Showing posts with label Bollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bollywood. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 July 2020
Tuesday, 7 July 2020
Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame
Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print
When an internship is a phone call away
In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.
The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.
We are all complicit
It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.
We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.
Copy-paste woke culture
To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.
In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.
If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.
And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.
Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?
Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.
It will be your turn next
Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?
If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.
You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.
We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.
Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.
This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.
Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.
This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.
A drain on the GDP
This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.
The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.
India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates.
This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.
The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.
India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates.
When an internship is a phone call away
In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.
The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.
We are all complicit
It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.
We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.
Copy-paste woke culture
To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.
In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.
If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.
And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.
Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?
Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.
It will be your turn next
Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?
If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.
You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.
Sunday, 14 October 2018
Wednesday, 3 October 2018
Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade
George Monbiot in The Guardian
By reducing politics to a celebrity obsession – from Johnson to Trump to Corbyn – the media misdirects and confuses us
By reducing politics to a celebrity obsession – from Johnson to Trump to Corbyn – the media misdirects and confuses us
Illustration: Ben Jennings
What kind of people would you expect the newspapers to interview most? Those with the most to say, perhaps, or maybe those with the richest and weirdest experiences. Might it be philosophers, or detectives, or doctors working in war zones, refugees, polar scientists, street children, firefighters, base jumpers, activists, writers or free divers? No. It’s actors. I haven’t conducted an empirical study, but I would guess that between a third and a half of the major interviews in the newspapers feature people who make their living by adopting someone else’s persona and speaking someone else’s words.
This is such a bizarre phenomenon that, if it hadn’t crept up on us slowly, we would surely find it astounding. But it seems to me symbolic of the way the media works. Its problem runs deeper than fake news. What it offers is news about a fake world.
I am not proposing that the papers should never interview actors, or that they have no wisdom of their own to impart. But the remarkable obsession with this trade blots out other voices. One result is that an issue is not an issue until it has been voiced by an actor. Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault: none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.
This is not to disparage the actors who have helped bring them to mainstream attention, least of all the brave and brilliant women who exposed Harvey Weinstein and popularised the #MeToo movement. But many other brave and brilliant women stood up to say the same thing – and, because they were not actors, remained unheard. The #MeToo movement is widely assumed to have begun a year ago, with Weinstein’s accusers. But it actually started in 2006, when the motto was coined by the activist Tarana Burke. She and the millions of others who tried to speak out were, neither literally nor metaphorically, in the spotlight.
At least actors serve everyone. But the next most-interviewed category, according to my unscientific survey, could be filed as “those who serve the wealthy”: restaurateurs, haute couturists, interior designers and the like, lionised and thrust into our faces as if we were their prospective clients. This is a world of make-believe, in which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers.
The spotlight effect is bad enough on the culture pages. It’s worse when the same framing is applied to politics. Particularly during party conference season, but at other times of the year as well, public issues are cast as private dramas. Brexit, which is likely to alter the lives of everyone in Britain, is reduced to a story about whether or not Theresa May will keep her job. Who cares? Perhaps, by now, not even Theresa May.
Neither May nor Jeremy Corbyn can carry the weight of the personality cults that the media seeks to build around them. They are diffident and awkward in public, and appear to writhe in the spotlight. Both parties grapple with massive issues, and draw on the work of hundreds in formulating policy, tactics and presentation. Yet these huge and complex matters are reduced to the drama of one person’s struggle. Everyone, in the media’s viewfinder, becomes an actor. Reality is replaced by representation.
Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story. Where is the public clamour to see yet another image of May – let alone Boris Johnson? The pictures, like the actors, blot out our view of other people, and induce us to forget that these articles discuss the lives of millions, not the life of one.
The media’s failure of imagination and perspective is not just tiresome: it’s dangerous. There is a particular species of politics that is built entirely around personalities. It is a politics in which substance, evidence and analysis are replaced by symbols, slogans and sensation. It is called fascism. If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.
Already this reporting style has led to the rise of people who, though they are not fascists, have demagogic tendencies. Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all, like Donald Trump, reality TV stars. The reality TV on which they feature is not The Apprentice, but Question Time and other news and current affairs programmes. In the media circus, the clowns have the starring roles. And clowns in politics are dangerous.
