Make the men answer

The recent attack on a woman actor in Kerala has shaken the state. Both government and employers, including the film industry, are accountable on women’s safety

for your co-workers. This is normally missing for women professionals on other sets; how will the men know what the other sex goes through unless they engage with them? Employers in the film industry have to get gender-friendly; else, not many would risk being in front of or behind the camera.

However, even on a gender-equal set, there is no clear idea about what kind of support the fraternity can provide if an untoward incident takes place. I recollect how, in my early years, a popular director ignored a young woman’s complaint of a driver feeling her up — not only was she asked to overlook it, the same driver continued to ferry her around for the next 15 days. As a 20-year-old, it caused me tremendous discomfort, but I was too naïve to figure out what could be done.

A decade later, with a fashionable NYU degree and Vishakha guidelines backing me, I still don’t know what the recourse is. It isn’t just me who’s ignorant on this; AMMA (Association of Malayalam Movie Artists) members have been circulating emotional emails on how to support our recentlyattacked colleague. But we should get real — being physically violated in any manner is a heinous criminal offence. As an industry which contributes significantly to the economy, shouldn’t Vishakha guidelines be as applicable to this industry as it is to others?

C R Sasikumar I was asked to write this piece as I have always travelled alone, sans parents, bodyguards and all the trumpets surrounding us stars. I respect and continue to trust all the drivers who have clocked miles with me. But let me confess — that never happened organically. It happened at the cost of being extracautious about what I wear, what time I travel, how I talk — doing all that a female is expected to do to survive in this country in a sane and safe manner. As a matter of fact, as I write this piece, a female colleague and I are juggling diverse permutations to find the safest way to travel from Wayanad to Calicut to catch a 6:30 a.m. flight.

Seven decades after Independence, it’s shameful that the polity of India defines a woman’s “boldness” by her decision to travel alone. It is high time the government — and our employers — come together on a war footing to find comprehensive solutions that are implemented vigourously, and not just announce a slew of measures for which non-outcome-based budget lines are created amidst a media outcry. It is also high time that the women of this country held their employers and government accountable, through their vigilance — and their votes.

The writer is a National Award-winning film actor, dancer and public policy researcher. Views are personal I HAVE quoted from this book in the past, but there is no harm in doing so again. This quote is from Alexander Campbell’s The Heart of India, published abroad in 1958. The book is “banned” in India. The word “ban” is often used loosely. This book has never been published or printed in India. The ban (Customs notification No. 49, dated March 11, 1959) is on imports into the country. It is an extremely patronising book, though that should hardly be a reason for a ban. There is a section about a meeting with Vaidya Sharma of the ministry of planning. “He (Vaidya Sharma) put away the housing development papers and talked again about the Five-year Plan. ‘We have now entered the period of the second Plan. The first Plan built up our food resources; the second Plan will lay the foundations for the rapid creation of heavy industry. Delhi, as the capital of India, will play a big part, and we are getting ready to shoulder the burden. We are going to build a big central stationery depot, with a special railway-siding of its own. There will be no fewer than 12 halls, each covering 2,000 square feet. They will be storage halls’, and, said Sharma triumphantly, ‘we calculate that the depot will be capable of an annual turnover of 1,400 tons of official forms, forms required for carrying out the commitments of the second Five-year Plan!’”

Richard Mahapatra is the Managing Editor and publisher of Down to Earth. In the current issue (February 16-28 2017), he writes, “Many old-timers, gathered around a Murphy Richards transistor in a library, would react to the approval of the five-year plan, as a grave voice of the newsreader would inform about allocations. In colleges, the economics professors would read out the new priorities to students and often, shyly, hint at lucrative academic opportunities and new subjects for applying for scholarships. Not going into the details of whether planned development did any good or harm to India, the five-year plans were always good experiences.”

I will not get into the merits/demerits of planned development, not only in terms of historical context, but also its continued relevance/irrelevance. (In view of the Campbell quote, perhaps I should have said reverence/irreverence.) As students, we were reverently taught, and studied, plan models. I don’t know if this reflects my jaundiced view, but the charm of plan models probably died out with the Fourth Plan (1969-74), at best, the Fifth (1974-78). Once rolling plans (1978-80) got going, plan models gathered moss. Incidentally, the number of equations in any plan model was almost entirely driven by the computing power one could rustle up.

In our student days, we rarely read plan documents and we certainly didn’t read annual reports of the Planning