Upper caste-lower caste

Pratiloma unions: the woman is of a higher caste than the man
Anuloma: Upper caste men are permitted sexual access to women of their own or lower castes

I read a fascinating article by Mary E. John in a question of silence? called 'Globalisation, Sexuality and the Visual Field' in which she says that pratiloma relationships tend to "be introduced through 'eve teasing' sequences, where class and gender are played off one another". About anuloma, she says "'Happy endings' demand that the heroine has learnt to subdue her 'uppity' ways, while the hero has his family and bloodline, and therefore also, fortune and respect, restored to him. In other words, if anuloma can appear as legitimate, even progressive love, pratiloma is approached through sexual harassment. Where the latter creates a certain sexual disturbance by rendering the play of power visible, the former more easily lends itself to the kind of idealisation of conjugality that is being currently promoted on a number of fronts".

Mumbai new year and the thought association game

photo - jasmeen patheja, 2007.


Street sexual harassment

I get that by dressing a certain way, you're not asking for it. i get it because it must be true: the only two times i have filed an FIR for harassment i was dressed most "modestly". i get it because what kind of regressive thinking would you have to be indulging in, to blame the harassed, not the harasser. it's hard to protect yourself without knowing what part of you will cause umbrage and invite violence, or cause (apparently) irresistible titillation and invite violence. i get the larger picture, the ethical implication of suggesting someone asked for it and yet... what story (of globalisation, of transition, of woman's body, of disjuncture, of private-public) are the details telling us....?

young women - glamour district - JW Marriott - black dress, jeans - teasing - mob of 40-50 - swear - growing mob - sexual violence.

From the HT - Jan 01, 2008

I'm thinking globalisation- societies in transition - female body as site for battles over "owning" and "belonging" - women relatively safe in private spaces of... home? (hardly!), malls, money=safety - private images coming out in the public - middle class women's huge variance in lifestyle as they negotiate a large difference between private liberated and public 'respectable' persona...

This is Arjun Appadurai on the "pains of cultural reproduction in a disjunctive global world" -

...young men (in particular) come to be torn between the macho politics of self-assertion in contexts where they are frequently denied real agency, and women are forced to enter the labour force in new ways on the one hand, and continue the maintenance of familial heritage on the other. Thus the honor of women becomes not just an armature of stable (if inhuman) systems of cultural reproduction, but a new arena for the formation of sexual identity and family politics as men and women face new pressures at work and new fantasies of leisure...


**
And then here we are at Majestic bus stand, for many days in the week, the centre of my little universe. All the buses seem to lead there and buses from there lead to everywhere. The journeys are pleasant enough (although it is tiring to stand and play this-is-the-two seater-i'm-next-in-line-for games with the aggressive elbow joints of tired looking tiny women). Many buses have a small semi-open sun roof. Glass windows are shut unlike the dust-caked auto rides. Distances hurtle past; views are more engaging from this vantage point - you can look over the tops of heads all crowded around to see a little girl holding a long stick between her teeth and riding a unicycle along a taut wire near the Malleswaram circle.

And then suddenly the joyride ends. The bus does a giant sweep into the Majestic bus stand, people have begun edging to the doors to jump out, already many are on their cell phones explaining, "Sorry, my bus got delayed, I'm at Majestic, I am just reaching..." and then suddenly it's a free-for-all.

Hands brush you, fingers knead you, eyes lust, mouths curve, entire bodies come up suddenly, unstoppably, rushingly against you. It's all in rush hour traffic: no time to stop to say, "Hey!" or to see anything beyond the backs of receding heads, the disappearing ends of fingers.

And on every bus bay that tiny, new fangled little flat screened (it is, isn't it? I can't see so well...) TV, shouting out, reminding us that we are in Bangalore! A super star region, characterised by “a new economic landscape comprising high level, internationally-oriented financial and business services” (Perrons). Whoo hoo! So what can we expect from the tiny, shiny TVs at the central bus stand? Bus timings? Delays? Emergency contact numbers?

It's a streaming video of Bollywood songs. Women gyrate, men rub their hands over them lustfully, women close their eyes, gasp and shudder in prolonged enjoyment.

And so in that surge of sexuality radiating so unapologetically from every tiny TV screen in every tiny bus bay, in that surge the men get caught up, reaching out, groping, discovering. A microcosmic experience of the Bollywood original, encouraging them from the pillar tops and emanating signals that whisper approval at reaching out and living (even a watered down version) of the Great Indian Sex Dream.

