Writing about gender violence

I have been struggling to get an article written on internal displacement and gender violence. Part of the struggle, a large part, has had to do with my preoccupation? absorption? consumption by the Prajnya 16 Days Campaign preparation and programmes. Another part, which I am now experiencing, now that I am actually sitting with articles and trying to get started, has to do with some of the analytical and political challenges of writing about gender violence.
Let's start with writing about gender (and some of this is partly a response to having read FMR December 2000 a short while ago): Having never formally studied feminist theory and never quite having mastered the artifice of talking about gender, I myself default to talking about women when I say gender. I am really much more concerned about women in most situations. With the campaign, we struggle with this as a 'gender violence' campaign because most of our programmes end up being about women rather than men, transgenders, etc. But we actually have taken to clarifying that we mean the rubric to indicate our recognition that violence is experienced by all genders. With my own writing, I pretty much don't adopt the 'gender' rubric, and try and speak/write as simply as my mind thinks: I just use the word 'women' to mean 'women.' But the reality is the problem does go beyond just what women and girls experience.
The articles I read today in FMR described situations in which disempowered twice over by conflict displacement and by relief agencies (run by white men) taking over the caretaker's role in their families, men were feeling disempowered and out of place in their own families. Younger men replaced them as community leaders because they were more mobile, enterprising and able to quickly pick up and speak other languages. A couple of the articles highlighted the downside of women's empowerment--the sidelining of men. Or so it seemed. I found these both interesting and perturbing.
Must women's empowerment be part of a zero-sum equation? That seems to land us at the point where we begin, the point we seek to escape.
And that's the utility of 'gender': that we can attempt to find a non-zero-sum solution we can all live with. At least, we hope we can.
Another issue that feels like a stumbling block is the question of victimhood. When an act of sexual or gender violence is committed, someone suffers it. To call them a victim is to recognize that they did not cause or invite this act. On the other hand, victimhood is not a desirable condition or identity or tag. Survivor doesn't always work; not all victims survive.
Moreover, does casting women in victim mode preclude their agency? Or does recognising their journey towards greater agency diminish their victimhood.

I don't actually know the answers to any of these questions and yet, I do. There is a way in which these things will disentangle in my brain. I just hope that happens soon so I can get this article written before long.

Chinks in hygiene and civic responsibility

Shombhit Sengupta, Chinks in hygiene and civic responsibility, Indian Express, November 8, 2009.

About 2.5 billion people in the world have no access to safe sanitation, and half of South Asia suffers the indignity of open defecation. This lack of hygienic facilities is a fundamental cause of disease leading to 1.5 million children dying every year as per UN figures.

Can India’s 2020 promise to become a developed country free from poverty be fulfilled without improving hygiene and civic responsibility?

Hygiene: Landing in Amritsar international airport a month ago, I felt really proud that India’s B class towns are becoming so advanced. A high-rise roof in modern glass and metal; the new baggage belt looking better than the latest German engineering. This thrill was knocked out by the foul-smelling toilet with insects running around.

On a routine market observation visit, a newly built public toilet in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar looked good as I saw it from inside the car. But on stepping out, its sharp stink immobilised me. On its left, a store was selling fresh flowers. I wonder how people differentiate floral fragrance from the toilet’s ammonia-and-faeces smell.

Most spectacular is Mumbai’s Rolls Royce showroom, just 500 metres from Worli Gutter, a putrid garbage drain that joins the sea. Just imagine this ambience when buying the world’s most expensive and sophisticated car. New Delhi’s upmarket South Extension displays the latest Japanese and Korean electronic products in neon-lit splendour, but their toilet on the floor above is ugly and dirty and it reeks. The purpose of a high-flying lifestyle escapes me when the fundamentals of better living are far from being in place.

Civic responsibility: When people sweep their own premises, it may not occur to them that they are gifting dirt to their neighbours. This aptly reflects our complete lack of civic responsibility as a people. Incidentally, India has developed an excellent hygienic habit in the jet washer in modern public WCs. This is undoubtedly superior to Western toilet paper that keeps the body unclean all day. Until you see water spots in the toilet seat, you never know if it’s water from the jet washer or a human body. The question is, how do you educate people?

