The Venus Flytrap: How Book Piracy Kills Book Culture

This question is on Quora: “Where can I download the book The Queen of Jasmine Country?” As the author of the said novel, I’m uniquely qualified to respond. Not about where to illegally get a free digital copy of my book, but about what happens when you do.

Writers may be creatives, but publishing is a revenue-based corporate industry. Publishers invest in authors (from accepting their submissions to allocating a promotion budget) based on how their work is projected to fare on the market, and then does. If book piracy undercuts profits, it significantly impacts the author’s career, and prospects for future books in its genre.

You may think it’s just one little download – but just like “one vote” or “one plastic straw”, you’re not the only one. Collectively, that’s a lot of lost sales. To be considered a bestseller in India, a literary fiction book in English only needs to sell around 2000 copies. The author makes just 8%-10% on royalties. Once, I bought a box of sweets for former colleagues when I signed a book contract. As I stood at the counter, I calculated that in order to pay for it from my royalties, every single person in that mid-size agency would have to buy a copy. I think three did.

Which brings us to day jobs and side gigs. Here’s the secret: if they don’t come from or marry into wealth, authors in India earn their incomes from something other than their books. Mine is from content writing, ghostwriting and journalism. Tell me: if I’m hustling constantly for paid work, growing disillusioned because making literature is so financially unviable, how am I going to find the time and headspace to write more? It’s a practical question.

Even bestselling commercial fiction writer Durjoy Datta has gone on the record to say, “You cannot expect to pay rent or even the electricity bill with a writing income.” Imagine the situation for lit-fic or poetry.

Libraries and piracy are simply not the same; it’s not classist to oppose the latter. With a library membership, you contribute to and participate in reading culture in a meaningful way, keeping books in circulation, supporting spaces in which they are sacred, and making them accessible in a fair way. Book piracy, on the contrary, has detrimental effects on this culture. It actively limits which books enter the market.

Don’t have a good library close to you? Look harder. Chennai, for instance, has: Madras Literary Society, Connemara Library, Anna Centenary Library, British Council and American Consulate Libraries, Roja Muthiah Research Library – and these are just the major ones. You can also access free online collections, such as Open Library, which work in exactly the same way.

There are only a few cases in which the downloading of illegal e-books is marginally acceptable, such as for prohibitively expensive academic texts, out of print works and banned books. But for a new book available for the price of a designer coffee, and deeply discounted through online retailers? Why would you hurt the author that way? If you want more books by them in future, buy (or borrow) the ones they’ve already written.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Poppy-High Parrots

Silence isn’t usually associated with parrots. But intelligence is, and in the farmlands of Madhya Pradesh, a wickedly intelligent pandemonium of them have learnt the value of keeping watchfully quiet. They wait until a farmer enters the poppy field and cautiously slits a pod to help it ripen, exposing the latex inside. And then they swoop in, diving right for the opium milk – sometimes tearing the stalk off below the pod so they can fly away and feast. Then they perch somewhere and bite into the pods, holding the stalk in one claw like a kid nibbling at candyfloss. They can’t get enough of the high. One opium expert said the parrots enjoy opium like we enjoy caffeine. Except they crash into branches, lie around dazed and evidently take evolutionary leaps in their desire for the next hit. Parrots that don’t squawk? Stoned, surely.

These parrots are addicted, and are causing severe damage to the livelihood of farmers in the Malwa-Mewar belt, where opium cultivation for medicinal purposes is legal, monitored by the International Narcotics Control Board. But illicit smuggling is a problem, licenses are renewed based on production, and the farmers are struggling, just like farmers all over India. Throw in a frenzy of drug-addled parrots and you can see why the pods are cautiously slit. Not because the flowering plant is delicate, but because it becomes liable to immediate plunder. Nilgais, scorpions and snakes are also common pests in poppy fields, attracted to the opium. But the parrots have the advantage of flight. And obsession.

