Circles

We're walking on parallel sides of the road
In different directions, away from each other.

He turns suddenly
I can feel the little hairs at the nape of my neck bristle
as he changes the direction of the wind with him

He smiles at me and I can feel its warmth on my turned back.
It ends swiftly, this two-second love story.

I want both this and the infinite that will follow
but half-emotions is all we can hope for
in half-returned glances and half-empty glasses

And again one day
In the heat and dust of a busy city street
Maybe two others will meet the same fate
Maybe exactly where we stand today, or a few feet away

They will step into the molds we left behind
Of hearts flowing over.
And love being a silly metaphor for life

It will still be us, in a different time and space
Such is the inevitability and history of human fault.

Old Fears, New Spaces

It feels good to be a statistic. At least you feel like you’re part of the country—of the millions who were intimidated by some action that they never called for. While protesting or writing complex, jargon-y statements about women’s right to claim the streets, to walk unafraid of mental and physical attack and through the very act symbolise the legal freedom of being out ‘there’, I never once really understood the utter sham words can be.

And yet all I can do is write when a gentleman on a bike reaches out of his way to plant a sharp slap on my ass. No I didn’t ask for it. No it wasn’t the middle of the night (Even the prude eleven o’ clock Bangalorean curfew wouldn’t frown upon a 10 PM walk). No it wasn’t a dodgy, run-down part of town. It happened where I’m given to believe Bangalore’s elite live. No I wasn’t taking my chances with the night in a mini-skirt or hot pants. Just merely walking home from dinner in a “morally conducive” pair of jeans.

The appalling thing is that he actually stopped to check my reaction. Turned his head around to see what I would do. Too stunned to move, I couldn’t even swear at him. The slap had seemed disconcertingly familiar.

I’ve had my breasts peeked at, poked at, an unassuming hand graze across my ass. I’ve had boys in school wait under staircases and been stared at so hard it made it impossible to stay in one place for too long. I had never underestimated the violence of a gaze, but the sheer anger of being touched without consent is something much bigger than just anger. It’s an unlearning, a complete undermining of your person.

He had a yellow shirt on but that’s all I could tell. He was on a bike, his face half hidden by darkness and the other half by an ugly smirk. He was indistinguishable from the thousands of others who do this to thousands of other vulnerable women across the country. They often do much, much worse.

The ironic thing is that on the way back from work earlier, on a bus segregated by gender, I thought about the geography of misogyny and violence. And I realised there isn’t any. Once the son of a prominent cabinet minister had joked about how women only got raped in Delhi, in contrast to Gurgaon where they get murdered in addition to being raped. I thought the joke in very bad taste, but since we were being young and urban and self-consciously gender neutral in our friendships, I let it go.

I sat through a slew of insults against Delhi when I first moved to Bangalore. About how Delhi didn’t know how to treat its women, about how raping was a sadistic past-time there, about how ridiculous the Khap Panchayats were. As if Delhi was a monolithic kingdom that sacrificed women as part of a daily ritual. The truth is that people rape, abuse, harass, touch and pinch women in Delhi for the same reason that men in other parts of the country do: because they can get away with it. The helplessness of not being able to run after the bike, or it being too dark to check it’s make, were things not in my control. They’ll never be in my control when a hand reaches out from the back. From now on, in my mind, my geographies of violence will change. Familiar streets will grow vulnerable to the sheer audacity of men on bikes.

Statistics have history. So I learned when I called the most un-hysterical person I know: my mother. Tough as nails, my mother’s response to the rising incidents of assault and abuse in Delhi has never been to curtail my freedom. Typically, she heard me out calmly and offered a few ripe insults towards the biker to assuage my hurt. She then told me about how thirty years ago, as student in Miranda House, she had faced much of the same thing while walking to class. In her mind, the map of assault and insult consisted of a few streets in Delhi University where she and her friends were regularly leered at by groups of men dominating street corners. “Sometimes the days would be just as bad. There would be no one around in the scorching summer heat. No one to help,” she said. For my mother, I know that these geographies of violence shifted constantly as she moved between states and even to other countries. Bad men were bad men everywhere. Their belief in misogyny intact, it didn’t matter how or who fell to the system.

When someone calls me a feminist, they usually mean it as an insult. They say it to undermine my political and personal belief that every individual has the right to live equal to his/her peers. At work, in the middle of UN millennium goals poll, a colleague, quite coolly, passed over the need for gender equality. “What do you need more? Water, food, sanitation or women’s equality?” he said. In his vision for the future, if this happens to me again, I should come back home to my water and scrub off the feeling of guilt and utter helplessness. Because that’s women do—they wipe themselves off an existence.

FAR FROM FICTION

My grudging appreciation of Chetan Bhagat is much like my grudging appreciation for Shah Rukh Khan. Both unwittingly stumbled into stardom, and without much talent or backing, created empires that shifted the meanings of superlatives in our vocabulary. Both, in a sense, are a celebration of middle-class India’s love for mediocrity. Both are heroes of an average kind.