The spotlight effect allows the favoured few to set the agenda. Almost all the most critical issues remain in the darkness beyond the circle of light. Every day, thousands of pages are published and thousands of hours broadcast by the media. But scarcely any of this space and time is made available for the matters that really count: environmental breakdown, inequality, exclusion, the subversion of democracy by money. In a world of impersonation, we obsess about trivia. A story carried by BBC News last week was headlined “Meghan closes a car door”.
The BBC has just announced that two of its programmes will start covering climate change once a week. Given the indifference and sometimes outright hostility with which it has treated people trying to raise this issue over the past 20 years, this is progress. But business news, though less important than environmental collapse, is broadcast every minute, partly because it is treated as central by the people who run the media and partly because it is of pressing interest to those within the spotlight. We see what they want us to see. The rest remains in darkness.
The task of all journalists is to turn off the spotlight, roll up the blinds and see what’s lurking at the back of the room. There are some magnificent examples of how this can be done, such as the Windrush scandal reporting, by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and others. This told the story of people who live far from where the spotlight falls. The articles were accompanied by pictures of victims rather than of the politicians who had treated them so badly: their tragedies were not supplanted by someone else’s drama. Yet these stories were told with such power that they forced even those within the spotlight to respond.
The task of all citizens is to understand what we are seeing. The world as portrayed is not the world as it is. The personification of complex issues confuses and misdirects us, ensuring that we struggle to comprehend and respond to our predicaments. This, it seems, is often the point.
What kind of people would you expect the newspapers to interview most? Those with the most to say, perhaps, or maybe those with the richest and weirdest experiences. Might it be philosophers, or detectives, or doctors working in war zones, refugees, polar scientists, street children, firefighters, base jumpers, activists, writers or free divers? No. It’s actors. I haven’t conducted an empirical study, but I would guess that between a third and a half of the major interviews in the newspapers feature people who make their living by adopting someone else’s persona and speaking someone else’s words.
This is such a bizarre phenomenon that, if it hadn’t crept up on us slowly, we would surely find it astounding. But it seems to me symbolic of the way the media works. Its problem runs deeper than fake news. What it offers is news about a fake world.
I am not proposing that the papers should never interview actors, or that they have no wisdom of their own to impart. But the remarkable obsession with this trade blots out other voices. One result is that an issue is not an issue until it has been voiced by an actor. Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault: none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.
This is not to disparage the actors who have helped bring them to mainstream attention, least of all the brave and brilliant women who exposed Harvey Weinstein and popularised the #MeToo movement. But many other brave and brilliant women stood up to say the same thing – and, because they were not actors, remained unheard. The #MeToo movement is widely assumed to have begun a year ago, with Weinstein’s accusers. But it actually started in 2006, when the motto was coined by the activist Tarana Burke. She and the millions of others who tried to speak out were, neither literally nor metaphorically, in the spotlight.
At least actors serve everyone. But the next most-interviewed category, according to my unscientific survey, could be filed as “those who serve the wealthy”: restaurateurs, haute couturists, interior designers and the like, lionised and thrust into our faces as if we were their prospective clients. This is a world of make-believe, in which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers.
The spotlight effect is bad enough on the culture pages. It’s worse when the same framing is applied to politics. Particularly during party conference season, but at other times of the year as well, public issues are cast as private dramas. Brexit, which is likely to alter the lives of everyone in Britain, is reduced to a story about whether or not Theresa May will keep her job. Who cares? Perhaps, by now, not even Theresa May.
Neither May nor Jeremy Corbyn can carry the weight of the personality cults that the media seeks to build around them. They are diffident and awkward in public, and appear to writhe in the spotlight. Both parties grapple with massive issues, and draw on the work of hundreds in formulating policy, tactics and presentation. Yet these huge and complex matters are reduced to the drama of one person’s struggle. Everyone, in the media’s viewfinder, becomes an actor. Reality is replaced by representation.
Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story. Where is the public clamour to see yet another image of May – let alone Boris Johnson? The pictures, like the actors, blot out our view of other people, and induce us to forget that these articles discuss the lives of millions, not the life of one.
The media’s failure of imagination and perspective is not just tiresome: it’s dangerous. There is a particular species of politics that is built entirely around personalities. It is a politics in which substance, evidence and analysis are replaced by symbols, slogans and sensation. It is called fascism. If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.