These marauding parrots call to mind ones from classic literature who enjoyed trickery and entertained themselves by distressing people. It’s easy to imagine some of them drug-intoxicated. Take the raunchy one from this poem, translated by Martha Ann Selby, from the medieval Sanskrit anthology Subhasitaratnakosa: “At daybreak, / when the parrot / was bent on mimicking / her cries of passion / in front of her elders, / the doe-eyed girl, / embarrassed, / drowned it out / by jangling / her stacks of bangles, / clapping / as if to make / the children dance in play.” I must confess I was amused when I first saw videos of them guzzling opium. I wondered: how did they escape with their loot without it falling out of their beaks during a triumphant cackle, like a bird in a cautionary folktale?

But this was ignorant. Not long ago, I was upset by a photograph of the corpses of poisoned peacocks – only to learn that they are actually pests in paddy fields. In these cases, parrots and peacocks are to the farmer what pigeons and mosquitoes are to us in cities. For me to find the thought of junkie parrots hilarious was only a few steps removed from those who snatch beloved creatures away from indigenous minorities in the name of animal rights. For us humans who do not really co-exist with undomesticated wildlife in our ordinary lives, our views on fauna will always be lacking. We could learn from those clever parrots, maybe – how to be quiet (and listen) when all we’ve known to do is talk, talk, talk.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 7th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Premonitions Bureau

In 1967, John Barker (a psychiatrist drawn to the occult), a science journalist and a newspaper editor set up what they called The Premonitions Bureau in the UK. The Bureau logged data from people who reported on dreams, physical sensations and other portents which accompanied a sense of knowing (always, notably, of calamity to come). Rather than relegate these findings as symptoms of psychosis that required treatment, the Bureau hoped to understand the phenomenon, and perhaps to use it to prevent disasters. Two of the most accurate percipients, who had between them predicted a plane crash, a major landslide and a shipwreck, among other tragedies, also both repeatedly shared warnings with Barker that his life was in danger. He died of a sudden illness soon after.

Reading a lengthy article on these events, I found myself interested only in two things: Barker’s work in reforming mental health facilities in the UK, and the fact that the Bureau was set up in a field that typically views the paranormal with not just suspicion but condescension.

As for visions, precognition, multisensory awareness? Neither new, nor restricted only to a gifted or cursed few (a vital distinction that redistributes power; important especially in our context with its fraudulent masters). What’s interesting is that Barker sought to reframe them in modern Western psychology, a project which held potential in decolonising the field.

The view that anything that cannot be explained by rationalism (or in shorthand, “science”) is non-existent, or that everything can be explained by the same, is deeply problematic. Those who expand and decolonise healing practices incorporate the work of shamans, doulas and many other therapists into the fold. The metaphysical has a place here, and the Cartesian mind-body divide is refuted. Do vaccines work? Yes. Does acupuncture work? Yes.

The derision of indigenous knowledges exists in many fields. Medicine, for example: many allopathic practitioners, even here in India where systems like Siddha, Unani and Ayurveda exist, tell patients to engage with “alternative” therapies at their own risk. The vocabulary itself reveals the problem – alternative to what? Queerness used to be described that way too, as an “alternative lifestyle”. Alternative, basically, to what’s acceptable.

Decolonising mental and physical health practices is not the replacement of systems (which is erasure, and counterproductive), but concurrent appreciation. The idea is not that any one is inherently better than another, but that they co-exist. And that the correct balance is deeply subjective, varying from person to person, ailment to ailment and situation to situation. Someone I know corrected a common illness we both have using only yoga; I on the other hand prefer to pop a daily pill, and probably will for the rest of my life. But I chose to treat another condition with herbal medicine alone (it worked), instead of a three-month allopathic course I didn’t want the side-effects of. The point is not to privilege one system or another, but to recognise them all as valuable. And human knowledge, both learned and intuitive, as vast. Capitalist pharmaceuticals, flawed education systems and internalised colonialism keep us from tapping into – and healing through – more ways that can quite beautifully be reconciled.

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

The Venus Flytrap: You Must Not Forget This Story

I wonder how many languages will die in the months to come, during the year which the UN has designated as the “International Year of Indigenous Languages”. Most of us will never know of some of them. Perhaps we’ll hear of them later, for the first and last time, in a news item announcing the loss. Or a stray phrase or word will drift to us, Romanised. We won’t know how to pronounce it but will treat it like a window into a perished world (like this: itek eoirapnene; later, I’ll tell you what I’m told it means). And every language, every dialect really, is a world of its own – with a worldview that is intimately tied to the words that describe the speaker’s experience of that world. February 21, observed annually as International Mother Language Day, is a fine time to reflect on this.

