Of Opinions and Political Correctness
I’ve come to realize that the world only cares about ‘saying’ the right things, not doing them. Now take for example, this household help that I happen to know. She was born in abject poverty, lost her father, her brother became an alcoholic, so she together with her mother, started to work to support the family. Now her mother is old and bent, so she supports them entirely with the money she makes doing odd jobs. She’s cheerful and positive and tells me that her only ‘aim’ in life is to get married and have two children. Every time she sees me, she asks me, ‘Sister, did you find a boy for me yet?’ I once told this story to a friend. She looked at me and said, ‘This is patriarchy. Poor women are the most prone to it. All she wants is to get married. She should want to be a scientist or a doctor. She can be an actor. This is why feminism is important.’ Keeping the obvious privilege in her statement aside, I was taken a bit off guard. What is not feminist about a woman supporting her entire family, being financially independent, taking her own decisions and ‘wanting’ to get married and have kids as a choice. That’s when I realized, it’s not doing the right things, it’s saying the right things.
Priyanka Chopra, an Indian actor, is celebrated as a feminist icon, who celebrates her melanin, who spoke up about being called ‘curry’ and ‘brownie’ in the United States, who spoke up about being teased for her complexion in India. The fact that she has endorsed two fairness cream products in India namely, ‘Garnier Light Ultra Intense Fairness Moisturiser’ and ‘Ponds White Beauty’ is just a minor inconvenience. I remember actor Sonam Kapoor’s open letter which went viral where she urged girls to feel confident in their skin. The letter was saying all the right things. All the empowering things. She was hailed for being vulnerable and honest and a hope for other girls who suffer from insecurity about their bodies. Who cares that she has endorsed ‘L’Oréal White Perfect which promised Flawless. Spotless. Pearl Perfect Fairness.’ Yep. All of it. Who cares as long as they’re saying the right things.
I once tried to point out leading actor Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Fair and Handsome’ ad to someone and I said that the power and position he’s in, he shouldn’t be doing that. The reply I got was honest. Yeah, it didn’t make sense to me but was honest nonetheless. ‘He doesn’t believe in colorism and bigotry. He is just making money because he likes to make money.’ I realized it again. As long as he is saying the right things, it should be forgiven and ignored that he has inspired thousands of young boys to apply a product to get ‘fair’ and handsome to be able to woo girls.
And unfortunately, this isn’t just restricted to colorism. This hypocrisy extends to everything under the sun. You can be sure the liberals will celebrate you for saying all the politically correct things in the world despite your actions which speak otherwise. Everybody asks you to feel comfortable in your body whether you’re too skinny, too fat, too fair, too dark, too short, too tall, too poor. But no one will give you work if you’re one of those things. But hey, fear not; you might try to fill your growling tummy with the advice the privileged women dole out to you, about feeling comfortable in your body. But make sure you exhaust the rest of your savings first, buying that fairness cream that promises ‘flawless fairness.’
To be honest, only actor Salman Khan knows a way around this hypocrisy. Don’t say the right thing, don’t do the right thing. Kill a black buck, drive drunk over innocent footpath dwellers, beat your girlfriend and watch as the animal activists and feminism advocates in Bollywood queue up outside your studio to sign you for their next film.
How I Met His Mother
Excuse me sir! Can you please lead me to the water cooler? I am new here and was wondering where it is.” A colleague asked me. She was just a colleague, except that I had a crush on her.
“Of course I can, Saumya.” My knees were wobbly as I led her to the water filter.
“Hey, if you’re free today evening, do you mind going out for coffee? I nearly spat my words out of my mouth.
“Of course I would love to, but we should really get to know each other before we do.” She smiled warmly.
“Oh well! I already know a lot about you. This is your first job, you were settled in Calcutta before this, you love to write about socio-economic issues and you have a fiery sense of humour...”
I could go on and on but I noticed the alarmed expression on Saumya’s face.
“How do you know so much about me?”
Well, we live in an age of the social media and all your posts are set to ‘public’, miss. I just happened to stalk your best friend’s fiancé too. He is allergic to oranges.
“Actually, these people here keep gossiping about everyone in the office so they were once discussing you and I just uh, happened to hear about it. Not that I was interested in the gossip but you just can’t close your ears to it. Hah.”
