Meet George Jetson!

I’m that person who never has cash — I don’t mean I'm broke, I just mean that at any given time, my wallet will only have an assortment of change and the occasional lonely Rs 1,000 note, which no one ever has change for. I was sold on the idea of cashless transactions long before it became an Indian government goal. However, I’m still more old school about it than my yoga teacher (who continues to bring me news from the outside world). This week, he told me how he had paid at a petrol pump using Paytm. Now, my only experience with Paytm is using it occasionally on Uber cabs. For everything else, I’ve linked my debit card and use that. But, thanks to Paytm’s recent round of investments from Chinese superpower Alibaba, they’re practically giving away money on cashback and rewards schemes. So why not jump in while the going’s good?

However, I’m not so sure India is ready for a cashless economy. Think of all the people you pay by cash. My list includes, but is not limited to: all the people we employ (housekeeper, gardener, press-walla, garbage collector), stopping at a local store to buy bread or whatever, taking the occasional auto and also buying the occasional single cigarette from a local paan shop. I can’t see myself whipping out my mobile phone to scan their bar code just for Rs 12.

Not to mention, older generations — like my grandmother for example — are used to having cash on them. They barely ever go to the bank (I doubt my grandmother has ever used an ATM in her life) and they pay everything with the wad of cash they pull out at the beginning of the month and lock up in their Godrej almirah safe. Feeling confident when all you have on you is your debit card is very much a younger gen thing.

I also recently read an article saying that thanks to the Modi government’s crack-down on black money, people were pulling out more cash than ever, because they couldn’t be taxed on it. This is an old tax-saving ploy, which everyone knows about and it’s unlikely anyone’s going to stop doing it just because it's more convenient to have your card.

Now, however, with the new unified payment interface (UPI) that’s just been rolled out, it’s going to be a lot more secure to use your mobile phone to make payments. Rather than bank details, UPI basically assigns you a code, and you use this code to make and receive payments. This takes away one more huge thing that worries people about online payments — how safe is it to leave my bank details online?

Also, a lot of residential colonies don’t have nearby handy ATMs—or if they do, they don’t work. The last neighbourhood I lived in had one ATM to service what was technically three areas and it was out of order a lot of the time. Not surprising, because according to a recent survey by the RBI, a third of India’s ATMs don’t work at all, which means you have a one in three chance of having to wander about until you find one that does. That, my friends, is a frustrating exercise. Take it from me.

Personally though, I find that when I don’t actually have physical cash, I wind up spending a lot more money. Money as a concept doesn’t really work for me, except in the vaguest way. I see numbers, I spend numbers. I have no way of knowing what those notes feel like, how weighty a certain amount of cash is meant to be in your palms, how something I do translates into bank notes. For that, I feel at a bit of a loss.

On the other hand, I’m all about rewards, so I might just sign up for this cashless boom after all. 

(A version of this appeared as my column on mydigitalfc.com)

No, YOU fucking leave the country

This week Aamir Khan said a thing and the whole country went mad. Coming just shortly on the heels of the terrorist attacks in Paris—a time when you think citizens stick together and huddle up in cozy corners to fight against the madness that is the rest of the world—the whole Aamir thing was nothing short of several dogs at a single fight, all trying to pick at the one single bone.

I couldn't see what the brouhaha was myself. As I saw the story unfold it seemed like all the actor was accused of doing was making a statement about his wife and how she mused that maybe they should move abroad following day after day of terrible headlines. Can you blame her? Just off the top of my head: a Dalit family burned to death for not following Hindu caste politics, a Muslim man beaten to death under suspicion of having beef in his fridge, the crazy fringe right wingers becoming more and more centre each day as their absurd statements in the press got picked up and waved about. Like, “see this is what's going to happen to our country and you can't do anything about it.” I mean, we're tempted on a daily basis to leave, and we would flee if we had the money and resources, which Khan is not lacking.

But wait. And abandon our country to the crazies? I think not. That's just what they want—but remember, they can't make the rules for us. They threaten us with violence? We do what we did when the Brits were here and refuse to cooperate. Stop giving them a voice in the press. Block them immediately on Twitter when they start buzzing by your ears. Without a voice, what can they do but implode from muteness?

Instead of them sending us away, let's send them away. Far. Somewhere where they can establish this perfect idea of Hinduism they seem to be clinging on to. (Even in the Mahabharata, there was pre-marital sex, so I don't know what era these guys are longing for.) Better yet, they can all live in communities with other super orthodox religious types—Muslim, Christian, Jewish—and with all their perfect godly ways, I'm sure they'll have the country they're dreaming of right now. I don't see why the majority of (normal) people have to live by the rules of the (abnormal) minority.