I remember when I left for Europe in 1973, the toilet cleaning I was accustomed to in my refugee colony consisted of specified people carrying away drums of human excreta on their heads every day. I feel ashamed that this disgraceful profession still exists in India. Later at Kolkata’s art college, I learnt of the Indian-style sanitary toilet. But it was in the plane to Europe that I first saw an English-style commode. In the students’ hostel in Paris, we used a common toilet. A Greek friend was one day knocking on the bathroom door, but I didn’t reply. So he climbed over the open top and found me with my feet on the toilet seat, traditional Indian style. I didn’t even know that I had to put the seat cover down and sit on it as on a chair. It took me nearly six months to get used to this Western toilet culture.

Men’s habit of relieving themselves anywhere, with no shame that women are walking by, is total disregard of civic responsibility. Women need a bio-break too, but you never see them using the roadside. While working for a supply chain logistics company on how frontline staff should be customer sensitive with their packet delivery system, one of our researchers followed a competition delivery van of a globally reputed company with a camera. The van stopped outside a customer’s gate, the man got off, first relieved himself on the customer’s wall, and then went in with the package.

In every urban corner, you’ll generally find overflowing, odorous dustbins. Before India joined WTO, our public dustbins mostly had Indian products; now they also have beautifully designed, non-bio-degradable plastic wrappers from famous multinational brands. A few responsible Bangalore citizens took the initiative to collect garbage from homes for bulk disposal in large black plastic bags. The other day I happened to drive through greenery in Mutkur village off Varthur lake, and suddenly saw mounds of black plastic bags dumped alongside the village walkway. Vultures and poor children were rummaging through the garbage, breaking the bags to find some surprise.

This situation was not always so. The earliest recorded covered sewers are in the Indus Valley Civilisation cities. In 2500 BC, the people of Harappa had water-borne toilets in each house linked with drains covered with burnt clay bricks. They considered sanitation an important public health measure essential for disease prevention.

Today’s lack of hygiene and civic responsibility is damaging the aspirational value of all business. Whether an industry is in manufacturing or service, the real delivery to customer hands is from the shopfloor or frontline people. Did anyone check the difference between the factory workers’ toilet and the one in the corporate office?

The factor differentiating organised retail from wholesale, mom-and-pop or commodity markets, is housekeeping. But housekeeping is totally alien to those hired to maintain cleanliness, so the retail soon looks dishevelled. Inside an American fast food outlet in Delhi’s Greater Kailash, the dustbin was being cleaned next to people enjoying their chicken. You may mistake the car park behind the market as a garbage storeyard, but it’s surprising that even globally renowned companies mushrooming in India make no move to clean up the environment. Perhaps as part of 2020 development, the government should create a separate ministry for hygiene and civic responsibility to take serious action together with MNCs and Indian companies.

Hygiene derives from Hygieia, the Greek goddess for good health preservation and disease prevention. Let’s take her blessings to modernise India and teach people basic hygiene as an initiative in civic responsibility, which betters everyone’s body and mind for work and enjoyment.

Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management.

shombit@shininguniverse.com

The Resurrection of Indira Gandhi

Somewhere out there, is a photograph of my being introduced to Indira Gandhi at a cousin's wedding reception. This part of the story I often narrate so will abbreviate here: I was 2 when she became Prime Minister; 11 when Emergency was imposed; the election that ousted her was held on my 13th birthday; she returned to power in the beautiful January weather of the year I was 16; and when she was killed, I was a devastated, bereaved graduate student very far away from home in every sense in Syracuse in the days before the internet and satellite television. I had grown up assuming the default gender for all Prime Ministers to be female. And I had learned about dissent in the murmurs, then trenchant critiques of Emergency excesses. All my growing years are associated with the ascent and influence of Indira Priyadarshini Nehru Gandhi.

All my adult years belong to an age where she was an object of vilification, responsible for everything wrong with Indian politics. This is also an age that found her father a romantic fool whose capacity to lead a nation-state was overestimated by those who anointed him leader and those who adored him. And an age that had to be reminded about the Father of the Nation, with whom Indira came to share a last name, through a blockbuster movie. That's life.

This week, therefore, has been really interesting. Starting about midweek on Twitter, I began to notice tweets mentioning Mrs. Gandhi and attempting 140-character assessments of her contribution. They were from television journalists I follow, so I suppose they were preparing for programmes scheduled for her 25th death anniversary. (They have also been discussion the anti-Sikh riots that followed Mrs. Gandhi's assassination.)

India's Indira, NDTV.
Remembering the 'Iron Lady' of India, Times Now.

