And hence we celebrate...

Priya Ramani is someone most women professionals of a certain age can identify with.

What happened with her when a senior journalist took her into his hotel room to conduct an interview was the kind of thing that happened to many of us. It was something that made her deeply uncomfortable, yet she stayed silent because thought she was uncomfortable, he didn’t “do anything”.

Most of us have had similar encounters in our career.

Not an overt demand for sexual favours in return for professional growth (or to avoid potential professional death), but situations where the intent is made quite clear. We were uncomfortable, but we chose silence. And we did so for many reasons.

We chose silence because they system is so clearly stacked against women, that even other well meaning women would have rushed in to assure us that we were imagining things if we spoke about how we were made to feel. We would have been assured that we should move on since nothing really happened.

We genuinely believed that harassment took only certain very well defined forms. That unless there was deliberate touch in inappropriate places or unless a clear cut proposition had been made, it was not harassment. It took multiple POSH trainings before most of us accepted that the perception of the victim was as valid as the intent of the perpetrator. That if something made us uncomfortable, we had the right to speak up against it.

We chose silence because of the people we were up against. The men who made us feel uncomfortable were powerful people who could destroy careers. They were also part of a cabal that would brand you as attention seeking- “he can have anyone, why would he waste his energy on you?” They were men who knew that their network would stand by them, and help them destroy any woman who complained.

We chose silence because we subconsciously knew that if we spoke up, we would be put on trial not the perpetrator. And we were right in that perception. When Priya Ramani spoke up against her perpetrator, MJ Akbar responded by filing a defamation suit against her- he knew (as we did) that he would get away.

So, when MJ Akbar with his 97 lawyers accused Priya Ramani of defamation, we felt for her because we have remained silent because of the same fear. For us, it was not just Priya Ramani who was on trial, all our hopes and fears were too.

And hence, Priya Ramani’s victory feels like a vindication for all of us. It assures us that even if the perpetrator is not punished, he will not get away with attempting to turn the tables on you. It sends a strong message across that intimidation no longer works.

Yes, it is pathetic that we should be happy for winning a case that should never have been filed in the first place. But even this case, we were not sure of winning.

And hence, we celebrate. We all celebrate. It is a moment of validation for us.

The Silence of the Looms

 It was the silence that hit my friend when she went to the Angara weaving cluster in November.

Everytime she visited her father, she would make at least one trip to the co-operative, spending an entire day chatting with weavers and picking out the sarees her friends asked her to get for them. The clatter of the looms provided a pleasing background score as she checked out the design innovations and gave her expert advice on which designs may or may not work.

She’s often messaged me from the co-operative store, sending me pictures of a saree she thought I would like and asking which of the colours I preferred. If I didn’t respond on time, she’d just buy the one she thought I would like, and she knows my taste so well, she would always get it right.

When she visited last November, she wasn’t quite sure whether to risk visiting the weavers’ co-operative or not- would the people be following adequate masking and physical distancing or not, she couldn’t be sure. But since a friend had given her a laundry list of sarees she wanted, she decided to brave it.

As she walked through the weaving cluster, what struck her was how surreal the scene was. There were fewer people moving around, and all she could hear was one solitary loom valiantly clattering away as the master wearver worked on a customised wedding trousseau. The rest of the looms had fallen silent. With the co-operative society full of stocks which nobody wanted to buy, there was no point in getting further into debt by continuing to weave.

The economic slowdown has hit the weaving industry hard. With money being in tight supply and fewer opportunities to wear new clothes, people are buying less. Not only do the weavers not have an income from sales, their capital is tied up in the inventory that and their debts continue to mount.

Most rural weavers and artists are in similar situations. Their margins are so low that they depend on volumes to earn anything more than a subsistence livelihood. With the economic slowdown, they are actually losing money everyday, because while there is no revenue, loan repayments don’t stop. Any solution proposed by the government has been ad hoc and unsustainable.

There is not much an individual can do, and my friend did what she could. She bought as many sarees as she could afford, hoping to match sarees to owners later. Since she knows I have put a freeze on buying clothes for two years, she got me one as a gift. It was an Angara saree with jamdani motifs- a pleasing Andhra meets Bengal saree which would have been cherished as a design innovation in better times. As I draped it on a short day trip, I wondered anew about the trade-offs we make. At a time like this, should leading a more sustainable life matter more than supporting rural livelihoods?

More importantly, what is the government doing to alleviate the distress?