The height of the Ridiculous and subsequent misogyny

Male fantasies are so often either misdirected or are a product of constant media hammering.
Take for instance the foolish male fantasising of maids and nurses. Maids and Nurses? These are two professions that if nothing else are symbol of sheer hard work. Work that could start by killing your feet, work that is most unglamorous and far, far away from any activity that would even remotely suggest sexual activity or fantasising thereof.
How can you fantasise a romp with a woman who is constantly hassled (of course it’s her job and people love reminding her/ him by ringing the bell. Now tell me if you love being reminded of your job this constantly by your manager or supervisor) to empty the bedpan, clean the mess YOU have made, shove pills down your throat and put up with your childish behaviour (illness notwithstanding). The nurse makes your life bearable in a hospital that if left to the mercy of the doctors would half their patients to their carelessness. She is the person who works double shifts when needed, sleeps on chairs when exhaustion takes over (because you are not allowed to officially put your feet up) take the tirade and reprimands from hotshot doctors on their chin and move on. There are some who have a smiling face and then there are some who have a snarling, sulky, unhappy one. But then we all do. To make ‘nurse’ the butt of teenage/ midlife/ dirty old man sexual innuendo or fantasy perhaps should be punishable with whiplash on whatever part of the anatomy that is guilty of collaboration.
Then come the maids and I don’t even want to justify the whiplashes. Just suffice it know that this is a punishable offence in extreme.
Listed below are some events/ incidents/ fictional plots that have evoked disbelief and then outrage from yours truly:
Calling Draupadi a prostitute because she married the Pandavas (keeping this as a reference point, it’s a little hard to believe that Yudhishtir is called Dharmaraja especially since he was one of the five husbands!)
Psychopath going on rampage killing prostitutes/ young women because he has seen his mother involved in activities that a child shouldn’t have to witness ever. I wonder if he thought about the men who were as involved? In such events history showcases men in retrospective virtue as having made the journey from innocent little mamma’s lambs to vengeful monsters out to slaughter them. That they were in bed with MEN makes no difference.
What triggered this whole post is an episode in a serial called ‘Criminal Minds’ on Star TV. Once is enough though.

Experiences in God's own Country

We had a lovely holiday in Kumarakom and Cochin. The Taj Malabar is right on the Arabian Sea. You can simply lie back on bed and watch the shimmering waters and the lazy movement of cargo ships, yachts and tankers. At night of you leave the curtains open , then you can see the lights of Cochin port. It was really magical.
After spending a couple of days in Kumarakom, we headed for Cochin. My friends had gushed so much about the churches and a synagogue that I decided to check these out before I checked into the hotel. The streets leading up to the Fort Kochi area were jammed and the traffic moved at a snail’s pace. Tourists and visitors to the synagogue have to park half a kilometer away and walk it to the main attraction. I fell in love with the milieu. It’s very European. I think the streets are cobblestones and the shops lining it are quaint and charming full of funky, hippy style clothes and antiques. I binged on the antiques- two lamps from a ship caught in a wreck- the seal reads0 RPyal Navy of Scotland, 1920. It has a wick and a kerosene tanker inside. I also found a karandai – a small pot for haldi and kumkum that also doubles up as a lamp once you pour some oil and plant a wick in the hollow. Oh and a 1915 compass that feels good to simply hold in the hand. I don’t know if these really antiques but they look good anyway. Forgot to tell you about ceramic handles that I think Cochin specialises in. Lovely tiny handles with ceramic knobs in pastel shades of blue, red, pink and yellow.
Shopping done, we turned to the Synangue since it closes at 1300 hours and I really did want to have a peek inside.
As we approached the entrance of the red temple, the scruffy guard rudely asked us to deposit our bags and sacks in exchange for a token. He also ordered us to leave our cameras outside. This was shocking. He waved his hand with a finger pointing to our belongings and then jerked his head toward the shack where we were supposed to get the token. I felt like a bloody, cheap person who has been handcuffed for petty thievery and was being explained the rules of getting into the jail.
Well If these are the rules then that bugger ought to tell us politely. It out me off the synagogue so completely that I asked him to stuff the synagogue, saaley tumhaara synagogue tumaharey paas rakho, and to top it all it was a paid attraction- case in point- paid tourist attractions are never worth it- the best things always come for free (while travelling anyway).
Later the shopkeeper in the street and the general manager of Taj Malabar told me that the people there- managers, guards are known for their rude and condescending behaviour. Well I don’t care. I wish there was a way to give feedback to the people who manage/ run the synagogue.
Since I am on this subject, I have heard stories of the similar uncouth behaviour from Israelis in Goa and Manali. They look down on the locals, indulge in abusive language and discriminatory practises are not unheard of. I have only one thing to say- this reeks so much of racism that the Israelis always accuse the others of . Time to check the mirror you Sons of David.

