Death at a Funeral

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

You know what is the worst part of hearing that someone you know has been visited by the grim reaper? No, not the part where someone you know has stopped existing forever; that’s something you deal with much later. The worst part is the realization that now you have to attend their funeral. 

If the funeral is for someone you shared an emotional connection with, then you’re probably too zoned out to notice what’s going around you. However, if the person being mourned is an acquaintance you didn’t meet often, like a ‘facebook friend’, you become a party to the farce that most funerals are. All our rituals are useless and horrible anyway. People do things they imagine would help the dead wherever they are, but it only helps them feel better about the situation. The dead don’t care what you do after they’re gone! They’re not coming back.

Firstly, the deceased is suddenly turned into a saint. Even if it is that old fascist relative who not only judged you for wearing jeans but also blamed you for putting a scratch on their precious Ming vase.  And despite the fact that everyone who has spent their life bashing them is relieved that the object of their disdain is finally visiting the big gulag in the sky, they still have to find something nice to say. He was a creature of routine! She really believed in old fashion values! At least he died doing what he loved; sucking the innocence out of young children.

Secondly, a lot of the people who populate these shindigs are kind of terrible human beings. They are not there because they feel any sadness or remorse over the passing of the deceased. They’re there because it’s a social obligation. Because they imagine that if they don’t show up and pretend to mourn, people are going to hold it against them and won’t show up when their own time comes. If I wanted to see people put up a false show of emotion while also trying very hard to look forlorn, I’d watch an episode of KBC.

Then there is the compulsive Indian need to put food into people. We’ve been programmed to be so social that even during a funeral we have to take care of people who are supposed to be comforting us. When you go over to give your condolences and mumble empty platitudes that offer no real solace whatsoever, members of that family will cry and force you stay for lunch. You feel like shaking them and telling them that you just lost a family member! Mourn, for cripes sake! Stop asking me if I have eaten. Instead, you nod and awkwardly agree to do whatever they say, because you know on the inside they’re thinking: here, have some lunch. A single serving contains vegetables, salt, tears, despair, and a compelling feeling of running away somewhere, anywhere, just to get away from all these expressions of artificial grief and phony concern that I have to endure for no logical reason.

We even take this with us wherever we go. For example, after the horrific shooting at a Gurdwara in Wisconsin last year, while family members waited outside with a smattering of friends, relatives, police personnel and journalists, some of them got together and were serving food and beverages to all the people who were waiting. I’m so worried about my family still trapped inside, but here, have a bran muffin.

According to most of our traditions and religious customs, the official mourning period ends after the deceased’s family has fed a few hundred of their closest friends and relatives one last time. But people don’t get the memo! They still keep coming over or calling you on the phone. And everyone wants to know what happened! So you keep reliving your trauma each time you need to answer that question. By the time the last vestiges of ‘well wishers’ are done darkening your doorstep, you start wishing that you were the one who died instead of the lucky bastard who escaped this daily dose of fresh hell.

A common reaction to hearing of someone’s demise can be summed up as it could have been me! Death, even if it happens to someone we barely know, reminds us of how thin the thread of life really is and despite what our favourite self-help guru says, we’re not really in control.

Hey, at least we don’t have to attend our own funeral.

Mind Your Elections: Clichémageddon

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

While the rest of the country was busy shouting expletives at their favourite IPL teams on teevee and hoping that Sachin Tendulkar wouldn’t injure his ‘brand’ by pulling a ‘Ganguly’ and overstaying his welcome, the people of Karnataka were busy electing a new set of porn addicts to darken the legislative halls of ‘India’s weather capital,’ Bangalore.

Elections in India bring out all the clichés to the yard.

The clichémageddon begins before even a single vote is cast. Most days leading up to the election are spent talking about the gaffe of the day. Some unpolished leader will say what is really on their mind and people will be shocked and outraged that an Indian politician is a horrible person on the inside. If the person is a senior leader of their party or are instrumental to the election campaign, they will begrudgingly release a terse statement saying that they didn’t mean to cause any offence; a sort of non-apology in which you can sense the gritted teeth and the unstated contempt. If the leader is a disposable sycophant, their party will leave them to fend for themselves and they will disappear from the election campaign for a few days.

