Corona me ghar aana!

 When everyone is looking for a way to live a healthy lifestyle and a less toxic environment to be in, one doesn't realise how much we all have the wealth of a lovely family, a home, comfortable clothes and the skill to be able to manage it all, just by being at home. I love my home, being by myself, a little bit of yoga, say once a week, or a short walk to a nearby shop everyday. But I never realized how much I love my home AND work, till I started working from home. There are zillions of pros and absolutely no cons to it. We get to enjoy the work even more, and there is absolutely nothing to complain about.

The detox from the office AC's stale recirculated air, where everyone gets sick at the same time, the bad food, the delivered food packed in thin plastic trays, the amount of plastics and random spices and colors going into our bodies, I can't stop listing the cons of a work environment.

The best part is that, home is where the heart is. We are comfortable, happy, relaxed, thereby more creative and we work better. I don't see any reason why one should stop working from home and start going to their offices once the Coronavirus scare is less life-threatening.

COVID-19 maybe a quick death, but going to an office and sit for 7 continuous hours is a slow death and more painful since I've seen the effects on people right from the age of 50, who have had a desk job for years. Their retirement is no picnic. Their old age is even worse. The risks of diabetes, heart disease, joint issues are no joke; and not to be taken lightly either. I believe that working from home would cut all these risks.

Some offices are even giving flexible work timings i.e., they let their workers take longer breaks, but let them finish the agenda of the day, by the evening. Some offices just keep track of the log in and logout times. I work in one of those offices that were quick to take measures and implemented the lockdown before even the govt made the order. It must not have been an easy decision to let 100s of workforce change base and start working elsewhere. But it was necessary. Here I'd like to list the pros and cons of this new setup. Ofcourse, working from home is the pro! And literally everything about office seems to be a con. But some lazy bums may complain about the fact that they get unlimited tea / coffee at the press of a button in the office, but someone has to add the milk and other ingredients in the machine right?

Office / place of work gives us a 'pow' without us realizing everyday, be it while commuting or the unbearable sitting of hours together in one place. 

Home: Good water, hot or warm, as per taste. Can use our own glasses, wash them right away.
PoW: Bad tasting, obviously chlorinated, masala water with dirt and all sorts of particles in it. Once, a pigeon died in the water tank, and wasn't cleaned till the next day.

Home: Good food, simple and neat, no need to worry about ajinomoto or the spice level or the MSD content in it. We can have freshly cut fruits and veggies as per our interests.
PoW: Feeling anxious about lunch, evening snack. Canteen food = diarrhea. Order good food online = constipation. Evening snack is always a potato based or fried food that we get outside.

Home: Our own private loo that we clean from top to bottom.
PoW: Everyone's been there every five minutes. Always smells bad. Seen blood and stool so many times.

Home: Comfortable chairs, standing desk, sitting on the floor desk, walking desk too!
PoW: Just the one uncomfortable chair, no standing desk, being judged for walking around for 2 secs.

Home: Kitchen is always clean, we can eat in our plates, wash them right away, no need to pack food.
PoW: God knows where our food is coming from, and we use plates that every random fellow uses.

Home: Can take a 5 min nap in the comfort of our own bed.
PoW: Can't even rest your face or eyes as one gets judged for literally everything, so by the end of the day, it gets really hard to even stand.

Home: Healthy, happy with the ones we love
PoW: Unhealthy, unhappy

Home: Always calm
PoW: Anxious about the travel, being conscious about our body or the uncomfy pants that are neither tight nor loose.

We can stretch, or do a 5 minute yoga in the middle of work hours, we can detox ourselves, and at the same time be productive. Working from home boosts morale, helps us mentally and physically. At the end of the day, we can go for a short walk to rejuvenate ourselves and then get back to our life with the family. None of this would be possible, if not for the lockdown. 

Comfort thy name is cushion

Cushions help cushion the blow we get on a daily basis. Oh what we get on a daily basis? The ice cream shop is closed, the brown Haute Curry handbag to go with those Catwalk pumps are missing, the tan socks have gone for wash.

City life makes everything comfortable, whether it comes to food or work, most of it is all about easy access to things within a 5 km radius. Desk job, a cushion chair, the need for air-conditioning in every place we go, be it at work, home or malls; I'm sure even beaches will come up with AC rooms soon for the so-called 'privileged' to hang out at. By privileged, I mean the ones who have no idea how beautiful life can be, without these extremities that man invented.

