Why Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy means so much…

…To me, and to women in general. Tell me one of you out there who’s remained unaffected by the news, not imagined at least once what it would be like to be in her shoes, to take a conscious call to get your breasts removed? It would still make news if it were any other body part, if it were Angelina Jolie, but would it affect the women so much if it were not her breasts? I’m not so sure.

Considering how common breast cancer has become in the recent years, we all probably have a family member and friend’s mother or friend who’s dealt with it at some point in their lives, and come out of it, without a boob. My mother-in-law fears the C word, because her mum died of breast cancer when MIL was still a young girl. I have a relative, who fought and survived breast cancer, she has a severely swollen arm as testimony to that, a result of the chemotherapy she underwent years ago, I am told. When I was much younger, we’d heard in hushed tones about how this Aunty didn’t have a breast, she’d lost it to breast cancer, and that she wore some sort of a special bra with a faux boob. And I remember at that time thinking how terrible that must be, to not have a part of your body. I know better now, I understand that a life is far more precious than a breast, any body part you could lose.

But I’m still trying to process how much courage it must take to voluntarily get your breasts removed, (honestly, I had never heard of preventive mastectomy before this) not because they are killing you, but because there’s a chance they could kill you. Even if you can get them replaced by two silicone substitutes. I don’t think it’s about money, it’s not that she can afford to get a double mastectomy and then silicone implants, as some people would make this out to be. Agreed, everyone’s not as rich as Jolie, but a lot of people are still rich enough to get those procedures done. Would you still opt for it? Or take the risk of letting a faulty gene in your system play out its own story, which may or may not cause cancer, as was the case with the Hollywood actress?

How much braver then for a woman to come out  in the open, and say, yes, they’re not real anymore. And think about it, does it affect the way you view Angelina Jolie if she’s got two fake breasts? Is she any less sexier to you now than she was before? Not to me at least. Why then should a woman’s sexuality be defined by the size and shape of her breasts.  We have to disassociate from this construction to be able to view our bodies for what they are, not for what they are perceived to be. No, our breasts were not meant to titillate, to be stared at, to be objectified for pleasure. Like any other body part, women have breasts for a purpose — to nurse babies.  Will Angelina’s double mastectomy help us all to put things in perspective?

Some children have it all…

…I’m just not sure if it’s for their good or not!

I’m posting some links, and  excerpts from these links, about some out-of-the-ordinary news about children and their lifestyle.

1. The child with the $76,000 bedroom

Custom murals! Designer prints of Barbie dolls framed in gold foil! Pink hand-blown glass chandeliers! Would you spend as much on your child’s bedroom as you would on their college education? If you spent your afternoons rolling around in sticky piles of $1000 bills, bored out of your mind, you might

2. 8-year-old Botoxed by mother – now the mother has lost custody of her daughter!

A mother who’s been administering botox injections on her own daughter’s face — for purely aesthetic reasons, mind you — has decided to share her side of the situation on morning television…. 8-year-old Brittany is a part of the pageant circuit — an activity that Brittany’s mother says influenced her daughter’s desire to rid her face of “wrinkles.” She skirts around the blame, suggesting that other moms kept mentioning the “lines” on her daughter’s face, and that “a lot of the kids making a big impression about the lines [on her face] probably influenced her to want to do [botox] a little bit more.”

3. Suri Cruise is living the high life

She has just been named one of the world’s best-dressed women, right up there with Samantha Cameron and Alexa Chung. Yet Suri Cruise is only five years old.

She is barely out of nappies, which is surely a design statement far away from a little girl like her. By what or whose twisted definition is she a woman?

>Is there enough leg room on the court?

>

By now, all of you must’ve heard about the Badminton World Federation’s new rule for women players making skirts compulsory on the court to popularise the sport. Now, in India there’ve been reactions from the badminton players supporting and showing dissent against the new rule. While Saina Nehwal doesn’t think her wearing shorts or skirts on court will affect the number of people watching her, Aparna Bopanna and Jwala Gutta have no problem with the new directive. The latest is that due to stiff resistance from Indian players, the BWF has pushed back the date of implementing the rule.

But the resistance is not so much to the spirit of the rule as to wearing skirts, and I think that’s just missing the point. Why is no one questioning the BWF’s rationale that a woman’s sport must be glamorous in order for it to be popular? Why is no one asking how the Federation plans to popularise men’s badminton? Surely, not by having them play shirtless! So why then should a woman’s sport be subjected to such a ridiculous assumption?

At the end of the day, what we’re doing is objectifying women who’re in a sport because they can play the sport, not because they can look a certain way. If more people watch badminton because there’s more skin at display on the court, what’s being popularised is not the sport but the notion that women are objects on display.

