An Open Letter to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, in Response to 'Lean In'

Dear Sheryl Sandberg,

I am taking seriously the invitation you extend on page 173 of your book to continue the conversation you have begun with Lean In, on women and leadership.

I waited with great anticipation for your pre-ordered book to arrive at my doorstep on March 11^th, and now that I have read it, I have much to say in response. My acquaintance with your philosophy of female empowerment began with your 2010 TED lecture. Like thousands of other women, listening to your talk kindled in me a general sense of self-empowerment. Your message of “sitting at the table” and “not leaving until you leave” hit home hard as things that I had clearly failed to do well enough in my own life. As a woman, as an emerging writer, and as someone who has straddled both sides of the fence, namely, the stay-at-home and “working woman” sides, I had many perspectives and angles that were begging to be fit into some philosophy. That your philosophy was an imperfect match I attributed to the fact that yours is mostly tailored to suit the woman in the corporate world. There were many contradictions and questions that I knew could not be addressed or clarified in a TED lecture or commencement speech. That is why I waited, truly eager to read what you had to say in the leisure and expanse of a book. I hope you will take my points of reaction to your book in the spirit of someone who wishes the same end-goals for women as you do, albeit from different pathways and perspectives.

As someone who has been “the only woman in the room” far too many times, it is natural that you have begun your efforts at bridging the gender gap in professional achievement by focusing on issues that you have grappled with yourself. Your spotlight on the issue of ambition and leadership roles fills a much-needed gap in the literature of women’s roles in management.  You make a compelling case for targeting the barriers of self-limiting behaviors and internalized stereotypes, because, as you say, “they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.” You offer valuable advise on how to navigate the terrain of the corporate world which is seemingly a minefield for women. Why then has (initial) support for your book not been unanimous? I offer a few explanations and suggestions:

The statistics surrounding the ambition gap (as quoted in your book) are alarming and not easy to interpret. As you point out, there is scant evidence of the ambition gap when graduation rates are taken into account, as girls out-earn boys in degrees at the undergraduate level (57% of degrees are conferred to girls) and at the graduate level (60% conferred to girls.) However, as you also point out, the ambition gap is a gaping morass when one looks at women several years after graduation. Even among Harvard graduates, the percentage of women in full-time jobs ten years after graduation is around 60%, and for women who have two or more children, it’s less than 50%. The ambition gap is therefore a robust phenomenon that’s hard to ignore. But the reasons underlying this gap are not so transparent. One interpretation of these numbers, and the one you favor, is that a few years after taking educational measures that reflect a prior ambition, women give up on their aspirations and “opt out” of careers by succumbing to negative messages and internalized stereotypes. You treat the ambition gap as predominantly an internal issue, and the thesis of your book, as stated in the introduction, is, “We can re-ignite the revolution by internalizing the revolution.” Many have mistakenly interpreted this approach as an indication that you view women as primarily responsible for their lack of a greater presence in roles of leadership.

Another source of criticism for your philosophy stems from the idea that there are many factors that contribute to the notion of ambition.

An alternate interpretation of the dismaying statistics surrounding “opting out” and the ambition gap that must also be given voice is that ambitions may be muted and squashed as a result of inadequate support in the work and home environments. To use the jungle gym analogy, many women who climb onto the jungle gym are forced to jump off when children arrive because their spouses and work environments do not adequately support their new responsibilities. And it’s very difficult to hang on to the bars of the jungle gym while also holding onto a baby or two. Much of the dissent about your book revolves around this issue.

