Tag Archives: the venus flytrap

The day before my beautiful father passed into the light, I posted a Tweet, sharing for the first time this aspect of my private life. In it, I said that he had been on a ventilator for ten days, and that it was okay if one did not pray for him or for I, but that I asked only this: “Next time, cast your vote well.”

My father is one of lakhs of Indians who have been murdered by the Modi government during this pandemic. It is not only the deaths of those who were COVID+ when they died that count among these, but also every post-COVID death, every never-tested death, every fudged data death, every death by penury, every death by suicide because of an untenable situation caused by how public resources were funnelled into propaganda and unaccounted coffers rather into our infrastructure, every death from walking a highway because of an arbitrary lockdown, every death from another ailment that could not be treated because hospitals had no room or equipment, every death that could have been avoided had the election rallies and the Kumbh Mela that brought this second wave upon us had not happened. This is avarice and evil. It’s wilful. Negligence is an understatement.

I value my privacy; it was in a moment of need, not anger, that I posted that Tweet. It was also a moment of empathic unity with everyone who has suffered so much recently, and all who will continue to. I am glad I posted it before and not after he died, because what happened was this: regime supporters began to hurl abuse my way. Dozens of quote-Tweets expressing vile sentiments, cursing and blaming my family and I, without an iota of kindness. Some even skewed what I said to suggest that I was against the DMK government, which – since it is openly against the terror at the Centre – I’m currently grateful for. What I experienced happens daily online. Rightwing trolls (and to a lesser extent, progressive-posing provocateurs) descend on people in their times of pain and loss without decency or sensitivity, sending terrible words, and even death and rape threats.

This is the naked face of all who support this despicable regime, including those who are not Internet trolls. There is no temple that can be raised that will be enough to cleanse their souls of sin.

You see, I’m a believer. My father’s last rites were performed by the people he loved the most in the world: four women, two of us menstruating. In the absence of crowd and formality, we sent him across in the way we needed to: with our hands, with our words, with our own ceremonies. 

My father was a devout man, who identified as Hindu – and like anyone with a pure heart opposed the regime at the top. He had a beautiful, non-Brahminical, non-patriarchal, and most importantly heartfelt farewell, replete equally with the Sanskrit prayers we know by heart as much as all else we were moved to offer. It was not a political gesture.

But may I remind you of this: here in this undeclared yet evident Hindu Rashtra, the waters of the holy Ganga have been clogged with bodies that could not be given this dignity. Mass, indistinguishable pyres have spread ashes over cities. Ask your conscience whether a government that believes in God or Goodness, orthodox or otherwise, would have allowed for all this to happen. This terrible regime has caused such immense despair across this land – intent instead on raising monuments, erasing history and distorting if not destroying the possibility of joy, peace and prosperity for everyone who lives (or lived) here.

I was with my Appa etherically in the last minutes of his life, guided by the divine to connect with him even though I did not know what was taking place. I had a profound spiritual experience that will hold me in grace for the rest of my life, and to the afterlife that he will greet me into one day.

This is something that the rotten-hearted who use God as a prop without practicing compassion will never understand. My faith is strong, and so I am in the chorus of all of us who chant this: the evil that has consumed our country must go, and must be replaced by leadership that is equal, just, rational, honest and can begin to repair all the damage that this regime and its cheerleaders are doing.

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

“It wrenches me beyond describing, therefore, to accept that I have violated that long-standing relationship of trust and respect between us and I apologise unconditionally for the shameful lapse of judgement that led me to attempt a sexual liaison with you on two occasions on 7 November and 8 November 2013, despite your clear reluctance that you did not want such attention from me.” In November 2013, Tarun Tejpal – the accused in a rape case against a younger, subordinate colleague – not only sent this email to the survivor, but even had it published. This confession did not suffice; over seven years later, a “fast-track” court has just acquitted him.

In Eve Ensler’s book The Apology, she channels/imagines her late father, who had sexually abused her, and gives herself the apology she longs for. In Michaela Cole’s TV series I May Destroy You, which fictionalises a crime she experienced, she creates her closure as well, through a series of fantasised potential outcomes to confronting her trauma, including apology. Layli Long Soldier’s poetry collection Whereas is a response to the duplicitous language and covert non-delivery of the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, a U.S. government decree that was quietly signed in 2009 – so quietly that many indigenous people, including the poet at first, did not hear about it. Sometimes an apology means nothing – it cannot hold water in court, cannot repair what was done, cannot give back what was lost. Or it is tendered in a crafty way, to further exploit, to attract sympathy, to offer ruses and excuses.

