we are like this only

Recently, there were reports that Akshay Patra, which is the NGO partner on the midday meal scheme across several states, doesn't cook with onion and garlic, and the beneficiaries do not relish such food, leading to wastage. Arguments are raging back and forth on both sides, and I was shocked to read a tweet from someone who said: "1. Beggars can't be choosers; and 2. What's next, Biryani fried rice?" Rather reminiscent of the reaction Oliver Twist got when he asked for more. It reminded me of a research project I had worked on a few years back. The client had come up with an idea for a brand of sambar powder for a southern state targeting the budget-stressed consumer and wanted to understand consumer attitudes and usage beforehand. When I reported the findings - that not only were there huge variations in the types of sambars and therefore  powders, but consumers were extremely picky about the taste and therefore powder they used, the client was aghast. They...

Of late my environment consciousness radar has been more active than before. From giving up straws to refusing bottled water, I am trying to take small steps towards being friendlier towards the environment. My husband and I shop for the week’s veggies at an organic veggie pop up market every Sunday. Apart from veggies and fruit, it offers various types of organic produce – soaps and cleansers, varieties of rice, grains, pickles, pesto, butter and ghee etc. Alongside, since the market starts and packs up early, it also offers breakfast – piping hot idlis and sambar. Two weekends ago, there was also a guy selling fresh squeezed orange and malta juice. I ordered a glass of juice and wandered off to finish my purchases while he got the juice ready. Much to my dismay when I returned to the stall, it was being served up in a thin, single use plastic glass, and even worse, he had already inserted a plastic straw into it. Much of the joy of the delicious fresh juice was diluted by the carele...

Every year Women’s Day comes around and never fails to irritate me. A flurry of ads from days before, offering discounts at salons, clothing boutiques and restaurants…this year there was even an ad from a hospital specializing in cosmetic surgery saying ‘Get the beauty you have always wanted’. A number of well meaning colleagues came up to wish me Happy Women’s Day, and sundry whatsapp messages, circulated by women added to the mawkishness of the occasion. Some people cut cakes to celebrate the occasion! Let’s be clear, Women’s Day is not a celebration! The attached video gives the potted history of the day – essentially created to raise awareness about the lack of equality working women face, at work and at home. Be it in terms of pay for the same work, progress up the career ladder or a fair share of domestic chores, the balance is always tilted in favour of the male. For example, the entire class whatsapp group for my two younger kids is composed of women, my husband being the ...

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...

Sports films are a relatively newer genre in India and there have been very few films in the genre. Dangal is a classic sports film in the sense of an underdog (underbitch?) who fights against the odds to get to where she is, the early success, arrogance, fall and then the clawing back to victory. The classic redemption story. But the true story is much more gritty than that. It is the fight against patriarchy, against social norms, against gender dominance by the male, against the stereotypical role of daughters and the traditional father-daughter equation that prevails in Haryana, which is one of the states with the highest gender imbalance. Dangal does a decent job of portraying all of this, even while it glosses over the many struggles that must have taken place in real life against the expected mores and behaviours society dictates for women, in favour of a focus on the relationship between father and daughters. What Dangal does even better is to underline the terrible co...

I’m no economist, despite an undergrad degree that claims the contrary. So, to be honest, I fail to understand the rationale behind the demonetization move. I mean, I’m sure (and hopeful) that someone somewhere has thought this through and that somewhere in the longterm cost-benefit analysis, the pains of poor people going without meals and real middle class people (Not my friends on social media – all of us must now admit that our origins may have been middle class but we are firmly in the fatcats class) dying while queueing up to withdraw money for their daughter’s weddings will all prove to have been worth it. Hopefully the epitaph will read ‘Never before have so few sacrificed so much (55 lives at present count) for so many’ and not the other way around (Never before have so many sacrificed so much for so little)! But as of now, I’m honestly stumped. Can someone explain to me how this scheme is supposed to benefit the country? There were a few rationalisations given: 1 ...