A house these days is incomplete without atleast 2 ACs. Lifestyle diseases come and go due to this. Human body is not supposed to handle this much comfort. In Tamil, there's a saying: 'Odamba kadambaala adi'. It means we're supposed to push ourselves out of these comfort zones, sweat as much as we can. There has to be a certain limit to the comforting atmosphere. We get used to using cabs and autos so much, that we tend to even forget that there is a thing known as buses or trains, connecting every part of the city. 

Almost everyone has diabetes or symptoms for cancer at least. Every website or magazine advertises material things 'that are supposed to make you feel better'. Even in the office we need cushions. That too the fancy ones, with a Buddha painting or a silhouette of an Egyptian woman carrying water...if only we knew about the water crisis in so many places. 

A joke that I came across recently:

'Mom, are all these gifts from Santa?'

'Yes dear.'

'So you didn't get me a darn thing this year too didn't you?'

Gifting each other during birthdays, anniversaries and holiday seasons has made this world a much materialistic place to be. Someone posts their birthday cake on Instagram. Someone else feels bad that they've never had a cake or a party. Someone posts a plate of pasta that one has. The other person thinks how sad his life is, even though he'll be having a wholesome healthier meal than thou.

“Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the center of our lives, they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings,” Pope Francis insists.

The Pope explains that people must be on guard against “the danger of complacency, comfort, worldliness in our lifestyles and in our hearts, of making our well-being the most important thing in our lives.”

When materialism takes over, we “end up becoming self-absorbed and finding security in material things which ultimately rob us of our face, our human face.”

This further leads to more self-indulgence, bitterness, insecurities and being intolerant towards things that need more effort to get to. 

When Starbucks had a sale of any fancy Frappuccinos at Rs. 100 one day, we didn't mind taking a good 4 hours of our lives to wait for one cup of coffee, all of which ended up tasting the same anyway. 

With the growth of communication at a supersonic pace, it is tough to not lust about the advancements in modern equipment that are, unsurprisingly, being advertised as 'a must have' by many websites and magazines. The need for ordering food online, the need for ready-to-make food items, the need for cool accessories, the obsessive need for getting a fancy latte wherever we go, are things that we can do without. Even 15 years back we didn't have such easy access to items that need no cooking whatsoever, it made us better planners and we were very well equipped to do things with our own hands.

A week is incomplete without visiting a mall. The day is incomplete without a cup of Starbucks for our instant feeding and the Insta feed. Starbucks opened in India five years ago. When Café Coffee Day started in India, every kid would hang out there after school hours. A person is now defined, or rather, fit into a box, based on what all things he uses, the vehicle he drives and the brands he's advertising through his clothing, leading to a train of thought that a person with a basic nokia phone, simple shirt and trousers and using public transport is seen as a simpleton, while another one showing off his branded sunglasses in social media through a photo he clicked with an expensive mobile phone, with a luxury car in background is considered smart alec.

But truth is, the 'simpleton' can sleep at night peacefully, while the smart alec tosses and turns lying in bed, checking his Insta feed occasionally.

In conclusion, though our lives are filled with equipment and gadgets to comfort us, we are, in fact, slaves of technology thus adding to the endless produce-use-dispose cycle, leading to an increase of toxic elements that poisons our natural resources, apart from our own state of mind.

That is not to say do not use technology, but use it to a minimum and not spend on stuff that we can live without.

Permission to wear clothes? No one has the right

The School Education Department last year turned down a request made on behalf of women teachers in Tamil Nadu government schools for permission to wear churidars. “Compulsion to wear saris was not to the liking of women teachers who would desire to wear churidars if given an option since the dress covers their entire body,” the petitioner said. Replying to the representation, the Director of School Education rejected the request on the grounds that dress code being a policy matter of the government, there was no scope to change the norms. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/no-churidars-for-teachers-department/article19512527.ece

Why does the Director of School Education write rules on how teaching staff are supposed to dress? 

Why the hell do women need PERMISSION to wear certain type of clothes? Sometime back, wearing salwar kameez to school landed a teacher in Malda in trouble. The managing committee members of Aiho Girls' School in Malda lodged a complaint against her for arguing with them and not agreeing to wear a sari to school. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Teacher-hauled-up-for-wearing-salwar-kameez/articleshow/13016038.cms

A school management should value someone's right to wear something comfortable to them. If sari will be imposed on women, then dhoti should be imposed on men. A teacher shouldn't be judged based on what she wears. Anything decent and modest can be worn. 