Languages seldom die organically, even if it seems as though the demise of the last speakers is the reason. The erasure begins far earlier. Centuries ago, with Western colonisation. In more recent decades, with globalisation and capitalism and the ways in which the hungry mainstream always pushes the so-called fringe further and further beyond the margins. And still, and ongoing, with all kinds of cultural impositions, some so subtle they are unfelt except once their changes have become entrenched. According to the UN, 43% of the approximately 6000 living languages in the world are endangered, and a language disappears every two weeks, “taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage”.

 “Untranslatable” words are among the most popular cerebral memes, and geeks everyone have become familiar with the poetic mangata (Swedish: the path-like reflection of the moon on the water), the now ubiquitous hygge (Danish: a cosy contentment) and even the gorgeous mamihlapinatapei (Yaghan: an unspoken moment between two people, neither of whom may act on what’s between them). But the words are not necessarily untranslatable, as their descriptions prove. Only their brevity doesn’t transfer. The listicles thus allude to something else, an intangible interplay of knowledge and loss. Perhaps it comes from the awareness that a thing exists but can only be experienced out of context, for the world it arises from isn’t a world one has the vocabulary to imagine.

Literally. This is why the widely-held idea that Inuits have one hundred words for snow persists, when the reality is that their languages are structured polysynthetically, and what we think of as an English sentence may be one long word. To satirise this, someone named Phil James made a convincing list, with some red herrings – “warintla: snow used to make Eskimo daiquiris” and “depptla: a small snowball, preserved in Lucite, that had been handled by Johnny Depp” should have tipped anyone off. Still, these un-dictionary definitions even find themselves onto baby name websites.

And finally, itek eoirapnene. These are Ainu words, meaning “You must not forget this story”. The Ainus have an ancient Japanese culture I only learnt of while reading on vanishing languages and the worlds they sustain. This is as far into their language as I may ever go. But that message is worth carrying forward.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Strawberries In The Salt Sea

So the meerkats at the El Paso Zoo love crunching on cockroaches, and the zoo’s Valentine’s Day fundraiser has them snacking on lots of them. So many, in fact, that it seems like the zookeepers feared the meerkats were going to have a roach overdose and decided several more species could enjoy the treat. Now, cotton top tamarins, golden tamarins, white-headed marmosets, rhinoceros hornbills and northern tree shrews also get to partake of the pests. The reason? The zoo’s donation drive, called “Quit Bugging Me!!!” (all exclamation points deliberate – and probably appropriate), lets people name a cockroach after an ex, before it’s fed to another creature. And since there’s a webcam livestream for the meerkats, participants can even watch the devouring. Catharsis via cockroach proxy. Other zoos, including the Hemsley Conservation Center, UK, and the Bronx and Boise Zoos, USA, are doing the same. Meanwhile, the Sydney Zoo is offering to name a snake after an ex for just $1. But those snakes are staying alive.

Petty? Valentine’s Day is an occasion that inspires a range of reactions in the unpartnered: from a melancholic twinge to righteous rage. Indifference is the ideal, but it isn’t possible every year. As much depends on what you see around you as how your heartscape feels. Of course, the truth is this: every day is Valentine’s Day for those deeply in love and those who are deeply lonely.

If you’re in the latter category, but aren’t feeling bloodlust this year, there’s a better sight worth pondering on. A striking photograph was shared online from Ventura Beach, California, in which strawberries lay scattered on the coast at low tide, with hills on the horizon and a blue afterglow in the atmosphere. Strawberries, heart-shaped and show-stoppingly crimson, are widely regarded as an aphrodisiac. Still on the twig, in this photograph they appear at first glance to be red roses on long stems, the green calyxes seeming like plant sepals, the fruit like blossoms.

But as beautiful as they are, these shore-strewn strawberries are not edible. Neither is their presence miraculous, for all that happened is that storm water washed the fruits out of the farms they were being cultivated in, close to the beach. They mingled with effluents in the drainage before being flushed out to sea. Then, the tide brought them in, salted. They are not meant for our mouths, but they are pretty on the eye.

