Blakwall

June. What a stellar month for LGBTQIA+ folks. Out of the 12 months, the people of this community get one month to celebrate themselves, and joining in on the celebrations, capitalist companies change their social media display pictures, adorning it with the rainbow colours and flag emojis. There are PRIDE sales, “Get 10% off for every purchase during Pride Month!”, but there's an obvious loophole here. These companies have country-specific social media pages. For example if I own a multinational company called XYZ, it will have a social media page  ‘XYZ India’ for consumers in India. Since the annulment of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, multinational companies in India have definitely ramped up their "support" for the LGBTQIA+ community.  (Image via Melodie Vo/The Eagle Eye) Before I digress further, let's talk about Queer Baiting . So what is exactly does this term mean? Queerbaiting is a techinique used for marketing by creators in order to depi...

A common question that has been skirting the broad narratives of #MeToo is that if the movement has gone far beyond the boundaries of due process and legality. In April 2019, a few months after the #MeToo movement expanded in India, then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi was accused of sexual harassment by a former Supreme Court of India employee. The committee that presided over investigation of the allegations included Gogoi himself, and unsurprisingly he was cleared of the charges. Prior to the case against Gogoi, in October 2018, journalist Priya Ramani accused MJ Akbar of sexual harassment. The former junior external affairs minister registered a 41-page defamation case against her. She won the case two years later when the court acquitted her of all charges.  The phrase “Me Too” was coined by African American activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual abuse and assault within the society, and help the survivors. It was the fall of 2017 w...

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2021 by WEF, India went down 28 places from the previous rank of 112 to currently being at 140. While the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown also played a significant role in increasing India’s gender gap by 4.3 per cent, the World Bank has estimated that female participation in the labour force has decreased to around 20 per cent over the last three decades. This decline in economic opportunities and workforce participation was initially chalked up to women leaving work to go for higher education. But the increase in the number of women going for higher education is just around 5 per cent over the last decade. In 2019, The National Statistical Office (NSO) conducted the first Time Use Survey to measure the participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities. The survey provided information on the time spent in unpaid caregiving activities, volunteer work, unpaid domestic service-producing activities of the household members. It also inclu...

Secularism has gone from being a part of our constitutional to an insult and accusation.  On October 11, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray announced that the government would not open places of worship due to the risk of Covid-19. This is reasonable because Maharashtra has the highest tally in the country, both in terms of cases and deaths- 1.5million and 40,000 deaths. The restrictions on opening of religious places will avoid crowding during festivals. In response to the Maharashtra government’s order, Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari shot off a letter to Chief Minister Thackeray, advising him to reopen the places of worship. The Governor went on to take a jibe at the Chief Minister by asking if he is turning “ secular ” despite the Chief Minister being “ a strong votary of Hindutva .”   The Governor’s letter is a far cry from the constitutional position of his office. That the governor found it fit to interfere in the state government’s...

Raat Akeli Hai. (2020) Director : Honey Trehan. The patriarch of a rich Uttar Pradesh family, Raghuveer Singh is found murdered in his bedroom on the night of his second marriage. In comes Inspector Jatil Yadav, a no nonsense cop, to investigate what turns out to be a layered whodunit. It becomes clear in the very beginning that every member of the family is a suspect. Although all fingers point towards Singh's mistress and now second wife, Radha, played by Radhika Apte, who the family loathes, Jatil is in no hurry to declare her the killer. Even in the face of pressure from political leaders and seniors from the department, Jatil says with gusto, I'll dig out the truth from anywhere. A lot of reviews seem to be comparing Raat Akeli Hai with Rian Johnson's Knives Out. The only similarity between these two movies is that they're both closed room mysteries. In Knives Out, detective Benoit Blanc suspects the entire family and Jatil does the same here. As the fi...

#Alive (2020) Director : Cho Il-hyung A gamer finds himself alone in his apartment when a zombie apocalypse hits the country. He barely manages to escape from an infected person who enters his apartment, and helplessly watches people being bitten by a horde of zombies. He soon runs out of food, water, phone and internet connection, and at one point decides to take his own life. But he is saved by another survivor from the adjacent complex who shines a laser pointer at him. Finding the other survivor lends our gamer a renewed vigour and the two share food and eventually a walkie-talkie to talk. After they barely escape another mad horde of zombies, they realise they'd die if they stayed at their apartments any longer and decide to make a run for the 8th floor. Of course things go bad and zombies find them but they're saved in the nick of time by a stranger. Things start to look good only for the stranger to drug them so that his zombie wife can feed on them. They bar...

