Two advertisements were withdrawn in India last week, each widely commented on. Dabur’s karva chauth commercial, which featured a queer couple and peddled a skin bleaching cream, drew ire from multiple quarters. Progressive people were upset by the appropriation of queer narratives to peddle a festival that is considered anti-feminist. Conservatives were angered by the portrayal of a lesbian couple taking part joyfully in a Hindu festival. As for me: no commercial for complexion whitening will ever have my support. Not even if it involves kittens.

Sabyasachi’s social media campaign for their new mangalsutra line was less all over the place, and its withdrawal was therefore more sobering – in that “another week in eroding India” kind of way. The problem, this time perceived only from conservative quarters, was that it showed the nuptial chain nestled in cleavage. That the model also evidently ticked off certain inclusivity criterion, with her dark skin and voluptuousness, is not without importance. The same ad, had it featured one of the many svelte, Caucasian models working in Mumbai, may not have caught the same intensity of ire. The discomfort experienced by those against the ad cannot be said to be entirely about an object considered sacred. The model’s looks subtly imply caste and class locations that unsettle those who consider themselves arbiters of culture, or indeed of taste and style. The discomfort thus comes from witnessing a sense of empowered sensuality wielded by a woman, that too a woman who doesn’t conform.

The mangalsutra is Indian society’s official license to have sex. All this ad did was put this license on display. A cis-het man once told me that he found the thaali hanging between the breasts of the many married women he’d slept with very titillating. The same person later reacted with shock when I started wearing metti on my firmly-unhusbanded feet because I wanted to, and furiously questioned whether I’d buy myself a thaali if I found that aesthetically pleasing too. The hypocrisies of a repressed society are many, and exist to some extent in us all no matter where on the political spectrum we place ourselves. 

Byju’s paused Shah Rukh Khan’s brand ambassadorship when his family became dragged into controversy last month. It was really the brand’s loss; this month, the superstar’s Diwali advertisement for Cadbury’s warmed many hearts. There is widespread perception that Khan was targeted for refusing to toe the line in terms of state propaganda. Whether one is tacit or outspoken, this danger remains. When cricketer Virat Kohli issued a strong statement about religiously motivated attacks on his teammate Mohammed Shami last week, his infant daughter was sent rape threats.

Some would say this is nothing new: wives, partners and girl children of Indian cricketers receive rape threats from “fans” whenever the team loses. But this proves the point again. Self-appointed custodians of culture prize symbols, rituals and figureheads above people and lived realities. How can a healthy, evolving culture then thrive? It can’t. With each of these infringements, however small they may seem, we lose more and more vitality – and we lose conviction in what makes it worth it to keep “tradition” alive.

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

Línea Calma (“The Calm Line”) is a helpline for men in Bogotá, Colombia. It was launched in December 2020 to provide assistance for men dealing with anger, jealousy, the desire to control, anxiousness and other emotions, some of which potentially lead to violence against women. The New York Times reported that the calls are “urgent and pleading” – a sign both of the necessity of such a helpline, and the willingness of many to better themselves and the lives of those around them. Línea Calma has recently been featured in a number of international publications, which invites this dream: what would such helplines be like, in other parts of the world?

As far as I know, nothing like it exists here in India yet. But there are helplines for men to report abuse, including physical or sexual violence from women and especially when domestic abuse charges have been raised against them (under Section 498A). In their approach, these helplines are the opposite of Línea Calma. They villainize women. There is nothing that suggests that they work toward dismantling toxic patriarchy. One of the largest, with a network of 40 NGOs, even brands itself as “saving” the Indian family system.

What would a helpline for men that actually understands that the root of all gender-based violence in this country is the patriarchal system as enforced primarily by the institution of family be like? To have such a premise would mean that even a man who has experienced abuse from his wife or wife’s family should be able to call this helpline and be understood and assisted. The onus will not be on the person seeking help – the one on the inside of a personal nightmare – to shoulder systemic weights, but the onus is on the staff to avoid a misogynistic framing.