I laughed at my own joke for full two minutes hoping she’d forget everything I had just said and I could just go back to my chair and cry.
“There’s something else you need to know, sir. I have a four-year-old son.”
“Oh my! A son. You have a son. Your son of course.”
I mentally moon-walked back to my chair. I just wished I could disappear.
“I am a single mother. I had my divorce a few weeks back.”
Oh! A single mother. I mentally moonwalked back to the water cooler.
“I am so sorry Saumya. I didn’t know any of this. I regret that this had to happen to you.”
“Well, the only regret I have is not being able to take my son out for ice cream. Because by the time I go back from office, he has already slept off.”
Numerous conversations and seven months later, I proposed to Saumya. She accepted a couple of months later.
But the real challenge was far from over. Her son had to accept me before we could become one. So one day, armed with toys and chocolates I came to visit him.
“Say hello to uncle, Ansh.” Saumya gently reprimanded her son.
“No.” Ansh said snatching his gifts.
I nevertheless, tried to make a conversation with my limited linguistic abilities.
“Hello Ansh. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Bill Gates. And you?”
“Me too. I want to be Bill Gates too.”
Scanning his school notebooks, I pointed out to Ansh a spelling mistake.
“It’s pi-geon and not pie-geon. Just write it how you pronounce it. Pi and geon.”
“Mom once told me it is knife and not n-i-f-e but it is pronounced n-i-f-e and not k-nife. She told me pronunciation is not important in English.”
I raised one eyebrow. “She is right. Let us do math.”
“You know math?” Ansh looked at me with disbelief. “Tell me what is 100+150.”
“250. Now can we do a bit of math?”
“That was fast. Almost like my teacher. How did you do it?”
“Well, you’ll be able to do it even faster when you grow up. Till then here’s a trick. 100 plus 100 makes it 200 and adding 50 to it makes it 250.”
“Neat,” Ansh smiled.
Saumya called me up that night.
“Rohan, I am so happy. Ansh likes you.”
I kept the phone away and air mouthed ‘W-O-W.’ “I am so happy love. We can finally be together now. We will have our own little family. You, me and Ansh. I will adopt him legally and he will be our son, not yours alone.”
“I talked to Ansh he seems to be comfortable with the idea that mommy is happy with this uncle.” Saumya laughed. “He just has this one question though, which he wants to ask you and won’t discuss with me.”
“Put him on the phone.”
“Hey dad.”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“How do you know 100 plus 100 makes it 200?”
Mom, I'm trying to be cool..
I joined social media later than my peers. Much later actually, and that was a source of shame for me in school. Every time there would be a conversation around Facebook or any tweet that some celebrity did, I would just steer clear of that conversation. I’d pretend I knew what Facebook was for, but had no clue. Nada. I was a socially awkward teen and I'd do anything to be cool. So one day I simply lied that I was on Facebook.
I told a friend that I had lied, and she was furious. “How can you lie about being on Facebook? They can easily type your name and look you up!” That was probably my first experience with a panic attack. “Well shit.” I could not wait for the classes to get over so I could go back home and make an FB account. Problem was, internet till a couple of years ago was not really available easily. And in my house, with my siblings, it was going to be tougher than I had thought.
“Why do you need the internet?”
“I uh, wanted to download songs.”
“Nope you don’t need to. Check mom’s phone, there’s over 50 songs in there.”
“I want to make a gmail account.”
“You already have one. What about the pricelessfunnyangelgenius one?”
Turns out that I did get the dongle but the net was way too slow and limited. I gave up and slept off fearing the worst humiliation that could possibly be meted out in school the next day. In the morning, I asked mom if I could skip school. The dual agenda was to avoid humiliation and also pray that the net would work and I could have an FB account. “No. I have already packed your lunch box.” There wasn’t much to argue after that. She had spent a sum total of 30 minutes in the kitchen and now I was having to face 30 days of pure humiliation for trying to be cool. I swallowed my pride and left for school. Little did I know that school was going to be much better than I had anticipated.
“Hey! We found your FB. Selena Gomez dp right?”
I mentally did a fist bump and a high five and a jump all at the same time. “Oh yeah. Sure.”
“Nice dp. Mine is the one with Bella and Edward Cullen.”
“Of course uh I remember.” I didn’t know what “dp” was and could not risk it.
“Cool but your Noddy dp before was plain weird.”
