Himalayan trek, Osama, Obama, Kanimozhi, Feminist poets & I Am...

I go climbing mountains for 10 days and look at all the things that happen behind my back. As soon as we got back to the hotel from the Himalayan trek, I was informed about the death of the world’s terrorist number one. I was totally disoriented after climbing up and down and the lack of toilet facilities while trekking had added to my head feeling all addled. So when one of the youngsters in the team told me grimly that Osama had been hunted down in Pakistan, I confused the man with multiple wives to be the US president. My first reaction was ‘OMG, there’s going to be repercussions. I am sure the US will declare war on the rest of the world.’ Everyone present in that lobby looked at me strangely but I took it to be something they were doing out of habit. All through the trek they had looked at me in a similar fashion because I was always chanting aloud- ‘Dear God, I don’t know why I did this but if I come out of this alive, I will turn into a good person.’ I guess God believed me and took away Osama instead. But I am not sure whether I was all that wrong in assuming the US president to be a terrorist. Maybe not Obama but Rambo Bush definitely qualifies to be in the most wanted list.

I wish Obama had waited for one more week to carry out the covert operation. That way I wouldn’t have missed Arnab Goswami or Rajdeep Sardesai giving their silly interpretations after the event. They are such entertaining gentlemen. They do this voice inflection thing, raising and lowering it alternately in order to drive home a point. I am sure both of them thundered afterwards whether India will have the guts to take a leaf out of the American adventure and embark on a similar operation. Of course we shouldn’t listen to these silly chaps. It’s much better to be on the sidelines and watch the souring of the love story between the ex allies. Since we Indians are Bollywood trained, we can always sing a background ditty ‘Do Hanson ka joda bichad gaye re...’ Very apt, don’t you think?

Behind all these frivolities, my heart goes out to the citizens of Pakistan. They are caught between the devil and the deep sea. If they support the US, the Al Queda would get them and if they support Osama’s outfit, Uncle Sam will take their trip. They hardly have any space to manoeuvre a peaceful existence for themselves.
Another of those sad news is about the great feminist poet Kanimozhi’s imminent arrest. No one’s talking about her poetry any more. Not even Barkha Dutt. And we all know how much she supports poets, even bad ones like Kapil Sibal. I haven’t read any of Kanimozhi’s poems because they are in Tamil but I believe they are quite firebrand.

I came across one of those written by a young poet in English. It had lines like ‘the man in the bus stares at my breast.’ I don’t get it. A creep staring at the body parts of a woman is sexual harassment. He should be slapped and not have lines in a poem dedicated to him. I hope Kanimozhi doesn’t write such senseless lines. In any case she will be in an all women prison so no man is likely to stare at her. Hopefully she will organize a kavi sammelan inside the prison and have Sibal as the chief guest. Dutt can cover it live for NDTV, enraptured expression et al.

What I didn’t miss after coming back is ‘I am’ by Onir. I should have but since it covered serious issues like child sexual abuse, I thought it was my duty to watch this one. The film turned out to be a damp squib. There are four stories crisscrossing each other. The first one was quite nice with Nandita Das and Purab Kohli in it. Das wants to have a child through sperm donation and Kohli is the young donor. They meet even though they are not meant to and the encounter is both funny and touching. Das is self assured as always but it’s Kohli who walks away with the acting honours. He is very good as the confused young man getting slowly attracted to the character played by Das whose child he is meant to ‘father.’ The next one has Juhi Chawla and Manisha Koirala and is set in Srinagar. Chawla plays a Kashmiri Pandit who was hounded out of the valley with her family as a child and is forced to go back to sell her house. Koirala plays the friend she left behind. The situation has tremendous possibilities but not much of the potential is realized because both the actors find it difficult to cease being divas. So they spend much of the time in the segment walking the minefield streets of Srinagar as if they were walking the ramp for Rohit Bal. The child sexual abuse segment again fails to deliver. Anurag Kashyap is very good as the abuser but the rest of the cast sucks. Shernaz Patel playing the mother of the victim hams it like anything. Patel is a competent actor but here she is reduced to a caricature and grimaces and winces so many times while delivering the few scanty lines the script accords her that you end up wondering whether she had a stomach upset on the days she was shooting. But the worst is reserved for the last segment.