There will also be a lot of puffy teevee and print profiles in which a reporter spends a day or two with one of the star campaigners for a party in which they show how hard the leader is campaigning for the elections by addressing multiple meetings in one day, clocking thousands of miles in a helicopter and/or chartered jet. You can tell which leader is being setup for the electoral success-failed government-eventual comeback narrative by the amount of news coverage they receive.

The most common refrain that we hear from every second person covering the elections is that in India people vote their caste and do not cast their vote. Which is a horrible thing to say because not only is it a bad pun, it reveals a casual acceptance of racism. Nope, nothing to see here. Everything’s a-okay! Just a large percentage of people being bigots. It’s a feature of Indian democracy, not a bug! We are like this only, etc.

On the day of the elections, we get to see exciting pictures of party leaders casting their votes for the “political leaders: they’re just like us except they get to cast their vote accompanied by security personnel and hundreds of flashing cameras!” segments. After the polls close, they release the voter percentage. Without any exception, the most prominent urban city in the state is revealed to have the most appalling percentage of voter turnout. That city becomes the object of everyone’s disappointment. Celebrity panellists chide the eligible voters who didn’t bother to show up at a polling station and question their commitment to civic engagement because, apparently, casting a vote once every few years is the answer to all your problems. Low voter turnout also helps people on the internet play a round of their favourite game: my third world, dystopian shithole of a city is better than your third world, dystopian shithole of a city because more of us show up to stand in a line to select our next ‘most corrupt government yet.’

Then there are the exit polls. From the moment the last vote is cast to counting day, we are on the receiving end of analysis, debates, arguments, plausible scenarios, hypothetical coalitions, and bad metaphors based on these famed ‘polls,’ even though they are seldom accurate. But no one ever takes any responsibility for being wrong! Instead, we end up hearing paeans to the Indian voter who suddenly turns out to be ‘smart’ and ‘wise.’ Hey, the gypsy lady with a crystal ball who writes our poll predictions was having an off day. What can we do about it?

However, the major impact of clichémageddon is felt on counting day. If you turn on NDTV, you get to see a panel of experts who were popular and respected in the 1990’s but have spent the last decade being exposed for the hacks they are. Times Now will have more old people on its panel than a ‘yoga shivir’ in Haridwar so they spend all their time shouting at each other. IBN makes it clear that no matter what the results show, the real winner of the election is always their coverage, which has won every award they have printed out on Rajdeep’s personal ‘dot-matrix’ printer. Headlines Today is the popular destination for all the analysts no other channel invited - like the world’s premier writer of erotic Rahul Gandhi fan fiction, Sanjay Jha. Headlines Today is the “linked-in” of Indian news channels; people join it just to get a better job somewhere else.

The reaction of the political parties was also quite predictable. The BJP was pretending to be shocked that changing names of cities, banning beef every few months and beating up people trying to get a drink after a bad day at work didn’t make them popular. Deve Gowda’s party wrapped up all its dry cleaned jackets in plastic, put on its pyjamas, and got ready to go back into hibernation for the next five years. And the Congress ‘outsourced’ the election of its chief minister to the party’s ‘high command.’

If only there was some way to determine what the people really wanted.

You Know Who Else Was A Superpower?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the most popular narratives of the late 90s/early aughts was the emergence of India as a candidate for this century’s “superpower.”
We were supposed to finally break the shackles of the past, realize our full potential, and take our natural place among the world’s most powerful countries. But then reality intervened and everyone realized that we weren't really ready for prime-time. However, despite being faced with a large amount of evidence to the contrary, the narrative still strangely persists.

We’re the ‘Ajit Agarkar’ of superpowers. The only reason we’re on the team is because someone with actual power pulled some strings to get us in. A real superpower shouldn’t have millions of malnutritioned children going to bed hungry every night. A real superpower shouldn’t have a complete electricity grid failure for more than half the country because some idiot overloaded the system by switching on his toaster. And the primary objective of a real superpower’s foreign policy shouldn’t be to get every country in the world to like them.

