Sania Mirza, Feminism, Chauvinism, and CryBabism

Statutory Warning to the Male Readers : Please dont read this post just because the title involves Sania Mirza, all you MCPs will be disappointed because she is a feminist now and not an "object" of visual consumption anymore..

Statutory Warning to the Female Readers : Please read this , specially if you are the "feminist to the core" of Facebook or Twitter, the two most fertile grounds of budding feminism, you will get lot of material to comment, share, criticize and dislike - which will really furthur your cause-  and vent out your feministic wrath against the male dominated society.

The newspapers have been flush with  news about the internal squabbles, the confusion, the humdrum in the sending of the Indian Tennis team to the London Olympics. Amongst all of it a new messiah - though old Testament would disagree since according to it the Messiah has to be a male- has risen, the champion of saving the "Indian Womanhood from prosecution", our very own glamour doll - which she had happily accepted herself to be but not anymore -Sania Mirza. I was moved to tears to finally realize that yes the ideal of equality was soon to be realized because we have a "PowerPuff" girl (Indian Express called her so) amongst us now  and all we chauvinistic MojoJojos would be served what we deserved.

The blasphemy that happened was that  Mahesh Bhupati and Rohan Bopanna were partners in Doubles. Bhupati had committed to Bopanna. None of the two was ready to partner with Peas. So there was a "Big Deal" that Peas would partner with Sania in the Mixed doubles and Vishnu Vardhan in doubles. Sania Mirza displayed real team spirit declaring that she would perform her best whomever she is paired  with. However keeping  with her feminist fundamentals she spoke up against the "disgruntled stalwart", her partner to be  in the London Olympics and with whom - she in the previous sentence had declared - would be giving her best.

Ofcourse Peas should not retaliate, he should silently take the insult, because any retaliation would
come from his "male ego". It is a fact that bargaining for players and partners is a regular phenomenon, and the only event other than doubles where one can bargain is Mixed Doubles and definately a female had to be involved. So what ? For the sake of equality Peas should have treated the  female "differently" not just as a "player". We want equality then how can he treat the female as an Equal, so what if in the process he would have violated Plato who said "Equals are treated Equal" . And dare anybody equate this with the fear psychosis that is visible in minorities. This is just not that.

I must salute Ms. Mirza for this crusade against oppression by the males.  She has been a constant victim of the male-centric society. She has been made really beautiful along with being endowed with the skill of tennis. She has constantly been devoured on the screen by the male vultures oops! I mean viewers. Ofcourse this led to her becoming much more popular than she would have by the sole virtue of her game. But no body can imagine the agony that our "true feminist" must be going through while becoming brand ambassador, minting money, rising the popularity charts, participating in Wills India Fashion Weeks, Lakme India Fashion Weeks etc. My heart cries when I imagine how she must have felt being reduced to such an object of display. I can vouch for her that she must have wanted to protest just like now but it is the male society to blame which must have crushed her desire to rise against it.


Her feminism is also very patriotic. She is afterall an Indian Feminist. . The televison coverage around her wedding, it being made a national affair because she is a heartthrob of the "males" in India was silently borne by her. She wanted to be the ambassador of Indo-Pak unity, otherwise she would have definately protested against it. 


Ofcourse many fools like me used to believe that the current humdrum around  feminism is more of an identity crisis, that too mostly by people who cant even understand it, an effort to make their presence felt in a world dominated by men, an order that has existed in 99% of the society, an effort to blow the remaining 1% out of proportion.  


But I am enlightened now , I am happy to be born an age when stalwarts of women freedom like Sania Mirza walked the earth in flesh and blood. 


I have to end the article here because I need to go and wash my face which is all sticky due to all the tears of happiness  that have flown down while writing this article.


:)

Casteism in Indian Movies

Our story begins in a calm peaceful village called "Yadavpur" where the entire village was terrorized by the dreaded don of the city "Bhalla" . The honest, educated, hardworking school teacher "Master Bholanath Gurjar" is trying to bring about a revolution in the city by educating the people of their rights. Meanwhile the Business Tycoon of the city "Amit Ahirwar" is planning to set up a steel plant in the village in collusion with "Bhalla" . Meanwhile "Brigadier Arjun Meena" has planned to stay in Yadavpur on his parental farm estate.
The story might have created a slight unease in most of us because the "Surnames" of the characters are not in sync with the popular perception of the castes.  

Social stereotypes as it can be seen  find their way into movies as well. Although considering the rigidity of the Indian social structure one would not be surprised that they do. I just went through some of the movies' cast to verify this point.


Let us start with the ascendent castes such as Yadav, Kurmi, Ahir, Jat, Gujjar. These are mostlly the castes that have been categorized as OBC and have been engaged mostly in Agriculture and allied activities ( includes Dairying etc. ) . Most of these castes have been associated with muscle power in the villages which was kind of necessary to sustain in their occupations. I googled the list of the most famous villians of Hindi Cinema and as expected most of the villians belonged to these caste. Just to substantiate the point I will put down some examples.