When I was contacted casually by someone who had hurt me in an incident that I later understood as having been sexual assault, I felt a mixture of dread and curiosity. My therapist said, as I processed my feelings: “You need justice.” I think I smirked, recalling everything I knew about how abusers of all stripes get away with wrongdoings of all degrees of severity, as I replied, “What is justice?” It was a question I had to answer for myself. After weeks of anxiety attacks, I sent him a long email. I wrote unequivocally about the impact of his actions and begged him not to reply if he could not do so gracefully. He didn’t; a relief. It was never his apology I needed.

But in the aftermath of Tejpal’s acquittal, I experience again the fear of being manipulated through words, the fear that the recipient of my email has just been biding his time and now has permission to be vicious, dishonest or glib. A bit of that old shadow creeps across my heart: here, on the public stage of the world, under the aegis of the law, is proof that an offender can make a confession and still be absolved. What if this sets a behavioural precedent, and not only bolsters a legal one? What do words mean then? What do apologies?

Long Soldier writes: “Yet the root of reparation is repair.” Healing is more beautiful than justice. Perhaps they are sometimes synonyms. We cannot always have it. When we can try, we must – giving to ourselves, guiding our own ways into restoration.

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

“It wrenches me beyond describing, therefore, to accept that I have violated that long-standing relation

For Tanuja Patil and Shardul Kadam, a Maharashtra-based straight couple, starting their marriage off on an equal footing meant exchanging mangalsutras. They will both wear the traditional nuptial chain, conventionally worn only by women.

Objects like this are inherently loaded ones, even though they are also privately sentimental ones. For some, the radical abjuring of all such markers is the only form of acceptable self-presentation. For others, there’s sincerity in adapting markers so that they reflect the self, the partnership and shared or specific beliefs.

There are certainly strong arguments to be made for how an accessory isn’t going to equalise an institution, but these apply most at large. If all woke couples began to wear matching nuptial chains tomorrow, this will become just as meaningless as those cringey karuppu kannadi wedding photos that every Chennai couple takes (sorry folks, you look like rejects from a 90’s boy band music video). But within the scope of this one partnership, the ornament has been chosen to represent the kind of marriage the couple is making an effort to co-create. As Kadam stated, “Tanuja and I can define our relationship better than anyone else; we support each other’s work, believe in each other’s dreams, and are in this journey together. So, who cares what the world thinks?”

A friend of mine got married sitting on her mother’s lap recently. I’ve never been married, but I wore bridal mettis for a few years, because I wanted to (an aside about the evolution of gendered ornaments: mettis were originally worn by men to indicate their marital status – to women who were taught to keep their sights on the ground, rather than look a man in the eye). Many have opted for legal registrations over the uneasiness of figuring out how to have a ceremony that doesn’t reinforce regressive mores. Some reinvent the rituals to suit what they believe in, from eliminating certain portions to rewriting incantations. The mangalsutras mutually tied at the Patil-Kadam wedding would fall into this category.

Now and then, these little things happen that rearrange one’s personal equation to overarching institutions and traditions, and the way we navigate these as people who know that we all internalise conditioning, but can grow and choose anew. They are not radical things, just individually precious ones. Inter-religious and inter-caste marriages, even if they have the most traditional ceremonies, will always be more progressive on a larger and more long-term scale than small gestures. So will marriages that transcend racial and heteronormative boundaries. Then, of course, there’s the eschewing of marriage altogether in favour of partnership, and bonds that are forged and renewed without the scaffolds of societal and legal sanction.

But marriages and partnerships, even if they have elements which appear to be open-minded and reformist, are only as successful as what goes on out of sight. True equality within a partnership can’t be gauged only in comparison to cultural norms. Neither can acceptance or acquiescence be understood as contentment. The truth is our standards are low, with centuries of abusive relationships in our collective histories. Our simple gestures must open the door to deeper transformations, and broader change.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 20^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Here in this brutal second wave of coronavirus in India, with mental health problems endemic in a population that’s suffered economically and emotionally for upwards of 14 months, how are there still people glibly ignoring the reality of the situation in favour of chirpy phrases and flu tonics? That is not hope. That’s toxic positivity.

If you’ve done this, you may feel like you are helping. But this sadly doesn’t do anything useful for the person on the receiving end, who has to make an effort to be polite in response to platitudes when there’s so much else that needs (sometimes urgent) attention.