When someone says that they want their country to be a ‘superpower,’ what they’re trying to say is that they now want their country to be the world’s ‘decider.’ The sort of asshole country which tells other countries what to do and where they can stick their ‘sovereignty.’ What they mean is that they want to be the guy in the room who has the remote to the teevee and will continue to watch a documentary on the drainage system of the Aztec civilization even though everyone else wants to watch that show which has ‘everyday people’ eating bugs for money. 

What jingoistic patriots don’t realize is that being a superpower is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Superpowers have to keep fighting wars; even those which they have won. Did you know that there are still more than fifty thousand American soldiers stationed in Germany. Why? Probably just in case Germany gets that funny feeling in its stomach and wants to try to take over the world again. In India, we don't like wars. No, not because of the millions of lives that would be fruitlessly lost. No one cares about hippie things like “human lives” in our country. The reason we don't like wars is because they clash with the cricket season.

The various spy agencies of a superpower need to be powerful enough to engineer a coup in unstable countries. Our spy agencies can’t even organize a dinner party successfully.

Superpowers have huge empires. Do we really want to be like the people Tom Alter portrays everytime he is forced to speak Hindi with a bad accent? We’ve always maintained that our country doesn’t want someone else’s territory. We’re happy with what our Mama gave us. Plus, we satisfy all our colonial urges by acting like an occupying force in Kashmir and the North East.

Superpowers need a constant supply of straw enemies to keep a large portion of the country’s populace so terrified that the government could do anything in the name of national security. Okay, I’ll let you have that one.

The demise of empires like Ancient Greece, the Romans, Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USSR are proof that no superpower stays on top forever. Being a superpower means spending a few years at the top and then eventually fizzling out. Being a superpower means penalising future generations by making them live in a country whose best days have passed but whose people still have delusions of grandeur. If superpowers were people, they’d be the 1983 Indian cricket world cup team - a bunch of has-beens hanging on to every last shred of glory for something which happened decades ago. Maybe it's because I never stayed in a hostel or participated in an NCC camp, but I don't see the point of playing the geographical version of "mine is bigger."

I’m not saying that we should burn all our weapons in a bonfire and invite all our neighbouring countries to hold our hands while we dance around the pyre singing ‘kumbaya.’ However, we could tread a saner yellow brick road. Maybe we could try being the superpower of space exploration (Think of all the “ring view” apartments in gated communities they can build on Jupiter!). We could try to be the superpower of not letting foodgrain rot in government warehouses. If we’re not expending all our energies enriching Israeli defence equipment companies, we could try to be the superpower that provides its citizens with quality healthcare (Most of our current healthcare plans involve asking people who cannot afford treatment to ‘walk it off’). We could even try to be the superpower of not trying to ruin the environment at such a rapid speed that mother earth finally loses her cool and cancels ‘the human race show’ forever.

Or we could just spend all day dreaming about punching China in the face.

How to Survive Result Season

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

In a few days, as we finally say goodbye to angsty April and waddle into marshy May, we will be reminded why May is one of the most important months in the children’s calendar. While for most of them it is the beginning of the summer vacation - a lovely time which they make forced memories of happy times with their families by heading out to overcrowded vacation spots full of other families wanting to make forced memories - for some it is the month of nervousness and anticipation.

That’s because in May the board exam results are announced. For some students it’s a culmination of years of hard work. A moment in time, which if goes their way, would vindicate all the sacrifices they’ve had to make since they were nothing but a mere twinkle in their parent’s eyes. For others, it’s an indication that getting a decent result by pulling an all-nighter is a metaphor for the rest of your life. A life which you will spend ignoring that pesky voice in your head which fruitlessly keeps asking you to stop procrastinating. Now, since we once skimmed through a book in which a minor character was a child psychologist, we feel that we are qualified enough to offer our counsel to all our young friends out there to help them cope with the aftermath of such a game-changing life event. (We call them ‘friends’ because that makes it easier to speak to them in a condescending tone. You see, that’s how we old people talk. We also answer every question about our age by saying I am __ years young in a faux-inspirational voice.  We even use the plural ‘we’ to refer to ourselves. Why do we do that, you ask? Simple! Because we’re a terrible person! As you kids say, Like duh.) Also, since we don’t know how to communicate with teenagers because the present lot of them seem to suffer from some sort of a mystery ailment that makes them talk and write without using any vowels, we’re hoping that one of our kind readers would translate this article into teenager-friendly things like a “facebook status update” or a “sext.”