My contention about the ambition gap doesn’t concern your particular approach to remediation, but rather, concerns itself with questions about the studies that generated the alarming statistics in the first place. Were questions in the studies posed in a general manner that assumed the status quo of inadequate infrastructure and stereotypical gender-roles for women? Or, were the questions skillfully worded to tease out only the element of ambition? For example, consider the question: “If you had the requisite infrastructure and support in terms of childcare and other domestic responsibilities (a condition that the average man takes for granted), would you pursue roles of leadership and greater responsibility at work?” My guess is that if the questions in the studies controlled for variables in the environment that are known to put a damper on ambition, the ambition-gap between men and women would be significantly bridged. Thus, the question still remains: Are women truly less ambitious, and more fearful of risks than men are, or are the differences in ambition an artifact of being too aware of the stereotypical gender roles and sub-optimal conditions in which women are expected to sustain a career? Perhaps the best method to fueling ambition in women involves a multi-pronged approach where women are urged and taught to dream big, as your book most certainly does, but to also create a home and work environment where those dreams are sustainable.

Many critics have also pointed out that a top-down method will not spark a movement. I am of the same opinion. In an essay on feminism titled ‘The Problem with Women,’ I wrote: “Top-down solutions are capable only of  ‘trickle-down’ effects, and not capable of larger brush-stroke changes. For a solution to bring about meaningful changes within a single lifetime, it must begin with a broad base that is common to women of all ages, socio-economic, educational and ethnic backgrounds.” That the focus of your book is primarily on educated women in the corporate world is another reason why I think there is such a polarized response despite the fact that everyone with an opinion wants the same end results for women! The media has already identified a Sandberg camp and a Slaughter camp. While I do not wish to add to the growing commentary about these camps, I will state for the record that I, like Prof. Joan Williams, think that you are both right. I see the shortcomings of your philosophy in its scope and not in its content. In other words, if your philosophy could be extended to include all women, you are sure to ignite a movement. To that end, casting the idea of leadership as a way of life rather than a role is imperative. When we cast the idea of ‘leadership’ as a role or position that women should aspire to, we create certain corollaries that develop from that viewpoint: If you are not in a designated leadership role, you are automatically in the category of the less empowered. You are not in control of the wheel. A “worker bee” who is satisfied with her level in the corporate hierarchy is automatically considered a non-leader when external labels of leadership are applied. And when exclusionary criteria are applied to groups within a group, i.e. women in non-leadership positions within the larger cohort of “working women,” there comes about unnecessary divisions among an otherwise homogenous group.

On the other hand, if leadership is viewed as an attitude, a mindset, a philosophy, and a way of life, it doesn’t leave anybody out of its spectrum. And from anywhere on the spectrum, one could still aspire to external roles of leadership.

Part of my eagerness to read your book stemmed from the desire to learn about the theoretical bases of your philosophy. Why, in your opinion, is the female sex beleaguered (other than the fact that she internalizes stereotypes)? Do you subscribe to the Marxist origins of early feminist thought? Or, what, in your opinion, are the historical roots of female oppression? I was especially looking forward to seeing how your senior thesis at Harvard on the economic determinants of social behavior might have informed your current philosophy. I was particularly hopeful that you would address the question of how, when there is a significant wage-gap between partners (a topic closely related to your thesis), the lower-earning partner could “lean in” (without much financial leverage) if doing so meant scaling back for the higher-earning partner? While these issues were not directly addressed in the book, you hinted at your theoretical leanings in your discussion of the “mommy wars” and the phenomenon of many women rejecting the label of ‘feminist.’ I would like to present my own analysis of these two issues.