What they portray is a dream without the cruelty of irony or parody. Khan can still earnestly morph into a make-believe, computer generated action hero and fight the fight, talk the talk and charm the pants of his heroine. Bhagat can still write books, despite his clear paucity of expression, and postulate on what the youth of India want.  Both are marketing phenomena par excellence. Both pander to an audience only too willing to indulge their exploitation of the middle class bucket-list.

Those of us who look down on Bhagat’s style of writing often forget the kind of intuitive appeal his books have had on a generation bred solely on post-liberalisation TV programming and very little library time. The creation of his stories, it seems, is based on this very insight—it’s a seamless extension of the programmes they watch on TV, the news they consume, the women they wish they had and as always, the aspirations they need to mirror to be part of this seemingly buoyant economy.  (It has, however, been four years since he penned The Three Mistakes of My Life and India’s fortunes have dithered since.)

In the early 90s, when Switzerland was being re-imagined by Yash Chopra through his epic romances, it was Khan who shouldered the weight of middle-class aspiration. He was a one-way ticket to the Alps.  However Khan himself was beyond the aspiration and the struggle. As the poor little rich Raj, he was charmingly off limits. We revelled in the gaps he created, happy in our half-baked hopes of flying abroad one day and tasting real Swiss cheese.

Bhagat is a harbinger of a completely different generation. His heroes are call centre executives and MBA grads. It’s not so much about inherited wealth and privilege as it is about enterprise and self-worth (For the sake of this argument, let’s assume that all Bhagat’s books are potential scripts, which seems to be increasingly the case). His heroes are optimistic to a fault and smack of familiar stereotypes of the Indian middle-class. They would pick a business plan over a trip to the Alps.

What changed? Did we forget our fascination for the West? Or did we imbibe it so seamlessly that we’re happy with our mashed-up version of consumerism? Maybe a bit of both.  In Kai Po Che, Bhagat’s latest offering in Bollywood format, a familiar underdog story is played out between three men driven by different motivations. This, Three Idiots and more urbane fares like Rock On and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are markers of another classic shift—from largely portraying the inner realms of family life to the very public nuances of friendship and camaraderie.  Friends, in a sense, become moral guidelines for right and wrong, often leading to the creation of a different set of standards to live up to. For instance, filial loyalties in Kai Po Che are trumped by what was promised to friends. There is rebellion against the idea of duty and support for breaking away from the fold. Associations with the family, like in the case of the right-wing Omi character only end in complete destruction and friendship is sacrificed for a pithy game of communal politics. The re-emergence of the multi-hero format is reminiscent of the late 80s/early 90s when it was unsuccessfully tried with films like Tridev. While Dil Chahta Hai marked a watershed moment for Hindi cinema in the new millennium, no one could quite replicate its success through the decade. Till of course it became apparent that that no new talent could singularily carry a film like the Khans of the 90s. Acting talent, at least partially, is crowd sourced from lesser platforms like reality TV and soaps, re-casting the middle class hero in 2012 in middle class roles. With the exception of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Khan’s directors made him do quite the opposite.

The sly brilliance of a Bhagat and the directors that adapt his stories is that they understand the value of populism. They derive full value from the term ‘popular culture’. Kai Po Che uses the Bhuj earthquake and the Godhra massacres as backdrops, referencing them only to the point that’s comfortable to the middle class imagination. The rather sanitised depiction of the riots is a familiar itch but something no one’s willing to scratch for fear of a scab. The film never lets it get under the skin of the characters and the socio-political history that abets the riot is reduced to an emotional outburst, where the character is only looking to avenge his parents’ death, nothing more.

Admittedly, mainstream cinema is not a platform for conflict resolution. The portrayal of the Muslim minority sans caricaturisation itself is a triumph for Hindi cinema. While their blatant victimisation and dependence on the secular albeit Hindu hero isn’t exactly palatable, it’s still less unequal an equation that Bollywood is used to showing.

Political niceties aside, what burns through and pointedly so, is the entrepreneurial spirit of Gujarat. It brings to mind the other middle-class hero who has risen to now contend for the top job in the country. Narendra Modi, or Bhagat’s Parikh, is also re-casting himself in the public arena of politics. Chief Minister three times in a row, Modi has successfully created a brand of Hindutva that works on the simple theory of economic development for the majority. Kai Po Che (or for that matter Three Mistakes of My Life) also never makes an attempt to alter this set equation. It’s logic that sits well with the middle class. It’s the children of the 90s, weaned on Shah Rukh Khan’s opulent cinema, who now understand Modi’s easy and rather flawed link between money and development. Bhagat as a chronicler of our times has captured our shift rather well, be as it may in SMS literature.