Footnote

(Published in Business Standard today)

I woke up the other morning to find that I couldn’t step on my left foot without pain. It was so unexpected and so painful that I thought I might have broken a bone, except that there hadn’t been any tripping or bumping during the previous day, nor, in fact, during the previous year, when I might have occasioned a sprain or a broken bone. A bit of poking and prodding narrowed it down to my left big toe.

I mentioned it to my mother at breakfast. She said, with no pause—nor, I’d like to point out, medical qualification, “Probably gout. Rich man’s disease. From drinking too much and eating too much rich food.” She proceeded to smirk into her newspaper. She often makes up things to fit her darkest theories about me, so I went to the internet, which knows its stuff, and looked up my symptoms.

Here’s what I got: Gout. Ever heard of gout? Rich man’s disease. From drinking too much and eating too much rich food.

I hate the internet.

My aunt dropped in for tea and the two of them had a lovely time laughing at me. They particularly enjoyed the fact that the classic image of the gout sufferer is an elderly earl in a nightcap, suffocating in rolls of his own fat, aching toe propped up on a footstool, paying for a lifetime of frivolous overindulgence with joint pain that sends his howls of agony echoing through his draughty castle. Some people have no empathy.

I went back to the internet and decided to go with other possibilities, like sesamoiditis (an inflammation of the little bones around the big toe) which I can attribute to tango dancing and an insanely healthy exercise regimen; or to osteoarthritis, for which I can blame genetics, aka my mother. I like that one. I will apply an ice pack and refuse to go to the doctor and if that ends with my foot being sawed off in an operating theatre, so be it. The alternative, which is to acknowledge that frivolous overindulgence might have played its part, is simply too shaming to contemplate, and anyway, I don’t have a castle to howl into.

However, if it is gout, that’s both ironic and really bad news, because I’m about to travel a great distance to two places, one to watch a couple of music concerts, which covers frivolity, and the other to patiently observe and mimic the habits of the locals, who are known for their enthusiastic drinking, which covers overindulgence. There is no length to which I will not go to be culturally sensitive (when in Rome, etc etc), and if that involves imbibing a lot of ale and spirits, well, my big toe can just lump it. An added wrinkle is that I’m going to be driving a rental car around the second place, so sure, it would be nice to have two working feet, but I feel I can get away with one.

The best way to deal with inexplicable physical ailments is to go with the theory that most are self-limiting and can be ignored away. I have places to go and things to do, so if I have to drag a gouty foot along with me, I will. Anyway, what does the Internet know? Getting online is the best way to conclude that your cold is a symptom of a brain tumour. And what does my mother know? If all goes according to plan she will have a gouty foot of her own at the end of this frivolous, overindulgent holiday, because she’s coming with me.

Diary of a traditional Indian wife

(Published in Business Standard on May 2, 2015)


Wednesday, April 30, 5.30pm.

Woke as usual, giving thanks—before I’m even fully conscious, that’s how thankful I am—that I have a husband, and therefore a place in Indian society. Turned over and looked at the hairy back I’ve woken up next to for four years. Sometimes, waking up to this view makes me want to stick a knife between his shoulder blades, but when that happens I quickly do some pranayama, as our ancient culture counsels, and the feeling passes. (Don’t understand it. Indian marriage is a sacrament. Maybe I have a vitamin deficiency?) What would I do without Hairy? I’d have no kids, I’d be a shell of a being, a waste of social space. My spirit, my mind, my friends, my interests, my job—all meaningless. Feeling thankful all over again.

Checked FB and Twitter very quietly. The minute Hairy wakes up, he expects me to be kneeling by his bedside with tea and biscuits, so if I want a few minutes’ peace I have to be as quiet as a mouse. Saw some hoo-hah in the headlines about something called marital rape. Hairy and I have talked a lot about rape, he’s very progressive and totally outraged by it as I am. He’s never mentioned marital rape, so it’s probably not even a thing, so I ignored it. He says the pseudo-sickular western atheist gay West is always making stuff up to try and make India look bad.

Eventually the kid started wailing. That woke Hairy, who wanted to get busy straight away. I said no, have to feed the kid. These days he wants to get busy a lot because the kid is a girl and he wants a boy. He’s not as responsible as I am about feeding her when she’s hungry. I tried to get out of bed and he wouldn’t let me. I said stop it, but he didn’t, and it turned into what we call a ‘marital scrape’. I hate when that happens. I could hear the kid wailing throughout, which made me very distressed, in addition to being in pain and furious and humiliated. Hairy did say ‘Sorry, but’ afterwards. He always does, and I always want to kill him, except that he’s my god and my sun. I wrote down “Indian marriage is a sacrament” fifty times on a piece of paper and then ate it, so that he won’t know that I have to practice when doubt creeps in.

Dropped the kid off at the in-laws’ place. Pa-in-law still winking annoyingly at me about a second baby. Pran Chacha was also there, who once tried to kiss me in the corridor. Obviously I told Ma. She told me to never mention it again. I gather that there was some funny business between Pa-in-law and Pran's daughter once too, nobody talks about that either. Bottom line, it’s understood that nobody is in a position to point fingers or get judgmental.

Went off to work, editing copy. Opinion pieces filled with rape statistics. Very odd thing: Parliament says this marital rape thing doesn’t apply in India, but official reports say that 97% of women are raped by people they know and intimate partners. Hmm. But that means…Hang on just one goddamn second. That means... Can it be true? Oh god.

Indian marriage is a sacrament. Indian marriage is a sacrament. Indian marriage is a sacrament. Indian marriage is a sacrament.

It’s not working.

Hairy and I need to have a conversation.