Already this reporting style has led to the rise of people who, though they are not fascists, have demagogic tendencies. Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all, like Donald Trump, reality TV stars. The reality TV on which they feature is not The Apprentice, but Question Time and other news and current affairs programmes. In the media circus, the clowns have the starring roles. And clowns in politics are dangerous.
The spotlight effect allows the favoured few to set the agenda. Almost all the most critical issues remain in the darkness beyond the circle of light. Every day, thousands of pages are published and thousands of hours broadcast by the media. But scarcely any of this space and time is made available for the matters that really count: environmental breakdown, inequality, exclusion, the subversion of democracy by money. In a world of impersonation, we obsess about trivia. A story carried by BBC News last week was headlined “Meghan closes a car door”.
The BBC has just announced that two of its programmes will start covering climate change once a week. Given the indifference and sometimes outright hostility with which it has treated people trying to raise this issue over the past 20 years, this is progress. But business news, though less important than environmental collapse, is broadcast every minute, partly because it is treated as central by the people who run the media and partly because it is of pressing interest to those within the spotlight. We see what they want us to see. The rest remains in darkness.
The task of all journalists is to turn off the spotlight, roll up the blinds and see what’s lurking at the back of the room. There are some magnificent examples of how this can be done, such as the Windrush scandal reporting, by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and others. This told the story of people who live far from where the spotlight falls. The articles were accompanied by pictures of victims rather than of the politicians who had treated them so badly: their tragedies were not supplanted by someone else’s drama. Yet these stories were told with such power that they forced even those within the spotlight to respond.
The task of all citizens is to understand what we are seeing. The world as portrayed is not the world as it is. The personification of complex issues confuses and misdirects us, ensuring that we struggle to comprehend and respond to our predicaments. This, it seems, is often the point.
Thursday, 3 December 2015
Dons still pull the strings in Bollywood
- JOSY JOSEPH, SHARAD VYAS, GAUTAM S MENGLE in The hindu
Two decades after the cold-blooded murder of “Cassette King” Gulshan Kumar, the underworld still enjoys considerable access to the Mumbai film industry. Beneath the glitz, the fabric of the underworld-Bollywood nexus has not changed much even in 2015 — actors, producers and distributors not only pay obeisance to the ‘bhais’ at offshore locations such as Dubai but also help them establish a toehold in the film business by collaborating with production houses directly funded by fugitive gangster Chhota Shakeel, show investigations by The Hindu.
Indian agencies listened in on several conversations between Chhota Shakeel, a leading organiser of Bollywood events in the UAE, and other underworld operatives that showed that arrangements were under way in full swing to welcome a Bollywood superstar at the popular Meydan Hotel in Nad Al Sheba in Dubai from May 27 to 30. The fugitive don booked a double-room in the hotel for Dawood Ibrahim’s son Moin and daughter-in-law who were keen on a photo-op with the star. One intercept reveals an aide telling Shakeel in Dubai that he and others were with one Karim Bhai and the film star had gone out. The aide assures Shakeel that he will take Dawood’s son and daughter-in-law to the star. After a few minutes, Shakeel calls the aide to ask him to give his reference to the Bollywood event organiser, and that “children” must be arranged a good photo-op.
The meeting concluded on the same day as planned by Shakeel.
Dawood’s family was introduced to the actor as “Haji Saheb’s” children. It could well be the code name for Dawood among those in the film fraternity who continues to deal with him, or a way to mislead the superstar into meeting Dawood’s family members. Sources in the security establishment said the Shakeel contact in Dubai, who arranged the meeting for Dawood’s son with the star, was closely involved in Bollywood film promotions in Dubai and was a close acquaintance of top actors and production houses in Mumbai. Close proximity of actors, or cricketers, with the criminal world during their UAE tours has been a matter of concern for intelligence agencies. The Hindu’s investigation completes an important missing link of this puzzle since the 1993 blasts: a clear synergy between Bollywood and the underworld during tours abroad continues to date.
In March, a popular Pakistani television actor, desperately in need of a visa to visit India and find work in Mumbai, approached Shakeel for arranging a meeting with top television channels. The don immediately set up meetings for the newbie with several popular production houses.
