Challenge

Ian Chen/Unsplash

For all the high-paying jobs in the world's biggest companies be it tech companies or financial behemoths, there is a stampede of the sharpest minds. At least the sharpest minds academically speaking. The dream then is to enter an organized system that is already printing money and join the party. The challenge in that case is how to make the product(s) of the companies unique or at least better than their competitors. How exciting! But how guaranteed! Don't they wonder with that all that brainpower to harness, having succeeded in some of the toughest competitive arenas how it would be to take on a real challenge? The challenge of the environmental crisis, the challenge of ensuring medical reach, the challenge of delivering education to the masses. Oh, but that sounds like the job of politicians, doesn't it? Occasionally a few of them brainiacs do wander into politics with mixed success but it is a wonder why more don't. I assume that they would (deservedly) hold their mental abilities in high regard but then why doesn't the complex multidimensional challenge that is politics fascinate (more of) them? Some would say that their being smart is the reason why most of them don't wade into this arena where popularity contest meets management ability meets mental sharpness. I would say that intellect is of the greatest value in solving the greatest problems and no role squeezes it to the maximum as much as that of a politician.

Travels Grimm

Once upon a time, I had a lot of Amazon shopping rewards balance left and in the upcoming change of countries, I would lose access to it. This meant that I had to spend the amount fast. Naturally, I defaulted to stocking up on books on my Kindle and given my flavour of that season, they turned out to be a bunch of travel books. V S Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer ruled the roost as I bought their entire travelogue catalogues electronically.

It would be more than a decade later that I would actually get around to reading them and in their respective formulae, one was particularly disturbing. Pico Iyer was comfort food, displaced across multiple cultures but finding peace and joy in almost every one of them. V S Naipaul may seem more aligned to the title of the post as his unique mix of precise prose and incredible self-hatred shone through. But for Travels Grimm, I refer to Theroux's span of work in particular.

8th January, 2023

Wherever he goes, he finds only terror and deformity, stink and decay until all of a sudden, he comes across something incongruously beautiful - an experience, a person, a thought. An incredibly effective formula for his developed world readers, most of whom would anyway never leave that reading chair to venture into the badlands being written about. In horror movie parlance, this was jump scare inverse but with a series of jump scares bookended with a aesthetic moment of redemption.

Now I don't mean to judge one of the most well known travel authors of all time, but it does seem that despite his travels, he carted around his privileged first-world understanding of how life should be. Any deviation, as per him, was nothing short of hell itself. That perhaps is a result of not knowing that people are happy in most circumstances. They find many ways to be. This is not to cloak the grinding pain of poverty and dysfunctional systems but to understand that a little more engagement with his subjects would have made his travels a little less grim.

"Who needs intellectuals?" - Kerala Edition

Loving this post shared by a *neutral* friend on why Kerala is stupid. I am always proud to be a liberal. Then there are other times when I am even more proud to be so.

For context (which may be useful at a later time), this is about the state of Kerala in southern India resoundingly rejecting the message of religious discord spread by a certain political party by giving them a grand total of zero seats in the recently concluded Lok Sabha 2019 elections. Naturally, some *neutral* egos were bruised and rather lame attempts to make fun of a progressive, secular and intellectually aware state are in full swing.

The very first line by a *neutral* is dissing a couple of South Indian languages, which are thousands of years old with millions of native speakers each and as Indian (if not more) than Hindi. "They don't even speak Hindi" seems to be the mood. No secret then about which side of the liberal-conservative divide these *neutrals* fall. "OK leave it" they say as they graciously overlook that unforgivable 'fault'.

It's time to now look at their math skills. In their liberal nailing calculations, since total population is XYZ, naturally all of them voted... never mind the concept of voter turnout percentage and the fact that a significant number of them are ineligible to vote because they are below 18 years of age. These are 'intellectual' concepts of no importance.

Then, it gets even more brilliant as they calculate the number of votes the *neutral* party received. Since they won 64 out of the 80 seats in India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, it's a simple multiplication. Never mind the 'intellectual' concept that even within each constituency, not every vote goes to a winning candidate. Besides, the concept of an individual opinion is so anti-India and scary. How dare anyone not vote for their *neutrality*?

