Tag: vrushali lad

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Diaries

Trust in God, but carry pepper spray

Don’t just wait for ‘manly’ help – it is not ‘unwomanly’ to raise an alarm and protect your personal dignity.
by Vrushali Lad | editor@themetrognome.in

Part 2 of the ‘Women’ diaries

I was first molested by a 20-something man when I was 10 years old. We lived in pre-Gulf War Kuwait at the time, and I had accompanied my older sister to the grocer’s just a few steps from where I lived. He touched me twice between my legs, and as I watched him walk away calmly a few minutes later, even at that young age I remember being so ashamed that I did not raise an alarm though I easily could have. I let him get away.

There were several more molestation incidents as I grew up. Hands reaching out to pinch. Elbows swinging into ribs. Bodies being pressed against mine on a crowded bridge. I dealt with these assholes, fearfully at first, then with increasing violence.

Did the behaviour of some men put me off the rest of them? Nope, funnily enough. All my friends are men. I love men, they’re awesome. Only the creepy ones make me mad.

Cut to 2014. My temper rises at the teenaged boy who, accompanied by his friend in the restaurant, thinks it’s totally okay to keep staring at me over the rim of his beer glass. Of course, I have gone out of my way to ‘deserve’ this kind of attention – I am the only unaccompanied woman in the restaurant, and I do not pretend that a male partner will be joining me soon. I order a huge plate of food, sit cross-legged on my wooden chair, watch an old cricket match on the restaurant’s TV, yell for water.

I give this silly staring infant a full five minutes to quit staring. I can’t know what he’s thinking, but as his head keeps swivelling around in my direction, I know he’s not thinking, “This is the kind of independent woman I will raise my daughter to be – who will go to restaurants alone and not mind being stared at.” His five minutes are up, and I look away from the TV screen. Looking directly at him I loudly ask, “Kya dekh raha hai, bho%#@*ke?”

eve teasing Shocked, he whips his face around so quickly, I’m sure he’s broken his neck a little. Both boys do not look at me again. By now, I feel the eyes of the restaurant on me. The auntie on the next table looks murderous. “Kaisi besharam ladki hai,” she must be thinking. I finish my meal and ask for the bill.

I am 35, and by now, I have learnt several swear words. My potty mouth does not reduce my femininity (I think). My parents, however, worry about a bigger disorder that plagues their child – the one that makes me cause a huge scene and hit men in public. My mum tells me to be careful, my husband condoles the reason for my loss of temper, but not my outburst. “I worry for you,” he says, sighing.

Me? I find I care more for my peace of mind than creating a certain ‘impression’ about myself as a woman from a decent family, and I really don’t care, in the heat of the moment, if the guy I am pummelling turns around and starts pummelling me (though that would be embarrassing). The times when I haven’t reacted to such abuse are the times that I still recall with tears in my eyes.

Wherever a woman goes, whether returning home from work or going vegetable shopping with a child in tow, she is subjected to casual remarks, butt pinchings, breast gropings, and what not. At least more women are speaking out against these attacks (which are sweetly termed ‘eve teasing’). But most are still caught in the ‘Jaane do, these things happen,’ mindset. I can’t understand it – if we raise hell when somebody steals from us, why do we hush it up when we are humiliated for no reason?

Most people’s line of defence goes thus: ‘Go to the cops. File a police complaint. Get the perpetrator arrested.’ All of these are fine remedies, and they must be adopted, no question. But what happens in the few moments just after you’ve been inappropriately touched in a crowd, or a passing uncle whispers a disgusting suggestion in your ear? Do these remedies race through your mind first? Do you choose to keep walking as if you didn’t notice that hand on your breast, or do you turn around and satisfy your hurt ego with a filthy look?

You’ve got to do something.

I’m not saying everybody has to beat such men to pulp, but girls, don’t let them just walk away and grope somebody else a minute later. And trust me, no amount of filthy looks will help – those work only with close friends and family, who actually care for the sentiment behind the look. If you know who’s touched you, or said something disgusting, turn around that instant and go after the bastard. Run after him, turn him around by his shirt collar, and put all your strength into the hardest slap you can land on his face.

