Hating or loving Dangal?

A few days I had an email conversation with a friend of mine on the movie Dangal. She said she hated the movie for the following reason:

Mr Phogat, played by Aamir Khan, foists his wrestling dreams on his daughters. While the girls go on to excel at the sport, this does not take away from the fact that Mr Phogat is undoubtedly a patriarchal figure, who actually may need therapy over his unresolved issues, my friend says.

I could understand her line of reasoning, but I presented some counterpoints:

If you switch wrestling with, say, academic excellence, which would certainly ring a bell with most of the audience, then you would not have a movie. (Actually, academic excellence may be the wrong term. It's just acing the exams that we are after.)

For, that's what it is about: your parent making your career choices for you and making you bring their dreams to reality. 

Yet, there's also a few other things to consider here: there comes a point in the movie where the girls realize they are privileged for having wrestling as a career option as compared to a life of domesticity. Here's where they stop pushing back and own their father's dream. Of course, you may ask what choice do they have? 

But if we do find joy and meaning in what we are doing, does it matter so much how we came unto that choice? Does it matter that there were other roads (worn out though they maybe)?

Thing is, yes if Phogat weren't in rural Haryana, he should have been consulting a shrink. Or, if he was asking his daughters to ace the JEE exams. But because he is in rural Haryana where female-male ratio is one of the lowest in the country, the choices he makes for his daughters definitely make him swim against the mainstream, and thereby qualify him to be a hero. 

Yes, he is making the decisions for his daughters, but would feminists be happy if he were not to? That is, if he were to just accept that wrestling was not for his daughters and married them away? 

If you remove the particular circumstances of a story, you end up with a controlled environment. But then all human reality would more or less be the same, removing perhaps the necessity for art and its criticism.

Dangal can be looked at from the alternative education viewpoint, too and you would arrive at much the same points and counterpoints. Phogat’s way of parenting is very much mainstream, parent-led rather than being child-led.

But does the outcome justify the means? Again, this is not an easy question to answer. For, if it were just mainstream academics that the father was pushing the girls into, the answer would be straightforward enough. However, in rural Haryana, if Phogat hadn’t exposed his girls to another possible world for them, they would have hardly had a chance at life, much less sporting excellence. How would the girls know what they had in them if their father hadn’t shoved them into the akhada?

But does that validate the rat race Indian parents enter their children in, with the justification that they know what’s best? Hardly, I’d say. Still, this movie does pose some tricky questions.

Oggarane misses an opportunity

Oggarane is a step above the usual Kannada movie fare, but I would stop short of calling it unusual. It did have the potential to be better than it is, though.

It starts to be a movie on mature love, but mid-way it can’t resist the temptation of mixing it up with the song-and-dance routine that must accompany young love on screen. The use of the food motif, too, could have been carried throughout.

What irritated me were the different ways in which the significance of marriage is portrayed for the leading man (Prakash Raj) and woman (Sneha Prasanna). For the man, it is a simple need for companionship but for the woman it is loaded with vulnerability. For God’s sake, man, when will we get rid of this clichéd crying of the lone, unmarried woman? Do people who write up these storylines even know that the majority of women in India are actually breadwinners in their family? And, I am not even talking of white-collared professionals, but the women that you see at construction sites, in the fields, and on the roadside. The husbands of most of these women have either abandoned them or spend their days in a drunken, wife-beating haze.

As a cub journalist, I once came across a village in rural Bangalore district, where I met so many abandoned women that I was tempted to give a hackneyed title to the story such as ‘The village of abandoned women’.
And, that’s for the utterly poor.

Then, there are the self-supporting professional women of the middle class who are in a discreet way made to feel inferior to their married peers, in spite of being achievers in their work lives and leading fulfilling personal lives. Is marriage the way to nirvana for women, while just being an emotional option to the man? Sheer nonsense. Most of us do feel the need for companionship at some point in life, but everyone need not and does not seek it out in the same way.

The other WTF moment was when the caricatured gay character in the movie tells the leading lady that she must act decisively and not miss an opportunity to land Rai. He hints that he’s still single because God erred in deciding his fate (that is, his being gay is a mistake). At this point, I began to doubt if the people who made this movie live in this real world. If the director frowns upon homosexuality, why even have a gay character in the movie? Just for a few laughs? How is that even fair?

What has stayed with me from the movie is the below song by my favourite singer, Kailash Kher, and the fact that product placement has firmly made its way to Kannada movies. Otherwise, it’s an easily forgettable flick.