There’s a Scottish folksong, recorded by Sandy Denny as “The False Bride” and by other singers under different titles, that describes this scene almost eerily. In the song, the lover has wed another and the abandoned one must somehow perform joy at the ceremony. The lyrics contain this mysterious verse: “All men in yon forest they asked of me, / ‘How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?’/ And I answered them with a tear in my e’e, / ‘How many ships sail in the forest?’” Those toxic strawberries that seem out of a dream remind me, to quote another line from this song, to bid “Adieu to false loves forever”. And keep my eyes open for other, truer, fish in the sea.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Rising Divorce Rates Are A Good Thing

As a child, I once got my hands on some kind of corporate diary, and flipped through its strange front matter curiously. It contained various facts and trivia – time zones, international calling codes, capital cities, and what I think of now as a slightly pedantic list of statistics. Including, strangely, divorce rates. India’s was 0%. I didn’t live in India then, and assumed that that actually meant that no one there ever got divorced. Now I know, of course, that it just meant that so very few did that they were anomalies. And that in less abstract terms, divorce was often brushed under the carpet even when it did happen – so that, quite possibly, even people who lived in India would have liked to think that 0% meant exactly that. No divorces, just happily ever after. Each and every time.

Not much has changed in over two decades, not in terms of the numbers. In 2017, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, an international forum established in 1961 that works in public policy) reported that India’s divorce rate stood at 1%, or 13 in 1,000 marriages. This statistic has just been reconfirmed, and come to public attention again, thanks to an infographic released by an Australian legal agency called Unified Lawyers which has been making the rounds. According to them, India has the lowest rate of divorce in the world.

This is very unfortunate. Just as a very high divorce rate (such as Luxembourg’s 87%) could be construed as unhealthy, an almost non-existent one shows that something is wrong. Are the vast majority of Indian marriages even mostly fulfilling ones? Let’s not lie to ourselves.

The truth is that an increased divorce rate would be meaningful evidence of the effect of social justice movements on ordinary households. It would mean, among other things: women staying in or returning to jobs, which let them live on a single income; people getting second chances at life when the horoscopes are perfectly matched but the couple themselves are incompatible; survivors being able to leave abusive situations with support and without stigma; and respect for individual freedoms. Especially where women’s empowerment issues are concerned, more divorces would actually imply success. Not failure.

For those of us who are surprised by the statistic, given how many divorced people we ourselves know, this is a moment to reflect on our privilege. We think divorce is not so terribly taboo anymore, but if so, why aren’t there more of them? We must be careful to not generalise based on what is true for our circles, or to presume to understand individual experience even then.

I don’t know anyone who found getting a divorce easy, or who wasn’t punished for it in some way after. So it’s also a moment to reflect on just how much it takes to terminate a marriage. Staying married in a system that’s designed to make you stay is no evidence of the strength of a marriage. But being willing to to leave the institution, see the divorce through, and go on – that’s strength. May it become easier for anyone who needs to make that decision.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 7th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Scent of Hibiscus

Hibiscadelphus wilderianus grew on the slopes of Maui up until a century ago, before it was declared extinct. Now, a biotechnology company, Ginkgo Bioworks, claims to have resurrected the flower’s scent through genetic reconstruction. They recently debuted a perfume, which they described as piney and earthy.

But in truth, most hibiscus flowers have no fragrance. If at all, it’s just a wisp of one, possibly partly imagined, and we know it more from clear reddish teas and blended into herbs and chemicals in haircare than from the plant itself. That redolence, light as it is, is not in the blossom. The blood-bright ones placed at Kali’s feet are silent in the realm of scent.

So what is the fragrance that these biotechnologists have developed? How much of it is the power of suggestion, what the words “Hawaiian mountain hibiscus” conjure? When they tell us their new perfume line will return to us something lost, do we believe them?

