Apology/Update: Turns out it wasn’t Benetton (see Eco’s comment below and Jill’s on the other blog). The ads were never sanctioned by them. So you could replace this post with a “someone’s so sick they think this is a practical joke”.

Blr Bytes again points me to something thought-provoking: a Benetton ad(?) “issued in public interest”, part of a series called ‘Colours of Domestic Violence‘.

My first instinctive response was ‘ugh’. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it’s the right response. The ads are not just in bad taste, they trivialise and use domestic violence in a way that is absolutely repulsive.

Each of them is a typical Benetton ad – good looking models wearing trendy Benetton clothes against a plain background and just the little green block with the UCB tagline to identify the brand. Except, it isn’t the UCB tagline. It says “colours of domestic violence”. And the good looking models are wearing, in addition to the trendy clothes, bruises.

Colours. Pretty purples, greens, oranges and browns. Bruise colours. The colours of domestic violence. Oh, how lovely!!

What do I see, when I see the ad? (No, I’m not putting up the visual: follow the link above if you want to see it.) I see Benetton clothes worn by domestic violence survivors. Benetton first, clothes next, survivors last. Well, you may say, that’s not necessarily true; someone might see the domestic violence first, or the survivor first.

I don’t think so. The focus of each of the ads is on the clothes: they occupy the most space, are centrally placed, the models are obviously showing off the clothes: posture, body language, all indicative of a typical clothing ad. The logo is right where you’d expect it to be, and you know this is Benetton even without reading the tagline or the ‘public interest’ line at the bottom.

So the point of the ads is to sell the clothes, piggybacking on the shock value of bringing Domestic Violence into the open.

Domestic Violence is pain, humiliation, abuse. It is stigma and self-doubt and ugliness. It is a lot of things that need to be talked about, but it is not a vehicle to sell clothes on.

*Crossposted at the other blog. Well, more or less.

I caught the movie on TV today, having seen it for the first time ages ago. Starring Naresh and Poornima, along with a host of ‘character actors’ like Sutti Veerabhadra Rao, Nutan Prasad, Srilakshmi and Rallapalli, the movie has a rather complicated plot.

Naresh is an idealistic young man who works in the ‘city’ (I think Vizag, I’m not sure) and refuses to take a dowry. Poornima is a young girl who refuses to marry anyone who wants a dowry. Perfect, huh? But they don’t know each other. Poornima writes a louu-letter to an imagined Mr. Right, for the sake of a bet, and sends it off to an imaginary address. Naresh gets the letter and falls in love with whoever wrote it (she signs herself ‘Sony’). Meanwhile, Poornima rejects yet another sambandham, and comes to stay with her sister in the city. She meets Naresh on the bus, and then discovers he lives in the house opposite her sister’s. She falls in love with him and he likes her too, but a scheming typist in his office gets her sister to pretend to be Sony and make Naresh fall in her net (valalo vesukovatam, it is called. Don’t you snigger.) Naresh tells Poornima he is in love with a Christian girl, so Poornima goes away broken-hearted and agrees to marry the non-dowry-taking boy her parents have found for her. Meanwhile Naresh’s brother, who comes to the city to meet this Sony, smells a rat and follows Sony, discovering the truth. Naresh, broken-hearted, agrees to marry the girl his parents have found for him. Naturally, the match has ben arranged between Naresh and Poornima. When Poornima sees the groom, she refuses to mary him, thinking Naresh is in love with another girl. Naresh goes to thank the bride who refused to marry him, finds out it’s Poornima, asks her why and clears up the misunderstanding, telling her about the letter, and finding out that she is ‘Sony’. So the wedding is back on, and Poornima, getting ready, notices the missing diamond in her ring, and remembers that she swallowed it to commit suicide when she hadn’t wanted to marry Naresh. While everyone is panicking, her father reveals that it wasn’t a diamond, after all, because he couldn’t afford one. So the wedding is back on again. But Naresh’s father is angry at this attempt to cheat them, and calls off the wedding, till he is blackmailed by everyone into agreeing to it. And so, finally, they get married.

