Drawing a Song

Battle for Bittora

2011-05-02T21:44:00.003-04:00

Battle for Bittora is Anuja Chauhan’s second book, another wickedly funny, light-hearted romance set in contemporary India, and it’s been very interesting to see how she’s evolved/changed as an author from The Zoya Factor. Not to mention, it’s such a great read by itself.

*Spoilers galore, mind*

UPDATE: I deleted this paragraph before posting first because it seemed too corporate & 'pat', but I really want to make the conclusions explicit, so I'm putting it back in...I think the big change is Chauhan's increased confidence - in her content (#1 below and #5) and in the business (#3 & #4), and in her craft (which comes across in #6 and #2 below, where the confidence wasn't as warranted). Content and business are maybe easier to learn than craft? Or does the learning curve for craft, as opposed to content/business take up some funny plateaus on its way? Or worse, does success lead to a flattening of the only learning curve that truly matters for a fiction writer - craft (as opposed to a technical writer for whom content is key)? Anyway, here are my thoughts.....

First, let me just state how much I love the casual feminism in Bittora:

The plethora of fantastic, fully realized female characters here makes this book easily pass the Bedchel Test, and I’m not sure The Zoya Factor does that.
She wins!!! She wins!!! They have a political battle, and she wins, fair and square. I was dreading reading the ending of the book because I was expecting it to be something like Zain winning, and Jinni totally making an unbelievably submissive cop-out at the end, like realizing at the last minute that she never had wanted the seat, and then Zain offering to make her his second-in-command, which would’ve left such, such, such a bad taste in my mouth.
I love how she has an internal life and a purpose throughout the book, and that the reader can believe that she has a life path ahead of her after the ending, too. Unlike Zoya, where the romance was the main story, and you were left wondering if she quit her job afterward or something.
The protagonist’s last name is the same as her maternal grandmother’s, and there is no explanation of this. None whatsoever. Smart writing, too, because saying anything there would’ve just sounded contrived and defensive. This is an unlikely scenario, but not all that unbelievable, especially in the anything-goes world of Indian politics (Indira Gandhi appropriated the ‘Gandhi’ name quite randomly, for instance).
No Disney-dead-mother syndrome here, thank you very much. And the woman character gets a cool, permissive mom, too, the likes of which usually cool male characters get. The women get cool dads and dead, or absent, or subservient moms.
Chauhan dismisses Rahul Mahajan categorically. I wish she also dissed Salman Khan less subtly.
How fantastic was Ammaji’s comment about wanting to ‘settle’ her granddaughter - i.e., her career, not her marriage. For all her religious bigotry, how very, very far-thinking and impressive.

Second, and hopefully not caused by the first point above: somehow for me, the romance isn’t that very strong. It’s still amazing, and better than most other books, but Zoya Factor wins, very slightly, here. It’s not for lack of a fantastic hero in Bittora - if anything, Zain Altaf Khan is even more ‘eligible’ than Nikhil Khoda - he is equally handsome, of royal blood, is an environmental engineer and an MIT graduate, and as a teenager, wrote a superhero series - and has compelling vulnerabilities! All of this should’ve totally made him more compelling than the sports-quota-type, back-story-missing Khoda, at least for someone like me (erm, I still swoon over liberal young handsome Indian Muslim men with the nostalgia of my own love. But, TMI). What gives, then?
Maybe it is just the fact that this is a repeat performance, and nothing beats the first, unspoiled, original version.
Maybe it is the fact that the first book was focused more on the romance and less on the Zoya Factor phenomenon, and the second book was focused equally on the political battle and the romance (actually this one is hard to say. I think both were equally split!).
Maybe because Zain never does something completely unexpected and out-of-the-blue in the romance, he’s never pushing the envelope, unlike Khoda with his ‘I’ve been wanting to kiss you all evening’ and his random intimate text messages especially in public, his popping-up-in-her-hotel-rooms when least expected, etc.
Maybe it is because all the back-story of the romance is between sixteen-year olds and thirteen-year-olds in Bittora, and that for me was borderline creepy and often boring.
Maybe because the first time they meet, they instantly jump into their make-out session, with no build-up for the reader. Anticipation is half the fun.
Maybe in said ‘first-for-the-reader-make-out-session’, Zain disregards her non-consent and kisses her. Somehow that wasn’t as hot as I think the author set it out to be. Khoda does a similar thing towards the end of the first book and that played out as playful (ha!), here I found it distasteful.
Maybe it is because I was put off by the crude ancillary references, e.g. Tawny uncle’s son The Rapist, the crowd’s groping at the mela, etc. that were all supposed to be casually laughed off (and were pretty much correct-for-context), but which totally put me in a defensive, disgusted mood, not receptive towards the actual romance. In Zoya Factor, the ancillary references are equally crude, but they refer to sex (not rape).
Maybe it is because the supporting cast in Bittora - especially Ammaji - was so solidly crafted that your attention was split, vs. in the first book where no one else apart from the main characters got to monopolize reader attention & affection.
Maybe it is the fact that in the Big Contest in the book, Khoda won his battle, but Zain lost. Did ‘loser stench’ ruin the latter’s alpha male scent?
Maybe it is that Khoda kept his hands and nose very clean and never lost the high moral ground during the book, even in times of stress with Jogpal & Sons. Zain was doing as much mud-slinging and dirt-throwing as his competitors in the electoral battle. A Bauji-type honest man would’ve called for suspension of disbelief, but wouldn’t’ve been totally impossible, would he?
Maybe it is that Khoda was shown to be a leader of men, literally, but Zain was only shown to command his friends’ loyalty, which is admirable, but less sexy.
Maybe it is because the captain of a successful Indian cricket team is unattainably desirable, but there are a hundred former-prince’s-son-types around?
Maybe, paradoxically, it is because there is a close real-life analogy to Khoda in M S Dhoni but someone like Zain isn’t really around today (no, not even Omar Sharief).
Maybe it is the face that the power and social status imbalance is so little, almost negligible, between Zain and Jinni, rather than the insurmountable gulf of celebrity between Khoda and Zoya. And obviously power imbalances are what make (straight?) women swoon with lust, or something.
(Oh, and of the four main characters, I only referred to Khoda by last name in my first draft of this post, then went to correct it, and stopped myself. Maybe my subconscious is telling me something. That I think of Khoda as more male? That the author thinks of Khoda as more male? She keeps calling Zain ‘Zain’, but called Nikhil Khoda ‘Khoda’ almost throughout. Men are usually called by their last names, especially in situations of power and authority, and women are called by their first names - through history, and for various reasons. Remember how everyone back in 2008 called Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ‘Obama’ and ‘Hillary’ respectively?)

Third, the Hinglish was so much more obvious here in Bittora. There was not even the perfunctory attempt as in the first to ease the way for readers who didn’t speak Hindi or know local references. This is an unapologetic “of Indians, by Indians, for Indians” book. While I’m impressed with such confidence and a little intimidated (what to do, I’m a pasty-faced NRI), a part of me does wish they would care for their overseas readers, even if it’s just so readers like me could share the book with local friends here. But yooooohooooo for no more stupid substitutions like ‘unleavened bread with clarified butter’ for roti-and-ghee, like in English books by Indians published even as late as 2002.
This means the economics of the publishing/book selling business is so sound in desh that it can sustain itself, which is more than the US publishing business can say for itself. Despite nakli books sold by eight-years olds at traffic lights. Good for you, desh.

Fourth, and related to the above, the target audience seems to be a more mainstream Indian than the SEC A, urban woman target audience of Zoya Factor. There aren’t too many highbrow riffs on people who use unnecessary plurals (‘anyways’/‘grands’/‘butts’); instead, the riffs are now on people who ask politicians for favors. The internal demon that gets defeated is not a nation’s harmless superstitions during cricket matches but the violent, all-pervasive, gut-wrenching religious bigotry.

Fifth, and this is not a change in Chauhan’s writing as much as a repeat performance. I’ve also recently read a couple of other desi chick-lit books, and wanted to gouge my eyes out. The plot is non-existent. The heroes are vapid. There is absolutely no originality to the stories or the characters or the conflict or the treatment. There is liberal lifting of entire narrative arcs from Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’ Diary, the wannabe-ness of it all is depressing. Oh, and the editing is SO disgusting, SO terrible the editors should commit hara-kiri. In Advaitha Kala’s Almost Single, the very first line has the protagonist waking up from a ‘deep dreamless REM sleep’ and I read that and threw the book across the room in disgust. Unfortunately, in a moment of weakness I picked the book off the floor a few days later and continued reading, to my eternal regret. Another book - Kkarishma’s Konfessions, was it? - has a blatant error in the first page: someone is someone’s elder sister, then suddenly becomes the younger sister in page two and goes on. And that typo is not even an ironic insight into the idiotic world of Indian soaps. If it was an insight, it was way too subtle as irony and way too obvious as a typo.
So, compared to genre, Chauhan’s books are high literature, which is not saying much. But even by themselves, her books are well researched and grounded in their industry and setting (rural India and politics for Bittora, cricket and advertising for The Zoya Factor), have lots of in-jokes about Bollywood and pop culture, and lots of really funny random insights (“like all visiting NRIs, [mother] was obviously hoping to squeeze both a funeral and a wedding into one India trip” - Bittora, or “People who knew only one language...what would they switch to if they started getting pally, or angry, or fell in love?” - Zoya Factor)

Sixth: I love that this one had a much more satisfying ending. This book had closure. Of the relationship, and also, for the character’s individual lives. Zoya Factor didn’t. I kept turning the page to see if I’d missed the last part. That, if nothing else, makes author confidence very clear, as I'm realizing in my own writing.

So what's unchanged?

As before, Chauhan’s own stated real-life inspiration for the hero (Saif Ali Khan for Zain Altaf Khan) completely rings false (like Rahul Dravid for Nikhil Khoda. Ew.) Saif when younger was too dissolute and completely unlike current-time-Zain or even younger-Zain. And current Saif? Oh, please. The guy is more and more like a real-life Macbeth, with his insecurities and his younger, prettier girlfriend.
As before, I can imagine only Farhan Akhtar in today’s Bollywood doing any justice to Zain’s character. Stretch it to Imran Khan, or (ugh) Ranbir Kapoor. I actually know some people in real life who’d play this role perfectly, too. Jinni would have to be Ayesha Dharkar, I suppose, just to be able to do justice to the ‘abnormally wide smile’. Konkana & Kareena are good stretch choices.

Finally: if she were to ask me: dude, what should I change in my next book, I’d say:
Please have a genuine love triangle. I’m curious to see how you’ll write that. Oh, and please don’t have a creepy, precocious pre-teen male child with an inappropriate obsession (women’s panties/torture). It’s too done, and done irritatingly. And get yourself a website, woman, it is 2011 already, and even fans have needs - e.g. to obsessively stalk their authors.

Oh, oh, and write more. Please.

The Zoya Factor

2011-04-21T16:45:00.001-04:00

Just finished re-reading the excellent chick-lit "The Zoya Factor". For the record, I have no major qualms about using the word (phrase?) 'chick-lit' to describe the broad genre of easy-breezy reads involving contemporary-to-the-times characters, a female protagonist - a usually ditsy and often extremely insecure female protagonist - dealing with relationship issues, presented to the reader with situational, self-directed humor, and involving a happy ending. I wish we could come up with a slightly less condescending name, but I can live with 'chick-lit' because it captures the spirit of the books themselves - irreverent, playful, self-deprecating. It's the covers of these chick-lits - uniformly involving red stilettos, 'cartoon' drawings on the cover, primary/pastel colors - that usually get my goat. And the utterly boring, predictable plots that some of them have - seriously, even if it is 'chick-lit', you still need to put in *some* work, Ms./Mr.Author!! Oh, and yes, the irritating stupidity of the heroines, who just can't seem to handle the fact that they have actual brain cells in their heads.

But The Zoya Factor is not irritating. The Zoya Factor is not thoughtless. For the most. And Zoya, the protagonist, is silly, but not teeth-grinding-inducingly stupid. I love that it is set in the familiar world (for me) of advertising/marketing. I love that it involves a seriously ambitious love interest - it doesn't get bigger than the captain of the Indian cricket team. Oh, and did I say the humor is spot-on?

I'm not going to review this one thoroughly, because there isn't much to review - it's a pretty straightforward story that makes fun of 'India shining' while also being reclaiming 'India shining' for itself, in the whole Luck-by-Chance/Om-Shanti-Om style. Anuja Chauhan, the author (who's from my college!! WHEEE!!!), doesn't waste too much space setting context or even background for Nikhil Khoda, and with good reason. Her secondary characters are excellent, the love story holds your interest, the conflict could've been better - it is contrived in places, but not terribly irritating, so I'll let that go. And the romantic pay-offs are superb.

Oh, and Nikhil Khoda has to be the sexiest romantic hero EVER. Really. He's in Rhett Butler/Mr.Darcy league. That is all.

Anuja does the cricket well, though I do wish she'd spent just a little more time, but that's a personal preference. Of course, she does the cricket-and-advertising pitch perfectly (see what I did there?), she does cricket-as-national-religion and cricketers-under-pressure pretty well. She's also incorporated the whole Greg Chappell-Saurav Ganguly-Jagmohan Dalmiya fiasco, leaked email and all. Unfortunately (for me), she takes Chappell's side very, very unambiguously, and makes Ganguly and Dalmiya look like buffoons. During the controversy, I'd felt - along with most Indians - that the Australian-import Chappell was being totally unfair to Ganguly, so here I will need to disagree with Chauhan. But of course, she probably has loads of better information. Maybe the former Indian captain was a shoe-stealer and weight-thrower during her Pepsi shoots? And this was her way of getting the perfect revenge? And maybe Red Chillies optioned for movie rights *after* Ganguly was out of KKR? Huh? Huh?

Because the script hews closely to actual current events, it's fun to play guess-who. Khoda is Dhoni, despite the author's protests. Sorry, but I just.do.not.see a 'younger, unspoilt Rahul Dravid' there. If anything, I can see a bit of Ganguly in the arrogance. Of course, Khoda is too metrosexual, dripping sophistication, compared to M S Dhoni's earthy-cool. But the records are similar, and there's just too many parallels.

Harry/Hairy is very likely a mix of Harbhajan and Yuvraj Singh ('cut surd', juvenile antics, aggressive on-field, etc.). Zaheer Pathan is, of course, Irfan Pathan, who was looking really good in 2005-6 when she was likely writing the book. Soon after, his luck turned south: but he's been immortalized in the book, good for him! I'm guessing the others: Monita-Rinku-Chachi-Zoravar-Papa-etc are from Chauhan's family/friends/acquaintances circle.

And now that the movie is being made, these are my picks for casting choices:

Zoya Singh Solanki:

Preity Zinta, 10 years ago, would be my top pick. And if Aamir Khan can play a 17-year old in 3 idiots, why can't Preity Zinta play a 27-year old lead? I would totally cast her. With crazy curly hair, of course.
Amrita Puri. She could do the ditzy stuff well, and of course be Karol-Bagh-Solanki to the tee. And I *think* she could pull off the advertising executive work - but that needs to be seen.
Konkana Sen Sharma. I can see her do both the ad-exec and the Karol-Bagh thing well. But she's probably a bit too self-possessed to do the ditzy stuff. Well, she's an actor, who knows. But this would be an interesting choice.
Anushka Sharma. But I'm so, so tired of her being the Punju babe.
Deepika Padukone, Sonam Kapoor, etc. - too urbane. But who knows, maybe they can pull off this role.

Nikhil Khoda - oh you dreamy, dreamy man.

Farhan Akhtar. Top pick, hands down. Looks like a sportsman. Can totally do the intense, brooding "leader of men" thing. And looks dishy, oh, so dishy (forgive me, I just re-watched Luck by Chance recently!). Can do the romantic/angry/sexy scenes SO WELL. And is probably one of the three ONLY actors in Bollywood who can say 'musical soiree' and 'pyromaniac' without sounding like he had to practice in front of his bathroom mirror for days (the other two being, maybe, Abhay Deol and Shah Rukh Khan).
John Abraham. Needs to stand up straighter to pull off the sportsman thing. And has been playing too many wing-man roles for me to be able to picture him as Alpha Male quite as well. But he does have potential.
Siddharth (the guy in Rang De Basanti). Intense, brooking, blah, blah blah. Also, looks a lot like a younger Dhoni, but pseud-er, which is what we're looking for. I just can't picture him being masterful enough, but you could probably compensate with camera angles or background score or something.
Imran Khan. In a pinch. Can't act for nuts - yet. Especially not the angry/intense scenes. But he looks the part.
Ranbir Kapoor - NO NO NO. He's over-exposed, and a real-life d*ck. He'll totally make the movie about himself, instead of supporting the woman lead. Doesn't look the part ONE bit (dark, sportsman, intense, etc.). Can act all right, but is - and looks - too entitled to be a hungry-to-prove-himself-rookie-Indian-skipper. I only added him to the list because there're rumors doing the rounds that he's playing Khoda. Please, SRK, NO!! Don't destroy Nikhil Khoda for me!
Hrithik Roshan - Not really. Too old, for one. And too, too good looking. But he has magic, and can probably pull off the role better than others who're more suited for it.

So that's my take. Can't wait for the movie, especially since Reema Kagti is supposed to be working on the screenplay (SQUEEEEEE!!!!).

Breaking stereotypes = breaking internalized belief systems.

2010-07-21T21:20:00.004-04:00

Just a quick re-post of my comment on the fabulous IHM's blog on her tag about how we're all non-stereotypical (link to her post here, to my comment here ). Basically, my point is that in order to truly break stereotypes, we need to subvert internalized belief systems, or else we may just end up reinforcing narratives and power structures. This is Game Theory 101 - by ensuring that OTHERS stay in line and WE break free, we do get a big short-term benefit bump, but for real long-term sustainable benefit, we ALL need to break the stereotypes.

First off, this is an awesome tag, loved the idea that if enough of us speak up about how we're not stereotypically female/male we'd all collectively have enough ammunition to break the gender molds for ourselves and for others.
However: I'm sorry to rain on everyone's parade, but after going through yet another cring-inducing blogpost on this subject, I need to say this.
As I go around reading all that everyone's written (and yeah, almost everyone on the desi blogosphere has taken up the tag), most women seem to take this on as a challenge to appear 'cooler' than other women because they don't do what 'so many other women do'. Instead of this being an exercise in celebrating our collective sisterhood & our delicious differences, it's become another attempt in one-up-man(!)-ship. I'm cringing as I see women so stridently separate themselves from 'OTHER' women who're so 'DISGUSTINGLY GIRLY'. The posts almost speak to some audience whose approval is being sought - and given the patriarchy that we all function under, very likely some imaginary male audience. This is first off disturbing because it casts all women as opponents of one another - that for one of us to win, another has to lose, because this is a zero sum game. Instead of leading to acceptance of our differences, we're all exacerbating them and using them as weapons. It just adds to the subconscious belief that women cannot be friends, because we're all threatened by each other, because we're all going after the same target: MAN. As it is, "our culture provides so precious few narratives about women in shared spaces, about female allies, about women who deeply love other women, about sisterhood. And its lovely, lovely benefits." to quote the fabulous Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister. This tag against gender stereotypes has become more of a tag against your own gender.
Secondly, this avalanche of blog posts that implicitly criticize other women for being girly (liking pink, liking dressing up, loving to cook and clean) and self-congratulatorily praise the writer's lack of such girliness (oh, I'm so cool 'coz I like BLUE!!! and I like CARS!! and HATE COOKING!! and NEVER WANNA CUDDLE BABIES!!) only feeds into the existing narrative that marginalizes all female or feminine qualities as being less desirable, and everything male as being the ideal, default state. Our collective conscious already internalizes messages like this - a young girl who likes climbing up trees is indulgently called a tomboy. A young boy who likes girly things - say dolls, or pink tutus, or cooking, or ice-cream - is seen as a freak, someone disgusting, someone to be made fun of. The parents of such a young girl will likely as not warn her that she will need to become feminine as she grows up to be successful (success as defined by being happily married, have babies, etc.). The parents of such a young boy will likely as not be extremely anguished as they wonder what they did wrong - his youthful interests will be seen as indicative of his weakness, or mental imbalances (like as not, this will lead directly to people assuming that his father does not have enough 'manhood' in him and therefore cannot pass on enough of it to his son, or that the boy's mother is too dominating). [See this for a great revelatory of how power = masculine and weakness = feminine in the English language: http://bit.ly/dyseG4 ] The last thing we as a culture need is more such stigmatization of womanly qualities, more reinforcement of toxic prejudices, more insecurities amongst our women.

Observation of the day

2010-06-17T11:40:00.001-04:00

When South Indians want to criticize North Indians, they call them uneducated. When North Indians want to insult South Indians, they call them South Indians.

Different but equal

2010-02-17T14:09:00.004-05:00

At first read, this sounds like one of the usual nonsensical statements regularly spouted by celebrities:

Amitabh Bachchan, who teamed up with producer Ambika Hinduja and director Leena Yadav for Teen Patti, says he doesn't mind working under women as they are more capable than men.

Asked if there was any difference in working with an all women team, he said: "There was no difference at all... Women are more efficient than men."

The last two sentences so clearly contradict each other that you're left scratching your head. But think about it - it's a brilliant statement, if only for the fact that it exposes the lie inherent when people say 'men and women are just different, but equal' (like they said a hundred years ago 'black and white children are separate, but equal'). How can women be the same as men and also more efficient - unless Amitabh was elaborating on his first statement using the second?

Different = inferior. It is codified in the way we think, we express ourselves. When we see someone 'different', we internally categorize them as inferior (why else would Sandra Oh be considered ugly?). The word 'different' is a polite way of saying 'eww' about a person or a thing, much as 'interesting' is a polite way of saying 'the experience sucked'.

So the next time someone says 'oh, men and women are just different', you know they mean to say one is inferior to the other.

Why we need feminism - Part 100,000,000

2010-02-13T19:20:00.003-05:00

MNIK wouldn't've been made! *Spoiler* The whole premise of Kajol's son being killed because his name is Khan would not've come about if Kajol, as a feminist, didn't change her name on her marriage to SRK. And in her whole rant on the football field ("I should not've met you/we should not've married/blah blah") not once did she bring about the idea that she should not have changed her name (in effect, a transfer of ownership of 'Mandira', her character, from her father/ex-husband to her current husband).

Bollywood - and K JO - need a little feminism-awareness stat.

Because we're all just Breeders?