Most feminists would agree with the above; but very few “men’s rights activists”, as they call themselves, would consider an inclusive view that takes into account how patriarchy is bad for everyone or how patriarchal agency is societally and culturally inbuilt into people of all genders in places like India. Just like how Línea Calma centres its approach on machismo, a culturally-sanctioned belief in male dominance, other helplines must find their own contextual centres. 

But in a country as diverse and unequal as India, a single contextual centre may not apply. Beyond requiring multiplicity of languages, sensitivities to other factors including caste, class, religion, community-specific gender dynamics and education will also be essential. If the helpline can set the overall approach, the callers can themselves fine-tune it, working in tandem with counsellors as per their personal needs.

What a tall order this helpline is turning out to be. But the fact that there is so much to deliberate while even dreaming of it, let alone setting it up, indicates how very necessary something like it is. I invite you to envision these possibilities as well, and then to bring that envisioning one level more deeply into your own context. In the absence of the helpline, what do we offer ourselves and each other each day that brings us closer to the dream of a better world?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 27^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

K. Sudhakar, Karnataka’s Minister of Medical Education and Health, observed World Mental Health Day on October 10 by making this statement at NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences): “A lot of modern women in India – they want to stay single. Even if they get married, they don’t want to give birth. They want surrogacy. So there is a paradigm shift in our thinking, which is not good.”

I agree with the Minister. This paradigm shift is not good. It’s great. It may even be the best thing to have happened to South Asian culture in… Centuries? Millennia? Well, a very long time, for certain.

Last year, I turned 35 – the age at which pregnancies are medically classified as “geriatric”, and data shows a steep drop in reproductive viability. I had decided in my late 20s to some day adopt as a single parent, but still found myself Googling “freeze eggs Chennai” in the middle of some teary nights. Then, tragedy hit my already broken family this year, and as I crawled out of the rubble I found that for the first time in my life I vehemently did not want to be a mother. I did not want to pass on the intergenerational trauma I had inherited, or to take sole responsibility for any life except my own. 

I’d been marriage-averse since I was a kid, but parenthood was something I longed for. To lose that longing was my own very surprising and very welcome paradigm shift.

Legend has it that my maternal lineage will end with my generation, due to a curse. Indeed, my cousins, siblings and I are marked failures at marriage or procreation. Who knows what my grandfather’s enemy intended, but I wonder if they imagined this sweet consequence: that at the end of a bloodline is at least one person who has begun to perceive it as a gift.

It’s only been a few months of breathing in this fresh air for me, so I hesitate to make any grand declarations about my change of mind. But I know this much is true, at least for now: I feel free. I feel delicious possibilities stretched out before me: what I can do with my money and my time, how I can date without the pressure of finding a co-parent, how I can centre my life. I feel young, which I factually am, through an unpressured lens. My mental health has improved through this freedom, as have other aspects of my health, holistically speaking.

The weight of oppression within so many marriages and families, bolstered by taboos and a combination of surrounding gaslighting and nonchalance, is hugely detrimental towards the mental health of all those who are trapped within them. K. Sudhakar was right to draw attention to this in his speech, although he had it backwards: those able to choose life outside of those institutions have found a solution. The choice is not only self-compassionate, but also refuses to contribute to suffering in the world through unreflectively entering harmful parental or partner bonds, as far too many do. May our numbers grow, even if (especially if) we don’t reproduce.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 16^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The apps went down and the atmosphere cleared – just for a bit, just enough to breathe in what it feels like to be without them. Unless, of course, you were hyperventilating from a crucial message not going or coming through, desperate for a dopamine hit from a photo you posted, or feeling suddenly bereft of a tool that reliably distracts you from all the things you don’t want to think about. But for me, the global simultaneous outage of Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook felt… nice. It meant that what was going to be a Whatsapp voice call became a Zoom video call instead, and the space of that personal conversation was augmented gently. It meant that there were less places to scroll in the blue-lit darkness of insomnia. It meant that I could indulge in the fantasy of what it would be like to just not have some social media platforms around anymore, and despite the obvious losses of certain photographs or words, I found I liked the thought.