Try and get this if you can. Rahul Bose is a successful corporate professional in Bombay. He picks up a hustler one evening and buys him dinner. Then they go for a drive. Bose can’t take the hustler home because his parents are visiting. So now we know that he has kept his sexual orientation a secret from his family. Next he parks his car in a lonely street and takes off his shirt and proceeds to pile on to the hustler. So now we know he is also stupid. A burly cop intercepts them and slaps around the indiscreet lovers. He also threatens to put both of them behind bars. Bose agrees to bribe the cop and hands over his ATM card to the hustler to withdraw the cash, presumably with the password. So now we know he is really really stupid. Bose and the cop are left alone with each other after the hustler goes to the ATM and Bose instead of putting on his shirt again stands provocatively next to the cop with his arms around his chest like he was Mamta Kulkarni posing for the Stardust cover. The cop gets turned on and forces Bose to give him a blow job. Later Bose discovers something that he should have known all along when he set out on the misadventure. That the cop and the hustler are partners in crime. And he is devastated. Seriously. What is gay about the whole thing? Won’t a pair of heterosexual lovers have the same experience if they were making out in a car and the cops intercepted them? The Delhi court has allowed two consenting adults of the same sex to make love but in the privacy of their homes or at the very least in a hotel room but certainly not in public places. As for the actors, Bose is plain terrible especially when he is giving coy angles to the cop. But both Arjun Mathur as the hustler and Abhimanyu Singh as the cop do a commendable job, though that’s not enough to rescue the concluding portion from drowning the impact some of the earlier segment leave behind.

One more thing happened while I was away. Rediff brought out an interview of mine about ‘The Boss is not your Friend’. Going through the comments thread I realized some ‘bosses’ have been as rude to me as I have been towards them in the book.

Life always evens out things.

Child Sexual Abuse

Talking about it leaves you slightly sick in the stomach. It’s like coming across a badly mangled dog on a highway that has been run over by a passing vehicle. You immediately look away pretending not to have noticed. And yet it registers somewhere in your psyche and makes you want to throw up whenever the sight comes back to haunt your memory. Sexual abuse of any kind is tormenting enough. Be it a look, a touch or more. But when it happens to a child, the aftermath is all the more devastating.
I suspect just as we have more people than any other country, the instances of child sexual abuse are also that much more. I am sure our cities have more children living on the streets than anywhere else and they are preyed on constantly by the adults around them.

The most sheltered of environment is no deterrent for the pervert who picks on children as victims. Most families hide the shameful secret of a relative or friend who has messed around with their child or at least tried to. So imagine the fate of those children who don’t have anyone to look after them.

The plight of young boys is as bad if not worse than girls. We are always more careful about the girls in our family. There are greater restrictions around them. With boys, our conditioning is that they can manage. Even to acknowledge something like this can happen to them is difficult to accept for us. And most abuse victims tend to internalise the guilt of the abuser. They fall into the trap of believing it is their fault. With boys, this tends to happen much more. Men feel more ashamed to talk about themselves as victims. So the chances of the crime against young boys going undetected are much more.

We had this neighbour when I was a young and he pretended to be very fond of children. If he came across a group of us playing in the street outside, he would pick one of us and hug that child tightly and go on mumbling ‘should I bite your cheek.’ All of us felt uncomfortable with him but the entire neighbourhood thought of him as this guy who was really fond of children. If any adults were around, they would just laugh at our discomfiture. Then we had this class teacher in Class IV in the missionary school I went to. This was a co-educational school and his way of punishing us for not doing our homework was to make us turn our back to the class, force us to pull down our pants and briefs and deliver five or six blows on our bare butts with a ruler. The caning didn’t hurt as much as the humiliation.

The girls had to lift their skirts to get the same treatment. The only concession given to them was they didn’t have to pull their underpants down like the boys. There were also days when he felt affectionate towards us. So one by one, we had to go and sit on his lap while he kissed our cheeks and moaned how much he loved us. I can’t figure out after years what felt worse. His love or his punishment. All I know is that for years I blocked out the memory of that painful year as the rest of my classmates must have. I changed my school in Class VIII and that too helped me to forget. But I know today if I came across him anywhere I will physically assault him. I wish him dead.

One thing that makes me absolutely furious is this soft pop psychology approach about how the abuser abuses because he has been abused himself as a child and needs counselling rather than punishment. It makes no sense whatsoever. Abuser are usually highly intelligent people who manage to prey on the victims by cleverly side stepping the boundaries and norms laid down by society. If they are devious enough to work through all that, they should work through their issues as well and ensure they are not contaminating others with their sickness.

There is a lot more that can be said about this subject. One of the first plays I wrote and directed, ‘Shadows on the Wall’ dealt with this subject and I remember how stressed the actors would get during rehearsals. It was an all women cast and I think they had to deal with their own set of painful memories. After all, all the women in this country have been abused in some way or the other; at the very least by a look or a touch or what passes off as ‘eve teasing.’

‘I am’ directed by Onir supposedly deals with this subject. His last film was a total rip off from an Almadover classic. I hope he has not borrowed this one from ‘Bad Education.’

Will let you know after watching the film next week.