2010-01-23T22:38:00.007-05:00

One of the more puke-worthy 'news articles' I've read recently has to be this one [emphasis all mine]:

Under-aged Mothers: Curse for the Infants
If a girl becomes pregnant before attaining the age of 18 years and gives birth to a baby, then that innocent baby has to bear the burnt of the same. The babies who happen to have under-aged mothers are under-nourished, under-weight, under-sized and almost half-starved.
This has been pointed out by Professor Anita Raj of the Boston University School of Public Health and is the effort of her research based on the data of 1,24,385 mothers between the age group of 15 years to 49 years. The National Family Health Department of India has provided the statistics to Prof. Anita Raj and the data is for the year 2005-2006. She has made a deep analysis of the data. Besides, Prof. Raj has gone through the case studies of 13396 mothers between the ages of 15 to 24 years who gave birth to 19,302 children during a period of five years.
The study points out that 67% of such infants are malnourished, 24% of such infants are under-weight and 22% of such infants are under-sized. If the mother is a minor herself, the baby has the more risk of malnutrition. The study also points out that 44% of the girls between the ages of 20 to 24 years get married in India and a quarter of the same become mothers during this age. The study further revealed that if the mother is under-aged, then the infant mortality rate will be higher.
It is unfortunate that India stands at # 1 position as regards the infant mortality rate of the babies between the age groups of 0 to 5 and that is despite the hue and cry of India being on the path of modernization and industrialization. It is high time, thus, that our Government must take stringent action against the child marriages. The state of Rajasthan, where the child marriages are quite common, should be asked to be very strict in this matter. The society should also be made aware of the results of the research and guided properly against this evil.

The whole article talks about how under-aged motherhood is bad for the children. There is not one mention about how an under-aged pregnancy is proof of statutory rape. The explicit journalistic concern - hardly subtle - for the health of 'innocent children' born to such mothers evidently does not extend to the equally innocent mothers themselves.

Seriously Mr/s. Journalist at The First Reporter, a question for you: how do you think such kids are born? Who makes these children? Why doesn't your effing article make ONE mention of the men who rape these women - these girls - and make them pregnant? Why not blame the system that actually puts such women - minor girls - in child marriages, that then denies them freedom of choice and access to birth control and contraception?

This is one of the many millions of ways in which the patriarchy affects our every thought, our every action. The importance of women in such a system is only when - and because - they carry the next generation, not because they're human beings in and of themselves. Their function in life is to be good, effective mothers of healthy children - of course, healthy male children.

Such thinking needs to change from the first fundamental assumption upwards. Women - & girls - are not important only because they're the carriers of the next generation. Their health issues are not, and should not, be studied merely as strong indirect influences on the future of humanity - they are today's humanity. It is not because the children born to under-age girls are unhealthy that our Government must take stringent action against the child marriages - it is because child marriages are in themselves an abomination. Child marriages are, by definition, between one or two participants who are too young to give their consent - and are therefore gateways to socially sanctified rape. And abuse of all kinds. A child marriage where there is no child born to a young mother does not automatically become a 'better' child marriage than one in which the young bride has children.

Girls who are forced into child marriages automatically will have had a lower level of education, have and will have lower quality healthcare (during maternity or elsewhere) and less access to income-generation opportunities and resources. They're likely to be married into families which believe that younger girls are 'more malleable' - which means more of their life and liberty is under the control of adults who're not directly vested in their well-being.

Such girls have had their lives cut off ahead of them, their horizons chopped off - unhealthy children are a side-effect, a symptom of the problem. It's a pity the repercussions are paid more attention than the actual problem. And because they are, we can be sure that the solutions found will not address the true root causes.

Teh stoopid is everywhere.

2010-01-22T17:45:00.006-05:00

What good news I just stumbled over in my Indian newspaper reading:

Women better off, gender gap is narrowing

How good. Now my work here is done, indeed. The gap has 'narrowed', so we're better off (than whom? than men? or than before? oh, okay then).

Both Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measurement (GME) — two key parameters of women’s development — have shown improvement over a 10-year period from 1996 to 2006, says the study released by Women and Child Development of State Minister Krishna Tirath.
The government had decided to conduct its own study on Gender Human Development Indices as it felt that global development indices reported by the United National Development Programme (UNDP) did not correctly reflect India’s ground situation.

The GDI scores estimated for India were 0.514 in 1996 and 0.590 in 2006, showing an increase of 0.076 points, which is almost double of what the UNDP reports suggest.

Ha! Take that, UNDP, and your stinky lying indices. Of course we had to come up with a better scale to 'reflect our own situation' or whatever. And since it reflects our situation, the scale is nice and loyal to its creators and is generously showing us that the Congress government is doing ZOMG! SUCH A GOOD JOB! that women are now better off!!!!!

The GDI is the Human Development Index (HDI) adjusted for disparities between men and women based on infant mortality rate, life expectancy at the age of one, literacy rate and decent living based on earned income. The GDI for India is lower than the HDI score at both points of time because of the existence of gender-based disparities in all four dimensions.

Forgive me, but I cannot even snark here because I'm so busy picking up my jaw off the floor. If you 'adjusted for' (in statistics that means eliminated the effects of) infant mortality rates, life expectancies, literacy rate and earned income rates, you've just eliminated four to ten of the most key factors and root causes - and symptoms - of inequality. Obviously your metrics are going to read better, but they're then not even measuring inequality correctly. Who authorized this 'new improved' index? And why? Where are the government watchdog institutions? Where are the NGOs? And where, for heaven's sake, is the Indian media? Oh, sorry, it's too busy making jealous jokes about irrelevant American politicians and standing outside Amitabh Bachchan's balcony along with the rest of Juhu.....

“The indices show that we still need to treat women equally,” Tirath said, claiming that the onus was on men.

Oh, STILL?? You mean even though the gap has narrowed we STILL need to treat women equally? C'mon, give us a break and let s get back to watching our saas-bahu serials. But wait, the onus is on men!!! Then the rest of us can all rest. The men will get to work building a better society as they always have. When will they start, you ask ....they'll get to work when they get to work. Now quit bothering me.

“The most serious aspect of gender discrimination that confronts us is violence against women, one manifestation of which is the alarmingly low female-male sex ratio. Special cognizance needs to be taken of this problem and actions taken to be put a stop to violence against women and girl child,” the report said.

Again, holding off the snark for aminute, I have to clarify to the lovely people at the Women and Child Development Ministry that violence against women is not an individual problem against which specific action can be aken when you've already ignored the root causes of such violence. You need to look at the differing literacy rates, income rates, cultural aspects (e.g. 'you can't leave it all it men'), overall social education, etc. If you fail to look at those root cuases, there's no way you can stop violence against women or female infanticide. That's Development 101 right there. Funny how some of these root causes coincide with the very measures you've left off - or 'adjusted for'.

Until it's internalized...

2010-01-18T13:53:00.002-05:00

...it's not really accepted.

I was adding The Good Wife to my Netflix queue after reading the amazing Melissa Silverstein say that it was 'very feminist'.

I hadn't heard about this series before except in passing (maybe via the same source, Melissa's blog), but found Julianne's dress awesome yesterday at the Golden Globes, and she seemed to sparkle, veritably, with intelligence even in the face of the typical stupid questions asked of her on the red carpet.

So Netflix, upon finding I'd added this series to my uqeue, trotted out its usual recommendations, which were all - other TV shows with legal angles. When I'd added Thelma and Louise they'd recommended other indie movies from 15 years ago. When I pick up Hindi masala movies they recommend other 'foreign movies' - including La Moustache. Seriously, Netflix -it's not the same kind of person that wants to watch Jab We Met and 13 Tzameti. Or at least, it's not the same person in the same mood. They don't seem to have figured out my patterns -either that I pick feministic shows (do they even have a category like that?), or that 'foreign' isn't just one big undifferentiated mass.

Apparently they paid the creator of the recommendation software/model a ton of money (was it a million $$ +?). Bah!

Lord help us from TOI.

2009-12-11T10:35:00.006-05:00

Anyone who still hasn't realized that TOI journalists are selected based on how low their IQ can go, needs to read this:

RK looks up to women:

Women are not things to be played with: Ranbir Kapoor

Ranbir Kapoor’s private life has become a topic of prime importance for the media. Be it his alleged break-up with Deepika or his concept of romance. We just want him to talk about love, don’t we!

Ranbir’s Rocket Singh Salesman of the year is about to release and we couldn’t help but ask Ranbir if there is any romance in it. After all, dad Rishi Kapoor is known for romantic roles. “There is no romance in the film” said Ranbir. But don’t all work and no play make Rocket Singh a dull man we probed to which Ranbir cheekily replied, “Women are not the only things to be played with.”

Ahem! Now Ranbir has made an interesting point here and we are impressed. Err Deepika are you too?

So, Ms. Vyavahare and others at TOI. Do you see a difference between 'Women are not the only things to be played with' and 'Women are not things to be played with'? Just so you know, the two sentences mean pretty much the opposite of each other. The latter sentence is an expression of respect, and states the obvious fact that women (=humans) are not things (=inanimate, non-human), and that their emotions or bodies are not solely existing for the entertainment of other humans. The former sentence says not only that women DO exist as playthings, and for entertainment, but also that they are not the ONLY inanimate objects available for the entertainment or 'play' of the Great Mr. RK. So the latter sentence implies that RK looks up to women, and the former sentence implies that Ms.Padukone has got away early, luckily, and smartly.

So which is it?

Now I have ANOTHER excuse for not working out

2009-12-11T10:13:00.002-05:00

Seriously, Reebok? Just saw the new ad of yours that shows the two breasts of a woman talking to each other, being jealous of how THAT SAME WOMAN'S rear end is so shapely. Did this ad even go through your usual quali/quant research? Did it pass the bar? Because it's so inane, so offensive and SO off Reebok brand equity I'm surprised your brand people didn't laugh off the ad pitch outright. Do you happen to have some new and inexperienced people running the brand, maybe? Men who know nothing about why women exercise (hint: it's not for appealing to men)? Or women who're auditioning for GGW and think ALL women share their aspirations?

Oh, and yes, see the awesome rant here by The New Agenda.

The only Rule is: there are no rules.

2009-12-07T20:17:00.003-05:00

I was reading Kate Harding's awesome takedown of The Rules - this takedown ought to be a mandatory inclusion with every copy of the book, really. Now yes, I'm a feminist, but was also intrigued for the longest time by things like The Rules, or self-gleaned (incorrect) lessons from Gone With the Wind, or my experience with the men - and boys - around me. It's the part of me that's fascinated with how human beings work (said in scary alien scientist voice), and my furious attempts to be different from my decidedly mal-adjusted mother.

I will say that the Rules can be quite effective and absolutely accurate about the reactions of certain types of men and women. The problem is that they're incredibly simplistic and inaccurate about vast swaths of humanity. This leads to them guaranteeing mediocre relationships for everyone, with no fulfilment and enormous scope for dissatisfaction. For instance, in the above-mentioned GWTW, Scarlett's 'dating' techniques were an absolute model of behavior, and yes, they worked with so many of the men around her, but the two most intense relationships in her life - with Rhett and Ashley - were predicated on her breaking the Rules and actually finding and expressing her true voice.

Kate ends her article with this:

Based on my experience as a successful husband-getter, I can tell you that all of the following behaviors are proven 100 percent effective in leading to marriage (and even a holiday season proposal!): Making the first move; having a first date that lasts three days; calling him frequently; moving in together after two months; publicly declaring that you won't apologize for being fat and are never going on another friggin' diet; telling him to suck it when he mentions that sweat pants aren't the most flattering sartorial choice you've ever made; offering a cranky feminist critique of every movie you see together; making no effort to conceal the fact that you're at least as smart as he is; blogging the early days of your relationship; talking early, often and in-depth about subjects including your ex-boyfriends, your dead mother, politics, religion, patriarchy and yeast infections; not knowing for sure if you ever want to get married, anyway; and living together for two years without really worrying about it.
So, as a certified relationship expert (I do, after all, have a legal document from the state of Nevada identifying me as someone a genuine male person agreed to marry), I can assure you that no matter who you really are or what you really want out of a relationship, it all boils down to one simple fact: Men want short-tempered, poorly dressed fat feminists who have sex on the first date and never stop talking.

My & P's own story is also so much like this. I often made the first move, especially physically & later sexually, I had sex with him when there was no comittment - we'd not even started officially dating, I did call/IM him very frequently, told him about my other relationships, was incredibly badly dressed, was abominably outspoken and a fierce, fighting feminist, had no qualms about bringing up commitment (though I did emphasize my lack of interest therein), lived together with him (and not in America but in India, where this was/is incredibly rare and pretty much equivalent to plastering your forehead with a bindi that ays 'hey, I'm a slut'), kept scrupulous accounts of expenses on all our dates and split them exactly mid-way for the most, then ended up borrowing large sums of money from him, and later held a gun to his head about marriage.

So yes, it does boil down to: Men want 'unsexy' intellectually-oriented women who're alternately fiercely independant and alternately painfully dependant, and are very very horny and open about their horniness.

Kurbaan vs. New York

2009-11-22T10:00:00.006-05:00

After watching the Kareena-Saif movie, we totally feel "hamne apna Saturday 'Kurbaan' ko kurbaan kar diya".

The movie was a bore. And way too much like New York with John Abraham and Katrina Kaif and Neil Nitin Mukesh - Islamic terrorism, a wronged desi guy out to blow up some Americans, a hapless 'innocent wife', a friend who's an infiltrator into the terrorist group. But it's fascinating how two people can treat one identical storyline in two such totally different ways. New York was nuanced, shocking, held its suspense so well, and made you intensely relate to the characters and feel their moral dilemmas. Kurbaan set out to dazzle you with the looks of the leading pair - and it succeeded with Kareena, not so much with the over-botoxed, rebonded-combovered-hair Saif - and was a movie that never made up its mind about whether it was a love story or a window into the souls of people who like killing other people. At the end of New York you walked out wondering about the pointlessness of terrorism and the senselessness of American state-sponsored violence; at the end of Kurbaan we walked out wondering about the pointlessness of the movie and the senselessness of a story that pretty much glorified terrorism.

The problem (one of the many problems, really) with Kurbaan is that it was like that episode of 24 where a liberal dude trusts the brown stranger against the fervent opposition of the all-American dude suspicious of all brown people with funny names, and then the brown stranger turns out to be a terrorist after all. It shamelessly encouraged the average viewer to go ahead and stereotype every bukha-clad Muslim woman and every young brown man with a backpack and rewarded such stereotypes.

The writing was abysmal. They couldn't make up their minds whose perspective to pick - Kareena's or Vivek's or Diya's, so they went with option (D), all of the above. Unlike New York, where everything unfolds from Neil's p-o-v, and so even small revelations - like Katrina knowing all along that her handsome all-American husband is actually a terrorist - are discoveries that keep you engaged in the story. John's haunted expression and sudden character twists are hugely gut-punching, even more so when you hear the back-story and see the real, very plausible torment he's undergone. Here, you never really related to Saif or felt for him - not in the initial love story, not when he's revealed to be a scheming, manipulative husband, not when you're told why he became a terrorist, and not when he falls in love with his now-pregnant wife, and not when has his final melodramatic change of heart. His journey seems eminently alien and strange, and each twist is totally 'yeah, right'. They'd've been better off making his a fully negative role, throwing in a couple of wife-whacking scenes and maybe having a last-second unexplained twist (was a change of heart? did he really spare her? or did he miss his target for once?).

The logic was non-existent. It's completely frustrating how at least two of the characters - Vivek Oberoi's and Kareena Kapoor's - are supposed to be Amreekan educated and liberal-thinking, but in any moment of crisis, faced with any example of rule-breaking, small or large, they end up going the illogical, circituous route. When Kareena's neighbor comes to her for help since she's presumably being beaten up and about to be murdered, she doesn't go to the cops or to a local NGO dealing with DV cases, or to a women's shelter. No, she leisurely pays an in-person visit to a news reporter that the neighbor had met months ago in an internet chatroom (yes, huh?! indeed), and passively walks away when the reporter tells her she'll call the neighbor in a few weeks after her vacation/travel. And then Kareena, professor and consummate Manhattan girl, generally wanders around in the neighbor's basement in the dead of night. Seriously heroine, WTF?

Poor Vivek ends up having to go one better. When he gets a lead on the people who may have bombed a plane and killed ~200 people, he decides to take on the whole terrorist agency by himself, and fight for world peace singlehandedly in a severe Miss World relapse moment. When he's in the middle of the terror plot, he still doesn't want to tell the cops what he knows, but renders ultimatums to Kareena (who's under house arrest) to source a f***ing subway map for him 'definitely by tonight!!!'. He tells the FBI/cops about the plot at the last minute, because evidently just saying 'subway system under threat' is less helpful than giving exact station names, because the silly FBI can't figure that out for themselves. Touching, such faith in the American legal system. And just proves my often-repeated assertion that modern journalists are, by definition, stupid. Thank you, KJo.

Of course, the five stations targeted by Saif and Om Puri & co. to 'teach the goras a lesson' are the ones with the highest possible concentrations of desi people - Jackson Heights, Lexington Ave - somehow suicide bombing takes on layer 2 meanings here, or maybe they thought desi/NRI audiences wouldn't be horrified enough if it was 57th avenue or Harlem. After all that analysis, Rensil couldn't even be bothered to keep his stations straight, because the back-ups bombers who were to target Times Square and Grand Central and 5th ave end up somehow, in a twist, at three of the originally planned locations, having been magically swapped for the dead guys with backpacks.

More logic issues - not only do the incompetent FBI not examine voicemails and evidence - (what happened to all the wiretapped evidence courtesy FISA and the Patriot Act, huh? huh? HUH??!!), they wait around for hours in churches for tip-offs from random people, in touching displays of patience and loyalty to anonymous informers. And then reinforce their good-guy status by exclaiming 'Jesus Christ!!!' at regular intervals, since of course this is all a war about Christianity vs. Islam, in which Hinduism mysteriously proves victorious.

Finally, possibly the brightest spark of talent in the movie belongs to Kiron Kher's uninhibited Afghani character - she somehow assimilates Iranian/Syrian hijabi sartorialism (maybe the real Afghan hijab was way too scary) and diction from villains in 1970s Amitabh-starrers to come up with a pretty good composite character, not too unlovable or too far from her usual Punju mom roles, but also crazy enough so you're a tad afraid of/for her. She was definitely better than Om Puri, whom one barely noticed - except when he sulked off in a huff when his authority was easily challenged by upstart Saif. And Saif! Saif, that nawabi bad-child looking for his lost youth just continues to embarrass himself and us by trying to be all-in-one: cool-dude and action-superhero and chocolate-boy-lover in every movie. He unfortunately seems to have upped his ambition and jock-style pecs (and steroidal intake) at the exact time that his talent - and jowls, and hair volume - are moving downwards. This when he's not terrorizing and manipulating Kareena in reel life and in real (watch their interviews where usually confident Kareena turns to him constantly for affirmation, very unlike the Poo-ing brat of Shahid's time).

Kareena is as luminously pretty as ever, and came good in the last scene with snot freely running down her face, but somehow she leaves you with utter despair for Indian women - if psychology professors are this dumb, there's not much hope for the rest of us. She's completely unresourceful, can't be bothered to do basic checks on the men she falls for, ends up accepting invites to boring sex-segregated parties, is trapped into house arrest in her own house and promptly packs a head scarf when she realizes her husband is a terrorist. And of yes, when tasked to do a difficult (!) chore, she turns to the only tool at her disposal - no, not Google, not her brains or her education, but her body and sexuality. It's possibly not just Saif here who's missing the 80's.

So, yeah, John Abraham still has my heart.

Lorenz attractors

2009-11-21T20:06:00.003-05:00

The problem with picking marketing/brand management as a career is that your earning potential is definitely capped. It's like picking supply chain management as a career option - even the absolute best experts in the field, the people right at the 90th percentile and above, only earn about twice that of someone just starting out. In brand management, the ratios are slightly better since general management is infinitely more accessible, but even the GM in my Southern company makes only ~$200K as his base pay (and add another ~$300K or so as a bonus).

This is totally different from, say, finance. Or even sales. If you're an entry-level sales person, or someone without the best pedigree or connections, you start out as a door-to-door salesperson or someone selling sabun to kirana stores, making the equivalent of ~$50 a day. Slightly better educational qualifications, or slightly better connections, keep getting you higher in the food chain - to pharma sales, to CPG/FMCG sales, to regional sales/distributorships, to financial sales, to the investment banking sales/trading floor. In the last category, a person 5+ years in earns ~$5-10 Million per year, about 300X of the door-to-door salesperson.

I can't think of the equivalent 'big bang for your buck' niche in marketing.

Women typical use considerations like work/life balance, etc. when picking a career - even us 'high-powered alpha women' from ultra competitive business schools. Which is why brand management is a disproportionately favorite choice for so many of us. This means we think short-term, and forget the long-term career-long implications of our decisions - we earn less than our classmates for ever, even if the (often male) classmates weren't all that great to begin with, they quickly overtake us in earning power because of that career line advantage. Marketing therefore gets us on the mommy track before motherhood/families even get a chance to hit us.

And this is the kind of stuff one should be taught to analyze in business school - not double-entry bookkeeping. Or, you should be smart enough to figure this out before you go about picking a career. Clearly, you get the profession you deserve!

Yeh toh kuch nahin hai, hamarein yahan toh....

2009-11-17T13:35:00.003-05:00

Then there was the Bigger family with Mr. Bigger, Mrs. Bigger, and Baby Bigger.
Q: Who was the biggest?
A: Baby Bigger, because he was a little bigger.

Remember the old popular joke about the guy who was visiting a small town and kept showing off that everything was 'so much bigger' in his own town? The roads, the houses, the cars - and then, when the small town guys dunk him in the pool, even the pools and the jokes were bigger in his hometown. And someone calls him an idiot, and he says there are even bigger idiots in his hometown?

That's what AP sounds like in this farce of an article:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin's book is highly anticipated in her home state — but she's no Harry Potter.
...
"I'm excited about the event," he said. "Am I as excited as I was for Harry Potter? No. That was huge."
...
At Gulliver's Books in Fairbanks, tins of candies packaged as "Sarah's Embarrassmints" are a hot item, far outselling Palin's book.
...
Store owner David Hollingsworth said he has received 10 pre-orders out of his 100 copies. It's nothing like the frenzy he saw for the 2,000 copies he ordered with the last installment of the Potter series.
The July 2007 release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" prompted two young sisters to wait in line outside his store for 11 days, living out in their parents' camper. Hollingsworth also had a midnight release for Potter fans but didn't plan to repeat those hours for "Going Rogue."
"Yes, it's a big deal, but we've had bigger deals," he said.