Everything was back by the time I woke up the next day. This was, of course, a relief to millions. The small bubble of finding myself breathing easy in that transformed atmosphere was a privilege, a highly subjective one. During the hours that this mega-corporate was down, those who depend on its platforms for mental health reasons were affected. So were those whose livelihoods require them (nope, no sympathy for the billionaire who owns these entities). Loneliness and fear must have risen. Despite my own unpleasant feelings towards social media, and my sense of security that I could still reach anyone I needed or wanted to reach, I was glad the outage was over. People need connection.

The elderly, the unwell or the struggling aside (I know, I know – rare is the person who wouldn’t self-identify in the last category these days), the relatively-doing-alright who felt frustrated or inconvenienced over truncated casual chats or random scrolling have an opportunity to reflect – specifically, on what life in places that experience Internet shutdowns is like. When fundamental rights to communication and access are clamped down on, there are major impacts on everything from timely medical interventions to educational and professional opportunities to basic safety and sustenance needs. The horror of not knowing what one’s crush was typing before the outage doesn’t compare to the horror of not knowing if one’s loved ones are safe or even alive.

There is much we don’t know yet about what caused this massive outage, and theorists have stoked the flames intriguingly, firing questions on capitalism and power. Still, it doesn’t really matter what happens to these or similar platforms. What matters is only what happens to us, IRL. Sometimes the world feels like it’s contained in our palms, sometimes the world feels as suffocatingly small as a screen. Both of these are distortions. It’s a privilege to think about what it means to be online, and to distinguish it from what it means to be connected. If we have that privilege, as I strongly felt I did during the outage, it’s important to not forget it now that the apps are back.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 7^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

I am so grateful that social media did not exist, at least not in the way it does now, when I was a teenager or a child. I am also nostalgic for the world wide web (remember that?) of my early adulthood, when it was possible to connect with people meaningfully and not just as your-projection-meets-mine, blogs democratised space for new writers, advertising didn’t clutter the screen, and the phone and the computer were distinct devices. This is because of the dire turn that social media and the internet have taken over the last decade. The former became less a place to engage than a hypermarket where capitalism and dirty politics collude. For many of us, social media is the internet in a sense. When I try to use the platforms less, for instance, I’m offline. I’m not browsing websites, or reading news or commentary directly from the source instead of via a link.

It was recently revealed that Facebook, which owns Instagram, knew from before the pandemic through its own internal research that the latter negatively impacts teenage girls’ mental health, affecting their body image particularly. The studies even showed that up to 13% of users who experienced suicidal thoughts were able to connect them to the platform. The company chose to dismiss its own findings.

Even from the relatively privileged position of requiring social media presence only for work and using it begrudgingly, it has still had myriad repercussions on my mental health. I am not a teenager, but no one who has ever been a teenage girl forgets what it’s like to be one – to be so intensely charged, so full of possibilities, and so unaware of how one is being broken daily in ways that will take decades to resolve. Mega-corporations that demand sacrificial participation in their economies so as to “belong” better offline makes those offline lives that much harder.

Michaela Cole, who won an Emmy this week for writing the brilliant TV series I May Destroy You, said in her acceptance speech: “In a world that entices us to browse the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility, these days, seems to somehow equate to success — do not be afraid to disappear. From it, from us, for a while. And see what comes to you in the silence.”

This is not something most of us can do, for many reasons. Cole herself has a social media presence. So this speech is only a reminder, in the same way that the leaked information about the platforms above is. Knowing what we know, can we give ourselves permission to disengage a little more each day? Speaking for myself, I’m finding it easier to, at this time, because the platforms are just that toxic. I can feel the way Twitter upsets me every time I open it. But then, I compulsively open Instagram or Facebook despite knowing they will bore me. Algorithms and other contrivances show us what they want to. In increments, at least, we can try to see less of it.

