EYE - March 11 - 2012
Stories of successful women Almost all the “aha” thoughts I have had that helped me navigate through the self-inflicted pain of super-woman-itis, chip-on-the-shoulder gender bias, guilty motherhood, to be she-male or female dilemmas, came from women icons, celebrities, and regular people who were part of my life journey. Last week’s Women’s Day calls for sharing some of these stories. I tagged along with a bunch of senior journalists, on the campaign trail during the last Bihar assembly elections. That’s when I met Rabri Devi. As I watched her impassive face and her placid, “homely” demeanour, I asked her how she managed to do all this chief minister stuff with such little training. Her answer, which I will use as a title if ever I write a book on Indian women, went something like “samay samay par adjust karna padta hai, so kar lete hain.” My takeaway? Hey nothing is such […]
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Indian Express - January 15, 2012
You might not understand it, but ‘sabar’ yoga might be a most useful life lesson. At the swanky T3 terminal of Delhi airport, I had a “we are like that only” moment. There was a large-ish crowd hanging around a huge mental sculpture, an upward sloping elliptical frame with larger than life human figures fixed on to it. They were going around it, aiming their cellphones, and furiously taking pictures. I used to be amused with Japanese tourists and their cameras, but we Indians have stolen a march over them when it comes to no-frills pragmatic consumption of even something as aesthetic as photography. It took a while to figure out that the sculpture was depicting the surya namaskar sequence and attracting more of middle-class India’s attention than shops selling foreign brands. Maybe we should just chill a bit on the FDI and death-of-the-kirana panic attack. Yoga has made a […]
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Reforms 2020, September 2011
BIG BAZAAR is a brand that is a symbol of middle class abundance, aspiration for a better living curiosity and thirst for new consumption experiences, and in general of middle India modernity and sophistication–not westernisation but better Indian ways of doing things. If Infosys represents the journey of India abroad in the productivity and earning space, Big Bazaar represents the journey of India at home in the consumption and spending space. Big Bazaar brand’s relationship with its customers is what makes it so special. An old brand health question used to be not “what do you think of the brand?” but “what do you think the brand thinks of you?”. Big Bazaar thinks you are worth it even if you are not “hi-fi”; it doesn’t expect you to speak good English, know how to read signs in straight aisles and work with checklists. It doesn’t laugh at you because you […]
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EYE - June 26 - 2011
Unlike the designer weaver establishments I had been taken to see in the past, the poverty was appalling and the younger people had obviously deserted the profession, leaving a predominantly older group behind, and few younger women. The physical labour was very hard and I felt that all this sweat was just not worth the beauty of the sari being woven; the more intricate the weave, the more it meant that the man or the woman with an emaciated body and a barely subsistence-level hut would have to work. I was told that the younger generation prefers regular jobs to all this back-breaking work, and I thought with surprising relief, “Thank God, there is some progress”. I did ask myself why anybody in this day and age of gadgets and robotics and artificial intelligence should actually do so much manual labour. If you asked the question, “Does anything else done […]
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EYE - May 22 - 2011
My take on this is that parents are now a lot more democratic, and there is little danger that they will force their children to get married to anyone that they don’t want to. The children know this and are outsourcing the hard work of dating and finding their own spouse to their parents. As my friend, adman and cultural analyst, Santosh Desai, says, the dating market has not developed. The mating market has just got more de-controlled. Young people have a word for it – they call it “engineered marriages”. Looking at the surveys in magazines on sexual attitudes and behaviour of GeNext, it seems that there are indeed two “value spaces” that co-exist, one new, one old, one the world of dating, the other, the world of marriage. It isn’t necessary that the dating pool is the one that needs to be waded into, in order to get […]
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