1.  Langda Tyagi : Omkara
2.  Bachchu Yadav : Shool
3.  Sadhu Yadav: Gangajal
4.  Rajmani Singh Yadav: Shagird
5.  Gujjar Singh : Mela

Next I considered the names of heroes and not surprisingly they were from the mainstream castes and to even make them appear more acceptable and '"good" ie to dissociate them from the upper castes that had at some point of time been the agents of exploitation, most of them were given names from the trading communities ie the harmless communities.
 I am giving here a list of the famous Shahrukh Khan movies and names the protagonist had in them .

1. DDLJ : Raj Malhotra
2. Kuch Kuch Hota hai : Rahul Khanna
3. Rab Ne Bana di Jodi : Surinder Sahani
4. Kal Ho Na Ho : Aman Mathur
5. Chalte Chalte : Raj Mathur
6. Mohobbatein : Raj Aryan Malhotra
7. Chamatkar: Sundar Srivastava
8. Raju Ban gaya Gentleman : Raj Mathur

The observations can be furthur extended to  other attributes of communitites such as religion. For example for any role with a stint of patriotism or ruling factor mostly a Brahmin or a Rajput name is used .

1. BhootNath ( Merchant Navy ) : Aditya Sharma
2. Swades : Mohan Bhargava
3. Baazigar : Ajay Sharma
4. Rowdy Rathore  : Vikram Rathore
5. Veer Zara : Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh
6. Dabangg : Chulbul Pandey

Well it cant be denied that more than anything this sort of a profiling exists in our minds. For example I was wondering  that there was this famous dialogue from Kal Ho Na Ho which went like " Aman Mathur ka jadoo Chalne laga tha" now had the name been something else, it would have sounded odd to all of us due to the fact that we have been socialized by a stratified inequalitarian society with stereotypes.

For eg: It would have been uneasy to hear "Aman Singh Ahirwar ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Meena ka jaadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Yadav ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Singh Kushwaha ka jadoo chalne laga tha"

These stereotypes will ofcourse only go when casteism as a whole is vanquisehd from our society.  Lets hope it does and some day we will have characters in our movies like a dreaded don named" Bachchu Bhalla" and a school teacher named "Bholanath Gurjar" without sounding odd.

IIT System reform : Too Soon Too Stupid

Being myself an alumni from one of the institutions of the IIT System ( counting only the "real" ones i.e. those with enough infrastructure and legislative competence to award genuine IIT degrees ) I feel I have every right to have a judgemental and biased opinion of the reform in the IIT system.
The reform can be seen as a combination of two reforms which by the sway of some wild figment of imagination of a top "babu" have been somehow knitted as one. The first part caters to having a common entrance examination and the latter is about having a "significant" weightage of board examination marks. Hence it would not be too unwise to discuss them separately.

Common entrance Examination
The first part is definately much less controversial and acceptable for the simple reason the it won't really make a difference.The structure of Indian society is such that such reforms would just act as cogs to perpetuate what currently exists in the society. Class differences are greatly entrenched in the Indian society, and the coaching industry is a by product of the same. The rich feel no need for an appropriate schooling and find it an easier option to pay extra in the coaching than take pains to ensure proper schooling through say the parent teacher committees. The new examination would probably serve to integrate the various coaching institutes across examinations and probably change their pedagogy according to the reformed pattern. Though it can be acceptable that it would slightly reduce their role and indispensability  but to call it "reform" would be an overstatement. One advantage would definately be that poor students would have to spend less on the forms but I doubt if its the right way to tackle it, subsidization of forms would hvae been a better way.

Another advantage highlighted is that it would reduce the stress of the students as they would not have to take multiple examinations. This is probably the most ridiculous argument I have heard since ages. In computer science we often have this principle that a single point of failure always makes the situation more precarious while a distributed system is always prefered. In the new arrangement consider the fact that what if due to some reason which could be as external as say a medical emergency a stuent fails to perform on the day of the sacred examination. In the earlier case he had other options say AIEEE, but now it would mean just waiting for another year. This is a clear case of a single point of failure.

Weightage of Board Marks

This is the more ridiculous of the two proposals.  The idea is to make schooling relevant by including their contribution in  the selection procedure of the entrance examination. This would nothing but perpetuate the Class XII coaching industry hence probably this is not the best way to rejuvenate our moribund educational apparatus. Furthur this would also tend to increase corruption in the state boards, which is already rampant in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Then comes the issue of comparison across the boards. It is said that Indian Statistical Institute would devise a scaling formula for the same. Those of us who have been through the UPSC process are aware that how "ineffective" the scaling process is evident in fact that each year there are optionals that "win" and those that do not. Hence this would be  clearly a compromise with the quality of the student intake. Hence such a reform would make sense only when absolute transparency and accurate comparison can be ensured across state boards, hence this refom even though it achieves little is not feasible. If brought without fixing the other factors this might end up as a serious jolf to the credibility of the IITs.

I realize that this post is very negative and overcritical  but I guess that its the first step towards any rectification.