If he protests (and he will), slap him again. Kick him in the shins, for good measure. Don’t care if a crowd collects to watch you in action (and a crowd will, and don’t expect help either), and also swear at him loudly. If, after all this exercise, you still want to drag him to the cops, please do so.

As a journalist with Mid Day in 2005, I had to do night shifts for a week every month. Every city reporter, girl or boy, had a week of night shifts, where they literally worked all night, scouring the streets for stories, reaching the spot of a development, and so on. I’ve had more than my share of crackpot police constables asking me why I worked all night, directing the question to my chest than to my face, and with some even going as far as asking if I was single. I learnt to blank out the bad behaviour, choosing instead to wear heavy jackets when I could, and always going out for work fully dressed. I don’t know why it is, but the sight of a woman’s bare arms emerging from a sleeveless blouse drives some men crazy. They call it ‘modern’ clothes. Ergo, if I wore ‘modern’ clothes, I wouldn’t mind a bit of loose talk.

And despite my treatise on hitting back and the rest of it, dear girls, please also be careful. I’ve learnt to keep the punches arsenal in reserve, and to not go looking for trouble. In Mumbai, the ladies’ train coaches have a police constable after sunset. The sight of the police uncle in the train is a reassuring one, but he’s not going to escort you home. There’s no need to go all Princess Guerilla and carry a bazooka in your bag, but for your own sanity, be armed with a sharp tongue and a sense of instant justice. Keep a can of pepper spray handy for the times you may be mugged. Don’t merely wait for men or cops or the courts to help you – in a reasonable situation, at least make enough noise to pinpoint the abuser and attract attention to him in a crowd. Shame the man, and do it loudly.

More to the point, don’t be ashamed if some random man tries to get his thrills off you. The guilt is not worth it, and besides, isn’t it easier to own your life and your body than let the scum of the earth define what you should feel?

Vrushali Lad is editor of themetrognome.in. 

The Women’s diaries celebrate the spirit of women on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8 every year. Look out for Part 3 next: ‘Her sister was killed. But she fights on’.

(Pictures courtesy www.rnw.nl, archive.indianexpress.com. Images are used for representational purpose only)

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Read

Review: ‘The Diary Of A Reluctant Feminist’

This book is, without doubt, one of the most awful books to come out at the start of this year.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Not all books one reads are good reads. Most of them are average, even tedious reads. But then you come across a book that is so bad, so futile, that every other bad book you’ve read in your life actually shines brighter in comparison.

Bhavna Bhavna’s The Diary Of A Reluctant Feminist is one such book. A look at the synopsis promised several good things, which prompted me to start reading it in the first place. The excerpt on the back cover goes thus:

‘The problem in my struggle for a divorce was in the small print – as with everything in my life it read “subject to my mother’s permission.” And since my mother was never going to allow me to divorce I was relegated to being an armchair divorcee…So I decided, after two years of being separated, to stop waiting for my parents’ elusive permission, and to take the initial steps in the painful journey myself. In this process, I was also branded a “feminist”, which in their view was marginally worse than being a “terrorist”…’

So far, so good. The problem actually began when I started reading it.

The problem with the book is: the whole book.

What could have been a (as promised by the publishers) “profoundly funny chronicle of a young woman’s attempt to get divorced…” is anything but. If anything, it is a whiny, outrageously cliched, lacking-in-the-essentials kind of book, with extremely lazy storytelling. In fact, subject to a few revisions and rewrites, this book could have been a bit closer to what it actually aims to be.

So the author brings out the entire jing bang of a large Punjabi family – a domineering matriarch heading the household, her obedient sons and their wives and children, how the arranging of marriages is a competitive sport, how traditions and customs set by the family’s elders are unquestioningly followed even after the elders’ deaths, how individual wishes of girls and women are never important, but the men get to exercise their rights, and so on. Unfortunately, the story does not rise about these elements at all.