  For the uninitiated, these pictures are screengrabs from the 2015 Tamil language film, Visaranai, directed by Vetrimaaran. The film is based on the book "Lock Up" by M. Chandrakumar. When I started watching the film, it appeared to be a film about linguistic divide and the sort of hegemony that locals tend to exert over immigrants. Boy, was I wrong! This is nothing like that. Visaranai kept me hooked to it. It took me a long time to unravel my mind and actually come to terms with the entire film. It is an ugly film that was shot beautifully, with actors who have done immense justice to their roles. Visaranai means Interrogation. Or at least that's what Google tells me. The film begins in Andhra Pradesh where we first meet some of the characters of the film, a small group of Tamil immigrants. They are soon picked up by the police and their life turns upside down. Beaten up by the police to coerce a confession out of them, our four Tamil immigrants are forced to be the sc...

Unsane (2018) Director: Steven Soderbergh. Unsane tells the story of Sawyer Valentini who finds herself unwillingly locked up in a psychiatric hospital after an interview with a therapist. Sawyer talks to her therapist about her previous suicidal tendencies for being relentlessly stalked by a David Strine. Based on this and that she did not look at the forms she signed, she finds herself stripped of her clothes, phone and gets told, she voluntarily committed herself to the hospital. Her fellow inmate, Nate, however reveals to her that her incarceration was part of an insurance scam run by the company. She is placed in a ward next to a seemingly violent woman who threatens to cut her. Trapped in an unwanted situation, Sawyer lashes out verbally & physically, leading the staff to drug her and strap her down.  It is here in the hospital that she seemingly runs into her stalker who is a member of the staff called George. But we don't know if she's telling the truth ...

At a time when Black Lives Matter movement is bringing forth the deep embedded racism in the United States, when racist people are being called out and racism deniers are trying to hog the limelight, The Nickel Boys serves as a testament to the truth beneath it all. Set during the era of the Civil Rights Movement, Colson Whitehead tells the story of Elwood Curtis. Elwood is a serious young boy, getting good grades and working hard at Mr. Marconi's Tobacco and Cigars shop. He's kept on tstraight and narrow by his grandmother, Harriet. Elwood listens to Dr. Martin Luther King and conducts himself according to the ideals. But as luck would have it, he is sent to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reform school. The school claims to turn delinquent boys to honourable men. But that is all on the surface. Inside the campus of the reform school, Elwood sees the horror white men can exert when he is beaten senseless for standing up for a fellow inmate. It is here in the school ...

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. The book revolves around Keiko Furukura, a thirty six year old oddball, who spent the last eighteen years of her life working at a convenience store. The fact that she does not conform to the society is set from the very beginning of the book. Keiko recalls incidents from her childhood, that to her were normal, but caused distress to others. But to Keiko, being a convenience store worker was a revelation. She has a manual on how to behave with customers. She copies her fellow workers' expressions, speech patterns and behaviours to fit in. If they express anger at something, so does she. Even when with friends, she reacts to situations as her convenience store co-workers would do. Her life revolves around the store.  But to her parents and sister, she needs to be cured. Her friends and their husbands question her lifestyle and her dead end job, suggest her to find someone to, even offering to set her up. Things take a funny turn when Shiraha...

Post 2014, after Bhartiya Janata Party took center-stage in India, the India-United States relations saw a few surprising turns. One of those was the then US President Barack Obama’s invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is important here to note that PM Modi had been barred from entering the country over U.S. concerns about the 2002 massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujarat, which occurred when Modi was the state’s chief minister. Until the US Presidential elections in 2016 which led to Donald Trump being elected as the 58th President of America, the Indo-American relations under PM Modi and Obama saw some milestones. On his first visit as the Prime Minister of India, Modi met a huge crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden. It was during this visit that PM Modi and President Obama reach agreement on a memorandum of understanding between the Export-Import Bank and an Indian energy agency, which provided up to $1 billion to help India develop low-carbon energy ...