So they're comparing a political book by a supposed (they wish!) non-entity to the last Harry Potter book? Umm, why not compare this to the two Obama books - wouldn't that be a more equitable comparison? Or to a McCain book, or a Clinton book? Or to any autobiography/life story/non-fiction/roman e clef by any famous woman, since they only think women should be compared to women? It's a truly telling sign when your detractors need to compare your book to the series that is supposed to have sold more copies than the Bible internationally in order to come up with negatives and then say 'ohh, it's no big deal' while crowing about it falling short.

I'm no Palin supporter, but when a global news organization reprints press releases from one side of a battle verbatim as news and claims zero bias, one needs to call b***shit. Proof:

Coinciding with Palin's national book tour, the Alaska Democratic Party announced Monday it was launching a Web site to hold Palin accountable on some issues. It's called "Say nO to Sarah," or SOS.....
On the Net:

Alaska Democratic Party: http://www.sarahwatch.org/

And that's the sign-off on the article - not the AP reporter's sign-off, but that of the party issuing the press release. Rachel D'Oro didn't even bother to wash hir hands and wipe the blood off the knife.

These [pirates'] rules, they're more like guidelines anyway

2009-11-17T11:34:00.006-05:00

Cap'n Barbosa from the Dead Man's Chest speaketh:

The Indian Air Force on Tuesday said it was planning to have women fighter pilots in future, but they will be inducted with a pre-condition of not bearing children till a certain age.

"In a few years time, we might see this change (women getting inducted as fighter pilots) coming in with certain pre-conditions that till this age we request you to be happy, be married, but no offsprings," IAF Vice Chief Air Marshal P K Barbora told reporters here.

"After 13-14 years of service, investments made on fighter pilots are actually recovered by the government," he said in an indication that women fighter pilots will be allowed to have kids only after putting in 13-14 years in IAF.
The IAF Vice-Chief said if a woman pilot has to take pregnancy leave, she will be off-flying for around 10 months, which will not be fruitful for both her and the Service.

Citing reasons for Services not inducting women into combat arms, Barbora said, the armed forces "feel that it is not right to have a lady or a woman exposed to a conflict where she can be a prisoner of war."

"Secondly, psychologically, are we fit? another factor," he added.

This is when I stop being proud of the Indian military that 'keeps us safe' (wev), and start wondering about eligibility & selection criteria that allowed Barbora and his ilk to come up through the ranks. First, psychologically, is he fit? Second, mathematically, is he sound? Third, how robust are his faculties of logic?

If 13-14 years are all that are required to break-even on training costs, then what's preventing them from directly saying that they require 14 full years of service - get initiates to sign a bond to deliver 168 full months of committed service or pay back training costs and suffer penalties? If someone takes 10 months off to deliver it's not like they are never fit to do anything after that - ask Kim Clijsters, who won the US Open 18 months after delivery. And why the exception for pregnancy - what if someone (a male candidate maybe?) falls ill with a debilitating heart disease at 30, and needs to take six months off to recoup?It's not like large emergencies never happen to fighter pilots, or that employees of the IAF are exceptionally protected from all such unexpected events .

Do Barbora and others that helped make this decision think they're fooling anyone when they say "Now, women in the age group of 21-23 years are inducted into the flying branch and may be allowed to start family after crossing the 35-37 years age bracket."? Is that condition likely to allow for any woman's priorities at 21? Or, for that matter, any man's priorities? What about changing priorities? And what if someone gets pregnant by accident? Is the IAF going to demand and force abortions? Sheesh, people, do you even think these things through before you call press conferences to shoot off yer mouths?

Maybe Barbora and ilk need to recieve printed copies of the story of Major Stephanie Nelson (her story here), the US Air Force fighter pilot (she flies F-16s) who got pregnant and was still treated with respect and equality.

snigger

2009-11-14T20:03:00.002-05:00

How funny is it that this woman, a show-off if there was one, the pinnacle of south bombay snobbishness, does not know how to spell 'spiel'? She writes 'schpeel' - and that on her FB status.

French maid fantasies, Om?

2009-11-11T14:23:00.003-05:00

Via Indiequill, apparently Om Puri slept with two of his maids a while ago. I've seen this in Hindi movies from the 80's and in books about pre-Civil War America when slave owners raped their slaves, but never realized this was such a wide-ranging phenomenon. Who knew an essential rite of passage for so many of our 'gritty, realistic' Indian male actors was to have sex with - or rape - a woman from a different economic class who was clearly their dependent? Who's next, now - Nana Patekar?

In Om Puri's case, of course, it's a little more complicated. In the first incident, apparently he was only 14, and they haven't spoken about the age of the maid then. Does that count as statutory rape on the part of the maid? Was she exploiting her adult privilege, or was he cruelly leveraging his economic and male privileges? In cases such as these, if the sex is consensual, is it still 'improper yet natural', like workplace sex, or exploitative, like boss-subordinate sex, or is it a whole different class altogether?

After watching Vanaja's nuanced portrayal last year, it's hard for me to be sympathetic to men who make out with maids/servants/nannies. And especially in the Indian context, where class and caste and English language privilege are still often insurmountable barriers, how can these people not see that what they're doing or did - or had - was not clear consensual sex but murky coercion, often based on economic dependency? These are the very same people who'll rant and rail against the Catholic Church donating money to poor untouchables to convert them.

But what truly sent chills running down my spine were not the incidents, but Om Puri's furious-ness at his wife:

"I don’t care if she’s my wife. I won’t let her get away with it "

When Nandita expressed a desire to write about me I couldn’t stop her because she’s my wife but she has forgotten who she is,” added Om.

She has forgotten who she is? Erm, dude, I'm guessing you don't mean the journalism part of her. She's forgotten she's your WIFE, you mean. Or rather, YOUR wife. Who shouldn't be doing things without your permission. Maybe you should meet Mr. and Mrs. Sanjay Dutt sometime soon - I have a feeling you'll like them.

And seriously, 'I won't let her get away with it'?!!????@##@$#$%

Class superiority much? Male privilege much? Of, maybe that will turn you on, knowing now what we do about you - you get off on that superiority thing, don't you, you sick ba****d.

*breathing deeply to calm myself down*

Hrumph. I wonder if French maid costumes are really disproportionately popular in Indian role plays. Maid (truly desi, subordinate, available) + white woman (loose, unattainable but 'available'). Business idea # 562, indeedy.

Deepika IS or DOES?

2009-11-09T09:57:00.004-05:00

Via MissMalini, yet another example of 'men DO, women ARE'.

Deepika Padukone: "Killing them softly with her smile" - Deepika's feminine mystique prompts us to dig deeper into..... what makes Bollywood's current dream girl tick
Imran Khan: "I should lead by example" - Actor Imran Khan writes....on how he works on greening life in the metropolis.

It's like palmistry when I was growing up - they all kept saying you should read the right hand of men, and the left hand of women. And then, further, that the left hand is what you start out with, what is 'God-given', and the right hand is what you make of it. My mother, then still a feminist, said categorically that I should always extend my right hand - because "nowadays women are also in control of their destinies - or should be".

If women even today in 2009, in the most privileged class of Indian society, including the most visible, most successful career women - are only about their beauty, their looks, and who their families are, there's very little chance that they can do or be anything different from the cards they were dealt. And one of the fundamental ideas, if not the fundamental premise, of modern human civilization is that no matter who you are, you get a chance to make of your life what you want to - through hard work and smart use of the resources available to you. It's still not an equal playing field by any means - but each one of us has the right to try, the right to the 'pursuit of happiness' (and not just in the US of A). And when half the population is denied that basic human right, how on earth do we call ourselves civilized?

A many-colored jackass

2009-11-06T14:26:00.004-05:00

Yeah, something was always definitely off with this guy:

“He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab, and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things,” the former imam said.
Mr. Hasan, 40, a lawyer in Virginia, described his cousin as a respectful, hard-working man who had devoted himself to his parents and his career.

Well, he was surely not 'respectful' of the women he met - but of course, that's such a minor detail that no one would even care about.

Apparently this guy was such an enormous patriot that he would go "against his parent's wishes to join the army" to demonstrate his patriotism, the same parents that he was devoted to - but this same uber-patriot had expectations from his wife that she behave in accord with a totally different culture, a different country's social norms.
And add to that, the mandatory inflexible hijab requirement should've set off major alarm bells that this man needed an eerie amount of control over his dependents, and would not compromise such control. Obviously it didn't set off those alarm bells, because who cares - women are meant to be controlled any way, whether you're Muslim or Christian, brown or white or black.

Ugly girls must rightfully be abandoned

2009-11-02T13:10:00.003-05:00

The story is, in itself, sickening - who was this orange-sareed-woman who could so callously drop off a new born infant the middle of a busy Indian road with cauliflowers on top of her head? What was the system around her that compelled such action? And what are the bets that there's no police searching for this woman or her family, even though she's attempted to murder a human being in cold blood?

But the last line in the article should get a prize.

Newborn girl found abandoned in vegetable bag
AHMEDABAD: The cries of an infant from a bag kept in the middle of a road confounded passersby in Amraiwadi area on Friday night. Some curious people ventured to probe and found a newborn girl, wrapped in a white cloth, kept under vegetables.

According to residents of Amraiwadi, a woman in her 30s, clad in orange saree, was spotted by a few handcart vegetable vendors placing the bag on the divider around 9.30pm. They thought she would come back for the bag. However, she did not return.

When Ramesh Gadhavi, a local resident, was passing by Hatkeshwar Circle at 10.30pm, he heard the baby's cries. He opened the bag with the help of others and found the infant.

"Vegetables such as cauliflower, eggplants and potatoes had been placed atop the baby. We then rushed her to Civil Hospital where she was examined by doctors who found her healthy. She weighs 2.55 kg," said Harshad Patel, a social worker from Amraiwadi.

According to local residents, the circle, bustling with activity, has been used very often for abandoning unwanted children. "The girl is very pretty. One cannot understand why such a child has been abandoned by her parents," said BR Patel, inspector of Amraiwadi police station.

ROTFLMAO

2009-10-09T17:01:00.005-04:00

I thought, after the initial shock laughter, that this would be a depressing day, like June 6th 2008. But I'm still giggling, and it seems like the whole world is with me today.

Some of the gems:
(from Pumapac.org)
“Just think: The Nobel Peace Prize on the very day we actually bombed the moon.” Uppity Woman.
Althouse suggests obama be recommended for the Nobel Prize in Literature for “writing” Dreams From My Father.
Ezra Klein reports the Nobel Committee also awarded obama the prize in Chemistry. “He’s just got great chemistry,” the Committee said.

Barack Obama’s Teleprompter: Bill Clinton called and was gracious in defeat. Offered to fly Kanye West over for Awards Ceremony.

Erik Erikson: Barack Obama is becoming Jimmy Carter faster than Jimmy Carter became Jimmy Carter.

Ms. Behaved: Didn’t our last one term president win one of these?

(from Corrente)

From Talkleft: You know what would be genius? If the Onion just posts: "Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize!" as their headline.

BREAKING NEWS: President Barak Obama also to be awarded the Cy Young, Hiesman, The Congressional Medal of Honor and some unclaimed Olympic track & field medals at a joint ceremony in Stockholm.

From Dr.Violet Socks: Best line yet: over at Lawyers, Guns & Money they’re predicting that Obama will win the Cy Young Award.

By anniethena: Today is John Lennon's birthdayAll the Nobel Committee is saying is Give Ponies a Chance....

By Paul_Lukasiak: that's why he's getting the award...the Nobel committee understand that Obama will give the greatest speech on Peace EVAH, if they give him the prize....and that's more than enough justification....

(from michellemalkin. - umm, I go where the jokes are, just for today)

Rush Limbaugh quip: “I don’t believe this! He’s not only the first post-racial president, he’s also the first post-accomplishment.”

from someone's twitter: 8 year old kid inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in anticipation of getting his first guitar this upcoming Christmas.

By Lockstein13: So, “Nobel” is how you say ACORN in Swedish.

(from telegraph.co.uk)

You’ve completely missed the point. The Nobel prize was clearly awarded for his heroic effort & sacrifice in trying to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

What an OBAMANATION!

Bin Laden has been peaceful since 9/11 too...

Bush is still holding out for the Nobel Prize in Economics based SOLELY on his accomplishments! (None of this wimpy ‘aspirational’ stuff.)

(from volokh.com)

For extraordinary diplomacy at the Gates-Crowley “Beer Summit”

UPDATE: “Obama? I thought we were giving it to Osama“

The Norwegians wanted to honor one of their own, and the committee discovered that Obama was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker.

Norway needed to stimulate its prize industry, and Obama was willing to trade in an older, less efficient prize.

He was the 10th caller.

Patent Lawyer:

For uniting a political party in chaos and on the verge of collapse–and it wasn’t even his own!

For bravely finding a dog for his allergic daughters to own.

For helping to rid the world of explosives by detonating some on the Moon.

For proving that the greatest leaders are those that accomplish nothing.

For making the world laugh with his hilarious and asinine diplomatic errors – like the “recharge” button incident.

For bringing peace to the streets of Chicago…er, scratch that one.

You know, Obama did claim to be qualified to take the 3AM call (or in this case the 5 AM call), but you conservatives never believed him. Neither, apparently, did the Europeans – they waited until 6 am to call the White House, for fear of waking him up.

From yoyo: Did you hear that Vegas has made Obama the odds-on favorite to win the Super Bowl?

Reason Obama got Nobel Peace Prize: It was a slow news day!

Because the Nobel Committee was cheaper to bribe than the IOC.

I am watching the White House, expecting to see a puff of white smoke from the chimney, announcing to the world that Obama has been selected as the Pope.

to be updated as I find more...

Rape? Eh. Slavery? Oh, GOD!

2009-10-09T10:51:00.004-04:00

Apparently Michelle Obama's great-great-mother was a slave whose child was born to her when she was 15.

In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

Funny how they never note that Michelle Obama's ancestors, like countless others, was the product of a rape. A forced sexual encounter, i.e. rape, of a 14-year old girl child. Who was also a slave - her body was bought and paid for. And then used.

It's almost like that part doesn't even count - oh, of course there was rape. What's the big deal? Oh, but look, one side of her family was black.

Sheesh, maybe that's why discrimination of one sort (e.g. rape) still happens today, and the other is a historical fact they needed to have experts dig for.

What I wish I could eat right now

2009-09-28T21:22:00.005-04:00

Tegalu - from Hyderabad ?

Jamun - anywhere in desh, I'm guessing

Taati munjulu - Kakinada

The burnt brown root you find in Konkan or Coramandel coasts. Alas, I don't even know the name of this thing.

Collecter kaya mangoes - most places in India, but especially around Tirupati

Big coconut-mangoes from Kakinada

Panasa tonalu - I know they're more Andhra, but the best ones I've had were in Pune with my tata. And panasa ginjalu (the seeds of the tonalu), dried overnight and roasted.

Ber (the small red sour things, not the big green-yellow freaks) - Delhi

Nariyal paani

Bhutta - Anywhere in desh

Roasted chestnuts from the streets in Paris

Really good bhel with kairi (the Delhi type, not the Juhu beach type)

Pootharekulu - the types with not too much ghee

Good telugu pulla dal

Champagne grapes

Banana flower koora - amma's

Knda bacchali koora - ammamma's

Selective editing

2009-09-23T17:00:00.003-04:00

Funny how both these news reports are from the same source research report:

The Hindu
Contrary to popular perception by historians that the caste system seen today is an invention of colonialism, the study found scientific evidence to show that “many current distinctions among groups are ancient.”

“The caste system is not recent,” said Dr. Thangaraj. “The social stratification existed right from early human divergence, some 50,000-60,000 years ago when initial settlement happened in India.”

versus:

Reuters
While the genes clearly show that the caste system has existed for hundreds of generations, the genes do not line up by caste.

"It is impossible to distinguish castes from tribes using the data," Kumarasamy Thangaraj of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

"This supports the view that castes grew directly out of tribal-like organizations during the formation of Indian society."

Ghar ki murgi vs. bahar ka murga

2009-09-23T09:30:00.002-04:00

Contrast:
Palin Attacks Fed on Hong Kong Visit, Wants ‘Responsible China’

with

Ahmadinejad urges Obama to see Iran as friend

They couldn't have said for the former: Palin urges 'responsible China', cites concerns about Fed direction. Like the German POWs who were given priority seating in concerts and musicals in New York over black Americans in the 1950's (read here), the average American today shows more restraint and respect when talking about a demented male dictator from a country far away, a potential threat to the US - than a domestic female politician. Maybe a hundred years from now, we'll see real change. Or maybe not.

Asked about the difficulties of balancing her political career with her home life, Palin said today: “I have a husband. I could have used a wife.”

Like my own grandmom told me when she visited my chaotic house as I'd started working - I need a housewife myself.

What about apprehending 'reporting'?

2009-09-15T18:13:00.002-04:00

One day, there will be many, many volumes written about the utterly poor quality of writing & analysis by media around the world over the last four decades. I 'humbly submit' this example for addition into those volumes [emphasis below mine]: Engg student jumps to her death, ragging suspected

LUCKNOW: A first year engineering student, identified as Poonam Mishra, committed suicide by jumping off the third floor of her college building in the city on Tuesday. Although ragging was apprehended as the reason for the girl's extreme step, college administration and the police said the girl was under depression.

The incident was reported from Bijnore area under Sarojininagar police circle. Identified as Poonam Mishra of Muftiganj in Jaunpur district, the girl was a student of Azad Institute of Engineering and Technology. Poonam stayed in room number 107 of Azad Girls Hostel along with two other girls.

The incident took place around 12.30 pm after her last class. Said college director Mohammed Hussain: "She along with her other friends came out of the classroom and then told them that she had left her bag inside and would get it back. As others waited for her, she jumped off the building.'' Students and teachers immediately rushed her to FI Hospital in Kaiserbagh, where she died.

A first year student of the college, who was present at FI Hospital, told TOI that ragging could possibly be the reason for her mental state. "Ragging is going on in our college. I myself have been a victim of it. Probably, she also faced such a situation,'' he said.

Talking to TOI, however, the college administration denied that ragging was going on in their college. Director Ahmad Hussain said: "There is no ragging going on here. What Poonam's roommates have told me and the police is that she was finding it difficult to cope with teaching in English. As she was weak in the subject, she had been under depression for some days.''

The director, however, could not explain how a student, who had just been in the college for a week, could take such a step. When asked whether the college was contemplating any inquiry, Ahmad said: "Till now, no inquiry has been conducted by us.''

Circle Officer (CO), Sarojiningar, Subhash Atri, too said Poonam had problems with English. "She didn't die because of ragging and no suicide note has been recovered from her hostel room or her bag.''

When TOI contacted Poonam's father Dharam Raj, who works in Azamgarh district administration, he said: "I don't know why she took this step. She did tell me two days ago that she was facing problems in coping with the English language. However, at that moment, I did not know it was so serious.''

Vocabulary, words, grammar, punctuation - all such overrated attributes anyway. Moreover, when the English language was responsible for this girl's death (even though 'ragging was apprehended'), we must exert all possible efforts towards butchering the English language in return. Maybe I'm just mistaking the gallant reporter's efforts at vengeance for illiteracy.

Women are dumb

2009-08-24T22:39:00.004-04:00

Not in the dumb=stupid sense, but women literally do not speak in public. I notice this at work all day, and in the news, on TV, in movies around me. Remember the Lindsay Campbell Moblogictv video Where My Ladies At?, where the less men know the more they're willing to spout their wisdom but women always, always are so reluctant to speak - afraid, intimidated, hesitant, nervous, silent.

Look at Mika Brzezinski here, she would make my mother-in-law totally proud with her wonderful portrayal of a good desi bahu in the company of men. In the middle of a heated and very profoundly dramatic ideological debate taking place in front of her. And it's unlikely that she has nothing to say or think, or that she agrees with both sides - that's simply not possible, and not now after 15 years and 6 months of public debate on these issues. Notice the only time in both videos that she feels bold enough, or uninhibited enough, to open her mouth - she shakes her head in disgust and mumbles in agreement when Joe brings up the 'death panel discussion' - obviously to Mika, she can only compete on equal intellectual terms against a woman, that woman being Sarah Palin. Mika seems to believe that debates are like matches at Wimbledon - you can only play against others your own gender.

And oh, don't you love Anthony Weiner - and he's engaged to Huma Abedin. I don't know which of them I'm more jealous of. Umm, wait, actually, my crush on Huma is a thousand times bigger. But Anthony's not too bad either, and he's the only one in this administration or in the public debate to so boldly make some very obvious points - not even Krugman has pointed directly to the large elephants in the many rooms this debate is taking place in.

Please, someone explain

2009-08-21T15:58:00.001-04:00

why my company has firewalled sockman.com

sigh!

What're your weekend plans?

2009-08-20T15:17:00.004-04:00

Keep your weekend free. This Sunday, I'm getting myself a copy of the New York Times's special issue. Yup, after nearly four years of being increasingly distrustful, disappointed, disillusioned and disgusted with the NYT, I'm actually recommending to everyone that they buy and read this issue, because of the most heart-warming, well-researched articles they've put out in a long, long time.

The Women's Crusade
Nicholas Kristoff talks about the 'alchemy of gender' in a deliciously long article, excerpted from his and Sheryl WuDunn's book. I was alternately in tears and alternately giggling with excitement and nodding in vehement agreement through the story (but it could just be undiagnosed bipolar :-))

A New Gender Agenda
An interview with Hillary Clinton (swoon already), but I'm shocked at how much and how often she references India. It's clear she's actually one of the rare Westerners who can wrap their heads around the fact that one nation can be both more liberal and more conservative vs. another at the same time; that progressiveness is not a one-dimensional continuum. She gets that India is, in many ways, a model of development for the West and desh seems to be as top of mind for her as it is to me. And most effectively of all, she's understood that advocating to the rest of the developing world (argh, I hate that term) that development = American values will not get them or her too far, that she needs to use someone else, someone closer to the developing world as an example - therefore the frequent references to Indian democracy in Nigeria, and to Liberian elections in Congo. Wish someone would smash some of her wisdom into Aaron Sorkin's pathetic little brain sometime.

And hey, I'm suddenly more respectful of journalists again. Who knew.

The hands that count the votes rule the world?

2009-08-06T14:37:00.002-04:00

This may be just a silly joke, and a statement that plays into stereotypes about India and is condescending to her audience - but it sure does warm my cockles to hear a US politician acknowledge, for once, that they may not always be the Best at Everything:

Clinton Pitches India As Model For Africa

NAIROBI (AFP)--U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton .[....]... was speaking to students in Kenya, where politics remain tense after a hotly disputed election triggered street violence until a power-sharing deal was reached in February 2008.

