You know how sometimes something is so bad it flips around to being awesome? Well, someone inadvertently made me crack up during a really shitty day by linking me to the following film about Delhi, made by white dudes in 1938.

75 years ago, they shot my city in glorious technicolour, and added the most lolarious music and commentary, and today, here it is on youtube for the edification and amusement of the natives.

There are unfortunately very few Delhiites reading my blog (that I know of, at least), but the errors in this film contain a grandeur beyond local knowledge, so I thought I'd put it out there towards the commentariat -

Spot an error in the film and you get rewarded with a kitten picture!

Now scuse me as I go take a metro to that pinnacle of civilised archetecture: Connaught Place Rajiv Chowk.

Here you go. Kitten pictures.

( Day 3: Still Alive! )

I continue to be delighted by advise or suggestions, if you can bring yourself to move beyond the high-pitched squealing noises that I trust Ms. Leher is worthy of inducing.

It's funny how in a whole bazaar of inhumane and outrageous things, sometimes just one ordinary, seemingly small item can jump out at you and pierce your heart.

Nivedita Menon recently posted Gender Just, Gender Sensitive, NOT Gender Neutral Rape Laws on Kafila, which is a statement signed by so many people whose feminist work I admire.

And I am terrified that these, the voices of some of the most publicly liberal and radical feminists who represent my interests, so stridently argue against one of the core realities of rape culture:

Woman can be rapists.

Female-identified people can sexually assault and sexually coerce and sexually violate another person. Their victims can be child or adult, male or female.

And this is not even touching the appalling lack of acknowledgement of transgendered and transexual identities, which are even more vulnerable to sexualised violences by status as marginalised and oppression minority.

This is not even about becoming the thing you are fighting by taking a push-back against patriarchy so far.

This is about wanting to take away protection from rape survivors, and denying them the legal ability to name the experience they went through with a term that states it to be as non-consensual, as violent, and as obscene as the actions a male rapist perpetrates.

Rape is sexualised violence, and violence can be perpetrated by any human being regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. Female caregivers who have power over children or the elderly or the infirm, female prison wardens and policewomen and armed forces officers, female teachers and professors, these are all in positions of power that can be abused. Women who have sex with women can be abused. Men in heterosexual marriages can be abused.

There is so much these women have fought for, so long and so hard, that I am so grateful for: these endless battles against the patriarchy, against casteism, against communalism, against homophobia, against classism and capitalism and every other form of bigotry and systemic oppression that warps the world I live in. I have such a sense of solidarity and empathy and admiration for most of their words.

It hurts so much to be so divisively excluded from their cause right now.

Occasionally, Shrivastava’s research produced vivid illustrations of what was lost when a religious relic was smuggled out of India. He stumbled across a series of beautiful Matrika, or mother goddess, statues from outside Tanesar, a village near Udaipur. Originally, there were a dozen of the statues, each about two feet tall, carved from dark-green schist, and dating to the fifth century. They depicted graceful, broad-hipped women, each in a different stage of motherhood: one pregnant, one breast-feeding an infant, one cradling a toddler, one walking a child. An Indian archeological journal had published photographs of the Tanesar Matrikas in 1961. Sometime thereafter they were stolen and smuggled out of the country. In the late nineties, one of the statues appeared in a Sotheby’s catalogue, and in February, 2003, Shrivastava assembled some photographs of the sculptures and travelled to Tanesar.

When the police contingent arrived at the village, a crowd formed. Shrivastava’s men asked whether anyone remembered a series of statues of women that had once stood nearby. “We got hold of a person who was now eighty years old,” Shrivastava told me. “Long white hair. Old guy.” Shrivastava asked the man if he remembered the Matrikas, and after a moment the man said, “Oh, yes, I recall, seven or eight idols were there of a lady, a lady feeding her child.” Shrivastava took out the pictures of the Matrikas. The old man stared at them for a moment. Then he began to weep.