Add to the above Naresh’s sister-in-law (Srilakshmi), who loves to watch movies and tell people the stories (starting from the titles, with dialogues, songs and fights all included), his sister, who loves to experiment with new dishes and feed them to unsuspecting people, his father, who wears his anger on his nose (mukku meeda kopam), his brother’s card-playing buddies who only need a flat surface to start playing cards, his peon from office, who loves liquor and lies in equal measure, and his boss who is a non-Telugu (and who is discovered to speak Telugu, nonetheless, at the end of the movie) whose laugh portends disaster, and you have Srivaariki Premalekha, in a nutshell.

Um. A rather big nutshell. With a lot of nuts in it.

But the movie really is testament to Jandhyala’s comic genius. There’s subtle satire, like Srilakshmi’s movie mania originating from her lack of productive employment, and the difficulties of a dowry-free marriage. There’s bold political statements, like Poornima, at a pellichoopu, telling the dowry-seeking groom to go stand at the santha two villages away, because there he will fetch a good price. There’s pathos – Poornima’s father remembering how they were worried when she turned two without ever speaking a word, but now are worried that she speaks too much. There’s plain old jokes, Naresh’s father cursing his elder son’s friends with a “may your funeral pyres be lit with your playing cards”, only to have one of them ask “how did you know that would be my last wish?”

And not a scene where you don’t smile at something or the other. They don’t make comedies like that any more.

I saw the ‘mo movie measure‘ over at Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog, and of course, I am off, recommending Indian films that fit the bill. The ‘bill’ is that the movie

• should have at least two women characters
• who talk to each other in at least one scene
• about something other than a man

So, let’s see. I started off with the rule in mind, but the open thread over at Finally was about much more, so here are movies I would watch with a Feminism 101 class, in no particular order:

1. As a consciousness-raising exercise: Kramer v. Kramer, the latest violent Telugu blockbuster, and a Sooraj Barjatya movie, and of course, Karan Johar
2. Films with defiant women: Sophie Scholl: The last days, Vanaja, Bhoomika, Sarafina, Sujata, Charulata, Aandhi, Fire, and one of the 80s Telugu movies in which Vijayashanti plays a police officer
3. Films where women strike the balance between expectation and ambition: Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Metro, maybe? Masoom (the old one with Shabana Azmi in it). And what was the movie with “Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho“? And Deepti Naval and Farooque Sheik’s Miss Chamko movie. And the other Deepti Naval movie where she pretends to be a gaon ki ladki to satisfy her boyfriend’s father.

Do all of them pass the MMM? Maybe not.

Other recommendations, anyone?

No, not a superhero baby. A real bat baby. Baby bat. In my flat. Yesterday.

Tipsy, what’s that bird flying around?
What bird?
Over there
Oh, God! Must’ve gotten in somehow and is trapped. Open all the doors and windows and it’ll fly away
Tipsy?
Yeah?
I don’t think it’s a bird…

After which Tipsy and her friend proceeded to call the watchman and ask for help from a neighbour while the not-bird perched on a curtain rod, and then crouch on the floor and scream when it panicked and started swooping around the house again.

(Watchman arrives)
Where is it, then?
It’s… I don’t know… it seems to have hidden somewhere…
(Much shaking out of curtains and peering into corners)
Well, it’s gone now
No, it’s not! I didn’t see it go! I can’t sleep in this house!

Of course it hadn’t gone. It was hiding till everyone had left and I was alone in the house, and it was dark outside, and came and swooped at me. Reduced me to a squealing mass of jelly fast melting on the floor of the kitchen, it did.

But this scene out of an ’80s horror movie fast turned into a tragedy, as it hit the rotating fan and plopped on the sofa, and lay there mewling. So now there was a screeching me on the kitchen floor and a mewling bat on the living room sofa. The watchman (my hero!) came and took it away, and to his credit, didn’t laugh even once at my hysterics.

And I was left staring at a bloody sofa and a bat wing on the floor.