Clinton told the students that India's billion plus people also had strong political differences.

"But they have figured out how to run an election where the results can be surprising and unpredicted but accepted," she said at the University of Nairobi.

"I said only half-jokingly after our problems with our 2000 election, and then our 2004 elections in some of our constituencies, that we should outsource our elections to India," she said

The tiny expletive man

2009-08-04T15:40:00.005-04:00

Waaah! Stop fighting with me or I'll hold my breath till my face turns blue!

Of course, this is round #N in their training manual of media-aided kabuki. Confuse the main issues (defend the horribly un-thought-through recovery plan and focus on the long-term regulatory requirements), reframe the debate (concerns about not having strong regulations expressed by the people who implement them are now suddenly due to 'turf wars between regulatory authorities') and make the whole thing public before the other party does.

Bravo, Geithner. Looks like you learnt from the best in the business: your boss!

Me, I'm just grateful we have people like Elizabeth Warren and Sheila Bair still willing to work around this half-brained nutjob.

Shame, power and nudity

2009-07-29T17:17:00.005-04:00

huh. Who knew?

Naked girls plow fields for rain
PATNA, India (Reuters) - Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.

Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.

"They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains," Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar's remote Banke Bazaar town.

"This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily."
India this year suffered its worst start to the vital monsoon rains in eight decades, causing drought in some states.

(link via Confluence)

This is like that scene I remember from the TV show in the 90's based on quaint South Indian stories set in the last century (NOT Malgudi Days, though this starred Girish Karnad, of course) . There was a Malayalee woman who was going to be beaten up by a man (her father-in-law, I think), and as he was menancingly advancing toward her she dropped her sari. The father-in-law, being a 'respectable society man' with 'concern for ladies' dignity' (though not TOO much concern, since he meant to beat her up after all) instantly cursed her, and with a very disgusted expression, turned around and stormed away (thinking, no doubt, "how dare she defend herself in this reprehensible way from my beatings. Shameless women!").

Female nudity has always been a powerful means of communication, of manipulation, and it was especially powerful when it was so rare. It's just that in the Indian context, female nudity has taken on so many non-sexual or asexual connotations - remember Akka Mahadevi ?- that it bestows oblique power on the woman. Even though that power is derived from the basic premise that nudity = shame, at least there's some karmic recompense for women who pay the price of that shame.

As opposed to, of course, the female form today and in the West always, which has nothing but sexual connotations (whether or not the woman is nude), and removes every stitch of power or control from the woman and bestows it to the viewer.

Maharani Gayatri Devi

2009-07-29T12:44:00.007-04:00

What is it with these iconic Indian women - that makes three of them about whose exciting lives and activities I last heard in college about 10 years ago in dusty books in the Miranda House library, about whom there were mysterious references thrown around in conversations between my mother and her parents, three women who were always for me, part of the hazy past, the paradoxical and confusing 60's, all now gone.

She passed away yesterday, and was hardly in my mind a feminist icon, though definitely a strong female aspirational figure. The one thing I did always know about her was that she was once accepted by Vogue, that bastion of strict stereotypes of female anatomical acceptability, as being one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. Oh, and that she was the brand ambassador for a diamond jewelry brand, and that caused a big debate on whether celebrity endorsements have gone too far, too cheap.

But, like Princess Diana, or Grace Kelly, or Marilyn Monroe, or Aishwarya Rai, she has the irresistible appeal of someone who 's young, beautiful, intelligent, connected, royal and unattainable. These women all hew so close to What Constitutes GlamorTM, and do so well per the unfair standards imposed on them that they're celebrated so much more than any ordinary achievers who didn't have to confirm to such standards.

So I went and did some research, and discovered six kewl things about the late Maharani Gayatri Devi:

She had a governess named Miss Oliphant (ha! beat that, Kipling, or Saki)

She helped set up one of the oldest girls' schools in Rajasthan. While I think that sex segregation in schools is actually not good for equality, sometimes that is the sweeter pill for orthodox cultures to swallow: the first step to getting girls an education. And I know from my experience in a girls-only institution that once you take the boys out of the picture, the excuses used to keep women away from physically intensive and stereotype-challenging activities (e.g. leadership of various student councils, sports, public speaking, mechanical/mathematical contests, even lifting heavy objects, like desks and tables) mysteriously melt away. So, thanks, Maharani.

She drank (alcohol) and played sports, both openly and publicly, and was good at tennis and riding: "Apart from tennis, she was an expert rider herself and both husband and wife greatly encouraged young polo players"

She and that other legendary post-Independence royalty, Gwalior Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia, had a lot in common, - both of them were members of non-Congress parties (like most Indian royals, really) and they held elected office. Their power was not necessarily derived from the powerful men they married or gave birth to or were fathered by - their power was derived from exactly the same source that all political power in India has been derived from - class, wealth, income, education, caste, royalty, and an existing powerful family structure or genes (could be maternal or paternal).

Gayatri Devi's mother, Maharani Indira Devi of Baroda, was a regular Princess Kickbutt herself. She was supposed to marry the Maharaja Madhavrao Scindia of Gwalior in 1910 (she was eighteen, he was forty). She didn't want to marry him, but it was an arranaged marriage she couldn't get out of. So she sent him a secret letter explaining her position - this by itself was really bold, but she stood her ground and Scindia graciously called the marriage off (why hasn't this been made into a kickass Hindi movie again?). And then she had a roaring clandestine affair with the Prince from Cooch-Behar and married him a couple of years later. Now the sordid wedding-scandal could've affected relations between Baroda/Cooch-Behar and Gwalior, but the women held it together.

She not just held elected office, she was a regular ultra-achiever there as well: she was "the woman with most staggering majority that anyone has ever earned in an election." Contrast this with Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who received barely 5% of the vote in a two-way contest in Haryana.

This is exactly the paradoxical nature of things in desh, especially of social change movements, that P and I were talking about the other day. For instance, Rakhi Ka Swayamvar and our (my) obsessive interest in it: it could and does stand for the cheesy, cheerful oppressive triteness of reality shows everywhere - for gender stereotypes, for bad fashion choices, for drastic invasion of privacy, for utter Lowest Common Denominator dialogues - which it does, but it's such a breath of feminism still! (Rakhi deserves a whole 'nother post - she's getting to be a fascinating, intriguing character after all). For another instance, see this: "In Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, 40 former rulers decided to fight with modern methods: they formed what was, in effect, a trade union to battle for their rights". I fear sometimes that I'm totally forgetting how to grasp complex ideas by staying out here in the Wild West.

Anyway, I'm revising my opinions of the Maharani as just a pretty & privileged lady - I'm so off to read this woman's autobiography.

Hillary Clinton in India

2009-07-14T16:51:00.002-04:00

Huh.
Badly spelled, with practically no analysis, but he may just be right.

6.Americans understand India better than they understand Pakistan and its jihadi hordes. Pakistanis understand the US better than Indians.

7.Hype and flattery will be the defining characteristics of her visit. Indian ego will remain tickled for some months.

But I'm glad she's able to make the trip, even with feminist elbow and all (btw, check out her new 'blinged sling')

Shattering Glass ceilings? First woman ever to...

2009-07-13T10:11:00.006-04:00

...be court martialed by the Indian Army?

Army court-martials its first woman officer
For the first time in the Indian Army’s history, a military court on Saturday ordered the court martial of a woman officer for disobeying orders, levelling false allegations against her superiors and communicating service matters to the media.
Captain Poonam Kaur had accused three officers, including her commanding officer and second-in-command, of sexually harassing her last year. She was then serving with an ASC (Army Service Corps Battalion) at Kalka near Chandigarh.
....
A court of inquiry conducted before the court martial had slapped 21 charges on Captain Kaur — whose father is a retired army havaldar —of which 11 were dropped, as there was no evidence to substantiate them.

The charges levelled against her included wrongfully getting married accommodation allotted and having an improper relationship with her driver.

I'm not defending either Captain Kaur or the Indian Army - I don't have enough information, and I'm not interested in fighting that battle. A charge of physical abuse, sexual harassment and/or rape is a career stopper (not very often, of course: Phaneesh Murty, K P S Gill, Sanjay Khan, Virendra Kumar Dohare) - but a false charge is not just unfair, it also reduces the credibility of many, many true charges and causes plenty of harm to everyone involved. And I'm of the school of thought that true gender or racial or communal equality is not just equal opportunity to success, but also equal leeway to be bad, to fail, to irritate, to upset those around them. We'll know women are equal to men not just when the # of women CEOs are equal to the # of male CEOs, but when the average woman is as much at ease to go against the grain as the average man is, when the punishment is commensurate with the crime and not with the gender.

It's just unfortunate that the first woman to have broken this glass ceiling, to be court martialed and sacked from the Indian army was done so regarding a complaint of sexual harassment by her Commanding Officer. It's very, very hard as it is for women anywhere in the world to speak up about sexual harassment (when the perpetrators are friends or acquaintances, the rapes go unreported 61 percent of the time - this is in the US), even harder for Indian women, and those in and around Punjab have to deal with the additional Punju male 'pride & ego' (a survey done in the state of Punjab a few years ago found that for every rape reported, a humongous SIXTY-EIGHT go unreported), and for anyone in a job, especially in the army to speak up against their own boss, even in a trivial case, is so difficult as to be impossible (example in case: yours truly!). When the victims get the courage and resources and huge support system required to fight such cases and go public, invariably there are plenty other issues - e.g. media silencing, a media trial on the woman's character, and sometimes, incredibly stupid, out-of-touch judges ("a judge summoned a nurse who was raped, her one eye gouged out, in Shanti Mukund Hospital in the heart of Delhi by a hospital employee. The judge wanted the woman to answer a strange request by the rapist: would she marry him, as now, presumably, nobody else would").

The second issue here is the problem inherent in all military, jingoistic groups. Armies around the world demand absolute control over their employees. Military personnel and processes are used to expected to give absolute, unquestioning obedience. This is understandable at some level, because they do want their soldiers to die for a cause, and you can't have last-minute thoughts and backtracking and discussions and challenges in a battlefield. However, this sets up everyone inside for abuse and isolation of the worst kind (e.g. Lavena Johnson, tons of other cover ups of rapes and murders, and why soldiers rape) . Add to that the whole culture of 'looking out for each other', and 'having your brother officer's back', which somehow translates to defending the brother that did the raping & the harassment rather than protecting the sister that was raped and/or harassed (if you have the stomach for it, read this story about Houston firewomen targeted in a hate campaign - major trigger warnings). And top it all with the weird defensive argument that if you complain about something the army or your President is doing, you're somehow unpatriotic and don't care for your country (see: Dixie Chicks). That last one is seriously f***ed up, because by making sure the army is functioning as it should, you're actually strengthening it.

Given such a context, it's really really sad that Captain Poonam Kaur's case has been resolved so badly. It only further stops other women from speaking out when in bad, dire need, and closes out the options of half of the world's population from living and working productively.

Cool FAIL by Burger King - again

2009-07-09T09:25:00.005-04:00

Russ Klein evidently spent his childhood ringing the doorbells of neighbors and running away and got caught plenty. Or John Chidsey, CEO of Burger King, had friends who did that, and he never got the guts to do so himself, so he's making up for it now (no surprises here, apparently: "We want to stay on the cutting edge of pop culture," says CEO John Chidsey, 44, whose office is lined with photos of himself with celebrities from Sheryl Crow to Tiger Woods.).

First off, you can't be entirely cool-based if you're aiming to be a high market share brand selling at a low price point for your category. That's way too many things at once for too many people.
And second, One can be 'kewl' or edgy without falling off the edge entirely, really. Someone please show this awesomely written article to Burger King, stat:

Burger King's MO: Offend, Earn Media, Apologize, Repeat

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- How's this for a global marketing strategy? Each month target a different international market with an ad that offends some segment of the population, then, after earning a lot of media attention, apologize and pull the ad.

That's the pattern of offense Burger King has established in the past few months. Most recently, the fast feeder had cultural and religious groups screaming today in the latest installment of what has become a series of monthly melees. A few hours after an ABC News reported that ads in Spain depicted the Hindu goddess Lakshmi atop a ham sandwich -- with the caption "a snack that is sacred" -- Burger King announced that it would pull the ads. Many Hindus are, of course, vegetarian.
According to the statement: "Burger King Corporation values and respects all of its guests as well as the communities we serve. This in-store advertisement was running to support a limited-time-only local promotion for three restaurants in Spain and was not intended to offend anyone. Out of respect for the Hindu community, the in-store advertisement has been removed from the restaurants."
...
This has all become familiar. In April, Burger King pulled and said it would revise a European TV spot for its Texican Whopper that had proved offensive to Hispanics. In it a small, masked wrestler draped in a Mexican flag was carried around by a tall gent in jeans and a cowboy hat. Parents expressed dismay in the chain's online promotion of "Star Trek" in May, in which the chain's iconic King character kicked a succession of people in the crotch. Last month brought "The 7-incher," a promotion in Singapore for a long, fat burger that was sure to "blow your mind away." A woman's head with an awed, open mouth accompanied the picture of the sandwich.

Emphasis mine above. So they did put out and them withdraw the ads that were offensive to Hindus and to Hispanics. Good for that. Of course, they never withdrew the advertisements that were offensive to women (Pshaw! Our 'superfan' is 18-34 MALE, y'know!) - e.g. the woman's head ad (also called the 'blow-up doll' ad: here), or the pedophilic Spongebob Squarepants ad (here).

My issue here is not just that the advertising is provocative, or that it's really insulting - my bigger problem here is that the advertising is SO pointless! It's (A) bad, (B) ineffective advertising that is (C) NOT built around a solid insight and (D) does not communicate any real benefit. The (E) drama is all misplaced, and the (F) branding is really non-existent. Finally, (G) there's really poor benefit vizualization - and the (H) execution is poor - the food looks unappetizing!

Any one of the eight strikes above, and at P&G - or where I work now - we'd've been forced back to the drawing board. I can just imagine the Burger King ads being shown at a advertising workshop as an example of 'how to spend Millions of $$ and not communicate effectively'.

Look at the Spongebob ad, for instance - at the end of 30 seconds all you remember are square butts on little girls, and a sick Spongebob going around measuring the girls with a measuring tape. They're not advertising a square burger, or a larger burger (to explain the tape) - they're advertising their version of the Happy Meal. There's no logical link (unless it was a convoluted pun on measuring tape = ruler = king = Burger King. Really?). I didn't even recall that it was a Burger King ad until I went to register my outrage.

Or the Lakshmi ad mentioned above - how is a 'sacred snack' a meaningful consumer benefit or drawn on an insight? Do you eat more of a sacred snack than one that's not? Do you plan for it and schedule your day around it, like you would for a religious event (uhm, isn't it supposed to be fast food)? And if you HAD to go with that benefit, isn't there a more effective, relatable way to depict 'sacred' to Spaniards than via Lakshmi? If you wanted to show a new Asian line, or spicy food, or new exotic items, I can imagine this kind of an image making some convoluted sense to a small-town, unsophisticated, untraveled creative director. But a Hindu goddess to sell a hamburger? Massive FAIL.

It's gotten so bad I can't be bothered to put out an action alert - I can just sit here and laugh my ass off at these idiots working in the 'Miami-based Burger King'

Kambakkht @#!@$#@$#

2009-07-07T13:26:00.007-04:00

Mr. Rajiv Hari Om Bhatia, Hon'ble Smt Pratibha Patil called. She wants the Padma Shri back.

Is Akshay Kumar gunning to be India's Judd Apatow? In which case, why is India's Angelina Jolie wannabe (*cough* Posh Spice wannabe *cough*) acting in his movies again?

And who's going to break it to either of them - and to the rest of bollywood - that feminist != man hater and/or frigid? (Please, even Hollywood's gone beyond. Not!)

Of course, they'd've happily gone onto feminist = ugly, hairy, old, etc...but arre, phir piktchar kaun dekhega yaar? Hence.

Yes, Kambakkht Ishq sounds like one sick, stupid, and (worse) utterly boring flick (No, I haven't seen it. No, I don't intend to. Yes, I review films I haven't seen). The first weekend after a three month movie strike in Bollywood (except for New York, which was released a couple weeks ago) is probably the only time it would've got the opening it's got. Also kudos to the people marketing the movie because they made what I thought was an utterly boring trailer, but one apparently not nearly as offensive as the actual movie (unlike some other trailers which picked the worst parts of the movie to showcase).

The saddest part? Apparently Kareena's character goes from blaming her dad for her parents' divorce to realizing that it's all her mom's fault. I just hope to the Good Lord that she doesn't subject her own mother to this appalling movie and its sleazy sub-text.

UPDATE: Apparently great minds do think alike.

Privacy, pizza and politics

2009-07-07T10:39:00.004-04:00

So I ran into this the other day on the ACLU website, an old joke about how, a few years down the line, you'll want to do something tiny and supposedly inconspicuous like, order a pizza, and the person on the other end will have access to everything about you, including your favorite types of pizza, your love life, your credit history, your tax filing status, your health records, etc. etc. If you haven't already seen/read this, go read.

But the fun part is, the last timeI'd seen this I'd seen it in a right-wing site (don't remember which). Funny how one person's poison is everyone's poison, too.

ACLU likes this because it effectively paints a doomsday scenario for when 'Government controls and records everything'.
The right wing loves this because it shows what could happen if the 'Government controls and records everything'.
My problem here, and that, I imagine, of the average immigrant, legal or not, is that the '(US) Government controls and records everything'.

Of course, if this were to be shown to the average Indian college kid, I'm sure (s)he would wonder how soon (s)he could get a job in that call center.
The smart Indian college kid would start writing the scripts to link the databases and make this a reality.
The smarter Indian college kid would wonder how to get the contract from pizza companies/the US government to implement this software.
And the smartest Indian college kid immediately would get into regional Indian politics, start a party and loudly decry 'Evil Western Culture' that limits such great technology to pizzas and doesnt open it up to roti-subzi in dhabhas, win the election and make sure hir own records were off-limits to the database.

Google endorses sexism

2009-07-06T22:22:00.006-04:00

If you haven't already read Dr Violet Socks' amazing new post, go read here. It's got 300+ comments last I checked, and seems to be an online clearing house for everyone, on the left or right, Dem or Republican, male or female, who's disgusted by the stupidity of the reactions 'provoked by' Sarah Palin for some reason.

And then if your stomach can still take it, go here. What, you say - it's a Google blog, for Chrissakes. The Official Google Blog. Pretty neutral, considering Google rules the Internet and, by extension, the world. What may that have to do with the topic on hand?

Well, to the right of the main post is a section of 'what's hot' - not necessarily the most popular sites on the Intertubez, but the 'kewlest' ones that Google recommends. At the moment, the third one there is this: Deadspin's Diagramming Sarah Palin's "Full-Court Press" Metaphor...with comments such as -

TimCouchFanatic Where exactly on that diagram does Eminem nail her?

Matt Sussman 2:15 PM Sarah passes the ball to Trig, open for three ... YES! From Down's town!

NordoftheBlings 2:16 PM Calipari coached Levi on how to use Dribble Drive Penetration to beat the Palin Press.
TT-Zop Shouldn't Trig Palin be bigger since he has an extra...
Chuck Knoblockhead 2:35 PM I think we should be more concerned with diaphragming Bristol Palin.

Brando 3:57 PM Those thigh-high boots of hers are really going to scuff up the court.

What is it about the woman that encourages utterly demented behavior? Why do people think they can get away with incessantly insulting her, her sexuality, her very existence? What insecurities in these idiots compel them to forget humanity, forget civilization, forget brains - if they had any in the first place?

Either way, good to see that Google, that which Does No Evil, endorses violence against women, sexual harassment and violence against special needs' children, not to mention endorses sheer stupidity.

Welcome to our new overlords.

What people can do to you

2009-07-03T23:12:00.003-04:00

From what I was reading today:

I'm furious.

I'm furious that my long-awaited holiday has, once again, been destroyed by a thoughtless, unreliable, selfish companion.
I'm furious that after many, many years I was ready to dance again - with a judgemental partner, unfortunately - and that my opportunity to do so is now forever gone.
I'm furious that the city I loved so much at first sight, the city which put me in such a great joy, to learn, to experience, to explore, to have fun again - that city is now forever destroyed for me.
I'm furious that my best years are with a man that not only knows not how to record them for us, but also knows nothing about how to appreciate them for himself. He's that bad.
I'm furious that I'm committed to a life with a person who takes pride in no accomplishment that is truly original; who takes joy in nothing elemental; who professes to have intelligence but cannot learn basic information about people or of objects; who is a quitter torn by pettishness and jealousy so deep so ingrained that he cannot, will not acknowledge it; who, after years of being with someone, still understands none of their passions or can express his own to them; and unfortunately whom I have invested so much in.

Could a tear-down be more perfect?

a red-letter day?

2009-07-01T13:34:00.002-04:00

in suede.

Pictures and thousands of words

2009-06-26T16:41:00.004-04:00

Apparently, even a flimsy, two-dimensional sheet of paper has more agency than a living woman - as long as that paper is imprinted with the image of a man. And men, of course, do the gazing, the "active looking", even when they're just staring off into the mid-distance. And women are always being looked at, even if their eyes are in focus - even if they're actually looking at things and people in front if them, it doesn't count because they're women.

"Sticking around: Posters of moderate candidate Mehdi Karroubi gaze at women strolling in downtown Tehran on May 26."

Now I have nothing against Preeti Aroon, who usually does a good job being provocative, informative and fairly unbiased in her daily posting at Madame Secretary. This one is just the most recent in a series of very badly crafted captions I've caught recently from all over today - it's Freaky Friday.

What Google & Wikipedia can't answer for me

2009-06-19T12:01:00.007-04:00

You'd think that with the slew of search engines, a new one being launched every week (Cuil, Wolfram Alpha, Bing), everyone would now the answer to everything that can possibly be found, searched for, derived, or put together. But as anyone using the Internet for long enough knows, there are some things Google can just not answer for you. My list of 'aggravating unknowns' for now:

* What is the real name of the story/novel that I remember as 'Ants', a story that starts with a white man being tied naked on an ant hill as the ants slowly crawl up his toes, his feet, his legs, his genitalia, his stomach ? It's revealed slowly that he's being held and tortured in a town in northern India (near present-day Uttaranchal), it's pre-Independence era, and that the local leader who instigated this and has the power to get him out is a woman, a foreigner, presumably white - and he tries to escape twice, both very daring series of last minute run-ins and escapes described wonderfully. I think he escapes in the end, but I'm not sure and (therefore) I badly want to read this again, just to make sure he does escape.

