Personal
Abuse
I read, in quick succession, a couple of posts on domestic violence. It got me thinking. Why do men beat up their wives? Anger? Passion? Inability to keep one’s sanity? Drinking? Most of the time, we assume that men who drink, who are unfaithful, who are inept, are the ones beating up their partners. But sadly, I find that none of these need to lead to violence. Yes, drinking makes it easier for a man to justify his behaviour. But, the actual reason lies elsewhere. It’s about control. It’s about domination.
When I was in college, I studied Women’s Studies. I studied rape from an academic perspective. The first thing I discovered was that rape was not a sex crime. It was not for sex that women were raped. They were raped because the men who raped them had a point to make. Of being stronger, more powerful, better. Domestic violence falls under the same category. Only, it’s more difficult to detect, identify or control. For one simple reason. The man who beats is the one who is supposed to protect. And more than anything else, it is not the wife’s responsibility to ensure she is not hit. Why do people not understand that the abuser is at fault? The comment quoted by Ra is a case in point. Women are attracted to violence? What the hell? Why are women always held responsible for what happens to them? It hurts when girls are told that they were teased on the road by some loafer because they must have dressed provocatively. It angers me that women are told to wear only salwar kameez because boys will be distracted by me if they turn up in jeans. It irritates me and causes me to rebel when I see some vague engineering college in Chennai enforce gender-based segregation because they don’t want their boys getting spoilt by under-dressed female classmates. Why can’t the world see sense?
As a woman, it’s my business how I want to dress. A woman’s dress, her job or her behaviour is not an excuse to beat her. I fell the need to tell all those women out there who are in abusive relationships one thing. If a man hits you, he can’t love you. A man who loves you will get upset when he sees you hurt. A man who loves you will risk his life to ensure you are not in pain. A man who loves you will get angry with you for crying over a friend’s death because he can’t see you cry. A man who really loves you will suggest you don’t do things that make you unhappy. So, if you have a partner who is abusive, he probably doesn’t love you. Stop deluding yourself. Walk out when you are still alive. Please.
A call centre saga…no…make that two…
Over the last week, I have been wondering if I should refuse to call any customer care centre as a mark of protest. The first of my two experiences was exasperating. But, the second, was infuriating. But, let me start from the beginning.
It was Monday morning. Our fax in office was not functioning. I had to call HP customer care and complain. More importantly, the printer was not picking up paper properly and I had to get an engineer to visit. The process took me 45 minutes. Here is how the conversation went. I call, identify myself and my company and politely ask explain my problem. My first call goes waste as the Customer care executive has no clue what to do. She promises to call back. Which she does. Here is how the conversation went.
Me: I have an all-in-one. The printer and scanner are working fine, but the fax is simply not going through.
Customer Care Exec.: Ma’am, you will have to follow our instructions so that we try to resolve your problem over phone.
Me: Uh, ok. What should I do?
Customer Care Exec.: Ma’am, there are three cables behind your printer; a fat one, a very fat one, and a thin one.
Me: (already exasperated) Which one are you talking about, the power cable, the RJ45 or the RJ11 telephone cable?
Customer Care Exec.: Pardon me ma’am, but I don’t think you understood. There is a fat cable…
Me: (interrupting) Yes I know. But which one do you want me to check? The phone cable, the data cable or the power cable.
Customer Care Exec.: (Finally catching on to the fact that I am not completely illiterate.) The power cable ma’am. Please follow it to the other end and check if it is plugged into the mains.
Me: Are you mad? I am telling you my scanner and printer are working fine. How would that happen if the printer is not turned on? Will you please send an engineer to set my fax right and to check on my paper pick-up mechanism?
Customer Care Exec.: Sorry ma’am, we are only authorised to send our service engineers for hardware problems. Is your fax having a hardware problem or a software problem?
Me: How the hell am I supposed to know? You must tell me.
Customer Care Exec.: But, we can’t send an engineer unless we know ma’am.
This conversation continues for a good half an hour before she has a brainwave and decides to log the complaint for referral to her supervisor. Soon enough, she returns.
Customer Care Exec.: I am sorry ma’am. The paper pick-up seems to be a hardware problem. We will send an engineer and he can fix the fax also while he is there.
Me: Thank you.
Customer Care Exec.: And ma’am, we have a special offer. Would you like to go in for a low-cost inkjet at just Rs.7999 for pesonal use?
And and that point, I give up trying to reason with her. I am calling from an office that will soon have close to 200 employees. And she proposes a personal inkjet?? I do wish these call centre executives would use their God-given brains once in a while!
Now, the second incident. The call centre in question is Airtel. I was getting unsolicited calls from a particular Airtel number. The calls were sometimes exasperating, but mostly irritating. The subscriber has obviously got my number from somewhere and the calls I got were bordering on sexual harassment. I decide to report abuse to the Airtel customer care, despite the fact that I have a Vodafone prepaid connection. The conversation goes like this. The emphasis, needless to say, is mine.
Me: I am calling to report abuse by an Airtel subscriber.
