On Being a Woman and 'Keeping Safe' in Delhi

My city is not mine. I have always felt this, but only realised it fully last week, when, in the aftermath of the unspeakably brutal rape of a 23-year-old woman by six men, I began talking to women around me about safety. This is not a new subject. I have grown up and into an understanding that this city is hostile towards me, and that everything possible must be done to keep me safe.

My safety, my mother tells me, has always been a primary concern for her. No men in the house. A maid supervising the daily carpool to school. Boarding school and college abroad. Having spent her youth getting pawed by men in DTC buses, once only narrowly escaping an acid attack, she was determined to shield me from what she knew to be a harsh city for women. Every effort was made, every resource utilised to ensure I could circumvent the hazards of this city and be the independent person I was already becoming—elsewhere.

I now understand that that alternative would have been to stay here, in the city but removed from it, skirting its edges, tunneling through it, being smuggled in a tightly regulated bubble between illusory safe spaces—ones with gates, or guards, or a cover charge—like so many young women I know whose parents can afford to keep them safe, to hold them apart from the city.

Though irreproachable in its intent, the tragedy of this approach, as my mother puts it, is that you can’t give your child the confidence to operate in the world. Indeed, our collective fear of the city transforms it into an adversary, with whom we interact tentatively and only when necessary, careful not to do anything to provoke its ire.

We abide by a hallowed yet vague code of conduct: don’t stay out after dark, don’t wear anything that shows off your legs, don’t trust strangers, especially men, don’t stand out in a crowd. We negotiate our own curfews: no autorickshaws after 8, no metro after 10, no driving alone after 11. We permit ourselves small conditional freedoms: if you must go out, go in a group with boys, go to someone’s house, go only to this or that safe neighbourhood, take a driver.

One or another of our well-wishers arms us with a laundry-list of good faith measures: wear a dupatta, take my Swiss-army knife, here’s a bottle of pepper spray, why don’t you buy a padlock, a metal torch, a sharp umbrella—just carry it, please, for my peace of mind. Pin-up your bangs. Wear leggings under your skirt. Don’t get into an auto with two men in the front seat. Text me the cab’s licence plate number. Call me when you leave the restaurant, and then again when you get into the car. Have someone walk you from the restaurant to your car. If you’re driving yourself to a movie at night, don’t go to one in a mall. Why would you take an auto when I can pick you up? Why would you take a bus when we have a car for you? Why would you drive when we have a driver? What if a bunch of cars corners you and forces you to stop? Never get out of your car if someone hits it. Don’t slow down for male cops.

And in the news: a buffet of nightmares. We are fed fear all our lives, and, as adults, are expert navigators of an obstacle course of terrors. Being safe in this city is a full-time job, but the only skills you develop doing it are self-censorship and avoidance. A whole generation of women brought up in hiding, never learning to swim for fear of drowning. Who do we become, in all this? Fugiti- ves from our own city and our own lives, expending all our energies and using all our resources to avoid getting raped.

And yet every woman I talk to knows that there is no foolproof way to avoid it. I speak to a 21-year-old who has moved to Delhi from another city where also she lived alone for several years, mastering the art of keeping a low profile. She tells me she doesn’t feel too afraid anymore, perhaps because she is accustomed to constant vigilance, or because she has reached the end of her tether.

“I’ve lost my hang-ups. If I’m late, I’m late. I’ve done my part. I try to be respectful of the society that we live in, but there’s only so much I can do. Whether it’s apathy or stupidity, I’ve just realised that there’s really nothing you can do to be safe. If I have to be raped, it’ll happen. Pepper spray won’t help, being with a man won’t help, the police won’t help, society won’t kick in, humanity won’t kick in, protests will happen and fizzle. As women, we’ve exhausted all possibilities. And if I still can’t go out at night, then screw it.”

The sentiment is echoed by other women, fed up of the things they’ve been told they must do to keep safe. A 25-year-old who grew up in a single-parent household finds it irritating that she even has to think about things like what she wears and how she travels. “I decided I wasn’t going to stop myself from doing things just because it was unsafe.”

