For those of you who can decipher it (hint: think James Bond-ish), the news is that M and Q are getting married.

Heroin-ism

I was trying to get hot toast out of the sandwich toaster without burning my hand, when A said, “Why don’t you use a spoon?”, and gave me one. She went on, “I know, we all want to be superheroes with things like this – and then we end up with burnt fingers.”

It’s true. I’m generally quite un-daring – keeping out of trouble is always better than any heroine-giri, isn’t it? I walk on the footpath if there is one, otherwise well on the side of the road. I look right, left, right – some three times – before crossing, thus resisting all attempts by my well-meaning but misguided friends to get me run over on the street. I don’t drive, thus avoiding a whole set of other heroine-ness-es.

But put me in a kitchen, and my inner superheroine, or silly child, if you will, seems to wake up. When I first tried to turn the roti on the tawa with my fingers (like all the cool North Indian cook-types do), I burnt them. Both the roti and my fingers, I mean. Did that stop me? I just did it a couple of times till I got the knack of it. A-ha. The first time I saw an unfamiliar-type pattakara (that’s tongs, for you philistines. There are two kinds), did I ask someone else to take the dal out of the cooker? No, I looked at the pattakara, opened it, closed it, and managed to get the dal  out. On to the floor, mostly, but that was because the dish slipped out of the tongs after I’d gotten it out of the cooker and before I put it down on the counter. Scalded my feet, that time.

Or just the other day, when I decided to pick up the hot kadhai (it has handles on the sides, plastic ones) with one hand, instead of both, and instinctively put my fingers out to steady it. All because I wanted to pick up a dish to empty the kadhai into with the other hand.

Or draining rice that mysteriously has more water in it than usual (I swear I put two cups of water in before I put it in the cooker, and it came out with the rice cooked to a mush, and about two cups of water floating on top) using one of those hole-full shallow steel tray-thingies, holding it in one hand, and pouring the rice/water into it with the other. That one didn’t result in an accident – I’ve done it before, and learnt to do it without hurting myself.

Now, what was it I was saying? Yeah - heroine-giri. The kitchen is not the safest place for it.

Conversation

I walked out of the Library Block looking for a colleague. This Hon’ble High Court Judge (the hon’ble, henceforth) whom I don’t know from Adam looked at me, smiled, and

The Hon’ble: So, what are you doing?

Me: Oh, hello. I was looking for [colleague], actually.

The Hon’ble: {colleague] is here only (points).

Me: Thank you

The Hon’ble: But what are you doing?

Me: huh?

The Hon’ble: What are you doing here?

Me: Um, I’m a consultant on the faculty

The Hon’ble: What consultation do you give?

Me: I do pretty much the same work as [colleague] actually (try to move away)

The Hon’ble: You are also a law graduate?

Me: Yes

The Hon’ble: From where you did your law?

Me: The [alma mater], sir. I also have a Masters from [pretty small town in the UK] and taught at [middleofnowhere] for a couple of years

The Hon’ble: You girls no, all of you. You go to the best colleges and then, instead of slogging in the courts you take the easy option and go for teaching.

…

Colleague is male. Director is male. The resource persons for the programme the hon’ble was here for were all male.

‘Nuff said.

Of precedents and research

The HT (why I take the HT is a sad, sad story worth its own post, which I promise I will write) today on Page 5 has this article.

In an extraordinary judgement, the Supreme Court has said that a man accused of rape can be convicted solely on the basis of the victim’s testimony even without any evidence to corroborate the allegations.

Please note it’s called an “extraordinary judgement”. 

A quick search of the Supreme Court’s judgements in the past ten years for rape and corroboration threw up 46 results. A few quotes at random:

There is no rule of law that her  testimony cannot be acted [upon] without  corroboration  in material  particulars.

- State of Rajasthan v. N.K., 30/3/2000

It is now well-settled that conviction for an offence of rape can be based on the sole testimony of prosecutrix  corroborated  by  medical evidence  and  other circumstances  such  as the report of  chemical  examination etc.   if  the same is found to be natural, trustworthy  and worth  being relied on.  If the evidence of the prosecutrix inspires  confidence, it must be relied upon without seeking corroboration  of her statement in material particulars.

- State of Himachal Pradesh v. Gian Chand, 01/05/2001

The testimony of the victim of sexual assault is vital unless there are compelling reasons which necessitate looking for corroboration of her statement, the courts should find no difficulty in acting on the testimony of a victim of sexual assault alone to convict an accused where her testimony inspires confidence and is found to be reliable.