They seal their bulletproof argument with the case of 'these intellectuals' electing a candidate, a lunkhead of the highest order in his own right, who had lost to a *star* candidate of the *neutral* party in the second seat he was contesting. This *star* who first lied about being a Yale graduate, later promoted herself to an undergraduate degree and then finally revealed that she had studied only till grade 12, (incredible but true) served as Education Minister of the world's largest democracy, a period which she spent angrily questioning IITs and JNU, India's most premier educational institutions, for their lack of standards. Obviously, her victory is clearly indicative of 'actual' intellectuals somehow.

Also, do note in the midst of their *strong* arguments, how they sneak in a convenient half-truth about Kerala having the highest crime rate in India. Sure, Kerala has recently seen a spurt of political violence due to the rise of a certain *neutral* party which will later milk it for electoral purposes through their divisive but tremendously successful *majority is in danger* strategy. But on the list of violent crimes per capita for states, Kerala - with its high Human Development Index - has still consistently ranked near the bottom out of the 30 states in India while guess which state always hovers nears the top of that list? Hint: It's that state that the *neutral* party is so proud of winning and wants to set as a model in the face of happy, wise Kerala. Truth is optional, as it always is for any side terrified of logical opinions.

All I can say is: Kerala, stay your way. If these arguments against you are any proof, we sure need your intellectuals. As far sensible people in both Uttar Pradesh and Kerala and the rest of India know, whatever this joke of a diss was trying to be, it is not exactly a strong case for the *neutral* kind of 'literacy'.

*---* = Self-proclaimed

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/05/who-needs-intellectuals.html]

Not My Fault

Of late, the fans of a certain political ideology have been insisting that my vote will be ‘wasted’ kyunki “Aayega toh…” Something compels them to come looking for me and post on my FB wall, some talking to me for the first time almost 11 years after college, specifically to tell me that “YOU will lose, OUR guy will win”. Silent Likes on his kinda-funny-but-still-out-of-the-blue aggression indicate that a few more share his opinion. They are the quiet ones, ashamed of expressing their inner feelings but put 3 of them together and they graduate directly to mob frenzy. They want to tell me, shout me down, that I, the sickular, pseudo-liberal, West Bangladeshi will lose and their nation (because obviously secularism = foreign concept imposed on Indians, so I can’t be one) powered by their warped version of religion, long suppressed, shall reduce me to ashes. Also, hate to inform them that I am not running for any office.

I laugh at these children of summer and their naivete. They do not realize that elections work a little differently from Indian Idol. The vote is not always about the most razzle-dazzle and membership on a ‘winning’ team. Sometimes it is a judgement for promises not fulfilled and an indictment for situations unravelling in an atmosphere of unprecedented hatred. Individual opinion scares them, even their own. An independent National Green Tribunal, Reserve Bank of India, Supreme Court, Election Commission etc? Why on earth would any ‘patriot’ need such separate (read inefficient) and free-thinking (read deeply dangerous) power centres? They like to be guided, goose-stepping in alignment with their identified superhero even if for the mildest unbiased eye, he’s just another credit-stealing, buck-passing, self-promoting bag of political hot air. It’s impossible for them to process that those in power can be questioned and should be. Because they are blindly in love with a very tattered and deeply compromised image, they assume that power must be obeyed and worshipped. Since they cannot see any faults in their candidate, others MUST accept His flawlessness too.

I fear I might have already triggered a few of them into commenting below but here are a few other key identifying criteria. JNU students and NDTV are their ‘core’ national issues, not poverty and inequality. The massive environmental crisis that looms ahead due to water, land and air being compromised for business ‘utility’ is acceptable in the race for superpower-dom, except for a few anti-nationals who worry about children being reduced to wearing facemasks to school, their survival dependent on Kent RO water. While they claim to dream of an undivided India, they can’t even bear to look at the people of a particular religion without whispering ISIS and running about, dizzy with panic. Such brotherly feelings they foster, for a massive group of people who first moved to India in 632 AD and subsequently chose India over Pakistan as their home in 1947, never mind those that moved across. Talking about patriarchy and caste crime is a tremendously touchy issue with them. You see, we never had those problems in our golden perfect period until them ‘foreigners’ ruined it. These are just anti-majority foreign constructs being forced down Indian throats. Someone in WhatsApp authority told them so… hence this must be true.

