The Tamil #metoo movement

 These past few days my birth city of Chennai has been rocked by a couple of major scandals. 1) The sexual harassment of female students by a male teacher in a leading school in Chennai 2) The seemingly free pass afforded to one of the most powerful poets/lyricist in Tamil cinema despite 17 women accusing him of sexual harassment. At the outset I have to say that I have not lived in Chennai for nearly 25 years but spent the first half of my life there. I also did not go to the school in question (although I am married into a family in which everyone graduated from the school) and have no direct connections to the movie or literary industry. Thirdly, as anything in Tamil Nadu is an intersection of caste and class I have to state that I grew up in an upper middle class Brahmin family, not financially rich but not poor either. 

With all that out of the way, I wanted to share what it meant to grow up as a woman in the so-called "Tamil culture" in the period between 1975-1995 Chennai. I am not speaking for other parts of India although I am sure that the Tamils are not unique in terms of the reckoning they need to have w.r.t misogyny and patriarchy that is so ingrained and steeped in everything we do that we never had words or phrases we could use to describe the female experience in such a suffocating environment until recently. 

1. Misogyny in everyday life

The Great Indian Kitchen captured this beautifully and this is a story that has been timelessly repeated in every home in India and TN is no exception. Our moms and grandmoms always ate the last despite having prepared the food; there was an expectation that the girls in the family have to help out with chores around the house (how else will we survive when we get married); you can study all you want but when I say it's time, you need to be ready for marriage and marry the guy I ask you to; your wedding will break my bank and back but that's the way it is; put up with any "inconveniences" in your married home; when it's time to raise a child step back from your career. Some classes and some castes might do a bit better on some parts of this narrative but this playbook applies to most women. I personally didn't face much of this at home and this also meant I naively challenged a lot of these issues outside of home and wherever I encountered it and this came with its own side effects as it generally made me angry and come across as a belligerent person.

2. Portrayal of women in our popular art (specifically Tamil movies and songs)

Model women are often portrayed as selfless creatures whose duty to the family trumps anything she wants to do as an individual. Our movies will show women as one of the following stereotypes

a)The shrew who had to be tamed- she had a choice, but unfortunately she chose badly and had to be taught a lesson

b) Angel in the house - she gave up choice and did her duty - this is usually reserved for the mother characters

c) The victim - no choice, just die

d) The sex siren during courtship who turns into the angel the moment the wedding is over 

It is also important to juxtapose these stereotypes against the hyper-masculinity of our heroes in Tamil films as the two go hand-in-hand.

3. A woman's body is not hers.

It is meant to be prodded, pinched, rubbed against and violated in countless other ways everyday and in public. It is meant to be shrouded in 6 yards of mystic beauty - the magical sari which somehow still doesn't guarantee any protection from violations. It has been dictated to in terms of what it can wear or not wear. It was an unsaid rule in my college (1991-1995) that I am better off not wearing jeans and not parking my bike in front of the department so I won't incur the wrath of certain male professors. 

Then there is the concept of a girl attaining puberty that has been celebrated in tamil films and music and is also fertile ground for male fantasy. It never ceases to amaze me how a woman's natural bodily function is simultaneously both celebrated and ostracized.

 The concept of "karppu" (virginity) in tamil cinema has made me want to throw up. Rape is termed as "karpazhipu" (erasing of virgnity), model women in tamil literature are referred to as "karpukarasi" (the queen of virginity). I wish someone does a study of the number of popular movies that have played with these notions, not from the point of view of stepping away from trying to control a woman's body. Modern movies have moved away from explicitly mentioning karppu but I bet you to revisit any movie from even a so called modern film maker like Shankar or Maniratnam and see if you can spot these themes or the 4 stereotypes I laid out in #2

4. Lack of awareness of what sexual harrassment and trauma does to a woman's psyche.

Growing up we had a number of weird phrases "eve teasing", "accused", "jollu party" to describe the predators and perpetrators of sexual harassment, for to even use the word "sex" was a taboo. Most girls and women knew the perpetrators - they went to school with them, study under them, work with them, meet them in family gatherings but very rarely we spoke up and when we did we used the watered down phrases that somehow made it seem harmless. Even before social media, no woman would want to speak up as it brought unwanted attention to her and any small spot to her reputation will be a violation of all the rules laid out in #1. In general there is a lack of awareness that sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power and the more stratified a society is, the more patriarchal its values are and the more rigid its structures are the power equations don't favor women.