She speaks of repeated rows with her mother over her comings and goings. Regretful of the pain and anxiety she has had to cause her mother, she says it was a conscious trade-off with the independence and fearlessness she insisted on cultivating in herself.

“I’ve done a lot of stupid shit consciously. Nothing bad has happened, and that’s not true for everyone, but it’s made me feel confident. Now I don’t feel helpless in the city.”

It irritated her to live in fear, especially when, in the course of her work on human rights, sexual violence and public health, she met people who had been through much worse, and those who were taking greater risks every day of their lives. She is clear her risks are not the same as theirs. “I am in a privileged position. I choose where I go, when I go. It’s when you have to do something every day against your will that it becomes a problem. Otherwise it’s all a lark.”

When I listen to her, I think of all the times I’ve heard the question, “Why do you want to take an unnecessary risk?” I suppose that depends on what you understand as being necessary, and what it is you’re calling a risk. It is not necessary that my friend take the bus home at night, in that her circumstances do not constrain her to only that option. This lack of constraint is what she calls her privilege. But, perhaps, if we live in a city where something as basic as public transport is so unsafe as to be seen as a compulsion, a last resort, a risk, it is another kind of necessity that motivates her to do it anyway—the necessity of conscience, of asserting control over her choices, of carving out a place in public space.

My friend constructs her privilege as something that enables her to take such a necessary risk—“I know if something happens, I will have support”—rather than something that excuses her from having to take it. This is a crucial difference. By deploying her privilege to choose to do something considered risky, like taking a bus at night, she has transformed that action from a compulsion to an empowered choice.

Another woman, 24 years old, understands that privilege is no guarantee of protection. She narrates to me my own experience of studying abroad, becoming convinced of the centrality of public transport to city life, then coming home and having to argue with her parents about taking an autorickshaw. At first it was a matter of embarrassment and convenience—it was ridiculous to have to rely on your parents’ car and driver—but eventually, she realised that a car and driver are no guarantee of safety in the first place.

Soon after she moved back to the city, she was stopped by cops in outer Gurgaon in the middle of the night for no reason, with two younger girls in the car. While her driver sat paralysed with fear, she negotiated the release of her car’s insurance and registration papers. A friend of hers was in a car with friends when they accidentally brushed past a man in a narrow street, and found themselves watching terrified as their driver and the boy in the front seat were pulled out and thrashed.

“There are degrees of safety,” she says, “but by and large, anything can happen anywhere. You could lull yourself into a sense of security. But if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. I value my independence. I want to do what I want, whenever I want. I’m not going to let a threat of violence deter me from that.”

It is this refusal to let fear stop their lives that is motivating so many women I know to resist their unnatural coddling, jump their security detail, and confront the spectre of the city. Each of them has negotiated, and is continually negotiating her individual balance between prudence and principle. But simply being terrified is no longer an option. “It’s not that you don’t feel scared. But when you do, you just tell yourself to shut up. You have to push yourself,” my bus-travelling friend says, push yourself against your fear, even of getting raped.

Those talking about rape being the worst thing that can happen to a person, she says, are merely reinforcing its power as an act of subjugation. Why is rape any worse than a brutal beating, she asks. Because we have subscribed to the patriarchal carp about rape being a violation of honour, a destruction of identity, an “annihilation of a human being” as one young protestor screamed into a TV camera last weekend on Raisina Hill.

Growing up with the threat of such an annihilation hanging over our heads, we are intimidated to cede our stake in our city, our slice of public space, ostensibly in favour of a flimsy sense of security. Our parents, terrified too, yell at us, lock us up, try to give us the best protection money can buy, but a sense of safety cannot be bought, it must be fought for, and the fight is not merely against rapists, or indifferent police, or weak government, but also against ourselves and our inherited fears.

That my friend takes the bus is not a gesture of stupidity. It is a considered act of bravery. It is a challenge, to the world and to herself, of a person who no longer wishes to remain in the grip of her fear. You could tell her there is reason to fear. She will tell you she has no right to be afraid in a world where she is automatically shielded from so many worse fates. You could tell here it is unrealistic to act on her ideals, but what she is actually doing is acting out her ideal. Counterarguments are irrelevant. “You get to a point where you just have to live.” How are you going to talk her out of that?