It is these self-proclaimed "progressive minded patriots" who are OK with Sadhvi Pragya and Yogi Adityanath as candidates but would have pooped their pants if a single Opposition candidate used "Allahu Akbar" in their campaigning. "Jai Shri Ram" nasties are however OK? They want uniform civil code but beef - oh, that's a no-no? They are OK with a PM who lies through his teeth in public speeches and promotional interviews (Ganesh-was-plastic-surgery, black-money-no-digitization-no-wait-tax-payer-base-no-no-no-something-else-tomorrow, radar, digicam, internet, DU topper) and walks around claiming to be non-corrupt while canoodling with the shadiest of industrialists. The present government has diluted the Right to Information Act (chillingly, once the petitioner is dead, the RTI automatically closes), introduced the perfect route to industrial scale political corruption through the anonymous political bonds scheme and sanitized its past sins by exempting from scrutiny, all the funds received from abroad going back to 1976. Still, the faithful insist that the Special One is pure as snow.

Even if someone does win on May 23rd, do remember that Rajiv Gandhi won 400+ after the horrific massacre of Sikhs in 1984. Democracy has its ups and downs. The people’s choice is not always the right one. But irrespective of how perfect you think your candidate is (Harking back to a time when idiots, like a particular grade of supporters active today, had said Indira = India, India = Indira), democracy has its own schemes to make the arrogant fall, sooner rather than later. Most of the established parties have already been through that cycle. Some recent regional entrants, in this very election, will feel the same or in the 2021 Assembly polls. I will be watching and smiling.

Oh and sorry, I will always make my opinion heard. I have cast my vote and will continue to, circumstances permitting. I think it matters. I think I matter. It’s not exactly my fault if your bull-shit sensor is so deeply dysfunctional and your independent opinion had gone AWOL.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/05/not-my-fault.html]

Hardly Insignificant

Hope. Compromise. Failure.

Arvind Kejriwal embodies all three and in 95 minutes of an extraordinary documentary, Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla let the camera tell it like it is.

In retrospect, what Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) managed was nothing novel. In the make-believe world of Indian commercial movies, it happens all the time. Though the real India is one of the most corrupt nations on earth at every level, in our movies it is always a happy ending. The corrupt system chokes the good guy, who then takes on it and after many trials and tribulations, wins.

That someone would be mad enough to attempt this in real life and make it happen was what took us by surprise.

Irrespective of what side of the political spectrum you fall on, do watch this documentary.

“An Insignificant Man” (AIA) will not change your opinion of who Kejriwal is nor does it try to. 

At the same time, you can plunge head-on into the teething problems of a new political outfit in a crazy democracy like India.

The folks at VICE have done us the courtesy of sharing it for free (YouTube link here) while ensuring that at least some income has been generated for its makers.

As Kejriwal and team cross that shaky bridge from activism to active politics, the camera ruthlessly reveals the discomfort and exposes the now-required hypocrisy. Immediately after a combative interview with an Aaj Tak journalist, Kejriwal is shown in deep study of his lowermost shirt button, his on-camera bravado now bogus and his awkwardness very real. In one riveting section, Kejriwal is taken to task by his volunteers for abandoning his ‘volunteers will choose who will get tickets, not me’ stance for a very dictatorial ‘I am the only one without an agenda so I make the final call’.

AIA is strewn with moments of cinematic gold like that where the practical world combats idealism and noble intentions are quietly buried. The impact of the scenes is only doubled when you remind yourself that this is not a story, this is real life!

Also visible in full measure, is the optimism people still leftover in people, despite decades of corruption, oppression and all-round hopelessness. That people still believed in the possibility of an honest political party is a credit to both Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the common man’s naivete, if you want to call it that.

If what I have written so far makes the documentary sound like a hit job on Arvind Kejriwal, my apologies.

Kejriwal is definitely the star of AIA and the deep faith that people have reposed in him has also been given due emphasis. But to not highlight Kejriwal’s and AAP’s deviations from the ‘high ground’ would have been dishonest of this brilliant documentary and it takes special care not to do so.

AIA does a great job of capturing Arvind’s surging popularity, specifically in the 2011-2014 period when for the long-fooled public, he was the messiah. Making issues like corruption, water and power central to his manifesto instead of the usual communal/patriotic pitches of the mainstream parties, he really carves up a special place for himself and his party.