**
Modern, modern Bangalore with its Hard Rock Cafe which is dutifully signposted "Hard Rock Cafe Bengalooru", where bartenders flirt with you and ask you whom you're looking for; utter whoops of joy every now and then to keep the pace upbeat and frenetic; offer you more than one kind of beer... in this modern Bengalooru where women work for Google and test product design for Nokia, work and live in shiny enclosures on the city outskirts in high surveillance buildings, how do women schizophrenically negotiate dealing with the difference between public and private space? How do they become modern citizens?

Even as they adopt professional avatars of modernity based on ideas of scientific progress, presumably meant to be accompanied by the assumption of similarly progressive notions of modern citizenship, how do they negotiate the realities of class, caste and regional politics that inflect their actual functioning as citizens outside of the rarefied work environment?



Or, do they never leave their private spaces at all?
When, and if they do, are they 'asking for it'?

Where is the ladies?

The Tate Modern has new displays on cities - looking at them in terms of space, density, speed and so on with statistics, photographs and films to document the dynamics of some of the world's largest cities.

What fascinated me enough to go back again was Paromita Vohra's Q2P.

The second time around, I watched bits of it with a contrarian friend (I wish he would read this blog, but he's busy scrabbling for controversy and virtual fights elsewhere in cyberspace and none of that here!) who got completely peeved with what he seemed to consider the upper caste gaze of the filmmaker and her condescending jibes at the sort of Regular Roadside Romeo figures (in caps to mark my utmost respect for this ubiquitious constituent of life on an Indian street) who were being constantly interviewed through the film.

The filmmaker is out exploring the marginalising of women in India's public spaces and the reductivist view of her (seen as an object, rather than as a real human being with bodily functions, for instance) in popular culture and in people's attitudes and then watching this translate onto the larger canvas of public planning and city growth that ignores women.

The filmmaker chooses the gendered spaces of women's toilets looking at their practicalities and realities to reflect on the space women occupy in public. She looks at where they are situated, how small they are, how much they cost to use, who else occupies them and so on. She interviews members of the Sulabh group who set up a network of public toilets, asking them questions that relate to women's use. She interviews men. The interviews with the men are what friend objected to - most interviewees produced sniggers or looks of disbelief from the audience as they offered views which suggested they could not view women as needing to perform the same functions as them or having real needs.

Friend thought this was pointless - almost as if she was using the unknown man on the street as a fall guy and poking fun at his views? Perhaps because you could argue that these men were part of a larger culture and could not be isolated from it and then ridiculed in these rarified spaces of art gallery/sensitive film audience?

Seemed to me though like she was using irony to demonstrate how institutionalised some beliefs were. Does she not have the license to do that, to make her larger point more effective?

Watch the clip, but better still watch the entire film if you can.

Flaneur

With grey skies and sudden shots of sunlight, I can only bury myself in the chipped wooden study spaces of the Senate House and discover shelves on feminist geography which tell me that a flaneur (Wilson) is a man who "takes visual possession of the city".

That using space is often a way of demystifying it. "By daring to go out, women produce space that is more available for other women - spatial confidence is a manifestation of power" (Koskela).

That the city is seen as 'risque' and 'exciting' and masculine, whereas the countryside is feminine. Usually men enjoy the pleasures of the city, but Ally McBeal fluttering through the city's streets alone at night, pausing to gaze and wonder at the night around her... is she in a post-modern city? Is this a changing gender role? She is a flaneur and a voyeur: a single woman as hero of the street (Damosh, Saeger).

Reminders at the FCO

The FCO is Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It's a little bit unnerving for us fresh-off-the-boat types in the same way the British Museum can be. Huge, huge rooms, sprawling driveways, lavish wall decorations comprising spoils from former colonies and everywhere reminders of the hundreds of years of plunder and conquest.

But the FCO has delightfully retained some old murals, and what caught my eye was this one, Sigismund Goetze (abt 1914), Brittania Pacificatrix:


The people represent different countries. It's Britain at the centre, holding out to her hand to America prettily dressed in the flag (see the red stripes and blue stars on her gown?), Japan behind, with the fan, Russia - in mourning - hides her face at the back (Bolshevik Revolution, we were told!).

