The girl with the Dragon tattoo and how it disturbed me

Last night, I sat up late after working on my college project and started watching The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.The movie is based on a novel by Steig Larson titled "Men who hate Women" in Swedish. As the events in the film unfold we see the female protagonist sexually abused and then raped, later we are told the story of some murdered women who have been raped and brutalised and then the story of a runaway girl who was first raped by her father and then her brother.
Apparently Steig Larson was inspired to write such a horrific book after witnessing a gang rape by three men of a women he once knew.When he went to apologise to her later on for not helping her, she did not accept it and never forgave him.(Source: Wikipedia)

This movie came days after I had seen the trailer for the film 3096 days which is based on a real life kidnapping of a young girl for 3096 days.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natascha_Kampusch)
And few days before Amanda Berry escaped her abductors who had locked her up and raped her for years.(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/10/ariel-castro-amanda-berry-daughter)
This reminds me of the scary Fitzl incident of Austria in which a father has locked his daughter in the basement for years and repeatedly raped her, fathering seven children with her.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case)

These things disturbed me so much and have disgusted me. Not to mention the many cases of rape and abduction that we keep hearing of all the time. I am forced to ask myself again and again, why am I a woman? Why am I subjected to all this? Why is it that suddenly I have been thrown of the whole system of balance and made a weaker being who is meant to be mistreated?

A father raping his own daughter? What happened to the days when a father would come home with gifts and hug his little daughter? Why did she turn into a sexual object, even for him?

A brother raping his sister? Wasn't he suppose to protect her?

Then again, why I, as a woman even need protection? Why cant I live freely? Why do I keep asking these questions again and again? When will I stop asking them? When will I stop looking behind my back?

There are days like these when films and books like above disturb me so much. I was looking at the protagonist, Lisbeth and thinking that she is such a brave brave girl to survive. She attacked her rapist few days later and tattoos "Rapist" on his body. She tried to kill her father who attempted to rape her. And then sometimes I think, is it better to just die? When you are not treated as a human being, maybe in some years things will change or maybe in some years women might not just exist.

I don't know. All I know is that despite everything, women are not meant to safe. They are mere objects who are thrown from one person to the other. Maybe, they really should stop existing.

Decolonizing the Language

I write this post in English because it is the best language I know how to write with. I am an Indian with Punjabi roots and yet I cannot read or write properly in Hindi and I cannot even speak Punjabi. I am colonised still, even after 66 years of Independence.

But I am not alone.

 Almost everyone I know is like me. They are proud of the fact that they can converse fluently in English, write better English than many Englishmen and know little or no Hindi.

And we have people commenting on someone’s lack of English speaking skills, categorising them as “gavar” or judging someone just because he cannot string two words of English together and then going on to enunciate complex sentences in an attempt to appear all high and mighty.

This westernisation of our culture has seeped in so deep that now it is difficult to actually p0oint out where it all started and what exactly is wrong. Our politicians in the parliament( if you have been unfortunate enough to watch the Lok Sabha channel) argue in “English”, our cases in the court are argued in “English”, “English” news channels are the ones most watched( maybe not statistically but no one will say they like watching a Hindi news channel), the subscription of Hindi newspapers and periodicals is at an all time low and despite the fact that Hindi is our mother tongue, we are increasingly more adept at English than Hindi.

In countries where English is not their native language, it actually IS their second language and that does not deter them from achieving anything in the world. Italians are proud of their language and you can hear so many different dialects of it, Spanish speaking nations uphold their language in the highest terms as do the French and the Germans and the Bulgarians and the Arabians. They don’t care whether you understand them or not, get a translator if you can’t or learn their language. In UN meetings they speak in their own language while we, as a Hindi speaking nation speak in English.

We are so proud of the fact that we have one of the largest English speaking populations of the world but what about Hindi? We know all the letters of the English alphabets; they are on our tips but what about Hindi Akshar? We can easily count in English but do we know the whole Hindi Ginti?

We are divided into states based on their language yet we expect a Tamilian or a Gujarati to know Hindi because it is the official language. What about their native language? Why not encourage that? There is a human development index which ranks countries on the number of ethnic groups they have and India comes a close second yet we are not proud of it. We expect our population to be a linear one where everything we do is westernised. What about our own culture? Why do we frown upon a girl wearing Salwar kameez and appreciate the one in Palazzo Pants?

We talk of western ideas of feminism and an open culture but have we ever bothered to even scrape the surface of our own culture to know that these ideas have always been engraved in us? Did you know that until the Muslim invasion started in India, the women wore no dupatta, not even to cover their heads? Just one example of the kind of society we had.

I think I reached rock bottom when the other day I saw a Hindi book in my friend’s house and it was upright and I couldn’t read the title without tilting my head.

And that’s why I write this post in English. Not very proud of it.