The suspicious death of Santosh Koli, a popular grassroots level MLA candidate for his party and its impact on her co-revolutionaries is also very poignantly captured. It leaves one thinking whether it is really worth the trouble standing up to the powers-that-be. We are lucky that someone somewhere always does, leaving us to enjoy the benefits of their sacrifice.

The sheer disregard and disrespect that the BJP and the Congress had for AAP, which gradually turns into fear and very soon sets up them for spectacular electoral defeat - is the most rousing arc of the story. The reality of electoral promises and processes cause AAP to re-calibrate their mission in ways they had vehemently opposed in the past, right down to allying with the same party they had thrown out of power.

It is possible to do the impossible but as it turns out, impossible is only a variant of the possible, not the polar opposite of it.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2018/03/hardly-insignificant.html]

DD Prakriti : The right kind of Swadeshi

Nain Singh Rawat as Doodled today

At long last, the front page of a newspaper, for those of us who still read it in hard copy, carried some positive news. The sporadic sport victories do qualify as good news too but they don't count as policy decisions or announcements which would have a real impact on our immediate world.

Today's Indian Express carried news of an upcoming Doordarshan (DD) channel dedicated to the intricate and magnificent natural world. The Prakriti channel, Hindi for nature/environment, would focus on India specific nature documentaries and Indian content creators for the same. 

Yes, it may seem hard to imagine that a stodgy government department or panel will come up with something interesting but someone up there has made an interesting decision all the same. In the national parks that I have visited, I have been astonished by the sheer hard work and capability of individuals, who are not toasted or celebrated by the masses, but are doing extraordinary work alright in preserving what we have and making casual interlopers like me care about their mission too. 

Having personally seen what the brilliance of such men and women can accomplish, encumbered by red tape and realities though they may be, I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for great things from DD Prakriti.

Now this long wait for a local channel like this is something that had puzzled me. We did not lack in natural wealth, fast receding though it may currently be. We did not lack in wonderfully talented nature writers, researchers and local characters either. So why would only the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery make stories about our wilds and not anyone local?

It's not that I don't love the quality work that the foreign content producers have done. In fact, I have been raised on a steady diet of their wonderful programming about the forests of India and those of the rest of the world. It's just that for once I had hoped to hear the Himalayas addressed as the local Hee-ma-layas, instead of the clipped British Him-a-la-yas in every darn documentary.

Wandering about zoos in North America where I made it a point to visit the local zoo of every major city that I visited, I was amazed that most of the animals that interested me were found in or around my own country half a world away. Zoos, admittedly, are not the best place for any wild animal but the irony of seeing animals who were almost my neighbours being protected and discussed by countries thousands of miles away was not lost on me.

Sure, Indians are for the most part a practical sort of people to whom bumbling through jungles to study nature's menagerie seems like a colossal waste of time and a lot of the scientifically relevant information of our own natural wealth comes from books and studies by them so-called 'foreigners'. A lot of work still needs to be done to make the majority of us actually care for and understand the natural world but it's not like we didn't know anything at all. 

We knew better than to go about destroying jungles just for curiosity's sake or to try and control nature. For a country as populated and resource-hungry as India, it is a monumental achievement and a testament to our culture of tolerance in every sphere of life that we have co-existed with our natural surroundings even to this extent. Human beings do not have a very good reputation for putting up with competition from other species, and though with every passing day that relationship is strained and pushed further to the brink, we have managed a lot better than the developed world.

As spectacular and well preserved as the pockets of wild landscapes of the US are, in my travels through them, it was hard not to note that the systematic elimination of natural residents like pumas, grizzlies and wolves from domains once roamed by them, still beautiful but devoid of their animal soul. What happened to the native humans who had a relatively sustainable co-existence with their natural world is a tragic tale I won't even touch.

Development is the theme song for India of today but thanks to the efforts of foreign channels like Discovery, National Geographic and BBC, it would be fair to say that wildlife does have a fair hold on the mental landscape of a number of Indians. Developing local versions of their famed programming is a nativist initiative alright but one of the right variety and one that we are in dire need of. 

Having a local person well versed in the charms of nature explain to a larger, mostly non-urban audience of what exactly is so charming, would connect in a manner which was not possible before to inspire a lot of positivity and possibilities.