I asked what had become of the Matrikas, and Shrivastava told me that they had ended up in various museums in England and the United States. Today, one is at the British Museum, one is at the Cleveland Museum, and one is at the Met.

-- from this old New Yorker story

Why do you think the Indian reaction to your book was so bad?

Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels.

What do you mean by “literary”?

I mean the kind of novel that you have to bring something to: a novel that you have to put a little work into reading; a novel that doesn’t give up its secrets and its meanings straight away; a novel that maybe needs two readings. All readers are not equal. A lot of people are not moved, and those readers shouldn’t read certain books, which may sound like an arrogant thing to say, but I mean, f––– off, don’t read my book! Don’t quote that.

OK.

Actually, who cares? Say it.

But your reception at home in the UK was very warm.

I got the feeling that western critics had actually read the book, which at that point was a hugely emotional thing for me.

-- From this interview

supriyan, ActuallyAisha and sridala, please apply for your phoren passports now, since clearly you are unindian reviewers.

I spent a great deal of yesterday driving. An unexpected drive, with the back seat covered by hastily filled bags, familiar signs of the unplanned unhoming.

The day before that I spent some time in a police station, talking about how a certain person was locked up inside a room by a certain other person, and that I needed assistance in getting them out.

I've spent some part of today, as I did yesterday and the day before, being told that calling in the police wasiswillbe an overreaction.

That's ok. I have manifest faults and failings, but if you are ever locked up, or restrained, or being thrown dishes at, or in any other way facing violence enacted on your physical person--unless you make a really compelling case otherwise--I'm never not going to do my best to stop it. No matter how many bystanders or well-meaning elders or loving mutual relatives tell me I'm wrong, this is what I will do. My dharma, take it or leave it, but you can't change it.

Of course, all these events have precipitated the usual messy introspective sessions about interference and advise, abuse and violence, etc and etc.

The right thing isn't always effective, and there is no one true right thing. In class 9 I went to my home room teacher and made a big fuss because one of the other teachers had slapped one of the other students; that student didn't care to back up my complaint, and nothing was ever done to the teacher. (I found out later that even parents had complained many times over the years and were told it was impossible to fire the teacher.)

And violence and abuse, when intimate, is always complicated... mediated by intersectional identities and previous abuse and hierarchical oppressions.

Those conversations around me these past few days, dismissing, waving away, minimising the throwing of dishes at people, the locking up of people, they have a point. There is a way of looking at those actions that makes them not such a big deal, that makes them not a breaking point, that makes them forgiveable and could be worseable. Physical violence may be my boundary, may be the boundary I advise people to draw when called on to give advice, but I well know its not everyone's boundary, either out of choice or necessity.

And I know I've been coming across as strident, as opinionated, as loud, and pushy in these conversations. It's good that I rarely freeze up in the face of someone else's crisis; but my action in response may not always be appropriate. I may have tried harder than other people in these conversations to educate myself about patterns of abuse, about statistics, about helpful scripts and psychological insights and tools to support and not victim blame and other vocabulary expanding things but that doesn't guarantee I'm of any help when my advice and my opinions run counter to what a person wants to hear.

Sure I can push people to talk about stuff not talked about, but as the person I was driving said, "I don't want strangers on the internet coming up to me and saying 'Your Deepa's [...] and that happened to you?" I've chosen silence so many times for so many things. It's perfectly understandable that someone might wish to say silent rather than endure a lifetime of reactions from people about a bruise that will soon fade, or a scratch that will heal.

Tell no one.
Tell everyone.

I kept bouncing back and forth between those two, these past three days, back and forth, two rubber balls battering at my temples both with the imperative of Doing Something.

And somewhere along the way, I came to a realisation.

This is normal.

That is, normal means statistically average, and much like rape if 1 in 4 or higher should be considered normal, then so is domestic abuse, domestic violence. So of course its understandable that people are normalising it. These things DO happen. They are just the way things are.