Now, kids, the most important thing to remember is that your board exams do not define you. They do not decide the trajectory of your life. One of the objective of a well rounded education is to make you try a lot of things to find out what you really want to do in life. “LOL j/k.” Kidding! Your board exams results are the most important thing that will happen in your life. They are the only thing that will determine how successful you will be in the future. They are so important, that years from now when you’re old and haggard, and your half human/half-Pandorian grandchild asks you why you and the rest of your family are not allowed to enter the ‘gangnam galaxy,’ you will have to tell him that it happened because you weren’t successful enough and that this downward spiral started when you only scored a measly 95% in your board exams. His innocence shattered, he will look at you with disgust as you hang your head in shame and drown yourself in a puddle of sadness and humiliation.

The best course of action is to just follow the path your parents want you to walk on. This way, you don’t have to take any personal responsibility for your own actions and can spend the rest of your life being resentful towards them. Also, by pretending to be the sort of person who “obeys” his parents, you’re automatically set for the road to sainthood. In this country, the sort of children who cannot think for themselves and blindly do everything their elders tell them to are every parent’s dream accessory. Other parents will cite you as an example for their children to emulate. People will assume that you’re an honest and trustworthy person, for some reason. And once your parents decide that you’re old enough to make a lifelong commitment to a random stranger of their choice, your stock in the ‘arranged marriage’ market will be higher than Microsoft in the 1990’s. 

If you get good grades then you’re in for a lifetime of success! All you have to do is continue the same routine you had before. Just spend all your time working. You can sleep when you’re dead! And keep fooling yourself into believing that this is only temporary and that you will finally be able to really start living once you reach your goal because you will keep shifting the goalposts. And then, in a blink of an eye, ten years will have passed and one lonely Saturday night when you’ve finished work early and have had too much to drink, you’ll let your mind travel to that dark place where you finally ask yourself whether it was worth it. But nothing will come out of it because even though you know the answer to that question, you’re too much of a coward to actually do something about it and on Monday morning everything will go back to normal.

Hope that helps!

It’s Not Twitter Wot Won It

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

While ‘the nation’ sweltered in the blistering summer, its political establishment used this opportunity to remind its citizens that mother nature’s wrath pales in comparison to the mind-numbing torture that is going to be the slow trundle towards the General Election from Hell by having its two top dogs give duelling speeches. The nation lay divided, forced to pick a side. Would they choose the frog who might one day turn into a handsome prince? Or would they choose the hare who assumes that he has won the race even before it has begun?

Nobody really knows what is going to happen but that hasn’t stopped those brave men and women who weather the blowing winds of common sense everyday to bring you fake narratives that have no basis in reality from making predictions about the outcome. Those heroes who have never been right about anything, ever. There are no words that can describe their contribution to the public welfare. To a country plagued by unending problems, they continue to be an unintentional source of hilarity. You find these legends everywhere! They’re the ones shouting at each other on teevee. They’re the ones writing columns in language so archaic that Macaulay would be proud. They’re the ones voluntarily submitting themselves to receiving a hundred metaphorical lashes from the internet by writing a post explaining their hypothesis.

On each of the days the frog and the hare were giving a speech, the fans and paid sycophants belonging to the opposition managed to get a hashtag mocking them to trend on twitter. (I use the word ‘mocking’ very loosely here. The kind of people that were posting tweets using either of the hashtags are an embarrassment to humanity.) So, naturally, it somehow became conventional wisdom that whoever wins the hashtag war (yes, that’s what they’re calling it) on twitter is going to win the General Election from Hell. There were actual human adults who are paid for providing information to the public taking this argument seriously.