I was on a video call with a faraway friend the other night as she dressed for a date, and when she sprayed perfume on herself, I was sure I could smell it. “Is it citrusy?” I asked. It was. It was not a signature scent; I cannot explain how the fragrance burst around me at the sound of the spritz. One night more than a decade ago, I was weeping in bed missing my recently deceased grandmother when the scent of paan filled the room. She had loved chewing areca nuts and betel leaf, and the smell of this was something I associated with her. Someone will tell me I was hallucinating, someone else will tell me my heart imploded into aroma. You can guess who among those someones I would call kindred.

Our olfactory sense is as emotional as our tactile sense. We think it’s the one we can live without, the one we’d give up if we had to choose one, but we’d lose more than just reactions of pleasure or disgust. We’d also lose one of the keys to our inner selves, influencing both our ability to reach into our memories and to express the way they make us feel. Sometimes the past circles back to us unseen.

The Hawaiian mountain hibiscus was known to botanists based on a single sample, dated to 1910, with it being presumed extinct only a couple of years later. Perhaps those early botanists used the word “discovery” in some description of their encounter and study of it, but if so, it would only have been in the way the Americas or certain spices were “discovered”. It it was endemic to Maui long before this. Centuries of people held its petals in their palms. Millennia of creature paws scampered by its bushes, or dipped proboscises into the nectar at its heart. The flower had other names, possibly held a place in ritual or courtship or adornment. Those who claim to have revived its scent have still not told us what its colour was. What its secrets were. They aren’t poets, after all. Yet they speak its songlike name, and look how we respond – how we rise, or implode.

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

The Venus Flytrap: KonMari In Kinship

My friend handed me an adorable mug, pink with owls, and before I could comment on how pretty it was, she said: “You gave me this.” I had forgotten. Years had passed, during which I’d never imagined that I would be standing in her kitchen again. I was surprised that she still had it. “Yeah, I didn’t Marie Kondo the mug,” she joked.

But the words tripped out of my mouth. “Well, but I Marie Kondo-ed you, because I thought you’d Marie Kondo-ed me.” We both blinked at the prickliness of that moment. “What I meant,” I scrabbled. “Is that I wouldn’t have kept it…”

Objects which are mnemonics of pain, consciously or unconsciously, are a whole category of attachment (again, often unconsciously – hoarders don’t necessarily feel the attachment until asked to part with something). And many people who have transformed their spaces, inspired by Kondo’s techniques, known as KonMari, have done so through confronting the feelings evoked by, if not energetically contained in, those objects. “Does this spark joy?” has another question on its flipside.

Now, having organised and decluttered their surroundings, some KonMari enthusiasts have begun talking about taking the technique further. Top of the list seems to be toxic friends, another category of painful attachments. I’m all for good boundaries, freeing oneself from bad influences, refusing to be manipulated, laying ground rules for healthy relationships and the very effective liberation of headspace through social media unfollowing. But using a single question to evaluate an entire relationship? Not so much.

The idea of pruning connections purely for the purpose of having fewer of them to manage is itself suspect. And if it’s truly toxicity that’s the concern, it gets complex. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work; unlike what people are saying, digitally unfriending a classmate you don’t remember on social media is simply not on the same scale as ending a friendship with someone who is violent to their partner. While a catalytic event, the final straw, is often how we break out of abusive relationships, the exit is usually a long time coming. It takes circuitous routes, just as the healing is non-linear. The most toxic of our relationships are often also the most precious to us. Which means that by KonMari-ing our intimate circles indiscriminately, we’re only isolating ourselves further from sources of support who could help us clean up where we really need to. And sometimes, that cleanse is within – the friend is just a scapegoat.

It’s dangerous to label something “toxic” just because it currently contains friction, boredom or heavier demands on time and energy (for example: a friend going through a divorce is not toxic just because their pain is radiating from them all the time). A friendship, or any significant relationship, will not always reliably spark joy. There will be rough patches, misunderstandings, irritations and imperfect circumstances.

This was more obvious to me than ever in that kitchen, holding a simple object that my friend had divested of power by keeping, but which had suddenly become a mnemonic of our time apart. For a bond to last, you work at it. Love is complicated, but not clutter.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Huddled In A Bubble

Of course the cotton seeds that have sprouted on the moon weren’t buried under its surface, the way they are on Earth. Instead, they’re in a sealed container still on board the docked mission. As the BBC put it, “The crops will try to form a mini biosphere – an artificial, self-sustaining environment.” Only the cotton seeds have sprouted; potato, rapeseed and other produce haven’t. Of all the forms of life – cotton, which only last year became genetically engineered to possibly be edible (or at least, not toxic). I wonder why China chose to shoot it into space.