They're not ok. Never ever in my world, nor anyone around me's world as long as I can help it, will violence be ok.
Perhaps it will be bearable, because the human spirit's capacity to endure is remarkable.
Perhaps it will be tolerable, because the world contains many kinds of terrors, and people deserve the agency to choose which they will live side by side with.
Perhaps it will be minimal, because imagination or comparison offers worse.
Perhaps people will be ok, because why shouldn't people be, if they can, in spite of what may be done to them.

But violence will never be ok.

And my silence will always be selective.

You'll have it in the specifics, so that you don't have to deal with the shaming, the disapproval, the curiosity, the interference, the contempt, the mockery, the hundred and one pinprick reactions that people may fling at you if I told them.

You'll have it in the moment, when you have not asked for advice or opinion, but just me being quiet and being there.

You'll have it in the abstract, as I do my best not to judge your decisions and choices, and to remain open to your needs and desires.

But I'm never going to be silent about violence in the domestic sphere, because if it is normal and ubiquitous, then by god, it deserves to be as dissected as the weather and ill-health.

I'm never going to stay silent unless you are safe. That's me being normal right here next to you.

Wow, haha, ok so posting images from email from phone results in super enormous files that break your reading page and take forever to load. Good to know! (Upsidedown link for those with bandwidth)

Anyway, Happy Vikram Samvat New Year too.

Alright, I am in hiding since I have way way way too much work, but I snuck online to download a manual I need for work, and while the pdf was loading, I glanced over the reading list and discovered people talking about their kitchen contents.

Which amused me mightily, because one of the games I always played when I visited people's kitchens in the US was 'what is that thing?!' A peanut butter measuring cup! A knife specifically (and exclusively) for cutting bread! Chocolate-dipping tongs!

So anyway, modification to the meme:

Bold the ones you could never imagine owning, italicize the ones you've never heard of and are not sure you would recognise, strike through the ones you have because you use. Asterix the ones where you own something that you think fills the same purpose without the fancy name (and put the real name in parenthesis).

I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers* (kadhai?), egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans* (tava?), jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers* (khalbatta?), martini glasses, tea strainers* (channi), bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses, gravy strainers, double boilers, sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks, cherry stoners, sugar thermometers, food processors, bacon presses, mouli mills, cake testers languish dustily at the back of thethat there nation's cupboards.

And now tell me the ones you'd want to play with. Our kitchen is too small and basic for anything to lie around unused, although the taambe ka lota I keep meaning to use for drinking water is a little dusty. But I'll totally point fingers at my relatives' kitchens in whose cupboards idli moulds and modak moulds languish, languish I say! Oh also those things wot you squeeze out chaklis from. Oh, and I remember my parents had a boiled egg slicer from abroad but no one actually likes eating boiled eggs because shelling them is such a bitch, so I suspect that is probably lying around unused in their house somewhere. Have Americans invented a boiled egg sheller yet?

I will always regret I was never able to bring my seed:leech ratio up to decent levels thanks to my broadband being less than ideal. You go along with your noble predecessors: Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Megaupload, the Astatalk ebook fora...

Because I live under a rock, apparently, I just spent an hour catching up on the piracy and torrenting gossip going around. A few choice quotes from the torrentfreak blog:

Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there. That, according to a source in the country’s government, is all down to the United States getting involved.
A source inside the Interior Ministry has informed Kommersant that the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the very first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s trip to the United States. On the agenda: copyright infringement.
Ukraine had promised the United States that it would improve its attitude and efforts towards enforcing copyright and no doubt its Western partner will be very pleased indeed that Demonoid’s head has been presented on a platter. (Source)

A German law firm will hit a new low next week, even for companies engaged in the file-sharing settlement letter business. The company says that from September 1st it will begin publishing the details of individuals it claims have infringed their clients’ copyrights by sharing hardcore pornography online. To make matters worse, they’re threatening to target churches, police stations and Arabs first. (Source)