On the other side, behind Britain is Canada with maples leaves covering his, er, modesty as also South Africa with a lionskin and Australia with sheepskin. Belgium is at Britain's feet - a naked young girl - meant to symbolise the fact that "she has lost everything but her honor". Apparently there was some controversy over this, so the FCO wrote to Belgium who said they didn't mind.

I wonder if anyone wrote to Africa? Represented by a young slave boy holding a basket above his head. This, right at the head of the central stairway to the FCO!

Shilpa Shetty and the criminal court

After all the hype preceding the entry of Shilpa Shetty onto crazed reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, all the talk of her "reaching out to Brit Asian audiences" (film professor on BBC Radio4), clearing out misconceptions about India or just attempting to revive a flagging career, the last thing I expected would hit the headlines was alleged racism on the show.

Today, media regulator Offcom reports over 7,500 complaints and Channel 4 received 2,000. Relevantly, part of the debate asks whether the (obnoxious) three girls also in the house with Shilpa, and slandering her, are just bullying and being generally offensive or whether their behaviour and that of Jackiey Budden's constitutes racism.

Sure, you could argue that what this is, is class difference at play, but I'm distinctly uncomfortable with the inability of the perpetrators of this alleged "racism" to imagine a world outside of theirs. What's with Jackiey not even attempting to pronounce Shilpa's name in the beginning ("I can't understand it"?!), the reluctance to buy garam masala for the house? ("... as long as I can have my smoked mackerel", "can we have some fish fingers and chips?"), poking fun at her accent?

What does it take to label behaviour as racist? Does it have to be actual race-driven slander? "that ... Paki" (which apparently was never said)? I think this refusal to see behaviour/habits/mannerisms in their context (which may not be yours), to refuse to broaden your horizon a little wider than the corner pub and to be unaccepting of difference... I think these traits constitute racism just as strongly as direct race-related verbal abuse.

And the ugly saga on BB resonated, oddly enough, at a totally different setting today: a hearing at the Old Bailey, the central criminal courts for the UK and Wales. I went in to hear witnesses testifying on a torture case and caught some of the most surreal exchanges I've heard in my life. Ever.

Witness in stand - Pakistani man, unable to understand or speak English, using an interpreter and attempting to give details of incidents of torture occuring some years ago. To an all-white jury (apparently it's randomly picked? Which makes zero sense to me because, just as randomly, they could be all-BNP members?).

Mid-way through a questioning slowed down significantly by the continuous translation, prosecution asks about a crane the witness had something to do with.

(Paraphrase)
Were you hired as a construction worker?
Were you building?
Were you using the crane to build?

Repeated No's, then the witness explains he used it for agriculture.

Lawyers teams, security, judge all twitter. It's funny to them - going along an expected track and suddenly the Hindi-speaking man in the turban throws them off guard. A crane for agriculture - who'd have thought! Giggle, smirk.

Then a little questioning about a cockerel fight. Some more raised eyebrows, apparent mirth.

You drove one hour with the men yet you don't remember what they said?
I could not hear them.
They were in the same car as you but you could not hear them?
I have an old 1974 model car; it makes a very loud when I drive it.
People shout when they can't hear each other, do they not? Could you not hear their shouting?
I was concentrating on the road, I could not make out their words.

Who will explain the clatter of loud cars, the potholes and treachorous terrain of village roads to this sceptical prosecutor untangling the facts with apparent incredulity on a quiet lane off St. Paul's Cathedral? Who will magically extend his imagination to a village square where men gather around raucous cockerel fights?

Referring to an event a while ago, the defence judge helpfully explains to the jury the witness might not be able to have the "same concept of time" as them, but they should note there is an intervening gap of 18 months between the event described and the next one being recorded.

Who decides that because the witness claimed he could not remember one event because it was "so long ago" he does not have the same "concept of time" as the jury?

You were given this man's chickens and parrots to keep whilst he went away?
Yes.
For how long did he say he would be gone?
He did not say.
Did you not ask him?
No.
A man leaves his chickens and parrots with you and you do not ask him when he will return to claim them?
I knew he would take them back when he returned.

Who will explain to the amused courtroom that perhaps notions of ownership are culturally determined? Who will explain that perhaps leaving your chickens and parrots with someone in a small village near Rawalpindi is perhaps not the same as leaving your goldfish with a friend in London while you holiday in Tunis over the weekend?

