Why it is better to live in the North

Aakar Patel often writes interesting stuff on the Mint. Yesterday he had a different take on the North India-South India debate. He claims it is better to live in South India. I though why not rebut this point by point and look at the other side - why I like living in the North :)

1. Aakar claims that south Indians are more knowledgeable about music. Ok. But ask them about Sufi music or Qawwalli. Zero. Name me one singer in this genre from the South.

2. He claims that the south is more inclusive about North Indians and Bollywood. In actual fact Tamil Nadu has long run a campaign against Hindi and actually discouraged showing of Hindi films till a decade ago.

3. South Indians are more tolerant of other communities. I have no idea where this come from. Karnataka has a bad track record in this regard in the last decade. And Tamil Nadu? Please refer to previous argument. Tolerance here should not just mean other religions but also other cultures. Now Kerala might be tolerant but then so is West Bengal. They do things differently there.

4. He accepts that North India's high culture is influenced by Islam. So what is the equivalent of Urdu in the south ?

5. He claims that south's vegetarianism is not oppressive. This may be true. The only eating joints in Delhi you can find beef are mallu joints.

6. Another argument is intellectual. Apparently the south is superior. Yes but they also keep to themselves and do not interact with other communities. North Indians tend to be gregarious and sharing in social interactions. How long can I discuss Coleridge when I cannot borrow sugar from your kitchen?

7. As a last salvo he puts forward this theory that south Indians know another language from a neighboring state. This is bizzarre. My father knows Tamil and understands Telegu because he migrated for work and lived in these communities. The average south indian is not more interested in learning languages. I know of north Indian families who are conversant in Punjabi and Telegu since they live in Hyderabad. In the north if you travel from Bihar to Haryana you can do with Hindi. 

He signs off by comparing Mumbai and Bangalore and giving the latter a thumbs up. And what about the winters of Delhi? How can anyone beat that?

What say ?

Why I am not there

i am
as a rule
skeptical of crowds

each time they gathered
i was found wanting

1984
i did not love Indira enough

1990
i did not love my caste enough

1992
i did not love the temple enough

i cannot be like Anna and his company
because like all crowds
they want you to be on their side
else
you are the other

i cannot be like those in power
who say – come lets talk again
they have been leading us through
a circus
for six decades

i cannot be like the skeptical journos
whose current fashion is to attack
the middle class
tomorrow it will be
someone else

and i cannot be like those
who say
this bill will not solve all problems
so will not
the UID
it will just make us into a number

but then
as a rule
am skeptical of crowds
who ask you to be on their side
else
you are the other

each time
a crowd gathers
they seem to remind me
that
i am the other

Birkin diplomacy

Yesterday the Alligators called emergency session of their pressure group NSOMB – No Skin Of My Back. The Snakes were present and so were the Crocodiles. The Beavers were special invitees.

“What have you called us here for ?” the Snake asked.

“Haven’t you read the news? The Pakistani foreign minister carried a Birkin handbag to the Indo- Pak meet.” said the Alligator.

“So?” asked the Crocodile.

“Well apparently the meeting was a huge success. Everyone is attributing it to Birkin diplomacy. The Indian media is all excited about it.”

“This is good news for Birkin. They will sell a couple of more bags in India. How does this concern us?” the Snake said pointedly.

“Hillary Clinton has taken note of this trend and ordered 300 bags. She will gift it to women leaders all over the world. She feels that no two countries with leaders carrying Birkin will go to war. If there is a crisis, they will just hold a summit and discuss the latest trends in handbags.

There was pause as the Snake and the Crocodile looked at each other.

“Birkin has already ramped up its production. The first bags are scheduled to be delivered in the UN session in September” the Alligator continued.

The Beaver looked around and smiled.

“So why did you call me for this session?”

The Alligator turned to look at him.

“ Did you think that men were going to carry handbags? Not to be left out, the Indian foreign Minister has ordered a beaver hat from Birkin for the next Indo-Pak summit. Now the Chinese delegation to the UN is demanding beaver hats too.”