BitTorrent is the fastest way to share files with large groups of people over the Internet, and this is one of the reasons that prompted the Internet Archive to start seeding well over a million of their files using the popular file-sharing protocol. (Source)

And finally, this list of 15 things Kim Dotcom would do if he were president of the United States cracked me up, because it's adorable. (He's the Megaupload owner who got an anti-terrorist level raid and arrest a few months ago.) If this were a Simpsons episode, we would all be able to vote him in via write-in ballot sent on the backs of carrier pigeons or something. And then Anonymous would have to take him down because, whoops, the guy also says stuff like "Romney is simply the better bet for a free Internet". And it would be revealed that Maggie was (of course) one of the ringleaders.

So, anyone able to hook me up to the places the cool kids are seeding these days?

Around 20 minutes ago, as I was having my morning hot water while sitting on the chair jhoola in our passageway, a monkey poked her head up outside the window opening onto the neighbour's terrace and then pulled herself up to sit on the ledge.

Our neighbour's barsati has the kitchen separate from the main room, so she always keeps it locked. She normally is the one to warn us when the monkeys are particularly active, and routinely reminds us to shut the window which doesn't have grills.

But me and my flatmates are forgetful and lazy, and also, every extra bit of air from outside makes my room just a little bit more bearable, so normally the first thing I do when I get home is open it.

We keep talking about the necessity of getting grills for that one section (the other ones are either solid panes of glass or openable glass with grills), but our landlord is a khadoos makkhichoos who would make us pay even for such structural changes, and also, we all use that window to climb over into our neighbour's terrace to put the washed clothes for drying. Her landlord keeps threatening to extend the barsati into a full flat and render my room and our corridor, kitchen and loo sunlightless, but thus far we've been spared. Day before yesterday I was able to enjoy some quality patriotic patang-baazi by the boys my neighbour had invited over.

It's not like we haven't had a monkey come in before. The last time it happened when we were around, a male came in while I was in my room, went to the middle flatmate's room, took the biscuit packet on her bed and then went back to the neighbour's terrace to eat it. The middle flatmate had happened to be in the beginning-wali flatmate's room. (It's one of those train bogey flats with the drawing room converted to a bedroom.)

But that monkey was a dudebro we've seen around before. It's pretty easy to identify monkeys because either they are trailing large dangling testicles around behind them, or they sit in a way that, like the one on our window ledge was doing, displays an obvious and unmistakable vulva.

The lady monkey looked at me. We made eye contact.

From a distance of foot away, sitting in the jhoola, I flapped my hand and made hud-hud noises.

Then when she just continued surveying our home, I stood up and stepped back.

I picked up my chappals from the shoe rack outside my room. I made gestures of throwing one at her, along with more sounds of questionable aggressiveness. She did not respond.

I could have thrown the chappal. At the distance I was, I am reasonably sure I could have hit her, although my habit when throwing things at animals is always to throw in front of them to make them startle and move back, and I have a very strong never-ever-hit-anyone-with-stuff-you-throw-at-them instinct. Then I thought, what if she grabs the chappal and chews on it or takes it with her to a terrace I can't climb to. These were my nice walking chappals, not the hawai ones I wouldn't have minded losing.

Then as she looked back at me, I also thought, what if throwing something at her makes her angry and she comes to bite me instead of heading away or into the kitchen.

So then I went inside my room and closed the door. I stood on the gadda by the window and attempted to throw my chappals from there, but the grill on my window proved awkward to push a chappal through, and I felt my attempts to be a menacing deterrent were a failure.

I stood by the grill tapping the chappal against it, and she reached down and climbed on the jhoola, looking at me, and that made me wonder what would happen if she decided to reach through the grill to snatch at the chappal I was waving around so eye-catchingly.

Then she stepped from the jhoola to the floor, and made her way to the kitchen.

I listened to the occasional rustling sounds. I had closed beginning-wali flatmate's door in the morning so she could sleep undisturbed, so there wasn't much danger of the monkey going to her room. I wondered whether to call her from my mobile to tell her the monkey was here, but decided to let her sleep. (Middle flatmate was not at home.)