The phenomenon of the “gender wars” or what the media loves to call the “mommy wars” is a predictable outcome of the way in which we have framed the issue of female empowerment within a broader theoretical framework. While Prof. Joan Williams (as you quote in your book) attributes these conflicts to a clash of identities and a clash of social ideals, I attribute them to the way we perceive gainful employment within the larger theoretical framework of feminist theory. A detailed account of my explorations is delineated in my essay ‘Is Feminism Elegant?’ In that essay, I explore the shortcomings of dominant feminist thought from the viewpoint of the aesthetics of theory. But briefly: The dominant modus operandi of the feminist movement is gainful employment outside the home. This method has been cast as the unique and singularly powerful pathway to female emancipation. In addition, this technique of empowerment is viewed as a principle of empowerment, and not a parameter, or one expression of a higher principle. Thus, by solely viewing women’s work outside the home as a means of empowerment, we have gravely undermined the value of women’s work inside the home - and by extension, the value of the woman herself. Furthermore, because we view the presence of women in the workforce as a manifestation of a principle of feminist empowerment (and not a parameter), we view those who do not practise it, and do not enter the mainstream workforce as somehow not sipping from the cup of empowerment. They are viewed as ideologically indifferent to the general feminist agenda, or worse, ideologically under-developed! Therein lie the attitudes of superiority from the “working moms” and the counter-attacks of attempts to induce guilt by stay-at-home moms. These judgments are thus predictable products of our perception that gainful employment is the singular method of female empowerment. If however, both gainful employment and domestic work were on equal footing in the theoretical framework of feminist theory, the mommy wars would diminish. Thus, to remedy this, perceptions must be changed. We must learn to view all work undertaken by women, domestic and otherwise, as having monetary value.

Like many others, I too reject the labels ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism.’ My objections are on linguistic grounds. A full exploration of my viewpoint can be found on my blogpost ‘The Feminine Mistake.’ In brief, I reject those labels because they have (negative) connotations of being the “other.” As someone who belongs to the group that makes up half the human population, I deeply object to being classified as the other.

In conclusion, I’d like to offer some unsolicited advise: If you hope to ignite a grass-roots movement with your book and with LeanIn.org, you must broaden your message to include ways in which a woman without a job outside the home can assume leadership roles within her domestic precinct. When I heard you say, in one of your speeches, that women need to “sit at the table,” my immediate reaction was to broaden your message to apply to all women: A woman needs to sit at the head of the family dining table, especially if she is the primary domestic worker. Then, when I read your book and saw that you ended chapter eight ‘Make your Partner a Real Partner’ with “We need more men to sit at the table…… the kitchen table,” I thought to myself: Damn - She beat me to the dining table analogy!

Finally, while many in the media are getting dizzy pointing fingers at your standpoint on female empowerment and supposed lack of experience with female oppression, I want to commend you for beginning a conversation and bringing about awareness regarding the intangible barriers that women succumb to in their professional lives. As you are someone in a position of great influence, I hope that you will eventually broaden your message of self-empowerment to target the intangible barriers that suppress the voices of women in their homes and daily lives.

Sincerely,

Nandini Ramakrishna

On the Death of my Father - Part II

Keeping vigil by a dying parent’s bed-side is a bittersweet reversal of roles. But unlike a sleeping child who is left alone in slumber, my father didn’t spend a single solitary moment in the hospital. There was a round-the-clock companion to my father throughout his hospital stays, a mission shared mostly among my brothers and Sundar, and supplemented by others in the family. 

In the weeks and days before my father’s demise, he had begun to show signs of imminent death. He had significantly lost his appetite. He had great difficulty swallowing… In the months following his diagnosis, my father would have read all there is to read about lung cancer and the course it takes. He may have recognized the signs in himself. Or perhaps my father consciously avoided reading about the inevitable end in order to maintain a positive outlook throughout his illness.

My father’s prognosis turned bleak when his breathing functions continued to decline despite efforts to rejuvenate a collapsed lung. A final scan revealed increased tumor growth that explained his deterioration. Already, as a result of inadequate oxygen and the build-up of carbon dioxide in his body, he was in a fluctuating state of drowsiness and wakefulness, of which the latter would become fewer and far between. When my brother had asked him, during one period of awareness, if he was ready to depart this world, my father had answered "Yes." Eventually, unconsiousness would take over. His blood pressure would decrease. His pulse would weaken. His heart would stop.