* What is the name of the series of science fiction books I spent half of 1998 devouring? This was a series of YA-type science fiction books that started off very, very strongly, with a boy and a girl in a high school in California, both intelligent, good athletes in their late teens. It went on to a major search of some 'golden orb', and was a Jetsons-version of LOTR, and so I gave up after book 7 or 8. But what was the name of the series?!!!?

* What are the titles of the three novels (and where can I buy the books) published by India Book House (they were all gifted to me by an uncle for my 13th birthday, i.e. mid 1990's) - one story involved an alien who survived on sugar and supported a girl fighting for her right to play football, this was set in a 'colony' much like the one we lived in, and this girl had a twin brother who was not as good as her at the game but got to play it nevertheless. A second book was a sci-fi story set in ~2050 and involved some really kewl technology. The third was a geeky gamer boy cracking a kidnapping ring using gaming technology, again very very engaging.

* Which country(ies) of origin does the last name 'Lukashok' denote?

Lern 2 Logik

2009-06-04T11:17:00.007-04:00

It's your fault, bitch!

Salman, Katrina stopped talking**
Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif’s relationship have finally ended and it was bound to happen because the couple was never consistent in their love. They were in news more for their fight than for their love. If Salman’s over possessive nature sometimes irritates Katrina then Kat’s frequent turning down Sallu’s marriage proposal worsen their relationship. If minutely judged then both were responsible for the breaking relationship.

(emphasis mine)

It's "her fault equally" too, apparently. So what if Salman was overpossessive, overbearing, jealous and manipulative? So what if he physically assaulted her*, and brazenly in a crowded Bandra Barista at that? So what if he's had a history of beating his girlfriends, publicly humiliating them, stalking them and harassing them and their families - to the extent that the most silent, private Bollywood actress alive spoke out? So what if Salman Khan hunts protected animals in a fucking wildlife sanctuary? So what if Salman Khan is a murderer?

"If Salman’s over possessive nature sometimes irritates Katrina then Kat’s frequent turning down Sallu’s marriage proposal worsen their relationship."

Per the brain-dead author, the first part of that sentence has no causal link to the second part of the same fucking sentence. They're independent faults of each party. The "breaking relationship" [sic] was Katrina's fault. Her 'frequent turning down [of] Sallu’s marriage proposal worsen [sic] their relationship'. If only she accepted his many proposals, then the relationship would still be okay.

Seriously, monkeys on keyboards, lern 2 logik. We're all "minutely judging", too.

________
** This is by no means the only apologist article/comment ever written - Salman apologists are a large demographic, sometimes giving you the impression they're omnipotent and omniscent. Some of the gems I found include: "Salman Khan’s career was going steady but in 2002, Aishwarya Rai broke up with the actor which caused him a lot of grief." (http://www.bollywoodblog.com/tags/Salman-Khan/). I just had to write about this one today.
* Trigger warning: Comments at the source linked are atrocious

The day the music died

2009-06-04T08:48:00.004-04:00

A year ago today, Hope was lost.

A year later, Hillary wins

A year ago today, the final set of primaries made official the foregone conclusion that Barack Obama had won the primary, and Hillary Clinton lost it.

......[Today], on the central health care policy debate of the Democratic Primary -- which was, to be fair, conducted within a fairly narrow frame -- Obama appears to have conceded today to a Senate plan likely to more closely resemble Clinton's.

In a dense, careful letter to Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus, Obama offered his principles for a health care plan and conceded on a central point: He is now open to an individual mandate, which he campaigned against, and which is now being talked about by Senators of both parties with the buzzword "shared responsibility."

As ambivalent as I am about Government-supported healthcare, this is probably the only logical way forward for the US.

Hillary's won in many, many other ways too, of course: the first one being that most recent polls show Clinton with a whopping job approval rating of 71% as Secretary of State, while the new President topped out at 65%. (link)

General White Stupidity

2009-06-03T14:42:00.003-04:00

After having stayed here in Southern US, and having resigned once triggered by a racist, ignorant and offensive comment by my then-manager, I'm obviously seething at the Australian
attacks on Indian students.

These are on the heels of months of mounting tension here in the US, too: Over the last twelve months, ~10 students from Andhra Pradesh have been violently attacked and killed, most in seemly unrelated petty-crimes-gone-bad situations.

A 21-year-old Indian student has been attacked by a group of males in suburban Melbourne after they stopped him and demanded cigarettes and money. [...]
Police said Mr Singh told the men he was a non-smoker. The men then demanded money and when the student refused, he was slashed across the chest.

Mr Singh made his way to a police station where he made a statement about the attack. [...]
Today's incident also comes after a vandalism spree at a Sikh temple in Shepparton, in central Victoria, yesterday.

Shepparton police tonight confirmed the attack but told The Age they had no further details.

But worried as I am, I had to laugh at this:

However, website India Today reported racist graffiti and a swastika were painted on the walls and a car driven into a fence around the temple, smashing it.

If that is true, then these attackers are fools indeed. Someone please, please let them know that painting a swastika on a Hindu or Sikh (or Buddhist or Jain) temple is actually auspicious.

Why did we have to go to Raging Burrito again?

2009-05-07T23:28:00.003-04:00

And every single time for Mexican food here in the US?

Because most authentic Mexican refried beans have lard. And it's hard to convince people that Taco Bell doesn't. No, really.

But why does authentic (=traditional) Mexican food have lard, anyway? After all, pigs weren't native to America anyway, right? [ Unless you're talking about guinea pigs (I remember seeing a litter in Peru being kept for future food - urgh!)].

Pigs have been domesticated since ancient times in the Old World and are known for their exceptional intelligence. Domestic Pigs are found across Europe and the Middle East and extend into Asia as far as Indonesia and Japan. They were brought to southeastern North America from Europe by De Soto and other early Spanish explorers.

But this, as everything else, has to do with major patriarchial and religious wang-wagging. Read on:

With the culmination of the Reconquista and the rise of Catholic fundamentalism at the time of the Catholic Monarchs, pork came to be seen as a sure sign of faith in a land of half- and falsely-converted Moriscos and Jews, and so was the dominant use of lard {manteca} in detriment to olive oil, which began to be associated with plebes, peasants and people with suspicious blood lineages. As the Galician writer and gastronome, Julio Cambra put it, 'Spanish cooking overflows with garlic and religious prejudices".

Olive oil did not, however, lose its reputation as an efficacious health tonic. In the south and along the coast, olive oil continued as the dominant fat, yet it wasn't until the late 19th century that Spanish cookery writers, notably Angel Muro in 'El Practicón', began to extol its virtues over lard.

So it's all because of the sighing Moor that lost his kingdom that we keep going back to the one trustworthy Mexican restaurant with the moustached Mona Lisa.

Knotted stomach, tired mind

2009-05-01T10:18:00.003-04:00

Family, people,
No alone time with him
Anger ferments into love

Arrive near and dear
Disconcerting disconnect
Will it ever end?

Seeking harmony
Too much, too fast, too early
Perfection.

Deception

2009-04-29T18:06:00.002-04:00

The worry is still in my heart, scratching away
At the very lining where love should be, to my dismay.
It’s been two days now, forty-eight hours is long
Rest awhile worry; you have nothing to feed on.

I tell myself this each time he lies, “tells a falsehood”,
“pretends with intent to deceive”, “says the untruth”,
“distorts reality”, then says he’s been misunderstood.
I tell myself he cares, he’s just regressed into youth.

But I know I’m fooling myself, much as happens when
I tell myself he wants me to achieve, to succeed, to win.
No matter what he’s done, no matter if I get ahead
He lets me believe best wishes are all that’s in his head.

I know that’s a lie too. My missing the then-critical
company presentation on campus was atypical
I know I bite my lip a thousand times and sit and hush
When I want to talk about flying, to crow, to exclaim, to gush.

I always knew he’d push away my plans to travel - and not
in the way I do, directly, but slowly - using intrigue and plot
I knew he’d be not too different from others that begat him
They believe they and all women, ought exist at their man’s whim

But I know, and have spoken often about the destruction
that is wrought in my heart with falsehoods, with deception.

For if it is this easy to pretend to have started when not,
To lie about an accident and be certain he wont get caught.
Then what’s stopping more crucial untruths, the evilness
inside from coming out and finding a permanent address.

When he doesn’t have the best intentions for me, and does
not hesitate to hide the fact, what keeps me safe? Because
all that stays true is my trust. When that is asked to leave,
again, and again, to stay back means to just self-deceive.

The Best Picture Ever

2009-04-24T12:56:00.005-04:00

*permitting myself to be totally frivolous for a while*

So you may have heard of the Great Speechifier President Obama. When he speaks, flowers bloom on desert lands all by themselves. When he speaks, people of all races start magically living in harmony, all wearing Abercrombie & Fitch (but of course). And he spreads iHope^TM and iChange^TM, all just by his awesome TelePrompter skillz (hey, the thing even has a blog of its own).

And if you do know of all this, you also must know of the President's right hand man on all things Economic, Larry-He-Man-Who-Knows-Math-Better-Than-All-The-Wimminz-Of-The-World-Summers. Lawrence Summers is important to the President and to all of us around the world, because he and only he can rescue us from this economic crisis (since he helped create it, maybe?)

So today, when the great speechmaker was speechmaking, this happened:

and then this:

The best parts are this:

Mr. Summers “appeared to be nodding off near the beginning’’ of Mr. Obama’s remarks, the report said. It went on “And then he DID nod off, doing the head on the hand and then head falling off the hand thing.’’

and this [emphasis mine]:

All the other officials in the room, including Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner; senior adviser Valerie Jarrett; chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Gene Sperling, counselor to Mr. Geithner, seemed to be fully awake.

(LOL. don't you love how they need to specify that the others were actually awake during Obama's speech?)

*end of permission*

And in other god-awesome news, via Shakesville: Mystery donor to woman-run colleges strikes again (here and here).

As the USAToday article says:

"Coincidence? Unlikely. With about 23% of U.S. college presidents women, the odds of a dozen randomly selected institutions all having female leaders are 1 in 50 million."

Ooh, look, shiny Twitter!

2009-04-22T13:15:00.008-04:00

I was reading this post the other day and realized I've grown up, finally. My old boss at the fuddy-duddy-but-hugely-successful-global-CPG firm would heave a sigh of relief....

A few years ago, when I was there, all I could think of was 'new media', 'interactive', 'internet', '360 degree'. I was so caught up in the buzzwords - each time I heard of a new way to sell things, I was hooked. Excuses of top management didn't make any sense to me - of low penetration, of mainstream moms not caring for high-technology, of low costs & high reach of TV, of lack of measurement tools, even of medium unsuitability ("oh, people don't go to the Internet to buy detergent or paper towels" - WTF? they don't watch Lost or 24 for paper towels either!). It took a lot of my ideas being shot down for me to start realizing I wasn't going to succeed by putting those in front of management.So I stopped - but I never stopped following them myself, or caring for them. I even got my Twitter account back when they had ~5000 users. Oh, those days.

Half of my early excitement for new media was that this seemed like something I could 'own' within the firm as my specialization, and I couldn't own say, rural sales because being a girl those things came with safety hazards and hoops for me to jump through. Second, the Internet, in its early days was completely gender-indifferent and seemed like a place I could finally forget what was between my legs and focus only on what was between my ears - and have everyone else focus there too (this was, of course, disproved pretty badly last year, with the uber-geeks and Internet gods being the worst sexist offenders every.single.day, and threw Hillary Clinton and Palin supporters out of mainstream online discourse and left us cowering in the deep dark 'safe spaces' that we could create for ourselves). Finally, it made me think I would help empower all those millions of Indian moms by giving them an easy way to network, connect, communicate and make their own Girls Clubs so that they would no longer fall for our silly, tall, often-asterisked claims.

But these last two years, I've grown up. I believe as strongly as any Proctiod that traditional marketing, - measurable, reliable, boring, designable - works. For consumers, and for us - marketers and advertisers, who, frankly, don't know yet how to really use these new powerful tools. The people who seem to be winning in the new media are exactly the same people who won in the old media. People with power and money and clout in the bricks and mortar world are using their heft to succeed in the new world, too. The offline bullies are the online bullies, only now they don't even use deodorants. A NYT reference gets your average political blogger-boy very happy indeed, because it means newspaper gigs for him, and maybe leading to a book deal. Most of the time now, new media is just an amplifier (see Anne's predictions on what will be in the news tomorrow). The paradigm hasn't changed, the patriarchy hasn't been dismantled, and the paths haven't shifted.

No wonder I'm disillusioned. So much so, that I can't be bothered that my company blocks Twitter and FB and all of these new media. So much so, that I can only smile at Critical Mass's Riot excitement and shake my head. I don't mean that it won't work - I mean I don't care that/if it does because there's nothing in it for me.

And seriously, who buys toilet paper on Twitter, anyway?

Odd Organisms via Photo Shop...aka 'oops'!

2009-04-20T22:06:00.004-04:00

This picture from Victoria's Secret definitely has me sniggering. Seriously, Mr/Ms Photoshopper - did you forget to add back her waist? Is the mask still on? Did you not flatten the layers right?

Or did you want to say, as the cheesy RSS papers do, that women contain dualities within them, and so they have one body's upper half and another's lower half?

Bad NBC. Down, boy, down.

2009-04-20T09:34:00.003-04:00

NBC suffering?

NEW YORK: NBC Universal saw its profits fall by 45% to $391 million (€301m; £267m) in the first quarter, with chief executive Jeff Zucker writing in a memo to staff that "a weaker advertising market and slower consumer demand," along with one-off costs, all contributed to the decline.

Profits down 45% this year? Yay!

He also stated that without "one-off" costs, its profits would have fallen by just 15% during the first quarter as a whole.

These costs included a $45m fee to broadcast the Super Bowl, as well as a writedown in the value of its local TV unit ION Media, and increased film development costs.

C'mon, that doesn't even make any sense. If the Super Bowl had costs, there had to be profits too. You're not telecasting the Super Bowl out of the goodness of your hearts, are you? Just admit you did a really bad job and kept trying to upcharge advertisers who were, not making too much money. There's just so much you could've got out of them, even if the upfronts sold mid-year last year there was already strong talk of a worsening economy.

And oh, wait, it gets worse:

[Jeff Zucker] praised the "incredible strength" of the company's cable TV operations, which now account for 60% of NBC's operating profit, and are continuing to perform at "record-setting levels."

Srsly??!!!!

People, stop watching stupid TV content. Vote with your remotes, or you will perish! And take the rest of us down !!!!111!!!1!!!!!

When will America really change?

Sigh.

Friday night musings and how far ahead India is sometimes - take that, Simone de Beauvoir!

2009-04-18T01:00:00.013-04:00

I was watching TV last night - it's unusual, but was a typical Friday decompression session where I don't move my big butt for eight hours on end and get P to fetch and carry for me - and caught NDTV's 'Left Right & Center', a political round table discussion mostly about the on-going elections.

First off, the oval table has four participants and one moderator - five people in all. Take a guess on the composition of the panel: FOUR women out of the five! On a f***ing political panel! I know this shouldn't be such a big deal, I've grown up watching panels such as these, but after last year's disgusting spectacle of US misogyny and lack of self-awareness or self-regulation in the Western media to their utter, complete bigotry - this was like a huge gulp of fresh air.

The moderator was a woman (in a brilliant mauve cotton sari), there was Jayanthi Natarajan representing the Congress (I), a woman from the CPI(M) and a woman journalist from Tehelka. There was also a lone guy from the BJP who was seated in a great position to create impact but ended up making some hilarious - and basic - debate missteps. Not that the others were great debaters, but they all at least succeeded in getting their points across without spewing endless non-sequitors. I re-realized how different the Indian debating style is to the antiseptic, colorless and totally fake 'debates' we see on TV here in the US. I suspect J.Jacques may actually be onto something here.

Anyway, back to the panel composition. Compare this with any political talk-show in the US, on television or on radio - including on NPR or Air America. Even, apparently, on the panels debating feminism, men are the majority. And you realize how remarkable this is that in India this panel was un-remarkable and why our rare inclusiveness and gender-blindness must be treasured (maybe we ought not speak too loudly about it or around it, or it'll just go away?).

Say what you will about Barkha Dutt - her visibility and fame (infamy?) has helped carry forward the tradition of vocal and recognized women journalists, women newsreaders, women news presenters in India. Usha Alberquerque, Geethanjali Ayer, Neeti Ravindran, Minu, Komal GB Singh and all those awesome women - helped ensure India was never on the US track where a woman finally getting to read out the news from a teleprompter was a historic milestone that needed 'achieving'.

I'm very impressed by Sajjan Lone, too, who made a brief appearance on the show. He evidently plays by the Oriental family playbook, not the more familiar Occidental one - i.e., the one with brother against brother for money, sister rivalling sister for a man's affection, or parent vs. child for political power. Sajjan made sure to scuttle the chances of his sister Shabnam Lone, when she was running in the Kashmiri Assembly elections. But today in the show, the guy was articulate, incredibly humble and sans frands - sans pretensions. I cannot and do not agree with his policies or what he stands for, but the guy sounded like exactly the kind of politician who would not garner political victories simply because he's too honest and openly intelligent.

Monkeys on keyboards...

2009-04-17T13:04:00.003-04:00

Kya aap paanchvi paas se tez hain?*

Kasab appears to be smarter than a standard four dropou t
16 Apr 2009, 0311 hrs IST, Kartikeya, TNN

MUMBAI: It was the world's first glimpse of arrested gunman Ajmal Amir Kasab in flesh, and it was hard to miss the ease with which he walked. His short stature came as a surprise to many, but even when towered over by burly security men, Kasab looke16P5-3.TIM at home in court.

He did not hesitate while addressing the judge, and unlike regular criminals he was not nervous or intimidated by the judicial proceedings.

His keen understanding of what was going on was clearly visible as he followed every argument made in court. He often grinned, tried striking a conversation with the other two accused, and walked in and out of court with an unmistakable swagger.

Why do idiot journalists keep building these guys up as larger-than-life-heros anyway? And what is this mysterious "16P5-3.TIM"? Sounds like a secret code to co-conspirators in Pakistan to me....

*P loved the video for this with the screaming kids making inane gestures. Since you're reading this far, you might as well go watch it here.

Why the furore?

2009-04-15T10:08:00.004-04:00

So, yes, along with the rest of the entire planet, I've seen Susan Boyle's performance in BGT 09 here. Go look already if you've been living under a rock.

I saw the video myself, and I have to be the only one human being who wasn't shocked or totally shaken by the performance (there! I said it!). I liked her voice and loved how she sang that particular song, no doubt the performance was great. But nothing before she started singing had led me to believe that she would or would not be good. Unlike the audience there, and the judges (especially Piers), who seemed to expect her to fail - doing what, exactly? screeching? fubbing her lines? falling on her face? what??!!!?

Of all the various critiques and analyses I've read and seen, this one at Kate Harding's by fillyjonk is what I recommend to crystallize half the world's thoughts (the other half can't articulate why they like the video). (S)he says in the above link:

In a culture that values youth, wealth, and carefully-maintained femininity, this woman is like a cheat sheet for “don’t take me seriously” signifiers. She’s over 40, she’s ungroomed, she’s on the fat side, and her accent denotes low class. As it turns out, she also has learning disabilities and has never been on a date. She flies in the face of what we expect out of a performer and what we, as a culture, esteem in a woman. The judges respond accordingly: they snigger and mock, and her confident posturing just makes her (in their eyes) more ridiculous, more dissonant. Dissonant because confidence and sass don’t compute from a woman who falls so short of the ideal.

So that was it - unlike everyone there in the video and outside who'd been writing about the performance, for me her doing well was no surprise, no big shock, no re-thinking of mental frames. I should give myself credit for this - not wonder what's wrong - for not taking those external 'signifiers' so seriously. It should - and does - bring me pride in my judgment all over again (e.g. in not thinking Hillary was cold-hearted and conventional and even evil and would eat live puppies because she was old or short or ugly).

This incident reminds me of the time in our college physics lab when I had a surreal - and unintendedly honest - discussion with a friend about how I had no idea how to evaluate beauty: I didn't understand what I was supposed to find pretty and what not. And she asked me, a bit disingeniously, "you don't see any difference in me and Gauri ?"(Gauri was a not-conventionally good-looking classmate of ours, dark and scrawny and buck-toothed). I said - I know you're pretty because you're popular, because of the way the canteen guy looks at you when you walk by, by how strangers smile at you, and with Gauri, all of that is different. And that was true, I knew Gauri was smarter than her but badly lacking in self-confidence. I knew enough about beauty by then to know that the low self-confidence was probably a result of her not being pretty - and it also exacerbated the problem, because low confidence helps a beautiful girl be more accessible, but makes the ugly ones looks even less like they're 'worth it'. And I was beginning to personally discover how being full of gumption and charm and being well-spoken and bold and being groomed but also blasé about your looks can make up for not having any (and so've Mallika Sherawat and Rakhi Sawant, evidently in very different ways from me).

So, back to my friend - she was shocked, and repeated, "so you can't tell the difference between Aishwarya Rai and KSG" (KSG was a professor of ours, who wasn't supposed to be very pretty - and that's putting it mildly). This time I said "I know KSG is a bad teacher and not smart or really competent, but that's my quibble with her as a person, not because of the way she looks". My frank admission then became a big discussion point for a long, long time and led to many, many sessions of 'leg-pulling' over warm winter chai discussions in the Hostel too. I believe it even found its way into my scrapbook at the end of college days. But no one really believed me then, and some parts of me didn't believe myself either: I was smart enough to subconsciously pick up on who was conventionally good-looking and who wasn't, because the non-beauty metrics (e.g. popularity, confidence, preening, clothes, etc.) are such good indicators of beauty and self-image of beauty in our world. I'd trained myself by then in life to quickly read everyone's signals and analyses, and even if I didn't have any bias I sure acted like I did. In other words - at the same time that I was learning what clothes to wear and how to behave so I could fake being pretty, I was also learning how to behave I could fake my knowledge of what "pretty" was.

Susan Boyle's video brought me back these memories, and my pride in my own judgment. Even thirty-odd years on, evidently, my knowledge is still fake, I'm still pretending :-). I've not internalized expectations and stereotypes, and so, like everyone else is saying, I can say "Susan Boyle has given me pride in myself" - for entirely different reasons, and mean it.

Thanks, Susan!

Repayment crisis

2009-04-13T14:41:00.001-04:00

The IOUs are coming in, but seems like Barry can't manage the repayments:

Vatican blocks Caroline Kennedy appointment as US ambassador

Mr Obama was reportedly seeking to reward John F Kennedy's daughter, who publicly gave her support to his election bid. She had been poised to replace Hillary Clinton as New York senator, but dropped out amid criticism that she lacked enough experience for the job....