I’m not saying nobody will like this book, it may find its fair share of admirers. Why I am not one of those admirers is because when I read a book, I want to be told something I don’t already know. I don’t mean I should be told an entertaining account of the Higgs Boson, for instance, but when I pick up a book about a woman wanting to tell her overbearing Punjabi family that she wants to get a divorce, I want to be a told the story that makes me 1) Sympathise with the protagonist, 2) See the (promised) hilarity in the several (often banal) exchanges between the woman and her strict parents, 3) Feel the woman’s tension as she tries and fails to save her marriage before deciding to separate from her husband, and 4) Most importantly, find a non-cliched representation of a loveless relationship of the kind we see often in the till-death-do-us-part milieu of Indian marriages.

Instead, all the reader gets is a series of cliches thrown at him one after the other, in a rambling account of the protagonist’s increasingly failing marriage, how her opinion has never been solicited even on matters affecting her life, how her family and indeed, all of society, gangs up on her once her singleton status is established, and how nobody gives her a chance at doing good for herself. Well, boo hoo. What is even more annoying is the sweeping assumption that this is what all girls in large Punjabi families go through – I’m not saying these things don’t happen, but since they do happen fairly regularly, what is the point of telling us just that? And while we’re on the subject, when will be stop caricaturing Punjabi families in this fashion? Aren’t there good, wholesome, uncliched stories about Punjabis to be told at all?

In short, I do not recommend this book at all. If you still want to read it, knock yourselves out here.

Rating: 1.

Rating scale: 1 = Awful; 2 = Slightly rubbish; 3 = Tolerable read; 4 = Good; 5 = Paisa vasool

(Pictures courtesy www.flipkart.com, www.theatlantic.com)

Categories
Deal with it

How I was sexually harassed at the school where I worked

A Goregaon resident and teacher describes her ordeal when a male colleague started harassing her after she turned him down.
by Bhakti Sankhe-Varde

I think I first realised that something called ‘sexual harassment’ exists when I was in school. We had a Sports teacher, a Mr Joseph, who I had heard often made girls uncomfortable. I had always found him to be an affable, nice man, and a very good singer with a great sense of humour.

We were in Class 8 when I first realised that beneath that genial exterior lurked a dirty old man. He must have been over 50 years old then. Slowly, we began to put his antics in perspective. He would insist on the girls not letting their braids fall over their shoulders and over their chests. “Pin up your hair!” he would order, and stare at the students’s breasts as they tightly rolled up their braids. Even the songs he would sing were often of a vulgar nature, and he would stare at some girl in the class as he sang. He would often place his hands on the girls’s shoulders when he spoke to them, tell the girls not to let down the hem of their sports shorts to make them longer.

The worst was when he once called a girl to the staff room after recess to discuss her participation in an upcoming sports meet. She said later that when she got there, he was seated alone with his pants undone. When he saw her approach, he casually smiled and redid his zipper. In tears, she later told the class teacher and her parents.

When he was sacked from work a month later, several students came forward with similar stories. We found it all a little shocking and confusing.

I am a teacher, too. I take tuitions at home and volunteer to teach underprivileged children in a local slum. Five years ago, I taught Math at a boys’ primary school in Mumbai, and I found that most of my colleagues were men. Which was quite okay – I have two brothers and a lot of male friends, so being around men was never a problem for me.

I loved the school and my colleagues were fun to be with. We would often hang out together and there were some movie and dinner plans made as well. However, I soon realised that one of my male colleagues had totally misunderstood my friendly banter for flirting. It seems he had gone around telling people that I had proposed to him. Infuriated, I confronted him, but he just denied it all. Another teacher said that that colleague was actually interested in me, and was probably spreading the rumours to boost his ego. To prove that I was totally disinterested, I once made it a point to get my fiancé to school. This man’s face fell when he saw my fiancé and I thought that he would back off.

The situation worsened

I suppose it was inevitable that he would find out that I was engaged to be married. At first, he was friendly, even congratulating me on my engagement and saying he must throw a party for me. Then a week later, somebody called my fiancé at his workplace and said that I was cheating on him – that I was having several affairs at school. Luckily, my fiancé and I were childhood friends so he trusted me. Imagine if he had gotten angry and broken off the engagement!