Threatening to beat someone up for their views is the opinion of three-year-olds. If these mouth-frothers are going to act like babies, we should treat them like they are. Give them the occasional lollipop. Pat them on the head. Punish them by withdrawing our love and smacking them on the wrist. Put up big notices that say: SHARING IS CARING or NO HITTING.

Jokes apart though. Here's where the picture is messed up. We keep saying how they're getting stronger, but we are partly to blame for this. We are giving them a voice! We're making them stronger by looking the other way when they misbehave. The system needs to crack down on people like this: we need to punish them, and when that doesn't work, punish them harder. They need to know that we live in 21^st century India and not whatever-century-it-was Kings Landing. We do not stone people, or punish adulteresses with rape, we do not cut off hands of theives, we have a long history of democracy and a law and order system that—when it creaks into place—can astound you with the way it works, and people doing amazing things every day, and all sorts living shoulder to jowl and villages from back in the day and cities that have seen dynasties rise and fall and languages that bind you together and food that you always miss if you're away from it too long.

Why should we leave because we want to speak our minds? They have a problem? Get out, get out, stop polluting our amazing shared history of tolerance and peace with your terrible, regressive words. 

(A version of this appeared as my column on mydigitalfc)

Everything changes, and everything stays the same

It’s almost the end of October with Diwali fast nipping at our heels and for those of us in the North, a distinct tang of winter in the air. Which means that another year is almost over. This isn’t a year-end column though—even though Dusshera and its burning of all evils should be a good place to start—but a way of examining my feelings about the news lately. Which is a great weary feeling that nothing has changed, nothing at all, and we’re still stuck in the same place, outraging about the same things. Here’s a list I made of the more “evergreen” news stories as it were. (Warning: it’s very depressing.)

1)   I guess we’re still talking about beef? It all began with a ban(g), when the sale of beef was stopped in Maharashtra. This actually had a personal impact on me, because we were travelling in Goa at the time, and one night all of us had a great steak craving. There was none to be had for love or money, the owner of the restaurant we picked said. I think that was the first time it struck home for us that a ban on a certain kind of meat could actually happen. But, naively, I assumed it would blow over. Blow over? Hardly. Over the next six months, beef became such a hot button topic that people are dying all over the place and trucks are being burnt and people are being told to go back to Pakistan if they like beef so much, that argument so loved by the uneducated.

2)   Caste shouldn’t be a thing anymore in 2015, should it? But it is. This is the year that saw huge injustices against Dalits. I’m thinking of just a few days ago, the story of two small children killed in a fire set to their house while they slept because of some pride thing the upper castes of their village had. Or a headline that said, “In Jodhpur, a family lives in fear after boy touches non-Dalit’s plate.” Or the several lower caste women who are sexually assaulted in villages across India, unable to get justice because the system is so heavily biased towards the upper castes, their rapists.

3)   Dengue! Again, I’m going to marvel that the year that Marty McFly chose to travel to is the year where we still haven’t managed to come up with a way to keep away an illness which is basically caused by a mosquito bite. I get that it’s mostly a question of a social situation: crowded areas with more stagnant water get dengue mosquitoes, but instead of panic and fear, just get everyone to slap on a cheaper version of Odomos (or Odomos itself, since that’s the only thing that seems to work against the mosquitos in my house). It would be truly ironic if I got dengue after writing this though. Ironic, and yet, proving my point.

4)   Murder most foul and our not-so-great justice system. Ugh, the cops and investigators tumbled from one bad story to another. If it wasn’t the whole Aarushi case resurfacing, it was the very weird Sheena Bora one or the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq (where the cops very usefully performed a post-mortem not on the body but on the meat in the fridge.) Here’s a fun fact I unearthed when researching this: “India has earned the dubious distinction of securing a spot for the eighth year in a row on a global index which ranks the countries around the world where journalists are murdered and their killers go unpunished.” Yup.

5)   Finally, this last thing is less of a news story and more of a way people react to a news story: people have got to stop responding to a rant about one thing by saying, “Oh, why didn’t you rant about this other terrible thing? Did you not care then? Therefore you do not care now! QED!” (You know who you are!) That’s just stupid. An argument can be made that increasing exposure to bad news can make you feel worse and worse about it till it all comes spilling out, and so you didn’t make a passionate speech about it then, but you will now. An argument can also be made that by derailing an entire discussion and turning it to who-said-what-when you’re kind of killing the point and that’s not doing any good to anyone. Think about that one, internet people. Think hard. 

