Even if we do accept the Hon.Minister’s explanation, there is something really wrong with this picture, in my humble opinion. The caption boldly asks “Where would you be if your mother was not allowed to be born?” And accompanying it are pictures of four men! The makers of the ad, whoever they are, were broadminded enough to include the picture of a man from a neighbouring country, but for some unfathomable reason were unable to find one female achiever to feature in the ad purportedly for the welfare of the girl child.

Uncommon sense  says  that :

Domestic violence against men by their spouse rarely come out in the open due to some obvious reason. A man wouldnt go out and tell the world, or say to his friends, or other relatives that his wife beats the hell out of him. The men are in a situation similar to sexually abused children, they are not able to speak about it. If there are violent men so are there violent women and the feminist ignore this angle completely as a matter of fact i would say, women are more wicked than men on an average.

Human selfishness draws boundaries

Not leaping streams

Not forests or waterfalls

Who can say whence

come the clouds bringing rain here!

[...] Although this isn’t a feminist poem in the strictest sense, I’m drawn to it because of my fascination for people whose imagination blurs boundaries.  Like that nameless narrator in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the little boy whose imaginative universe extends far beyond the Calcutta he grows up in, while for his globe-trotting cousin, the world is a series of airports.

Hope she does more of these.

She stopped in front of the police station but found herself unable to go in and lodge a complaint. She knew that all those who were in there to ‘protect society’ were men. Men like the ones she had tried to push off herself as they lunged themselves onto her. Men who had no respect for their own mothers and sisters. Men who had lust in their eyes. She walked to the nearest pharmacy and considered buying tablets that could spare her parents the disgrace that they would have to face if she went home. Instead, she bought herself a pack of Band-Aids and tried concealing the bruises that were visible to the public eye.

Anand Teltumbde recalls his association with his ‘dearest friend and comrade’:

I knew Balagopal since 1980s and admired him for his sharp intellect and deep commitment to human rights. Not many in the movement knew that he was a brilliant mathematician and could have easily shone himself in the galaxy of great mathematicians of the country. However, he easily gave it up and threw himself into the movement to expose the spate of human rights violations by the state to crush the then CPI (ML) PWG movement. He rather studied law in order to equip himself to fight cases of human rights violations more effectively.

Most times he acted as a one-man army against the state and rushed to the spot of such a state crime by whatever means. We used to be always worried for his safety for he could be individually marked to be most responsible for causing embarrassment to the state in its diabolic mission. Many a time, he did face such moments of danger but nothing deterred him from his resolve.

Jayati Ghosh says:

It is rare nowadays to come across people of unflinching and unquestionable integrity. It is even rarer to find in such people a strong sense of personal and intellectual honesty that demands that they interrogate their own actions and arguments with as much sincerity as they turn on others. And it is rarest of all to find such people engaged in public life, where they would constantly have to face the possibly unhappy consequences of such honesty.

Dr K. Balagopal, the eminent human rights activist whose untimely death has shocked a very wide range of people across India, was one such extremely rare person. While there is much else that can be said to praise him (such as his extraordinary commitment, his patient persistence, his personal courage, his completely selfless attitude to the causes he believed in and the simplicity of his manner of living) it may be that this special kind of honesty was at once his finest and most inconvenient attribute.

There are other tributes from activists and organizations.

Neha Bhat:
Madam, kitna charge karega?” ( “how much will you charge?”)
This is was my first experience of being mistaken for a sex worker and being approached outright at a bus stop. Was I leering? Was I ‘sexily’ dressed? Did I wink and gesture lewdly? No, all did was smile.
Maybe I didn’t smile at only the people I knew. Maybe I did make eye contact with a person to make the smile on my face evident. Are these things ‘wrong’?

What’s interesting is, there were male volunteers and their came varied reactions. Read the report on the fun experiment yourself. Here.

One of the pioneers of Women’s Studies in India, Prof. Neera Desai, passed away on 25th June 2009 in Mumbai. She was 84.

Prof. Neera Desai was the Founder Director of Research Centre for Women’s Studies (1974) at the SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai, India. She was among the first few women academicians in India who raised their voices against the invisibility of women within academic disciplines.

Her works include: ‘Women in Modern India’ (1952) and ‘Feminism in Western India’ (2004). She was a member of Status of Women in India Committee that produced TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT. in 1974, and was nominated for 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

This on the face of it seems like pretty sound explanation, so with a magic wand if we push the upper caste down the ladder, upper caste men lose their ‘manhood’ when their women are appropriated and humiliated, right? Any caste that finds itself at the bottom of things, will experience it, any human aggregation that finds itself stripped of its protection from civil society; such as during war and unrest, experiences this.

Substitute caste in that paragraph with war, and nothing changes.