Why should we have to choose

My generation of mothers is not the first one to have a full-time job and raise a family. I can’t speak with any authority of what their work-life balance looked like. This post is only about Indian mothers like me in this day and age, who live in cities, are looking up in their careers, and want to be always there for their children. In short, those who do not want to be forced to make a choice between work and womb.

I have seen our types tackle work and motherhood in about three typical ways:

1. Give up job as soon as they become mothers or even get pregnant.
2. Hold on to a part-time job and become full-time mothers.
3. Neither give up job nor motherhood and come to resemble a full-time circus.

I belong to the third group. My child is now two years and three months old and the worst seems to be over, in terms of sleep-deprived nights at least. And, though I willingly continued working full-time after my maternity leave, I’d be lying if I said I never thought of giving up the job or at least consider a part-time option. It took all the grit I could muster to get to work day-after-day, irrespective of how the night had been and how my own health was. And I didn’t feel that gritty or that inspired every day.

The silver lining was my child herself. She is a remarkably manageable kid and made it as smooth as possible for me, but it only went so far. Yet, I am grateful as she could have easily been more difficult.

I work from home for an American company, which had its pros and cons for me, the new mother. I was technically always around the baby, if she needed me. Initially, within the first year, this worked quite well, but as soon as she started to talk and crawl around, she’d ask for me and this would tug at my heart. Working for an American company also meant that I had to devote evenings for calls with my colleagues. So, in the morning, I would be busy with the baby. I’d start work at noon or so, go on up till dinner time, then take over the baby from the family, and immediately post-dinner start the lullaby routine. As my daughter reached the 1-year milestone, she seemed to keep awake for longer and putting her to sleep in the night could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours! On tougher days and there were quite a few of them, I had to put in an hour or two of work, after she went to sleep.

Yes, I had my family to support me but as anyone who has relied on family will know that it’s not like professional help. That is, you can’t ask them to follow the schedule you want and have to accommodate their need for rest and non-baby time, too. For the working mother, of course, there is no down-time, except for 5-6 hours at night at best.

I can hear all those mothers out there who did get professional help in India and learned that it was hardly professional, after all. And, this is where Indian working mothers are severely handicapped from their Western counterparts. Of course, not all help in the US or UK is great and when they are, they come at very high prices.

But in India, at least as far as my own experience goes, it’d be highly risky to leave your baby under two years under the full-time care of a stranger with no family member around. Unsurprisingly, mothers choose the well-being of their kids and give up the job. Work-from-home options are few and far between and even when they are, they rarely match up to the pay and perks of a cubicle job.

My situation has made me think of why there are so few, quality childcare options in India and what employers are doing about it. It’s not that we don’t have playschools or cribs, but there are not enough good ones, in terms of security, cleanliness, nutritious food, trained teachers, and a teacher-child ratio of not more than 10 children per teacher. At least, not that everyone is aware of. And, if you want childcare at home, you hardly have a choice with the ayah the agency is going to send you. In an earlier generation, the domestic help would double up as daycare provider, but that’s not to be counted on today.

Why don’t we see some start-up energy in this service? I feel there's immense scope for a company that provides professional childcare, full information of their staff and lets you choose and then rate them in a transparent way? Or an app that lets you compare childcare facilities available in your city? I know that a few employers in India provide crib facilities at the workplace and offer flexible work options, but why aren’t there many more? (NASSCOM seems to have a dedicated report on the topic, but it’s behind a firewall.) Why doesn’t it become a norm than stay something fancy that only a few women can avail of?

Many women in all classes of society have to leave their homes and work for a livelihood. They have often no one but their in-laws or parents to care for their children. Those who don’t have this support often disappear from the workforce. This report that I found rightly says this is not a problem with ramifications only for the productivity of India’s workforce, but that of the world’s, as many of the white-collar jobs that Indian women do are actually for global companies. Perhaps we can never dream of anything like the family-friendly policies of Nordic countries, when our country is supposed to have a surplus of workforce, but let’s not forget that by losing women, we lose highly skilled communicators, multi-taskers, problem solvers, and the possibilities of varied viewpoints.

All the education, rigorous training and competing with men comes to naught, if childcare is not provided. Do we have a discussion of these problems in feminist studies? If anyone knows, please enlighten me. Because, this really is the problem of the educated, middle-class, modern Indian woman. 

I am back (hopefully)

My last post on my blog was long, long ago. Blogging was one of the casualties of me graduating into more responsible positions, personally and professionally. To some extent, Facebook is responsible, too. Before motherhood, managerial positions, and social media, I was a creator of content. I would react to news, trends in society that concerned issues close to my heart.