Loved ones who say “be positive, test negative” mean well; often, they want to make the recipient feel better. But there are much better ways to do this than to try to diminish the threat of the virus. Being unwilling to hold space for the fear, confusion, exhaustion, grief or other difficult emotions of a coronavirus or coronavirus-adjacent experience has adverse emotional repercussions on the person being told to cheer up.

Unless you are going to personally visit a patient’s or caregiver’s kitchen (double-masked mandatorily, obviously) and pluck, peel, chop, hand-pound and strain the selection of rhizomes, leaves and spices that you casually suggested over Whatsapp that they consume frequently – Don’t. It isn’t that these remedies are ineffective; it’s that it’s far easier to shoot off a prescription than to prepare something. You don’t know what the practicalities of their schedule, the ingredients or income at their disposal, or their energy level on any given day are.

I’m writing this amidst a respite from the way the virus has affected my own circumstances, and I’ve noticed what actually helped me in terms of communication. Since updates vary even between different parts of the same day, so if someone has reached out to you to, respond promptly. If you’re not usually in frequent contact, ask before you call – a caregiver may have their hands literally full; a patient may be resting. Catering, financial aid and such essentials may be appreciated; if you can provide, do.

In lieu of insensitive or even stupid phrases, ask meaningful questions or offer things that balance the difficulty of the situation with the hope that you feel (because you can; you’re not in their shoes).

“I pray for this night to be safely behind us,” a dear friend texted, showing me he wouldn’t pretend things weren’t scary with some “It’ll be okay!” nonsense. This crucial assurance let me safely pour my anguish out over a 2am phone call.

“I am curious about what is guiding you emotionally and spiritually right now, helping you find your own inner rhythm and be cared for and loved?” another dear friend asked. This beautiful question opened up a space for me to name, request and receive nourishment.

 On that note: supplementing prayers with angry questions toward the authorities who let this country down will go far in helping us collectively recover from this horror. We must inculcate heartfelt resistance over toxic positivity. That’s what will give us resilience for the long haul. Those of us who survive are going to need it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 15^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Oh, how low the bar is for cis-het men to appear to be romantically impressive. 

The actor Riz Ahmed, walking the Academy Awards red carpet with his partner, the novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, asked press photographers to pause for a few seconds as he reached over to play with Mirza’s hair. I guess he was trying to look like he was adjusting it. Except it didn’t need adjusting. Mirza’s coiffure, a side-swept and very smooth fringe and even smoother straight hair left down her back, had probably already been worked on by professionals who had ensured it would stay in place. Which it did. No flyaways, no wisps, no pedestrian disarray. In fact, he could have wound up messing it up by touching it at all. Which he didn’t, but still: what was the point of that unnecessary, interruptive, red carpet-traffic-holding up caress of her hair? Or here’s a bigger question: why did so many press outlets and people get so excited about it, as though it was the 21^st century equivalent of a gentleman covering a puddle with his cloak so that a lady wouldn’t have to take a slightly longer step across or around it? Some kinds of chivalry are best left dead, thus avoiding both dry cleaning bills and dramatic eye rolls.

Look, who knows what the dynamics of their marriage are. Maybe random acts of interference are their love language. Maybe it’s none of our business.

But that moment on the red carpet, that little performance for the public eye? That was for us to see and maybe even for us to fawn over, but mostly it was just territorial behaviour on Ahmed’s part. The gesture is not necessarily controlling in and of itself, because people do appreciate different kinds of displays of affection, depending on their temperaments, needs and comfort levels. But it’s certainly territorial – Ahmed put his back between Mirza and the photographers, as if to say, even if lovingly, “Remember that she’s mine”.

I’ve been meaning to read Mirza’s work ever since I became aware of her through the couple’s last viral moment in the media. That was when Ahmed revealed in an interview that the couple had a rom-com style meetcute – they were both vying for the same power point for their respective laptops at a café. It’s the classic un-pandemic daydream of certain introverted, ambitious types: to be immersed in your work, and then serendipitously find love just by stepping out for a change of scene (her hair was probably perfect that day too, as it is in all such daydreams). Mirza is a bestselling author. I’m annoyed that I hadn’t known of her except through her spouse talking about her, and that I’ve been reminded about her only because he drew the spotlight again.

I checked out a sample of her novel, A Place For Us, and smirked because right there on the first page was a line that was kind of funny, miscontextualised. A man greeting guests at his sister’s wedding is described like so: “He smoothed down his hair, as if a stray strand would be enough to call attention, give him away.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 1^st 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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