I also realised that something had changed at school. Some of the older boys had started giving me funny looks, whispering to each other as I walked the corridors to classes. Then one day, a male colleague took me aside and said that the school principal had taken down a disturbing photograph of me in one of the students’ toilets – it seems my head had been pasted onto a naked woman’s body.

Mortified, I wondered what to do. For the time being, I decided, I would do nothing, the prank would soon be forgotten.

Then one morning, I was horrified to find a pair of men’s underpants nside my locker. When I yelled in shock and disgust, the staff room only laughed. Everyone told me to ignore the mischief. There was nothing I could do, so fuming, I remained silent and decided to lock my cupboard from that moment.

Other disturbing things happened. Somebody spread a rumour that I was actually a eunuch. Once I came to the staff room for lunch and discovered that somebody had placed a packet of condoms in my handbag. The school’s vice principal once summoned me to her office and told me off for having an affair with a colleague. She refused to say which colleague and who had made the complaint. I began to realise that my name was being vilified – I was being branded as a ‘loose’ woman who had multiple partners, a woman who was more interested in flirting than teaching.

As my confidence dipped, I began to notice that I was being shadowed after I left for home. I would often walk home, but I always had the feeling that I was watched. One day, I suddenly turned around and saw, at a distance, that same colleague who had been telling people that I was interested in him. I was sure that all of these things happening to him could be traced back to him, but there was no way to prove it. The only thing that kept me going was my fiance’s steady support. I got married to him a few days later.

And then…

One morning, that colleague didn’t report to work. He wasn’t there the next day as well, but by noon, I was summoned to the principal’s office. When I got there, I was stunned to see the principal and a policeman. The policeman was very polite, he said that my colleague had tried to commit suicide and named me in his ‘complaint’. Shocked, I asked him how I could possibly be responsible when I didn’t even know him that well.

Luckily for me, the principal supported me and had already explained that I was a married woman and that I had never been seen in the company of that colleague. It turned out that in his suicide note, the man had written that I had led him on for a year, promising to marry him, but that I had recently married someone else. I didn’t know what to do.

My husband and his family stood by me in the situation. I had to do the rounds of the police station, give my statement and there was a time when I thought I would be jailed. But the police were sympathetic towards me and had understood that I was probably at the receiving end of a false case. Even more fortunately, the colleague had survived his suicide attempt and later confessed in hospital that the story had been cooked up. However, he never owned up to the things that had been done to me, to the rumours that had been circulating.

I finished that term and resigned my position. I had suffered enough and whatever I did, I knew people would still look at me in a certain way.

Today, I wish I had lodged an official complaint while the harassment was going on and insisted on an inquiry. My inaction probably spurred the harasser into doing more things to embarrass me. I wish I had not been so defensive from the start – as women, we are conditioned to feel shame when men humiliate us. I hope women who are harassed don’t take it silently. They must fight back and be alert at all times.

As told to Vrushali Lad.

(Picture courtesy www.indiafirstedition.com. Image is used for representational purpose only)

Categories
Deal with it

The scrap house

An artist put a lot of scrap and unused material to creative use and created a themed home in Sion. Read on to know how.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

I was invited to view the Jamkhedkar residence in Sion last week, amidst the Ganpati fervour. The Jamkhedkars celebrate the festival with a 10-day themed Ganpati decoration, and at first sight, I was slightly bewildered by the living room in which I was invited to sit. I could hear a waterfall close by and the ceiling, with angel motifs and a beautiful woman on it had an eerie 3D effect.

Dr Neela JamkhedkarActually, everything about the house is themed – the bedroom’s theme is ‘Khajuraho’, the living room is a ‘Kashmiri shikara’ (see pic above), the kitchen is a ‘garden’ and the music studio they own on a lower floor is ‘cave’ themed. Says Dr Neela Pimparkhede Jamkhedkar, (61, in pic on left), whose idea the house’s design is, “When we purchased the house and studio about 10 years ago, we had little money left over to get the interiors of the house done with furniture and all the fixings. Besides, I had always wanted to decorate the house my own way.”