Tempted as I am to draw attention
To the flurry of words we attract
A silence in the real world
Attracts me instead

A silence that is heavy
With words we all can hear
As we wait for speech

This silence is punctuated
(Is that what attracts me?)
By the beeping of a dying cellphone
An alarm? A signal, maybe.

I get up and leave the circle
Of men waiting for a  decision
The creaking of the chair is
As speaking the words
“to leave you in peace“

I sit here, anonymously
Alive and just a little tipsy
Silence broken, voices rise
Is that a decision made?

I am tempted to draw attention
To us, here, to myself
Does my silence not speak?

In my usual spaced-out and self-centred way, I appear to have missed out on a blogwar-of-sorts about the IIT-JEE. Usually, I would’ve shrugged and moved on, but this war was about gender bias in the JEE! You can’t expect me to resist that! The fact that this is actually being discussed gives me this huge high, so forgive the Tipsiness of this post, and read on!

The consensus appears to be that Abi has lost the blog war (I’m not going to recap it for you here) for a lack of supporting data. Vivek found data showing that there are very few women in engineering courses, JEE or not, and so, he concluded, the idea that the JEE is biased is rubbish.

Now, apart from about two years of JEE-coaching that I have almost-completely blanked out of my mind, and which was more than ten years ago anyway, I don’t know much about the JEE. However, the biases inherent in an examination must be proved in relation to the examination itself, and data in relation to admissions indicates very little about the bias of the exam.

Let me explain. One of the first exams I ever set included a long and complicated fact situation, to which a very simple and obvious principle of law had to be applied, and the question required arguments on both sides to be presented. I thought it was a rather easy question, but it left some students weeping, and me wondering what had gone wrong. The answer lay in the question. The fact situation I used involved a stock exchange, and while it didn’t need students to know anything about the stock market, many of them (in the fourth year of a five-year law course) just blanked out when they saw the facts. They could not relate to the fact situation, it was unfamiliar, and on top of the existing exam tension, it was just plain SCARY! The fact scenario was so unfamiliar that they couldn’t get beyond it to focus on the actual principles involved, which they knew and could’ve easily applied.

What I learnt from that paper was that there are always biases in a paper that influence how students perform. In may case, it was my comfort with corporate/commercial law contexts that led me to set the question in a stock exchange, not realising how many students would be intimidated by it. In relation to entrance exams, this translates into a bias in the ‘gatekeeper’, and therefore, a denial of opportunity. An article in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism[1] explored the gender bias of the LSAT in great depth,

documenting how the LSAT decreases women’s and (particularly) minorities’ admission opportunities in the 1990’s, even compared to men and Whites who had similar accomplishment levels over four years of college. As a way of studying the impact of current definitions of merit, I compare present admission practices with two admission models based on undergraduate grade-point averages. Either alternative admission model results in the admission of about two thousand more women to ABA schools, and would create overall gender parity in legal education

The impact of ‘current definitions of merit’, as reflected in the choice of questions, the model of test administration and many many other things that make up the test, can only be measured in comparison to other admission models. Women in my classes do better on research projects than on multiple-choice examinations. They do better on exams that allow collaborative work than on those that require individual work. But Kidder actually identifies four sources of exam bias: stereotype threat, speededness and differential guessing, the gendered effects of subject matter selection and biased questions.

Isn’t it time we examine our entrance exams in relation to these, and figure out whether they’re biased? As Vivek pointed out very effectively, we have ‘missing women’ in science, and there are many many many social biases that have led to this. But that is no reason to assume that our exam papers themselves are not tainted by these biases. It’s time we take a hard look at the choices we make and the biases we reveal when we arm our ‘gatekeepers’, isn’t it?