When we talk about Television or any media and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels is perhaps the most infamous name that comes to mind. The Reich Minister of Propaganda used his position to influence newspapers, theatres, art galleries, radio broadcasts and the cinema. His vision was that of an empire that would control schools, universities, film, radio and television. He wrote, “The national education of the German people will be placed in my hands.” His mission to sell Nazi ideology was a success Goebbels started the work for Adolf Hitler to control the German people. Even after this death, Goebbels remains a shadow behind the workings of media, be it TV, newspapers or social media. One other name associated with Nazi propaganda in media is the German film director and actress, Leni Riefenstahl.  Although she went onto deny her Nazi connections and feigned ignorance of Hitler’s atrocities on the Jews, her contribution to Nazi propaganda cannot be forgotten. She was famous f...

White Chrysanthemum is the story of two Korean sisters- Hana and Emi, separated by the second world war. Hana is dragged away by a Japanese soldier to a life of sexual slavery while Emi is left to grow up in war ravaged times. The book is divided into two narratives- Hana’s narrative covers the war years, while in Emi’s chapters it is 2011, and the elderly Emi is still looking for her sister. The sisters are part of the haenyeo community, female sea divers. The book is an account not of war but how war affects people, how wars bring out the worst in men. It isn't an easy book and I found myself crying a lot over the days it took me to go through it. It is an immensely well told testimony of the brutalities of war and it has attempted to recognise the plight of the comfort women, who are yet to receive an apology for the atrocities committed on them. The characters are fictional but the truth it has attempted to show needs to be recognised, so we do not end up denying or...

Murder in Mahim was a quick and interesting read. Although it is a crime novel in a general sense, but it could very well serve as a viewing window for the dark underbelly of Mumbai's gay scene. This book reminds me of another book I had the chance to read, The Boyfriend by R. Raj Rao. Both books dealt with the role of casteism and sex. Murder in Mahim starts with the discovery of the body of a boy called Proxy, in the loo of a train station that is known to be frequented by gay men. Bodies follow in a quick succession and the two people at the centre of it, Inspector Jende and retired journalist Peter "Pittr" Dsouza are nowhere close to solving it. It is a proper muder mystery book, with all the gore and blood. The narrative is fast paced and in the process of going through it, you might end up guessing some of the plot points( it isn't a bummer, though!). But it isn't just the murder at the centrefold. The chaos surrounding the characters take up as ...

Growing up, I've listened to my mother read out stories and folk lore about gods and goddesses as prayers. As a kid, these stories enthralled me and I'd listen to them with rapt attention. One such story was that of Devi Manasha and Behula. And it is one of those stories that form the backdrop of Amitav Ghosh's new novel Gun Island. Based on the legend of the Bonduki Saudagar and Devi Manasha, the book is set years after the end of Ghosh's previous book, The Hungry Tide. While in The Hungry Tide, Ghosh took us on a journey of the beautifully dangerous waters and jungles of the Sunderbans, in Gun Island, he takes us from the waters of Sundarbans to Venice and then further out to the ocean. Dinanath Dutta or Deen, the rare books dealer, Cinta, the Venetian historian and Piya, the marine biologist from the previous book form the pillars of Gun Island. Fakir's son, Tipu and Rafi, one of the last descendents of the entrusted caretaker of the shrine of the god...

T en years have passed since Roshan Kalra started the Raasta café. Radha and Armaan, moved by his newfound passion and dedication towards them and cooking, decided to stay back, even though Radha had said it wasn’t a hot idea. She eventually gave in to Roshan’s killer moves on the dance floor and in the kitchen and got back together    with him, much to the delight of Armaan, Nazrul and Alex and much to the dismay of Biju. Biju was devastated. He was all set to propose to Radha when she dropped the R bomb on him. Heartbroken, he took out his 1960 Impala on a ride which unfortunately broke down in the middle of the road. Finding no option, he started walking/running towards the next town and realized he was a pretty decent runner and took to marathon running where he met his 23 year old girlfriend and went off to Oslo for their pre-wedding trip. Roshan K moved to his childhood home in Chandni Chowk with his family and father, and his son Armaan, infused with the lov...