Customer Care Exec.: I am sorry ma’am. We cannot reveal details of one subscriber to another.
Me: I don’t want the details. I don’t care who he is. I want to register an abuse complaint against him. That’s all.
Customer Care Exec.: Ok ma’am, I will register your complaint. I will send an acknowledgement number. Please save it. Thank you for calling Airtel, have a great evening.
Please note, that at this point, he neither asked for my name, nor my number, nor even the number of the person I was complaining against.
Me: (almost shouting now) Will you please listen? I have not finished. I want to file a complaint. A complaint of abuse. This is sexual harassment.
Customer Care Exec.: I understand ma’am. But, we cannot do anything. You must go to the police.
Me: Are you telling me you will not register a complaint against the subscriber?
Customer Care Exec.: How a subscriber uses his number is not Airtel’s responsibility.
Me: Are you willing to go on record on that?
Customer Care Exec.: Yes ma’am.
Me: Well, all right then. I will register a police complaint. I will include Airtel as accomplice, as you are refusing to register my complaint.
Customer Care Exec.: Ma’am, understand your problem. You must go to the police. Handling cases of sexual harassment is not our business.
Me: Do you have an email id where I can put this down in writing?
Customer Care Exec.: www…
Me: I was an EMAIL ID, not a web URL.
Customer Care Exec.: oh. ok then, 121@airtel.com
Me: Ok.
Customer Care Exec.: Thank you for calling Airtel.
The phone line is cut. The executive has still not taken my name, number or the number of the person. The name of the executive is with me. He revealed that after asking three times, while they are in fact trained to identify themselves personally before proceeding with the call. Is there something I can do? The call centre executive I spoke to treated me as if I was the criminal, not the victim. He hasn’t bothered to get the basic minimum details from me. He has in fact, on record, absolved himself and Airtel of all responsibility for how a subscriber uses his number. If the problem was a terror threat and not sexual harassment? Will Airtel behave the same way?
On marriages, love or otherwise
Ok. I know the whole world and his dog are debating the abortion issue. So, must I too? No thanks. I am not qualified to comment on either abortion or pregnancy see as I have had neither. So, let me not venture into that dangerous territory. This post by Nita, on the other hand, is something I can talk about. She wonders if love marriages are any different from arranged marriages because short-listing according to one’s preferences is going to happen anyway.
Well, I agree. And I don’t. Confused? Actually, I have pretty ambiguous views on the issue. Personal experience dictates that I defend love marriages passionately. No, I am not married. But I am in love. So, I can talk. Oh yes! I can. First, Nita asks if someone looking for a potential partner would not hang out at a place he/she like so that chances of meeting someone with similar tastes is greater. Well, I really don’t know. Not many people are actively looking for a mate. Ok. Let me modify that statement. Not many people I know who eventually fell in love, actively looked out for a mate. It happened. To me too. You can’t exactly blame me for going to work can you? That’s where I met him. So, I am really not sure people mentally shortlist people before falling in love. If I may say so, he is not the kind of person I would have considered perfect 5 years ago. But once I met him, everything changed. Including the idea of perfection. So, are we filtering unsuitable candidates? I somehow doubt it.
And as far as physical attributes are concerned, I suppose it is true to a large extent. Of course everyone wants a husband who looks like George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Abhishek Bachchan, hell…I don’t know. Whoever you think is good looking. I have no clue what I liked when I was in my teens. But I certainly know that that dream is nothing close to the reality I so adore today. About that teenage bit. Everyone wants the latest heartthrob as husband when they are 13. Whether they would actually marry the person, given the chance, when they are 25 is anyone’s guess. And mine is, no.
Having disagreed with Nita for so long, let me say that I found that example rather amusing. She knows someone who wants a guy with a head full of hair!! Excuse me? How do you actually think so much? As far as I am concerned, if I gel well with the guy, that will do. Wavelength. That’s what I call it. And I have an extremely cheeky question. What would you do if the guy lost all his hair after marrying you? And developed that forbidden paunch and put on lots of weight? Ditch him? A question to ponder. 😛
Are all-women’s colleges really that bad?
Well, I really do not know. When I was in college, I was pretty irritated by the fact that WCC did not admit men. It cannot. Simply because it is the Women’s Christian College. But today, when I read a few posts on same-sex education, it got me thinking again. Like Chandni and Sunita, I too was a vigorous advocate of co-educational schools for much of my life. But now, I am not so sure. What sporadic blogger said in her post is quite true.
“We are who we are, largely because we studied in an all-girls institution. And by that, I mean, we grew into people who are confident of their, our, ability. In several co-ed colleges, one sees that very few girls ever occupy union positions. If they do at all, they are elected into positions that are traditionally seen as a female domain-cultural representatives, literary representatives.”