Ms Kennedy, 53, has said that she supports abortion. Raymond Flynn, a former US ambassador to the Vatican, said earlier this week that Ms Kennedy would be a poor choice.

"It's imperative, it's essential that the person who represents us to the Holy See be a person who has pro-life values. I hope the President doesn't make that mistake," he told the Boston Herald. "She said she was pro-choice. I don't assume she's going to change that, which is problematic."

The White House refused to comment.

I can't think of a better way that Caroline Kennedy and her ilk - women who do not support women - meet the consequences of their actions. "Hillary Clinton is polarizing", indeed.

On the other hand, funny how one of Obama's few repayment-appointments that went through smoothly was the appointment of anti-women's rights douchebag Tim Kaine as DNC Chair.

Wonder Woman! Woot!

2009-04-12T22:26:00.007-04:00

So, on a lark, P pointed me to the Wonder Woman DVD at Blockbuster last week, and we watchd the movie today, simply because we wanted the next one in quickly. I speak for both of us when I say we LOVED, LOVED the movie.

And P is impressed by Keri Russell too - but I found her interviewing (here, go to 'NEWS') kind of hesitant. It's the same irritating "oh, I know I did something that could be construed as feminist/strong, but - hahaha - hey dont hold it against me! I didn't really *giggle* mean it, y'know!". What's with all these women?

On the contrary, the interview with Virginia Madsen (same location: here, go to 'NEWS') reads like a yummy bowl of the most wholesome wholemilk chocolate ice-cream ever. See what she has to say:

QUESTION: Did you prepare for voicing the Queen of the Amazons in any special way?

VIRGINIA MADSEN: Well, I prepared this morning by writing several edicts for my son (laughs). Honestly, I love when I get to play these characters that are bigger than life. There are roles in animation that I never get to do in real life and it appeals to my ego as an actor to play the Queen of Everything (laughs) Hey, I'm honest. I admit it.

VIRGINIA MADSEN: This is a blockbuster voice cast - any thoughts on your co-stars?

VIRGINIA MADSEN: Actually, Marg Helgenberger and I were waitresses in the same restaurant in Evanston, Illinois. I'm happy to say that that restaurant has since been torn down. But Marg made it out first. We both had an audition for ABC soaps different soaps, but we auditioned at the same time, and she got the part and went off to New York. Three years later, I went to L.A. So she was kind of an inspiration to me. And it makes sense that we will both be in Wonder Woman together, because we ARE Wonder Women (laughs).

QUESTION: Is there a comic book role that your inner geek covets?

VIRGINIA MADSEN: Sadly, I really want to be Batman … and I just never will be (laughs). That's the cross I bear. When I was growing up, the really, really cool super heroes were all male so I wanted to be them. I really didn't like Batgirl. I was like, 'No, if I'm not gonna be Batman, I'm not gonna play.' Maybe they could write an evil female super villain who takes over Batman, and nobody knows. Then I could live my dream (laughs). I think that's a good idea.

[all bolding mine, all symbols and punctuation mine]

I think that's a great idea too, Madsen! And kudos for not settling for a side girl role. May "they" write greater and better women roles for women like you to play and for people like us to watch and fall in love with.

This movie may not yet pass the Ultimate Heroine Test, but we at least have one (B) of three qualifications met:

A movie with a strong leading woman character:

A) Whose sex life the audience is not made aware of, either its details or the fact of its existence.
B) Who is not, or has not, and will not be sexually assaulted during the narrative.
C) Who does not have a makeover.

And this is my live blog of the movie [Spoilers possibly ahead - but you'll first need to make sense out of my notes, har har har]:
_____________
W.O.W. the origin story is simply F.A.N.T.A.S.T.I.C. I'm drooling at the richness of all this. It'll take me DAYS of reading Bullfinch to unpack all of this.

why did the GUY pilot have to go onto the island? I was hoping for the black woman 'rook'. But yay for pilots! (After doing my first stall and my first landing and my first take off today, I feel like I'm already Amelia Earhart! :-))

ummm.. with all this discussion of what to do about the stupid pilot and the outside world - even THIS movie would fail the Bedchel test!!!

wolf whistles, 'hot chick' - why do the Amazons allow that? And is it really something to be brushed off?

ok, I get the silly stars and stripes - but why did Diana have to wear a bikini? Thats not even remotely like what the Amazonians were/are all wearing.

And why's PErsephone the betrayer? Because women cannot be trusted, as always? Not good.

I liked how Diana's mom said, because men are untrustworthy....

Great move on the Etta scene, where this colleague of Steves pretends to not be able to find her pen. But it's WONDER WOMAN being independant - so its eas to externalize.

Aha. WW actually explains the patriarchy. :-) Awesome stuff.

Again, is 'hot chick' really something to be brushed off?

WW is a great role model too - she teaches small girls to defend themselves. Poor little girl, she doesnt know that even if she's a zillion times better at the sword fight than the boys they wont let her play or win. Ask Hillary Clinton.

WW does NOT GET DRUNK!! WOOT!

This stupid pilot just sexualizes everything - every fight she wins. Is he trying to do a James Bond? And it's a-okay - is he giving the audience permission to do so as well?

The street fight - wow. Simply awesome. Ten thousand leagues above the morass of the Watchmen street fight.

She pokes Deimos in the eye with a red stiletto. Umm, cute, but cliched. Anyway.

if only it was TWO girls fighting in the greek underworld, not Steve and Diana!

Is Ares is going to kill persephone? The sacrifice is like Voldemort's attempt in the Goblet of Fire?
and Ares brought the statues to life - like in the Mummy. Which one thought of it first? Oh, maybe it was the Chinese a thousand years ago, with their Terra-cotta army....

So a simple stupid PILOT saves Wonder Woman from the talons of the eagle? AAARRGGGHHHH.This is Wybie all over again. I CANT WATCH!!!

she gives it back in the Ospedal. His first duty was not to save her, bt do her bidding. Men............

At the footsteps of the Whitehouse, the battle begins.

Again Steve rescues her? Oh no, that was an arrow shot by *drumroll* THE AAAMAZOOONS!!!! YAY!

Oh, Ares can make Inferi...and like the Pirates in the Caribeean, they cant be killed. Every loss is doubled on the Amazonian side! Sister kills sister. Oh no. Oh no!

Ah, the inferi shake off their control with quick thinking by Artemis and Alexa. Oh good, so book knowledge is sometimes important too. Who were all those people criticizing WW for being yet another comic that glorifies violence - there's a bone for ya!

Steve saves Atlantis....I kinda don't mind at this point really. Wonder why :-).

Persephone ruins it for me by saying 'we may be warriors, but we are women too - we need families and children'. What, and men don't? It's a false dichotomy, lady.

PERFECT - WW beat Ares with SCIENCE!! Though the fact that electricity is conducted in water should be basic...it's surprising how less often media and fiction shows even this basic level of science. So TRIPLE YAY!

P: And she beats him fair and square. No black magic or sudden 'out's....

"I can lift cars, Steve - I can lift car door handles!" :-) oh, but she needs to apologize and keep his ego - and societal norms - in place? w.t.f.

Call if you're going to be late, he says. Har har har .

Hey, when's the next WW movie coming out?

Have you got yours yet?

2009-04-10T15:01:00.002-04:00

My Betty Brown Approved Name is LaVerne "Cracker Barrel" Brown.
Take Betty Brown Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

Headline contest

2009-04-09T18:29:00.003-04:00

This would be the awesome subject for a headline contest - some suggestions at the end:

How Obama voted on war funding bills in Congress
By The Associated Press – 25 minutes ago

Major war-funding legislation while Barack Obama was in the Senate, and how he voted:

_May 2005: Congress approved an $82 billion bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and international anti-terrorism efforts. Obama voted yes.

_June 2006: Congress cleared a $94.5 billion bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as provide aid to hurricane victims. Obama voted yes.

_September 2006: Congress cleared a $448 billion Pentagon funding bill that included $70 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama voted yes.

_April 2007: Congress cleared a $124 billion spending bill that provided $90 billion for war costs but mandated the withdrawal of U.S. troops within six months. Obama voted yes, but President George W. Bush vetoed the legislation.

_May 2007: Congress approved a roughly $100 billion spending measure to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and domestic projects, including hurricane relief. Obama voted no.

_December 2007: Congress cleared a $555 billion catchall spending bill that included $70 billion for U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama did not vote.

_June 2008: Congress approved a measure to spend $162 billion for war costs as well as provide a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits and emergency relief for the flood-ravaged Midwest. Obama voted yes.

Note the one bill that Obama votes 'no' for, also contained hurricane relief funds. Who is this guy?

And for the headline contest/cartoon options:
* Yawn, so which year is this again? Dang, I slept for a whole year???!!!
* Hey, did you remember that story I bumped off eighteen months ago? Yes, that one - go, press 'publish' now.
* "Google"? What's that? I do all my research in old, dusty libraries with no indexing systems.
* My post was eaten by a desert lizard - you know how slow their metabolism is.
* I was waiting to publish the story as a lead-in to his announcement of withdrawl from Iraq and Afghanistan. But now that it's a surge instead.....
* I'm a Republican - this is my way of showing pride in, and support for, our President!

* I was waiting to see if he was going to flip flop on his Senate votes too.

* Present.

Women and their urges. Bah!

2009-04-09T17:51:00.004-04:00

Apparently, there's trouble in Lanka on the sets of Ravan (who knew?). And it's all because of Aishwarya's face. Read this and this .

Now it depends what makeup exactly Aishwarya wanted to keep for the second half. If it's mascara or concealer, I understand her hesitation in removing it because she'll look like her eyelashes miraculously got shorter upon abduction (which doesn't make sense unless the story has Abhishek playing an alien abductor with a prediliction for conducting eyelash-hair-shortening-experiments) - or that she's suddenly got splotches on her face (which doesn't make sense unless the story has her moving to Ladakh or Australia. Ohhhhhhhhhh, wait.....).

And there're tonnnns of instances across movies, TV shows, photographs - where make up can actually enhance the depiction of any emotion, including, say, loneliness, fragility, sickness, or ill-health. I doubt if Aishwarya Rai would be so blind to the impact on the story-telling that she showed up with pink-cheeks and rose-lips for scenes where she's supposed to depict 'loss and pain'.

Either way, note how the story's spun not as artistic differences between two artists - one being a very, very successful & powerful actress who's played a variety of characters with and without make up - but as the frustrating battle of a stalwart director with an insecure, 'moody' woman who 'sneaks in makeup' even when told not to, lest she look - bleargh - UGLY!!!!!!!11111!!!!!

Of course, if she did look 'ugly', these same websites would be plastering her photograph everywhere, screaming headlines of 'Former most beautiful woman has put on 0.2 kgs!' or 'Bachchan bahu has a pimple'.

And if this happens to Aish-f****ng-warya, what about the rest of us?

I wish there was...

2009-04-06T14:22:00.000-04:00

...some way of 'tagging' and then searching physical things, like books.

Accio hair brush!

I wish there was...

2009-04-06T14:17:00.004-04:00

some way to sync up all my tags across applications - my blog posts, feedreader, del.ici.ous, Gmail labels, maybe even Outlook, etc.

It's driving me crazy, this trying to remember what tags and tag bundles I've created where and used how often. Don't blame me for unintelligible tags at times.

Of misplaced punctuation and punctuated rulings....

2009-04-06T11:10:00.007-04:00

HC allows girl to 'live-in' with boyfriend

This should've read: HC 'allows' girl to live-in with boyfriend.

After all, the disapproving old men on the division bench have no legal right (as they thankfully recognized) to rule on the romantic life of a willing, able 29-year old woman. It's sad that they felt they could tsk-tsk to her face along the way.

Strangers have the best candy

2009-04-03T23:23:00.006-04:00

So I've been on Omegle for the last few hours, referenced via Randall's blog (why, yes, I'm on first name basis with him. Didn't'cha know?). But I've been upto no good, really - I've been enticing poor unsuspecting strangers looking for quick excitement online into reading this and this, and into watching this. I leave them with the thought that women are 52% of the world but only have access to ~15% of the world's resources.

Try it, it's fun. Knowledge is power - and yes, sometimes you can use it to hit people on their heads when they aren't lookin'.

Well, do remember to tell the li'l ones strangers have the best candy. Har har har.

Importing not just fruits of business, but also business models

2009-04-03T15:25:00.004-04:00

Papers in Michigan cut home delivery to only thrice a week starting this week, in order to save costs. But why are European newspapers doing better?

But there are signs of journalistic life in Europe. Circulation is falling more slowly than in the United States. Most papers have been less affected by the recession than their American counterparts because they rely on readers more than on advertisers, who tend to be more fickle.

Would explain not just financial health but also journalism quality in the US, wouldn't it?

Sadly, Indian papers seem to be doing things the Yankee way. Duh.

You can only give of yourself

2009-04-02T18:23:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, when US President Barack Obama met the Queen of England for the first time ever, he gave the Queen an iPod containing a video of her visit to Virginia, Washington, in 2007.

Now we know why he doesn't like to give his children gifts for Christmas - they probably say "no, thank you" to such ugly, un-thought-out stuff anyway.

In which the Sena believes itself to be an army

2009-03-31T21:44:00.007-04:00

Ram Sena, Shiv Sena, same difference. What they love to do is to attack anyone vulnerable. And of course, physically attacking women is what they live for:

Sena mob attacks Ajmal counsel

MUMBAI: In a midnight attack on Anjali Waghmare, the newly appointed defence lawyer for gunman Mohammad Ajmal Amir ‘Kasab’, a Shiv Sena mob pressured her into writing a statement that she would withdraw herself from the Mumbai 26/11 terror attack case.

The group, which went to her residence at Worli here at 0015 hours on Tuesday, hurled abuses at her and made obscene gestures. The police said 12 people were booked on charges of rioting and outraging the modesty of a woman.

The party’s supremo, Bal Thackeray, even demanded that Ajmal be hanged publicly at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of the scenes of the terror strike.

I feel the same pain that these people do, and so do ~1 billion people. But the idea that I can use that pain, that anger, to deny the accused terrorist legal counsel is abhorrent, and frankly, so very counterintiutive.

The whole point of this attack that we believe this guy perpetrated, was to destory "India", hurt our nation and make it more like Pakistan or Aghanistan or whatever his overlords believe is the best role model (no accounting for taste, really).

By hanging a human being in public or by not following proper Indian constitutional processes the Sena is themselves, voluntarily, moving our nation into Pakistan/Afghanistan/tribal/lawless land. By attacking a woman for following the law, while she's in her house and has asked for police protection - the Sena is no different from the Taleb. By not allowing this guy what is due to him in a court of law, they're delaying the punishment due to him and the justice that my nation can serve to a murderer - they're delaying Dharma. By ripping clothes off women whom they believe to be indecently attired, they literally further the indecency of the womens' attire and expose the depravity of their own souls. Their actions have no place in modern-day India, and no place in my country. And there is no place in any Sanskrit or Indian or Hindu (independent variables) literature or cultural reference where a nation that was unsafe for women was lauded for being great or well-ruled - but there are plenty of references to wonderful lands with great rulers who ensured that "even a lady peasant could take a walk at midnight, unmolested and unafraid".

I bet they're not even sure what kind of a Ram Rajya they want, but the fucking Sena idiots need to get a brain first.

IT issues

2009-03-31T10:17:00.003-04:00

On Saturday morning, for no apparent reason, my computer started redirecting Google.com to investopedia.in. None of the other Google sites were affected (Gmail, Google News, Reader, or even Google.co.in, etc.). I cleared the cache, the cookies, the temp files, history, everything, and ran my antiviruses. I went online (via yahoo.com) to check for other issues and discussions, removed the Google toolbar and changed my homepage to about:blank. But google.com still redirected me to investopedia.in.

This morning, I tried google.com and it's back to normal and everything's working fine - as if nothing had ever gone wrong, or as if my cry to the universe was heard. Weird stuff.

Evolution of man

2009-03-27T09:37:00.004-04:00

Randall Munroe became a geek girl hero after this and this, and he was just 17 when he started xkcd. I've been a HUGE fan of his for a while, and these are a few of my favorite things.

But I've been very uncomfortable with some of his work - and so have others. Once you look at who (Obama: I mean, seriously "[Clinton]'ll keep fighting for the status quo"?!!! W.T.F. - that statement warrants an xkcd comic all by itself!) and what (Self Made Man: Would've been a good book if she'd laid out the facts and not her inane analysis, because she blames women for modern men feeling lost, and it's not the individual women's fault but that of the patriarchy) has been influencing him, it's no surprise.

Today, he's officially grown (and not up) to become an American man. He can't comprehend of a normal man who'd want to be committed and/or a normal woman who'd not.

Maybe he's been watching too many "chick flicks", too.

How badly do we need the 33% solution in India?

2009-03-25T18:18:00.003-04:00

An alien - heck, an American - hearing all the talk, reading all the headlines about the Indian Lok Sabha elections in April would read so much about Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Jayalalita, Sheila Dixit and Mamta Banerjee. I bet (s)he would think India is close to the Nordic nations in terms of women in politics.

Out of 188 countries in the world where this representation is measured, where do you think we stand?

A measly 105 out of 188 countries. In terms of representation of women in the National parliament, we're behind Afghanistan. Iraq. Sierra Leone. Bosnia and Herzegovina. UAE. Kazakhstan. Burkina Faso. Djibouti. Swaziland. And Pakistan.

We're just above a handful of nations like Saudi Arabia, where the laws do not allow women to contest.

Just in case this is still contested: India is NOT a representative democracy when 50% of our population has no voice. We're pretending at a democracy.

We may be sixty-two years old, but we're just playing.

How high is too high?

2009-03-25T12:52:00.004-04:00

I was looking at a vendor's presentation today that showed a research technique, and it struck me - we, i.e. ALL CPG companies - base all our millions and millions of $$ of product development and innovation on a choice made by a sample consumer in 0.7 seconds on one-sixth of a computer screen. Then, of course, we spend months and months and plenty of $$ refining that one choice and pretti-fy-ing it...

No wonder we have idiot-proof stuff, and idiotic stuff that all looks similar. We make junk, and consumers get junk, and they end up then selecting new junk in research that is familiar to them, therefore most similar to their existing junk. Then we launch it and then plan another line extension or a new ad campaign to keep the junk alive in the market.

Anything that takes longer to figure out and say 'ah-ha' to, is lost in the packaged goods business. Anything that takes time to know and like and love, aka Rahman's music, is lost forever in the CPG world.

I'm not sure I believe any longer in the Procter school of brand management. After having worked there and after a hundred years of that model in the marketing/management world, we definitely need something different.

We're just not that into you. Really.

2009-03-24T14:50:00.003-04:00

So mental floss's one of my fav blogs. But here, as elsewhere in geek world, I can find stupid, sexist and plain inaccurate statements. Just like, apparently, "dogs can find almost anything":

Their noses contain far more olfactory receptors than humans’ sniffers do, and the receptors are situated perfectly along the main airstreams of the pups’ noses. Sure, you already knew that detection dogs were able to sniff out drugs, bombs, and corpses, but what else can a well-trained pooch find using only his nose?

Examples of casual, everyday misogyny - Ethan Trex, who's posted this, is not yet Favreau-level, but he could get there:

There’s very little romance involved in commercial cattle breeding. For the most part, the cow is artificially inseminated, so the bull’s not even around to make awkward excuses about why it’s not going to call. Given this impersonal system, breeders need to know when the perfect time to inseminate the cow is, and dogs can help. Since a cow’s physical chemistry changes slightly when she’s in heat, a dog can sniff out the differences and alert a farmer ....

Poor Trex, it seems, spends all his time fighting off clingy women who can't get enough of him. So much so, that 'romance' = 'clingy women'. The first thing that pops into his head when he thinks of reproduction and/or sex is not romance, not fun, not even porn or other "deviant sexual behavior": it is figuring out ways to avoid calling women.

Seems to me the only experience this lad's speaking from, is Judd Apatow chick flicks.

$ no more reserve currency?

2009-03-23T21:59:00.004-04:00

This is HUGE:

China will propose the new world 'currency' with reserve status, in fact a basket of major currencies as defined by the IMF Special Drawing Rights, at the G20 meeting on April 2.

This will have some serious implications for everybody. And it basically means that as US citizens are now seeing their credit card statements come due, so is their government. Good that it's going to happen, bad for the people it'll hurt.

See my earlier post here - this may just be the beginnings of a brave, new, equal world.

Change is here. Truly.

[edited for grammar, punctuation]

Why I look to the future

2009-03-22T18:43:00.010-04:00

When I ask 'where would you want to go if you had a time machine', more people choose some place/time in the past than in the future. Usually, these are times of great mystery (e.g. when dinosaurs became extinct), times of great culture (e.g. the Maurya or mid-Mughal dynasties in India), or times of great rulers (e.g. Cleopatra or Elizabeth I).

I would've been one of those people (with more imaginative choices, of course :-)) until 2006. Because that year, I got a severe, and misdiagnosed, case of tuberculosis. And I wouldn't've survived it but for modern medicine, invented/discovered barely one hundred years ago.

Of course, death by TB would've put me in some seriously exalted company*, the likes of which I likely wouldn't get access to now in my 'survivor' state, but hey, I'll take this option. As it was, I recovered from the physical health issues and the multiple surgeries, but as I was warned, I went through a long, long convalescence including depression and dependence.

So, on this World Tuberculosis Day, I'd like to celebrate the scientists who discovered the drugs and the treatment, the doctors who save lives every day, the social workers and policy-drafters who went after TB with a vengance, the public health professionals who implement these rules, and the many, many medical professionals who treated me, and to P who 'saved me in every way a person can be saved': Thank you.

And to those in the US, congratulations on this: "The latest national surveillance data show that tuberculosis (TB) rates reached an all-time low in the United States in 2008.".

But we still have a long, long way to go, because TB may soon become a bigger problem than HIV. I have no option but to look to the future, and hope for the best.

____________

* Apparently including: King Tutankhamen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Bronte, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vivien Leigh....

Inadvert-ising

2009-03-17T19:09:00.006-04:00

Funny how something that suggests women's breasts are for/on "SALE" is called out as an example of ethical consumerism. And Oxfam, like PETA, actually sets out to do good. To be sure, it isn't even irony.

Oxfam, IDEO: Ethics FAIL.

Only in India...

2009-03-17T17:49:00.004-04:00

...can a Hindu husband and a Muslim wife together get a Jewish symbol tattooed on their forearm and no one (not even the gossip-sniffing-out journalist) blinks an eye. Awesome.