Indian women somehow always seem to be forced to wear sarees wherever they go. Many women come under a certain dress code once they reach a certain age. This is prevalent in most of the places, including major cities, where once women are married, bindi, chain, bangles and tied up hair are a must to make sure they are acceptable to the 'society'. But nobody has the right to force someone to wear certain type of clothes. Clothing is a part of human rights that entitles someone to wear an attire of their choice. Why are women being permitted to wear a sari? Shouldn't it be okay to wear any formal attire at our places of work? 

Even a God in south India wasn't allowed to wear salwar kameez in Mayiladuthurai’s Mayuranathaswami temple. The temple priest was removed from duty as he adorned the deity with sandalwood paste (sandhanakaapu) but going against the traditional saree, the goddess was dressed in salwar-kameez-dupatta. Some devotees were upset that the 'sanctity' of the 1000-year-old idol has been tarnished because of the display.  The decision to expel was expedited by the Thiruvadheenam Aadheenam (Mutt) that also has about 27 other temples under its administrative control in Tamil Nadu. It is, however, not uncommon for temple priests to get creative with such decors.  https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/dress-code-goddess-tn-priest-sacked-dressing-idol-salwar-kameez-75930

India is making progress in every field. We've been moving towards a considerable amount of change. Technology has improved to be more and more personalized. There is not a single thing that we do without electricity-powered devices. It is 2018 and we still continue to impose a strict dress code on teachers!  Fashion industry has evolved so much with what can be worn and even couture now has ready to wear stuff off the ramp rather than playing their way with fabrics. But why are we still following the 2nd century garb of a garment that has to be spun around a human like a mummy being wrapped and pull one part of it over the torso, just to cover a small portion of the front and not the back? It takes atleast half-an-hour to get ready in a sari. Do we have time to dress ourselves just to please some school management that comprises of men who wear pants and shirts? Somehow men moved to pants and shirts, and they continue to wear it ever since Britishers came and left this country. If sari is a dress code for female teachers, then men must wear veshti with a man-bun like it used to be before! 

If a teacher doesn't wear a sari, does it mean she is naked? Why this sexism? Teachers aren't born to please the management's eyes. Even my perverted stalker demanded me in a vulgar way to wear a sari. India is a country where even 60 to 90-year-old women wear pants and shirts, but the majority of the mindsets are the ones who are surprised when they see a married woman wearing pants and shirts. Women who wear the so-called Western clothes are still seen as an odd-man-out in many areas in this country (maybe not in metro cities). Will this country ever develop or adapt to the ever-changing reality? Private institutions shouldn't impose such a rule. There are still some colleges who insist on strict dress codes. The college where I did my undergraduate course, insisted that teachers cannot step into the campus in anything other than a sari. 

Some Indians do tend to show off their 'traditional' side once in a blue moon for a wedding, where all one has to do it sit on a chair and eat! But wearing a sari, can you catch that train that you'd miss dearly? Can you run to catch a guy who just snatched your chain? Can you walk without the top part being swept off by wind? Can you get on a bus without one portion being pulled away? Can you even ride a bike? Sorry, not sari. 

It is only easy to show off skin with it, that's why even Kareena Kapoor wears it when she tries to dance some hip-hop among men whose faces go right to her hip, they may be waiting for a slip. Not just item numbers, almost all romantic songs have the lady in a sari. In Main Hoon Na, Sushmita Sen wears a thin sari to teach in this college where Shah Rukh Khan's movie character falls for her; it was done for the sake of bringing glamour to the movie. What other attire would be more attractive, some ask. The hero and heroine romance in snowy area with the hero in a beautiful leather jacket and the heroine..well.. In her sleeveless sari blouse. I wonder how they managed to do a dance routine in that freezing cold! When I went to Himachal, I couldn't even take my gloves off in room!

Shah Rukh Khan's yet another character Rahul lusted for Kajol's character Anjali only when she wore a sari in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Indian cinema would've been saved if she didn't wear that piece of garment and continued to wear pants instead. Pants were invented for women at first. But somehow it became a norm for men, who used to wear dhotis, but women are expected to continue wearing saris.

There are high chances of wardrobe malfunction if a person suddenly starts to wear it. And none of the women till their 20s even know the whole point of wearing such an age-old garb. It is a sexy piece of clothing that teachers can do without. Not only that, in some movies where there's a 'sexy' character that is shown as a men-magnet, the most common thing we see? Her in a chiffon translucent sari and a sleeveless blouse, and atleast one instance where she drops something and bends over to take it, in a revealing way. 

