Life as I find it

Guess who I am just chatting with? Heh. As though you can. I am chatting with Manisha Bhattacharya - an old friend. When I say, old, I mean it - we used to park our dinosaurs next to each other - that’s how we met.

Time and tests took us away and we lost contact and made contact sporadically. Both of us with our own struggles and demons. When I left Mumbai for Manali, she was in Mumbai. When I returned to Mumbai, she moved to Goa…… and no, its not about either of us forgetting to use deo. It was fate (drumroll)

And fate brings us back together. Today, as we chatted, I discovered that Manisha has discovered the internet like I did, and is a newbie blogger, with the same talent for stomach-clutching-roll-on-the-floor humor that she has in life. Naturally, such things are addictive, and I’m now in the process of convincing her to join me here.

Together, we shall sweep the cobwebs of age and disuse on this blog and hijack it to do ….. well whatever it is that two strong, self-assured women do when they come together - we shall discover that as we go along.

Yeah, its wishful thinking, but how much better can it get? Without wanting to do exciting stuff, we may as well sit there and stagnate.

Call me old fashioned or ignorant, but I am well aware that I am not entirely cues in to this feminism thing. I am female. I am a housewife, a mountaineer, a professional in multiple areas at my whim. They are all aspects of me. Why should it be that my being a housewife is wrong or makes me weaker in anyway? For that matter, why is there a need to have an exclusive label, if equality and empowerment is the idea?

Does being protected make something stronger? Is that equality? I think feminists are the biggest danger to women power, because they demand that separate platform, rather that empowering women to simply be themselves and powerful.

I think that this whole thing is so hyped and people are so aggressive about it, that all sense of perspective is lost. The original idea of setting women free from social pressure has now given was to the pressure of expecting a woman to reject all that is “traditionally” allotted a feminine connotation. That’s plain silly.

No matter how many women burn their bras, its going to be a hell of a long time before there are as many female construction workers as males and if it happened, it would be plain stupid and a mismanagement of human resources.

Rejecting traditional female roles and beginning afresh is like reinventing the wheel. I am a woman, and only one who doesn’t understand people at all will imagine me to be weak. That strength didn’t come from competing with males or insisting that I be the same as them. It came from being myself and if some expectations crashed, either from the traditional end or the feminity end….. *shrug*

Males don’t get PMS. Women have multiple orgasms. On the other hand, orgasm for a male is guaranteed. Men have more muscle mass than women, women do have breasts, and I’m not even going to get into the psychological differences. Just grab a copy of the Mars and Venus book.

I can understand how it is important for a woman not to be oppressed and how it is a violation of her personal rights. What about the rights of those who are expected to accept women even where they don’t believe it works?

I think woman power is not about “Equal-to-man” power. Why use men as a scale anyway? Are they an ideal? I think its not about woman power even. It is about being yourself and having the guts to go through with it, whether you are male or female. There is no point dragging gender in as a measure while claiming that the ideal is removing it from the public domain.

So people, figure out what exactly it is that you are trying to say. And yes, this is a kind of direct response to a “burn-the-bra” type who had the guts to look down her nose at me for being a housewife. I am a housewife, because I don’t want to land up for work everyday. What’s more, I have managed to figure out a life for myself where I can work 10 days a month at the most and afford to live happily.

I refuse to believe that my feminity requires me to slog 30 days a month to prove I’m powerful. If I can’t ensure my freedom, what power do I have?

I write and write, and imagine people reading my blog, clicking through to something else, reading that. Nameless faceless creatures in the dark known to no one, except server logs.

The only thing I guess I know about you, is that you are probably interested in the outdoors, considering that you are here.

Could you take a moment and drop me a line about yourself and your interests? I’d like to know more about you.

I had been longing to get rid of my Windows OS and begin using Linux. However, as there always is, there was a catch to the story. I have horrendous amounts of data on my machine. Stuff that I couldn’t afford to lose. Easy. I backed it up.

But the problem was that the data was a daily thing. I use my desktop to run my business, a couple of websites, learn coding and stuff…….. there was an incredible amount of data piling up every day. Even with regular back ups, restoring was going to be a pain. Not to mention what would happen if the all too likely destruction of my hard drive happened, and I was unable to use my computer until I could fix it.