“But so many bags and hats are going to cost at least 10 million dollars. Who is going to foot the bill?” argued the Crocodile.

“That’s a small price to pay for world peace.” muttered the Alligator.

“What can we do ?” asked the Beaver.

“Pray that some crazy from Norway or Iraq detonates a bomb and the world is distracted by a War on Terror for another ten years.” said the Snake.

Birkin Diplomacy - To use a fashion accessory to distract from the real issue

The Norway Incident

After all the speculation about different Islamic groups it finally emerged that the guy who pulled this one - Anders Breivik - was a white European. As he views became public, journos abroad have started building a strange case. They say that right wing parties or groups in Europe are not to blame for this attack.

The Atlantic has this observation:

Breivik may have come from the European anti-Muslim right wing, but he certainly does not represent it.

Behavior, ultimately, is a product of one's environment: ideas, yes, but also social pressure, family pressure, norms, constraints, inspirations, barriers, and expectations. Sometimes, these constraints push a man to do any number of heinous things. It doesn't excuse the man himself (at the end of the day, you always have the choice and the responsibility not to react to your circumstances violently), but it makes the question of "why" terribly difficult to understand. It is deeply complex.

WOW. I have never seen such clear lucid thinking coming out immediately after a terror attack. Take a look at these lines again:

Behavior, ultimately, is a product of one's environment: ideas, yes, but also social pressure, family pressure, norms, constraints, inspirations, barriers, and expectations. Sometimes, these constraints push a man to do any number of heinous things.

Funny that they never seem to think of these lines when there is a Islamic terror attack. Would the same reasons listed above not apply to them?

How to find God …

…the Maria Susairaj way

1. Become an actress

2. Get engaged

3. Travel to Mumbai

4. Find a lover

5. Get your fiancé to kill the lover

6. Go to the supermarket to buy a bread knife, an air-freshener, new drapes and two large duffel bags

7. Chop the dead body into pieces

8. Dispose the pieces in a forest

9. Get arrested

10. Plead innocence

11. Stay in jail

12. Leave jail since the court feels that 3 years 41 days is enough suffering for cutting a body up and hiding it

13. Find God

14. Share this news at a press conference

Repeat from 1 if not satisfied the first time.

Turning Girls into Boys

Last Sunday, HT wrote about a new trend in Indore where parents are turning their girl child into a boy. Yes you read that right. A sex change. When you are too young to ask what the hell is happening to you. Just because they want a boy.

Having worked on several projects that dealt with female infanticide, I thought I had seen and heard all kinds of stories. But this one still shocked me.

When I was part of a film that we made in the 90's, the focus was on two states - Rajasthan and Tamilnadu. In the first decade of this century, more and more people in the cities started killing girls. Highly urbanized states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana topped the list. What was surprising was that "educated" and economically well off communities were indulging in this practice.

I have always maintained that education does not make us broadminded, tolerant or sensitive. Most people who garner degrees continue to believe that they should have a male child. And there are enough people to find new theories why we still have female feoticide.

A new argument put forward in the NYTimes was this :

...female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status.

The article then goes onto point out that skewed family planning programmes and access to abortion has led to an increase in female feoticide.

Easy access to abortion is leading to more girl child deaths ?

Bullshit.

Female foeticide was happening decades before there were abortion clinics. If hospitals would not allow it then people would go to quacks or back alleys.

Female empowerment and access to abortion clinics are not responsible for skewed gender ratio. It is patriarchal and misogynistic cultures.

Instead of focusing on real issues, such arguments take the the sting away from the ongoing campaign to set the gender balance right.

Do you speak NGOish?

Economist has a fun take on the impact of international NGOs in Sudan.

It seems that it is fast becoming a place:

where the language of aid is taking hold even among the natives.“I feel like a stakeholder now,” exclaimed a woman of the Dinka tribe

Other popular words include empowerment, capacity building and focal groups !