State of HP v. Asha Ram, 17/11/2005

There are cases as early as 1954 in which the court has held that you need corroboration of the evidence of an accomplice. And that the prosecutrix (howIhatethatword) is not an accomplice. I do wish papers wouldn’t publish such crap.

Does Bhadra Sinha realise, I wonder, what it means to say that it is ‘extraordinary’ that the courts will accept that a rape survivor is speaking the truth? It’s not. The law requires rape survivors to be believed. A rape trial is traumatic, but the law does not deem a survivor a liar. The HT seems to, though.

Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na

Spoilers galore, be warned!

Yeah, I managed to watch it even in the CityOfNoMovies. And yes, it’s very well made. It works.

‘cept. There’s a squeaky wheel, see? I only see/hear it because I’ve taken the red pill, maybe. I’ve been reading a bit on the construction of masculinity recently, especially the role of violence in the construction of masculinity. And so, for me, the primary narrative in the movie, alongside the story of Rats and Meow, was that of Rats “becoming a man”. To become a man in the tradition of his family, Rats has to beat up someone (haddi pasdi ek karna), ride a horse, and go to jail. And the climax of the movie is when he does all three, and gets the girl in the process. (And this leads to the discovery that the hyper-macho jerks whom we see earlier in the movie are his cousins, help him with his task, and turn out to be ‘good guys’).

The ‘becoming a man’ tack is not new, neither is the association of violence with masculinity. In fact, I can’t offhand think of a movie I’ve seen that doesn’t do the violence = masculinity equation. We build violence into masculinity , we punish ‘effeminacy’ in a man, and then we try to tackle domestic violence by legislating against it. If, to become a man, one has to own violence, if to avoid it is to renounce all the privileges of manhood, and if one of those privileges is superiority over not-man, over woman and over child, is it surprising that the primary means of asserting privilege becomes violence?

As promised

So, when I finished puking over Splitsvilla, I started thinking this post out. Why was it so offensive? Was it the shallowness? Well, it’s a TV show, how deep can it be? Was it because it was a show about girls making up to guys so as to ’survive’? Bingo!

The show’s basically the patriarchy, stripped of its veil of respectability or acceptability or tolerability (depending on your attitude to the patriarchy!) What is the patriarchy? Let me direct you to  the Hon’ble Twisty, who says:

patriarchy is a violently tyrannical but nearly invisible social order based on an oppressive paradigm of class and status fetishizing dominance and submission.

Excellent. If you want details, go to Feminism 101.

Now, one of the cornerstones of how society is organised in the patriarchy, is the control of women’s bodies. You see, as one of my profs in college so eloquently put it, maternity is fact, and paternity is reputation. So the only way to establish and ensure constant paternity is to control how a woman’s body can be used. And to only allow a woman’s body o be used (a) for the pleasure of men and (b) at the pleasure of men.

And that’s what most of our society still does – works to establish and ensure that control of men over women.

Now let’s look at Splitsvilla again. See it? The girls exist in that villa at the pleasure of the boys. They exist to please the boys. They survive only if they please the boys. And what are they supposed to use to please the boys? Sex.

It clicks, doesn’t it?

Has anyone else seen

a show called Splitsvilla on TV? I refuse to link to the site – it’s supremely gag-inducing, and I wouldn’t subject the five people who still read this blog to something like it.

The show has twenty girls and two guys, and the girls are supposed to compete for the attention of the boys. The ones left over after the boys ‘eliminate’ the others, I guess, ‘win’.

This is just so wrong on so many levels, I can’t even start to write about it. Not right now, anyway - I need to go puke. But go on, if you want to put in a comment or two while I read a rape judgement to make me feel better. I’ll be back.

Slowly

Shakespeare told a story once, about star-crossed lovers. Remember?

Milton told one too, apparently – about heaven and hell, and the creation of man (and yes, woman)!

So, I’m going to tell one too – just not on that scale. Or that beautifully.

Because this is not complex, let us call it the story of the snail. Have you seen a snail? They’re surprisingly slimy, by our standards. And not as slow as you’d think, either. And if you look closely enough, the pattern on the shell is very-very-pretty. You can lose yourself in it, almost. There’s also some mathematical thingy to it – something about pies, or was it tarts? No, it was pies – that tarts were in another story. Yes, yes, a naughty one. Shush, now.