I’d been surfing around for a long time, trying to find ways in which Linux would “become easier”. The only thing I succeeded in discovering was that it was one of those things where you needed to fall into the water to learn to swim. Not funny!

Then, I happened to come across the website for Ubuntu. From descriptions by online friends, it was very good. Not to mention the community itself on the forums, where queries were very helpfully dealt with. Plenty of Indians there too. I decided to give it a shot, and to my surprise, not only were there options to download the OS, but a very considerate and generous offer to ship it free of cost to people with slow connections, who couldn’t download the massive iso file.

To make a long story short, I downloaded the thing, backed everything up, crossed my fingers and went for a dual boot according to the detailed instructions on the site. To my surprise, the CD seemed to read my mind. Everything happened exactly as the instructions said, and before I knew it, I had a smooth as silk dual boot with my Windows. No loss of data at all - I never used that back up.

What’s more, my PC is running like a rocket. The Ubuntu simply went ahead and recognised my network settings and everything else it found, and I was simply using it. I took to this new experience like a fish takes to water. Yeah I’m raving.

Meanwhile, I got myself a nice new laptop with a Vista, and well….. I fail to see what’s advanced about Vista. Surely the more developed a software gets, the more compact and faster it is? Apparently Microsoft doesn’t agree. The “place holder” OS is hogging 15GB out of my 80GB hard disk on the laptop, and still doesn’t manage to look snappy. 15GB!!!! Its way slower out of the box than my rarely maintained XP even then and I dare not compare it against the Ubuntu unless there’s an option for reverse gear. The Ubuntu just picked up that 1GB RAM and turned it into speed - like its supposed to.

After spending all that money for software, turns out that the best thing in life is indeed free. All software for it is free. It updates or installs automatically if you want a new software for something. I’ll keep my Vista for a bit, since I’ve paid for it, but the minute I get serious about working on it (I like working on the desktop), the first thing that will happen is a format of the hard drive.

For all those reading my post and wondering about their ancient, slow computer, pirated Windows, legal Windows, anything…… don’t take my word - just go for it and see for yourself! If there is stuff you need Windows for, go for a dual boot, or just save yourself the space otherwise. Believe me, I acclimatized within a day and have to simply do a search or ask for what I don’t know.

Life will never be the same again.

What is it about the BJP and Gujrat that makes so many embarrassing stories for the country?

This time around, its art. Apparently, the erotica that has always been a frank element of our culture, is also now about shame. An art student’s work is put up for exhibition, and he gets arrested. Why? What is this new brand of moral policing? And what is it about Hindutva they are protecting? Why does a government need to interfere with an art student’s work?

The uproar hit the ceiling when the fellow students of the arrested Chandramohan organized an exhibition of Indian erotica. Vice-Chancellor Manoj Soni, living up to his reputation as an RSS stooge, took the decision to seal the department after BJP municipal councillors complained about the erotica exhibition. Oh really! Give me a break. Nudes are a staple of fine art education and study of anatomy. Good work elicts admiration, bad work elicts criticism, but arrests? Shutting down of a fine arts department?

I wouldn’t be surprised if owning a copy of the Kama Sutra became illegal in Gujrat, or if Khajuraho itself got destroyed after this. What are we, the citizens doing, allowing such insanity to rule our country?

Nudity exists. Acting holier-than-thou doesn’t change what the mirror shows us as we change clothes. It doesn’t stop minimal clothing and erotic films from being best sellers. It doesn’t stop people from seeing the beauty of the human form, and finding appeal in it. Where is the shame in erotica, a student’s art, or Indian erotica? It is not like they are exhibiting these on the street. People walking into an exhibition are well aware of its theme and what to expect. If they don’t like it, they can stay away. What is this with arresting artists?

What do we do about Indian artists who have already painted plenty of nudes in the history of India? What is this new overgrown morality being imposed on people?

So what’s next? Will love matches and dating be banned and offenders arrested if they are seen together in a public place? Are we India of the Kama Sutra, or are we Saudi Arabia?