Take all of the above and now let's consider intersectionalities which complicate the picture even further.  Two types of intersectionalities are at play here.

These intersections have made it nearly impossible to get to the truth and bring about change, because everyone is coming at this with the lens that suits them best. Tamil Nadu politicians have always known how to manipulate casteism to their advantage. So any political solution is going to come from that angle. The Tamil movie industry and the associated popular culture is closely intertwined with the political establishment that it is going to take cover under politics. The school in question should be seriously taking a look at its own policies and the protection it owes to its student body. Instead the case has become politicized and as politics = caste in TN it has become a conversation about caste instead of about the children whose well being is at stake. In fact the incident at the school only goes to make my point about the second intersectionality above - if this happens to girls in an upper class, upper caste school, can you imagine what would be the plight of girls who belong to the lower classes and lower castes? (I am cringing to use the phrase upper and lower castes, but in TN we take pride in our myriad classifications OC, BC, MBC, SC, ST - innocuous abbreviations which make everyday casteism more palatable. It is like KFC but for castes).

These days I visit Chennai only for a couple of weeks every other year. Some things are different and for the better. More women seem to be exercising their choices from clothing, to career, to partner choices, but this is still not the norm and certainly this is not true across classes/castes. I don't see a bunch of "road side romeos" (another one of our watered-down phrases) stalking women on sidewalks, but they don't need to do it physically. Most trolling has moved online. I still love Chennai, but being removed from it has allowed me to see its culture honestly. Culture is not simply about the past. It is a living, breathing thing. We can sit on our laurels and talk about Sangam, Thiruvalluvar, Bharathi, Mammallapuram etc but let's look at the lived reality for women today. Let's not forget that just because a culture worships women it does not automatically value them. After all witch burning in the west during medieval times also coincided with the rise of Marian worship. And from where I stand we seem to be stuck in medieval times and have a long way to go before this culture does it right by its women.

Celebrating Mother's Day with Moms of a Different Kind

 This Mother's Day was a very special one! We spent it with moms of a different kind. All I wanted for today was a little bit of nature time. Given that May 8th was Global Big Day we went birding in San Elijo Lagoon (my favorite birding spot in SD). So for today we decided we will go to a place we haven't been to in many, many years. When my daughter was a toddler we used to go to the Scripps Ranch Library + Pond often. Since we moved away, we only ever went there for her annual piano recitals and since the last two were online, we haven't been there in ages! 

This is how I spent my Mother's Day - in the company of mothers of different species! I never really paid attention to bird mothers during Mother's Day before although May is the perfect month for rearing the young. As we took a stroll around the pond we encountered many moms with newborns and it was such a delight.

Here is a Mallard mom watching over her 5 chicks while simultaneously warding off unwanted attention from a fairly obnoxious male who was after her. Bravo dear lady!

And then we ran into a Pied-Billed Grebe mom on her nest. We didn't see the eggs, but am sure she was keeping them warm as the weather was getting a bit chilly around sunset.

 

 

 And as we turned around the corner, we saw another Mallard mom with 3 of her chicks. She had them all tucked under her when she decided maybe it was time for a swim lesson after all.

 

 

 

I know, I know this last one is probably not the greatest of moms! My daughter once broke into tears when she saw how harshly coots treat some of their little ones. But today in the spirit of Mother's Day we were not going to judge anyone and their mothering styles. So we were happy to note that even the Coot showed her tender side (even though she appeared to favor one of the chicks).

And so here I am thrilled to have spent Mother's day in the company of these moms and my very own chick. I thought about how quickly time flies! She used to take unsure steps near this very pond more than a decade ago. Since then she has taught me to love birds and care about other species and I could not have asked for a better Mother's Day gift than what she has taught me over the years and the joy she gives me by coming out to bird with me.