This, to a certain extent is true. I studied 14 years in a co-ed school. Three years in a women’s college instilled the confidence that 14 years of co-ed failed to do. I was always rather talkative, but college channeled that urge to talk into something constructive and made me a debater. Now, let me say that any college could have done that. But the fact that I was accepted for what I was in WCC made a huge difference. Let me give you a rather personal example here. When I was in school, I was constantly judged on how I looked, how tall, how fat, how thin, how beautiful I was. I was judged on what boys (immature and even superficial young men) thought of me. If the class “cool guy” thought I was not worth talking to, nobody would. Not even the equally “un-hep” reject of the class. I stepped into college with a lot of apprehension. I constantly looked over my shoulder to see who was scrutinising my actions and judging my appearance. To my utter surprise, nobody cared about what I wore or how fair or how dark I was. To them, to the hundreds of girls I was surrounded by every day, I was normal. For the first time in life, I felt at home.
This was a personal experience. I will not say that co-ed is bad. But I would like to disagree with one point that Chandni makes. She says,
“In college we found girls who were 18 plus, behaving with the opposite sex, in a fashion that we did when we were 13. You know, the whole excitement and hype regarding “boys” when the hormones are in full swing and you suddenly see the “pests” with new eyes!”
Uhm…I do not agree. At 18, girls are not all that mature. Maybe growing up in a co-ed environment makes girls more confident. But, crushes do happen. At 18 or even at 23. Judging a girl as immature because she crushes on a cute guy is not fair. I blushed like hell when I first went out with my boyfriend. And I was at the ripe old age of 23. Hell! I still do sometimes. So?
I admit, at WCC, we definitely were excited at the prospect of culturals because they meant that guys would come. But we were barely out of our teens for goodness’ sake! And we were women. Of course we wanted them to come to college. As someone points out in the comments section, not all women from all-girls’ institutions behave like blubbering idiots in front of men. Some co-ed girls do so too. I think it’s hardly fair to blame a type of education system for that.
I just think that each has its advantages. I for one loved my time at WCC. I could do what I pleased (as long as Mrs. Phillips didn’t hear of it). I did not care a damn what I wore most of the time because we were all women. I have friends who used to turn up to classes in their nightsuits and pajamas because they woke up at 8:25 for an 8:30 class. It’s all fun. The shopping, the gossip, the late-night secret chats over cell-phone (because my hostelite friends had sneaked it in without the warden’s knowledge), everything was fun.
On dyslexia and Bollywood
I watched the movie Taare Zameen Par today. And man, was I surprised! Surprised to find that Bollywood actually bothered to make a film that’s both relevant and realistic. And managed to restrain itself from introducing any contrived love story into the film. It reminded me of an earlier post where I reviewed Chak De India. Each of these movies signals that Indian cinema has indeed matured. If Chak De dealt with the place of women in a man’s world, Taare talked about parental pressure, and a child’s response to it.
To be honest, I cried, through practically every frame of the movie. Not that I bawled my eyes out, but that I felt genuinely touched by the pain the kid went through. I laughed at his antics and cried at his loneliness. And for the first time, I felt as if someone had actually understood what I felt like when I was a kid. I was never dyslexic, nor did I have a serious learning problem. But, I lived through loneliness and desperation at times. I was never among the top ten, or even twenty in class. And it hurt. Not because I got the 2’s and 3’s that 9-year-old Ishaan Awasthi did, but because despite a decent 10 on 20, my teachers would still insist that I was incapable of learning. In a way, the film brought back my childhood to me. It only got worse as time went on. Classmates, toppers all of them, would advise me to study as hard as I could. Some would insist that going to X Sir or Y Ma’am would change everything. And being the stubborn ass I was, and still am, simply refused to seek help. Not until I got to college did I feel genuinely happy about myself. If I am a confident student/teacher/worker/blogger today, it’s because college taught me to love myself, irrespective of what others think.
On an intellectual level, the film also made me think. Think about why engineering or medicine are considered the only things “worth” studying. How can you judge a branch of study by the amount of money a person makes in life? I studied political science. I am now teaching French. I have not got a job that is related to my studies. Does that mean that political science or security studies is worthless? Why can’t I study, just for the heck of it? I loved what I did in France for two years. I don’t regret it. Then why should people look at me with pity, when I say I am teaching French at the Alliance? Oh! So, you mean you have nothing better to do? They ask. Why is it so wrong for me to consider teaching a good enough option? Am I worthless because I am not a “professional” as others would see it?
All around me, I see parents stuffing their children with knowledge. I see 7-year-old kids studying feverishly for the “pre-annual model exam”. I see mothers fretting over the loss of a single mark in maths, or the relinquishing of the first rank to a neighbour. Is this all you want from your kids? Is it more important to get marks (and money later in life) then to think for yourself? What are we doing to our kids? Why can’t we just let them be kids? Why do we refuse to let them enjoy their already short-lived childhood? In the unlikely event that any parents are reading this, I have one request. Be proud of your kids for what they are. Don’t expect them to be what you could not be. If you wanted to be a doctor and failed to make the grade, don’t expect to make up by living that life through your child. You may be the parent, but the child is his own individual. Remember, everything in life is not what it appears to be. And sometimes, the ability to think out of the box can be a person’s greatest asset. We must take care not to damage that ability irreparably.