After the nursing staff had medically confirmed my father’s death, they, along with Sundar and my brothers prepared the body. His nostrils were occluded with cotton balls; gauze was wrapped under his jaws and over his head to prevent movement of the joints before rigor mortis set in. My father was changed out of the hospital gown into his own clothes. A “body bag” was brought, in which my father’s body would be transported on a gurney out of the hospital to the hearse. While adjustments were being made and procedure was being followed, what was left physically of my father was referred to as “the body” and “it.” The transition from referring to my unconscious father as “him” to referring to his bodily remains as “it” was immediate and natural. Yet, when they had put my father’s body into the body bag, my brother quickly instructed the nursing staff to not zip it up the whole way. To leave the face exposed. And just in case they hadn’t heard him the first time, he repeated his request. One of the nurses responded that when they transport the body out of the room and into the hospital halls, they are required to zip up the bag completely. My brother acknowledged that as a given, and reiterated that in the room the face must not be enclosed. He might as well have taken the words out of my mouth. Even while the mind easily accepted (as seen in the shift in our choice of pronoun), that the sleeping image of our father was no longer our father, the idea of covering the face of the body, as if it might hamper his breathing, was unpalatable. We hold on even as we let go.

In Song of the Flower XXIII, Khalil Gibran writes of the flower: “I am the last gift of the living to the dead.” In reality, though, this gift is as much for the benefit of the living, as it is a final tribute to the dead. The last images I have of my father’s physical remains were strangely beautiful.

As we rode in the hearse to the crematorium, I happened to sit at my father’s feet. As a child I had had an unexplainable fascination for the protruding veins on my father’s feet. If I wasn’t on his lap, playing with his warm hands, I was at his feet – trying to displace or squash these veins, and then watch them quickly resume their shape. To my 5-yr old self, this was an activity that was hugely entertaining.

When I saw my father for the first time in the hospital two days earlier, I had noticed how swollen his feet were, and how the edematous flesh had swallowed up the protruding veins. The rest of him was, in contrast, shrunken and thinner than he had ever been. I remember him remarking about my own weight when he had visited me in the US the previous year. The day before my parents were to leave Phoenix on their way back to India, I was weighing their suitcases by holding them while standing on the scale. I subtracted my weight from the joint weight of suitcase and self. On hearing me speak my calculations out aloud, my father interrupted from the next room: “Wait a minute. There must be some mistake. How could that be your weight when it’s just a little less than mine?” I told him that I’m a lot heavier than I look. Hopefully that’s true. In retrospect, it was he who was a lot sicker than he looked or felt.

At the crematorium, the priest undertook the last set of rites performed on the body of the departed before we proceeded to the crematory, the room containing the furnace where my father’s body would be consigned to flames in the electric kiln. I imagined my father inquiring, some time in the recent past, while attending somebody’s funeral, particulars about the electric furnace – a relatively new possession of the funeral industry in India. He would surely have inquired about the temperatures inside, the method of ash collection and other particulars.

The final image I have of my father’s physical presence, as his body made its way on a moving trolley into the furnace of the crematorium, is a multi-colored arrangement of garlands and flowers in the shape of a sleeping man with only his face visible. Placed over the flowers were ten diyas – little clay lamps that were lit with burning camphor – whose dancing orange flames symbolized the funeral pyre of earlier days.
It occurs to me that some rituals do serve useful purposes. Holden Caulfield was wrong when he said: “Who wants flowers when you're dead?  Nobody.” I most certainly do.

A famous quote from Remembrance of Things Past reads:

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life, which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.  It is as though they were traveling abroad.

Although Proust intended this to refer to death in general, it applies well to the way in which someone views the death of a loved one in another country. In his observation, Proust inadvertently carries the immigrant experience.

I have lived outside of my hometown for 18 years now. In these years, my father did not have a daily presence in my life. Now in death, he doesn’t cause, for me, the experience of a daily absence – as he most surely does for my mother and brothers. My consciousness of his permanent absence would come in sudden bursts of recognition - they would come on unawares, greeting me each time as if it were a new revelation. I would sometimes react as if it were indeed a new announcement, until my memory, always a few steps behind, would remind me, that I’ve been though those same emotions before.