Ask the witness if he understands the term "on-the-run"?
Long exhange between interpreter and witness, no doubt trying to convey the essence of what is a pithy English phrase but perhaps has no direct translation, or one that is immediately evident to the interpreter at any rate. No response.
Does he know what it means to be 'on-the-run'? I'm sorry I don't know how you would translate that? (Helpless, understanding smiles are exchanged across the court. "What a hard case to try - no communication possible. Deep sigh".)
Another long exchange as interpreter tries to translate despite the apparent stupidity of asking an interpreter to directly translate an English phrase.
Finally the answer: Yes.

Court laughs out loud in relief.
--
Was this complete disconnect between the witness and the lawyers a manifestation of racism? Their implied superiority, their open laughs at a world they could not imagine, their insinuations against a culture that might regard ownership, friendship, community different from their own?

I'm only too aware that it is the prosecution's job to rip apart a seemingly plausible testimonial, but I also had just spent the morning listening to a case related to a stabbing incident where a young, black boy from a housing estate stabbed to death another unarmed man and although the prosecution was predictably harsh, it seemed she was wilfully pasting over considerations of the general hostility of such neighbourhoods, the possibility of violence, the need to attack before you're attacked (the boy had just been punched), the likelihood that most young men carry some form of weaponry and so on to instead play up existent stereotypes and fissures in society and broaden them in order to gain credence from the jury.

Here too, by positioning the witness as the teller-of-fantastic-tales we have an argument that is built not on the "rational" principles of justice, the bare facts, the who-what-where, but, increasingly, one that plays up difference and seeks to discount the facts told by someone who has perhaps different concepts of time than you. Who says weird things. Who participates in cockerel fights. Who is so different from you, the all-white London-based jury, that you may begin to wonder how much stock you can place on this turbaned man you've all just been laughing at.

Never mind what on earth must have been going through the witness' head as he watched a bunch of white men with wigs on their head occasionally laughing at him in a strange enclosed high security room, in a new country. If that doesn't constitute abuse, and this inability to look beyond your world to embrace wider contexts, racism... I don't know what does.

Conquer on!

Would it just be cynical to think all the shmooze about a "post-colonial predicament" is a bit premature because the ex-colonies are still being "conquered" by Britain... but now through aid imperialism, not military might...? Or would I just sound like a lefty loon?!

Probably the latter!

But I did hear on the radio this morning that "the Conservatives have pledged £500 million a year to fight malaria in sub-saharan Africa if they get into government". Great!

Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne spent the weekend in Kampala with Jeffrey Sachs and is now convinced that treating malaria will lift people out of poverty. Great!

Then the hard-to-leave-behind-dream of Conquest sneaks in. Rather upfront-ly.

"If we properly monitor how the aid is spent... all of us have an interest in bringing, particularly, sub- Saharan Africa into the world economy just as... we did in Asia over the last 20 years, we have conquered, I should say we are conquering poverty in Asia".

Thoughts from a question asked at a Blank Noise meeting...

"Why does it seem that more men from a particular class/es look at me whilst I'm on the street?"

Perhaps because there are more people from lower classes negotiating with public spaces. Affluence increasingly brings with it a conscious 'opting out' from public life, a "secession of the successful" to borrow from J K Galbraith; out of public transport into cars (although there are large ocurrences of car-owners engaging in street harassment, by slowing down, pulling over, insistently offering rides and so on), out of open bazaars into upmarket malls, off the streets and away from neighbourhood hangouts such as outside the cigarette shop, or at street corners. The larger prevalence of men from a lower class occupying public spaces would naturally increase the number of them subsequently engaging in a certain type of behaviour.

Often we find that street sexual harassment in India adopts certain "typical" patterns modelled on cues received from popular culture; Bollywood, music videos, song lyrics, advertisements and so on. While it seems likely that basing behaviour, however loosely, on popular culture is a universal norm, in India this trend becomes unique because popular culture acts as a handle, perhaps even a crutch, for cross-class and cross-caste interaction which, in terms of sexual relations, is still largely taboo and unusual. Thus the tuneful whistle of a suggestive Bollywood number, or a lewd one-liner sourced from the latest blockbuster - these attempts at attracting attention receive an almost social sanction being, as they are, borrowed from a source which has already enjoyed mass appeal thus lending it some legitimacy. The dependence to a large extent on handles of popular culture can perhaps be attributed to the lack of any other cues for how to behave when crossing class and other historic divides when encountering the opposite sex.