(A version of this appeared as my column in mydigitalfc.com)

(My new book is out and you should totally buy it. LINK.)

On the Dadri Lynching & Why Some Cows Are Holier Than Others

The ancient Egyptians worshipped the cat. If you killed one—even accidentally—you got the death penalty.

Several hundred years later, the puritans in America decided that cats were the familiar animal of the witch, and cats were killed in masses. In fact, it’s kind of amazing how many black cats there still are, considering the genocide on their species.

Now, cats are the world’s number one most popular pet. (Take that, dogs!) However, killing one—while it makes you a bad person—will not get you killed, personally.

My cook is Muslim. She loves our three cats—but that’s something that’s part of Islam as well. The Prophet loved cats, he even had a favourite one called Muezza. Cats are considered cleaner than other animals, and allowed to enter homes, plus food tasted by them is halal. However, my cook extends her compassion to all animals—so much so, that I’m not sure how much of this is her religion and how much is her general love for other beings. The dog downstairs gets bones when she can manage them, and leftover chappatis go to the cows in the cow shed next door.

Which is where the problem steps neatly from being an animal-lover to something that’s polarized by religion. Next door to my house is a temple. It’s a Shiva temple, which basically means the main temple guy (I’m not going to call him a priest, because I’m not sure he is) takes it as an excuse to be stoned and drunk a lot. Entering his maze-like complex, you see several rooms and in front of the rooms a large open yard surrounded by trees; which is also where the cowshed is. There are different families in each room, but it’s still a big enough space that it never looks crowded. And also, everyone seems to have a pet. From Romeo the obese pug, to a small kitten that they asked me for help with because she wasn’t eating, to a white mouse that they kept in a cage. And three cows that occasionally break the boundary wall and walk on through with impunity, knowing that no one can touch them. Occasionally, I’ll be driving past and I’ll see someone tossing “offerings” to the cows, and then standing there, hands folded in front of them. “It’s just a cow,” I want to say, “Four legs, udders, has horns? There is nothing more holy about this animal than any other one.”

I think of Dadri, a teeny tiny town a little outside Delhi, where a man was killed on suspicion of having beef in his fridge. When the meat you eat is tied up to someone else’s holy beliefs, you know there’s a problem. When modern India behaves no differently than ancient Egypt or Puritan America, again, you know you have a problem.

What is it about food and the things we eat? What makes some food such a trigger? Think back to the revolt of 1857, when the final straw for Indian soldiers wasn’t that they were under a foreign rule—oh no, that was totally fine—but that their guns were greased with pig fat. Just that one fact and mass slaughter of the Brits across the country.

But then, just a few short weeks ago, people threw meat in front of Jain temple, irritated that there was a ban on meat sales in slaughterhouses. Goats with their beady little eyes and long cocker spaniel ears are not sacred (also they’re delicious), no one would think of worshipping a chicken (mmm tandoori), even buffalos, the cow’s less attractive cousin, get eaten without much of a fuss.

You would think that we’d have more respect for life if we’re that upset about an animal being killed. A man died. A man was beaten to death, just because there was a rumour that the meat in his fridge was beef. The family begged for mercy. They were the only Muslim family in the village and they asked the mob how they could have smuggled in a cow and killed it without anyone noticing. They swore the meat was mutton. The mob roared in and smashed the skull of Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old farm worker, who was already asleep in the next room.

They killed a man whose family had been living in that village for generations because he might have eaten a meat they didn’t think should be eaten. 

Twitter rant: why does it matter that a drunk driver was a woman?

A set of tweets I did last week on the drunk driving of Jhanvi Gadkar. 


I didn't like the way the media was reporting it at all, so I wrote down a list of things I thought were relevant or not.

The way the wind is blowing in this drunk driving case is pissing me off, so I have a few thoughts.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

1) Drunk driving is stupid, & that should be the focus of it.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

2) Not relevant: women who drink “whiskey for fun” (Why else would you drink whiskey?)

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

3) Not relevant: where she went, who she saw. A drunk is a drunk is a drunk.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

4) Not relevant: the make of her car. Fools drive all sorts.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

5) Relevant: is the media going to come down harder on her for going easier on other powerful drunk drivers?

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

6) Relevant: are there going to be checks in place where they matter (before someone leaves a bar, for instance)?

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

7) Relevant: is it always going to be easier to bribe your way out of shit & how can we make that the harder option?

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

9) Not relevant: what kind of person she is, who she works for, what she does in her spare time.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

10) Not relevant: her gender.