In Sultings

2009-03-16T20:33:00.013-04:00

Dwarfs

Women

Gays

Lesbians

Los Angeles

10-year-olds

Uni-gun makers

Smokers

Non-smokers

Midgets

Fat people

Americans

Prostitutes

Belgians

Belgium

Irish

Girls

Black girls

African-Americans

Suicidal people

Depressed people

Priests

Little boys

Receptionists

Pakistanis

Skinheads

People on tranquilizers

People who know & practice Karate

Spastics

Robert Powell

R2D2

Vietnamese

Chocolate-inventers

Child abuse victims

Child abusers

Ticket/gate agents

Englishmen

Pregnant women

"Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles, he's gone!"

2009-03-16T13:32:00.005-04:00

Muthalik banned from Mangalore

NEW DELHI: A Mangalore court on Monday banned Sri Ram Sene chief Pramod Muthalik from entering Dakshina Kannada district for one year. Muthalik's Ram Sene was involved in an attack in a Mangalore pub in January, 2009. ...The order by district magistrate V Ponnuraj came into effect immediately, the spokesperson said by phone from Mangalore. ....A group of 40 activists of the Sri Ram Sene barged into a pub in Mangalore and bashed up a group of young women and men, claiming the women were violating traditional Indian values.

Satisfyingly strong stuff by district magistrate V Ponnuraj there. But I wonder - will this just mean Muthalik gets even more free publicity and a great deal of sympathy? Can he pretend that he of the Ram Sene is like "Lord Ram, exiled from his motherland", and cash in on the unintended (?) symmetry of their situations? Will Muthalik be the simple son of the soil who's been subjected to separation from his sustenance by those very shoppers of sin, those suppliers of superficiality he'd been trying to shut-down in his saloon-strike?

Meanwhile, I do see Ponnuraj's pov too. Especially in an election year, you don't want moronic misogynists making a mockery of the (mis)rule of law. But if Muthalik can't do mayhem in Mangalore, where is he going to do so? Because his mischief-causing mind isn't going to become milder with mitigated means.

Will Muthalik see sense? Will the Sene make a-mends?

Again, and again, and again.

2009-03-12T14:32:00.003-04:00

When the Hill was saying this idiot's not going to be ready on day one, this is what she'd meant:

Obama's CTO Kundra in bribery scandal.

I - and everyone - seems to have lost count of how many appointees of this President have some weird past or the other, some scandal or the other. Indicative of the President himself, much like Bush's appointees were all unscrupulous, vacuous and winger-ey.

Like someone said over at the Confluence, did everyone in Obama's team spend time vetting Hillary Clinton and none of the other appointees got their turns?

Coincidence?

2009-03-11T15:46:00.002-04:00

Citigroup spark ignites rally that flames a modest hope

What perfect timing.

Maybe the whole current economic crisis is/was manufactured.

Follow the money

2009-03-11T13:46:00.000-04:00

An old post, drafted in November/December 2008:

Who stands to gain if the US economy crumbles because of terrorism? Who stands to gain if India is destabilized? Yes, we know it is jihadists, "Islamic terrorists" who actually carry out the attacks. But take a look at the numbers.

The average annual per capita income of an person in Pakistan is ~$1000 (source and source), and for PoK it would be considerably lower since there's far less industry or agriculture and far less legitimate income. An average AK-47 costs ~$1000 (source); an average magazine for the AK-47 costs ~$30. Both would cost less on the black market/weapons market, and esp so in the sub-continent. The average cost of a rocket launcher on the weapons market is around $500 per launcher and $300 per rocket (source, unverified).

Clearly, the pathetic blokes who actually use these weapons don't have the money. Kasab, for instance, was promised 1300 GBP (source), which is ~$1800, or about 2 AK-47s (fools that they were, the ten of them could've taken all their stockpiled weapons and the boat and just sold the things and vanished with a lot of money and their lives. They could've still been watching Hindi movies somewhere in the sub-continent. Bah! for non-economic thinking).

So if the weapons are bought and the 'terrorists' are mercenaries, who's behind them all? Not just the people with the money and the means, but also others who have the motive. We need to look at who is funding them and why - and this isn't just the Pakistani government, and not just Dawood and other rich Sheiks in Saudi. Who stands to gain if India loses its economic potential? Which country stands to gain if the USA loses its financial muscle? Which entity is it that is the only viable, credible, plausible threat to both and is threatened by both? And which nation would think in such zero-sum-game terms, anyway?

Oh, btw, this and this too.

Calling B.S. on AP

2009-03-11T12:19:00.005-04:00

I've done this before here, and so have so many others, but Gary takes the cake today:

Ever since the AP lied when they ran a story during the final primaries that Hillary Clinton had dropped out of the race, those of us immune to the kool-aid have known that they are a thinly disguised propaganda ....For example:
Jennifer Figge [.....] became the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic Ocean…The 56-year-old left the Cape Verde Islands off Africa’s western coast on Jan. 12, battling waves of up to 30 feet and strong winds. David Higdon, a friend of Figge who kept in touch with her via satellite phone, said she had planned to swim to the Bahamas, a distance of 2,100 miles, but inclement weather forced her to veer 1,000 miles off course to Trinidad, where she arrived on Thursday…

The Cape Verde Islands are actually about 2,500 miles from Trinidad. That they wouldn’t even verify the distance should have been a red flag to begin with. But anyone who has gotten past 4th grade math would be able to figure out that this is just complete bullshit.

If she left on Jan 12, and arrived on Feb 7th, which is when this story was published, that means that she swam about 96 miles a day for 26 days straight. Supposing she swam a grueling 10 hours a day, that means that she was swimming at a rate of…..almost 10 miles per hour! That’s incredible considering this:

“… The highest speed reached by a swimmer is 5.05 mph by David Holmes Edgar (US). Mark Spitz (US) in setting the 100 meter record of 51.22 secs. in 1972, required an average of 4.367 mph.”

As is the norm these days, along with six-inch heels for ordinary women, and idiots becoming US Presidents, this is shitty, non-fact-checked, biased journalism. Shame on AP, "the only national-level news service in America". Apparently AP declares itself to be a non-profit. But for blatantly shilling for a political party and for one candidate over another, they've set themselves up for a cancellation of their non-partisan non-profit status, haven't they?

Oh, and Gary's also done some amazing fact-checking and story-line-spying before, especially on the Confluence all of last year. Go read...

Small thrills

2009-03-10T16:10:00.018-04:00

Should be 'small joys', but the list below sent a small thrill up my leg. I remembered the first when someone was bashing all mainstream Bollywood movies, including the ones made in the last ten years (many of which I love).

Usually in any Hindi movie song, the hero plays an instrument and sings along. Magically, during the song when he gets up and walks around/jiggles/dances around a tree, the instument still keeps playing on. And he plays spectacularly well, even if every thing you've learnt about his history so far states he had a deprived childhood with no access to education, let alone musical training. But in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, a girl plays the guitar. And not even the heroine - this is a friend who plays the guitar, not the all-knowing all-accomplished hero.
In Baabul, one of the worst movies of all time w.r.t entertainment value as well as values in entertainment ^[1], has a scene where Hema Malini (swoon) confronts her husband when she's not allowed to attend her son's funeral per Hindu (north Indian) customs. woot!
Aishwarya's million-dollar expression of unabashed lust in Jodha Akbar in that scene. I wonder if too much acting was required there, but that's another story...
The story itself was great in terms of class-and gender-equality, in allowing a Queen, who was pretty much her Lord's property, to have the right of self-expression and be self-willed. Coming from a filmmaker like Gowarikar who's made fantastic movies like Lagaan and Swades but where the women were just props, I loved him for making J-A so equal. woot!
The last scene in Luck By Chance with Konkana's character dumping Farhaan's character - and with that, her meal ticket - since he was being self-centered.
Priyanka Chopra's character in Dostana crying - not for love, for relationships, for shame, for social approval, for fear - but for a career loss (!!) when she gets passed over for a promotion. This, when a leading lady with a career was rare in the 80's and Madhuri's 'computer science student' character in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun was such big news.
Konkana's character in Amu doing the 'search for her roots' that's usually the reserve of men around the world, since it is usually the man's right and duty to carry on filial obligations and maintain/trace paternity lines.
Shah Rukh and Rani's characters together wishing for a girl child in Paheli. The movie itself was very strongly feministic, and talked about a woman's right to choose her life partner and her destiny. It also was the rare Bollywood movie that allowed its leading characters to pick love over some random concept of family duty. And, its execution remained true to its setting and context. Excellent.
Salaam Namaste: I know so many people had so many valid issues with this movie, but again, I'm grateful for small mercies. A leading lady with a career that is important to the story, earning her own money, working hard & long hours, and unconcerned about cleanliness in the house vs. her neat-freak male partner (YAAAAAYYYY!!!)
Chokher Bali. The book was depressing in the extreme, and so's the movie, because it reinforces old tropes of all women being sexual rivals of each other, no woman being worthy of your trust, widows as sexual predators, men as easy, innocent victims to manipulative women's wiles, etc. But I liked that the movie showed a woman with a spine, even if by the end her spine, spirit and self are all crushed, even if she's ultimately a victim of social mores and her she's shown to have no control over her life or her destiny. Gosh, that was depressing - not sure if this still should be in this list!
Dor - Both Gul Panag's character as well as Ayesha Takia's were feminists in their own ways. Of course, this one followed regional stereotypes, movie-making stereotypes, and may not even be a mainstream, masala Bollywood movie by most standards. And sadly, the women were strong not by themselves or 'just because'; they were strong in their search for lost husbands or in their escape from rape, both situations that 'allow' for strength in women in a patriarchal context (other traditionally approved situations include saving your child from hunger/horror, fighting for your nation, nurturing your mother/family, etc.). But it was a good movie because it attempted to tell a woman's story, at least showcase her voice. Small thrills, indeed.
Aaja Nachle: the whole darn movie! The fact that Madhuri was back, and looking better and acting better and dancing better than ever. God, peeps, give this woman more movies, was positively glowing in every frame of this one. The fact that she didn't need Akshaye to step in and help her out. The fact that she was not just a spirited fighter, she was also a master diplomat (watch the scene when she deflates the local goons gunning for her show with 'this is so bharatiya, as opposed to a shopping mall, ji). The fact that she and her friend make up with each other (does that help the movie pass the Bedchel test?). Sadly, her counsel to Konkana when the younger girl is failing in love, to act feminine and play hard to get, was so cliched and all Rules-ey. Take it from one who did the opposite - the Rules often fail miserably, especially when your guy has a brain!
Swades: The heroine does math! Long division! The numerical kind, not the family-feud variety! She does it in her head!
And, she's the first to declare to her boyfriend that she loves him ^[2]. Blub.
Chak De India. Despite the fact that the film used a male authority figure and therefore reinforced traditional lines of control and leadership, despite the fact that it reinforced regional stereotypes and prejudices, despite the fact that it was marginally homophobic, despite the fact that it didn't even examine class barriers, and despite the fact that almost all the characters save Shah Rukh's were uni-dimensional, Chak De nevertheless was a ground-breaking movie. It showed that women could legitimately have outside interests, that women didn't need to be either doormats or angry mis-fits, that women could play sports, that women could compete and be petty but still make up and fight/play together for the team, that women could be stunningly pretty and feminine and still be good sportspersons, that women could be conventionally ugly and 'masculine' and still be good sportspersons, that women could be boring-looking and still be good sportspersons, that women could legitimately express themselves with violence in public, that the various mediums of physical expression were still available to women (see this post and this one). And of course, it showed us (after Swades) that Shah Rukh Khan can actually act. Which is a feat in itself.

So, anyway, there's my starting list. I'm sure I'll add to this in time, too. Yay for Bollywood!

^[1] sorry! :-)

^[2]Oh, and the best part - P openly gushed when her saw her do that. How I love my guy. :-)

Fe-: Iron-y, indeed.

2009-03-09T00:02:00.001-04:00

Obama hails women leaders, calls for more participation

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.....

Which feminist icon are you?

2009-03-08T23:46:00.004-04:00

You are Judith Butler! Your postmodern queer theory has shaken up people's ideas of gender, sexuality, and sex. Your work has blurred lines between what it means to be a womyn and what it means to be a man. Queens and transbois all over the world worship your Birkenstocks!

Go here to take the test. Happy Women's Day!

Watching Men

2009-03-08T03:04:00.017-04:00

Kotwal ko kaun dekhta hai? "Kotwal" ko kisne dekha?

First, in this totally play-worthy "interactive trailer" of the movie, each of the characters is represented by a symbol that you, the audience member, needs to figure out. It's a little like the Spice Girls, manufactured personalities distilled into an idiot-proofed symbolism, but then again, the Watchmen is a graphic novel, so I have no major delusions of its profoundness like so many others seem to. Maybe for some parts of me animation is still = cartoon, and I cannot take a Tom & Jerry equivalent too seriously :-).

But anyway, once you play that trailer, see what symbols they have for each of the male characters, and compare it to the one they made for the sole female character. ****SPOILER**** They have everyday objects, like glasses or the smiley face for the other characters, and 'girl' for the female character. I don't know if this means that the makers of the trailer think of women as objects, or if they picture the female form (not female genitalia, but our bodies) in Rorschach tests, or if they're trying to say the Silk Spectre is a token female, or that the only thing that she stands for is her body, or that her superpower is her sex appeal - all of these explanations just point to some crazy reasoning or just lazy trailer design by these guys. ****SPOILER ends*****

Second, I propose a follow-up test to the Bedchel/Wallace test (read here for a great description).
To pass the Bedchel test your movie must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.

Corollary to that, I hope I sometime get to see a movie with a strong woman character:

A) Whose sex life I am not made aware of, either its details or the fact of its existence.
B) Who is not, or has not, and will not be sexually assaulted during the narrative.
C) Who does not have a makeover.

I'm really tired of seeing ANY independent woman's independence having roots in some sexual assault, or in some deviancy. I'm sure there are other ways in which women characters can be made to find their voices or themselves. I'm sure there's a range of hurdles they must cross, much like the male superhero, to be tested and prove their mettle. But if for once the hurdles were not sexual- or appearance-related, I would be very, very grateful.

I understand why they do it. For most male scriptwriters (or women who write in a predominantly male context, e.g. Farah Khan of Main Hoon Na) and the audience they wrote with in mind, this is just a natural way of viewing women.

Flowchart begins:

Do I want to put my penis into her? If no, then of course she's not worth existing (see a wonderful analysis by Amrita here on female film villains). If yes:
Does she want my penis in her? If yes, she's a slut but also a golden-hearted one. If no, she's a frigid woman. Since she can be pretty much one or the other, once I establish her interest in me, I can easily go on to the rest of my story. Either way:
Does she want the other guy's penis in her? If yes, she's a slut, and just a confused, virtue-less whore. If no, she's a wronged woman and the other guy's the bad guy.
Do I get to put my penis into her or not? If no, then the other guy who does is definitely the bad guy. If yes:
Do I get to put my penis into her before someone else does? If yes, she is the heroine of the movie. If no, she dies or is otherwise made irrelevant before the end of the movie.
Flowchart ends.

What a wonderful, simple way of establishing good and bad. Almost as simple as Isha Sharvani's character in Luck By Chance, who establishes her character with costume colors. Who needs complex story arcs and narratives when you can use sex lives and assault tales as proxy?

For women or men who're trying to break their characters out of a patriarchal construct, I can somewhat understand what they're doing too. They usually show sexual assault or attempts thereof as symbolic, as the ultimate form of patriarchy, which our female protagonist needs to go through and then win over. Examples - Thelma & Louise, Bandit Queen. Of course, often the 'winning over' is with her life. But she's a free woman, since she's 'suffered the worst' - and she dies or goes into exile a 'free woman'. Some really rare times, the protagonist goes through assault and/or rape, and then pays her dues again through exile or life-threatening situations as 'punishment' for having escaped the rape, and then is granted her life - changed, modified, somewhat incomplete - but still a life. Example: Volver.

While their attempts to face facts are admirable, what the latter category does is no different from what the former does. Everyone's just using sex and the sexual act to define their female characters in ways it would be unthinkable to define male characters. And as much as I understand where they're coming from, I wish someone would be creative enough to give me a kick-ass heroine with a completely mysterious, undisclosed sex life. I wish they made the heroine so kewl, so complex, so real that I couldn't care less where she keeps her vagina.

Girlfriends, we've just OD'ed on TMI. Tell me about yourselves. No, not about that. Everything else. Reveal the rest of your amazing, funny, smart, resourceful, frivolous selves to us. You too, Silk Spectre I and Silk Spectre II. What were your superpowers? What gadgets did you use? Which bad guys did you destroy? What government secrets did you help protect? What is/are your obsession(s)?

Ah, the possibilities.

Moody goes to economics class - and comes out unhurt

2009-03-06T13:07:00.010-05:00

India loses investor appeal: Moody’s

When you read a headline like the one above, you know (if you already don't) that rating agencies are as ridiculous as, say, journalists. Rating agencies are supposed to predict future performance, based on data, intuition, industry knowledge. Given that India’s economy is still supposed to grow at a 5-7% this year (5% as per the Economist, 7% as per the Government) - in a year when most global economies are tanking heavily, contracting and barely standing still - I'd say Moody's is as wrong as ever. In fact, they sound a little peeved that their recommendations on reducing interest rates were not heard by the government.

Of course they have so much credibility, since their - and everyone's - excellent judgement in the 1980's for Japan worked so fine, didn't it. So what are Moody's reasons for the outright downgrade?

Moody's stated "big concern" is the government's debt: “One of the core concerns is the unsustainable fiscal position. ...,” says Sherman Chan, economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

How worrisome is this worry? Apparently, from here and here, quite:

...the budget deficit is expected to balloon to 6.1% of GDP in fiscal year
2008/09 (April-March) and remain at 6% in 2009/10, but it should then narrow
gradually, to reach 3.6% of GDP by the end of the forecast period.

Compare this to the US's projected deficit of 12.3% of GDP:

An eye-popping $1.75 trillion deficit for the 2009 fiscal year underlined the
heavy blow the deep recession has dealt to the country's finances as Obama
unveiled his first budget. That is the highest ever in dollar terms, and amounts
to a 12.3 percent share of the economy -- the largest since 1945. In 2010, the
deficit would dip to a still-huge $1.17 trillion, Obama predicted.

So, 6% of GDP vs. 12.3% of GDP. Of course, the rating of the United States is correspondingly affected. Not!:

Still some analysts noted than an outright default was actually impossible,
since the United States only owes money in dollars and could therefore simply
print cash. In that case, inflation would be the more likely outcome.

"The U.S. is not going to default. It's silly," said Joseph LaVorgna,
chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank Securities. "The U.S. was, at its peak,
roughly almost 30 percent of world GDP. The U.S. may inflate its way out of its
debt obligations, but it will not default on its debt obligations."

So easy, no? Not just do you print yourself out of your debt to your citizens, you print yourself out of debt to others, because YOU define the MONEY and YOU make the money. And therefore, you can never be downgraded, and Moody can never really be miffed with you and send out stupid reports.

Looks like it's time to design a currency symbol for the Indian Rupee too. That'll solve everything and make Moody change his mood to "happy", no?

My most memorable compliments

2009-03-05T07:25:00.003-05:00

*continually updated*

So I realized, that as usual, I was revelling in my own angst - and found the most wonderful QOTD on my favorite feminist site. It's a great pain-remover to remember your own best moments, and something I never, ever do for some reason (though the bad moments keep playing in an endless loop in my head.

My grandmother discovered she could teach me Sanskrit when I was 3. After one day of learning, I spoke full, albeit basic sentences. I think this speaks more to her teaching skills, but I can now take pride in my child-prodigy status :-).
My aunt’s mother-in-law said that whenever I walk in to their house, everything seems more ‘alive’.
A friend in college (hostel) whom I didn’t know very well said I was more full of life than other people.
My uncle’d written to me when I was 16 saying despite all my ‘gifts’ that I had my head screwed on right. Of course, this one needs to be massively discounted as I’ve since discovered he’s not that great a judge of people J, plus he had other motives in saying this – as a family member, he wanted me to succeed at my looming entrance exams to various colleges.
My husband told me I had the best butt ever. This was before we’d started going around.
My now-husband’s grand-uncle saw my resume before my marriage, and called his brother (my grandfather) to tell him that I was so shockingly accomplished, I was too good for their family!!!!!!!!!!!!
Last week, at work, a vendor sent me a card after we’d worked with them – they’d said different, customized things for each person about project next steps – and for me, they slipped in a compliment saying “you really know your stuff, and you’re so easy to work with”.

ECHO and Mira Nair's film

2009-03-04T18:22:00.004-05:00

Not sure if I've blogged about this already, and I'm too lazy to check, but I did register my outrage elsewhere, so FTR:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081023/film_nm/us_rome_film_un

Top film-makers focus on poverty, despite U.N. row
By Silvia Aloisi Silvia Aloisi – Thu Oct 23, 2:51 pm
ETROME (Reuters) – Wim Wenders and Jane Campion are two of the acclaimed
directors behind a collection of short films on the United Nations' fight against poverty, but the U.N. agency meant to sponsor the project has pulled out of it.
"8," which premiered at the Rome film festival on Thursday, brings together eight film-makers to illustrate the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and aimed at halving the number of extremely poor and hungry people by 2015. Each director takes a different angle to show how poverty, climate change, lack of access to education and basic health facilities are affecting the world's needy but also those living in the rich West. African film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako looks at an 8-year old boy being taught about the U.N. goals in a bare school in Ethiopia; actor-turned-director Gael Garcia Bernal shows a father in Iceland explaining the importance of education to his son; Campion explores the ravages of drought in Australia.Gus Van Sant, author of cult movies like "To Die For" and "Paranoid Park," plays on the contrast between carefree American skateboarders and the dire statistics on child mortality in poor countries. Dutch-born Jan Kounen follows a pregnant woman in Amazonia desperately trying to find a doctor while another of the film's chapters, by Argentinean-born Gaspar Noe, focuses on AIDS.
But it is Indian director Mira Nair's take on gender equality that sparked a row with the United Nations Development Programme, which eventually withdrew its support from the project.
"AN INSULT TO ISLAM": Nair's short film portrays a Muslim woman living in New York who decides to leave her husband and young son because she is in love with a married man. "In April 2008, the UNDP came to us and demanded that we pull Mira Nair's film or they would withdraw their logo from the project. They said it risked insulting Islam," French producer Marc Oberon said after a press screening in Rome."We decided we could not take it out, so they pulled out."
UNDP spokesman Adam Rogers told Reuters the agency had felt Nair's work "would get caught up in controversy.""We were afraid it would bring the wrong kind of attention to the cause of promoting gender equality," Rogers said by phone from Geneva. He said the European Union had also backed out of the project.
Nair, in Rome to promote "8," defended her choice, saying it was about a woman's right to express herself. "It's a storm in a teacup frankly. It's not what the film deserved," she said. "My film is inspired by a true story and was written by the person who lived that story. Freedom does not come neatly packaged. It comes with pain," she said."I also wanted to make the film because of the reaction in the West to any woman who lives under a hijab or a burqa. They are usually identified as women who have no rights and are submissive ... which is completely untrue."
Oberon said the UNDP had put pressure on some film festivals, including Cannes, not to screen "8," but the UNDP denied this. Controversy aside, Wenders said he hoped the film as a whole would raise awareness about poverty, especially as the global financial crisis risks diverting aid and developments funds. "We are full of the best will, but the solution is only with governments," the German director said, speaking in English. "(The crisis) might make some nations even less willing to fulfill what they have promised and signed. I am very much afraid that the bill will again be paid by the poorest."