Neela’s idea of decorating the house was simple – decide on a theme per room, then look for items she already possessed and which could be put to use, and lastly, go sourcing for items she would need. “You will be amazed at the amount of things every house has, things which are no longer usable but which we can manipulate and use as something else. I got a lot of such items together – an old painting of a woman I had done, urns and murtis I had brought from my maternal home, and even sheets of cardboard that were just lying about.”

Getting down to work

Chor Bazaar became Neela’s favourite go-to refuge for things she could buy. “My husband and I would do the rounds of the place, and I picked up so many beautiful, ornate things there,” she says, pointing to the sliding door that closes off the living room from the passage, and the front door of the house. “See how beautiful these doors are. I got them at not over Rs 2,000 per door at the time. Then I got them home and made my carpenter work on them to create the designs I wanted.”

She also sourced several wooden partitions and strips from a local scrap shop, which she would buy at Rs 30 a bag (till the shop owner wised up and demanded an exorbitant amount). Door done up with wooden strips“I had hired a local carpenter, Rampreet, a most patient man who would do exactly as I said. I got him to carve each strip to the design I wanted, and then these were pasted in a pattern (in pic on right).” She even hired a local painter, Nandu, to implement her designs and assist her wherever required – Neela is an accomplished artist on both fabric and canvas.

Chor Bazaar also came to the rescue when Neela wanted knick-knacks and smaller items. “For example, I got a lovely little beer keg for the bar that I created for my husband and son,” she says, showing off the little corner which is adorned with a mural and which holds bottles and a running waterfall. “I also bought a measure of cloth and stitched it myself for the lamp over the dining table. Besides this, I got a small mandir from Satguru’s and created a little puja corner in the bedroom. It is everyone’s favourite space in the house,” Neela says.

Lessons learnt

Neela says that though putting the house together this way took a long while, it gave her the kind of creative satisfaction nothing else could give. “Our house is not expensive, but it has taken a lot of effort and ideation to get it to this stage,” the former Ayurvedic practitioner says.

“The setting up of the house had taken over my mind completely. There were days when we would have no money left over for the cab home after making our purchases. My husband and I once carried giant murtis home in a BEST bus!”

She contends that it is easy to decorate your home yourself, provided you have a clear idea of what you want and the resourcefulness to procure the items you need. “I am always looking for interesting objects that can be put to use. And I make a lot of things at home myself – I have painted entire carpets and put together canvasses too,” says the artist, who has also held exhibitions of her work previously.

“In a city like ours, using every square inch of space is essential. Besides this, one must keep learning all the time,” the senior citizen says. “I learnt to use the Internet so that I could browse different designs and interpret them my way. I look up a lot of Street Art as well. When I’m not painting, I’m designing sarees or strolling through interiors exhibitions. Eight years ago, I got a diploma at JJ School of Art, which honed my skills further. I also plan a different theme for Ganpati each year. Planning and designing my house taught me several things.”

She adds, “I have learnt one thing – the world is a beautiful place and we have to participate in its beauty. If we invest ourselves in beautifying our homes, we will find the kind of happiness that nothing else can give us.”

Dr Neela Jamkhedkar is open to conducting a paid tour of her home and explaining the various ideas she has used in designing it. If you want to see her house and get design inputs for your own home, write to editor@themetrognome.in and we will facilitate the interaction.

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Patrakar types

“You paid media dogs!”

It is the age of the instant response – and the age of the crudest name-calling against mediapersons and celebrities. We are so quick to take offence at the media commenting on things that affect us, that we resort to shooting the messenger instead of debating the message.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Two days ago, we ran a story on how traders in Thane and Pune had all but called off their agitation against the LBT after Sharad Pawar’s intervention, and how traders in Mumbai were about to follow suit. See the story here.

We’d got quotes from Viren Shah, President of the FRTWA, who was part of the delegation that met Sharad Pawar on Sunday at the latter’s residence. We had excerpts from the press note that the FRTWA later issued, outlining the points discussed. Viren Shah even went on record to say that, “The FRTWA is against the LBT but our retailers will not down shutters. Business will go on as usual while the protest is on.” The story went live on Sunday evening, and Monday’s newspapers carried the same news with varying degrees of detail.