This is why so many women have responded to the rape of a 23-year-old girl from Dehradun not by battening down the hatches and hiding, but by barrelling into the street to reclaim the space that was denied her. We cast our bodies into the city like ballots, affirmative votes for our place in it, protests against the default monopoly of men over space. This is my city, we are saying, and I am here. I am here to take up space, I am here to reassure the next woman she can be here, I am here to provide with my presence one more defiant answer to the question “What do you think you’re doing here?” I am here to alter this city’s character, I am here to combat the normalcy of my absence, I am here as an argument against fear. Gawp, glare, gossip, but get used to it, I am here.


[Published in OPEN Magazine]

Questions [Part Two]

Which is a greater threat to a state's citizenry: the routine one of death through the devices of extreme of deprivation, or the threat of sudden terrible violence? Which is worse: to be a stated target of an event of violence, or to be the uncounted collateral of the everyday? To be killed or to be lost to an indifferent, persistent background rate of extinction?

Should the government of India spend 800 crore rupees on a surveillance program with the stated purpose of preventing terrorist acts? Or could we possibly use that money to counter a more consistent, less glamorous terror?

Revealing

Here's what I wrote in response to a rightfully angry, yet slightly off-kilter Salon article, regarding it's confusion on the point of Nir Rosen's controversial tweets in the wake of early news about Lara Logan's assault during celebrations in Tahrir Square last week:

Unquestionable crime, questionable media.

"And your opinion of how she does that job, the religion her assailants share with a few million other people, or the color of her hair has nothing to do with it."

Nothing to do with the heinous crime, certainly, but EVERYTHING to do with the western media's coverage of it.

Which, by the way, is the point Nir Rosen was attempting, in an admittedly crass way, to make. A person's belief in the validity of that point need not necessarily be interpreted as an apologia for the assault perpetrated on Logan.

That people so adamantly interpreted (it) as such smacks of defensiveness. Nobody wants, after all, to admit that the horrible abuse of a white woman celebrity is more worth reporting than the similarly horrible abuse of anonymous non-white women.

Saying that someone's tragedy caught the media's attention because she looks a certain way is not the same as saying that that someone deserved her tragedy for looking that way. Nir Rosen, I believe, was making the former point. He chose a highly inappropriate time to make that point. There is no good time to make that point. He should absolutely be criticized, chastised, even ostracized, what have you, for publicly withholding his sympathy, for implying that her "war-mongering" reportage somehow balanced out the offense against her, and for being such an ass about making his point. But his point, underneath all the insensitive rhetoric, was still not that she deserved the assault, but that her assault would provoke a unique (and in his opinion overblown) media reaction--one that would not exist were it not for the way she looks. This nuance is crucial to me. Victim-blaming is a terrible, sick thing, far worse than being unsympathetic or insensitive, and we should take care in accusing someone of it.

Because let me be very, very clear: that she is blonde, attractive, a celebrity, was allegedly promiscuous, might have made an arguably 'bad call' getting into the thick of riotous celebrations, and 'was in the Middle East, after all' are not and should not be cited as excuses for the assault on her. Any form of "she was asking for it" is unacceptable--no woman is ever asking to be forced upon. In any setting. No matter how she looks or what she wears or what she has done in her past. No aspect of her conduct or personality or appearance should be license for her violation.

The incredibly sad truth, however, is that her appearance might actually have had something to do with why she specifically, over other women in the square, was assaulted. And she is still not to blame. Her assailants probably had no idea that she was a pro-war reporter, but it is possible they took her to be a symbol of what angered them. Anti-American sentiment does exist, some of it highly misguided. Misguided enough, perhaps, to imagine that it is reasonable to exact historic revenge from one woman because she looks American. Just as misguided as those who deliriously took her assault to be confirmation of the bad-character of all Arabs or all Muslims, no matter how insistent on democracy. For it is equally likely that this was an isolated incident. Still, one cannot ignore that this is what someone, somewhere took the opportunity to do at a moment of great political import.