— Meenakshi Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) June 12, 2015

Maggi and the food-loving children of the 90s

Maggi. There’s a word that hasn’t been part of my vocabulary since I left college,

and is now all of a sudden all anyone can talk about. By “Maggi” we mean Maggi

noodles, the pale yellow ones with their distinct Maggi-ness, not the oats or atta

imposters that came in later. Maggi was never more than a junk food, even

though the advertisers tried hard to make it some kind of nutritious home meal.

“Dress it up,” they begged, “Put frozen peas and carrots in it! It’s all your child

needs.” Rubbish. 

Yum, I love lead.

Maggi in my home was such a junk food, it was a special treat. I remember when

I lived in one of those housing societies where everyone’s kitchen was in the

same place, and if you walk through a certain vent, you could smell everyone’s

dinner cooking. This was the 90s, the height of the Maggi explosion in India,

when everyone sang along to the happy mother in Maggi ads who said, “Two

minutes!” when her kids clamoured for food, and banged their forks on their

empty bowls. I smelt Maggi wafting out of at least four windows. “It smells like

home,” I told my mother wistfully, a story she does not fail to trot out now with

great indignation. “Here I was making sure you had healthy, balanced, tasty

meals, and there you were craving Maggi!” she says now. Of course, now that I

live alone, I would love to have my mother’s home-cooking any day over some

over-preserved instant noodles, but there’s kids for you. 

The same really happy, really healthy looking kids toured all the food on

television in those days. There was a kid who boing-boinged out of bed when he

smelt sunflower oil on the stove, his mother making puris, and such was his

delight that he did a cartwheel right there, yay, sunflower oil! There were the

kids who drank Complan without complaining (a pun the copywriters should

have used back then, if you ask me), going so far as to boast about it, while an

undiagnosed lactose intolerance made me gaze gloomily into my glass every

evening, the milk brown with Bournvita or whatever, and already forming a skin.

I envied them as I envied the children shouting about “doodh, doodh, doodh!”

Then, there was the little girl who had a whole pitcher of Rasna, the lucky thing,

and who tilted her head to the right and said, “I love you Rasna” with such a glow

of health on her face that I wanted her life immediately. I wanted all of their lives.

But none so much as the Maggi kids, who demanded a snack and were given

something their mother was so pleased to serve them, so healthy, she told us, so

easy to make!

Of course, as the years went by, we realized that “two minutes” was that

standard Indian lie. More like two-minutes-ish. I grew suspicious of food that

was that easy to make. Just add water served me well through exams and late

night sleepovers at friends houses. I don’t think I ever ate as much Maggi as I did

in college, when we were discovering the joys of a midnight snack after drinking.

Maggi, made the way my friend did it with loads of chilli garlic paste and cheese,

was perhaps the opposite of the way the Maggi Mother intended, but it was

much, much tastier.

But even I, nostalgic in spots, child of 90s, haven’t picked up a packet of the

instant noodles in years. I eat them in extreme weather conditions on mountain

tops somewhere, where the starch and the warm and the feel of it are comforting

and soothing. On a pass in Ladakh. On a ski trail in Gulmarg. But after two days

up in Gulmarg, my body longed for something not so instant, so I got boiled eggs

instead, halved and stuffed with masala, and just as warming, if not more than

Maggi. In Ladakh, I veered for the chocolate section, great for altitude sickness,

and probably still not as bad for you as Maggi, it turns out.

Why the furor then on social media? Why the sadness? It came as a great

surprise to me. Surely people aren’t still eating Maggi as a regular thing, not

when we have access to so many other good instant foods out there? (MTR’s

range of home-cooked food comes to mind.) It must be the memories. We’re

conditioned to think old is good, and Maggi has somehow entered our

consciousness—this Swedish brand—as quintessentially Indian.

It was fun while the party lasted though. And I’m glad we’re getting more

stringent food checks. The last time I saw someone buy Maggi was ironically my

mother, who now that she lives alone at home has taken to eating it as a “guilty

pleasure” in her own flat. Meanwhile, I who longed for it so much, whip up three

course meals made out of organic materials.

(A version of this appeared as my column on mydigitalfc.com.)

(More Maggi? I wrote an article for Scroll on books that came out in the same era)

Me wan' girl to make me roti

I was with a gay friend—this was before the whole 377-debate, and while gay-ness was not “illegal”, a lot of people still didn’t come out—and we met another couple, also gay. One of the men in the couple took a liking to me, and spent the rest of the evening telling me his secrets over wine. One of them was: “I can never tell my parents I’m gay, so I’m getting married.”

This was both shocking and saddening to me, but as the years went by, and I met more people, both openly gay and not, I heard similar stories over and over again. I hesitate to pass the blame on to anyone, because I think this is a many-pronged problem.