But on Twitter, at least five tweeters called us several names, the substance of their remarks being that we, like other media outlets in the country, were “paid media dogs” who were bribed by the Congress to spread rumours. “Pls do not spread rumours. Do u have a signed letter to confirm this?” asked one, the mildest of the lot, while another tweeted, “chal jhota, congress ne paisa diya hai kya rumours felane ka? #PAIDMEDIA #LBT” with an entertaining cartoon showing the Congress scamming everyone in sight. A little digging by our social media team found that this latter guy had been on a name-calling spree all afternoon, tweeting at every mediaperson on Twitter and calling them all #PAIDMEDIA. Some of these luminaries included journalists Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt.

I wonder if people really understand what this ‘paid media’ thing really is, though all and sundry use this phrase as freely as they use public streets as their personal dustbin. I always imagine this paid media business to be a situation where somebody comes to a media office with bags of money, plonks them on the editor’s desk and says, “There, I paid you. Now write nice things about me.”

I’m not saying things don’t necessarily pan out like that, either.

In recent times, we’ve been seeing a growing tendency in the country to take offence at everything. And, not content to merely take offence, we’re outraging all day about things that, in hindsight, were meant as a joke, albeit a not so funny one. Some of us are so outraged, we form packs of similarly-outraged persons and attack the offender all day.

Recently, a sarcastic tweet from stand-up comic Rohan Joshi, who was responding to a self-proclaimed feminist who’d accused him of being a male chauvinist, took up the Twitterati’s time for an entire day. And he wasn’t even being a chauvinist. A Firstpost.com article about how a new initiative to provide leftover food from one’s lunchbox to starving slum and street children was most likely a sham, prompted all and sundry to address the article’s writer with every possible swear word known to mankind, even as they jeered at his cynicism and asked how much money he’d been paid to write that piece.

And there’s no point responding, if you’re the writer of a particularly controversial piece, to such name-calling and trying to explain your point of view. Any such attempt only results in a bigger barrage of insults.

We didn’t know this a few years ago, safely insulated as we were in our print media offices and our TV channel stations, how much hatred there was out there. Then the media’s working changed, to the extent that every bit of news and information put out there is compatible on all forums, most significantly, the web. And the Internet doesn’t do a very good job protecting us from instant, biting feedback the way other media can. Sure, there are such things as comment moderation tools, but what does one do when an article also has Facebook-enabled comments? Who’s going to disable Facebook?

Does this hate stem from the genuine fury consumers feel at seemingly important issues not being covered by the news media? The LBT strike, for instance, is over 25 days old, but apart from snippets on how closed shops are inconveniencing the public, has there been an in-depth piece on the issue by the electronic media? Even on Sunday, as trader organisations decided to suspend hostilities for a few days, news channels continued screaming headlines about one more player arrested in the IPL spot-fixing scam. Not a single LBT-related story surfaced at all that evening.

Or could a part of this hate be attributed to the clout the big media players enjoy, of being able to function well despite its consumers not liking most of the content they put out there daily? In another business, for example, if people don’t like your product, you’re going to either take their feedback on board or shut shop. This doesn’t happen with say, The Times of India, which gets roundly criticised every single day for having more ads than news, or for biased reporting, or for peddling advertorials as news items. The TOI continues to function, and function well. Is that enough to make people so resentful that they start calling the TOI names and tell it to go to jump off a cliff?

Or is it as simple as a lack of manners, of good breeding? Sensible people, when debating a point, argue with the person’s point of view. They don’t tell the person to his face that he is a jackass, or worse. In my eyes, you have to be totally moronic to say a person is a prostitute who sleeps around with Congress politicians and writes against the BJP, when what you really wanted to say was that the writer’s views had hurt their own and they begged to differ. Say what you wanted to say, don’t get into needless side issues about a person’s parentage or background or tendency to take bribes. Apart from being moronic, it is an unnecessary exercise in wasting time when, instead of debating the message, we shoot the messenger over and over again. Tell people they are wrong, certainly, but remember that you don’t really have the right to do so. A point of view is never right or wrong; it may be contrary or controversial.

