Tuesday
I'm sitting at my desk and for no reason I am reminded of a fat inebriated man who was dancing at Guzzlers Inn pub in Bangalore and i am laughing at my screen. My good friend swa was in town, my brother had finished some rotten engineering exam and we wanted a cheap drink so we went to this "sidey" pub. There was no place to dance and this guy stood up and started dancing, his friends were embarrassed to death and kept trying to get him to slow the pace or sit down. He was wearing a yellow t-shirt and dancing like I've never seen anybody dance before. Crazy twitching, head banging, bottom wiggling, swinging side to side, forgetting half the lyrics but making them up anyway and having a jolly good time. Finally, when one of his friends told him off quite sternly, the dance machine said very loudly, "eyyy, life is a bullllishit thing i sayyy, dawnce while you can." HHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HA.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
More Guardian (God bless the website, may it always be free) for those of you with a couple of free hours. Read first chapters of books shortlisted for this year's booker prize. I had read the first chapter of Carol Shields' Unless, a long time ago and found it very, very good. Happy to see that it has been shortlisted. I looked for it in stores here and not even Strand had it. If anyone finds it in bombay, please let me know where.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
"She might want to forgive him, but the next time he assaults her she could be killed," the solicitor general, Harriet Harman, will tell an Association of Chief Police Officers conference on domestic violence. The Guardian reports that Britain's solicitor general will tell prosecutors to try men charged with domestic violence even if the woman victim later retracts her statement or asks for the case to be dropped.
This is a significant development. Of course, a lot of men and women will say that this provision will be misused. Women might actually be deterred from reporting minor assaults/abuse, for fear that it will lead to a serious trial that cannot be reversed. Even with these pitfalls, I am all for it. I only wish that something on these lines would be possible in India. If only they would apply it to dowry prosecutions. I cannot forget the faces of the women with 90% burns lying in Victoria Hospital's burns ward. It was a complete shock to me, (protected 23-year-old squeamish girl) taking on the role of crime reporter. But I learned very fast that the men who had set fire to these women would walk free, marry again and earn some more money. They would pay off the cops, get the thumb print of the unconscious woman on a made-up dying declaration or have the dying declaration changed. I heard out hapless parents who had urged their daughters to stay on in troubled marriages, forking out large sums of money to keep the farce going. I had never encountered such callousness for human life and it left me depressed for days.
But it goes on, this pressure to marry, this very 'Indian' portrayal of the girl-child as burden. I watched the new fair and lovely advertisement in complete shock, where a father bemoans his fate because he has a dark daughter "kaash mera beta hotha." I'm REALLY ANGRY AND OUTRAGED at this screwed-up son preferring, phallic-worshipping culture and I don't want any part of it. Big financial companies don't even miss a beat as they advertise: Save for your daughter's marriage and your son's education. @#$%%. I know this perception has changed in small, small pockets. But for the rest of this wretched country, when will it EVER change?