An artificial, self-sustaining environment. The two words should cancel each other out, because the effort it takes to truly self-sustain cannot be simulated. Yet, in a strange way, we understand. That bubble in which we must sometimes live, because there’s no other way in which to survive. As 2018 ended, I was shocked by my naïveté in a post, shown on the “Memories” FB feature, from one year before that. I’d written that 2017 had been kind to me and that I’d remember it fondly – a statement which had rapidly proved untrue. I’d been in a bubble of forced gratitude, afraid to accept the truth of my misery. I could only do so in hindsight.

How much depends on the framing. One flip of the coin: in six months of that year I’d gone to Batticaloa twice, my ancestral town, and found a key I had looked for my whole life. Another flip of the coin: in those same six months I had been so sick from fatigue and anxiety that I declined a free trip to Bhutan, to mountains I had seen in dreams. One more frame: I ponder travel only because I did so little of it last year, when I thought I would do so much.

An astrologer friend opened my chart up. I told her how when she’d last done so, I hadn’t believed when she’d said I’d have to wait a year for what I’d thought was just around the corner. The lease on that prediction is up for renewal now. I remembered how when we’d last met she’d touched her heart with a sympathetic look and said, “Here – you had a terrible disillusionment, with the planets exact on that point about three months ago”. And how, dazed by the possibility of new love, I’d said No. I’d forgotten that something had indeed happened then, a culminating disappointment to a heartache that had dragged on for ages like roadkill on a bloodied wheel. One turn of the solar wheel later, she referenced that painful transit again and I saw it anew. How everything has a miasma. I hadn’t escaped with one terrible disillusionment in a December past; there was another that came later, even more harrowing, of another kind of love entirely, that I hadn’t framed that way before.

Sometimes life offers nothing but harsh conditions. We huddle within our bubbles – our artificial, desperate, self-sustaining environments – and tell ourselves what we need to. We cannot tell it straight until we’ve seen through the miasma, into clarity – or at least the next bubble.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Not Loose

Could there possibly be anyone who doesn’t have a crush on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? If her progressive worldview and personal journey weren’t impressive enough, the newly-elected American politician won even more hearts after conservatives released an edited video of her from college, happily dancing, intending this to smear her reputation. (She responded with another video of her happily dancing, in her lofty new office). There’ve been similar, malicious smear attempts, like a photo misattributed as a selfie of hers which made the rounds, in which a woman’s feet are seen in a bathtub, with a hand holding a vape pen, and a suggestive reflection in the faucet.

Dancing, relaxing, having fun, being and feeling attractive – all activities deemed inappropriate for a woman because the overall impression is that she is… What exactly? The answer is spelled out many times over in the heterosexual dating app Bumble’s new commercial for the Indian market. Bumble’s premise is to let women decide whether to make contact or not. The ad stars Priyanka Chopra, one of its investors, and shows her in various scenarios being described with a positive adjective, followed by “not loose”. The inference is that loose women use Tinder or other apps, while not-loose women use Bumble. Newsflash: it’s the same dudes on all platforms. And it’s the same pitting-women-against-each-other strategy that’s run the world for millennia.

But why not “loose”? The slut-shaming is shocking, given Bumble’s purportedly woman-friendly ethos. How can a dating app that claims to be based on women’s empowerment denigrate women in this manner? Bumble’s Twitter replies to the surprisingly few people who have protested were patronising, claiming that “loose” is a misogynistic term (it is, which is why Bumble’s use of it is especially misogynistic, positioning women who enjoy their sexuality as less admirable than those who don’t) and making vague statements on “on the ground” work in response to clear objections.

And what on earth is “loose”, anyway? Back in 1994, before we could take for granted sex-positivity (i.e. the acceptance on a socio-political level that sexuality is natural, to be celebrated, and not at odds with the fight for social justice) as a cornerstone of sound feminist principles, the poet Sandra Cisneros released an entire collection called “Loose Woman”. The titular poem unfurls like an anthem. Among its many thrumming lines are these: “I built my little house of ill repute. / Brick by brick. Labored, / loved and masoned it. / I live like so. / Heart as sail, ballast, rudder, bow.”