I’m ready to convert to another point of view – one that convinces me that there is nothing sexist about this move and that if they had to make a men’s sport also popular they would glam it up. I agree, glamour attracts a lot of eyeballs, a lot. But that’s no justification for us to ask women with a certain skill set to pander to such demands. What happens next? Do we ask women wrestlers to look more feminine because that would attract more fans, and do we ask women basketball players to wear body-hugging racer-back tees? And the men can continue to be sloppy, muscular and just good at their game?

If a sport has to be popularised, there must be other ways to do it. If cricket is so hugely popular in countries like India, it’s because we’ve had players who can win us matches. There’s glamour in the game, but that’s come because of the sport’s popularity. And even then, Sachin is by no stretch of imagination what you call glamorous. Neither was Kapil Dev. So what’s the connection?

>Why I will not vote for BSP ever!

>I have been living in this house for five years now and just the thought of having to give it up is depressing. The thought of having to give it up to a government that hopes to build a future on the foundation of destruction isn’t depressing; it’s downright annoying. The government wants to acquire our home because they need a parking space for government vehicles! And we, who live in this 100-year old house spread over an area of 60,000 sq feet, must make peace with the idea of having our house blown up by a dynamite (there’s no other way they can break down these walls), to have the trees planted with love and tended to with affection uprooted, to have the garden filled with brick and mortar – so that the government officials and their sundry visitors have a place to park their cars.

And no, we aren’t expected to be emotional about a house. We cannot smart from the idea of abdicating a lifestyle we built over the years for a parking lot to a government building that came up much after this house was built. We are not even taking into account the financial setback that the acquisition is going to cause us. But it’s pathetic that we cannot bring up the fact that a sprawling BSP party office has been built not 100 yards away by acquiring many such bungalows as ours. And that space cannot be utilised for parking. Why? Because the statues of reverend Kanshiram and Mayawati are installed within its precincts that is not even open to all their worshippers.

I’ve talked about this before on this blog but I glossed over the details because they seemed irrelevant then. I do now feel the need to point out how unfair this government is, how destructive and I can say that without citing the example of my own house. It’s sad that the tax-payers money in this state is being misused to destroy and built irrelevant buildings that serve no purpose for the public at large.

“Why don’t you go to the court,” people ask. That’s because even though the High Court in UP can discern between right and wrong, the Supreme Court has decided that the judiciary should not intervene in the working of the executive. The SC does not think that the working of the executive cannot be viewed in a vacuum and that the executive must work not for itself but for the people whose money it takes home as salary. The SC also does not think anything of alterations in the Master Plan of a city that very conveniently do away with a city’s Green Belt.

And well, who are we to fight a case against a popularly elected government in the apex court and it’s decision to exploit the green cover to erect her own statue when the powerful Sahara conglomerate had to withdraw their case against the same government?

The rural populace that brought Mayawati into a full majority in UP might also not be able to explain why her party deserves to be in power. I’m still trying figure out how all the schemes in Ambedkar’s name have benefited the Dalits who make up her vote bank. Even Mulayam Singh knows better than to turn the capital of a state into a mammoth graveyard of structures.

In the last year and a half since this government came to power, the city has been turned to rubble, the trees lining the roads uprooted for “development” of exactly what we have no idea, houses and colonies acquired to give wings to unreasonable dreams of Behenji. You see, people are not half as important as ugly structures of concrete for our CM. A three-tier parking lot at a rally ground (which will be used by none other than the political parties) costing a whopping Rs.300 crore is being built at the cost of rendering people homeless. A slum near a nullah was razed to ground because its stench suddenly became unbearable for the second-in-command in her party the day the party came into power. The green patches in the city have turned into an ugly patchwork of sandstones. And that the beloved sandstones which cannot be replaced by anything prettier at least, have sent the pollution level in the city soaring to unprecedented levels. None of that matters. And hopefully, the people who voted for her will remain unaffected by the pollution.

You see, it’s almost fashionable to trash the BJP as an unsecular party. But what will I do with my faith if I don’t have a house to live in? And what will I do with projected improvement in law and order when that law does not work for a common person like me? I’d gladly vote Mulayam Singh back into power because he runs a government, however unruly, not an autocracy.

PS: I have provided lots of newspaper links so that you know these are not just opinions, these are facts reported by the media.

>PDA for Public Display of Anger

>Just when we were coming to accept one kind of PDA – Public Display of Affection – another kind of PDA has been generating heated debates across the world – it’s called Public Display of Anger. It’s the kind of PDA that gets witnessed when an Iraqi journalist hurls both his shoes at the American President in the middle of a press conference.

