CCTV Installations

By Nisha Susan My friends and I like to retell a story about a well-known Bangalore feminist who passed away a few years ago. Two stories actually. One that when her husband brought home, over her objections, a friend with a reputation for being abusive to his wife, she left the house and sat on the footpath and told everyone who asked her why she was sitting there. The second one was when she got into a protracted argument with an auto driver who wouldn’t return her change. The auto-driver eventually snapped ‘soole’ at her. That’s whore in Kannada. She is supposed to have said, “naan soole irrbohdu aadre chilre vaapis kodu.” (I may be a whore but give me my change.) It is a line I have had many occasions to remember during this election season. Long before a comically villainous pamphlet against AAP’s East Delhi candidate Atishi started making the rounds this week. When I attended a non-partisan meeting in December 2018 to promote the number of women candidates, politicians across ...

By Gaurav Jain Protests at the Supreme Court. Image via Twitter @DeshdeepDU The Supreme Court’s special in-house committee investigating sexual harassment accusations against the Chief Justice of India (CJI), Ranjan Gogoi, has given its verdict—it found “no substance” in the allegations and has exonerated him completely. The SC’s Secretary General issued a terse note on the subject that has exploded into a major controversy, with criticism mounting in mainstream and social media. There were public protests against the judgement in Delhi and Bengaluru on Tuesday May 7, with many more cities expected to organise them in the coming days. The committee’s judgement and the authorities’ subsequent behaviour has thrown up several troubling questions: 1. It reportedly took the committee just four sittings to arrive at a conclusion. Why was it in such a hurry to render a judgement? 2. Why did the committee not try to correct the imbalance in power between the accuser and accused in ...

By Gaurav Jain “Woman Does 6% of the Work but Gets 100% of the Credit”. That’s one of the first videos that pop up when you search for MIT scientist Katie Bouman on YouTube. Another leading video is titled, “Hi my name is Katie Bouman and I’m a fraud.” We can now capture on our screens a swirl of black nothingness trillions of kilometres away, but we still can’t manage to give a woman her due for the achievement. Twenty-nine-year-old Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm that produced the first-ever iconic image of a black hole released to the world last week. She was the leader of one of four teams that collaborated to turn massive amounts of data on half a ton of hard drives, culled from eight radio telescopes around the world, to produce that one image. But alongside this scientific breakthrough, another photo went viral on the Internet—this one capturing Bouman’s shy triumph of the moment when the black hole image was first processed on her computer screen—...

By Nisha Susan On April 11 the BJP’s official Twitter account reported party president Amit Shah as saying, “We will ensure implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha [sic], Hindus and Sikhs.” This is an election which is not just gloves off about communal agenda, it’s also an election in which you are likely to forget that there have ever been gloves. While the BJP is still using the tiniest of figleaves like infiltration and the legitimacy of citizenship to evoke the promise of a Hindu nation, some right-leaning citizens have no patience for such tomfoolery.   On April 8, Twitter user Poornima Nayak Deb who on her timeline generally displays an undiluted dislike of Christians and Muslims tweeted a long thread that began, “Though not a new thing & has always been a part of “Sex Jihad”, “Porn Jihad” is becoming a trend among organized attacks on Hindu sentiments. But there’s also a very alarming sin...

By Nisha Susan Jacinda Ardern. Photo credit: Wikimedia What does a leader look like? To many people round the world, the picture of a leader remains male. In a recent CNN News 18 short docu about women’s political representation, Bangalore’s only woman MLA Sowmya Reddy tells this story — “I was at an event and someone was introducing me and said here is the MLA. Everyone was like where?” It was only when someone said ‘Lady MLA’ that eyes focused on her. It is this kind of ingrained thinking that allows political parties around the world to justify not even nominating women candidates. It is also this ‘male as neutral’ thinking what probably led to the former Silicon Valley darling Elizabeth Holmes (now accused of enormous scams) reportedly even faking a deep baritone to go with the Steve Jobs costume she wore every day. What is the meaning of a Jacinda Ardern then? What is the meaning of her leadership after the massacre in Christchurch? It is hard to get away from the fact that ...

By Gaurav Jain (This article contains references to child sexual abuse and predatory behaviour. Reader discretion is advised.) Michael Jackson and Wade Robson. Image via Twitter. 2019 might be the year we finally face up to the possibility that Michael Jackson was a serial pedophile and a rapist of small boys. It’s hard to read the previous sentence, but it’s time we did. A harrowing new four-hour, two-part documentary called  Leaving Neverland  premiered at the Sundance Film Festival a few days ago and immediately created worldwide controversy and cultural upheaval. It has been acclaimed for its careful and convincing narration of the accounts of two boys (now men) who say they were groomed and sexually abused by Jackson over many years, starting when they were only 7 and 10 years old. Wade Robson won a MJ dance contest and, at age 5, was invited to perform on stage with Jackson at a concert. Child actor James Safechuck was cast in a Pepsi ad with MJ in 1986. Both bo...