Afterward, I only became a passive watcher on the bylines of social content creation, as I became busy getting my dal-roti and tending to a baby, while juggling late-evening conference calls, and managing a team virtually. I'll blog soon about what I have learned as a full-time employee and mom. I know that women out there in similar situations such as mine are always looking for some affirmation and encouragement - at least, I did.

I am now hoping to make a blogging comeback. The posts may be shorter, but they'll appear with some regularity.

Is sex sexist? And, is something wrong with what women study?

Does heterosexual sex necessarily involve subjugation of women?

Is the feminist movement toothless or even unnecessary today?

If women can’t reach the same professional heights as men, is it because they studied the wrong subjects in school?


These are some of the questions being currently discussed in Germany as a result of a public spat between feminist and author, Alice Schwarzer (left), and the minister for families, pensioners and women, Kristina Schröder.

To me, it seems Schwarzer is looking at how child birth often pushes the woman out of economic production. Because, the value of reproduction, the value of a woman’s time and effort in reproducing a human being is still unaccounted for, taken for granted. Corporations myopically question what they are to gain from the reproductional function of women. But then they are quite adept at conveniently pretending they operate in a social vacuum, when it suits them to do so.

It is only in few countries like Sweden where mothers receive huge support in terms of maternity leave and childcare facilities. Other countries, even developed ones, are still dilly-dallying about what they should be doing for working mothers.

About the second question, it reminds of me something that happened in the first year of living in Kolkata. I was looking out of my office window when I saw some CPM cadres march by, shouting “Inquilab Zindabad!” I asked my boss what they were revolting against, what was their agenda, what was the revolution in the 21st century about? My boss, a CPM loyalist, was very offended and said something about keeping the spirit of revolution alive.

A movement loses fizz when its goals are reached or its members get compromised. Have the feminist movement’s goals been reached? Clearly, no. And, when I say no, it’s not only about how even competent women find it difficult to become the CEO of their company, but the ingrained, implicit, and often explicit violence that women are conditioned to bear and even propagate. So, have we women been compromised? Or, been led to believe that all’s well as long as we match up to men.

I sometimes think in terms of the three generations in my family: my grandmother worked shoulder to shoulder with my grandfather in the fields, cooked for him, and raised a family of nine kids.

My mother had to struggle to get through college, not because she could not afford it, but because it was not she who decided things in her life.

In my life, it seems however, that most important decisions are mine. Yet, when I peer at them, I find quite a few of them to be the result of conditioning so strong that I don’t even realise they are not mine.

Yet, the differences between my grandmother’s life and mine are profound. And, both she and my mother have always dinned it into me how important it is to a woman to have her own source of income.

To me, feminism is not about being equal to a man. It is about being recognized and treated as a human being. It is about being able to decide for myself. It is about being able to reach my potential unhindered by my gender. And, I recognize that a lot of these freedoms hinge on who controls the purse strings. Not that an economically independent woman is not exploited, but she can afford to negotiate terms better.

And, about Schroeder’s statement on women’s under-performance being linked to the subjects they studied, I, like Schwarzer, must say that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

When you don't do anything, do it in a sari

This graphic adorned The Telegraph’s front page a couple of days ago. In response to protests by women’s organizations, the paper’s reply was:

"For some months now, Bengal has looked like a state without an administration. Friday’s bandh and the unchecked vandalism on its eve further demonstrated the lack of will on the administration’s part to enforce the law.

In yesterday’s paper, the five top administrators were depicted as men in saris to illustrate the paralysis of government draped in humour.

Some of our readers and others have taken affront, seeing in it an assumption that women are weak. It is possible some may have associated the administrators in the graphic with women, which was not the intention of the visual device at all. We are sorry if the graphic gave that impression.

Some others have, however, expressed appreciation of the political message we sought to communicate and the humour.

The Telegraph practises gender equality. It also believes that women have long grown beyond stereotypes as the weaker sex in saris. Sonia Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee are just two examples of women in positions of strength. There are a million other unknown women — in saris or business suits — in whose daily shows of strength we rejoice in the pages of our newspaper. We hope our readers will see the Gang of Five in Saris in that context.

We also hope despite all its divisions, true to 19th century poet Ishwar Gupta’s words — Eto bhanga Bangadesh, tobu range bhara — Bengal still enjoys a good laugh."

