the fobby snob

still relishing my big career change and passion journey. remember how hard it was to get here?? someone pays me to write! more than rs.5 per word. so grateful.

so as a way of really leveraging the bombay experience, i’ve decided to write for a paper that covers the indian community in the U.S. this is what it’s like:

1. at the office, people speak in hindi to one another and i’m sitting there having no idea what the eff is going on. and this feels normal to me at this point. that is weird.

2. this woman keeps calling one dude “babu” and i always think she’s talking to me. this would not happen anywhere else.

3. i see the receptionist drinking chai (real masala chai, not the bullshit from coffee shops here) and i look at it longingly hoping that he will ask me if i want some.

4. they gave me a work phone, which i guess someone else used to use. because this it:

5. i covered an event and ran into friends of my parents’. one auntie chick came over and grabbed my face like i’m a five-year-old while i interviewed a film director. this was the moment when the whole india thing, which, while i was IN india, never really struck me as related to my indianness, came full circle. i was like oh, HERE it is.

so basically, points 1 through 4 are like the experience at wogue, without the bitchiness, the fashion samples, and me forgetting underwear on the first day of work. yay remembering underwear!!

at about this time four years ago, kiran sent me the last text she would ever send me: “babs. tell me something nice about me. thank you!” i wrote her back, verbatim forgotten, but with a message along the lines of her being beautiful and fun and funny and radiant. and “you’re my best friend.” i don’t know, something like that. the next day she called me and demanded to know why i had failed to send the nice text - yes, this was the absurd relationship we had. apparently she had been out drinking somewhere (not surprising), and the place had a poor cell phone signal. she never received it. at least we sorted that one out. because two mornings later when i texted her saying, “seriously what the f, answer the phone we’re all getting worried,” she didn’t get the message, or the many others, for a different reason. they all went through; she just didn’t get them.

yeah, i’d say this ford india ad is in pretty poor taste. ford did apologize and apparently the artwork was made public by accident, but still, the fact that such concepts are even being conceived of, forget actually getting sent to designers to be created, is disgusting. clearly multiple people collaborating on this account thought this was a good idea that was going to be pushed to fruition.

"rape is not india's only story"

100%. change is happening. so let’s keep talking about this.

from rupa’s piece in the globe and mail.

“India, like many traditional societies, still has a strong strain of patriarchy and misogyny.

For example, recently during a debate in the the lower house of the Indian parliament over the new anti-rape bill inspired by the Delhi tragedy (it was passed), a few members of parliament spoke sensibly and intelligently about the bill, but several MPs revealed their mindset in their comments to the house. One prominent MP argued against making voyeurism and stalking offenses illegal, opining that doing so would be a disservice to India’s youth. After all, he explained, he himself followed women around in his younger days.

But the good news is that despite such attitudes, India’s political class and its urban middle classes are talking about sex, and in particular about violence against women – something you’d never have dreamt of hearing in “polite” company even a few years ago in what is still a puritanical country. And the bill, although watered down to win parliamentary support, is at least a step in the right direction.”

the woman at the eyebrow place talks to me in hindi and i have no idea what she’s saying (likely something along the lines of “you’re my hairiest client”), and i just say “okay” a lot. it kinda brings me back to bombay. *tear*

it does matter to talk to about how women’s issues and feminism and patriarchy and all that mean different things and play out differently for women of color. and poor women. and women with disabilities. and gay and trans women. and in india, lower-caste women. and muslim women. there are added burdens, ahem added forms of oppression that don’t merely double the impact of the injustice that faces them, for women who fall into these categories. i think to pretend otherwise is kind of silly. yes, i said silly. because that’s how ridiculous it would be to try to assert that individuals at the intersection of multiple forms of historic oppression don’t need extra battles fought for them. they do. and if you want to remain out of it, then don’t get pissed when people call you out for your silence. calling out silence is one of the most important tools to breaking down this shit.

the whole onion quvenzhané wallis “cunt” tweet thing deserved the heat it received from the WOC blogosphere. and the feminists who said it was no big deal (or simply dismissed) that a little black girl was called a slur with particularly malicious misogynist undertones (regardless of how people may want to appropriate it now) do need to acknowledge, if they’re claiming to fight for women’s empowerment and all that good stuff, that they’re not being very inclusive when defending the tweet as satire. or even not saying anything at all.

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