Increasingly we seem to live in a world where everything is Binary. Perhaps it began post 9/11 when the US started looking at the world outside purely in terms of friend or foe. Perhaps it was an outcome of George Bush’s policy of ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’. It seems to have cascaded around the world ever since, be it the outpouring of support for either side post Charlie Hebdo or the current public discourse in India. We seem to have become incapable of seeing finer shades of colour rather than pure black or white, or being able to appreciate a hundred and fifty shades of grey. Each event, each utterance has to be reacted to, and the only way is either total condemnation or wholehearted praise. It shows in the wave of indignation that has greeted Bhagwat’s pronouncements on Mother Teresa for instance. Isn’t it a fact that Mother Teresa was a Christian misisonary and therefore as such her first duty was to proselytize? How does that negate or decry any of the wonde...

After much kwetching over whether to take the train down or fly, eventually I decided to drive down with the new driver, and hope for the best. As usual, given that I had planned an early start ( 5:30 am) the next morning, I ended up with two meetings in Gurgaon that got me home past 9 pm and left little time for thoughtful packing. Serviceable clothes and boots were chucked in, along with spare cape and puffa jacket with hood, keeping last year’s 2 degrees plus windchill mornings in mind. Then of course, due to work events, I found myself unable to sleep and eventually dozed off only past 3 am, making 5:30 untenable at the outset. Resigning myself to seeing whatever little of day 1 I could manage, I set off, tucked into the middle seat with a pillow under my head and a blanket on me, catching some much-needed zzzs. Imagine my surprise when I found the car pulling into the hotel by 10:30 am, a bare four hours after I left! Though late for the inaugural session, I arrived by the tail...

I feel like I live in a world where nuance is dead. Everyone seems to busy taking positions on everything – including me – that sometimes we forget all about reasoned debate, or about actually arming ourselves with all the facts. Take for instance the recent decision by apple and facebook to pay for female employees who choose to freeze their eggs. Predictably, everyone including me reacted with disbelief and mutters about how companies thought the best way to get employee loyalty was to pay for them to put off critical life moments. However when I thought about it a little more, I realized that I don’t know whether this is over and above fair or generous parental/ maternity-paternity leave policies. Possibly it is, in which case this is an additional move targeted at helping employees find the way that works best for them. Not everyone wants to have a baby in their 20s and 30s, and if some people want to freeze their eggs and wait for the right timing, and the company is willing ...

What with Indira Nooyi’s dukh-bhari dastaan going viral, I can’t resist adding my two bits because the piece had me fuming at multiple levels. Having taken out some of the khunnus on fb. I thought I should resurrect my moribund blog so I could discuss it some more. First - the fact that her mother expects her to be the one doing both inside and outside the home pissed me off . Yes, yes, she’s from another generation and all that, but you can change, you can see that life today is a bit different than the time that you grew up and raised a family and you can have bigger dreams for your daughter than ‘ensured the kids had milk every day of their life’. I know lots of mothers of IN’s mother’s generation who raised their daughters to be independent working women and have a career, and agreed to be part of the daughter’s village in raising the family. Plus, to me, it’s a basic maternal instinct to want to celebrate with your child when the child so much as gets a participation medal fo...

There is a difference between mob-ocracy or anarchy, as Kejriwal prefers to call it and democracy. Mob-o-cracy is rule by the mob, such as the mob is. Democracy means that we elect our representatives, not necessarily people just like us, but those we would wish to represent us– people with hopefully wide learning and exposure, with maturity, with an informed opinion – to do the best thing for us. If that were not the case, 18 year olds would only vote for 18 year olds, women would vote for women and we would have the world’s youngest cabinet, 48% female to boot. If that were not the case, a Cambridge-educated lawyer called Nehru would never have become Prime Minister in one of the world’s most illiterate nations. If mob-o-cracy had been the governing principle that shaped us as a nation, we would never have a Constitution that guarantees civil liberties and equality to all Indians. Instead we would have had the caste and hierarchy system enshrined in a constitution that reflected ...