I am old enough to remember when a twitter outrage cycle used to take a week before it reached the mainstream media. Now, it’s all over the news cycle in a couple of hours. That’s because twitter helps news organizations to find a great substitute for an actual issue without leaving their desk. Take that, people going to remote locations to gather information. .

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love twitter! It’s one of the good things about the internet. Some of my best friends are twitter users! It’s really great for having funny conversations, getting to know like minded people and finding out the best place to have brunch in Zanzibar. It also enables a person to cocoon themselves from contrary opinion. When you only follow people who are like you or agree with you most of the time, it becomes easy to believe that everybody is concerned about the same things you are. However, at any given moment, there are more people on twitter not giving a rat’s ass about issues closest to your heart. If you think that twitter has any impact on the real world, then you need to go out and speak to an actual human. (Though I wouldn’t recommend it. Did you know you cannot even re-tweet or favourite things that you say in real life? How crude! Human interaction is the worst.)

If anybody with a large number of followers thinks that it actually matters, then please note that Nirupama Rao, India’s Ambassador to the US, has more than a hundred thousand followers and her twitter feed is basically links to articles everybody else on the internet read two weeks ago and sepia toned photos of her travels (no, she doesn’t actually need to use any filters. She’s so boring that all her photographs look like they were taken with a box camera and took a month to develop). Our minister of re-tweeting compliments, Shashi Tharoor, has more than a million. And the worst thing to happen to the memory of Anne Frank, Justin Beiber, has more twitter followers than the population of Canada.

Maybe the backlash to such useless discussions will finally reach the ears of the people that run news organizations in this country. Maybe they’ll realize the error of their ways. Maybe it will dawn on them that they don’t have to be stuck in this circle of banality forever. Maybe they’ll figure out that they do not have to spend the rest of their lives being party to the extended foreplay between Swapan Dasgupta and Mani Shankar Aiyar. Maybe this time, when they ask the question, Did we pay too much undeserved attention to social media?, they will actually mean it. Maybe for one brief moment, they will look the viewer in the eye and do something unheard of: report the news.

Or maybe, they could just have another panel discussion.

Whatever.

It’s Hard Out There For A Bigot

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

On twitter, a person’s one line ‘bio’ is a great way to gauge how people look at themselves. If the first thing they mention is what they do for work, then they usually turn out to be the sort of people who like to be defined by things they do in a professional capacity.  Anyone calling themselves a ‘foodie’ is the kind of person who goes to a restaurant and orders the most exotic sounding thing on the menu. A person who refers to themselves in third person is the type of person you need to stay away from. Someone with a mildly amusing, self-deprecating one-liner in their bio wants you to think that they’re funny. And when someone’s twitter bio says that “they’re politically incorrect,” what they’re trying to tell you is that they like to say racist things out loud. I’m a bigot and I know it!

Recently, while giving a speech at a fundraiser in California, American President and the guy who plays god to thousands of people through his killer flying robots, Barack Obama, called the state’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris, “the best looking attorney general in the country.” It became the sexist compliment heard around the world and Obama apologized to Harris a couple of days later. The apology angered a lot of people (mostly men. Shocking!) who hate ‘feminazis,’ the ‘p.c. police’ and the ‘liberal media’ for brainwashing everyone into believing newfangled ideas like treating other people with respect and dignity. Ugh. What has the world come to? Why can’t we benevolently compliment a woman about her looks in a professional setting? What’s next, not being able to constantly stare at women we’re not related to, lecherously? Tyranny!

If you’re not part of a marginalized group then you might have a blind spot towards subtle forms of discrimination they face. Even today, a lot of women are told that their only job is to look pretty and sit on the side with the other women while the men discuss important business, sweetie. It is a symptom of the problem that even an accomplished professional like Kamala Harris-a rising star who is talked about as a future Gubernatorial candidate or a nominee for the US Supreme Court-cannot escape the epithet.