For one, consider the parents. You have a kid, but you don’t have ownership of the kid, if you know what I mean. You have created a person, and you have to eventually let that person go into the world and do what they do. Sometimes you can try and stop them from actively harming themselves or others (parents of rapists, parents of drug addicts), but at the end of the day, your kid is a fully formed individual who will have to follow his or her own path. Too many people believe in the “emotional manipulation” school of parenting.

Let’s recap: you can’t force your child to do something you want him to do by claiming a) illness, b) I want to see my grandchildren before I die c) you are ruining your family’s good name. Be a good human being, parents, and let your kids be who they are and unafraid of telling you.

For two, consider the men themselves. I’m going with the assumption that they were forced or coerced into a heterosexual marriage against their will. Men, I know the stereotype about Indian men wanting to be perfect for their mummies (and daddies) but you need to learn to be honest about yourself. If you don’t want to get married, just say so. 

I know it’s easier said than done, but I lead by example: I’m in a committed live-in relationship with no immediate plans to get married. Granted, mine is a heterosexual partnership, but there is still an amount of pressure for me to take the plunge. Marriage is overrated anyway, but that’s the subject of a different column.

Imagine this: by making your parents happy, you are making a stranger, a person who never did anything to harm you, very unhappy. Is that the way you want to live your life?

For three, the women themselves. We do not know what goes on behind closed doors, what mental torture someone must have undergone to take an extreme step like suicide, but before it gets to that, please leave. Leave. Slam the door shut behind you. To hell with the consequences. The only one capable of living your life from inside your brain is you, and this is not the way you want to spend it.

It’s very hard to leave an emotionally or physically abusive relationship. You have years of building up feelings like “this must be my fault” or “this is my fate.” Most Indian women move in with a whole family once they’re married, so it’s not bad enough that their husband is cheating on them, there’s usually the unsympathetic mother-in-law, the absent father-in-law and a whole lot of relatives you have to put a brave face on for.

And finally, we’ve got to blame India’s draconian laws in the first place. They are capable of evolving—I watch with interest as live-in partnerships are given more and more legitimacy—but on this one subject, they refuse to move, forcing people to spend a greater part of their lives in darkness. We need to be able to love who we love, embrace who we wish to embrace. In other countries, gay marriage is moving forward in leaps and bounds, in ours, we can’t even acknowledge that such people exist.

Let’s move forward into a world where gay marriage doesn’t mean you marry off your gay son or daughter. 


(A version of this appeared in my column for mydigitalfc.com)

Television freak show cops and robbers everywhere

We need to talk about zoos. That’s right, the big compound in your city that you probably don’t pay attention to unless it’s wedding season and a huge hoard of relatives have descended upon you and you need to figure out how to entertain their squalling brats. Zoos. Short for zoological parks, places that should be full of awe and wonder and summon up images of the Sahara or the Australian outback or the deepest Antartica, and instead only remind you of depressed animals.

Most of India’s zoos are pretty pathetic. The Delhi zoo actually is housed in an absolutely gorgeous piece of land right inside the Old Fort, and is really good for a long winter walk, if you just stick to the trail by the migratory bird area, which isn’t caged in, and which most people find very boring. The further on you walk, the more your nose will tell you that you’re hitting the big animals—that and the sound of a hundred schoolchildren ruffling chips packets, and that one adult who is about to make a bad decision. Sometimes, these adults will poke at an apathetic bear or monkey with a stick. Other times, they’ll try to shout as loudly as they can, so the depressed big cat who is taking a break from pacing back and forth and back and forth will look up and roar back. The chimpanzee will stop poking the ground with its stick and look up briefly. There is a stench of animal and that animal’s toilet and that animal’s food all mixed up. You hold your breath, you gaze for a bit and you move on. But the lion is still there, his patchy mane speaking of malnutrition, his nose forever filled with the stink of his own scat, his whole life—a life meant to be lived wandered thorn forests, with a harem of his own—narrowed down to this enclosure, which has a few trees. With my three cats—panthers made miniature—I can guess that the lion, the tiger, the jaguar all have their own favourite tree worn low by scratching, but my cats have been bred to domesticity for their entire species and so don’t worry about favourites. They have no desire to go on, beating on through the forest, establishing new favourites, sniffing the wind for their next safe destination, they have no essential tiger-ness, which you’ll note the minute you see one in the wild, which makes them hold their heads high and tell you with one uplifted whisker: Lo, look it is I, it is Tiger.