The article continues in the same vein:

Such terms’ joy is that they are nice and woolly, hard to define and harder still to contradict: who could possibly turn down the chance to enhance development practitioners’ facilitation skills for the capacity-building of gender-disadvantaged women?

Having worked on various media projects with civil society groups that focus on capacity building and empowerment, I am intrigued by the term gender-disadvantaged women.

Either there are gender disadvantaged groups or disadvantaged women.

Or am I missing something here ?

PS In other news Omar Abdullah is spending Rs 3,000 cr on development projects in 64 days !

Media scare

That's what this H1N1 crisis is about.

Yesterday sitting at a cafe I looked up to see the correspondent on a news channel giving a PTC wearing a mask. Having just made an instructional film for the WHO, I immediately recognized that he was wearing the wrong mask. This is what he needed to have worn if wanted to protect himself from this virus.

So not only was he creating an unnecessary scare but he was also giving the wrong information.

It is now obvious that worldwide less than a fraction of 1% of infected people have succumbed to the virus. Many countries are reporting that there are no new infections. Most people who have died in India had other health complications which aggravated the situation. And yet the news channels kept up the shrill reporting asking silly questions - SHOULD YOUR CITY BE SHUT DOWN? - raising the bogey of the swine flu.

This inspite of an advisory from the I & B ministry.

Do they realize that even today the chances of dying of TB or respiratory diseases is still higher than H1N1. Guys get some perspective !

Or I will send you here.

Gossip makes the world go...

Outlook has a cover story on the importance of gossip in our lives. I have long been a fan of gossip. Often it is looked down upon and mostly underrated. Most of us do gossip consciously or unconsciously to gather information or to gain advantage in a situation. However we do not admit it.

One of teachers at film school used to speak highly of gossip. He said it sets your creative juices flowing. While I agree with the first part, for me gossip is more about gathering information (which is not available officially) or breaking into a group at a new workplace. Seasoned practitioners often use it to either to spread wrong information (!) or break set hierarchies.

Gossip started with school. Everyday when we returned back home I would be on the phone for hours on end discussing activities of my classmates to the minutest detail. Who did what? Who said what? What did the teacher’s pet do? This reached such a stage when I would even know what was happening in my brother’s class. My parents would often have to snatch away the phone from me.

When I joined a production house after many years in the freelancing wilderness, I was taken aback by the rigid hierarchies at work. No one spoke out of fear that he or she may be ridiculed or snubbed. The first week I sat alone at my desk with no one to talk to. I thought I would go mad. I realized that this had to be changed. I needed to help my colleagues loosen up.

I began with the office boy (who still remains my friend and calls me regularly) who was the repository of all that happened in the office. Slowly I worked my way up, creating new friendships, where conversations moved from the generic to gathering specific information about people at work.

At that time I was not aware of this process. Years later, I could observe myself with a distant eye when I joined another place. I would begin by meeting people alone. Of course gossip works best when done in groups but then you need to know the minds of everyone – what their motivations are and how much you should reveal your mind. When you are alone with someone, the conversation leads to more detail. But one must be willing to share information if one wants something that the other person has.

However the best practitioners of this are in Bombay. I realized people in that city had taken gossip to a new level. At the Lokhandwala Barista I saw one wannabe director move from one table to the other collecting information, adding his two bit and retelling the story. This process continued across three tables within the earshot of those who were talking to him a few minutes ago. No one bothered to correct him. In a business that thrives on gossip more of it was always welcome.

5 things I learnt from the mumbai terror attack

They came. They attacked. We (the police and NSG, not us) fought back. The ICON was reclaimed. I felt humbled. Lots of candles came out. And I learnt some things along the way.

1. The camera is mightier than the gun
The man with the gun can kill you once but the man(or woman) in front of the camera can screw your brains day after day and you will still keep paying to watch cable. For once it was not the politicians who decided what to do next but the news channels. God help us when there is a real war.