These are not editorial columns being written by blamed-for-being-biased journalists against errant leaders. These are also not vociferous celebrities on news channels sensationalising issues and attempting to increase channels’ TRPs. And these are not just discussions being carried out by people comfortably ensconced in their drawing room sofas. This is the common man standing up to express an emotion that’s now bordering on the trite – ‘Enough is enough’. What is not trite though is how he is choosing to express it.

In the post-26/11 India, political leaders have been at the receiving end of the public’s ire. When the Kerala CM was snubbed by Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s grieving father in Bangalore, it made headlines. When Narendra Modi stood before the Taj Hotel, Mumbai, and decided to politicise the issue of the terror attacks, it was the public display of anger that stopped other power-wielding politicians from doing the same. And there are no prizes for guessing why Raj Thakeray is conspicuous by his absence in this post-26/11 India! Such PDA against our leaders has been unprecedented.

So have we become more expressive as a race or just impatient with our leaders?

When Bush got the boot, quite literally, the journalist whose boot it was became a demi-hero. Let’s admit it: we loved it and laughed at it! Having given our tacit support to one such action, have we not paved the way for more people to come out in the open with their anger? And considering that one of the most powerful men in the world – the American President, no less – had to dexterously dodge the shoes of a scribe, it should come as no surprise if someone decides to pelt our leaders with an ugly puree of eggs, tomatoes and what have you at public rallies.

To be honest, just the idea seems exhilarating, doesn’t it? But there are few people who enjoy such unequivocal public sentiment as does Bush. And if public opinion is divided regarding a neta or a world leader, would PDA against him still be justified? The reactions then would not be half as funny as the Iraqi journalist’s shoe-in-the-air act evinced. Would a divisive world be able to handle this PDA just as well as it has learned to handle the other one?

>A different perspective on the terror attacks

>… And totally crap!

Watch Zaid Hamid, a Pakistani security consultant and self-declared strategist defence analyst (according to Wikipedia), analyse the recent Mumbai terror attacks.

If you have the time, do read the comments to the video on You Tube as well. I’m honestly stunned.

So much for the neighbour’s support.

Edited to add on Dec 3: This isn’t the view that common man in Pakistan ascribes to. Aneela has convinced me of it. And then I came across this post on Omar’s blog. It’s heartfelt and makes me just as emotional as the previous link had.

>What do you want?

>

When you kill innocent people, what is it that you want from them, from us?

When you turn a city into a war front, what is it that you want from that city, from its people, from this nation?

When you kill Hindus & Muslims, Indians and Americans, what is it that you want from any of us?

When your weapons do not discriminate between the rich and the poor, what do they want – from those who can give you nothing and those who take nothing from you?

When a wife wails and a mother cries because you killed our men and children, do you rejoice because you have what you want?

When we live with fear and yet we live with hope, how can you achieve what you want?

Edited to add on Nov 28:

It’s no longer about statistics, no longer about people we only watch on TV. It’s personal now. I did not know her, but just that I knew of her, had been part of conversations about her makes this tragedy seem personal now. I read about Sabina Sehgal Saikia in the paper today morning and it shook me. Stuck at Hotel Taj, they fear her suite was burnt down. She texted her friends from the hotel that “they” were in her bathroom.

They haven’t even found her body yet.

How much worse can it get?

>What will be, will be

>Last night The Guy and I dressed up in our pretty party clothes, got into our car and headed to our friend’s place for a Diwali do. On the way, it dawned upon us that we hadn’t got them any gift. So we stopped at a shop to pick up a box of chocolates. We ended up buying a piece of crockery instead – not very expensive but very presentable indeed! And while the gift was being painstakingly wrapped, the conversation with the friendly shop owner veered to the erratic stock market, the impact on the fortunes of millions of people and Diwali. We rued the state of the economy and the effect of the recession on various industries, we commented on the cut-throat competition at our work place and his, we sympathised with the shopkeeper next door who had to shut shop because of dwindling finances and tough competition… And then The Guy and I paid for our purchases, got into our car and drove off to the party at a swanky apartment in a posh locality where the hostess had brought out her best china, silverware and treated us to her culinary expertise.

All I’m trying to say is that it took us precisely as much time to forget about the sad state of the economy as it took us to step out of that shop. Five minutes later, we were too busy enjoying the good things of life to care about how the recession was affecting us.

Conversations about the rollercoaster ride that the Sensex has taken so many investors on keep coming up every now and then. The Guy checks every few hours how many points the Sensex has dipped or soared, never ceasing to be amazed by its downward trend. Newspaper headlines remind us to be wary of the times ahead, though in not so many words. And yet, we continue to live like nothing’s wrong with this world.