This is again one of those situations, like Aaliya Hassan's, where discussions of intersectionality and concerns with not offending racial/communal/religious/cultural sentiments trump basic human rights for the victims, often women. Peeps, it does not matter what someone's culture is, what a tradition says, what a set of people believe - if it is against anyone's fundamental rights, it is bad. Simple.

Culture is allowed to flourish, rituals should be allowed to thrive, if they are (A) equal for all in degree and kind, (B) by choice: have no repercussions for choices of opt-in or opt-out, (C)humane, and (D) not hurt/harm freedoms of others who're NOT meant to participate. That 4-way metric should be applied every time, for every one, every where. An evaluation needs to be done if you have a question on whether it is okay to do an all-night bhajan, or if (god forbid) someone's husband passes away and she/he wants to commit Sati, or if your friendly neighbourhood Talib wants to close down a girls' school because they teach girls ZOMG science!, or if you're wondering whether to publish an article criticizing FGM in Palestine. Or anything else.

Culture needs to be E.C.H.O. - equal for all; free choice; humane; not impose on others. And I say this as a big, huge, curious fan of almost every ritual I've encountered in my life. So far.

Clinton and Peres

2009-03-03T16:22:00.002-05:00

Awwwwwwwwww

Secretary Clinton “Catches Up With an Old Friend” in Jerusalem

Secretary Clinton’s first stop on her inaugural official visit to Israel was at the residence of Israeli President Shimon Peres...

More horrific violence against women in Bangalore: and time for action.

2009-02-27T15:57:00.004-05:00

And we will stand up for our rights:

Millionaire slumdogs and how things change - Saugata Chatterjee
Posted by Priyadarshini

The fantastic invisible sweep of time rushes and roars past us every dull and intense second that ticks relentlessly away every day, and all around us things constantly morph. Twin towers crumble, good people die, the good earth turns brown and bare, and old love fades.

And what precisely is your role in the incredible kaleidoscope of change?

A slack-jaw by-stander who barely registers the impact and implications? A commentator spectator who freely critiques but somehow rises above being affected by it all? A fatalist loser who bemoans everything and blames it all on circumstances and other people?

Look around you, you who reside in the so-called mind and knowledge capital of the shining new India. This is Bangalore.

Many of the quiet avenues that used to snake through the wooded shades and fragrant flower-scatters of a thousand gulmohars, flames of the forest, bougenvillias and silver oaks are now shorn of even a single blade of grass, their tar guts upturned by mammoth earth moving equipment, tortured sites full of grime, steel and concrete through which an endless procession of loud vehicles crawl back and forth, utterly indisciplined, frothing with impotent anger and frustration, from the early dusty dawns to the midnight hours, every single day.

We are the victims, you say? The civic governance of Bangalore is sub standard, you claim? Well, you may be right, but does that mean that even as an individual citizen whose real powers to influence matters is way less than what it theoretically should be, we have absolutely nothing to do?

I am re-thinking this premise, my friend. Unfortunately not a self realization case, but prompted by a black incident last Friday, 6th February, 2009. And this time it was not about aspects that affect your life and mine indirectly. It wasn't the death of yet another 100+ year old tree. It wasn't another instance of criminal neglect of any civic infrastructure. It wasn't road rage. It was a kick in the groin. Literally. And it woke me up all right.

So, in brief, this is how the drama unfolded:

A few of my friends and I were just paying our bills and coming out of our regular Friday night watering hole and dinner place in Rest House Road, just off Brigade Road, and most of the women in the company were already standing outside. Some of us outside were smoking, people were happy, there was laughter and jokes, as there were many other people in the street, all coming out, satiated, in the closing hour of the various pubs and restaurants around.

Suddenly from up the street a massive SUV comes revving and speeding, hurtling down, and stops in a scream of brakes and swirling dust, millimeters away from this group of 4 women, barely missing one of their legs. A white Audi, imported, still under transfer, with the registration plate of KA-51 TR-2767. Some millionaire's toy thing, that in the wrong hands can kill.

Naturally the women are in shock. And quickly following the shock comes indignation. These are self made women running their own businesses, managing state responsibilities for global NGO firms, successful doctors. They are not used to being bullied. So they turn around, instead of shrinking back in fear. They protest.

And as soon as they turn around in protest, the car doors are flung open, and a stream of 4-5 rabid men run out towards these women, screaming obscenities in Hindi and Kannada against women in general, fists flailing. Some of us who came in running at the sound of the screaming brakes now stand in the middle in defense of our women, and then blows start raining down. One of the goons make a couple of calls over the cellphone, and in seconds a stream of other equally rabid goondas land up. They gun straight for the women, and everyone – a few well-meaning bystanders, acquaintances who know us from the restaurant, basically everyone who tries to help the women – starts getting thoroughly beaten up.

Women are kicked in the groin, punched in the stomach, slapped across the face, grabbed everywhere, abused constantly. Men are smashed up professionally, blows aimed at livers, groins, kidneys and nose. A friend is hit repeatedly on the head by a stone until he passes out in a flood of blood.

A plain-clothes policeman (Vittal Kumar) who saunters in late stands by watching and urging people to stop, but doing absolutely nothing else. A 'cheetah' biker cop comes in, with our women pleading him to stop this madness, but he refuses action, saying a police van will come in soon and he cannot do anything. Everyone keeps getting hammered. Relentlessly.

The carnage continues for over 20 minutes.

Finally when the police van does come in it is this vandals who are raging and ranting, claiming to be true "sons of the Kannadiga soil", and we are positioned to be the villainous outsiders, bleeding, outraged. How do the cops believe them, especially seeing the bloody faces of our men and the violated rage of our women, while they carry nary a scratch on their bodies? Don't ask me! Yet, it is us who these goondas urge the newly arrived law-keepers to arrest, and the police promptly comply, and we are bundled into the van, some still being beaten as we are pushed in. Some blessed relief from pain inside the police van at least, even if we are inside and the real goons outside, driving alongside in their spanking white Audi. The guy who was hit by the stone is taken separately by the women to Mallya hospital.

Inside the police station at Cubbon Park it becomes clear that these goons and the police know each other by their first names. The policeman in charge (Thimmappa) initially refuses to even register any complaint from me, on the purported grounds that I am not fluent in Kannada and I have taken a few drinks (3 Kingfisher pints, to be precise) over the evening. No, it doesn't matter that I didn't have my car and was not driving, and no, it doesn't mater that the complaint will be written in English. We watch them and the goons exchange smiles and nods with our our bloodied and swelling eyes and realize in our pain-clouded still-in-shock brains the extent of truth in the claim of one of the main goons when he claimed earlier in the evening in virulent aggression: we own this town, this car belongs to an MLA, we will see how you return to this street!!

This was the turning point of the saga, I guess. For we refused to lie down quietly and be victims.

One of our girls, a vintage and proud Bangalorean who is running one of the town's most successful organic farming initiatives, took upon herself to write the complaint, when I was not allowed to write the same. Another Bangalore girl, a state director of a global NGO firm, wrote the other molestation complaint separately on behalf of all the girls. Some of us called our friends in the media and corporate world. Everyone stepped up. And even when the odds were down and we were out, we did not give up, and as a singular body of violated citizens we spoke in one voice of courage and indomitable spirit. That voice had no limitation of language, not Kannada, nor English, or Hindi. It was the voice of human spirit that cannot be broken.

And in the face of that spirit, for the first time, we saw the ugly visage of vandalism, hiding behind the thin and inadequate veil of political corrupt power, narrow-vision regionalism and self-serving morality, start to wilt.

We spent 6 hours next day in the police station. The sub-inspector of police who filed our FIR, Ajay R M, seemed a breath of fresh air inasmuch that he did not appear a-priori biased like others, even though the hand of corruption and politico-criminal power backing these goons was still manifest in many ways: a starched, white-linen power-broker walked in handing over his card to the sub-inspector in support of the goons; the goons got an audience with the Inspector because of this intervention, while we had to interact one level lower down in the hierarchy; the plains cloth policeman of last night, even though he had arrived far too late in the crime scene, gave a warped statement, passing it off as a "neutral" point of view, repeatedly stressing that we came out of a pub and hence were drinking, positioning this as a 'drunken brawl', while completely forgetting to mention the unprovoked attack against the women and the one-sided vandalism and violence that ensued. I guess one cannot blame the low ranked police officer – the criminal connections of these goons must be pervasive enough for him to be careful.

Thanks however to the impartial handling of the situation by Ajay, soon the goons were all identified. The lead actor was one Ravi Mallaya (38), a real estate honcho and owner of a small property off Brigade Road which he has converted into a "gaming" (you know what that means, don't you?) adda. The others identified are Mohan Basava (22) of Chamarajapet 12th Cross, R. Vijay Kumar Ramalingaraju (25) and Shivu Rajashekar (20). All are residents of 12th & 13th Cross in Vyalikaval. Their bravado and machismo were by that time evaporated. It was good to see their faces then.

Of course nothing much happened to them, nor did we expect it. They were supposed to be in lock up for at least the weekend till they were produced in court, but we understand that they were quickly released on (anticipatory?) bail. The car, purportedly belonging to an MLA, also does not figure in the FIR, apparently for reasons of "irrelevance to the case".The media also have given us fantastic coverage and support so far, strengthening the cause.

The goons meanwhile, as an after thought, also filed the customary reverse complaint on the morning after we filed our own complaint: the women have apparently scratched the car! (Why did they not file the complaint the same night, considering they came to the Police Station in the same car? Why was the car allowed to be taken off police custody? Why is the car still irrelevant to the case and not in the FIR? Questions.. questions..).

Is this the end of this saga? Probably not. Are these women, more precious to us as friends and wives than most things in our lives, safe to walk or drive down Brigade Road from now on or are the goonda elements, slighted by this arrest and disgrace, are lying in ambush, waiting, biding their time to cause some of us more grievous harm? We don't know. Is there reason for us to remain apprehensive of future attacks and victimization? Perhaps.

But here is the point.

We stood up.

We believed in the power of individual citizens even in the face of hooliganism, intolerance, corruption and power mongering. Even though many of us have the option of leveraging political or government connections, we deliberately chose to fight this battle as individuals. Sure, these connections have been activated and they have been kept informed, should the worst case scenario unfold tomorrow. But we have chosen to not leverage them. And in every small win we register as a group of individual outraged citizens of Bangalore and India, however insignificant these milestones may be in the larger scheme of things, there is one small notch adding up in favor of what is right, one small notch against what is wrong. And we believe that every such small notch counts, each such mark is absolutely invaluable.

It is the people who make this city, this country, this world. It is you and I, as much as the terrorists inside and outside. And in our small insignificant little ways, it is my responsibility and yours to not shirk from investing effort – not just lip service or any token attempt, but real effort – in backing up what we ourselves believe in. It is so easy to logically argue that everything is corrupt, nothing is worth it, there are so many risks involved. We must not fall trap to this escapist trend. We must not fail to try.

Next time you feel outraged, violated, abused, don't let it go by and add up to your list of litanies and complaints. Stand up and take it to the limit - at least your own limit. Not in the same way as they wrong you, but in the way that every citizen, at least in theory, is entitled to complain and protest. Do not let the hooligans power rant scare you or prompt you into submission. Do not allow the corrupt cop make you give up trying. Carry the flame forward. Try harder.

If are up to it, start right now.

Forward this note to everyone you want to be made aware of this. Post it in your own blogs. Talk about it amongst your circles. And if anyone of you should like to step forward with a word of empathy or advise, talk to me. Comment.

It is not Bangalore that is going to the dogs. It is us. We have far too long become accustomed to let everything go. And the more we let things go without any protest or fight, the dormant criminal and dark elements of the society get that much more encouraged. Every time we turn the other way, the hooligan next street gets incentivized to push the boundary a little further, provoke a little more, try something a little more atrocious. It is time for us to refuse to let this go on. We are responsible for making ourselves proud. Lets believe in ourselves. We can do this.

My name is Saugata Chatterjee. And I am standing up.I refuse to let Bangalore go to the hooligan slumdogs, even if some of them are pets of corrupt power millionaires.

Anita Brookner

2009-02-27T14:31:00.005-05:00

I find myself falling in love with Anita Brookner after reading this interview of her. It's unnerving to see how perfectly unhappy women can be, how perfectly unconventional, if they only let themselves be. It's rare to see a woman so outside the pale of 'normal human lifestage', but her life and lifestyle are just a Disney cartoon version of every 80-year old woman's.

I'm going to go buy myself one of her books now. On my new Kindle 2!!

Why Matthews can NEVER get it right

2009-02-20T17:06:00.004-05:00

Ah, thank you Melissa:

Meanwhile, secretary of state Hillary Clinton was bestowed the coveted Hardball Award by Chris Matthews yesterday, who explained that Clinton "deserves and wins the award, our fifth, and the first to go to a woman, for displaying the arts and science of smart human behavior. They are, to remind you: personal moxie, savvy, basic street smarts, knowing the world you're in, knowing what you have to do, and doing it. That's what makes a Hardball Award winner."

What also seems to make a Hardball Award winner, at least if you're a woman, is your willingness to do the bidding of your party and your president – which, one suspects, is Matthews' default expectation for "knowing the world you're in, knowing what you have to do, and doing it."

It isn't Clinton's moxie that Matthews shows in his clips as he presents his ludicrous award, but a clip from her Democratic Convention speech last year, where she defied the (totally absurd) expectation that she'd break the party in two before endorsing Barack Obama. Following is a clip of a speech from her first trip abroad as secretary of state, speaking not on her personal bailiwick, human rights, but about how much Indonesia means to President Obama.

What a good little girl, Matthews seems to say, as he delivers her pat on the head while adding a new twist to the rationale for choosing Clinton – not just "for grace under fire, personal moxie, courage," but also "for a bit of timely humility. For most of all the willingness to serve our country over self. We salute you. And I salute you."

Sure, she may have achieved massive career success, come closer than any other woman to winning the American presidency, delivered an iconic speech on women's rights, attained admiration and respect from all over the world, raised a brilliant daughter, and inspired millions of women, but, more importantly, she can still defer to men with exemplary submissive obedience – or what would merely be called "doing your job" if Clinton were an equally powerful man whose ambition wouldn't have been used to miscast him as a voraciously self-interested egomaniac.

The clear message to female politicians is this: You are not equal. You will be judged based on the way you look. Your success will not insulate you from our patronising commentary. You will be demeaned as we see fit. You will not be allowed to forget for a moment that you are women. No matter who you are or what you achieve, you are still just a woman.

Hillary's positives have always gone way up just after she's been humiliated by a man and taken it. She - and others before her - have been feted when they've confirmed to social expectations. Kajol gets SRK in KKHH only after she degrades from a sporty tomboy into a sexy sari-wearing nymphet, who loses in basketball to a remarkably un-athletic SRK. Amrita Rao's character is noticed by Fardeen Khan in Main Hoon Na after she looses her braids, her attitude, her remarkable unique-ness and turns into a salwaar-kameez clad, straight-haired, revolting-pink-a-rella, thrusts her hips outward with every step, a caricature of Rakhee Sawant's bimbo-character.

That's exactly how patriarchy works - there's not just a stick, but also a carrot for good behavior. That's also how you train dogs - by rewarding them when they obey you.

Matthews, I hope a thousand fleas fly into your mouth today and that you drown in your own spit and die a dog's death.

Pride

2009-02-20T13:42:00.003-05:00

Immense, immense pride at this:

The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 ....are still in the morgue because the leadership of India’s Muslim community has called them by their real name - “murderers” not “martyrs” — and is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai, the 7.5-acre Bada Kabrastan graveyard, run by the Muslim Jama Masjid Trust.
The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim
community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.
The fact that Indian Muslims have stood up in this way is surely due, in part, to the fact that they live in, are the product of and feel empowered by a democratic and pluralistic society. They are not intimidated by extremist religious leaders and are not afraid to speak out against religious extremism in their midst.
It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

Awesome. Take that, Ram Sene and all the idiots who support them. Even the minority community, the Muslims have the guts to stand up to stupidity in the name of religion. Where's your courage?

Now if only women around the world could get the same courage up for themselves.

Favreau of the day

2009-02-19T10:16:00.009-05:00

Favreau = Stinkin' stupid sexist scumbag.

Coming from a woman who's always stood up for justice & social equality, broken stereotypes for actresses in how they should look and what roles they should portray, and shown exemplary courage in speaking up against the organized mafia in Bollywood where every man on the 'Most Powerful People in Bollywood' list caved (incl. SRK, Hrithik, etc.), this is just sad (via Annie Zaidi):

Preity Zinta: I am a woman and do voice my concern over injustice done
to women but that does not make me a bra burning psychotic chick!

Say it ain't so, Preity. I strongly suspect this is horrendous mis-reporting by the great journalists of TOI and indiatimes, but if not, this just breaks my heart. C'mon, Preity. So all you want to do is meekly "voice your concern" but not actually voice it loud enough to get something changed? And are there just two mutually exclusive possibilities: a woman that voices concern vs. psychotic chick? Nothing in between - which belies Preity's whole existence, really, of smart power and effecting change thorugh personal courage. And what makes a bra-burner psychotic, anyway - can't you be a non-psychotic inflamer of underwear? She's actually more of a Phylis Schafly here than a Jon Favreau, but I have just one award to give away right now. I like to believe in positive reinforcement, so I'll institute a Renuka Choudhary award - and maybe give it first to Renuka Choudhary, the grand dame herself.

Oh, and is this Ram Sena the same one as Muthalik's? If yes, what delicious irony that the Indian right-wing supports the US "left-wing". Tell you a lot about (A) Overton's window and (B) about Barrrracccckkk's special, universal appeal to all kinds of bigots around the world.

We need FDR, not JFK.

2009-02-18T22:31:00.008-05:00

Did you catch this:

To note, this fiery Mayor of Lansing, MI, Virgil Bernero, endorsed Hillary Clinton for President last year. Of course. And not only does he seem to be as much of a fighter as she is, he also has the facts, the numbers and the arguments all marshalled up and speaks them with heart, like she does - versus Mr.uhhhh.

I was thinking the other day that if all goes as it is right now, we may just be witnessing the death of Libertarian theory in the US, like the collapse of communism in the 1980's. I've always been more a Hamiltonian, but this whole economic collapse moves me (as it apparently does everyone) leftward. I wouldn't want govenment participating in production, like in India pre-1991, but I do think the situation warrants more controls, laws and regulations.

In other news, awesome concept, this, to use biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction to identify the location of bin Laden.

Update 2/19: Apparently this Mayor's daughter was head of the Students for Hillary at U of M in Ann Arbor. Yay to her too.

Slow people at work.

2009-02-18T21:10:00.003-05:00

How I felt with one of the new people on my project team all through Q4 2008 when all I wanted was alignment on the already-created learning plan:

off here.

Ohio police strip, assault woman who called 911 for help

2009-02-18T15:39:00.005-05:00

We're not that far from Changeling today.

The awesome excuse here: "we did it to help her, to prevent her from hurting herself".

Like those men that were screaming at us to vote for Obama because he would protect Roe vs. Wade for us wimminz own good. Barack couldn't prevent today's ND ruling outlawing abortions, even if he'd wanted to - which is debatable considering his open, hypocritical ambivalence about women having full rights over their bodies.

Drawing a Song

Battle for Bittora

The Zoya Factor

Breaking stereotypes = breaking internalized belief systems.

Observation of the day

Different but equal

Why we need feminism - Part 100,000,000

Because we're all just Breeders?

Teh stoopid is everywhere.

Until it's internalized...

Lord help us from TOI.

Now I have ANOTHER excuse for not working out

The only Rule is: there are no rules.

Kurbaan vs. New York

Lorenz attractors

Yeh toh kuch nahin hai, hamarein yahan toh....

These [pirates'] rules, they're more like guidelines anyway

*snigger*

French maid fantasies, Om?

Deepika IS or DOES?

A many-colored jackass

Ugly girls must rightfully be abandoned

ROTFLMAO

Rape? Eh. Slavery? Oh, GOD!

What I wish I could eat right now

Selective editing

Ghar ki murgi vs. bahar ka murga

What about apprehending 'reporting'?

Women are dumb

Please, someone explain

What're your weekend plans?

The hands that count the votes rule the world?

The tiny *expletive* man

Shame, power and nudity

Maharani Gayatri Devi

Hillary Clinton in India

Shattering Glass ceilings? First woman ever to...

Cool FAIL by Burger King - again

Burger King's MO: Offend, Earn Media, Apologize, Repeat

Kambakkht @#!@$#@$#

Privacy, pizza and politics

Google endorses sexism

What people can do to you

a red-letter day?

Pictures and thousands of words

What Google & Wikipedia can't answer for me

Lern 2 Logik

The day the music died

A year ago today, Hope was lost.

A year later, Hillary wins

General White Stupidity

Why did we have to go to Raging Burrito again?

Knotted stomach, tired mind

Deception

The Best Picture Ever

Ooh, look, shiny Twitter!

Odd Organisms via Photo Shop...aka 'oops'!

Bad NBC. Down, boy, down.

Friday night musings and how far ahead India is sometimes - take that, Simone de Beauvoir!

Monkeys on keyboards...

Why the furore?

Repayment crisis

Wonder Woman! Woot!

Have you got yours yet?

Headline contest

Women and their urges. Bah!

I wish there was...

I wish there was...

Of misplaced punctuation and punctuated rulings....

Strangers have the best candy

Importing not just fruits of business, but also business models

You can only give of yourself

In which the Sena believes itself to be an army

IT issues

Evolution of man

How badly do we need the 33% solution in India?

How high is too high?

We're just not that into you. Really.

$ no more reserve currency?

Why I look to the future

snigger

The tiny expletive man