Ranveer Singh's photoshoot should be a non-issue

 [First published in Women's Web]

Stop at any roadside dhaba on the highway early in the morning, and you are sure to come across hirsute men clad in nothing more than a hitched-up lungi and a toothbrush going about their daily ablutions with utter nonchalance. If you stumble upon them, you are the one who backs away in agitation or confusion, muttering barely audible apologies. They, in their partial nakedness, are at home in public. You are the one intruding on their territory.

India is a country where the sight of topless men in public and semi public place is normalised. The neighbour who opens the door when you ring the bell to hand over a couriered parcel. The owner of the kinara store taking a quick nap on the floor in the afternoon. The man who after swimming four laps of the pool stretches out on a deck chair with a mug of beer. The friend who casually takes off his wet shirt after getting drenched in the rain, and remains bare-chested for the rest of the trek.

Men do not think twice before taking off their shirts in public places. Women either back off, or studiously ignore it while completing the transaction they have with the men.

In a country like this, the furore over Ranveer Singh’s photoshoot is rather amusing. The presence of a semi naked male body in public places is certainly not new; what people seem to objecting to is the fact that it is a toned body presented in an aesthetically attractive manner, not a flabby, hirsute one!

Aren’t there more important issues to outrage over than a photoshoot?

The people who argue against Ranveer Singh’s photoshoot say that it goes against their cultural ethos and that they are morally offended by it. Without getting into the details of what constitutes or doesn’t constitute “culture”, I wonder why there is not similar outrage when there are crimes against women? One of the people who filed a legal case against the actor for sharing photographs from the photoshoot on his twitter feed says that she does not want her young daughters to see the photographs and be led astray by it.

I wonder if she is equally outraged by the fact that by conservative estimates one in every three girls is sexually abused at home, often by a relative or a close family friend. Apparently the nation wants its young girls to be protected from the sight of the “bum” of a naked man. But the nation doesn’t care that the same young women are forced to fondle the genitalia of their uncles, cousins and neighbours. Parents do not want their daughters to be titillated by the photograph of an actor, but the same parents protect the relatives and friends who impregnate the same daughters.

Social media allows you to control what you see. Accounts with questionable content can be blocked or muted. Settings can be changed to block images which display excessive nudity or explicit violence. It is much easier to protect impressionable girls and young women from accessing inappropriate content, than to protect them from men who sexually abuse them. Yet, it is a photshoot that we outrage over, not child sexual abuse.

Who decides what is morally offensive?

Article 19 of the Constitution of India guarantees freedom of speech and expression to all its citizens, but imposes “reasonable restrictions” on the exercise of the right in the interest of “decency or morality”. Though well meant, this exception is being used to bring in extremely narrow definitions of “decency and morality”, and this is quite a slippery slope to go down. Today, a section of the population decides that a photoshoot by an actor goes against their sense of “decency and morality” and they file a case against him.

What if tomorrow the same people decide that the clothes I wear offend their sense of “decency of morality”. Will the law allow one section of people to dictate how others should dress and how they should conduct themselves? Will tomorrow, a Taliban style ruling be brought which mandates the length of our hemlines and how much cleavage we are permitted to display?

Someone famously said, “your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”. Similarly, the right to be morally outraged should end where another individual’s personal freedom is impinged. Just as we do not want others to dictate what we wear, we too should not attempt to curtail what someone else wears (or doesn’t wear).

Should children of an impressionable age be subject to such content?
Children are exposed to a lot of violence, including interactive violence from an extremely young age. Many of the TV shows they watch, including Shin Chan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and even our desi Chota Bheem, encourage bullying and violence. The games they play on laptops, tablets and smart phones, are games that involve shooting, fighting and blowing up people and structures.

Despite putting parental settings in place, from a very young age, children can access that is sexual or violent in nature. The only way to ensure that children are not ‘let astray’ is by giving them a solid moral foundation and spending sufficient time with them to ensure that they are able to put the content they consume in the proper perspective.

