What’s so funny, girl?
I’m a little baffled when people say feminists have no sense of humour. I’d be less surprised if someone told me feminists laugh too much. To me feminism is not the reasoned explanation that follows after I’ve stopped laughing. It is the reason I’m laughing. However, I do sympathise with male and female amateurs who...
Porn At The End Of the Rainbow
THE MOMENT in which your innocent sex tape turns into porn is the moment when English news channels talk with long faces about privacy and the Hindi channels, with less long faces, use variations of the phrase ‘zaleel harkat’. Until that moment, the sex tape1 was something you made one bored afternoon or slightly drunken...
Before you slutwalk, please kneel
A FORTNIGHT AGO, Umang Sabharwal, a 20-yearold journalism student caught the global wave of SlutWalks (12 since April 2011) and decided to organise one in Delhi. Umang is now in the strange position of having to answer for the state of Indian women. She has also to submit to the self-appointed committees that want her...
Sex, Lies and Homework
IN BENGALURU, the staff of a large old-fashioned Catholic school for boys clutched their heads when they found a 9-year-old distributing porn. “There was a picture for every sexual position,” said the young counsellor called in to talk to the class. He was both shocked and amused. His shock was largely reserved at the elaborate...
The Malayali Man
N A COUNTRY as diverse as ours, communities survive on stereotypes of the ‘other’. It’s a way of classifying and ordering an otherwise anarchic world. In this wealth of comforting pre-judgments, the vein of Malayali stereotypes is particularly golden, replete with two-line jokes and an accent everyone imagines they can imitate. Scratch an Indian lightly...
Why Indian Men are Still Boys
A FEW YEARS AGO, a group of young men, all Bengaluru- based lawyers, were asked who bought their underwear. Their answer bears out the seemingly arbitrary nature of this intrusion. Of the five men, all in their late twenties, all wellgroomed and intelligent, all given to the unconventional in their personal and political lives, only...
Famila
Today seems like a good day to post this here. Everyone remembers with great clarity the first time they met Famila or the first conversation they had with her. A filmmaker friend says with mild embarrassment that she remembers the way, the exact way, in which the light was falling on Famila’s face the first...
The Pink Chaddi Campaign
Join us on February 14, Valentine’s Day, the day in which Indian women’s virginity and honour will self-destruct unless they marry or tie a rakhi. Walk to the nearest pub and buy a drink. Raise a toast to the Sri Ram Sena or to Indian women if you prefer. But before that join us as...
Prop 8 the musical and in Kathmandu
You’d be surprised how hummable “You can stone your wife and sell your daughter into slavery!” is. And in Kathmandu they do things differently.
People I am smitten by: Rachel Maddow
P, the search for a non-angsty dyke is over. Rachel Maddow, funny, charming, Rhodes scholar. She did her undergraduate thesis on the change ‘in the perception of AIDS patients from “the other” to “one of us”’. She stalled her Oxford Phd to work in an AIDS project in a London slum. And yo, she is...
Fellowship of the ring
So for a couple of weeks my colleague Uzma Mohsin and I have been trailing after women boxers. We started in Kolkata and ended in Guwahati where 35 women were in the national camp before the Asian Women’s Championship. Uzma’s photos are quite extraordinary for which you really should get last week’s Tehelka but my...