When my grandfather, an octogenarian, passed away under peaceful circumstances, in his home, surrounded by family, I reacted to the news of his death in ways that I knew were clearly incongruent to the situation. But I couldn’t help it. There was an unbridgeable disconnect between my rational mind and my emotions - and I had no control over the latter. On my last trip to India, I asked a friend what drove her family’s decision to return to India after having spent many years abroad, as immigrants. She recounted an episode, similar to mine, where she couldn’t help reacting with excessive emotion to the death of a relative. Right then, she said, she had decided she couldn’t subject herself to that experience again.

Spurred by the experience of my own lack of control over my emotions regarding my grandfather’s death in 1998, I wrote a poem called ‘Telescopic Grief.’

Telescopic Grief

They did not cry to mourn his passing on,

Or ask aloud: Why should he now be gone?

They celebrated that he had lived, instead,

And rejoiced that it was he, their common thread.

I knew that he had lived well past his prime,

I knew that even for dying there is a time.

Still, my sense of loss, excessive and profuse

Was a sentence disproportionate to the crime.

For telescopic grief takes its own slow course,

Un-propelled and unguided by the healing force

Of bearing witness to Death’s Aftermath:

Cremation. Obsequies. Solemnities.

It’s a feather flitting down a zig-zag path,

It stays afloat or is carried by the breeze

Of nostalgic gusts that linger in persistence

As dues that absence pays – the price of distance.

The topic of grieving in absentia, or telescopic grief, as I call it, is an area much in need of reporting and research. That I did not have to deal with telescopic grief with my father’s passing is a blessing of immense proportion.

Is Feminism Elegant?

When the status of women is uniformly sub-optimal, with exceptions of relatively few women in substantial control of their lives (mostly because they began from privileged vantage-points), one needs to examine the driving forces behind female empowerment with renewed scrutiny. This is not to simply criticize these forces, but rather, to ascertain whether there are inherent limitations and road-blocks built into these efforts, and if so, to re-frame and rectify. The larger purpose of such examination is therefore to arrive at better ways to meet the goal of having the “average woman,” whoever she may be, of whatever ethnicity, education and economic background, have a larger say in what direction she would like her life to go.

The attribute of ‘elegance’ is widely used by disciplines both in the so-called hard and soft sciences to describe their own principles and theories in terms of aesthetics. Elegance as an aesthetic criterion is not trivial, nor superficial, for theories can be summarily dismissed because they are “not elegant.” The physiologist Ian Glynn, who wrote an entire book on the aesthetics of theory, titled Elegance in Science: The Beauty of Simplicity, described elegance as follows, in an interview on Inside Higher Ed: “…elegant proofs or theories or experiments possess most or all of the following features: they are simple, ingenious, concise and persuasive; they often have an unexpected quality, and they are very satisfying….. Perhaps the most surprising member in this list of features is the "unexpected quality"; so let me give an example. When Thomas Henry Huxley read Darwin’s account of his theory of evolution by natural selection his comment was "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"”

What constitutes elegance in a theory? The hallmark of an elegant theory is one that explains the maximum evidence with minimum effort. Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example, explain a wealth of phenomena both on earth and extra-terrestrially by invoking a mere three laws. Good linguistic theories account for grammatical phenomena in all or most of the world’s known or studied languages. In addition, while doing so, they employ the fewest principles or rules. Elegant theories, in other words, have high explanatory power. However, while explaining, they must also be parsimonious. An elegant theory must therefore be compact, yet all-encompassing. Einstein is believed to have said: “The grand aim of all science…is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms…”

I have always found a major goal of the feminist movement, namely, the right of women to equal work and pay to be lacking in something fundamental. But defining what it is has been a challenge. Applying aesthetics of theory to feminist ideology is an attempt at unraveling my objections. Let’s consider parsimony and explanatory adequacy.