Globalisation and liberalisation have brought many "Western" values and commodities to Indian shores, furthering the already vast chasm between those who can afford the lifestyle they accompany and those who are left static. Thus members of lower classes living in urban, burgeoning metropolis' are thus confronted with the presence of women from upper castes who might never have occupied such public spaces (streets, parks, movie halls) so defiantly before. They are dressed in a way they might not have been before, they behave more confidently (swollen with the confidence of their own income, earned through their own high power jobs, by virtue of their highly specialised skills) than they might have before and they are certainly out in larger numbers than ever before. Thus, coupled with the presence of much larger numbers of women from urban upper middle classes is also their new-found attitude and demeanour - making them a sort of double whammy for men from lower classes who need to locate some sort of path through which to negotiate with them. Unable to find one, through historic deficit or otherwise, they turn to the Universal Sanctioner, Age Old Teacher, the ever-prevalent popular culture.

"Drunken consent is still consent"

Chinmayee sets the ball rolling on the BNP site:

She got very drunk one night and woke up to realise that she had sex with someone in a corridor and could not remember whether or not she had consented to it. The man in question says she was aware they were having intercourse. She says she wasn't. So she files a case and the judge says - drunken consent is still consent. And therefore, rules that she was not raped.

The case has sparked off a tizzy.

What's your take? Rape? Drunken sex? Fair judgement?

Debate it on the BNP blog.

The New Activist

Reactions to the Jessica Lall case remind me in a way of similar outrage over what happened after Satyendra Dubey and Manjunath murders.

People you wouldn't have expected to have felt a sense of outrage and wrong doing. When we think of PIL-filers, protesters, outraged citizens asking for retrials and justice, often it's the lawyers/NGOs that come to mind. But in these cases, it's been what I'd reluctantly call "regular citizens". Software engineers, students, researchers, bankers, courier company employees. Ask a middle class person on the street about the Jessica Lall verdict - in Delhi atleast - and you're unlikely to draw a blank. There's some strong feeling.

A young researcher tells me she relates to this because "Jessica was a woman, she could have been me". Two young men buying paan outside the NOIDA Barista sound angry at what they call a media outcry over someone who was good-looking, and ask why no accompanying hype followed say the Kalinga Nagar killings. Whatever the reaction, there is one, and I'm certain I'd have drawn a blank if I'd asked the same people about Dalit deaths or tribal injustices.

Have so many people sent protest SMSes, showed up at vigils and rallies, signed petitions, ranted on their blogs because of the media hype? Or does the media hype reflect the newly expressed outrage of a class of society traditionally silent on issues of public governance/law?

Part of the co-opting of the New Activists certainly has to do with technology. How much easier to send a message or sign a petition online than earlier forms of protest. It's the mainstreaming of activism, the inclusion of a middle class so far impotent when it came to matters of governance. But what comes after the quickly generated SMS or blog petition? How does middle class frustration with the system translate to positive change?

ps: Just opened comments after months, let's see how long the good feeling lasts!

Faces of protest

What's a story without the human face? What's the big story without the small anecdote? The larger issue without the immediate impact?

So, on Day 2 of the airport strike, I'm hunting for the human faces to personalise our reports.

Angry, inconvenienced, affected people are found.

Anna from Waldorf (with an accent so strong I'm sure I heard her wrong): "The bathrooms were really unpleasant and there's been no help with the trolleys".

Ms. Chatterjee in from Lucknow: "I've just abandoned my car because there's no way to get out but my driver is stuck in a long line of cars with my baggage".

Vox Pop3: "I've had to walk all the way here because I couldn't find my car in the usual parking lot."

And so on. We've put them on air, "the faces behind the big story" of privatisation of two large airports.

And then two ladies come up to me (employees of the striking Airports Authority of India) screaming and asking why we haven't interviewed them, don't they have babies hungry at home, aren't they scared of losing their jobs?... And so on.

And it hits me how subjective it is, this whole "put a personal face on your story" line. Because, really, whose face will you put? The upmarket traveller agonised by her car's absence, whom your viewer can relate to, being, presumably, English-speaking as well?