Creeps after dark

Delhi is rife with creepy people crawling the city after dark, from passing lewd comments to doing condemnable acts, they are everywhere.As a girl in Delhi, walking alone at night can be a horrendous task, here is a list of creepy crawlers you might encounter and you should beware of.

1. Zara zara touch me: This category covers people who have a propensity to touch women for no rhyme or reason. So as you walk on a road minding your business or stand in a bus, a cold hand will suddenly brush against you or maybe when you are at a shop and paying the shopkeeper, he might think your hand is also a part of the payment.

2.Horn OK please: Many a bikers fall under this category, especially when its starts to get dark and you cannot see the shameless "man" on the bike, he would honk at you or play a lewd song just as he passes by you. The more creepy ones might want to follow you your circle around you for sometime.

3.The singer: The singer is the one you really want to slap hard. He will stand in a desolate location or maybe hide somewhere and start singing lewd songs when you are nearby. Once again, the creepier ones might just follow you and sing even more. You can hear songs from "choli ke peeche kya hain" to "Why this kolaveri Di?" all with double meanings and lewd connotations.

4.The Smartass: The smartass thinks he is very smart and clever with words. He is the one who will pass comments on your dress or your walk and team it up with some special sound effects that sound like he is in an orgasm of sorts.

5.One Direction: The braver ones of the creepy lot might try to strike conversation with you by asking you for directions and then, seeing that you were stupid enough in the first place to stand at night and talk to a stranger, offer you a lift or ask for your company to some place.

There are many more disgusting people on the road at night and as a lone girl on the road, it is always better to have some company or be home before dark. Ideally they should be publicly flogged, these creeps who have brains only in their pants, but as a smart woman it is always advisable to keep a pepper spray with you or better still, avoid situations where you might end up all alone in a dark road.

Pineapple and chocolate mousse Duet

This is a sweet dish made up of tangy pineapple and dark chocolate.

The ingredients are:

Del Monte Pineapple slices: 2
Del Monte Peaches halves: 4
Dark Cooking Chocolate: 9 tbsps
Coffee: 1 tbsp
Butter: 2 tbsps
Whipped heavy cream: 2 cups
Eggs: 7
Castor Sugar: 4 tbsps (or according to taste)

Pineapple mousse:

1.Take the pineapple slices and add a bit of sugar on it and keep on a low flame till it turns into a sort of gooey curd. Strain the curd and refrigerate for as long as you want. It lasts for a day or two.
2. Separate four egg white and whip them into stiff peaks with a tbsp of sugar and refrigerate.
3.Whip a cup of cream to soft peaks and refrigerate.
4. Take out the pineapple curd, strain it and add the remaining egg yolks to it.Mix well.
5. To the mixture, fold, a third of the whipped cream.
6. Now fold a half of the egg whites to the mixture and fold the remaining whipped cream.
7. Refrigerate the mixture.

The chocolate mousse has to be a bit bitter to counter the sweetness of the pineapple.

Chocolate mousse:

1. Whip a cup of cream to soft peaks and refrigerate.
2. Take the chocolate, butter and coffee and melt over boiling water till the mixture is smooth.
3. Separate the 3 eggs and whip the egg whites with a tbsp of sugar till soft peaks.
4. Once the chocolate mixture is cool yet warm to touch, add the 3 egg yolks to it.
5. Fold in a third of whipped cream and then half the egg whites and then the remaining whipped cream.
6. Refrigerate the mousse.

Serving:

Layer the pineapple mousse and chocolate mousse over each other and then top it off with peaches or whipped cream.

(PS: Check out http://www.facebook.com/worldfoody for the food adventurer!)

Awaiting Barfi! or not.

Barfi! starring Ranbir Kapoor is set for release on September 14.It is a story of a deaf and mute man and looking at the trailers, the acting seems commendable as the Kapoor stalwart does what every newcomer does to show that he can act, take on a role of an "abnormal" man.

But a personal take on this, I don't really think I am too comfortable watching films with such a subject matter.Somehow the Hindi film industry fails to hit the target like some other films like Rainman manage to do with a sensitive issue. I cannot pick point but there is a certain anomaly in our films with mentally challenged people. Be it My name is Khan or Black, the tone of the film, the settings and the music all adds a depressing "Oh you poor thing" feel to the movie that just diverts away from the whole story. In trying to show that the abnormal is normal, these films make the abnormal more abnormal and makes then stand apart.

So as SRK stood on a busy highway with a board reading, "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist" or Amitabh Bachhan pirouetted around Viday Balan in Paa, you don't fall in love with the character but just feel sorry for them, a feeling the filmmaker were not trying to achieve (I hope).

Maybe the technicalities of the film are a bit botched or the someone is hitting the wrong spot. Another thing that I have noticed is the extensive use of depressing colours in the films. So if there is a blue setting, the film will have a sad bluish tinge or an orangish yellow casting an air of gloom all around. The music always seems like a funeral march and I don't understand if filmmakers can give over the top senseless sets to films like Cocktail and get amazingly Bollywood type music to that film, why can't the same be done in such films? Why do we have songs which are not even catchy but really umm for a lack of a better word, abnormal?