By Nisha Susan On Tuesday, Prime Minister Modi gave tips to students about coping with exams but, as it turns out, marks have not been his friend as the week progressed. In fact, maths has not been his friend at all. On Thursday, January 31, there was widespread uproar over the Business Standard scoop revealing that India’s unemployment rate is at a 45-year-high. The data comes from a NSSO survey that has been vetted by the National Statistical Commission but not yet released by the government. The scale of the outrage around the jobs data has muted another other set of disorienting numbers that have come straight from the prime minister this week – this time about rape. According to an ANI report, on Wednesday the PM said at a youth conclave in Surat that, “There used to be rapes in this country earlier too, it is a shame that we still hear about such cases. Now, culprits are hanged within 3 days, 7 days, 11 days & a month. Steps are being taken continuously to get daughters...

By Nisha Susan When Rahul Gandhi recently promised a minimum income guarantee, understandably many people responded with scepticism and curiosity. Some people responded with hilariously bad fake social science such as ‘ universal basic income goes against the very tenets of Universal Basic Theory of Evolution ’ which I parsed as “Its normal for people to be poor and me to be rich.” The debate will hopefully continue for a while. That is, if everyone is not totally and deliciously distracted by Twitter luminary Madhu Kishwar’s ‘pigs may fly’ response to the Congress promise. On 29 January she tweeted , “Wait till Rahul Gandhi also promises free sex for every adult male for a certain number of days every year.” Kishwar is followed by 2.04 million people on Twitter and the response to this tweet of hers has been to a lesser extent, “Hauww, Aunty said dirty word.” But most people have latched on to the word ‘free’ and said things about not paying for sex or not having to pay for sex or a...

By Gaurav Jain This week, the grooming brand Gillette unveiled a new campaign targeting masculinity and got ready to take the requisite hate from some quarters. The video has already hit 1.6 crore views and has over 2.3 lakh comments underneath. More intriguingly, so far almost 7.8 lakh people have downvoted it compared to only 3.8 lakh upvotes. The ad film We Believe: The Best Men Can Be twists Gillette’s iconic tagline “The best a man can get” into “The best men can be”, and begins by asking: “Bullying, the MeToo movement against sexual harassment, toxic masculinity—is this the best a man can get?” It shows scenes of bullying, misogyny on TV and at work, simulated news clips of reporting on #MeToo, and takes on male tropes like “boys will be boys”. There is also footage of American football player and actor Terry Crews testifying to the US Congress that men need to hold other men accountable. The brand has received a lot of abuse online, and some praise. Right-winger and fring...

By Nisha Susan In 2014, Air Force Chief Arup Raha said that women pilots were not suited to fighter jets. I had argued back then that he was right, women wouldn’t be able to fly fighter jets. Until they trained for hundreds of hours. Just like the men. But I also tickled myself with preposterous things people could have told the child Arup Raha warning him off his Air Force dreams. “A teacher telling 10-year-old Arup Raha when he was in Sainik School, Purulia that Bengalis famously disappear in airplane crashes so he shouldn’t dream of flying. Or some hard-ass, reality-loving trainer at the National Defence Academy, Pune telling an 18-year-old Arup Raha that he shouldn’t join the Air Force because that would distract him from his cultural heritage of writing poetry or singing Rabindra Sangeet.” I wish my flights of hyperbole had been as enjoyable as Army Chief Bipin Rawat’s recent flights of logic. On December 15, in an interview with the TV channel News18 , Rawat stated his many op...

By Nisha Susan Congress MP Sushmita Dev and BJP spokesperson Malavika Avinash share a big laugh at the first national event of Shakti Last Saturday I met and listened to more politicians than I have in my whole life and ended the day smiling. And you know, I like to think if you had come, you’d have felt the same way. A few weeks ago I went to a meeting of a new group in Bangalore with a huge, one-point agenda. To get more women into political office. Any women from any party. The convenor was a stranger to me, Tara Krishnaswamy, a woman with a dayjob in a Bangalore tech company and a full second life in civic and political organising. I left the meeting impressed by many details, but mostly by her ability to conduct a meeting which set out its agenda, long term plan and assigned tasks for an event a month away, all in 2 hours. The meeting was relaxed though very few of us knew each other. Now that the first national event of the platform – since then named Shakti – is over, I st...

By Nisha Susan Perhaps you’ve studied Chaucer in college. I didn’t. I knew he was a poet from medieval England and called the Father of English Literature and really that was about it.  This week I read for the first time that Chaucer scholars everywhere now have to take in the implications of a legal document from 1380 by a young woman called Cecily Chaumpaigne releasing Chaucer from charges of rape. I didn’t feel any sense of deep personal betrayal, the way I would have if I’d found out that George Michael was a horrible man, for instance. But I was fascinated to see that almost the entire screen of results if you google Chaucer and rape are defences of the man. Here is Wikipedia, for instance, inserting earnest feels where there should be bald and unsatisfying description. “He was mentioned in law papers of 4 May 1380, involved in the  raptus  of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. What  raptus  means is unclear, but the incident seems to have been resolved quickly and di...