The Ides of March (to May)

While the Romans and Shakespeare intended the ides to last a single day on the 15th of March, for me it usually lasts from March to May bookended by my dad's death and birth anniversaries respectively. Usually this is a time when I think about his life, our times together and the things he missed being a part of due to his untimely death. However, this year the Ides have taken on ginormous proportions due to the horrific outbreak of Covid in India. Just when things were beginning to look brighter in the US, the pandemic seemed to send us a shocking reminder of the need for constant vigilance. While I expected the systems in India to be not as sophisticated as in the West, this was a failure at many levels. The hubris of declaring victory so early can only be compared to W declaring "Mission Accomplished"in 2003, also in May! In both cases declaring premature victory led to complacency, confusion and colossal loss of human lives. While I don't blame just W or Modi for both these "Himalayan Blunders", take their leadership (or lack thereof) and add to it a heady mix of hypernationalism, hubris, and exceptionalism, you end up with a deadly combination (both literally and figuratively). Behind all the numbers and statistics there are personal stories of individual lives lost which is heartbreaking. There is a palpable sense of heightened anxiety coupled with fatigue/ burnout as this pandemic has gone on far too long. As I sat down to write today I wanted to wear my optimistic glasses to look at the world, but it is hard as the goalposts seem to keep moving. But I am going to take a crack at it. Maybe it is a  cracked looking-glass view of the world, but for now I will take it.

Looking back these past two months amidst all the horror, birds have been a constant source of joy to me. I have to say that Covid opened a few windows (albeit on my laptop) even as it shut a lot of others. Birdcams for one! I would have never had the time to look at BirdCams normally but this year everything was topsy turvy. I had to drop out of Feederwatch given the salmonella outbreak in California and I couldn't put my backyard feeder up. Instead here I was watching BirdCams from Cornell and participating in a data collection effort for a feeder in Ithaca! Oh and if I wanted to watch tropical birds I could always switch to the Panama feedercam. Every morning I would wake up to the sound of birds except they were not in my backyard but in Sapsucker woods or in Panama.

Then a friend of mine decided to take care of his rodent-problem by putting up an owl box with a ring cam. What luck, that the owl box was immediately occupied by a couple of barn owls and he was kind enough to share his stream with me! For the past two months we've been engaged in bird voyeurism spying on the pair as they did some fairly intimate and graphic acts! So far the female has not laid any eggs as her mate is not bringing in as many rodents as she would like him to. He seems to be of the "Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am" school (despite the tender picture below) and she is not ready to commit to raising a chick with him. But am still waiting to see if things change once we are past May.

We had another opportunity to watch birds when we signed up to monitor Vaux Swifts as they migrate from the South to the North during spring. San Diego is a layover in their long journey. These swifts rely on chimneys to roost in the nights and we were asked to monitor one such chimney and count the number of birds that showed up. Nothing we knew could have prepared us for the sights we witnessed. After a couple of nights of no luck, we hit jackpot on the third night of monitoring. About 2000 birds circled the air and put on a show unlike anything we've seen and then they all rushed into the chimney as though it was a blackhole that sucks anything around it. We went back multiple evenings to monitor these amazing birds and to have witnessed these record-breaking numbers has to be a silver lining amidst all the bleak news.

Finally we also went to hear live music for the first time in a year and a half! I had tickets to the SD Opera's Barber of Seville (my daughter's favorite opera) from 2020. That season was cancelled and this year they tried to offer a reduced version of the opera in the form of a drive-in. We remained in our cars, listening to the opera over FM, but with live orchestra and performers on stage which was beamed onto screens around the car park. Rossini could have never imagined that people would respond to his music with honks, but that's how we collectively applauded every aria. Would we ever get back inside a theater? I certainly hope so. But for now, the drive-in opera reminded me how much live music and a collective experience of it was soul-enhancing.

 

So here I am waiting for the Ides of May to tide over leaning on birds and barbers to get me through it. The pandemic has proven to us how vulnerable we are as a species and I am hoping that when we are out of this we lose some of our hubris and instead channel our efforts into understanding all forms of vulnerabilities around us. Watching My Octopus Teacher I found myself moved to tears at the bond between a mollusc and man. The ephemerality of life is all too familiar for countless species in the natural world. The pandemic is just forcing us to come to terms with our own. Today would have been my dad's 77th birthday. I haven't wished him in 18 years, but I am thankful for the time we spent together. As I hear of other friends losing loved ones during this past year, I only hope with time they are able to celebrate the life of the person they lost and find solace in shared memories.