Conflict--cultural, moral, political, historic, "civilizational"--has always been played out on the bodies of women. That is the material point. That is why Lara Logan gets sexually assaulted during a victory celebration at the end of peaceful protests demanding fair government. And that is why Lara Logan is refracted through tabloid tragedy and turned into Exhibit A for the case against the Arab world.

All of it boils down to the same crappy fact: women's bodies are still not respected as absolutely being their own. A fact highly visible these days in the Republican party's charming efforts to redefine rape, and restrict reproductive rights to the point of complete illogic. It is the woman's body: she decides whether it is rape. She decides whether to have sex. She decides whether to use birth control. She decides whether to continue the pregnancy. She decides her appearance, her apparel, her profession. Somebody else may disagree with her choices, call them selfish or foolish or risky. But nobody else is entitled to pronounce judgment on what she may or may not do to her own body.

What is the purpose of life?

Everybody has got 5.5 liters of blood.

In The Eye

The latest gem from Arundhati Roy:

"The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination -- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars."

The essay which finds its conclusion in the paragraph above is stunning, upsetting, and absolutely essential. Put an hour aside and read every word.

Warning: Brown Anger Below

For those who have been peaced out from the real world this past week, because of summer, or Country Fair, or heartbreak, or whatever, here's what you missed:

Time Magazine published an opinion/humour piece by Joel Stien about Indian immigration in his hometown of Edison, New Jersey. Full of nostalgia and recycled clichés, there isn’t much in it worth talking about. Except that it unveils in spectacular fashion the rhetoric and logic that still lies beneath the sexy, suit-jacketed face of Post-Racial America. ("Post" in the sense that it exists beyond any awareness of what it is to be “racial”.)

As though it weren’t enough to dislodge yourself from the familiar for the promise of something the world insists is “the good life”. As though it weren’t enough to scrounge together an identity and carry it with you in a suitcase ten thousand miles to a place where you must remake home from fragments, against an entirely unfamiliar backdrop. As though it weren’t enough to have no idea who you are and where you fit and how to BE in the world. As though it weren’t enough to deal with the dissolution of self and dreams. Let's also take on the responsibility of ruining the landscape of American nostalgia.

Sorry, Joel. We totally disturbed your past in pursuit of our futures.

The malls in India really are "that bad".

Alanis Morissette may have thanked us, but we never got a chance to thank YOU, America. Thank you. Thank you for all that you have allowed us. Thank you for your jobs at desks or in cabs or behind counters, slingin’ donuts or ringing up Slurpees. Thank you for trying so hard to decipher our accents when you’re trying to get your laptop fixed, and for putting up with the overwhelming curry smell we bring with us everywhere we go. Thank you for the eight Oscars, for the occasional pop-culture nod, and for the polite literary applause. Thank you for recognizing our skills, and for telling us what we lack. Thank you for advertising yourself to us, and then withholding. Thank you for luring us away from ourselves, and relocating us in a nowhere. Thank you for letting us lose ourselves trying to be good enough for your left-overs.

Please let me know the next time you need to watch soft-core porn or steal and I'll get my shit out of your way. It's the least I can do for someone who has figured out "why India is so damn poor." And do accept my apologies on behalf of my fellow countrymen who have flooded you with violent emails. It seems we can’t even be relied on to play Gandhi anymore. What ever happened to bending over and turning the other cheek? Tch.

[Slightly altered version published in Brown Girl Magazine.]

Graduate.

How completely absurd to have to move past the people and ideas that you've spent such time and energy letting into your heart and mind.

I suppose the necessary impossible is a pretty apt summation of what they're calling "the real world". Choosing a self, a vision, a mission, and loving it, living it, every single day. Can't do, but can't do without.

So there you are.

There I am.

What I Am Doing With My Life:

In case someone's wondering, here's what I am doing with my life:

Making every possible effort to reduce my complicity in a world-system which invariably results in disasters like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the anti-immigration legislation recently passed in Arizona.

That's the gist. That's what I'm up to. That is what my whole deal boils down to. That's what I'll be trying to do tomorrow, Thursday, and six years from Sunday.