If you’re someone who grew up in the 90’s then you probably know someone who visited a foreign country and was asked where they park their elephants. (There was like one guy who was asked this question for real and then everybody else stole the anecdote and made it their own. That question was the “have you seen slumdog millionaire?”  of that era.) or if you’re the vice-president in multi-national company but a lot of people still come to you with their computer problems because you’re Indian and they assume that you’d be able to help them even though the only thing you know about technology is how to browse matrimonial websites. If these things piss you off, then so should the fact that one of the most powerful people in the world thought it was okay to add “. . . but but she’s so purty” to a colleague’s resume. When we do things like that, we’re reducing the vastness of the human experience to a single attribute.

Although, in India, we’ve got the act of reducing people to a single attribute down to a T. We’ve had lots of practice, over the years. We can glorify/demonize large groups of people just based on one common attribute they inadvertently share. We like to put people in a box and get confused when they don’t fit.

If you like to kvetch about being mistreated, then, you probably shouldn’t be doing that to other people either. For example: If the best joke you can make about someone is based on a regressive stereotype, then maybe “jokes” are really not your forte. Try to be a little creative, maybe? Or not. As the first of April proves every year, a large majority of us are just not funny. Ask your doctor if shutting the f**k up is right for you!

You don’t have to be respectful towards other people. You can be as obnoxious as you want! No one’s stopping you. But if you want to be taken seriously, then maybe you should try to treat people like, you know, people.

Except, of course, anyone from Chennai.

Because nothing good ever comes out of that shithole.

The Art of Magical Thinking

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

One of the things that makes this country great is the propensity of its citizens towards magical thinking. As long as something sounds implausible and illogical, we’ll believe it! Whether it’s the belief that banning smoking in movies will decrease consumption of cigarettes in real life or that wearing a ring with a ‘customized emerald’ will make you richer than a cabinet minister in the central government. Hey, if it’s second-hand information, it must be true!

This week, the competition to be India’s thought leader in magical thinking has been heating up!

Our first contender is noted self-help guru and living proof that if you say anything in a slow & deliberate voice, people will believe that you’re revealing the secret of the cosmos, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. In a recent public address, when asked about his opinion on the portrayal of outfits like his in hindi movies, he went off on a rant about how people who make movies are depraved, soulless drug addicts whose only purpose in life is to spend the public’s money and turn the country into a naxalite dystopia. Then a ‘holy man’ hailing from the shores of Benares gave the rebuttal.

It seems a little strange for self-help salesmen to rant against addicts. Being a member of a cult is just like being addicted to a harmful substance. You turn to both of them because you need a little pick-me-up. You think that you’re not an addict/one of those people who will believe this shit! Your need to run away from your problems keeps getting bigger and you promise yourself that one more session won’t do any harm. The people around you start avoiding you because of your one track focus. Then, when the crash comes, and you realize that your problems are still there and you can’t snort or meditate or wish them away, you try to climb back from the hole you’ve dug yourself into. At least drug addicts have the decency to not sell you overpriced spa sessions in the guise of spirituality. (Public Service Announcement: Don’t do drugs! Unless of course, you’re an investment banker, an actor or a musician. Then it’s mandatory! Hope this helps.)

Then we have the #1 chief minister in the history of the world and the man who will deliver us from evil by being more evil, Narendra Modi. As any hack on teevee will tell you, any issue surrounding Modi tends to turn “controversial” because he is a “polarising” figure. So, that is what happened when a delegation consisting of small time businessmen and three members of the US House of Representatives, who on a ten day tour of India, made a stopover in Gujarat and met the state’s chief minister. Modi’s supporters would like you to believe that this was the beginning of the ‘wooing’ that the international community will undertake because they have ‘accepted’ a truth that his detractors cannot. It’s a great narrative! Even the British ambassador also dropped in to meet him that one time. So now they can pretend that the west is trying to ‘engage’ Modi. Because if there is one thing Washington is good at, it’s picking heads of government for other countries.

Even though no one in the delegation was representing the Obama administration; even though Ahmadabad was just a stop in a ten day trip which was organized by an Indian-American organization and also included something called ‘a bollywood extravaganza,’ it didn’t stop Modi and his supporters from taking a victory lap. They were as giddy as a Times Now reporter talking about a tertiary Indian connection to a movie nominated for the Oscars. They used the sort of strenuous logic that can prove anything: Modi is popular, causes an extreme reaction in people and his fans on twitter keep trying to get his name into the top ten trending topics. ZOMG! He’s Justin Beiber!