Given all the content at their disposal, children of an “impressionable age” are unlikely to even come across Ranveer Singh’s photographs, much less be influenced by it.

To sum up, there are many other issues that could and should occupy our mind space much more than aesthetically shot photographs of an attractive actor.

The Fig and the Wasp

 When you tear a banyan fig open, chances are you will find a colony of tiny insects/ larvae inside it. But how did they get there?

Certain wasp species co-evolved with banyans. An impregnated female wasp carrying pollen enters the banyan fig, deposits pollen, lays her eggs and dies. When the eggs hatch, the male wasp impregnates a female wasp, drills out of the fig and dies. The female laden with fresh pollen, escapes through the hole drilled by the male, enters another banyan fig, deposits pollen, lays her eggs and dies. The cycle continues.

Since the life cycle of a wasp is very short, and they cannot reproduce without banyan figs, the banyan tree produces fruits throughout the year. These figs attract fructivorous birds like barbets and hornbills, ants, small mammals including monkeys and other flora/ fauna. The banyan tree is, therefore, always teeming with life.

The banyan is considered a keystone species since it, in effect, defines the ecosystem.

If you chop off the canopy of a banyan prior to translocation, you not only put the banyan in danger, you destroy the entire ecosystem that is centred around it.

On #NationalConservationDay, let us pledge to save the Banyan, our National Tree.

The Unexpected Visitor

 

I grew up loving lantana. The multicoloured flowers. The dark blue berries I loved to eat (in moderation). The butterflies that visited them. I even like the weird smell the leaves gave out when crushed.

During the pandemic, when sunbirds and silverbills started visiting my balcony, I dreamt of getting lantana too, so the butterflies would come. But people discouraged me. I understood they were an invasive species that messes with the biodiversity and is toxic to herbivores. That they have taken over more than 40% of tiger habitats and are almost impossible to get rid of. Though I really wanted the butterflies, I didn't get the lantanas I craved.

Then this plant sprang from nowhere (not really nowhere- from the belly of a fructivorous bird that must have visited). I rarely weed out the plants that spring up in my pots, so let this one grow. By the time I realised it was lantana, I didn't have the heart to uproot it, and even if I did, unless I burnt it, it would have just taken root wherever I trashed it. Maybe I was meant to have the lantana. And the butterflies I hope they attract.

I just need to make sure the plant doesn’t fruit, so the it doesn’t propagate further.

Book Review: Legal Fiction

 

“Everything in Legal Fiction is fiction. All that is fiction is fiction, of course, but even truth is fiction. If the people, stories, places and incidents at any point appear to be true, it is our collective misfortune. We advise you to consider it a fault of the imagination and move on.”

I read these lines three times, before I thought I could get a glimmer of Chandan Pandey was trying to convey. After finishing the book, I circled back to these lines, and they finally started to make sense.

The book deals with an India where reality and fiction coexist so seamlessly, you cannot distinguish between the two. An India where the enactment of play appears more real than reality itself. An India where life imitates art, and art is based on life.

The story is loosely based on a now forgotten incident where a policemen saved a man from a lynch mob. But the characters and settings are universal. We hear mumbles of similar incidents, which are soon drowned out by tidal wave of fiction and misdirection, till all that remains in the memory is a vague sense of resentment against the favourite enemy!

The book tackles the issues that define small town India- growing religious intolerance, corruption, patriarchy, intimidation, violence and fear. It dares you to look in the mirror to confront a reality you want to avoid. It forces you to look at an India where reality and fiction blend so seamlessly you find it hard to distinguish between the two.

*spoiler alert*
The book ends where you least expect it to, leaving you to write your one ending. Is the writer challenging us to chart our own destiny?
*end spoiler*

The work is a translation, but at no stage did it seem translated. The flavour of the original was captured so well, you almost caught yourself mentally translating them back to the original Hindi/ Bhojpuri.

A difficult read. But if there is one book you want to read to understand the India of today, it is this.