I looked around my room but there was a sad lack of sticks or long pointed objects which I could use to poke through the bars. I banged on the wall between my room and the kitchen, and made a few half-heated 'oye' and 'hoy' sounds.

I also watched myself vacillate; pressing myself up against the grill gave me the greatest range from which to see the kitchen door and any simian exits from it. On the other hand it also put my face in reach of anyone who might choose to come up from underneath and grab through the grille.

After around four-five minutes, she walked out, empty-handed. She climbed back up on the window-ledge and watched everything in the house, including me for a moment or two. I watched her back. Then she climbed down and left.

I opened the door, looked outside to make sure the terrace was clear and I didn't have to warn my neighbours, and then shut the window.

She had opened the fridge, and taken a tomato out. Half of it was lying bitten and squashed on the floor. She had either opened or knocked down a jar of sooji, and it lay trailing across the floor tiles in an abstract granular pattern of cream. Surprisingly, the chole in the cooker we had left out at night were untouched. (Thankfully she had also spared the over-priced half a brownie I had had to buy yesterday when there was nothing else to eat outside.)

I went back to my room and started typing this. When I went back a little later, the ants had formed two orderly lines and were hauling the sooji away. I left them to it, so that when the bai came at least some of it would not go to complete waste.

As I was in the middle of typing this, I got a call from someone I'm very close to. In the course of a long, freewheeling conversation, the topic somehow veered to the U.S. killing of Osama Bin Laden.

"But I think it's completely justified!" they said. "And I think after the recent bomb blasts India has every right to go into Pakistan and wipe out the terrorist training camps too."

"Oh." I said. "OK, I need to go now. And do something else."

"Oh." They said. "OK."

We have both come to recognise in the course of our political and social discussions that there are many moments when I disengage and step away completely because to continue is to fall down the pit of inarticulate incomprehension and personal fury.

When the bai came we both had a mutual head-shaking over the destructiveness of monkeys. "Mere ghar ke paas toh usne kisi ka fridge khol kar saare laddoo nikaale the, or aadhe khaa kar sirf phenk diye the," she said.

This is true, everyone I know has a story to tell about the appalling wastage of food that monkeys indulge in.

On the other hand, the other day as I was walking through the colony I saw a woman in the second floor direct her driver to buy some kelas from the rediwallah to give to the monkey who was sitting on the school compound wall on the other side of the street.

One of my martial arts teachers once told me that any human can kick a dog in the head and fight off a monkey. I was thinking of that advice the day I was walking down Tilak Marg stupidly carrying bananas in a polythene bag, and a big male from the group of monkeys lounging on the pavement came lolloping purposefully up to me.

I dropped the bag before he could extend his arm towards me, and kept walking on. Later I had an inconclusive discussion with a friend about whether I had been a coward and stood have stood my ground.

When I was a kid my mother and I were both standing outside the house when we saw a monkey come running up to a woman who was walking her kid back from the bus stop. It came straight to her and, as far as we could tell, started biting her. We helped her inside her house and put haldi and dettol on her leg, which looked badly chewed up.

Whenever I hear people complain about dogs or cats or even bears attacking them, my instinct is to wonder what they did wrong. Animals really don't attack without provocation most of the time; if bulbuls are divebombing your head, chances are (as experience has proven) that you are standing too close to their nest.

But what constitutes provocation?

And when does violence as prevention or retaliation become justified?

As I finish typing this the grill-less window is open again. The bai opened it when she came because washing dishes in the pankha-less kitchen is its own kind of violence. She didn't close it when she was done; none of us ever do.

I have to leave soon, so then I'll wake up my flatmate and tell her about the monkey, and we will chk-chk about the sooji. And then maybe at night have another one of those conversations with our neighbour, where we say, yes we should keep the window closed and yes we should get a grill and of course, such things are just a way to pass the time and have something to talk about with the people around you.