Always remember the correspondent under a hail of bullets is speaking the gospel truth. And the TV anchor is God. Very soon the government is coming up with the protocols for the correct way to address them (Your Highness etc) when you meet them (in a kneeling position).

2. Some people are more equal (or the Idea of India resides on the edge of Mumbai)
Never mind that we had transistor bombs going off in buses in Delhi twenty years back. Never mind that terrorists have attacked every town in the country (Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore,Ahmedabad, Hyderabad) in the last ten years. Never mind they bombed the trains in Mumbai some time back. But if they attack the Taj we shall come down on them like a ton of bricks with a lot of NSGs and news correspondents.

3. The Taj Hotel = India's Icon
The less said about it the better. Although the VT station where many people were killed is older than the Taj and more people from Mumbai have been through VT than had coffee at the Taj.
Last heard the government was trying to replace the Taj Mahal with Taj Hotel on the Seven Wonders List.

4. Facebook can help deepen our democracy
In the last ten days we have seen many decisions taken on Facebook without involving the Parliament and our bureaucracy. This seems like a good way to save money we waste on elections and our MPs.

Also we realised that ours is a dynamic constitution that we can make up/change as we go along. The politicians cannot fool us anymore. We can not only remove you but also refuse to vote ! (We know there is no such rule but we can make it up...)

A fortnight later, after the hangover I had this thought: This is not our 9/11. It has been happening since the 80's. Only this time the rich got hit.

All I can say is this. Engage with people around you. Debate what is right and wrong. But please vote. And pay taxes.

After all how are they going to find insurance money for the Taj...

The Olympic Torch is not a symbol?

You got to hand it to Tehelka. Once it a while it comes up with such gibberish that you take a step back and think - do the editors ever look at what they print?

In this week's issue Shoma Chaudhary has defended Aamir Khan's decision to run with the Olympic Torch. I can think of many reasons (India, Coke & Samsung) but she has of course a different perspective. Invoking Mahatma Gandhi she says :

The art of public symbolism is famously a difficult one to master. Few men in recent time have been as adroit at it as Gandhi. A fistful of salt, retrieved from the sea. Mass bonfires. Civil disobedience. The charkha. These symbols became powerful change agents, a moral force that unseated an empire because their inspiration snaked back to a deep search for truth, a clear goal, a massive ambition. And most importantly, a readiness to back symbolic gesture with suffering. There was also a direct correlation between these symbols and the oppression they sought to highlight. The Olympic torch — the most debated public symbol today — has none of those virtues.

Bullshit.

When he began, no one took Gandhi seriously. The charkha or salt had no meaning attached to it before Gandhi associated it with self reliance and freedom. In any case was only by the 1940s that his ideas and philosophy started to grip the entire nation something that we have preserved for over six decades now.

The Olympic torch has existed for some time now as a symbol of the Olympic spirit. The very fact that it is paraded and carried to all countries of the world it means something.

Of course it has nothing to do with China's policies in Tibet. Right now.

By snuffing it out, protesting or creating an environment to boycott the Games, the Tibetans are following the tradition of the Africans in 1976, the Americans in 1980 and the Russians in 1984. The Africans definitely achieved their objective against apartheid South Africa two decades later.

If by chance in the future, Tibet were to get independence, would not these protests be a significant step in that direction? Would not the Olympic Torch have a new meaning ? Of course this has to be part of larger strategy of boycotting Chinese goods etc. but snuffing out the torch has the maximum impact media wise. There can be no denying that.

Later the article says :

Perhaps Aamir Khan thought of all this when he rejected the grand dramatic gesture — emotionally satisfying, televisionfriendly, but ultimately hypocritical — and settled for a more nuanced and personally honest stand.

And what is this nuanced and personally honest stand ? Neither did he come out with a clarification (on China's Tibet policy) nor did he criticize anyone. His sponsors were happy and so were the Chinese who came to cheer him.