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

Have you ever had a friend whom you loved for reasons other than their politics – which sometimes made you cringe, and at other times left you shaking with anger – but who one day made an about-turn and learned all the hard-hitting jargon, all the sexy causes and all the clever ways of covering their former obnoxiousness? They overcompensated in ways that confused you (especially when the mask slipped), and made you worry if you weren’t offering the space for growth that you claimed to believe in. Discomfiting.

Sometimes, the actor Priyanka Chopra publically behaves exactly this way, trying too hard without trying much at all. Chopra is a judge on an extremely ill-advised reality show called The Activist along with musician Usher and dancer Julianne Hough. I’ll save myself the column inches about the actor’s gaffes in recent years that reveal regressive values – you’re probably well aware, given their frequency. For her co-judges, there’s no immediate recall of their problematicness (although if you seek it, you’ll find something – but this is true for literally everyone, celebrity or not). Chopra, on the other hand, has created a brand image that relies heavily on appearing radical, and being on The Activistmakes it all the more difficult to not notice the hypocrisy. Again.

The Activist’s premise is this: three teams compete for a chance to present at the G20 Summit about their chosen cause. Their efforts will be measured by social media metrics and media stunts. In other words: the cause doesn’t matter, just how cool you can make it look.

Social media is saturated with those who perform this way, gathering clout that quite often translates to real world opportunities. It’s no surprise that someone dreamed up a show that takes this unaltruistic approach to its logical conclusion. I wonder what the consolation prize for the show’s losers are. Probably that word that’s thrown often at people trying to make a living: “exposure”.

But wagging a preachy finger here is meaningless. Vast numbers of people will watch the show because we are like that – we’ve become used to channeling our own ennui into things we know don’t nourish us, keeping a cycle of dissatisfaction going. The cycle serves capitalism. Our outrage, this piece included, gives the show real estate in our minds. That’s just what those who benefit from this want.

Sometimes I wonder if the era for provocative but effective statements has passed, now that provocation is common currency, and that quieter, slow work is all that matters. The Activist could have made sense a couple of decades ago, before it became this fashionable to be progressive. American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been ridiculed for wearing a dress with the words “Tax The Rich” scrawled on it to the Met Gala. The same gesture, had it occurred when she was lower on the rungs of power, would have garnered applause. How is she to keep watch on the fluctuating barometer of social media pressure, while also actually doing the work of public policymaking? That dress is at the dry cleaners now, and we’ve all got our own dirty laundry – and our own work – to do.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 16^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Until just over a week ago, the 34-member strong Supreme Court of India had just one woman among its judges. Now it has four, with the new appointments of Hima Kohli, B.V. Nagarathna and Bela M. Trivedi, who join Indira Banerjee, who was sworn-in in 2018. They were among nine new justices who have been elevated to the apex court, a decision made by a collegium headed by the Chief Justice of India, N.V. Ramana. The CJI has remarked that he is still unsatisfied with the low percentage of women presiding at the Supreme Court. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say: well, so are we.

To the Supreme Court’s credit, that the work still left to be done is being highlighted is a good thing. The celebration of small gains is best reserved for our personal lives; on a larger scale, we wind up celebrating the tokenistic too often. In over 70 years, the Supreme Court of India has only had eleven women judges, beginning with M. Fatima Beevi as late as 1989 (which is also to say: until last month, the Supreme Court of India only had eight women judges in its entire history). Courts across the country are disproportionately headed by male judges. High Courts in some states, including Uttarakhand and Bihar, do not have any women judges at all. The high percentage of vacancies (42% out the sanctioned strength) in the High Courts is an issue that the CJI’s collegium say they intend to address, and a better gender ratio appears to be one of their criteria for selection. There are presently at least three transgender judges in the country (Swati Bidhan Baruah in Assam, Joyita Mondal in West Bengal and Vidya Kamble in Maharashtra), but this number too must rise. The recently-appointed Justice BV Nagarathna is scheduled to become India’s first woman CJI in 2027, but she will retire barely a month later upon reaching the stipulated age.

The need for greater gender and other forms of parity in the legal arena isn’t about optical representation (which it can sometimes be in other fields, including entertainment) but about how this can positively impact the application and the development of the law itself. The glaringly obvious human rights travesty of marital rape remaining legal in India is just one that if corrected will bring countless people succour or freedom. One would imagine that a Supreme Court with more women in it might bring in the necessary change. 