Our final spot belongs to Sanjay Dutt and his supporters. Led by future psychiatric case study, Justice Katju and India’s creepy uncle whom no person under eighteen can meet without a court appointed adult supervisor, Amar Singh, his supporters have been arguing that Dutt must not be forced to serve any time in jail because he is the nicest person to ever be convicted of aiding terrorists. He lends people his land rover! He makes cameo appearances for free! He made Gandhi cool again! What sort of monster sends such a saint to jail?

In their legal argument, they’re citing the oft-ignored fine print in the footnotes of the constitution which says “you don’t need to follow any law as long as you’re a nice guy.”

Or at least that’s what I heard from a friend of a friend.

How Should a Woman Be?

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Over the past few months, many people in this country have been attempting to have a conversation about equal rights. Each time we start talking about how citizens belonging to a particular gender have been relegated to second-class status, the conversation gets hijacked by something trifle. However, on international women’s day, a few high-minded activists took to social media website twitter dot com to bring everybody’s focus back on perhaps the most important issue of our time: men’s rights.

For far too long women in this country have been manipulating the men into thinking that they are lesser beings. Men have been oppressed in this land of ours for centuries. Whether it was watching from the heavens as their wives voluntarily gave up their lives by forcing members of her family to throw her into her husband’s funeral pyre, or conning kings into marrying so many of them that the poor fellow had to suffer every man’s worst nightmare – having more than one mother-in-law. Over the last few decades, women have been trying to have it all by taking it away from the men. Not satisfied with letting their family elders choose which man they have to spend the rest of their life being subservient too, they now want to be the one taking all the decisions concerning their life. If women are allowed to decide what they want to wear or who they can be friends with or what time they want to return home, that would render religious leaders and judgemental senior citizens without anything to do.

That is why they all breathed a sigh of relief when during the discussion on the anti-sexual violence bill, the brave men in Parliament took a stand against criminalising every so called ‘harmful male behaviour.’ Just because some women let themselves be caught in compromising situations every now and then doesn’t mean that we have to penalize every man in this country. To paraphrase India’s premier icon of sexual desperation, Mahatma Bhagat: First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they realize that you won’t take no for an answer so they start running away from you. Then you chase after them because if women didn’t want men to sexually assault them, they wouldn’t have been doing provocative things like, you know, existing.

* * *

Recently, due to some unforeseen circumstances, I found myself at a fast-food “joint,” at 11p.m., ordering what I hoped was an edible pile of fried cholesterol. I noticed that a large crowd was present at the same venue. However, in one of the safest neighbourhoods in the city, at a time that wasn’t ‘too late in the night,’ there were no female patrons. And that’s one of the consequences of our delusional that victims of sexual crimes are ‘asking for it.’ Every time we hear about a horrific incident of sexual violence, some asshole will try to mansplain how the victim has to share some of the blame because she put herself in that situation. If only we’d have restricted more of the victim’s freedom, nothing like this would have ever happened!

This train of thought was the subtext of the discussion about the anti-sexual assault bill under consideration in our most important legislative body and winner of the Palme d'Or for the ‘Worst Advertisement about Democracy’, the Lok Sabha. Besides the victims themselves, the second biggest villain was the ever dependable ‘western culture.’ When in doubt, blame the west.

Damn you and your wretched hold over our minds, western culture! Pretty sure it’s western culture that makes people believe that women in this country don’t have a right over their own bodies. It’s probably western culture that makes people ruthlessly kill a new born when they don’t approve of its gender. It’s the cowardice evangelized by western culture that makes people in this country look the other way when they see sexual harassment taking place. If it wasn’t for the corrupt influence of western culture, no MP would have dared to rise up in parliament and give a rousing defence of criminal stalking.

None of our problems would have existed if we’d just followed Indian culture.

Now please excuse me as I’ve got to explain to a class full of teenage girls how our ancient traditions expect them to treat their future husbands like a God.