The uniqueness of caste being that the forces keeps it in a war like exploitative situation. It must be the longest war in the history of mankind, and with that -the longest history of resistance. Dalits did not die out, that is the proof of their resistance and also proof of the pace at which the aggression keeps evolving.

For most of the Malayalees, Madhavikutty was a porn writer. Ask the common public, who couldn’t see the truly original soul that she was, about Madhavikutty and they would say, “I know, I know… she is the one who wrote “Ente Katha” (My Story – her autobiography), right?”. Ente Katha must be the most widely read autobiography in Kerala for it’s references to the experience of love and lust. Madhavikutty was true to herself in writing that book. Unlike most of the so-called social/cultural/literary icons, she did not try to glorify herself in her autobiography. She was honest and wrote what she experienced and felt. Madhavikutty was not a writer who wrote something pretentious in her works and lived off a personal life completely different.

A week ago, some of us ladies were unwinding there, on the corner tea stall. The boys had left for some work. We noticed a number of police around the place, but never paid them much heed. The next day, we return and find the make shift benches of the stall had been overturned and the proprietor informed by the police, to not allow women to do “unsocial” activities or it would cost him his business. Our offense? We were women sitting at a corner on the main road, drinking tea and occasionally smoking. And we wore shorts. So now we are forced to sit in the darkened park and it’s a risk to the stall owner if we call out aloud for cigarettes.

The dilemma is this: on the one hand, it is important that women have the right to abort as an inalienable right over their own bodies. On the other hand, to prevent the rampant killing of foetuses identified as female, the government has made such identification illegal. Then, is this equivalent to giving a woman only partial control over her womb? You may abort, but only for reasons that we approve of–is that what we are saying?

I am kind of curious about what he considers Research. Because what I see in the films is a sort of superficial accumulation of facts and episodes – very easily co-relatable to people alive and dead. Bhandarkar doesn’t seem to realize or engage with the idea that research brings us, not facts that we can neatly or forcibly fit into our moral grid – but leads us to an understanding of life, human nature and the contours of the particular context we are researching.

If he genuinely did research in that sense, he might end up making films that truly mirrored the ambiguities and compromises that each human being has to make with life in different ways – after all he chooses really interesting spaces to explore; and he might genuinely have been a commentator on our times. Instead he’s a sort of Rajat Sharma character – uttering selective facts laced with his own moral judgements and toxic neuroses until he’s built up a pulp fiction of black and black. He seems to look for only one side to everything – the seamy one. Having found it, since that’s all he’s looking for, he seems to sit back like a smug Little Jack Horner – a conqueror of reality, not an observer of it; one who has diminished reality by grinding it under his moralistic boot heel.

On her own blog, she has an inspired rant (and a half):

How can someone be so unempathetic? Oh well, I guess it’s easy if you’re a racist, homophobic misogynist. How can anyone write such a bad script in which plot point 1 is – Meghna smokes a cigarette – drums and synth full power AND Interval! Plot point 2 – Meghna has sex with – not 6 men, one dog and an anteater – But-with – a black man – silence on the track and then racing heart music. Meghna wastes a whole box of tissues trying to rub out her face. Is she worried that the mascara giving her raccoon eyes is man’s skin colour rubbing off on her perhaps? Breakdown happens.

And what is Madhur B’s problem with women who have sex by the way? What? All the women in the film who have sex come before a fall. The one who comes out smelling of roses (Janet/Mughda Godse) is the one who has a marriage of convenience/companionship with a gay man. Even when the gay man asks her to marry him he never says – hey, we can be married but you can have sex with other people or be in love with them or whatever you want. There is only one straight man in the film and he’s a bit of a jerkofsky – Arbaz Khan. So maybe Madhur B on the whole has a lot of discomfort with heterosexual sex? I don’t know.

*Personally, I think for this man ‘research=reading the ToI but what do I know?

IHT carried a very insightful article by Anand Giridharadas titled “A feminist revolution in India skips the liberation”. I would have posted excerpts, but the piece is worth reading in its entirety, so I suggest you make a quick detour to the IHT site before taking a deep breath (highly recommended) and plunging into my response.

Modernity involves more than sin. It demands irreverence. How many urban young women chop off their hair, or choose not to procreate, or dine out alone?

I’m glad I can say yes to all three! But I am still not sure that defines ‘liberation’.

For a feminist revolution to take place, Varali tries to convince you, there has to be a wider sense of rights and entitlement. Strong argument.

So, even as we speak of great development, we need to ask ourselves, “What is development?” Development to me may be the ability to communicate to the world using my Apple Mac laptop built and bought in California, while I stretch on the divan in my seaside home in Cuddalore in South India. Development to the fisherman, who is my neighbour, may on the other hand, mean the ability to feed his family every day. That would mean catching fish that are not bloated and poisoned by the many Chemical factories that have made Cuddalore, formerly a thriving fishing hub, one of the post polluted towns in the country.