So much for not being hypocritical.

Women’s Era, Femina and Savvy

I am a women's magazine regular. My folks had a magazine library membership and every evening there was a new one in our home. The Illustrated Weekly, Sunday, Imprint, Network. But what fascinated me were the Trimurti of women’s magazines – Women’s Era, Savvy and Femina.

Femina is of course very familiar to us. It has always been middle of the road answering questions like – how can I manage the home and my workspace? It brought the phrase “super mom” into our conversations and for a long time many working moms believed in that till they realized that the world was still unfair - super moms were constantly asked to step out their homes, they were venturing out into new fields (non aggressive things like teaching) while their husbands still did nothing more than what they had been doing 100 years ago. Mostly the advice was to find happiness in work etc. New fashion from London found its way to the pages once in a while. But one thing stood out – Femina drew the line on dowry – everything else was OK but if the guy asked for dowry – leave.

Women’s Era carried stories of newly wed brides and their problems with in-laws. Each issue had four or five stories centered around girls on the verge of marriage (or their sister’s about to get married) and the trials and tribulations they went through to find Mr. Perfect. The stories had words like “compromise”, “respect”, “commitment” etc. Initially the girl would be resistant to the guy or in love with the wrong person and then realize much later. The agony aunt column would always advice girls to “sort things out”, they would never advice them to go for a divorce instead they were to find solace in keeping their home and looking after their children. In all this advice for women, men did not have to anything to improve the situation.

Savvy was the spirited, feisty and bindaas one. It carried a story of a person (usually a high profile achiever) who had gone through the highs and lows of life (her husband beat her, her husband was an alcoholic, her husband was cheating on her, her husband was asking for too much dowry or all of the above). The story continued - how she felt guilty, then left her husband and now has found happiness. It was here where one learnt about the sordid details about the lives of our celebrities. Savvy’s advice was – when in doubt -leave. If nothing else you will be guaranteed a cover on our magazine. Again, since men were villains they could not help make the world a better place.

Of course men had no such choices. They had to make do with Debonair or Gentlemen that had a lot of skin show but no advice. Is it the case that we did not need any advice then? Or now for that matter?

Ash Abhishek and the unbearable set of expectations from Amitabh Bachchan

In a well-argued column Mrinal Pande has presented a case that the way the marriage of the decade has been conducted sets a wrong example for our country.

This argument now being articulated many magazines, newspapers and sites goes as follows: That Amitabh being a national icon, son of famed poet etc. should not be doing such things. People look up to him and therefore if he were to encourage behaviour like getting Ash married to a tree this will only reinforce retrograde rituals within society.

I have had my fun during the whole time. A couple of times I howled with laughter too. However two points need to be made to all the media commentators and intellectuals etc.

One is that Amitabh never claimed that he was a progressive person. All his actions have pointed to him being a conservative patriarch living in the 19th century. Including naming his grand daughter Navya Naveli (Please!!!!) .

His daughter had an arranged love marriage (depends on which version you believe) and his wife stopped working when she married. (You could argue it was her decision but if every act can be argued out then we could also defend slavery). And the countless trips to temples donating money & other things to please gods (127 and counting till 2006). Why are the critics surprised now?

The other point is that what Amitabh is doing is not new. People have been doing this for centuries and he is not setting a new trend. We all know of an aunt or a cousin who had to marry a tree or visit 51,000 temples to overcome some dosha.

What the media should have done is criticized all their activities staring from the first temple they visited in November 2006. They should taken a stand then.

What I’m worried is how come no one is criticizing the wedding outfits that the family was wearing. Who in his right mind would wear that? Is that a curtain cloth or did his table cover get mixed up with his suits ? Of course come wedding season in November a lot of aunties and uncles will order them for their families. I guess that’s one thing I would like to haul Mr. Bachchan to the Court of God for. That is, if He exists. (God not Mr. Bachchan)