L'oreal. Because I'm worth it

I mean, it is sort of our fault as well. The only reason we’re all talking about the zoo now is because some poorunfortunate leaped over a low boundary wall and was subsequently cornered and killed by the white tiger. The papers and TV showed the man cowering in the corner while the tiger examined him, “What is this? A diversion?” the tiger asked himself, before he was distracted by security guards throwing stones at him, and then it was “Predator! Kill!” and before anyone could do anything—like, as an article in Quartz India suggests, remove the tranquilizingequipment placed only 350 feet away for just times such as there--a tragedy unfolded and the man was dead. The papers didn’t say that the tiger ate him, only that the man’s neck was snapped in two, to disable him from the stones, from the roaring outside, from the cries.

The same article mentions that in the year 2013 to 2014, 80 animals that were placed in the care of Delhi zoo have died. These include—so you can feel even worse, five Bengal tigers. The zoo is killing the tigers, whether by negligence or by design, the tigers are killing themselves, perhaps, just to be free of it.

Not all zoos are bad zoos. Conservationist Gerald Durrell spoke of his plans for his own private zoo on the Jersey island in England at great length in several of his books. Zoos for him were a place to help animals—to breed species that were dying out, to help people observe these species, and at the very last, to allow people to watch the animals in their natural habitat. He begged for land and funds to be able to ensure his animals were in places they considered safe and home—and fed them special treats. Gerald Durrell was involved in his zoo, and like a chef-run restaurant, a naturalist-run zoo is the best kind.

 

So don’t kill the Delhi zoo. What is going to happen to the animals if it is gone? What is going to happen to all the humans who don’t feed the animals chips packets or tease them or jump over ledges? Those humans exist. I was one of those humans. I watched the deer, I watched the tiger and I watched the bears, almost every week. It gave me great joy, mixed with great depression at how unhappy some of them were. Instead, hand over the zoo to new management, a naturalist or a private board interested in conservation and let them run the zoo like the place it is supposed to be: a private haven for lovers of animals. A safe home for animals in danger in the wild.

(Wrote this when the Delhi zoo incident happened for my column in mydigitalfc.com)

Kerala I don't hate you, but...

I have a tortured relationship with one half of my gene pool. My father, as some of you may know, is a Malayali, and a Malayali quite well known because of his writing. I never really thought of Kerala as anywhere except where my other grandmother lived. A big house. The smell. Don't stand under a coconut tree or one might kill you. Fun fact: more people are killed by falling coconuts than in shark attacks. My little cousins--well, not so little anymore, but there. In Kerala, I read my aunt's Agatha Christie books, I lounge around and eat, they always bring home beef chilly fry when I'm visiting, I chat with my granny, I don't visit as often as I should, but still, Kerala was a very personal part of me. Half of my makeup. Distant from Delhi which was home, but wandering about Ernakulam, I saw my hair on a million people, I wore gold and white saris to weddings, I even lived in Trivandrum for two years when I was eight.

That Kerala was different from the public Kerala that emerged when my first book came out. The new Kerala did not like me at all. The new Kerala, the public Kerala that wanted to lay claim to me because of my last name thought I was a strumpet, a lady with loose morals. That Kerala was first puzzled and then extremely pissed off that I didn't speak Malayalam. The new Kerala doesn't like me, I don't think, and yet, and yet, they are loyal readers. Some of them hate me, and some of them are proud.

It's no secret that Kerala for all its equal sex ratio and literacy is quite conservative. Sandhya Menon on her blog ..and then, did an excellent post on this the other day.

A society that's arguably progressive, and educated, Kerala is a place where with this coexists a patriarchy that is, at an immediate glance, as surprising and confounding as it is deep rooted. In a state where communism (whatever its avatar today) thrives, where women work just as hard as men -- if not harder -- to sustain their families, the incongruity of the existence of male chauvinism and blatant patriarchy worries and fascinates me. If educated, financially independent women still struggle for justice, safety and equality, then what hope do those without the above-mentioned privileges have?

Menon struggles with the same things I think of, and in my case, I meet Malayalis who don't live in Kerala most often, and they're educated and professional and gentle and everything you aspire to be.

I bet a whole lot of women in Erna-flasher-central-kulam have seen their first erection right in the middle of a busy street on a dreary old work day.

I saw my first flasher in Connaught Place, but really, as a Delhi person, this is a bit pot calling the kettle black, so I'm not going to comment on this aspect. Just putting it out there. But there was one bit of the post that struck home, regarding a TV anchor called Ranjini Haridas.