If in the process I happen to change or improve something in some small way, that's just a bonus.

(Cl)aim to serve.

This is an open letter to the University of Oregon's administration, arguing for the repeal of their decision to "phase out" Professor Ken DeBevoise, one of the very best, and most unusual teachers I have had the good fortune of learning with. Even more appalling, perhaps, than the administration's near-uniform disinterest in student opinion is the devastating notion, widely-accepted, that a University is more about research prestige than it is about undergraduate education.


To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is my contribution to the student campaign to convince the University of Oregon Administration to retain Ken DeBevoise as an instructor of Political Science; my attempt to penetrate the wall of uncommunicative indifference encountered by this campaign.

I would like to begin by addressing a recurring motif in faculty and administrative responses to student correspondence in this matter--an accusation of naivete. I expect, based on recent evidence, that my case for Ken DeBevoise's continued employment will appear to some as being underpinned by a sort of naive idealism, no doubt attributed to my age. The same will have been read into countless other letters by my peers. Some worldly person or other will no doubt try to tell us that as we "grow up", we will understand and grow into the administration's way of thinking. Yet this is precisely what I, at least, am determined not to do. You see, while I am aware that idealism may not, perhaps, result in anything, the kind of dismissive cynicism evident in the administration's attitude toward education will most certainly not. It is my fervent hope that I never resort to this sort of passive acceptance of circumstantial difficulty, which is the most generous assessment of the attitude characterizing most of the response to our protest.

I concede that there may be intricacies to the circumstances that we do not comprehend--not because we are unwilling to try, but because we have been prevented from doing so, as in the case of the administration's refusal to cordially explain the department's financial constraints, or to provide adequate transparency of process. I do not believe, however, that these circumstances would appear quite so insurmountable if you were determined to keep Ken DeBevoise teaching at this university, which we are, and you should be.

As a student, I value, above everything, a good education. My highest priority, therefore, is that the university--into whose coffers I am pouring a hefty international tuition--retain the precious few professors who are able to give me such an education. To cite my insistence on getting what I am paying for as mere naivete would be, at best, a reduction, if not downright incoherence. It is the university's stated purpose to provide a quality education. It is my prerogative to expect it. If we are in disagreement, it is either a matter of differing priorities or divergent conceptions of what constitutes a quality education.

First: If a students' sense of priority were shared by the Political Science Department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the University Administration, I am convinced the financial circumstances cited as the cause of Ken's being phased out would seem far more surmountable. What disturbs me is not that the aforementioned parties might literally be unable to keep Ken teaching, but that they are entirely, transparently, unwilling to try. Especially in light of his willingness to continue to teach at a lower pay, or even unpaid. I cannot envision stronger evidence of his single-minded dedication to undergraduate education; a dedication, I might add, that is sorely remiss from a majority of the faculty currently employed by this university. I, for one, cannot understand why one would choose to compromise further the quality of courses offered by the Political Science Department by eliminating him from the curriculum. One can only infer that providing a quality education is not the institution highest priority. What, then, one might ask, is?

Second: Several of the responses received by me and my peers have leaned heavily on an invocation of the university's responsibilities as a research institution. In response to criticism of the administration's privileging research over education, Senior Vice Provost of Student Affairs Russ Tomlin was quoted in the Oregon Daily Emerald as saying: “It’s important to appreciate the research mission and the education mission. It’s not a dichotomy. Our best research faculty can be our best instructors. The pitting of research versus education is an oversimplification of such matters.”

With all due respect to Mr. Tomlin, and to his admirable intentions, his assessment of the compatibility of the university's research and education missions is deeply flawed. In his column for the Register Guard (dated March 8, 2010), retired professor Ronald Wixman makes plain the systematic compromise of educational standards in favor of research at this university. With the reality being what it is, Mr. Tomlin's claim that "our research faculty can be our best instructors" just doesn't cut it. In order for the "research-education-balance" argument to hold water, they must be. Or administrators must admit that the balance between research and education is tenuous, at best, and that it must at least be rigorously monitored, erring on the side of education.