So, a story about a snail, and its epic journey. Oh, didn’t I say the epic journey bit earlier? Well, it is. A journey that was epic, embarked upon by a snail. That’s what this story is about.

Now, snails’ journeys are different from ours, as you may imagine. For one thing, they don’t need to pack. I mean, really. Depending on where I’m going, for how long, and what I expect to do there, among other things, the complexity of packing varies, doesn’t it? And the most complex packing is where one manages to leave behind the essentials. Like toothbrushes, or underwear. But snails, they don’t need to pack to go on a journey. Nor do they need to think of acco. Most official trips suck because of the acco – either someone has made arrnagements and they suck and you can’t change them because of protocol, or they were supposed to and they forgot, or no one bothered because you’re too far down the food chain and you found out only after the meeting ended at ten p.m. Shucks! Snails, now, they carry shelter on their backs. How nice is that?!

And then, there is the noise. I know we make a lot of noise when we go on trips – not us ourselves, but whatever we’re travelling in, you know? The cars or buses or trains or aeroplanes, whatever they might be. They’re noisy. But have you ever heard the noise a snail makes? You can hardly ever hear it on mud – it tracks slime and stuff, and ‘coz it’s really small, it doesn’t make a lot of noise by our standards. And of course, it doesn’t use cars and buses and trains and aeroplanes (I’m pretty sure), so there that is.

But have you ever heard a snail travelling across glass? Across your window, to be specific? Happens in spring. Or the beginning of the monsoons, sometimes. Have you heard it? It’s like nails across a blackboard. Or when a piece od chalk has a bit of sand in it and scratches across a blackboard. Except this goes in a regular pattern, see, and that makes it more irritating, if anything. I can’t even say it, it’s that irritating.

So this snail’s epic journey, it was across glass, you see. A rather large piece of glass for a snail, actually, but not so large for us. The size of a medium-sized window. In fact, it was a medium-sized window – mine. Yeah mine. My office window. Behind me, as I sit at my desk, and on my right if I’m at my computer. And there was that noise. The snail was travelling across my window.

Of course, it was on the outside, so I couldn’t just pick it up and put it where it was going. The outside of my window isn’t actually inaccessible, it’s just difficult to access. Especially when it’s been raining and the ground is wet and mushy. Not the best thing to try in a white churidar.

So the snail’s epic journey. I don’t know where it was going, or from whence it came. I don’t know why it made that epic journey. I know it took it all day, though - as long as there was sunlight, actually. I even know it slipped, badly, three times. And I know I went mad with the scritching on my window – why else would I be writing this?

Does (your mom) work?

Now there’s a question that should put me off once and for all, isn’t it? I mean, if you don’t think of domestic care work as work, I will have to find a way, a place and a time, and the energy, to explain to the asker why that question is phrased wrongly. And then probably endure a lecture on how I shouldn’t be soooo… weird!

My mom’s always ‘worked’, so I guess I must have asked her at some point what the women who didn’t ‘work’ did all day. And because I was too young to know better, my mom must’ve spent the time and the energy to explain to me that they did work, only it was unseen, unpaid work, and so people didn’t refer to it as work.

It’s bugged me for as long as I can remember, this treatment of domestic, unpaid, (mostly) care work, as not work at all. It’s responsible for the “Second Shift“, which I’ve seen, thought about and discussed endlessly with my friends. It’s responsible for policy distortions, for example, in Tax Law. Which I started thinking about when I was in law school, and have had endless fun with in class. Which, I hope, I will not have to work. (Yes, and that’s why I am so judgemental of people who ask that question. The political, it so happens, is personal.)

And today I read this, via Feministe, about how difficult it is to get work-related rights for domestic work even when it is paid for and regulated. And the fact that household work has shifted into the hands of low-income, and in this particular case, non-white women, is the reason why there’s so much reluctance to secure these rights. After all, as Ms. Herrera says “They never think we are humans”

 

Colours

“Is love a colour, painter?”, she asked me.

Love is brown, the brown of wet earth and chocolate. It’s green, sometimes, the green of little shoots springing out of pots. It’s blue, grey and dark; the blue of a cloudy sky holding back the sun. It could be yellow, surprisingly yellow like the living-room frog. Love could be the indescribable colour of the bird trying to build its muddy nest above my front door, or the nameless brightness of the butterfly that fluttered onto my nose (well, almost!) this morning. It could be the rusty red of the cliffside that lines the path home, or the shiny silver of a raindrop as it falls to earth.

Is love a colour?

I smiled and shook my head no.