In what seems to be a completely unrelated but relevant co-incidence, the Google Doodle today celebrates the 187th birth anniversary of Nain Singh Rawat, whose name I must confess I had never heard of. What's most interesting about him is that he was the first to exactly pinpoint Lhasa on a map all those years ago in what was then the semi-mythical kingdom of Tibet.

There's no denying that Indians had set off on many a adventure before throughout our long history - for example when they sailed off to conquer vast swathes of distant lands in south east Asia or as missionaries walked to exotic lands to spread the wise words of the Buddha. But in my own brain-washed mind, the word explorer always conjures up images of a Westerner in a khaki suit so it is wonderful to learn of a native role model, a Swadeshi explorer for all practical purposes.

Nain Singh Rawat fits the more cliched image of a seeker in what was still the golden age of exploration (or exploitation, also a perfectly valid description), map and compass in hand, linking the modern world to an ancient one, forever changing both and launching a million more adventure stories. His example becomes all the more relevant when we aspire to capture in a modern and scientific way, what is truly Indian heritage, much older and much more 'native' than any human culture could ever hope to be.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/10/dd-prakriti-right-kind-of-swadeshi.html]

Mithali Raj and Night Trains

I’ll be honest. Sunday’s Women's World Cup final between India and England was the first women’s cricket match I have ever watched. Sure, I had read in the papers about Mithali Raj’s epic 214 a long time ago and of the current Indian team’s amazing progress all the way through to the final of this tournament. But it was only in the second half of the match when India began its chase of 228 that I actually started watching. 3 overs into the Indian batting performance, it was obvious to me why I hadn’t followed women’s cricket all this while. It was boring.

Boring is also how most people would describe the Bharuch I grew up in. Only one road ran through the ‘city’, the imaginatively named Station Road (Hint: It ran by the railway station) and that was all the city there was. Long before the Internet and data arrived to make Bandra news instantaneously available in Bharuch, we were in our own little pocket of boringness. So boring in fact that a pastime in my group of teenage guys was to grab a glass of tea from the railway platform, one of the handful of places that stayed opened late into the night and sit on the platform benches to watch the nightly express trains go by.

It was difficult to make time go by, a Facebook status was already saying, when watching the Indian women’s cricket team play. Looks like a third grade amateur match not a World Cup final. For me, that feeling only lasted till the 4th over, when without any explanation whatsoever Punam Raut whacked one straight over the bowler’s head and into the boundary boards. OK. Something familiar after all. This was the same sport that I loved and idolized then. But more dreariness was to follow. Harmanpreet Kaur spent her entire time at the crease pretending that only the leg half of the stadium existed. It wasn’t pretty to watch.

Existed would be the right description for my sporting life. Not pretty to watch would be equally apt. Saddled with an initial-days-Dravid technique (sorry Dravid fans… believe me, I worship the guy) in a see rubber ball, hit rubber ball universe, my talents were not quite eye catching. Naturally they remained underappreciated except for those times when an explosive leftie at the other end needed a drab ‘sheet anchor’ partner. But I existed on the sporting field alright, especially when the team was falling short of the 11 needed to participate in a match. What did not exist, at least on the playing fields I grew up on, was the female half of the world. Playing with dolls, were they?

Apparently Mithali Raj was not. In that brief innings in the final, I saw the magical Indian batting wristiness a-la VVS and also VVS in the lazy runout. Harmanpreet’s swag was Yuvraj grade and so was her unwillingness to be cowed down by this ‘big match’. Punam’s grit in sprinting the singles even after the cramps came on was Gautam Gambhir reselected. It is a testament to their potential and an indictment of my biased interests that I don’t even have female athlete names to compare them against.

  

Come on, I hear some of you say, don’t tell me our Women In Blue are even half as good as our Men In Blue are.

I’ll be honest. They aren't. Men’s cricket is far more fun to watch. Lords has seen far better cricket matches.

But what they are is astonishing enough.

  

It is easy to simplify things too much. As per the Indian Constitution, women have the same rights as men. Some laws, like the anti-dowry law, are even heavily pro women. Hence women are now equal to men. Boom. Problem solved. If it were only that simple.

