CHENNAI : Lesser Less than a week after writing about International Men’s day, I am wondering if these days serve a purpose behind the capitalist sales tool that they have mostly come to be. It started really with the uproar over ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’. The photo of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey holding a poster with the aforesaid phrase has not only opened a can of worms, but also made it clear where we stand in understanding the intersection of caste and gender — so low that we may as well be buried near the centre of the earth. For saying this on social media, I will be lectured for being casteist because well, not everyone buries their kin.
Think this is ridiculous? Last week’s Twitterati jumping to make the ‘patriarchy doesn’t exist only among brahmins’ or the ‘calling brahmins patriarchal is casteist’ arguments, and Twitter India rushing to defend itself (from what I still don’t get) was just as ridiculous. But again, in the age of passing on WhatsApp forwards like it is prasadham, it is probably too much to ask people to do a basic Google search before preparin for war.
I am now forced to ask if a Google search will be of any help to those do maintain a strict no-learning-outside-the-echo-chamber policy. But more so because it was discovered that a ‘bitches near me’ search on the engine results in girls’ schools and women’s hostels and clothing stores. There are many reasons why this may happen as discussed in over a dozen articles online, and it’s not entirely new — the tech is designed to spit out what is fed and it is known to show problematic and racist suggestions to complete search phrases.
But when the word ‘search’ is now synonymous with the tech giant and when as a company it positions itself to be gender sensitive, it is not too much to hold Google accountableAccountable by who is a difficult question to answer. We have to choose between a centre that keeps itself busy leading the nation to progress by outdoing other countries in statue heights and setting a record for new city names and a state legislature that has brought new meaning to holiday resorts. That’s like making the proverbial choice between the democratic (pun intended) devil and the deep blue sea — each fighting their way to the sewer of communal politics.
In other news this week, an international seminar on ‘Harassment of women as registered in Tamil literature’ to be conducted by the Tamil department of St.Joseph’s college was ‘postponed’ (the new polite replacement for cancelled). This is because H Raja from the BJP claimed that this was a plot by Christian missionaries and ‘Urban Naxals’ to incite unrest. The state might have defended this conference I think, had it not been on the touchy subject of Tamil. But that it is, and it seems to have been in everyone’s interests except that of the women harassed by and in literature do not have the event. I don’t think the day in which I will be asked to stop talking about the patriarchy and portrayal of women in Tamil cinema is very far away.
I would plead for civil society to step in to my defence, to hold governments and corporations accountable, to exercise their democracy and vote because it is their right, not because Thalapathy Vijay in ‘Sarkar’ says so, to not wait to return freebies till a movie is pulled up, to not believe that stars make leaders. But I will not because I am aware that we are too lazy to look things up, too quick to call out, too busy to verify, too stuck up to listen.
We have closed minds, eyes open into other’s bedrooms and hands counting under the table. When we have elected representatives pandering to a casteist state and resisting a law against honour killings, people who pass around doctored videos to pull down a people’s protest in Tuticorin instead of talking documented evidence, facts and figures, and leaders who are simply tweeting about the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, I can see where we’re headed.