Or the screaming, striking, Hindi-speaking trade union leaders whom the upmarket traveller is villainising ("These people aren't achieving anything")?

--
At about 10 a.m., ragpickers began showing up to collect the garbage. A TV crew doing an OB had pulled a dustbin into their frame to show the "overflowing garbage and dismal conditions" and when they spotted the ragpickers, quickly yanked them into the frame as well but the AAI employees watching stepped in and shooed the ragpickers away.

Jan 26

Construction of the Other

Wagah

Wagah, December 17

Minutes after the grand ceremony at the Wagah border, and I am left feeling distinctly uncomfortable. There are flags waving, photographs being taken against the divider gate and people muttering (really) "Jai Hindustan". It's a sort of self conscious nationalism (or jingoism?) played out amidst the pomp and grandeur of the sunset ceremony. The kind of thing that's expected to generate goosebumps in the respectable citizen.

Travelling in good faith

It’s about recovering the middle ground before the secularism debate swerves too far right or left, and becomes a lost cause. For years, I was convinced that religion was the great divide; now I have come to understand that faith can be the healer.

Amritsar, December 16, 2005

The older generation of the Singhs travel outside their home on the outskirts of Amritsar only to visit gurudwaras. The younger generation have been to Kasauli, Kulu Manali and other hill stations, but for the older lot - holiday=gurudwara. Now with a Lahore-Amritsar bus to roll in late Jan 2006, there's hope that crossing over into Pakistan to see the Nankana Sahib and Punja Sahib etc. might become easier. This, after all, is the bus that connects two arms of an earlier undivided Punjab and its people.

Post-Foxification

Most journalists (she said, in a sweeping generalisation) like to think they’re challenging the mainstream, the establishment. The challenge of their job lies in the expose that reveals a large defence scam, the mafia tearing into a much-publicised Prime Ministerial project, the government programme that killed hundreds of farmers.

But recently, journalists are being co-opted into a news framework that prioritises the marketing ploys. We dig up stories for our ‘core consumer base’. So an English channel obsesses with Southern states which watch English news, and within those states targets its programming at a demographic the advertisers will love: the young, upwardly mobile, two-car, own-flat, home-theatre-owning couple. Hindi channels run riot on the sensational incidents from their core consumers - the traders, the paanwallahs and so on. Editorial priority is mostly determined by what the marketing gurus say. This, I’m told, is the Murdochisation of news.

The increase of channels and newspapers in India also, ironically, spouts a uniformity of editorial content rather than a healthy diversity. No organization wants to be thought of as having “missed the news” and so each event is whipped into a frenzy by the multiple channels and papers. You can’t afford to have a consumer, sorry, viewer, think that they missed the big story because your channel didn’t play it up as much as the others. Therein spawning hours of repetitive, identical (almost) programming across channels.

To cut a long story short, this is where blogs come in. For diversity (because they don’t care about “doing a story in a bigger way than competition”), for democracy (because they pick up small stories mainstream might ignore in favour of the “big story of the day”), for challenging the establishment (because other news is so busy with the marketing mantras).

So after an initial phase of media adopting the role of watchdog or challenger of the establishment view, came the recent Murdochisation or Foxification of news (corporate, marketing-driven) leaving the role of watchdog… to blogs. This is now the post-Fox era :-)

Shooting with Jeet and Mandar

Sometimes a story stops being just a story and overwhelms you. So Jeet and Mandar's story has sort of overwhelmed me now.

We shot on Sunday after much back-and-forthing; a tussle over Mandar - who wanted to be paid for his time (not unfairly)- and much bitter fighting between the two of them late in the week.

During the shoot itself, in the lawns outside my house, there was some residual hostility in the air. Their fight had obviously left some unresolved issues in its wake and each time one of them was alone with me, he would bitch out the other.

Mandar is feeling suicidal apparently. Jeet wants another job, wants to leave Mandar, leave the city, leave his family, leave the job. He wants me to find him another job, following which I must promise not to tell anyone where he lives or how to reach him.

Mandar can sense this. "He's found someone else," he says to me, sniffling almost. He seems a lot more tired today than when I last met them. Jeet who was quiet and withdrawn is now assertive and brusque.

"He talked too much, didn't he?" he asked me about Mandar after we took the bite. The tape got snagged and we had to return to office. "If he didn't ramble on, we would have finished by now and wouldn't have had to go back," Jeet continued, accusingly.