The fact is, faculty chosen for their achievements in specific and undoubtedly fascinating fields of research, do not always make good teachers. Least of all when they lecture monologically to a class of more than, say, 50 students, to be generous. There are precious few instructors who are able to simply hold the attention of a 50 student classroom, much less communicate information, to say nothing of the ability to foster innovative thinking or analytical technique. Passing over what this says about our prized accomplished researchers, I will instead point out that Ken DeBevoise is able to achieve all this and more.

It should be clear, then, why the simultaneous decisions to fire an unusually effective and devoted teacher, and to hire explicitly research oriented faculty is so discomfiting to those of us in the student body who came here to learn, rather than to distantly admire what our professors have. It should also be perfectly plain that what is at stake, for those of us fighting for Ken DeBevoise' job, is an uncompromising vision of undergraduate education, of its purpose and its duty to those it claims to serve.

Respectfully,

Devika Bakshi

New Governments, Old Fears

From the Asia Times Online:

"Manmohan will no doubt continue to place primacy in foreign policy on India's partnership with the US. The accent will be on harmonizing India's regional policies with the US approach in theaters such as the Indian Ocean and South Asia, Middle East and the Far East; on boosting military-to-military cooperation, and, in overall terms, on striving to become a participant in the US's global agenda and strategies."

(The complete article can be found here.)

Is anyone else alarmed by this? I've been worrying about it for a while, but I suppose there's no point in me wringing my little hands, wishing India wouldn't jump on the US' War On Terror bandwagon. The Bush era is over, you say? Perhaps. But there hasn't been much change in US foreign policy. The debris left behind by the previous administration needs to be dealt with, and it looks like the new administration is doing the same old thing: an approach closer to slash and burn than sift and clean. The latter is dirty work, and Hillary probably prefers not to be up to her elbows in bearded men who want to cover her up. Having attempted a makeover of his nation's image, Obama probably doesn't want to hear "America Murdabad!" So off they go, with 17,000 troops to kill the Talibacteria from the inside. Anything that falls in the way, be it magnificent cities or mere civilians, risks destruction too. No holds barred. When America is threatened, all means are necessary. Palestinians and Pakistanis become terrorists by association, and layers of history are whittled down to strategic interest.

And in all this, India is willingly getting on board, allowing its local specificities to become subsumed in global generalities.

I know it's a little more complicated than an angsty blogpost. But, really, isn't this what it boils down to? Taking sides on the playground of global politics? Choosing teams? "You look like you have a good GDP, I want you." Bullies win, outcasts sit out, the little ones get pummeled. Do we want to play this game? Of course. Dissidents are called punks and punched out. Better make good with the punchers. Be friends. Allies. Thing is, I'm not sure powers HAVE allies. Agents, yes. And armies. The rest participate in their games, their wars, their agendas. For what?

I, for one, would prefer not to be sacrificed at the alter of material greed, cultural mimicry, and political ambition. But who the hell am I?

Playing Hide and Seek with Poverty

The world seems to be having some trouble looking at poverty. Accusations of 'selling', 'using', 'disrespecting', 'glorifying', and 'neutralizing the gravity of' poverty are regularly leveled at the few who attempt to examine, or even simply portray it.

Granted, we may have gotten to a point where poverty can no longer be talked about with less than a very high level of complexity or activism. Which is difficult, even for the very best minds wading bravely through layers of social structure and meaning.

Arguably, there are those who do recognize the marketability of poverty, the sell-power of a distant sad-story to a consumer base composed primarily of liberal westerners (but not just westerners) who have come to feel guilty enough about their privilege that they can no longer live with themselves if they do not look something ugly or unfortunate in the eye.

I would suggest that portrayals of poverty (presumably for first-world audiences) are popular because they are tamer, and therefore preferable versions of the third-world. They help ease, or perhaps balance, the subterranean fear of mysterious, raging death-mongers who rise from mobs shouting "Death to America", with a passionate mission to destroy freedom and democracy and everything else the first-world holds dear. The mythical fanatics who "hate us because we're beautiful" are balanced by the pathetic poverty-stricken innocents who admire the west for the same reasons.