If that’s what it means to be a loose woman – hardworking, passionate and proud of herself – then who knows why it’s deemed unappealing. And worse, incongruent with being ambitious, curious, busy, free or equal – the ad’s buzzwords.

It’s clear Bumble’s India strategy is just the latest version of that old Ladies’ Night bar tactic. It appears to be for women, but all it offers women is something watered-down, while it’s the men who are the true target market. And when it comes to the political playing field, it pays for anyone who isn’t a man to remember this too. It’s their world. We’ve got to usurp it.

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

The Venus Flytrap: The Songless Female Of The Species

It was the length of the tail feathers that caught my eye, and then the statesqueness of the pose, and only lastly those eyes like beads of ruby. I didn’t know what it was, this bird that had sought out a branch of the neem tree that I see more of every day than any other living creature. Only a crow that surely has come to know me as well or as little as I know it roosts there, and sometimes it takes a companion; they bite each others’ beaks (I wonder if they are voyeurs into my life, too). Intrigued, I looked up the plumage colours of this strange new bird and was surprised to learn that this creature so striking that I could not think of it as anything but totemic was in fact something quite ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in poetry and public imagination, that I couldn’t believed I hadn’t even known that this is what it looked like. It was a female kuyil who had come by, who briefly lingered within the lush enclosure of the branches of the neem tree that is my neighbour, whose leafy heart I look into directly.

The female of the species, I read, is rarely seen. (This made me feel better about my ignorance of her beauty). It is not her song we hear, but her mate’s. He doesn’t look like her; indeed, he looks a little closer to the crow in whose nest she stealthily lays her eggs, uninterested in the process of incubation. The female of the species appears when she chooses to heed that call. When the love spell of his beautiful voice has worked, has convinced her.

Between the neem tree and I was one more neighbour: a spider whose home was made of silk spun from her own body. That delicate web often caught the light, and I refused to remove it. But someone who thought it inauspicious jettisoned it with a sweep of their fingers before my eyes. Minutes before I wrote this, and just a little after I had contemplated that little habitat again, admiring the arachnid for its autonomy, its dexterity and its architectural aesthetic. The spider and its home were gone before I could even gasp.

Now I look into that tree’s branches without the filter of a spider web on the window grill. And I wonder if she will come back, that allured and alluring kuyil, with her stippled wings and her receptivity to seduction. I am summoning her, too. I know if she returns, it will only be for the crow’s nest (but there is no nest that I can see, unless the tree has more secrets). Who really summoned her here – a mate or I? Perhaps beyond all other symbolisms – self-contained spider, intelligent crow, bitter and benevolent neem tree, auspiciously fertile female kuyil – it is he who is my true totem for this moment. This male kuyil whose song I have heard but who has not been sighted so far: who opens his heart and unfurls his voice, and unafraid to ask for his deepest desire, calls and calls for his lover to come.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Sex Workers In Ayodhya

Morari Bapu, a spiritual leader noted for his Ram Katha sermons held around the world, came under fire over the weekend for inviting 200 sex workers from Kamathipura, Mumbai, to attend an event which he conducted in the city of Ayodhya. This drew outrage from a number of other religious figures, who predictably spoke of sin and shame. Ayodhya is regarded as the birthplace of Ram, in whose praise Morari Bapu recites the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsidas’ 16th century Ramayana with the distinct religious tones which have since been popularly associated with the epic.

As one important criticism of arts-based activism more familiar to us goes: it is not enough to bring the kutcheri to the kuppam, when the kuppam is still (figuratively) kept out of the kutcheri. This makes Morari Bapu’s initiative admirable: he did not choose to just deliver his discourses in the red-light district, but brought the people of that district onto holy (and hotly-contested) ground. Sex workers who spoke to the media of their experiences at the Ram Katha did so in glowing terms.