Yep, I work at home, not at work!

SO ladies, its time to buck up! If you dont hold yourself in good light, no one else will. Stop looking and feeling apologetic when you say you are a housewife. Maybe its time to even look for another word to describe our status. Or not! The word itself doesnt matter. Its the perception that you have of your job and it naturally translates into the perceptionthat others have of you.
Whether paid or not both can be described as working for a living. Just putting food on the table is not enough, you gotta plan, store, cook, clean, enable good living conditions, ensure hygiene and the welfare of your family. Its goes beyond '9 to 5'. This kind of work in 24/7. You are always on call like a doctor.
See yourself as an enabler, as a facilitator.
On that note, lets toast to us! (umm i know its kind of early, but what is a good cup of coffee for!)

(oh!) …………You are a housewife?

The Oh is obviously in brackets because even though people might not vocalise the sound, it’s very much there. Why have I chosen a topic and a profession that is as old as society if not the hills? Well, being a recent entrant into the ‘housewife’ category, I can say that I have seen both sides of the coin and ‘housewives’ get the rawest, dirtiest, most unrewarding and painful end of the deal (co-operative husbands notwithstanding) By the way I also intend to address the term ‘housewife’. Let’s see what this unpaid labour does the minute she wakes up-
1. Put out the tea kettle (so that it’s on the boil by the time she finishes her ‘stuff’)
2. Before the rest of the household wakes up (children, husband and in many cases in laws) prepare tiffin boxes (one short break and one long break so that makes 5 lunch boxes for 2 kids and a husband)
3. Also get breakfast ready
4. Meanwhile dishes, vessels are quietly piling up
5. So after the morning hurricane leaves, the lady/ mother/ maid/ daughter in law silently picks up after the rampage- night clothes, water bottles, uncapped toothpaste tube. She folds fluffs up pillows, spreads fresh bed-sheets, and dumps the laundry in the washing machine.
6. As the clothes are being washes, the clothes line needs to make space, so she also has to fold the dry clothes and keep them in the respective wardrobes. There, major work done.
7. Now how about some coffee or that tea? By this time it’s already 8.45 to 9 am.
8. Lovely, just as she is about to have that first hit of the day, ding ding (that’s the door bell)
9. Oh it’s the mopping, cleaning.
10. Ok now, so she has to segregate clothes for hand washing, sort out the bedrooms a bit, out the keys away so she can do her job.
11. Ok now for that tea that has gone colder than dal tadka.
12. Its 11am. The cleaning lady has done her number.
13. How about some breakfast now? Oops she has to go to the gym
14. Off goes Our Lady of Hard Work and spends an hour to 70 minutes sweating it out.
15. Have a bath, some more clothes…….she remembers to also put out the morning lot of threads to dry.
So before she can really out her feet up, it’s almost thirteen hundred hours.
Some more reading and then cheers, its fifteen hundred hours and thirty minutes.
Time for the hurricane to come back home, so you have school bags by the door, shoes, socks flying and kids heading straight for the fridge……
I. So while the lady tells her kids to wash hands/ feet/face, she is frantically trying to get some snack ready for the hungry stomachs…
II. So while the snack is cooking, she empties the lunch bag and dumps the smelly lunch boxes intot he sink
III. The snack is ready, the boxes are washed and drying nicely, the kids are happy and satisfied
IV. Then she collects the plates that the snacks were eaten in and washes some more.
V. What’s for dinner aai? Asks the daughter and the Lady of the House remembers that little end-of-day-chore.
DINNER- all is good. Rice and dal in pressure cooker, tomatoes and onions chopped finely for salad with dahi, today we will have pithla, and methi subzee. So methi is washed, chopped and cooked. Finally as dinner is getting ready so is the kitchen sink that is filling up with kadhais, bartans, covering plates, spoons and pans. So The LOH (Lady of the House) sorts that out, cleans the kitchen platform. Hey you have forgotten to make phulkas….and then she also make phulkas to that the family eats a tasty, wholesome, hearty meal.
As a sign-off, she cleans the dinner plates, puts the left-overs in smaller containers or pots and into the fridge, wipes the table clean and switches off the light that has given her warmth and vision while cooking.
At last she is ready to go to bed, when the younger one has forgotten to do his homework, the elder one can’t find her history textbook both need fresh pencils. Our LOH gets on with it and finally as she dreams of a leisurely bath and wallowing luxuriously in the body lotion, gives it up for a quickie (a bath I mean) and collapses into that bed while already planning the lunch for the following day.
I am too exhausted to even introspect here . So I will hammer that out tomorrow. But before I sign off, let me include all the illnesses, repairs, bills that need tending, supervising and paying respectively that the sacred LOH needs squeeze in the time for.
See you folks and have a great Tuesday!