Hell, Parliament and I need to have a conversation.

Hands off my Internet

(Published in Business Standard on April 18, 2015)


Back in the olden days, my family got a word processor. It was a horrible, clunky machine with a bulbous screen, a rectangular flashing cursor, and zit-sized pixels. The sharpest image on the screen was your reflection. I learned to touch type on it, and played Mario Brothers like a zombie. The thing wasn’t good for much else—my mother did use it to work on her book, which my father deleted one day while trying to be helpful, even as I stood behind him loudly saying ‘Don’t press that, you’re going to delete her book,’ in my best don’t-come-crying-to-me adolescent tone. What happened next would shock you if I could remember it, but it was the kind of drama that adolescent brains block out so that they can concentrate on improving their Mario Brothers score.

I didn’t handle a computer again until college, where we were expected to hand in typed papers. I could only think in longhand, so I wrote everything by hand first and then typed it up. But that just took way too much time away from playing Trivial Pursuits, so eventually I switched to a computer. Suddenly I could only think if I typed, and to this day my handwriting looks as if it’s having seizures.

Somewhere in the middle of college life, email and the internet appeared. I’d just gotten the hang of it when I found myself back in India, using VSNL dialup services, which consisted mostly of soaring blood pressure caused by that infernal warbling whistle trying, trying, and trying again, mostly without success, to get online. It was around then that a friend told me about a cool new search engine thing called Google, and I got a mobile phone. The world changed.

I’m one of the ever-diminishing numbers of fossils whose formative years were on an internet-free, smartphone-free planet. Somehow we took off on road trips without digital maps at our fingertips. We made plans on landlines and then stuck to them, because there was no good way of changing them on the fly. We bought tickets at—you won’t believe this—ticket counters. We had to find a physical person or book or periodical for any sort of reference. Your views remained within your own tiny circle of friends and family. Information was the preserve of specialists. It was ancient. I was there. Let’s not get caught up in syllogisms.

I’m not here to tell you how much better it all was. Here we are twenty years later, with the whole mind-boggling galaxy of human thinking and learning at our fingertips—a magnificent and powerful tool for democracy, social justice, and stupid cat photos—and I no longer know how the hell we lived without free movement around the internet. How much time was spent on the littlest thing! What a curated set of views we had! The things that greedy, powerful and criminal people got away with, without anybody knowing! Information was the preserve of specialists. Access to information looked, in fact, a lot like that old computer of ours.

Today, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been updated, with only a little irony, to rest on a base of battery and wifi; the Internet is increasingly regarded as a basic human right. Should it be tweaked, like most things, to favour large corporations, by charging more for access to certain sites? If you like your Internet the way it is now—equal access to all sites—take a look at the Save the Internet campaign. You get to weigh in on the net neutrality debate until April 24.
Meanwhile I’m off to surf, just because I can. Have a nice weekend

No smoke without study

(Published in Business Standard on April 4, 2015)


I’m feeling very stupid for having quit smoking. A certain kind of pedant would point out that I had five cigarettes on my birthday, four on another random night, and one each on two other evenings; I would point out that that kind of repellent nitpicking personality is just dead weight that nobody wants on a Pictionary team. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t smoked in about two years.

There’s no doubt that quitting has multiple benefits. I can smell things, though this is a double-edged sword when you live in Delhi. I’m carrying some amount of extra weight, but you can’t really tell it apart from all the other extra weight I was already carrying. My complexion, nurtured on Delhi air, has been upgraded from grey to sallow. My fitness levels are higher. I have more money to spend on booze. But, if BJP MP Dilip Gandhi is to be believed, I totally jumped the gun by not waiting for a properly Indian study on the perils of smoking. Or at least one of which he was aware.

Gandhi is reluctant to plaster graphic warnings all over tobacco products. Packaging cigarettes with grotesque tumours instead of hot cowboys is becoming an international standard because it has been shown to be the most effective deterrent to smoking. But Gandhi says that while everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, there have been no Indian studies confirming the evil link between tobacco and dying, and he needs more time to think about it. We should cut the guy some slack. He’s a patriot, and like all patriots of that kind, probably needs time to use Google, or researchers, or certain virginal tracts of brain.

Actually I don’t feel all that strongly about his dragging his heels on this, only because those warnings never had the slightest impact on me. I have cheerily smoked truckfuls of such packets adorned with any number of gangrenous feet, tumorous faces, or black and shrivelled lungs. I ripped open those packets, god help me, and smoked the lot.

No; obstinate people such as myself will not accept anything other than evidence provided by truly patriotic Indians such as myself. I read reams of material detailing what cigarette smoking does to your body, and merely copyedited them in my head. I watched little signs pop up during movies telling us that smoking is bad for your health, and merely felt annoyed at the intrusion on the screen. I watched ads showing thick black tar being squeezed out of a sponge to illustrate what’s going into your lungs, and that grossed me out a bit.

But what really made me chuck the stuff was a very regular flu, which for some reason felt much worse than any other I’ve ever had, and made me believe that I was on the verge of death. I felt so sick that I didn’t even want to smoke through it; and by the time the illness passed I was already past the discomfort of initial withdrawal. In other words, the self-destructiveness of smoking stops being enjoyable when you actually feel the self-destruction.

Turns out that in the face of many studies (though apparently not enough Indian ones), lots of public service ads and announcements, and an entire Internet filled with revolting pictures of terminal smoking-related illnesses, smoking rates are actually climbing. As far as I can tell, the only foolproof way of getting someone to quit is to let them smoke their lungs out until they feel the cold breath of mortality on the backs of their necks. That’s always robust incentive for a lifestyle change.