But, here’s a pinch of salt: given the incendiary context in which we live, can we really read even generous acts as apolitical? How can they be, when religion is the expressed basis of compassion as well as the implicit basis of hatred? So what are Morari Bapu’s politics? I confess my ignorance: being non-proficient in Hindi means I lack access to much material and commentary. I wish I could offer the unequivocal hope that he is that unbelievably rare figure – a progressive spiritual leader – and that his welcome to sex workers is a feminist act. His dedication of a 2016 Ram Katha to transgender people, during which he was quoted as having expressed the wish that a person from the community should one day lead a similar event with his support, would be one such heartwarming example.

But I’m wary. So what I’ll pay attention to instead is a contradiction: earlier this year, Morari Bapu criticised politicians who use the performative gesture of eating in Dalit households as a pawn to attract voters, going a step further by saying that marrying people from the same households would actually be meaningful. He is correct: inter-caste marriage is radical, truly risky (as murders by family members have shown in too many cases) and potentially revolutionary. However, more recently, he also criticised a CM’s comment that Hanuman was a Dalit, calling it a divisive statement while others like himself were working for unity.

This contradiction – of focusing on transcendence rather than reality – is where good intentions go to die. If we insist that our acceptance of others lies in our commonalities, we also insist on certain erasures. We can assume that the 200 sex workers who visited Ayodhya from Kamathipura were pious – but is that why they should be respected? Will the atheist or non-Hindu sex worker be offered the same? Will she be offered respect as a routine part of life, upon her return to her workplace – where, night and day, men whose actions are never questioned as they enter temples come to commit the sins of objectification and abuse?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 27th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Lipstick On The Ladder

A personal essay I wrote a few years ago, called “Karaikal Ammaiyar And Her Closet Of Adornments”, took me everywhere from literary events in Brisbane to Lakmé Fashion Week in Bombay, went viral when it was republished online, and still brings me messages from women who see something of themselves reflected therein. It was about self-expression and self-concealment: specifically, how women camouflage ourselves so as to not be perceived as desirable and thereby attract undesired attention, much like the bhakti poet Karaikal Ammaiyar who prayed to be transformed into an unsexy wraith so she’d be able to wander undisturbed. But it’s time for me to come clean. At some point, that camouflage ceased to be armour. It became avatar. I began to overidentify, and my self-esteem sank partly from this. In my ongoing journey to reclaiming my voice, I faced an uncomfortable truth: gradually, being dowdy stopped being a choice and became the default. The weapon I uncap to fight back? A pen, of course – but alongside, lipstick.

Megan Falley’s poem “Ode To Red Lipstick” has many quotable lines, referencing history: from concentration camp survivors “thin as smoke, naked / everywhere / except for their mouth”, to Cleopatra. But one unusual detail stands out: “In post-war New York, butches could get locked up / if they weren’t wearing three pieces of traditional / women’s clothes.” A slash of lipstick was often the remedy, for queer women in pantsuits, to avoid arrest. The poem doesn’t say how many of them loved, or how many of them loathed, this. But what’s certain is that it was the preferred circumvention. No simple ribbon, brooch or barrette was chosen over a blazing mouth.

The dynamic young American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who caused a particular shade to sell out when she wore it to a debate, said: “I derive power from my femininity. Any attempt to make femininity trivial or unimportant is an attempt to take away my power. So I’m going to wear the red lipstick. Other people’s attempt to say, ‘Oh, talking about lipstick is unimportant,’ [they are] talking about feminine expression being unimportant. That expressing yourself as a woman is unimportant. Don’t ever believe that…. [Wear] whatever makes you feel authentically yourself and like a badass. The only way that we’re going to move forward is by running as our authentic selves.”

For me, why it begins with lipstick is because colour on my lips behaves like a woman who refuses to climb up a ladder without taking along others like her. The alluring, vivid burgundy or scarlet on my mouth demands that my eyes too be painted, that my hair be opened, that my skin be softened and made rosy – and because of all this, how could I do anything less than drape myself in clothing befitting that effort, that beauty?

I find myself going to my own words from that Karaikal Ammaiyar essay, which come back to me now like a note from a wiser, younger self: “If a red lipstick is wonderful anywhere in the world, it is most wonderful of all on the mouth of a woman who has claimed her own voice.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 20th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.