Anindita Sengupta

It’s still hanging over our heads: the neat hair argument. I remember when the hair-straightening craze started a few years back, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair which is wavy and temperamental, the opposite of neat. (No silky waterfalls here.) It was all those adverts. Plus the nuns I grew up with had drummed into my head that hair must always look neat. It seemed like the adult world complied with such ridiculous notions.

I couldn’t bring myself to endure the unhealthy manipulation of permanent straightening. So I settled for using the hair-dryer and brush rather fiercely.

But it was tedious. And what a waste of time! And after one too many person had said, ‘oh your hair looks different all the time,’ I just chopped it off.

Now I’m growing it back, without interference. It is being given free run and every time I see it being its not curly-not straight, hyperactive self, I feel a little surge of pride like I’m bringing up someone particularly well.

Of course, I don’t have to go to places which demand strait-lacing of any kind so it’s easy. I wonder what I would do if I still had to attend client meetings, board meetings, weekly meetings and other such in some stuffy office. The pressure on women working in mainstream professions can be formidable. In a setting where you’re fighting to be ‘taken seriously’ most waking hours of your day, you’re unlikely to do anything that detracts from your cause. Add the public face element like in tv news or public relations or a host of others, and you’re even more screwed because they can actually demand you look a certain way. Between losing your job and losing your waves / curls, most women would choose the latter.

But there are enough women who don’t need to change their natural looks because of their profession but do it anyway. The urge to look like role models, the urge to fit in, the urge to belong — all hefty forces. But can we start fighting them, please?

Also, please read Nisha Susan’s story (in Tehelka again) on how we are creating an army of clones.

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Also, Jeanette Winterson reviews Alice Oswald’s new collection and talks about the role of nature in poetry, even today.

We can expect poetry to be relevant to our lives, but our lives include the inner and the mythic, the creative and the inventive. Our lives are lived on Earth, however much tarmac gets between us and the soil, and our lives are lived with the Moon and the stars above our heads, whatever the street lighting. Tarmac and street lighting are not more relevant than the estuary marsh or the Moon, only more pressing, which is a good reason for poetry to remind us of other truths.

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And this is what it looks like when the sea explodes.

In Kakkabe, high up on a mountain at the foot of Thadiyendamol, I meet E. Girl-woman who’s into peace and climbing peaks. I fall in love with the way she speaks — I think I keep her talking just to hear her form words. E is  from Moscow and wants to live in Nice some day, by the blue sea. She’s currently studying yoga in Mysore. She runs a tourism business through the internet using her smartphone. She could be a cliche but she’s not. She’s rather cool, in fact, though her enthusiasm for doshas and chakras is (ironically) alien to me.

We get lost a lot. On our way up to Thadiyendamol and back, we try shortcuts, jump the wrong walls, run up deeply mossed steps to the other side of the mountain. There is a feeling of constantly traveling sideways. Then there are the women. At a dead-end in the forest, a bland white house and in the verandah, a woman who fixes us with her mad eyes as if she knows our deepest secrets. Later, after a crossing of streams, a tribal woman who smiles in relief as if she likes unexpected guests, gives us water from her groundwater tap. I am struck by our differences, all of us, women standing on the same small bit of mountain.

About E, what stays with me are not the specifics so much as a ‘mood’, the air she carries about her — of adventure bordering on foolhardiness, and the kind of innocence that Indian girls must lose pretty quickly. E is not wary, furtive, careful, or cold around men she passes on the streets. She smiles, says hello. They look bemused, shy or amused depending on their age and general proclivities. When I am with her during these exchanges,  I look away, am often caught between grimace and smile. You see, I’m not used to such warmth with strange men. I’m more the ‘look through – look down – look sternly ahead’ kinda girl. This difference in our behaviour makes me think of the places we grew up in, the ways in which we grew up.

I wonder what it would be like to walk down a road and not see men as  potential trouble. To not shuffle or scuttle or sidle by.

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After I got back, I rather instinctively googled  ‘russia women’ to find out more about gender constructs in modern-day Russia.  I say ‘instinctively’ because if I had stopped to think, I would have remembered the stereotype and expected the gadzillion dating and marriage sites I was hit with. Of course, I quickly modified my search with ‘gender relations’, ‘freedom of mobility’.  But I discovered little because the sea of dating sites and other stereotypes swamped everything else.

There were more putrid examples like this, but also reasonably innocent-sounding ones. This blogger talks about this phenomenon in some detail:

According to Google, all Russian women strive for one thing: a marriage with a foreigner. The first link that came up stated “All Russian Women Want to Escape from Russia” –  with an only intention of finding a foreign partner, of course….The ‘Russian woman’ as been turned into a brand by the internet.  I am surprised no one has registered the Russian Woman trademark yet. (Or has someone?)