Modern is a word that would denote only a female's attire. Men in India can wear jeans and T-shirts till their deathbeds and they'll still be called sanskari, but a woman must stop doing so once she is married, since salwars somehow got accepted as the best piece of clothing by Indians. Workplaces and other institutions should refrain from making their employees follow a certain dress code. Anything decent should be acceptable since no sensible woman would wear something indecent. The 'society' that criticizes people's attire is mostly made up by women, who in turn restrict their children, i.e. daughters and daughters-in-law to either wear saris or salwars, and to keep away from T-shirts or shirts, and definitely a strict no to trousers or skirts. Abolishing certain type of clothes is mostly seen among people living in certain under-developed areas where conservative methods are seen as the only way to live and anything apart from what their ancestors taught is totally ignored. Families too shouldn't impose such harsh rules, since wearing clothes – or more accurately, choosing which clothes to wear – is, for many people, an important part of right to freedom of expression as confirmed under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

Nobody would like to be told what to eat or how to dress, the Supreme Court said on August 24 while ruling that these activities come under the realm of right to privacy. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/no-one-likes-to-be-told-what-to-eat-how-to-dress-sc/article19554712.ece India’s tourism minister Mahesh Sharma said in 2016 that foreign women should not wear skirts “for their own safety”. https://www.indiatvnews.com/politics/national-don-t-wear-skirts-or-go-out-at-night-culture-minister-s-advise-to-foreign-women-tourists-345719 

Be it small towns or cities, the Indian mindset is set in traditional clothing, and by traditional clothing, it mostly means salwars these days, as the concept of sari draping is dying amongst youth, the youth that make up most of India. If one wants to wear a sari, then it should be okay. But if the teachers in Malda or Tamil Nadu didn't want to, even then it should be okay. They weren't asking to wear T-shirts and capris to school.

What is freedom when tax payers cannot wear something that they want to? India is a developing country where development has come out in infrastructure, but not in clothing. Imagine a female astronaut on the Moon wearing a sari with flowers on her hair and oh, her head has to be covered because she is married! 

Cyber crazy dogs end up in jail

Eve-teasing has been a common occurrence in any country. But foll­owing a woman, getting to know what she does, where she stays, and so on, is something that sets them apart. In that process, the person being followed would be totally unaware about it for months. But the stalker’s need grows even more. Such a deep-rooted interest grows stronger in these cases, always takes a bad turn later.

Here's how a so-called 'crazy' ends up making the other person paranoid:

1. Find her on social networks even though she hasn't mentioned her mail ID or where she works or her birthday, then send her lewd messages from a fake profile ofcourse, since your real profile is hard to compromise.

2. Leave her in a confused state letting her wonder if it is really a stalker who is messing with her or just a friend playing pranks.

(She ends up blocking you, ofcourse.)

3. Create a new fake profile, introduce some vulgar lines or mention what she wore that day, tell her you followed her to a library or a movie theater.

4. Ask her to wear saree the next day, cuz you have to insist on finding a way to control her; this in turn leaves her shocked, lets her wonder how you know her whereabouts or what she wore that day.

5. Never ever come in person to let her know that you exist. Take her number from the office database and start messaging her there. It is her official number, so ofcourse she replies, take this as an acceptance from her side to eve-tease her even more.

At the price of his own job, the mystery man would continue to send vulgar messages, she'd continue to block him or delete her social media profile entirely.

From the many number of stalkers I've realised that they look at only one thing: the girl's face. Nothing else is important for such disgusting low lives. She can be fat or slim or whatever. She just needs to be a girl and have a symmetric face. That's enough for them to continue sending vulgar messages. Be it a guy staring at you in a train or something... He will always wait for you to look at him or his side once, and thats enough for such minds to think that we are interested in them. Such nauseating minds make women think that men are all such creeps. When such horrible things can happen in big offices, more terrible things happen when these creatures are suddenly put in cities.

Staring at co-workers is such a harrasment as serious as stalking and this is an unfortunate reality in workplaces. Some men do lingering stares on women that's very common and there is no way of avoiding such instances. When they follow that one woman in the pretext of going for a walk themselves, no one can prove that she is being followed. Atleast they could do the courtesy of stopping the stare once the opposite party notices but such crazy dogs like M. Balaji, The Hindu web developer anyway belong in jail. Women's committee to the rescue!

