business Insider article put it: “[It’s] the point at which we can stop looking and start taking those big leaps of faith.” I had to concede that I’d already known this about myself: had the opportunity been available to me at 26, that’s absolutely when I would have entered my (first, anyway) marriage. How had this seemingly arbitrary theory so accurately deduced when I’d been most earnest, most in alignment, most adequately-experienced-but-not-yet-cynical and most set to benefit? If it was true for me, it was surely true for many.

I did take a leap of faith at that age, on the smouldering comet-tail of two messily overlapping relationships. I gave everything I had to a creative project instead, lost myself somewhere in the plummet, and surfaced a few years later strong and with something substantial to show. Some of my friends who married at the time experienced parallel trajectories of passion-collapse-growth, and after vastly different journeys we now find ourselves back on similar quests. For partners, for places to live, for something to call home. No equation is going to tell us when, or where or how. But at least we recognise now who needs to be #1 – after all this time, its ourselves we must trust again to be enough to come home to.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 3rd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Token Seats At Token Tables

Her name is Chanel Miller, and she wants everyone to know it. She has revealed it in conjunction with the release of a memoir; her 2015 assault at Stanford University became a notorious case in which everyone from the media to the legal system tried to absolve her attacker. A preview of the book reveals that the university tried to coax her into creating a statement of forgiveness on a plaque for the memorial garden they instated at the site of the crime. She refused.

Somewhat relatedly, the author Kamila Shamsie was stripped of her Nellie Sachs Prize due to her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel’s human rights violations. Ironically, the German award is given for “outstanding literary contributions to the promotion of understanding between peoples”, something reflected in Shamsie’s pro-Palestine activism. There are plenty of such honours, which appear to encourage anti-establishment thought, but only if it falls within certain parameters.

It’s profoundly frustrating when the work one does is co-opted by those it actually challenges. You can see this frustration all over Greta Thurnberg’s face in her widely-publicised speech at the UN. Right at the start, someone in the audience actually laughs, revealing how little seriousness the environmental activist is really given. Every person who cheers on this new hero but refuses to take personal steps to lessen their effect on climate change is letting her down. Our retweets don’t mean a thing if that plastic cup still goes into a landfill.

Powerful people and institutions allow interlopers in, indulge them, lionise and most crucially distract them, and continue to not incorporate the messages they carry. They are given a seat at the table as a means of placation, and a way to convince them that their work is finished or can be redirected. The indulgence also has its limits. As long as Thurnberg doesn’t do anything that crosses some major player’s invisible line, she will be entertained – and used as entertainment. If you’ve ever found yourself at a gathering and had the distinct feeling that you were on display, with the awareness sinking in that you’d be the topic of conversation once you left the table, you get the picture. Depedestalisation was recently discussed in this column, and some of the same ideas apply.

Can we say No to having that seat at the table at all? It’s a brave but not always viable choice. The choice between two outcomes – utilising the platform as a critical space, or making a statement by withdrawing – is not an obvious one. The latter can sometimes do little more than boost one’s own street cred, while the uncomfortable on-stage squirming of the former can add dimension to an event or the ensuing discourse. In some cases, agreeing to participate is to be cahoots with the problem, whereas in others, the participation brings challenge or at least nuance. But whether we fight for that seat, take it, or reject it, we have to treat the experience as window shopping. It isn’t the destination. We just need to know what’s available before we set about building a bigger, more honest, more effective table.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 26th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: When Misogynists Fantasise About Feminist Revenge

Is it alright to comment on something one has not seen? It’s a risky choice in this era of fake news, when we are all in danger of forming opinions not only borne of ignorance but from actively being manipulated. When I read that a sequence from a TV serial – described as being horrifying and which had since received a slap on the wrist from a regulatory body – was still available for viewing online, I toyed momentarily with whether I should watch it in the interest of journalistic duty. Then I chose not to. Surely, when it comes to depictions of gratuitous violence or injustice, the answer to that question can sometimes be Yes.

Instead, I read news about that scene, from the TV serial Kalyana Veedu. The violence described was both physical and verbal: a gangrape, ratified by dialogue that’s clearly an anti-woman fantasy. In it, a woman plots against another woman, hires a group of men to enact her instructions, and is then punished by them in exactly the same way. A further revenge sequence, involving fire and male genitalia, is something Freud (or better yet, Camille Paglia) would probably have analysed as the projection of male envy. A TV serial has more than one mind behind it. Just the thought of the kind of discussions that happened behind-the-scenes is hair-raising. I’ve been in enough work meetings with men who hallucinate that they are creative and cutting-edge to know that there was almost definitely someone there who imagined that castration by fire is what feminists want.

The Broadcasting Content Complaint Council, responding to viewers’ dismay about these sequences, fined the TV channel what seems to be a token sum, but more meaningfully has ordered a week-long apology to be played before every episode of the same serial.

To take umbrage against such content is straightforward. This is a good thing, to have internalised healthy protest so deeply, but the hope is that by now our sociocultural politics have evolved so that calling out such objectionable material isn’t enough. The Me Too movement worldwide, and the revelations it has provided into the way workplaces have functioned for so long, has made it crucial for us to no longer stop at disgust and anger but to delve into how such contraventions of integrity happen, and how they can be prevented.

The TV channel that aired this vicious sequence claims that the TV serial has family-oriented values. Perhaps our next line of enquiry should begin there. Among the public who made the complaints, was it only the visual violence that was the problem or the logic behind it as well? In other words – were they upset because rape is perceived to be a violation of chastity (a completely oppressive concept) and a taboo topic, or because rape is wrong, full stop? There are some interesting dinner table conversations ahead, if we choose to take this incident as not just a teachable, but an eminently learnable-from, moment. Those who wrote those scenes, produced them and were perplexed by the reaction to them didn’t conjure those ideas out of nowhere. Like I said – they’re not really that creative…

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 19th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.