With that being said, the expectation that a more diverse court will be more progressive or sympathetic to nuances that your average Indian man (no matter how erudite) can miss is a bit optimistic. Power is power, and people tend to abuse it, regardless of gender or other identity markers. Patriarchy cannot persist without the participation of people who don’t benefit from it but who are conditioned, and then keep deciding, to be its agents anyway. But I assure you: all this cynicism is just another way of expressing hope that good change is coming, but we need so much of it that we aren’t holding our breath.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 9^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The rapper Arivu’s sidelining from the hit song “Enjoy Enjaami”, which was inspired by his ancestors, who were disenfranchised labourers in Sri Lanka, has been noted ever since the track first came out. “Dhee ft. Arivu” read the credits, putting the performance collaborator before the conceptualiser, lyricist and performer himself. Then came a remix that dropped his name entirely, and most recently, a Rolling Stone India cover featuring only Dhee and Shan Vincent de Paul (both of whom rose to fame through collaborations with Arivu). The magazine misframed its cover story in a Tweet, later clarifying that is about the two artists’ forthcoming albums. Optically, at first glance, it looked like one more way to steal the spotlight from Arivu.

At the time of this writing, Arivu has not responded publicly to the controversy. However, he and Dhee posed for a photograph together at a party for composer Yuvan Shankar Raja, shared online by actor Dhanush. This is a move designed for social media semiotics. Arivu – the most successful of the three artists in the controversy – has gracefully chosen silence, for now, and this silence has spurred many inferences and projections. We cannot know what he is thinking, and he may not want us to, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from speaking on his behalf.

Or from fighting publicly, as de Paul’s diss track after director Pa Ranjith called out Rolling Stone India – which had a ripple effect of drawing abuse toward Dhee and himself – showed. Unlike the powerfully-connected Dhee (whose stepfather is music director Santosh Narayanan), who is clearly savvier about letting things blow over, as the least recognisable of them and probably the most inexperienced at handling trolls, de Paul did what a lot of people would do, i.e. react upon triggering. Or perhaps his detractors are right: “no publicity is bad publicity”, as the industry adage goes.

There may be an element of strategy to this mess, which has increased awareness of new releases from the A.R. Rahman-backed label, Maajja. There’s also much insider knowledge, PR decisions and other factors involved that we aren’t meant to be privy to, but which we certainly do play into. The socio-political complexity of this – specifically the relevance of caste – has inspired trenchant discourse. Still, missing in all this is the acceptance that the myth of Tamil unity is a dangerous and chauvinistic one.

Arivu is a Dalit musician from Tamil Nadu by way of colonial Ceylon, where his family were Malayaha Tamils. Dhee is Australian Tamil from Sri Lanka, and Brahmin. Canadian Tamil de Paul’s family fled Sri Lanka as refugees. The latter two are of Jaffna extraction – not the only kind of Ilankai Tamilness, but not enough people know there are others (a topic for another time, says this Batticaloa-extraction writer). They’re all Tamil, sure – but they are not the same. Neither assigning a hierarchy of oppression or privilege nor an uncritical mantle of “Tamil excellence” or similar rah-rahness is fair to any of them, or to the layered histories and identities each carries. Political allyship or solidarity isn’t about uniformity; it requires acknowledging profound unease, not glossing it away in pursuit of coolness.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 2^nd 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

According to the Madhya Pradesh High Court (Indore Bench, presided by Justice Subodh Abhyankar), “India are a conservative society, it has not yet reached such level (advance or lower) of civilization where unmarried girls, regardless of their religion, indulge in carnal activities with boys just for the fun of it (sic)”. The case that was brought before the court concerned a woman who attempted suicide after her consensual partner told her that he was marrying someone else, then lodged a case of rape against him. Instead of just dealing with the particular intricacies of the case, the bench felt it fit to opine on Indian women’s desires and personalities at large. While it’s possible that the prosecutor here feels she has gained justice, court rulings create precedents which can affect the outcomes of future cases. That’s where some of the trouble here lies.