    In applying the concept of explanatory power to feminist theory, the goal of a good theory would be to have feminist principles that can be applied to the maximum number of members of the group the theory purports to represent. By the average person’s understanding of the term ‘feminism,’ it applies to all women. Therefore, major principles of feminism must aim to be applicable to all women. A useful yardstick is to check if the tenet would be useful to you, your mother and your grandmother, or you, your boss and your household help. If the principle is hard to apply to any one, it suffers from explanatory inadequacy. It has low explanatory power. This inadequacy may be a result of shoddy language, where imprecise terminology and wording exclude certain demographics, or it may be deep-rooted.

The education of women and the rights of women to equal access to gainful employment are worthy goals of the feminist movement. This is not a critique of those goals, but a critique of the value placed on them. It is well established that education and employment are strongly co-related with the preservation of personal freedoms. This applies equally to both men and women. Financial vulnerability is gender-neutral. The point is that while this gender-neutral mode of personal empowerment may improve the status of the individual (man or woman), it is inadequate in raising the overall status of ‘the beleaguered woman.’

    Gainful employment outside the home is portrayed and perceived as the prime modus operandi of female empowerment. Understandably, in a male-dominated world, where the locus of monetary power resides overwhelmingly in the hands of men, it is natural for parity measures to begin with the assumption that if women were equally prevalent and represented in the workforce as men are, there would be fewer gender-based inequities. This assumption may turn out to be accurate. We will only know when the numbers are equally distributed.

In the meantime, the beaten path to gender equality seems to be overwhelmingly focused on following men blindly down the path of monetarily compensated occupations. If having one’s own remuneration guarantees a woman a way to break free of many areas of subordination, (in a world where power, knowledge and money are so intrinsically related), what’s the problem with it?

Let’s look at it in terms of the criteria for theoretical adequacy. Any “good” method of improving the status of women should theoretically work for women of all socio-economic backgrounds, of all races, and for women from both developed and developing countries - much like how a good linguistic theory accounts for the data in all or most known languages. Gainful, remunerative employment would not apply to many of our mothers and most of our grandmothers. It would not apply to cultures that have mutually exclusive gender roles, where the woman assumes the entire burden of domestic tasks. Gainful employment is too specific to a certain section of women from a certain time-period. One could rectify this by proposing many different principles/methods of operation that applied to women of differing times and backgrounds. However, this would violate the requirement of parsimony. This does not mean that education and lucrative careers are invalid as pathways to empowerment; it indicates, rather, that instead of being a principle of empowerment, it should be viewed as one expression or one parameter of a higher inclusive principle. This higher, inclusive principle would apply to a larger cohort of women, thereby demonstrating greater explanatory power.

Whether an effort is viewed as stemming from a principle or a parameter is not just a matter of labeling and semantics. How something is perceived can and does have far-reaching consequences. If the presence of women in the workforce is perceived as the result of following a principle of empowerment (as opposed to a parameter), those who do not practice it, and do not enter the mainstream workforce are viewed as somehow not sipping from the cup of empowerment. They are viewed as ideologically indifferent to the general feminist agenda, or worse, ideologically underdeveloped! Ask any woman who has chosen to not work outside the home about subtle and sometimes blatant attitudes of superiority from the “working woman.”

    By solely viewing women’s work outside the home as gainful employment, we have gravely undermined the value of women’s work inside the home, and by extension, the value of the woman herself. If you’re a woman with a regular pay-cheque, think about whether you consider yourself slightly superior to a woman who chose to not have a traditional career. If your answer is ‘Yes,’ then you contribute, however subtly, to female oppression.

    So how do we revise our perception? We ought to view women’s work, domestic or otherwise, as having monetary value. More on this issue on another day and another essay. But, I'd like to end with the opening lines from Vivien Leone’s 1970 essay titled ‘Domestics.’

The day I suddenly found out I was a lawful domestic servant I was flat on my back in a hospital bed with 47 stitches in my face and a broken arm in traction, as a result of an auto accident from which my then-husband, the driver, emerged unmarked. A lawyer was telling us that in addition to my own massive suit, hubby would be able to sue for loss of services during my hospitalization and convalescence, although these services, on which a monetary value was being placed, had been performed free of charge throughout a decade of marriage.