Mandar is looking at the floor. Jeet continues, unmindful. "He didn't talk about what you asked him to come here for. He just went on and on about the past."

Little things about them are depressing me. This fight firstly. Flecks of dirt on Jeet's white corduroy pants, Mandar's dirty finger nails.

At the end of the shoot we are near Shahdara and Jeet invites me into his office. A gaggle of cross dressers is crowded around a small table and chair. I am invited to the chair and they close in on me. Arched eyebrows, red lips, blond hair, flouncy skirts.

They stare at me expectantly and I feel like a Special Visitor to a kindergarten, expected to ask intelligent, incisive questions which will draw all the students into the conversation.

"So...," I begin, "do you all come from nearby?"

There's a chorus of responses which helps to break the awkward silence. Jeet explains the counselling that takes place here and the parties that unfold in the tiny hall upstairs.

As we leave the last few party-comers troop in, carrying plastic bags and wearing unremarkable checked shirts. In a few moments, they will quickly change clothes, slap on the lipstick and gyrate to music that will reverberate through this tiny terrace room in Shahdara.

Of this, that and the other

If the people I’ve talked to recently are anything to go by, being gay in India is to face hostility and aggression. Being metrosexual on the other hand is cool, hip and glamorous. So did the metrosexual craze sort of legitimize a gay culture, since they have some commonalities and points of intersection?

And now does the fickle marketers’ decision to edge out metrosexuality (“a straight, sensitive, well-educated, urban dweller who is in touch with his feminine side”- Trubo, 2003) by ubersexuality (a return to hyper masculinity) make a difference to the gay movement?

Or, as I was told knowledgably yesterday, are we now in a post-gay world, in which case it wouldn't really matter anymore?

So, what is it exactly...?

"Metrosexuality is an umbrella term for the convergence of sexualities"

...quite contrary ...how does your garden grow?

Great article (Thanks, Shreyas) on the Gaurav Sabnis - IIPM story.

" If blogs are to be taken seriously, they should live up to the standards of accountability and reliability of the mainstream media that they so deplore. "

*
On an aside, out of curiosity, how many Indian bloggers are libertarian whether or not they know it?

Does access to the Internet (middle class, well educated people) and use of blogs (by those presumably seeking free speech minus advertiser-editorial control) determine the nature and profile of the Indian blogosphere and point to a libertarian slant placing especially great emphasis on freedoms (most noticeably that of speech)?

Are most bloggers in tech jobs or with MNCs and in big cities and does this invariably determine their political views?

Is that why this has become a freedom of speech issue rather than a legal/cyber law/investigative journalism issue?

Also less and less time to blog, so please mail me if you have anything to say; have disabled comments for now!

The urban aesthetic

Since one of my 'beats' as a special news features reporter is supposed to be "the urban aesthetic", thought I'd drop by the afternoon PSBT session. Just an aside, this beat needs to be differentiated from 'urban aesthetic' which might be, as a parent rightly pointed out, the ergonomics of dustbins. So, back to main point. The afternoon session was on urban spaces and so on, so I walked in during Cityscapes Delhi by Meera Dewan (documents Delhi’s collapsing urban environment and recalls the city’s best-loved 19th century chronicler – Ghalib). Someone came in late, and insisted on squeezing into the seats right by me. Since I was seated in my usual cross legged pose, distanced from my footwear, I had to gather my stuff, untangle myself, get into footwear etc.

"Sorry, sorry," said Someone Late. "So sorry, sorry."

"That's alright," I said, magnanimously. Then the lights came on and I realised the Someone Late by me was Arundhati Roy.

Ruchir Joshi's film, A Mercedes For Ashish, described as "a cinematic document of simultaneous degradations of human space and dignity in Delhi, of how roads, walls, constructions-in-progress, ganda nalas, billboards, all in some way attack the human body" was right after. Many questions posed, but one stayed on.

Is it possible to fall in love in a big city like Delhi?

In love with someone in a big city. Yes, of course people have done it before but this film looked st barricades, impeding structures, distances... How does love change depending on the size and nature of your city?

The film is told through the eyes of a young person (I say that because it sounded like a guy, but the narrator's name was female) who battles the big city with its mega constructions, its constraining joint families, its intimidating distances, it's pollutants... can you still nurture love and intimacy through the onslaught of the metropolis?

Still thinking.