What we are forgetting is the circumstances that these women fought to get here. A week before their trip to England some of them were struggling to get a kit bag to carry their gear in. What we are ignoring is that we still largely live in a culture where everyone from the society watchman to the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has an opinion on what women should do, eat, wear, hang around with and by what time they should return home, let alone play sports among the ‘boys’. The reality we are continuously in denial of is that though everyone jumped onto the “Support Women’s Cricket” bandwagon (me included) as soon as they saw a chance of India winning the Cup, some of them like our BCCI’s own Rajeev Shukla did not even know whether the tournament was the Champions Trophy or the World Cup.

The Women In Blue have emerged out of this maze, this maze of expectations and inhibitions and girls-should-not-do-this-ness, to the highest level their sport has to offer. Yes, they stumbled catastrophically at the last hurdle but they showed a glimpse of what could be if 50% of our population is able to reach their full potential. Not worry about how hours in the sun would reduce their marriage prospects and think about how it would help their medal prospects. 

This whole process I must admit is going to be a little complicated. 

In my own home, my Mom was the only person watching the game from Ball 1. My Dad and me joined in post England’s batting. Dad made the mistake of putting into words what I was also thinking “Well… this match is interesting!” only to have his head bitten off by Mom for his ‘patronizing’ tone. Why should it not be interesting, Mom asked, is it just because it’s girls playing? At the same time, a cooking experiment which Mom was engaged in went awry much to her embarrassment. Dad polished his share off not willing to risk any more fire. I whined and tried to secretly feed my share to the dog who promptly declined.

  

But it was odd when you think of it. Here was this modern woman fighting for equal treatment yet at the same time drowning in old-school womanly guilt about not having cooked well. When I cook, all my cooking goes awry, simple non-experimental dishes too. I feel no guilt about it whatsoever. This is what I made. Now eat it. 499950 years of flawed cultural programming may have something to do with it.

Women can do anything. As long as they don’t have a strong opinion. Women can do anything. As long as they are cute and non-aggressive. Women can do anything. As long they still manage to be polite, slim, Fair & Lovely and keep their hair unfrizzy. These terms and conditions on being a woman are a strange mix of self-imposed and societal. Breaking out of them completely makes average ‘society’ uncomfortable. Staying completely within them makes women’s empowerment impossible. Someone should try making Rahul Gandhi understand all of this before he makes another appearance on Arnab’s s(laughter) show. Good luck!

In all those years of watching night trains go by, it never bothered me that it was boys, only boys, who could lead this carefree life of loitering and shooting the breeze. I never realized how privileged I was as a boy to get by late night entries with only a mild scolding. That late an entry by my sister would have involved a call to the police station or two. Not because my parents are conservative, they are absolutely not. But because the world outside is ‘bad’ – a sentiment half based in truth, half based in paranoia.

The world outside is 'bad' because the world outside is not used to seeing an independent woman, free of any male ‘protector’. It gets excited when it sees a girl in shorts and slavers in anticipation when it sees a girl drink alcohol. Because… why is she doing all those things otherwise? It is still struggling to come to terms with thousands of years of unchallenged male dominance and in the meantime, women have to be ‘careful’. 

It’s a wonderful way of absolving responsibility from oneself. Is it happening in India alone? How can we be misogynists when we worship women as goddesses? Have you seen Saudi Arabia? Excuses. More excuses.

That this will take time and many more Women’s World Cup finals before it translates to actual ground level changes is something already stated. But to deny that a genuine problem exists is to prevent its solution.

The same TV ad break during the final which had a nice Kotak Mahindra Bank ad showing a female sports-caster ask a cameraman out on a movie date also had the terrible Dabur Red toothpaste ad. It showed the age-old fairy tale of a handsome dude blowing a breath of fresh air at a cute girl from whose hands he had just snatched an apple. Love story begins. Don’t you see? When a handsome dude harasses a girl on the street, he’s the hero… when it’s an ugly dude harassing the girl, it’s the villain from whom the hero must save the girl from. Wrong lessons. Long taught to us.

The only way forward is to accept that women are flawed and real. Much like men are. They are not ideals of perfection to be preserved and protected within the four walls of the house. They have desires and ambitions and it is perfectly OK for them to chase them & fail at them if need be.

  

Like there are good men, there are good women. Like there are bad men, there are bad women. They can be brilliant. They can be normal. They can already send rockets to Mars. They should also be able to watch night trains go by.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention. I support women’s cricket… now.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2017/07/mithali-raj-and-night-trains.html]