Clearly, we have no other desires but to popularize ourselves with handsome foreign strangers who will whip out their cyber guides, make us borsch, and will then whisk us away from our homeland. Do women in other cultures have a better digital reputation?

So using the same, rather loose attitude-mapping tool, I googled ‘India women’. The top link was something about ’100 beautiful Indian women’ but most of the other links on the first page dealt with women’s problems in one form or another — an article on the Mangalore bar attacks, a UN report on women’s status, a dated, bleak census report on women’s health. And I wondered if all of us are just traveling sideays after all, in our own corners of the world.

It’s cool. It’s cheeky. It’s clever. I’m talking about the Pink Chaddi Campaign. Women all over the country are gathering pink chaddis and sending them to Muthalik as a Valentine’s Day present. The plan is to strike disgust in the teensy little non-heart of our chief moral guardian — and to loudly assert the fact that the bogeymen of morality, dignity, chastity etc cannot be used to take our freedom away. Gifting panties may seem like a softer option than dung bombing his house but it makes a strong statement on our collective lack of ‘shame’, the one quality he’s trying so desperately to instill in us.

And apparently, the organisers have planned a press conference to announce this because the point is also to generate talk. By cleverly using the media, these hoodlums have been spreading their propaganda far and wide. Time to pay them back in their coin, what?

So, pitch in with your panty power. The collection point is:

BANGALORE
The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road
(opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka

Contact person: Nithin (9886081269)

Oh, as an aside, female underwear has been used as ammunition before.

The blogging resolution seems to have flagged already. But in my defence, I finally moved to my own domain. It’s been a bought plot lying vacant for a while so I’m feeling a real sense of achievement about this. Heh. Small pleasures. I’ve also been traveling. Last week, I was in Coorg and Kabini on work (yes, really) and then we drove through the Waynad hills down to Kannur on the Kerala coast. I haven’t really had time to wade through the 700 photos I’ve taken, but a few are up at Flickr.

With coffee bushes and sea shells on my mind, I had boycotted newspapers for a while so I was jerked back to rude reality on my return. A protest meet had been organised (quite on-the-fly) against the Mangalore incident on Tuesday by organisations like Vimochana, Alternative Law Forum and HHS. The turnout was smallish because it was so spontaneous. They’ve prepared an open letter to the government which is up at Ultra Violet.

As someone pointed out to me, acts of hooliganism against women happen every day in India. Yes, which is why we must protest each one that we can, especially when it happens close to home. When the BJP came to power in Karnataka, I remember many of us felt a palpable sense of fear. And increasingly, it is being validated. The fact that cultural identity is continually being closely tied to such beastly violence also means that we need dialogue on what our culture is, what it means to most of us, and how it’s changing. This is something that a statement by feminists like Sumi Krishna and Ammu Joseph points out. An extract:

We believe that the Mangalore assault was not an isolated episode by self-appointed “moral police” and their sympathisers who criminally took the law into their own hands, but that it is part of a pattern in the profoundly contested political struggle over what constitutes Indian traditions, religions and cultures. It is evident that in this instance the attackers were emboldened to carry out the unprovoked assault in a political environment that supports a particularly narrow and fanatical view of Indian culture as also a repressive attitude towards women.

And:

We strongly believe that the State and democratically minded citizens must stand up to the violent targeting of women and re-affirm our commitment to the human rights and civil liberties of all people. There can and should be dialogues on what constitutes “Indian-ness”, but regardless of the interpretations of Indian culture and traditions, the beating and molesting women cannot be condoned.

You can read the entire statement at UV and leave your name, location / affiliation in the comment space if you want be added to the signatories. We will collect them and send them to Sumi.

And here are some of the reactions from politicians. All from here.

“Women should not try to imitate men. Progress does not mean becoming males,” said Mridula Sinha, member of the BJP’s national executive. Bijoya Chakravarty, BJP’s national vice president, said in Assam that “it is not good for a young woman to go to a pub”.

In Jaipur, Gehlot told reporters: “It was being propagated that young boys and girls looked very good while going around the pubs and malls by holding their hands. I want to end that culture.”

“India is not Europe. Mushrooming of pubs is not part of the Indian culture,” said Communist Party of India state secretary Manju Kumar Majumdar.

Bring on the veils already.

Also, my post at Guardian Cif on this.

My first post for the Guardian blog,  ‘Comment is Free’, is up. Do read .

It’s about something fairly talked about here, which is the whole point. I also chose to talk about this — yet again damn it — because nothing is changing. I think it’s time to start yelling in chorus.

Interestingly, I hadn’t anticipated a particular type of response, which is the ‘why is it our business?’ from some (clearly) British readers. When Jess from The Guardian wrote to me saying they want to highlight Indian issues, particularly because they also have Asian readers, I thought the logic was pretty sound. I also imagined that most educated readers are interested in global issues now that the world is shrinking yada yada. Anyway, thankfully, such comments are in the minority.