This is the benevolent third-world, where people can be rescued from poverty using the West's superior civilizational tools, as opposed to the malevolent third-world where the same tools are unsuccessful in rescuing people from hatred. It's reassuring. Happy poor are easier to reconcile with, and deal with, than angry enemies. Especially if we manage to convince ourselves that those poor are, in fact, happy.

And what better place to embody this sort of benign, resolvable poverty than India? Unlike the war-zones of the Middle-East, India doesn't evoke a reluctant sense of responsibility. Nor does it inspire the odd combination of economic and moral competition that the vast, presumably godless working class of China does. And, unlike the sweeping desperation of Africa, there is hope for India. The shining bits may just be able to polish up the dull ones; the prosperous may pull up the poor. It appears to embody the holy ideals of democracy, free market, meritocracy. It makes for the perfect scene for a success story.

If nothing else, Danny Boyle certainly has excellent timing. Unplanned though it was, his film managed to become the west's homage to Mumbai, a city which had recently been host to what some have called "India's 9/11". (Nothing like a corresponding catastrophe to create an automatic ally.)

Having been asked by several of my American friends for my thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire (which, in some cases, seemed requests for validation), I finally went to watch it. I stepped out with one, very vague opinion: There are things portrayed in the film that I wish I could deny, but are probably true; and there are things that I wish I could affirm, but are improbable at best.

More important than what I thought, though, was the question I have taken to asking everyone I know who liked the film: Why do you like it? This is what's interesting to me. Why is this film popular with those who do not know, love, or have any kind of relationship with India? Or, more specifically, why is this particular portrayal of India the one that people bought?

Several answers had to do with the technical, aesthetic aspects of the film, which I too am mostly a fan of. I particularly enjoyed the narrative-structure and the cinematography. Other people implied that their like of the film has to do with the sheer hope of the story, the way in which even the worst of circumstances are/can be transcended with the help of idealism and good fortune. This makes sense. Hope is so in vogue in America right now. For obvious reasons. Maybe that's why an underdog story was so much more successful than, say, a depressing drama about mid-century American society.

Is it a guilty conscience thing? Is it the gratifying sense of having revealed something long-hidden? (There's always the classic: "This is the part of India you don't see." To which I say: "That's only true if you don't want to see it.")

What's clear is that portrayals of poverty are not always comforting. I come back to last summer's global-media outrage surrounding the infamous photoshoot in Vogue India's August issue, which showed high fashion accessories being carried by 'ordinary Indians'--lower-middle to middle class people in mostly small-town India. (You can find the NYTimes article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/business/worldbusiness/01vogue.html)

The two words most often used in describing the shoot were "obscene" and "vulgar". But they weren't applied to the gratuitously expensive items; they were intended for the portrayals of poverty. What people took exception to was the juxtaposition of 'poverty-stricken' people with things that cost more than their annual income.

Passing over the gross misinterpretation and mythologizing of what, precisely, was contained in those pictures (because whether or not it was, in fact, poverty, that's what people thought they were seeing) let me just say this: Are miserable poverty and $10,000 bags okay as long as you don't mention them in the same breath, see them in the same frame? We don't seem to have a problem as long as one remains in National Geographic and the other in Vogue; one in Africa and one in Europe; one on sidewalks and the other on catwalks; one in our guilty conscience and the other in our unconscionable indulgence. Keep them separate, and we'll be fine. Don't allow them contact with each other. God forbid someone actually sees the injustice or feels the guilt.

A major point of contention was the anonymity of the people in the photographs. As if those very people aren't otherwise totally ignored. How dare we pretend we could do right by them simply by mentioning their names in a magazine? Would that have made up for their place in the world? Would it have apologized sufficiently for using them to advertise something they couldn't ever afford? Do we not use them routinely, in text books and on donation boxes, as the posterchildren of poverty?

Poverty is one of the biggest problems facing humanity. And faced with it, what do we do? Congratulate ourselves on being able to bear it, convince ourselves it's not all that bad, or bury our heads in the sand.

(An excellent article on the Vogue controversy can be found here.)