Science and Spirituality: Who can dissect the soul?

 “This discussion will start World War 3.” My best friend said as we sat discussing the concept of souls. She is a spiritual person and believes in the whole idea of souls and reincarnation while I, being a believer in science don’t really accept the ideas.

Many Masters Many Lives by Brian Weiss, a psychologist takes the concept of past life and deals with it scientifically, almost. It is not proven whether the doctor was right or was he just fibbing. He is a past life regression therapist now and talks about our “spirits” for the want of a better term travelling from one plane to another. In all there are seven planes but we, as humans have still been travelling in just two, the spiritual and the physical. He says he has seen proof of the human subconscious shifting between these, of people being born again and again in this physical world of them remembering their lives and of groups of spirits being born together again and again.

Spirituality has always believed in the human soul, of an unknown entity that guides us, that is the mind in our brain, that is the human in our lifeless machine and that believes in miracles and makes them happen. To a spiritual person, reincarnation is not a bleak possibility, but the truth of life, Hinduism, Buddhism and even Christianity talks of re-births and unfinished businesses.

Psychologist, Carl Jung talks of the human subconscious as something so powerful that holds the entire history of the human race in it and that hasn’t been tapped into yet. This does make sense, our brain is a powerful organ and we have hardly understood its function. We know of the chemical and neurobiological processes and yet we fail to explain how things work more importantly, how the human brain works. It is not a set of equations that can be broken down and studied or some hypothesis that can be easily developed with time.

Conspiracy theories are abound about past life regression that say it is all a fib, maybe that is possible but sometimes, there are things which we cannot explain, we have no answer to them. A man on his deathbed, a clinically dead man walks again, a person seems so familiar to you that you think there is a connection, things of which you dreamt one night suddenly seem to happen to you and you cannot understand it. Why do Psychics still flourish in this world of cold calculations? Why do we still get our horoscopes checked and believe in miracles when everything fails? And why is it that despite everything we are taught to have a strong will power and determination when there is no scientific proof that what we think affects the actual physical working of our brain.

Or does it?

Our thoughts so powerful, that they can alter the physical and chemical composition of everything that is happening in our body? How do we explain this process? What exactly is happening inside our body that makes it undergo such changes?

Dan Brown wrote in Angels and Demons that science is too young to explain everything and for the things we don’t understand, we should just keep faith.

Human beings are machines where each part functions in coordination with the other, a well oiled well meshed machine that is so complicated that even now we don’t know what is it that makes us “us”. Maybe the answer lies in our brain. We don’t understand it and hence concoct many reasons and theories to explain the inexplicable. It is a mass of unexplored territory, for the scientist and the spiritualist. It needs answers and in the absence of which it looks for alternative theories and accepts them because believing in something beyond our control, a power greater than us keeps us humble and helps evades so many questions. A time will surely come when we will have all the answers, about our soul, past life and many such questions that have created a heated debate in the world. Maybe Science will unravel it or maybe something else would, it is our brain that needs to be answered and it is our brain that will give the answer. It is only a matter of time.

Throwing away old clothes

Emptying your wardrobe after years of piling up clothes and assorted fabrics is always a difficult task. All sort of memories seem to claw at you as you throw open one old cloth after another. The jeans you wore during your graduation, your prom dress, your favourite T-shirt when you were a teen, everything just gnaws at you and opens up a stream of memories.

It has always been difficult for lazy me to sort my wardrobe, arrange anything in order and for years it has become a home to homeless junk. So, one can find my old extra large purple T shirt from the days when everything I wore resembled a tent to my skirts and shorts when I had toned thighs. Old caps from the days when I used to dress up like a guy to clothes I had bought to not clash with my faux red hair. Dresses that are out of fashion but still amazing, traditional clothes from my various cousins’ weddings and weird clothes that make me go what the hell was I thinking!?

Taking each item and sorting through it, rejecting it and making the decision to finally throw something away is so tough. I have been avoiding this for years, carting the contents of my wardrobe from Delhi to Pune to Mumbai to Delhi and adding on to the mess. Sometimes it comes in use when you want to go all out and wear old clothes and mix them with something else, a la hippie look. And sometimes it becomes a battle in futility trying to fit in everything in the cupboard. Mostly it is a bone of contention with my family which complains that I have the biggest wardrobe with the littlest space. I cannot throw away my clothes. It’s a disease.

Some clothes have history, like my Harry Potter coloured ones, the red and yellows, the colour of Gryffindor, my wizard robe look-alike clothes, some are my artsy hippie clothes for the days when I feel like a vagabond artist and some are my inspiration to lose weight, the sexy itsy bitsy ones in which I have to fit in.

Maybe you are not meant to throw away old clothes, maybe you just need to keep them safe in your cupboard as memory aids and maybe you can convince your family that you do need a another larger wardrobe after all.