Skip to main content

Mammary Pietism



If you are a cynic, you find life amusing most of the time.  Cynics have the unique knack for looking around for a coffin when they smell flowers.  I live in Kerala where cynicism is cultivated as a highly sophisticated form of art.  At dinner time the Malayalam news channels will bring you, without exception, the most cynical commentaries on the day’s events.  Kerala has probably the highest number of trolls on the various social media.  It is good that people like Narendra Modi and Amit Shah do not know Malayalam; otherwise the cynical TV programmes and the media trolls would have given them multiple sclerosis long ago. 

Grihalakshmi Cover
The latest target of such cynicism in Kerala is a Malayalam magazine, Grihalakshmi, which gave the photo of a breastfeeding woman on its cover with the caption: Mothers tell Kerala: Don’t stare, we want to breastfeed (our babies). The woman in the picture is Gilu Joseph, who is a model, writer, actor and poet. Her views are presented in the magazine and they belong to a feminist who argues for the rights of women to walk about freely even at night, to travel in buses at night without a male escort, to sit on a beach and breastfeed her baby, and so on.  Personally I feel women should have the same rights as men.  Why should women be deprived of any delight that men enjoy?

I don’t understand why the menfolk in Kerala took such exception to the cover picture?  Ok, I agree that such a picture was not required to campaign for women’s right to breastfeed their children wherever they are comfortable doing so.  Maybe, the magazine was just cashing in on the picture, as some trolls suggested.  Maybe, Gilu loves the fame derived from the controversy.  So what?  Don’t we all love such things: cash and fame?

The latest sex survey of India Today says that 1/3 of the men and ¼ of the women in Indian offices have extramarital sex at their workplace or related to the work. Premarital sex by teenagers is also on the rise at a rate that will shock conservative people.  I’m not an advocate of any of these indulgences and I don’t think such acts and practices will do any good to anyone.  But when people begin to question a picture used in a campaign, the cynic in me looks around for pedestals to elevate such people.  Why don’t they look at issues that really matter? 

Hypocrisy is one of the deep-rooted cultural values of India.  Scratch the Indian moralist and perversions will bleed out.  Look at the mounting number of assaults on women.  Even infant girls are not spared by the perverts. 

The real problem is not with Grihalakshmi or Gilu.  The real problem is with Indian men who have double standards when it comes to sex and sexuality.  The men should learn to fling the mask of pietism and learn to accept women as fellow human beings who deserve all the respect that men demand.

A Da Vinci painting of Mother Mary with Jesus

 
An Indian painting of Krishna with Yashoda



Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarMarch 2, 2018 at 8:01 AM

    Very logical analysis explaining some truths and facts of the society.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CRDMarch 2, 2018 at 8:40 AM

    Great subject to deal with.

    I'm glad you chose to post the images of Mother Mary and Yashoda. It will kinda drive home the point that how we look at things is completely in our heads.

    Cheers,
    CRD

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 2, 2018 at 9:50 AM

      I've always thought that a woman breastfeeding an infant is one of the most spiritual and beautiful images. No wonder so many artists have been inspired by it.

      Delete
  3. www.mohanmekap.comMarch 2, 2018 at 3:37 PM

    Nice article and the subject is great but I was reading news snippets, perhaps the case was registered against the magazine.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 2, 2018 at 3:50 PM

      Yes, a case has been registered unfortunately. There's no dearth of hypocrites or plain idiots or shrewd opportunists.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...
12 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Roles we Play

When I saw the above picture of Narendra Modi in the latest issue of India Today , what rushed to my mind instantly was a Malayalam film song Veshangal Janmangal … Life is a series of roles dressed up for the occasion. There are different costumes for celebrations and mourning, and there are people who can shed one and move into the other instantly. Are your smiles genuine? Do your tears mean sadness? Or, are they all costumes that suit the occasion? Are you just an actor who plays certain roles? Is the entire cosmos just a gigantic theatre for you? Where can we find the real you beneath all the costumes you keep changing day in and day out? Have you relinquished dharma in favour of cravings? Truth over expediency?  
10 comments
Read more