That was when it hit me: when you do it for free, you’re a wife; when you do it for money, you’re a maid.

A Response to the Backlash Against 'Slumdog Millionaire'

(This is an old piece of writing that I am re-posting on Cactus Chronicles:)


I saw the movie in November in a small theatre that usually screens only indie films, and I enjoyed it on many levels. Weeks later, when it had hit the mainstream theatres and everybody had an opinion on it, I was surprised that there was so much of negativity surrounding the movie. To me it was a film that was essentially about determination and a boy holding on to the hope of finding his love, in a setting of poverty and squalour.

My interest in this issue is on 2 levels: As an aspiring writer, it alarms me that there are artistic boundaries that cannot be crossed in peoples' opinions. Vikas Swarup evidently crossed those, and Danny Boyle and his crew skillfully gave us a collective imagination of those boundaries. 
Secondly, the fact that a movie can be so polarizing, makes me want to dig deeper into the reasons why. If we begin with the assumption that everybody is "against" poverty and the abuse of children, how then did some people thoroughly enjoy the movie (like I did), and some think it vile and an example of 'poverty pornography', a term vile in itself?

So for those of you who think that poverty was somehow exploited in the movie/book: Are you now going to decry all books in which the protagonist is in a deprived setting? A good number of classics will have to be pulled off the shelves. You can begin with Oliver Twist! 

You must also not watch crime scene dramas. They too are exploitative for the following reasons: They are not realistic in that not all murders are solved. There are a multitude of unsolved crimes, with murderers and rapists still at large. Families are still waiting for children, wives, husbands, brothers, daughters who will never return home. The entertainment industry capitalizes on social ills to come up with plots that captivate the average viewer looking for a rush of adrenalin while sitting on his couch. Lets call it Adrenalin-rush pornography!! So the next time your favourite Crime Scene Drama comes on, turn the TV off!

The same applies to Medical Dramas. There are enough uninsured people in the US, many of them children, to warrant the application of the same sentiments underlying the uproar against Slumdog. Medical dramas tend to paint a healthier picture of things, no pun intended. They don't always show the number of families who enter hospitals with their loved ones, but leave without them, due to incurable disease, or even negligence. They don't show the thousands of patients who can't afford the treatment they need. They only show what will fly in the name of entertainment. And if you have thought this through carefully, you should know that the Television Industry exploits! So the next time your favourite doctor flashes his/her smile on your television screen, switch to the History Channel. That's your safest bet!!

And if your idea of entertainment is to step away from reality, and only watch movies that portray an India that has been filmed on the hillsides of the Alps, where the streets have no beggars, (much less blinded or mutilated ones), that's fine - because that IS the purpose of entertainment - to get away from the grimness of reality for a few hours. But don't deny a film the power to entertain via realism. Or magical realism. 

Satyajit Ray was criticized by some for his style of realism and for "exporting poverty" to the west. If you are a part of that bitter bandwagon that thinks that realism panders to the tastes of the west, and that escapism and posturing a la Bollywood is the only Indian way of filmmaking, you are wrong. Just because Bollywood churns out more movies in numbers, their style isn't intrinsically authentic. It's time that realism too be recognized as an authentic style of (Indian) film-making, and that any deviation from the Bollywood formula not be looked upon as a way to just get "creative Global recognition" as suggested by Bollywood Bigwigs!

I think it is unfortunate that the name Slumdog has been received badly in India and by Indians abroad. A term coined by Simon Beaufoy, and an amalgam of underdog and slum, ironically, it has been lost on the citizens of the land of Sanskrit, known for its sandhis. That the residents of Dharavi and other slums are sensitive to the use of a word that is not in employment by the locals to refer to themselves, is understandable. But Slumdog Millionaire is not an expose on Dharavi, nor is it a documentary. It is fiction! And if writers, artists, directors are to work within boundaries that are so subjective, then that is equivalent to creative censorship.