I thought about replying with “no”, “of course”, or “why not” but settled with a laugh-cum-snort. As Baburao would say, “Bilkul ricks nai lene ka. (Don't take any risk.)”
My facebook was born that afternoon. And the first thing I did was search for "myself" on the site. The 4th account was a Selena Gomez display picture, which I didn’t know till then was called a “DP.” I saved Selena Gomez and Noddy's pictures and made a pretty similar account, give or take. Except for her 300 friends versus my 3. You only needed an account to be cool, right? Activity didn't matter, right? Wrong. A few weeks later realized that I was risking losing the support of the "cool" group because I hadn't been replying to texts and wall posts. So one day I opened my FB account to do exactly that. I discovered that my 3 friends had escalated to 135 friends.
There were chats which I'd never done. Posts that I had never made. Unless there was a rare medical condition called sleep-texting, much like sleep walking. Turns out, I had 3 very common medical conditions- Keeping my password "password", telling 23 people about my genius, and having forgotten to log out of somewhere. It would alarm me today but back then I didn't mind that much. I was cool with sharing my account, particularly because I was sympathetic to anyone who'd have to assume my identity for any social mileage. Yeah. Imagine that travesty. I ignored it and it did go on well for many months until one fine day that someone logged me out of my own account out of the blue.
Not to be deterred and fiercely of the opinion that I had no life, I moved on and created a new account. In due course, I became the admin of The Ministry of Humor, I started being less nonchalant about my account and more protective. (Last year, eating my sympathy, I even reported that account pretending to be me even though he/she had taken care of my trigger by blocking me). Things were going well. Until my mom called me to ask who had been chatting with her many friends and had eventually logged her out of her own account.
Panic attack #2. "Uh ma, are you talking about your account that I had made some time back?"
"Of course."
"I'll try to recover your account. I should've known back then. Password isn't really a great password."
My mom laughed. "This is just a lesson. Maybe you can remember this to tide over problems that your nonchalance can cause."
Now it's 2020, we're battling a pandemic and each time I want to inspire myself, I look up and repeat, "Password isn't really a good password."
Is it Women's Day again?
I find women's day to be a very interesting day. And boy does it divide opinion. It's the Right Wing vs the Left Wing but a lot more passive aggressive. People who're in a relationship would understand this term. Anyway, so while Right Wing vs Left Wing is battled out in the polls and on the streets, with votes and guns, the battle over women's day is fought over Instagram stories. Take Rosy for example. She thinks no one who has indulged in some sort of display of sexism should have a right to celebrate or wish happy women's day. Here we're safely ruling 7.7 billion people out. Yeah, the entire world. Now take John for example. He thinks no one should have the right to celebrate women's day. Period. These are one of the few moments when feminism and sexism battle it out and arrive at one conclusion. To hell with women's day.
Big brands rope in female starlets to say, "No means no. This women's day, no means no." Poor actress goes back home and wonders. This is probably a different 'no' than the one I told your senior executive last Sunday. Definitely a different no because then no meant a coy yes.
But in all honesty, women really like women's day. We really like all the gorgeous clothes on sale. Also, we don't really care if you call it the women's day sale, or the end of season sale, or no one wants to buy these clothes sale, or they're defective clothes but you won't hear it over the noise of 50% off sale, just give us the darn sale. *Rosy butts in: why're you being sexist? Why are you insinuating that only women like a sale on clothes? * I didn't even.. Okay Rosy, I'll be sure to hide my Instagram story wishing everyone a happy women's day from you. *John butts in: HAHAHAH women only like dressing up to impress men.* I look at John. No one's dressing up to impress you, I can assure you that. He looks at me. Why is this girl looking at me? Probably to impress me? Can she really now buzz off and make me a sammich?
Perhaps only a real political centrist feels they can find a way out of this. You're bad. You're also bad. Actually you're also bad. Darn they're all bad. To hell with politics. A centrist is born. And coming back to Happy Women's Day, the real centrist is guy on television, "Respect women you m*********** @#&f#@." Yet despite everything, I still feel women's day is a great day for our economy. Women do not cook and go out eat because it's a special day for them. Men go out and eat because, well umm women didn't cook and went out to eat. Told you duh. Another rare moment of truce for feminism and sexism. And ladies and gentlemen, Centrism wins again.