Firstly, it’s a technical quibble, but all girls should be unmarried because child marriage is morally wrong and legally a crime. The official court order quotes the judge as also having used the archaic word “lass”. As in: “… a boy who is entering a physical relationship with a lass must realize that his actions have consequences…”. The “boy” in question here is an adult. Infantilization in descriptions of people above the age of 18 is telling.

Secondly, to misquote Cyndi Lauper, “girls” do just want to have carnal activities for fun. That’s not a newsflash.

There’s another layer to this case, even as the red flag of the lack of acknowledgement of the sexual autonomy of adults is noted. The judge stated that someone who found herself in the situation that the prosecutor did should not have to resort to suicide. Fair. But neither should she have to resort to lodging a case of rape, walking back her own choices and thereby diluting what it means to have the right to say Yes as much as the right to say No. Perhaps there are no or few legal avenues available to resolve feelings of betrayal and despair, and such experiences cannot really come within the purview of the law. This is where more thoughtful, ethical and equal social mores would make a difference. Where respect for adults’ choices about sex and relationships prevails, the likelihood of someone having to give up their own power in order to heal will be far lower.

According to the report of the case in question, the woman’s parents had opposed her inter-faith relationship before her partner decided or was made to get engaged to someone else. A couple of weeks ago, this column covered a Chennai woman who roped the police in against her parents for trying to force her to wed. As far as redressal goes, how one frames one’s experience – who gets cast as villain, even if one feels victimized either way – matters.

Between the assumption that women in India have no sexual selves beyond the contract of marriage, and how retroactive legal revocations of consent have implications on society’s ability to adopt healthy sex-positivity, there’s serious regression happening here. That should clear the judge’s doubts about what stage of civilization we’re at.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 24^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Deepika Padukone has been dropped from – or has dropped out of – Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s forthcoming film Baiju Bawra after making a perfectly reasonable request – that she be paid remuneration equal to her co-lead’s pay. Incidentally, she is also married to her former co-lead, Ranveer Singh.

Bhansali and Padukone had previously worked together on Bajirao Mastani, Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leelaand Padmaavat (all of which also starred Singh). She was a known collaborator, whom the director could trust; when word got out about the rejection, she even put up a heartfelt post online thanking him for what she called an “iconic partnership” over the years. Her chemistry with Singh was guaranteed, both professionally and personally. Why would Bhansali and the producers look any further for a leading lady, and why wouldn’t they pay the perfect one what she deserved? 

Padukone’s 12 crore remuneration in Padmavaat had made her Bollywood’s highest earning woman actor (Kareena Kapoor reportedly requested the same recently to essay Sita’s character in Alaukik Desai’s forthcoming Ramayana adaptation, and was denied the role). This figure may seem astronomical to most of us, but in its correct context, it is practically just an honorarium, not real remuneration. In contrast, Bollywood’s highest paid actor, a man named Shah Rukh Khan, can make 100 crores per film. Gender-based pay disparity among Bollywood actors is an issue that Taapsee Panu, Sonam Kapoor, Priyamani, Padukone herself and many others have spoken out about or hinted at, usually in relation to having been ousted from talks because they asked to be paid fairly. But little has changed despite these occasional rumbles, as this Baiju Bawra fiasco shows. If this is how prejudicial things are at the very top, imagine how the disparity trickles down through the ranks of the industry.

What I would really like to see now is Ranveer Singh taking a stand. Will he drop out of the film as well, and make a statement about how he did it because his co-star was not being paid equally? This could encourage a ripple effect of beneficial copycatting in the industry, and bolster Padukone’s own stand, thus making it easier for others to both discuss and demand pay parity. Alternately: will he tell the producers to reduce his own wages so that they would be able to afford hiring both Padukone and himself for the project? The second possibility will be a nice, smart way to snub those who denied Padukone her rightful income. As very successful actors who, being married and all, probably pool some or all of their incomes, neither of them would be making a major artistic or financial compromise this way. More importantly, it would publicly be an exposure of how such calculations are made by producers to begin with, and how they automatically privilege male stars.