And besides, how brave would you be if you had to say half those things to the mediaperson’s face, and not from behind your computer or phone’s screen?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

(Pictures courtesy blogs.reuters.com, mag.bewakoof.com, pastorchrisowens.wordpress.com, www.sodahead.com)

Categories
Patrakar types

Can you keep a secret?

You’d think you couldn’t keep a secret in the public realm, in a city like ours. You’d be somewhat right.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Nothing remains a secret between people, at least not for long. In a city as populous as ours, where even a scuffle on a public street attracts gawping crowds from five streets away, where the whiff of a possible dead body in an abandoned warehouse brings people to the scene within minutes, where something told in confidence by one person to a friend and an acquaintance becomes news in a day, can anybody really keep a secret?

Turns out, they can. At least, for a little while.

Last month, an artist held a top secret showing of her works at Project 88, a well-known gallery in Colaba. The showing was a secret because it contained some photographs and videos of a sexually explicit nature. I had an invite to it, because a friend of mine had assisted in putting it up. I had been invited with the rider that “You cannot write anything about it, because given the nature of the work, it will be shut down in no time if anybody finds out.” The invite was non-transferable, and I couldn’t bring a plus one.

When I went there, two guard-type guys meticulously checked my name in a list of invitees. When they didn’t find any Vrushali on there (of course they didn’t: one was looking for Vaishali, the other scanned the list for Burshal), they looked at me coldly and were about to remark when I found my name on the list myself and pointed it to them. They duly crossed it out – this meant I could not visit again. I saw the work and proceeded to speak with the artist, who promptly hit the roof on knowing that I was from the Press (never mind that several mediapersons had attended the opening, since they were her friends and I was not). I assured her, despite my mounting irritation at her rudeness, that I wasn’t there to write about the work and thus bring about a speedy shutdown of the exhibition from right-wing nuts (a genuine fear for artists today), and that I had only dropped by because my friend had told me about the exhibition months ago, and I was very curious to see a secret exhibition in a public place.

After I left the gallery, I was still mad at the artist for unreasonably slotting all journalists into the same troublemakers’ box. For fully five minutes, I toyed with the idea of writing about the exhibition and getting her into the kind of trouble she was fully anticipating anyway.

Then better sense prevailed. I guess all artists, in fact, all creative individuals, are so attached to their work that anything disquieting – by way of a negative critique or a downright shutdown – must really cut them to the quick. After months of hard work, I suppose this artist also had the right to be touchy about who saw her work and who didn’t. So I wrote nothing.

A few days later, Mumbai Mirror carried a vague reference to the exhibition, and specifically mentioned that it was still on at Project 88. Within hours, the artist pulled the exhibition down. I learnt later that the Mirror columnist had been at the showing and was one of the artists’ friends from the Press.

You never know who can really keep your secret safe, huh?

Last week, I read a curious little item, also in the Mumbai Mirror, about a dessert queen in the city. The woman keeps her identity so secret, everyone only knows her via her brand name – Sweetish House Mafia. To sample her cakes, cookies and other goodies, you have to place an order on her FB page or tweet to her, and she lets you know when a car will come around next in a designated area on a designated date and deliver the order.

I really wonder how long the proprietor of this establishment can keep her identity a secret. Somebody must know her, right? And going by that, somebody’s got to spill the beans some time, right? I love the secrecy of the project, though. It reminds me in a weird way of the shoemaker and the elves.

My point is: how does one do something in a public place and keep it a secret? I suppose one could opt for a pen name when writing a salacious blog or book, for example. Or one could say that they are only the face of a project, while the actual creator would not like any publicity, thank you very much. But still – how long can you keep it up? You could probably swear your family and close friends to secrecy, but what about those outside your immediate circle, who might somehow learn who you are and that you’ve closeted yourself behind a secret all along?

Besides, there is a delicious thrill to unmasking someone, isn’t there? Is that why most things don’t remain a secret?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

(Picture courtesy www.moneywithflo.com) 

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