What is it about poverty that makes a certain proportion of Indians want to shoot the messenger? Especially if he's white! I think what is most offensive about Slumdog Millionaire is not its employment of a setting of utter squalour, but the reaction of people to it. Who having spent any extended time in India can deny having seen not just beggars on the street, but sometimes blind or mutilated ones? I was happy that the film provided me with plausible answers to questions that have crossed my mind during some point in my life encountering a scarred beggar: Have they been maimed to garner extra sympathy and bring in more cash while begging? 

So instead of being outraged that the movie was set in a slum and showed the seamier side of India as a part of the plot, be outraged that such things exist!

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The Problem With Women

Since the Dec 16^th gang rape in New Delhi, there has been much commentary about the status of women in India. Many have pointed out that we are all witting and unwitting collaborators in perpetuating subtle and arrant practices of discrimination against women. From cultural ‘lakshman rekhas’ or boundaries that prevent or discourage women from participating actively in society, to social customs that dictate appropriate behaviours for women, especially in the areas of morality, sexuality, and dress code, there’s ample evidence that there are dual and separate standards for the two sexes. When the problem is everywhere, and all pervasive, as is the issue of women’s status in India, the solution must also be one that can be applied everywhere and in a pervasive manner. Top-down solutions are capable only of  ‘trickle-down’ effects, and not capable of larger brush-stroke changes. For a solution to bring about meaningful alterations within a single lifetime, it must begin with a broad base that is common to women of all ages, socio-economic, educational and ethnic backgrounds.

So how does one even begin to think about solutions to a problem that can be described as: Changing the perception that women can be violently abused and then discarded as trash – from a moving bus? While this description pertains to the specifics of one recent and well-publicized incident, the gist of it applies to a million more. The key elements are that women are abusable and then expendable. In its extreme form, the dispensability of women is nowhere more evident than in the practice of sex-selective abortions and female infanticide. This is a crime in which women are equally culpable as men. When expendability is applied to adults, we see dowry deaths and bride/wife-burning. We see suicides by victims of rape, where the lack of recourse to justice and shame over the violation contribute to sending the woman down the path of complete self-destruction.  Manifestations of abuse are too varied in manner and severity to peg into a few categories, but the most prominent one, high on the severity scale is rape. It has proved to be so successful as a tool in acquiring control and power that it is now a much relied upon “weapon” of warfare in some parts of the world. Questions that have no simple answers are: Which type of rape is more dysfunctional – the one committed in isolation for no apparent tangible gain, or the ones committed as a part of a larger strategy to gain power? How are they different, and what do they have in common? On a moral level, they are both equally vile. On a social level, rapes that are not committed as a means to some larger end are perhaps more disturbing, and indicative of greater social dysfunction than the ones committed for obvious gain. What they both share in common, though, is the recognition by the perpetrators that women can be easily manipulated to work against themselves. Why else would victims of rape be subjected (by men and women) to so much shame and self-recrimination?

A paradigm shift in perception is required before any substantive changes can be observed in the position of the beleaguered women. This paradigm shift is not only about how men view women, but especially how women view themselves and other women.

A person’s identity is a complicated amalgam of associating oneself with many social groups and social roles. Social Identity Theory describes identity as the outcome of highlighting the similarities with members of the in-groups and exaggerating the differences with members of the out-groups. In trying to understand worldwide rape statistics, post-rape suicide, female foeticide/infanticide and non-violent manifestations of female oppression in the context of social identity, it is easy to see that women’s self-perception should be the logical starting-point of remediating efforts. Gender-identity should stem from meaningful differences between the sexes, and not be clouded by a blind quest for “equality.” Gender-identity should celebrate the unique characteristics, capabilities and limitations of the “weaker sex,” and not be defensive about women’s obvious conflicts of interest when motherhood and career overlap for her maximum attention. And lastly, gender-identity issues should be framed in neutral language that avoids connotations of otherness and exclusion. 

An elaboration in the next segment….