Friday, July 7, 2006
Blips in the buzz of static
Last evening I went to the Blank Noise tea party in Malleswaram.
I first come across Blank Noise at Jasmeen Patheja’s graduation exhibition at Srishti in Jan 2004. The impression then was of distinct hostility. The campaign was against eve-teasing, or specifically, sexual harassment of women by men. I was male (heck, I still am). Was I one of the targets of the campaign? Jasmeen is an attractive woman. One look is all you’d need to want to invite her out to coffee. I admit, I wanted to. And yet, there she was in her basement setup, surrounded by exhibits that amounted to saying I would be precisely the kind of person she was targeting if I dared make a move. It was scary. How was I supposed to sympathise with her cause when a Potential Offender label hung overhead?
I came away uneasy.
Jasmeen’s kept at her project beyond gradution, gathered a team of volunteers, indulged in direct action activism, made leaders out of her team (hi Chinmayee, Hemangini), spawned initiatives in other cities, and — if you will recall the Blank Noise Blogathon a few months ago — has created a fairly remarkable initiative. It may not be a household name yet, but it’s not obscure either.
All the while, my reservations remained. The entire approach seemed superficial, like a knee-jerk reaction, attacking the symptoms instead of the cause. How many offenders would you have to scald before you ran out of them? How long could her volunteers fuel the fire?
I met Jasmeen again at a party late last year. There would have been no reason for her to remember me but for that we were both on the Sarai Independent Fellowship last year. I had been studying the effects of user interface design on community formation. She wanted help with her blog and forthcoming website.
For various reasons, we didn’t follow up until this March when Nishant and I finally met her. We had been working on conceptualising community oriented sites (including two ongoing projects) and had some insights that we thought would be useful to her. My unease had since been tempered by a realisation of the pressing need for what she was doing. I’ve been “eve-teased” myself. I used to have chest-length hair a few years ago. When wearing a helmet, I could easily pass for a girl. Boys on bikes would regularly overtake me to turn around and peer into my visor. Sometimes recognition and shock would register. These irritating incidents made me realise what the other half must regularly experience in a world that’s perfectly normal to my XY-type. It has been a growing awareness since.
I’m also given to understand now that my reservations weren’t unique. Her team is aware of the criticisms to their approach and seeking to transcend to dealing with the causes, but for one little problem: nobody really knows what the causes are. Sure, you and I can argue all we want about how one cultural factor or the other is responsible, but unless it is careful research that has survived scrutiny and debate, we’ll just argue endlessly. It’ll take generations for attitude changes to propagate down to our children’s upbringing, while women continue to get harassed on our streets. Blank Noise has a need to deal with the problem now. Worrying about effectiveness and deeper change comes after.
As Yashas Chandra put it at the gathering yesterday, they’re hacking society’s attitudes, one little bit at a time. Power to them. As for the revamped website, that must unfortunately wait for funding.