Hardik Rajgor

F or the first time in life, I got a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to be a woman. I was gripped with fear and uneasiness. As  India’s #MeToo movement  gained momentum over the past two weeks, I watched a lot of supposedly woke men get called out – for sending unsolicited texts and dick pics, predatory behaviour, and outright  sexual harassment . I followed some of these people on Twitter, I have enjoyed some of their work – their films, their writing. These were not those “other” dastardly men who rape women and brazenly skirt the law. These were not those men who make it to front pages of newspapers, men who’ve made you think, “Who are these monsters?” But as the past few days have taught us, these men belong to a different breed of monsters – they are one among us, or rather we are the monsters.   We are on the news now. Our behaviour has been unacceptable and downright shameful. We the regular people who have had a decent education and enjoy privileg...

I t was not a festival, it wasn’t anyone’s birthday in the  family , as far as I could remember. It wasn’t even the weekend. So I was taken by surprise when my house was abuzz with energy in the middle of a workweek. There was a serious amount of pav bhaji and grilled cheese sandwiches that had been ordered. For a  Gujarati  family living in Kandivali, it felt like  Navratri  had arrived early. Before I could figure out what was happening, mum told me we had guests – my dad’s colleagues. Really? When did dad start making friends at work?   Pratik* from my father’s office had come home to visit us, all the way from  Kalyan . Seated next to him was a woman, who I guessed was his girlfriend, but I couldn’t be sure. It was 10 pm on a  Tuesday , way past my father’s bedtime. And yet everyone seemed quite content chatting away. “Why aren’t they leaving?” “They can’t be staying over!” “Do I have to sleep in the living room today?” My mind was overf...

C orruption  in India is like oxygen – it is integral to our lives. From the local traffic police to spectrum allocation at the cabinet level, corruption is as rampant as potholes on Indian roads. You can move your file faster in a  government  office if you accompany it with a bit of “chai paani”, a word we have coined to convince ourselves we are not all that dishonest because it’s not quite “rishwat”. Corruption is a major election plank for our political parties. One party says, “Mera PM chor hai”, the other says “Tera pura khandan  chor  hai” and the average person on the street believes, “Saale sab chor hai”. This defeatism pervaded our Supreme Court recently, when it took the hands-off position by allowing politicians with criminal backgrounds to contest elections — so long as they were loud and clear about their criminal antecedents. This, presumably, would help the voter make an informed choice, and possibly avoid the worst among equals. But is ou...

“W hy did you fail in Geography?” the questioning would begin, with me in the hot seat like  Mark Zuckerberg . My parents and relatives were everyone else, taking turns to destroy me. “But dad, what about the fact that the entire class  failed ?” I would ask. I had no clue where oranges were growing in  Maharashtra  but even as a 10-year-old, I had mastered the classic Soviet tactic of “whataboutery”, or deflecting the problem by raising another problem, that the New Yorker labelled as “a strategy of false moral equivalences”. If everyone failed then it became acceptable for you also to fail. You don’t have to deal with the larger problem of being poor in the subject if you can raise suspicion over the evil Geography teacher itself. How could she fail everyone? Make no mistake, I wasn’t the only one in my  family  doing it. We engage in whataboutery every day, all the time. The other day I was pointing out how dad’s stock investments were tanking like...

“I believed it was the right thing to do,” said Tony Blair about the  Iraq War , because self-righteous belief is more important than fact and reality. He had kept repeating to the British public that there were  Weapons of Mass Destruction  in Iraq. As it turned out, there weren’t. The fake news was further spread out by large sections of mainstream  media , as they cheered for military action. Thousands of British troops lost their  lives , and many others wounded on account of the “intervention”. Iraq’s education system – considered one of the best in the region at the time – was in tatters. Sanctions and blockades were introduced and instability was created in the entire region from which they struggle to recover even now. WMDs, however, were never actually labelled “fake news”. For decades, it was institutions in the form of governments and traditional media that had the monopoly over the circulation of news, information, rumour, gossip, and eve...