China China…..what an inscrutable face..

Oho, I feel so vindicated. Latest new- A.Ak Anthony has declared that China is shoring up its muscle along the border now hopefully, India will flex a few of her muscles. Flex for flex, bicep for tricep, brazen claims for deadpan defiance. Come on India…..

Ok now onto something entertaining.
Why is it so hard for famous people (read actors and actresses) to dress normally.
I was going through photos of people who attended Surinder Kapoor’s prayer meeting. Surinder Kapoor for you information is Anil Kapoor’s father who passed away recently.

Everyone was wearing white without fail! I guess once an actor always an actor, the script always follows you wherever you go and you see a drama being unfolded whenever ten or more people get together. I was present at a post-funeral occasion twice or thrice and have been discreetly told by those grieving that it would be ‘nice’ to wear white. I immediately dug up my wardrobe. Not that it needed any digging, the number of clothes I have can be measured by a couple of inches on the ‘footpatti’ at the most! So there I was a hand on my forehead and my mind beset ny anxiety.

Did I have to buy a new dress to attend the occasion where the dead would anyway be smiling from atop a wall via a garlanded photograph? To hell with it! I thought if these people were grieving then they shouldn’t be caring what people wore and in which colour to the event. This is called orchaestrated grieving. The women were all clad in Asian Paints white that was softened by lace work and chappals that were silvery white.

Oh how could I forget the huge sunglasses that covered their faces from the forehead to the last fold of the chin. And the men! It was quite entertaining! I saw a pic with Rakesh Roshan looking (or trying to look dapper) in a colourful white shirt that showed off his biceps! If it were a normal death-day event then this would be considered obscene. And the footwear! Probably all of them made a trip to the Bata shop the same morning or the earlier evening. White shirt, blue jeans and chappals that you would wear on the beach or the bathroom. Chappals???? Hritik was wearing chappals, so was Akshay Kumar and Aftab Shivdasani. Bathroom Chappals? Well if you follow decorum ass far ass white is concerned then might ass well let your feet lead the way.

Have a look folks, it indeed is very amusing. The ladies in ill-fitting churidar kurtas with equally ridiculous footwear and men looking like they have gone for a cup of chai at a tapri and unshaven too. Nice look as I said for that casual chai or gossip at the Amrutatulya but not nice if you are attending a ‘filmi’ prayer meet or for that matter just a prayer meet.

Once upon a time, I hated Pakistan......

......hated it enough anyway to turn me into a rabid fan of cricket when we played them. Fanatic and violent enough to wish that our bowlers hit them where it hurt the most. That wish was granted when Tendulkar did exactly that and sent Shoaib Akhtar with his tail between his legs. I rejoiced. After that though my it all went downhill. How can you hate an entity who has become old and weak and dying? No, no let me assure you, I didn’t become pacifist, but the it just wasn’t any fun to hate Pakistan, no longer fun to point fingers at it as the outside hand. Javed Miandad had been replaced by the genial Inzamam and Afridi who were genuinely likeable.