[1] William C. Kidder, “Portia Denied: Unmasking Gender Bias on the LSAT and its Relationship to Racial Diversity on Legal Education”, 12 Yale J.L. & Feminism 1

Aa okka vishayam meeda kada, nannu lokuvaga choostunnaavu. Aa okka daanito nenu neeku lokuvai poyaanu. Anduke kadara nannu ila treat chestunnavu…

Interspersed with sobs and in a suitably tearful tone of voice. Overheard on the road home. A girl, perhaps a few years younger than me, standing on the roadside, and crying into a mobile phone.

She’d obviously stepped out of office to take the call, and as I passed her, I was reminded of two inane idiots who told me they didn’t mind when I told them I could hear all of their conversations when they used the corridor outside my flat as a phone booth.

It made me wonder about how technology has impacted privacy. God knows we talk a lot about this, but discussions seem to revolve around the protection of privacy rights from the Big Bad State or the Big Bad Corporation: essentially, around protecting our private spaces from interference by ‘public’ entities.

We don’t usually discuss how our fundamental notions of privacy have themselves changed because of technology. Once upon a time, if we were using a public telephone booth, we would shut the door, if there were one, and speak softly so that we couldn’t be overheard. Speaking into a private phone at home, even in front of a room full of family and friends, was still a private conversation. Now, as long as those-we-know can’t see us or hear us, we believe we are private, even if we are in the middle of the street. The fact that complete strangers are privy to intimate conversations does not seem to us like an invasion of privacy (ours or, for that matter, theirs).

And so, as technology makes us more and more self-centred, it also changes the notion of the ‘other’, the one from whom we require protection. Hm.

“Service should be inspired not by servitude, but by concern and consideration”

Cool insight from last night’s pankti bhojanalu, with traditional food vaddinchufied by an extremely enthusiastic and affectionate bunch of kids.

Saw it in Hindi, in Nagpur, in a more-than-half-empty hall, at midnight.

The problem with Hindi-dubbed movies is that you’re automatically translating into English in your head when a dialogue is spoken, so when you can’t get an idiomatic translation immediately, your mind is occupied with wondering what it is, rather than what is happening on screen. But even that doesn’t excuse some of Provoked’s sins.

First, here’s a movie that deals with an event that led to a change in how the law viewed provocation. It was also an incident that highlighted the problem of domestic violence, and gave it a brief visibility in the media. But the movie ignores (well, a fragmented presentation in flashback is as bad as ignoring) the provocation and the violence. The first time we learn of the violence is through a sight of the bruises on Aishwarya’s beautiful back – even blue welts on pale skin. What does the movie show of its heroine? Pre-prison, she’s a pretty, fresh-faced girl. In prison, she turns from scared shadow to confident woman. But how did she become scared shadow in the first place? That is a transition we never see. Her husband hits her so hard he knocks her over, apologises, professes love, and the scene is cut. Again and again, the director seems to choose not to look at the  sheer ugliness of domestic violence.

So what, one might say, it doesn’t have to be ugly, does it? The problem is that this means the movie is no longer about the domestic violence, or how it provoked a killing.

Fine, then, the movie is about her getting her life back together, after the killing. And most of the movie is. She comes to prison a battered, broken girl, and leaves it a strong, admirable woman. But how does that happen? She finds friendship (love?) with her cellmate, who protects her from the jail bully, holds her when she wakes up from nightmares, teaches her English, gets a QC to plead her case in appeal – turns her life around. But the jail scenes are all deeply discomfiting because of the stereotypes that permeate them. You can tell, even before it happens, what is going to happen. Like a Hindi movie, cliche after cliche rolls out. Surely the story was poignant enough, in itself, without having to resort to that!

It’s a pity, really, because the idea held so much promise. The cast was pretty decent, the dialogues might have been decent in English. But if ever a movie sucked for trying too hard, this is it.

…can you smell lightning too?

When the weather is going to change from dry, soul-sapping heat to a quick storm-like shower, when clouds are moving in over a blazing white sun, and the wind is revving itself up among the trees, can you smell the lightning? Does it travel up your sinuses, burning them up, searing a path across your forehead to settle at the top of your head, making every movement agony till the sweet sound of rain, the smell of wet earth and the taste of water in the air distract you from it?