we are like this only

Chetan Bhagat, by no means a great intellectual, seems to be on a quest to turn politician as soon as possible. To that end, apart from becoming a motivational speaker to the youth of the country, he writes simply egregious columns, trying to ingratiate himself across vote banks. Among the most annoying are his columns full of advice to men, in which he masquerades as a feminist while basically advising men to reinforce the status quo by disguising it as women's empowerment . While the ever-submissive Indian woman is supposed to look gratefully and adoringly at her man for being so egalitarian as to 'let' her take her time to drink the lukewarm tea or sit and press his feet after running around all day doing things that any self-respecting adult should object to having someone else doing for them - no, not in the 50 shades genre but more in the 'bringing up my baba' genre of wife-ing - putting away his clothes, dressing her child ( how come it's her child when t...

As a fair complexioned, yet relatively darker sister of two, I have heard my share of fairness-related tropes over the years, from people exclaiming over how ‘fair and lovely’ someone is to people referring to me as the dark or if being kind, ‘wheatish’ one. It has been part and parcel of the Indian psyche for years, whether as an impact of colonialism or predating it by centuries, despite our darker-skinned heroines and heroes of myth like Draupadi or Krishna. There is now a consumer video going viral about Fair and Lovely and how it makes people feel bad for being dark and it’s time for the brand to shut down. Is it a multicrore brand generating megabucks for HUL? Yes it is, and has been for years. Could it do that without consumer support and empathy? Not a chance in hell. Brands that are successful manage to do that by understanding or anticipating a consumer’s needs and then producing the products that help fulfil those needs. A Fair and Lovely or Fair and Handsome could...

I am not a big supporter of days – Valentine’s day and Mother’s day and the like – I consider them hokey and made up. And the way that International Women’s Day has come to be represented in society and the media certainly makes it no less trivial – every brand ‘salutes’ women and then goes on to offer discounts for beauty and fashion products as if that would suffice to celebrate womanhood the world over. It is not a day to be ‘celebrated’ and certainly not with sales offers and free spa offers and mani-pedis, as if all we need to distract us from the gender imbalance of society is a few beauty treatments or a shopping outlet. And then the next day we can go back to business as usual! International Women’s Day should be a day to remind us of the distance covered and the millions of miles to go before we sleep. It is a day on which, as members of society, and the many stakeholders, from government to corporations, political parties, entertainers, artists - we all need to reflect on t...

Looking at the objective third party facts that seem to be emerging, it doesn’t seem like Prime Minister Modi’s gamble of demonetization has paid off in terms of the black money conundrum. It has so far produced arguably mixed results on the fronts of black money, preventing corruption or counterfeiting. Further, there is a quantity of anecdotal evidence and data on lost jobs, micro and small sector troubles and the return of thousands, if not lacs, of rural migrants back to the homestead, in distress. Given that, it seems to have become quite the puzzle as to why poor Indians aren’t up in arms against demonetization. Hamlet once questioned whether “…Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles…” That, Hamlet, depends entirely on how you frame the argument, as Sir Humphrey would tell you! The entire narrative of demonetization has been masterfully constructed by a skillful communic...

JLF, or Jaipur Literature Festival has now been an agenda on my winter horizon for the past 6 years. Every year, with some of my dearest friends, I spend 3-4 days soaking in panel discussions about eclectic topics, readings from books I haven't heard of before and interviews with new authors to be discovered. For the most part, we have stayed focussed on the festival itself, with a rare break for coffee or a shopping and lassi run during a one hour lunch break. But a couple of years ago, it began pouring on day 2 of the fest. One of the trio was stuck on a flight that got directed from Mumbai to Delhi, Ahmedabad and then Jaipur due to the downpour, thus postponing her arrival time to sometime that evening. The other two - my soulsister M and I - rattled around the environs of the sodden Diggi Palace for a dispirited hour or so before we decided to make tracks. We had heard about some interesting stores around Jaipur including Dhora, so we decided to head there. Anokhi Cafe ha...