Now however the mantle of bearing the weight of my hate goes to.....The People's (liar liar) Republic (how ludicrous) of China (the only honest thing about its name). It started ten years ago when I realized on my repeated shopping trips to Tulshi Baug in Pune that there was something different about toys and clothes and even plastic containers that I was browsing for. They were all made in China. Right from pencil cells to computers to electronic peripherals to cell phones and erasers and the popular toys were all flooding in from China. Even the Ganpati statues were being imported from that China. I hated it. The decorative items were made in china too. Sharpeners, novelties, cheap toys, items of clothing and even food like chocolates and bubble gums, lamp shades, glassware, crockery, watches; the local shops were being glutted with these and the quality was suspect. I would prefer a cycle made in Pakistan but China?? Now way.

Be local buy local, this became my motto. Then came the Arunachal Pradesh issue. China claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own. It’s like claiming the neighbour’s parking lot as your own when he has in fact paid 13,000/sq ft for it and has the requisite papers. The you also lay claim to the car parked on it since you already have claimed the ground it stands on as your own. Next come the inhabitants of the car. You start showing sympathy for them, try to befriend them, help them and finally also claim them as your own and allege that the family members have been starved and ill-treated. Then you stop the guests from visiting the house because that is allegedly your house so how can you have uninvited and unfamiliar people who ‘claim’ to know those living in the house, when in fact it is you have been living there.

And so on the so forth. However China has been extremely persevering with its claims and consistently building on it, exactly like that of the ‘parking lot’ example. It’s amusing at first, then irritating, then becomes a nuisance until it grows into a dire, serious problem . A problem where the neighbors start taking sides (forget that this problem shouldn’t have cropped up in the first place) and express the sentiment that maybe, just maybe there might be some truth in the to the person claiming the parking lot as his own. You are doomed.

That China has balls to back it is evident from the claims, threats and protests that are more brazen than the ones before. Your disbelief keeps growing until finally you believe what China claims. Bingo, mission achieved!

Wha wha whitest of white! Our obsession with the colour white!

We have come a long way indeed. Or so say the articles in newspapers and magazines. We have come to believe that yes, we have become more inclusive, more tolerant and less discriminatory of our complexion which is generally brown/ dusky/ wheatish but certainly not fair/ pale and white. The media backs it up by throwing up the name of Bipasha Basu, the Bong Bombshell and who is NOT fair. Well neither were Hema Malini, Rekha, Mumtaaz, Zeenat Aman, Parveen Babi, Meenashi Sheshadri or for that matter Madhuri Dikshit or Sreedevi. Madhu Sapre was not fair and neither were other models and actresses who made it big despite their non-white complexion of course due credit must go to the make-up men who were ready with tubs of fair paint and brush.
My point is, nothing has changed. We are neither more accepting nor more inclusive and our obsession is gaining dangerous proportions as evident rising number of fairness cream advertisements and all-white faces and bodies that we see in TV. Honestly when was the last time you saw an actor/ actress in her or his natural state of body? Not in the buff you pervs!
Even Mallu John Abraham looks white and let’s not forget Priyanka Chopra whose skin colour has ‘improved’ despite her Mallu genes. No, no I don’t mean to be degrading or demeaning here or even racially abusive. I am just shaking my head at our need to change the skin-tone of our own people into that of the pucca sahibs or the Aryans both of whom left the country (or blended in) sixty and six thousand years ago respectively. My history is a bit blurred as far as time lines are concerned but the essential core of the argument remains. Why can’t we see our baby as beautiful?
Did you check the ads on TV? Everybody these days looks like they suffer from a skin pigmentation problem. It couldn’t have been more stunning in all its glory in the ‘chammak challo’ song from Ra 1. All the chorus dancers look like they have been selected only after ascertaining that they have a pigmentation problem. Why even Shahrukh Khan looks very Aryan (blue eyes and fair skin) so then why the hell not go the full monty and dye your hair blonde? Kareena is naturally fair so she is excused. But I am sure the director/ choreographer must have said “sabsey gori lagni chahiye”!