I hear the markets are deserted despite Diwali being around the corner. But I’m still heading to the market every other day to buy gifts for family and friends, to shop for new clothes for the festival season, to indulge in fancy diyas and candles. I’m attending parties every single day: food trials at upcoming restaurants, pre-Diwali bashes, cards parties, grand first birthday celebrations, late nights, more invitations to more fancy parties… It’s almost as if my life’s insulated from all that’s happening in the real world. I pretend every morning that work is still the same when I know that it may have changed irreversibly though that may become evident only six months later. I like to believe that nothing has changed yet.

It’s not as though the rate of inflation doesn’t bother me. It’s also not like I have saved enough to see me through a lifetime of financial crunches. It’s just that I don’t have an option but to go on with life doing what makes me happy. And is there anything I can do to make things different? At work, I’m giving more than my hundred percent, but I can’t wish back the money we’ve lost in mutual funds, can I?

I cannot be eternally bothered about these things just as I cannot be eternally bothered about when the government will finally take away my house. When they have to, they will and I know I’ll be able to do nothing about it then just as I’m able to do nothing about it now.

I think about these problems with a heavy heart because there are some problems of life you cannot resolve by yourself. And they are the worst, because they leave you feeling so helpless. But if I have to make a choice between feeling helpless and feeling happy, I choose the latter. I cannot stop living the way I do for fear of what the future might hold for me.

>Hum Hindustani

>Apathy, acceptance or anger – we’ve heard about reactions of all kinds to the Delhi serial blasts. But this isn’t about the blasts, it’s about us – people like me who still cannot imagine migrating to another country despite everything that is wrong with ours, who live with terror and hope, who may wait or will a change.

What makes me an Indian who believes in Indian-ness?

I know about the corruption, I face it every single day. I know about our inefficient government machinery too. I also know about poverty, politics, and population issues, perhaps not as statistically well as some other people may know it. But I still call this country my home and wouldn’t willingly change that for anything. Am I a romantic fool who believes in high-sounding emotions such as patriotism? Or am I unnecessarily complacent?

Like most of us living in India, I have relatives settled in various developed nations of the world. And I also know how different their living is from ours: how much safer, how much more organised, how much more hassle-free. I wish too my life back home was a little like theirs: with more manageable traffic, with better public service amenities, with more law-abiding citizens to call my countrymen, with fewer politicians with a criminal record – you get the idea. But I do not wish to be anything but Indian, be anywhere else except India. Even when I come back from a holiday abroad and can see how poorly we score in comparison, I never once wish I was born elsewhere or that I lived some place else. I hate the dust, the climate, the allergens that make me ill. And I know I would even be medically better off in another land, but I have never given a serious thought to it in all my life.

Perhaps, it has something to do with my upbringing. My parents are not landed people: my father is a lawyer by profession and could have easily made a living anywhere in the world. But he chose to stay in India. My parents were never enamoured by the idea of getting my sister and me married off to green card holders, affluent NRIs or software engineers earning big bucks. But they didn’t close that option for us; we did. Perhaps, this isn’t about our upbringing after all.

The Guy’s NRI relatives in Australia believe we’re (‘we’ being the Indians who live in India) too lazy and so used to domestic help that we cannot contemplate a life anywhere else in the world. It’s far from the truth, I know: we’re not lazy by any standards even if we have house help. But that rather mean perception of us has forced me to think what it is that keeps me rooted to my country. Sometimes, exasperated with all the red-tapism and the judicial malpractices, my F-I-L suggests The Guy and I should think of shifting base to another country. That’s not even an option I see for myself. So what is it that keeps me from aspiring for an American or Australian citizenship?

I hope this doesn’t sound clichéd, but for me, my country is like a parent. I’m not blind to her faults, I only love her despite them. You can’t disown your parents because they aren’t the best in the world, can you? I feel the same way about this nation. I am so much a part of it, I can never hate it enough to leave it. And if the whole truth be told, living here isn’t so bad, is it? There’s so much I love about India, so much that makes me proud: the history, the culture, the arts and crafts, the places, the monuments, the achievements, the people too. I know if I leave the bad stuff, I will also leave the good.

All this, of course, is not being said to judge other choices made by other people. It might be okay for someone to move bag and baggage to another country and it might be okay for them to live with an inexplicable longing for their motherland despite making a deliberate decision to migrate. But it’s not okay with me. I wouldn’t be able to live my life reiterating to myself the reasons that justify the migration to another country and ignoring the reasons that make it difficult for me to be happy there. I’m happy being an Indian.