At the short programme held at Shakti Sthal, Javed Akhtar read his poetry. In Times Now's documentary shown on October 31, Shyam Benegal, Saeed Naqvi, Inder Malhotra and Kuldip Nayar were among those who offered assessments and reminiscences. Some of these people I remember as 'anti-Indira' at one time or another, or just plain, 'anti.' Hmmm, I thought.

Newspapers have had the most fascinating bouquet of articles. The Indian Express, Indira's staunch supporter turned foe, which published and distributed blank pages to indicate that it was being censored during the Emergency, carried these:

• Shekhar Gupta, The Idea of Indira, October 31, 2009.
• ‘People have never been able to associate themselves with any other leader as they did with Indira Gandhi,’ Ambika Soni in their Idea Exchange, November 1, 2009.
• Sudheendra Kulkarni, Indira and India, November 1, 2009.

In the Times of India, never in confrontation mode, I found: MJ Akbar, Indira: Great heroes make great mistakes, November 1, 2009. Asian Age carried Inder Malhotra's article, Gudiya to Durga, October 31, 2009. Inder Malhotra, Pran Chopra, Kuldip Nayar... these are names I associate with the Indira years. As also, of course, Arun Shourie. Karan Thapar remembers Indira Gandhi in Hindustan Times, the paper most closely associated with Congress governments over the years. And in the Hindu, Pranav Gupte remembers: Twenty-five years later, October 30, 2009. Vir Sanghvi's thoughts appear on his website.

Twenty-five years mark a milestone, fair enough, but what accounts for the whiff of nostalgia in these reminiscences and revaluations? I have a few guesses apart from the most obvious reasons: the resurgence of the Congress party as a player in national politics and the appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family in its new, chastened avatar. I think people are tired of what the endless politics of identity conflicts has done to the fabric of this polity. Governance failures are not acceptable any longer and while Mrs. Gandhi did undermine institutions with disastrous results, people are now associating her with this UPA 2's resolve to try and address those issues. Twenty-five years is also long enough for most people to forget bad news and with two generations that can barely remember the past, a strong leader with a clear focus must seem appealing. We live in a technocratic age where the messy details of Turkman Gate and the innumerable arrests of the Emergency might even seem like inconvenient expediencies. These are my guesses, not scholarly analyses. Not today, anyway.

Is India ready to dispassionately evaluate Indira Gandhi's contribution to its politics, institutions and socio-economic change? I don't really know. What do you think?

A visit to the Ladies' Toilet in a Most Important Place

Caution: Gross details follow.
Yesterday, I visited the building where the headquarters of a very important government organization were housed. It was a long morning and as I waited for my meeting, it seemed like a sensible idea to visit the rest-room.
I wasn't expecting luxury, I assure you. I stepped in, gingerly. It was not very clean but I have seen worse in my lifetime as an Indian woman. I thought I would pull the flush.
The split second that followed was like a moment in the heart of the special effects of a horror film. Water rushed out in a torrent..... around my feet! I ran out of the stall as if chased by a vampire or an avenging banshee.
It took me a few minutes to compose myself. As I narrated this story later on, it was also funny. But outrage also remains with me.
This is the only ladies' restroom on the floor that houses the CEO of the organization. What if the CEO were a woman? What happens to the women who work there (and by the way, I barely recall seeing any)? What is the plight of women who visit for all-day meetings?

We organize a 16-day campaign against gender violence in Chennai and one part of the campaign addresses the issue of a good working climate for women in the context of workplace harrassment, but this is even more fundamental. How can you go to work in a place which doesn't bother with the upkeep of the most basic lavatory facilities for women? Perhaps the men's toilets are as bad, but is that an excuse or a consolation?

Why don't we care about these very basic amenities? How can a person go to work if their stomach is even slightly upset? How is a woman to work during her menstrual period or in the last stages of her pregnancy when she would need to use the toilet more often?

The conference room is airconditioned but the kitchen and pantry area are not built for hygiene. The executive office wears a designer label but the toilets are ghastly. The campus is manicured but the road approaching it is an open sewer. I am not writing about any one office or institution. This place is everywhere, and we have all suffered it.
On a day when the world is discussing President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, I suggest that the most appropriate recipient for this honour should be a person who has made toilets, hygiene and sanitation their priority--whoever it is.

PS: On my own bathroom water-banshee attack experience, I should add that when I ran out, I could not wash my hands because the soap-dispenser was empty and there was barely a trickle of water coming out of the taps. Luckily (for those who will rightfully worry) I always carry wet wipes and I could somehow assuage my own sense of 'ugh' before stepping back outside.