She's a classic template for poking merciless fun at girls who decided to be "modern." Men hated her. But the women, ah, here was a fascinating story unfolding. Young women, ripe for rebellion and finding their wings, all over Kerala felt here was something they could point to in case of crisis. "If she can, I can." Haridas wore sleeveless clothes, body-con dresses, knee-length shifts, off the shoulder blouses, see-through ensembles, stuff that no anchor had worn on Malayalam T.V. hitherto; she did her hair experimenting with high glamour; she didn't shy away from adventurous make up; she wore exactly what her free little heart desired and she did it with confidence, not letting criticism of her clothing or her speech cramp her style in the least bit. Men kept hating, she kept working, laughing all the way to the bank in her designer high heels.

And:

To me, it says many things, this hatred from men in Kerala young and old, educated and not, married or single. The insults are almost always sexual in nature, the language is highly disrespectful, (apart from being abusive itself): the use of nee, the informal word for 'you' in Malayalam is the only way she's addressed. Her lack of hypocrisy is another source of anger. Unlike many women who care about their reputations, Haridas tends to live life rather candidly and if that threatens the Malayalee man, then so be it.  

The way I see it, the anger these men feel is directed at her being happily single even though she's ... gasp... nearly 35! Anger at her being unfazed by the barrage of biting criticism, at her completely normal way of behaving even on screen (she hugs, touches, gesticulates and uses her body freely that way you or I do). The anger is towards her success -- six years of calling her a whore and she's still the top rated, and possibly highest-paid, anchor in Kerala. The anger is towards her completely ignoring the very men that hate her; they just can't seem to get a rise out of her. But I think the thing that threatens them most is that she is an aspiration: she is what a lot of their daughters, sisters and wives would like to become. Glamorous, articulate, successful, confident, and assertive. Everything that these men don't want in their women, lest they get left behind; lest they get dragged to a police station for raising a hand; lest their women leave them after finding self-worth.

 The whole post is fucking brilliant. Read it.  

Meanwhile, I'll be here quietly trying to figure out my confused feelings for my fatherland.



 

In Which Kevin Spacey Calls Us Thieves

Man, how much do I love House of Cards?

THIS MUCH (SPOILER GIF AHEAD, DO NOT SCROLL IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE BEGINNING OF SEASON 2)

Anyway, so old Kevin Spacey was the star attraction of the India International Film Festival (because, why not?) held in Tampa, Florida (I saw a sign in Bombay for it that said, "The India International Film Festival! Now in America!") and he looks like he was wearing a lungi? Why oh why Kevin?

(Woah, right? I can't stop watching it.)

In an AFP story in Firstpost, Mr Spacey was all:

House of Cards is really big in India, I discovered," Spacey told reporters late Saturday as he walked the ceremonial carpet into the packed stadium. "Except isn't it funny that Netflix doesn't exist there yet. Which means that you're stealing it," he said.

WELL EXCUSE US FOR TRYING TO WATCH GOOD TELEVISION, KEVIN!! Actually, a lot of people I know buy or rent movies or TV shows on iTunes if they can (they need a US credit card because iTunes here doesn't allow it, and so WHAT are the rest of us supposed to do? If only all the people who supplied TV would realize there is an enormous market for American television here in India, we'd all be very happy.) (Also Star World is really picking up its game now, I hear.)

Anyhow, despite the fact that Kevin hates us, we still love him. 

And how amazing is Claire Underwood aka Robin Wright aka PRINCESS BUTTERCUP OMG IS YOUR MIND BLOWN BECAUSE MINE IS

No Brides For You: Running Out of Girls in Rural Haryana

I began reading this story about the plague of single men in Haryana in today's Business Line Ink by Priyanka Kotamraju with a little scorn.

Being a single man in Bibipur is tough. Just ask 22-year-old Joginder Singh. Or 48-year-old Ranveer Singh. While the younger man is desperately looking for a bride, the older one is resigned to his fate. “The marriageable window is between 24 and 26 years now,” says Kumar, who is 28. “Above that, you’re overage and prospects are dim.” Joginder, dressed smartly in a purple shirt and fitted denims, toting a fashionable pair of shades and riding a Bullet motorbike, is a real estate dealer. Rana, a computer science graduate, heads his own infrastructure and IT firm in Hisar. Yet, they have no takers.

"This is what happens when you kill all your girl babies!" I want to say, "This is the bleak future you're facing! Now get along without any wives. You brought this upon yourselves!"

With one of the worst sex ratios in the country — 877 females to 1,000 males, according to the 2011 census — this village is running out of brides. And every single man here, like the 23-year-old Rana, is in a tearing hurry to get hitched.