Padukone’s dissatisfaction should be enough to set things straight, but if it were, she and the rest of Bollywood’s women wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. Since it isn’t enough, maybe it’s time that Singh and other men shouldered the load of making a righteous fuss more often. After all, they can quite literally afford to.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 12^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Just an hour before her scheduled wedding in July, 22-year old Chennaiite Janathulla Firdose successfully staged an intervention that prevented it from happening. She had been engaged against her will to her maternal uncle. Undaunted, she lodged a complaint with the All Women Police Station in Puzhal against her parents and the groom’s other relatives, and circulated a video detailing how she felt about being forced to get married. The police showed up on the appointed date, and the event was called off.

I looked askance at the tone of some of the reports on this incident, which highlighted the police’s efforts, including how they “convinced” the woman’s parents and gave her further advice on her future. This is real life, not Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There are good people who happen to be cops, certainly, but law enforcement as an institution has been responsible for a great deal of harm. The institution doesn’t need a PR favour – especially when an incident isn’t even about them. 

Ms. Firdose is the hero of her own story. It wasn’t that the police rescued her as much as that she rescued herself by reaching out, taking a risk and finding the resources she needed. That her escape seemed unusual enough to draw attention says something about how rarely we feel we can do what she did – ask for help, and be supported by services and systems. Even where our rights are technically protected, to actually take a further step and exercise them takes gumption. Part of this comes from a warranted distrust of institutions, but most of it comes from knowledge of systemic and public apathy or complicity. Imagine if every person being forced into a marriage, as well as every person being pressured out of a relationship, felt assured that they could rely on legal rights and human decency to protect them.

I wonder: would the police – or indeed, anyone – still have intervened if the video had not contained a threat of suicide? Generally speaking, beyond this single case: could someone reaching out and simply stating that she did not consent to a marriage have stirred the same reaction? Mostly, “well-wishers” may counsel the complainant about respecting their elders, the exciting possibilities that come with marriage, or how they are too young to know what’s good for them. All this probably happened in this case as well, prior to the video and the police involvement, but fortunately, she didn’t cave.

“I thought sports would be my ticket to a job and avoiding marriage,” Kamalpreet Kaur, Indian discus-throwing Olympian, told the press this week. It is wonderful to see more women speaking out openly about how they do not want to succumb to marital pressure, and about the choices they made to stay true to themselves. Stories like these are footpaths that cut through the grass, away from the paved track. Someone else who needs to break away sees a possible alternate trajectory for themselves. Gradually, the landscape changes as the new path becomes more well-worn. It becomes easier to traverse, and there are footprints – and maybe even friends – that make it less lonely, even if (for some) ultimately solitary.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 5^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

They are still calling it the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, even though we are quite evidently nearly eight months into 2021 (also known as – the year things didn’t get better). The Games are happening despite widespread public and professional opinion in Japan – an Asahi Shimbun poll found that 83% of respondents were against the event being held, towns that were supposed to host athletes pulled out so as to protect their residents, the Japan Doctors Union warned against the possible creation of a new “Olympic” strain, and the country is under an official state of emergency due to the virus. Still, the tournament is very much ongoing, with checks and measures such as daily testing for athletes and the banning of spectators from the events (but not, despite what the Internet said, anti-sex cardboard beds).

But as it happens too often, the development of these new security and hygiene protocols have not necessarily been inclusive. Some athletes have come forward to talk about how the rules initially prevented them from bringing their nursing children with them. A blanket ban on travelling with their families meant that even those whose babies literally depend on being breastfed were forced to choose between their careers and their loved ones.

