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Retelling India’s fashion story
There’s a beeline for India – from publishers of magazines and newspapers to manufacturers of garments and textiles. Not quite without reason – its ever-growing affluent section is bigger in numbers than many European nations put together.
If you care to look beyond the obvious, you will realise those making this beeline have not just been taken in by speculative hype alone. Numbers scream realities, and the numbers indicate that the Indian fashion market is huge, it is growing, it is vibrant. The rich are getting richer, and the number of the rich is also increasing at an alluring rate. This lure is for all those who see India as the promised land for fashion and retail.
So what is it with fashion in India? What is it with sportswear in this country?
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink:
Women and religion: The politics of it
• Sections:
The polls are here – now is the time to fabricate politically correct statements. So the BJP prime minister-in-waiting Atal Bihari Vajpayee pledges to hasten in the Women’s Reservation Bill and goes on to add, “Rapists should be hanged.” Don’t ask why this man never came out with such radical assertions all these years. For pretty much the same reason, PR Kumarmangalam, when cornered on a TV show about his party creating an issue of Sonia Gandhi’s Italian roots, comes out with a patriarchal defence “...bahu akhir ghar ki hoti hai (the bride, after all belongs to the family).”
Rape of sensitivity
Man, if you are stressed out, you can easily go and rape and practically get away with it these days. No, not by hoodwinking the law, or by finding ways to cirumvent the system. In fact, the law will be on your side and be pretty sympathetic too.
A US soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy has been given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others. James Michael Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help. [Link]
Phooling all the people all the time
My colleagues were exhilarated. They were agitated too. So the woman who, they claimed, had killed hundreds and got away with it, had finally been gunned down. Quite rightly so, they belligerently maintained. Those who live by the sword must die by the sword, was the apology. But they were disturbed as well. What if the man, who had liquidated her and been subsequently nabbed, were to be hanged for the justice he had meted out? It would become a travesty of justice.
The boss, barely able to gulp down his lunch in this choked state of mind, felt rape is fine, but rape cannot be an excuse for killing your rapists. Yes, nodded the others sotto voce, almost as if rape is the greatest thing than can happen to a woman. The boss, need one reveal, was a man? The physical humiliation and emotional trauma that Phoolan had to undergo during that infamous, seemingly-unending gangrape was perceived as "okay". All in the game, you see.