But it's actually a hopeful story. The men realize that they need women--even though they weren't paying attention to the girl child before, they're monitoring pregnancies now. They did try importing women from around the country, but they never took, running away as fast as their legs could carry them. Can you blame them? Haryana is particularly patriachal, and for anyone not born within the system, it must feel like a rude culture shock, a hearkening back to the Dark Ages.

On April 11, a day after Narendra Modi filed his nomination from Vadodara, Bibipur’s women held a gram sabha on Jashodaben. The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate had, after years of silence, admitted to having a wife in his papers. Outraged, around 50 women gathered for a spirited debate. “How can we accept someone who has neglected his wife for so long?” says Ritu on Modi. “We have been following the news; she is fasting for him and going on a pilgrimage for him. We feel he should acknowledge his wife and invite her to live in the PM’s residence if he becomes (PM).”

They can't marry for love either, but there's a little group of men and women in rural Haryana, who are trying to tip the system, and empower the girls. Only so that they'll have someone to marry, sure, but it's a start.

The fledgling association makes only one demand — bahu dilao, vote pao (give us brides, get our votes).

Read the whole story here. 

Now for a little (radical, feminist) poetry plus GAME OF THRONES! HUZZAH!

Misandry In Haiku is my new favourite Tumblr.

Cat haiku is also cool.

I could just copy the entire website and put it down here, but that's just super lazy as one of you was kind enough to point out in my last post. So, instead, my favourites of my favourites:

i answer only

to khaleesi. call me “babe”

and you’ll die screaming.

(Segue: Um, SPEAKING of Game of Thrones (also, yay, Sunday! Only one more sleep before I can get a new episode!) I have a kick ass interview with old George RR waiting to be shared with you. It's a long interview in Vanity Fair so pour yourself a cup of coffee before you dive in. Choice bits: the books might've originally been just Bran's story, you can tell who's going to die just by the heavy FORESHADOWING that he leaves in just for you, and George doesn't like to be a douchebag with the show's writers.

Peter is actually different from Tyrion in the books. Just certain basic physical things. He’s taller than Tyrion. And he’s considerably more attractive. Peter is a good looking guy and Tyrion is not. But none of that matters when you see him performing. He’s Tyrion. There he is. And it’s perfect.

Peter Dinklage makes me so confused, because he's a sexy guy, but he's also a little guy, so all my old pounded-into-my-head notions are like, "Whaaa? What's happening over here?" I love when my Notions are Challenged. Here's his Reddit AMA, where you too can sigh in fangirly glory.

Read the whole interview here.) 

Right. Back to Misandry in Haiku, and let's make clear it may or may not be a satirical site, AND it's just funny given all the "make me a sandwich" memes that float around the internet on a near daily basis.

in a rocking boat
with my rocking sisterhood
sailing to freedom

Comments on the site from some include: "Why are you such a gigantic bitch? You know what, I wasn't going to do this but your blog is the last straw. It is now my personal mission in life to make the lives of women intolerable. I will close doors on them before they can reach them, I'll trip them as they pass by, and I'll knock over what they are carrying just because I can. You have yourself to blame, bitch." 

Ah man. Troll Dudes! You make it SO easy!

i’ll never date you

because you are gross. friendzoned?

no. enemyzoned.

ALSO:

misandry is not
a real form of oppression.
shut up men’s rights groups

 Whoever runs this blog, and I'm imagining a Lady in a long Greek style white dress (yes, I know haiku is from Japan, but for some reason in my head she's sitting at a desk, surrounded by clouds, with a pen) also answers all snarky questions with a haiku.  For example:

What do you think trans people are? Crazy people who are just pretending? I'd like to know what exactly is broken in your brain to dismiss trans* folks as you do. You seemed like an intelligent person before I read your FAQ.

Anonymous

i seemed smart before

you realized i don’t agree

with you? haha k!

Just ending with a few choice haiku thoughts for this glorious Sunday.

a proposal

all the ladies will

abandon society

that oppresses us

with only banks

of refridgerated sperm

we’ll build hateless worlds

 ***

"Misandry is mean,

And all the men will hate you!”

^I don’t give a fuck.

***

“women are weaklings!”

i’m strong enough to carry

your corpse to the woods

Read. Enjoy. Love.

Update: I read the FAQ only after finishing this post, because I'm blind, and here are a few questions answered:

this blog is run by a 22 year old radical feminist. i’m white, poor, a nursing student, and the terfiest.

men have institutional privilege over women. women can not oppress anyone on the basis of sex or gender because we gain no privilege from being female. naturally, the people who are oppressed are going to be pissed at the oppressors.