As somebody said on Facebook, the explanation is worse than the original deed.

Now, if we assume, for a nano-second, that it was not The Telegraph’s intention to equate saris and thereby women with paralysis/immobility/sickness/weakness, will the paper then enlighten us on what was?

This was on the front page, so a lot of thought must have gone into it. Probably, an entirely editorial meeting or, at least, a discussion between the top editors. So, what exactly were they thinking when they did this? It’d be disgusting to know, but I’d still hear them out on how they’d defend such a primitive mode of thinking.

If not for saris, they’d have shown the five men wearing bangles, perhaps?

And, of course, Bengal will have a good laugh at this incredibly creative, path-breaking, out-of-the-box visual. I, for one, almost fell out of my chair laughing. They are too much man.

After all, this trendy unputdownable paper employs a lot of women, you see, so their gender-sensitive credentials are proven beyond doubt.

Just for curiosity sake, when the venerable editors of this paper were gleefully debating with their designer on whether the Gang of Five should wear this or that sari, and showing shock and surprise at the ruin Bengal has fallen into in the last few months (!!!!!! This is unbeatable, side-splitting humour. Way to go, TT!), did they call the administration a bunch of fatherfuckers, bhaichod, etc?

Am just curious, that’s all.

We are always asking for it. Men, beware!

This comes about 2-3 weeks late; no excuses for the delay. I simply have to catch up on my blogging. I had written down some thoughts when I heard of the American student's rape in Mumbai:

Going by what some people had to say on prime time TV about the TISS American student rape, and going by everything that I have come across till date, we women folk always seem to be asking for IT.

We wear a chudidar, we ask for it.

We wear a saree-blouse, we ask for it.

We wear figure-hugging jeans and low cut t-shirt, yeah, we are craving for it.

We wear clothes that show more than hide, you bet, we are most definitely asking for it.

‘It’ can range from men leching their brains out, being groped, whistled at, elbow-to-breast bumped, being told downright insulting things, molested, and being plain raped.

This American student went out with a friend at 10.30 in the night. (When I was in Mumbai for a short time, I saw that this was a pretty common thing: I’d see families coming back from Juhu beach with sand in their slippers and colourful balloons in their hands at 1 or 2 in the night.)

After some pubbing, she went to the flat of a person, who was friends with her friend. There were other men, too, by this time. According to a girl on TV today, she should not have done this, that is, going to the flat. Another aunty said that she should not have gone out at all at that hour.

Yeah, of course, she shouldn’t have. She went to the flat, perhaps because her friend was one of the men; perhaps because she was tipsy, sloshed, and wanted to cool it off; perhaps because she didn’t know she was about to be gang-raped.

But she should have known better, shouldn’t she, than to be the only woman – that too white – around 5 or 6 depraved Indian men, for whom a drinking, pub-going woman who then accompanies them to a flat in the middle of the night can only send out one message: am here for the taking, the raping, murdering, etc.

Am not even talking here about what some men may have to say about why they think they can rape women. No time for that shit.

But what enrages me is the attitude of those women on TV. I don’t expect them to side with the American student just because they are women. For the same reason, I cannot accept them laying down rules for another woman.

If you wish to live your life wrapped up in a saree, or believe that distrust of men is a woman’s best weapon, that’s your prerogative. Don’t dump it on another woman.

I find this attitude very sick: these women do not see themselves as individual beings, independent existences. They have fallen in line, and expect others to. It’s a sad thing when the oppressed becomes the oppressor and doesn’t even realize it. I wish I had more time to write about this, but I must stop here.

Some related interesting links I found:

Sleepwalking no excuse for rape (Now, Indian men don’t need such lame excuses, do they? Women are asking for it all the time, you know.)

A feminist theory of rape defense

Would you report it if you were raped?

"....the landlord and his son tried to rape me. Somehow I managed to get away. I didn't report the incident to the police because, back in 1980, it was widely recognised that women who reported a sexual assault were usually seen as liars.

....In 1982, a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Police: A Complaint of Rape, showed a rape complainant being interviewed by police. The police officers were shown bullying a woman into discontinuing her complaint against three men.

...Despite improvements, there remains a culture within the police that assumes that women who report rape are lying. One study found that a third of police assumed that at least a quarter of all reports were false. Research actually suggests, though, that numbers of false allegations of rape are no higher than for any other crime. Assumptions of false allegations are plainly dangerous. One case discontinued by police as a "false allegation" involved a man who turned out to be a serial sex attacker."

Guess which country's police system are we talkin about?