Aliphine Tuliamuk, a member of the U.S. Olympic women’s marathon team with a nursing child, wrote to the International Olympic Committee, resulting in a change of the rules. But Ona Carbonell, of Spain’s artistic swimming team, has since spoken about how the new provisions still demand a choice. Carbonell’s partner and child would have to quarantine in a hotel room for the duration of the Games, and she would have to leave the Olympic Village’s bubble every time feeding was required, thus taking repeated risks. Whether a nursing athlete “chooses” to leave her child at home or to negotiate quarantine rules, the situation adds mental stress that could affect her performance. As tennis champion Naomi Osaka recently demonstrated: the psychological costs of public-facing careers are huge. Especially if you’re a woman.

During the qualifications stage for the Tokyo Olympics, Germany’s women’s gymnastics team wore full-body unitards as a protest against attire that sexualises athletes. Meanwhile, the European Beach Handball Championships fined the Norwegian women’s team for wearing shorts rather than the mandated bikini bottoms (the musician P!nk announced that she would bear the fines).

There are rumours that Yoshiro Mori, a former Prime Minister of Japan who served as chief of the Tokyo Olympics organising committee before resigning in February, may return as honorary advisor. What will this mean? Mori resigned due to a backlash over a series of sexist comments, including that meeting with women in senior positions would be time-consuming as “women talk too much”. Hiroshi Sasaki, who was the creative director of the Games’ opening and closing ceremonies, similarly resigned after it emerged that he had body-shamed entertainer Naomi Watanabe by remarking to colleagues that she should perform as an “Olympig”. Sexism isn’t a competitive sport – or is it? Sometimes it certainly feels like it, what with the sporting world and the rest of the world constantly trying to set the next worst record for gender-based discrimination.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 29^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Danish Siddiqui, one of the finest photojournalists in the world, was killed while embedded with Afghan security forces during conflict with the Taliban in Kandahar last week. Those who hadn’t known his name certainly knew his work. He captured images that that immediately became iconic (or by today’s measure, viral), including powerful photographs of the coronavirus pandemic in North India and the January 2020 pogrom in Delhi.

One of the signature elements of his work was the way he took care to conceal faces. Voyeuristic photojournalism dehumanises by clearing identifying people in moments when they may be unable to give consent, and broadcasting the same in a way that crystallises terrible moments. But Siddiqui had a sense for shadow, light, fabric and motion and used these to great effect. The image of a Rohingya refugee bending to touch the wet shore, the boat she escaped on still behind her; the image of a family of three holding each other upon hearing of the death of their spouse/parent; the image of a man with his arms over his head, being beaten bloody by a mob – you cannot identify a single vulnerable face in any of these (perpetrators are not vulnerable). Thus, larger stories are evoked and memorialised. Siddiqui captured the big picture. He created historical documents.

This is not to say that he didn’t create any work at all that didn’t fall into tropes of exploiting emotion, only that he had quite evidently begun to perfect an idiom in which one didn’t have to utilise those tropes any longer. Siddiqui’s untimely demise is a great loss to photojournalism as a medium that helps uphold democracy and justice through recording and disseminating truth. The medium’s use in this way is often a lofty ideal, but he demonstrated it in practice.

I distinctly remember the anger I felt upon seeing press photos immediately after the Easter 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka, which captured people’s confusion and anguish as they looked for their loved ones. There was one woman in particular who was recognisable across different images, perhaps not even taken by the same photographer. By contrast, Siddique’s photo essay showed the spaces the victims had lived in, and objects from their daily lives. Eschewing shock value, this technique thoughtfully rendered the pain inflicted on these communities. A sewing machine, a Jesus statue still wrapped in plastic, a schoolbag – these simple items evoke the depth of loss. They do so without inflicting further violence – the violence of insensitive documentation – on either the deceased or those who mourn them. While creating this work, Siddiqui was briefly arrested in Negombo, one of the locations of the concurrent blasts. Incidentally, his arrest was on World Press Freedom Day.

Tellingly, Siddiqui’s death has been celebrated by those who want the truth obscured. While his life and career have been curtailed, the impact of his work remains, and will continue to teach. Here’s to the emergence of more photojournalists who provide dignity to their subjects, and who brave the perils spawned by human evil so as to provide mirrors that show society exactly what we are – and shame and inspire us to do better.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 22^nd 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.