In another intercept, the same actor called up Shakeel to push for his launch in Bollywood with a leading production house. Subsequently, Shakeel called up the CEO of a movie production house that is a major player in the Indian TV world and arranged a meeting. The intercepts do not reveal if the meeting ever took place, but prove the phone call was made.
Several intercepts show Shakeel attempting to reach out on February 26 to a Bollywood director who had just finished a film on Dawood Ibrahim’s life. In 2013, the fugitive don had planned a hit on the same director. When an associate in Mumbai asked Shakeel if he found time to threaten another superstar of Bollywood, Shakeel replied that he no longer called up actors with extortion calls.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
When women ask for Sex
When Women Ask For It
If I was “asking for it”, it would be a lot more than showing cleavage, or leg. If I am asking for it, dude, you will know it.
To me, the most memorable scene in Dev D is the one where Paro takes a mattress from home and ties it to her cycle. When she reaches the edge of the field, she abandons the cycle, lifts the mattress on her shoulder and marches to the clearing where she lays it down and waits for her lover. There are no words spoken and the camera holds her face close. Her expression is one of intense seriousness. You can see her desire is a field force of intensity that fuels every step. She is determined to see it through, to let that desire take over herself completely; not surrender to it but to let it explode out of her. You know that when she meets Dev, the sex would be passionate and powerful. And yet, in the south Delhi multiplex where I was watching the film, most of the audience burst into rapacious laughter. The women smiled embarrassedly at each other. Which made me wonder, why is female desire a laughing matter?
I thought back to the movie and that scene because even now, in the last seven weeks that we have been talking about sex, sexuality, power, passion and crime, we are still, yet to talk about female desire. In the conversations about rape that we have had, there have been infinite references to provocation. That if women dress a certain way, they are “asking for it.” To my mind, what this means is that men don’t know when we are really asking for it. Because if I was “asking for it”, it would be a lot more than showing cleavage, or leg. If I am asking for it, dude, you will know it.
When did desire become a male privilege? There is so little conversation about a woman’s desire for sex that a lot of people simply assume it doesn’t exist. A Times of India article last month starts with this surprising headline, Women too have high sex drive. Did you not know that? To my mind, understanding that there is such a thing as female desire is essential to knowing how we behave. There has, rightly, been a call for the Indian film industry, especially Bollywood, to introspect how it depicts its women. The whole “chhed-chhad” business, the near stalker-ish behaviour that Hindi film heroes indulge in does influence how men on the streets behave. That it gives that boorishness credibility. And eventually, the girl succumbs. What is important to the girl, it suggests, is acceptance. She does not desire. She does not chase. She does not acknowledge, even to herself, that she wants this man. She gives in, relents, submits.
Truth is, female desire is as much a brute force as male desire. Sometimes it takes us by surprise, often we relent to it. Some of us take risks to indulge our desire. Some of us fight it, telling ourselves why this particular one is not good for us. It occurs to us just as randomly as it does to men. When we watch a movie, read a book, walk down the street, see someone hot, at the pub drinking, at the temple praying. Sometimes we fabricate it, filling our head with fantasies. Sometimes we deny it. Sometimes we fake it. Sometimes it’s a coiled spring. Sometimes it’s a warm breeze. But what is important for you to know is that we feel it. We know what it is.
In an early episode of Girls, one of the characters reads from a dating manual. “Sex from behind is degrading. He should want to look at your beautiful face,” she reads. To which the other asks, “what if I want something different? What if I want to feel like I have udders?” Because, you know, sometimes we do. In Saudi Arabia, where laughably a lot of people seem to think there are no rapes because women are “properly attired”, the intense segregation of the sexes makes us turn our desires to other women. Don’t believe me? Read Seba Al-Herz’s book, The Others. Because no matter what you believe, you can’t put a burqa on a thought or wrap a hijab around a feeling.
We probably don’t talk about what we desire enough. But we certainly think about it. So this will probably come as a surprise to you. When you proposition us, on the road, in the bus, or at a movie theatre, and we say no, we are not saying that we don’t feel any desire. We are simply saying that it’s not you who we desire.
Veena Venugopal is a journalist in Delhi. She is the author of the book Would You Like Some Bread With That Book, published by Yoda Press in 2012. She is a contributing writer forQuartz and Mint. This piece first appeared at Kafila
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