Freaky stalkers in Chennai

We have been dodging stalkers for a while now. When stalkers pursue their interest, they wouldn’t let it go for months or years at a time. What a stalker thinks is that, a continuously led chase isn’t going to turn futile. His consistency is what drives him to the darker side.

Girls walking on roads or using public transport are more accustomed to being harassed by strangers, being followed till we reach our homes and being mocked about our body parts. Any reaction to this would just trigger them more towards us. We always want to bore them out, and not reacting to all of this would help in some cases.

I was constantly tortured on Facebook for months and he would mention that he is following me to so many places. He would mention a lot about my body parts, he'd specify which ones he likes, he'd mention which part is bigger, how my character changes if I wore jeans. He'd even ask me to wear saree and meet him, so that he can see more of me. No matter how many times I block, he’d return with another profile. Any action wasn’t possible as he remained anonymous. I never knew who the pervert was. So I deleted one profile and created another one with another mail ID, with no profile photo nor I mentioned my city. He started harassing me there as well. I was managing some pages for office work so I couldn't delete my profile.

After so many months, the freak came forward in person, that too in a railway station. He got down from the same train I got down to switch to another train. He mentioned that he was the one who sent all those messages. He already knew that I got down in that particular station at that time, to switch trains (even I wasn't sure of taking the train that day; I had taken a bus the previous day). I was in shock, as I’ve seen this person at my office, but I never knew his name. He followed me to the other platform even though I thought he'd walk away after I shouted at him for doing such a hideous thing, I slapped him but he moved a bit so I couldn't even hit him; I wanted to file an FIR against him, just that I didn't know who he was. He was staring at me with such rage, and murmured something, that didn’t seem normal. He stood looking at me, and not moving even a bit. To think that all this was happening in a public place could have been even frustrating for him. But it was my luck that there were some people around. He took the same train I boarded. I got down at my destination. I knew that he would continue his ecstatic behavior some more. Who knows who he is torturing, at this moment?

He ofcourse denied the whole thing when the human resources department quizzed him. The HR never bothered to take any action. And now its been 4 years and still he keeps staring at the office. We never know what is gonna hit us when. His name is M. Balaji, a web developer at The Hindu.

This must be a disturbing read for a normal guy. But for someone who knows only one thing and who wants only one thing, all this must seem sane. I’m someone who respects men, for the fact that they’re kind and sweet to everyone they know. But this guy was the total opposite of anything that a normal human being would stand for. Very rare cases only turn out to be this way. Such cruelty can only come from a deep frustration of some sort. Understanding such people would be difficult. And so, any step that a girl takes will only trigger something worse than what has happened before. This is what my experience taught me.

The more the people know about such characters, the more they will able to defend themselves. Many women face this kind of problems on a daily or a weekly basis. Every stalker is different and anything that a victim does or doesn’t do during that period, is only going to make the perpetrator pursue his interest even more.

Some of the crimes that we’ve known to be faced by women depend on how long is one being victimised. One may say that Chennai is supposed to be the safest city to live in. But that may not be true, since such issues exist everywhere in this world. Even if we wear scarves and sunglasses to cover our faces, it wouldn’t matter if the stalkers already know our whereabouts. We can be equipped with a pepper spray, and can definitely start taking a self-defense class.

Being commented at, or touched by men walking on the streets, are common occurrences. What sets them apart from stalking is that, all of the eve-teasers and molesters do it in that moment, and forget all about it. But following a woman to all places, getting to know what she does, where she goes, and so on, is something that the girl is totally unaware about. The guy’s interest in the girl only grows even more. That leads to a total fanatic state of wanting something very badly, which in turn takes its toll on both of them. 

It cannot be said that it is young men who do such things. Women have been teased by men of all ages – right from teenagers to a 60-year-olds. We know a lot of women, young and old, who face such brutality.

An eve-teaser would pursue the girl to a couple of streets, drive behind them for a few kilometers, try to over-take them and call them names, but all this would end within a few minutes. A stalker, on the other hand, drives behind the female for months, constantly showing their face here and there, tries to make fun of them and makes it a point to be heard atleast after a few months of learning the person’s whereabouts.

All this may be due to the fact that the guys on the street aren’t someone who get the attention. They want to be seen/heard by someone. A cry for attention is what drives some stalkers to head towards women in a certain way. Such are the men who later in their 50s and 60s, tend to again stalk younger women, since they find only the young ones appealing. They prefer only the ones who are of lighter skin. Any woman with a slightly duskier skin wouldn't even be visible to them.