HEART 2 HEART (Herald March 26) By Ethel Da Costa Women must play hardball!
Diksha Mayenkar. Jyoti Masurkar. Uma Naik. Shushila Chandrakant Gawas. Melita Manuel Afonso. Carolina Raul Po. Maria Regina Almeida. Ruth Surendra Furtado. Varsha Haldankar. Vivina Gokuldas Nasnodkar. Vaidehi Vivek Naik. CCP corporators chosen by the power of the ballot box, lending much weight to the right to VOTE representatives into decision making political board rooms. Tina Ambani. Nita Ambani. Parmeshwar Godrej. Maureen Wadia. Simone Tata. Pallavi Dempo. Dipti Salgaocar. Anju Timblo. High priestesses of the corporate universe, married into influential business families, where MONEY makes the world go round. Shobhaa De. Amy Fernandes. Anuradha Mahindra. Shefalee Vasudev. Barkha Dutt. Payal Kohli. Ayn Rand. Naomi Wolf. Arundhati Roy....putting ink to words, print to opinion for a generation of women in MEDIA. This is not a March 8 post-mortem, because women should learn to celebrate their lives everyday. Hence I can say this with confidence, this is a harbinger to the revolution of power feminism, where women are surely beginning to bite and bite hard I hope they do in the years to come.
Whether it is Dr Savita Kerkar giving a new, modern, secular twist to the tradition bound Hindu ceremony like `Haldi Kumkum' by inviting women to her home and giving each one of them a fruit bearing sapling to promote the virtues of protecting Mother Nature; or Asha Vernekar taking AIDS education into the homes of rural folk; or Chaya Gawas from Saleli leading a non-violent hunger strike in protest of the riots to empower her community in the midst of mindless blood cries. Simple women awakened by the spirit of the conscious. No heavy-duty intellectual mumbo-jumbo fed by rabid activists unmoved by the vagaries of the human spirit (you remember the fear-stricken faces of little children at Baina during the evacuation of commercial sex workers and the impotency of the Women's Commission to lobby for a humane displacement of residence?) Faceless women who go about with their brand of feminism without breast-beating.
My brand of power feminism means looking at, analysing, acknowledging all of the obstacles that we know are there and then identifying, accounting for and using your power to put pressure on the institutions, to transform the society, to create true equality for woman. Every small step counts, first by beginning with the way we think. Feminism accounts for playing hardball with female clout where it counts, which is in three areas - votes, money and media. Women are a majority in India and Goa. The vote in a democratic society is extraordinary. It is the women who must realize the potential of their numbers and vote and lobby to choose effective leaders, who in turn can be directed to work towards framing better laws for women. This relevant now because the Indian woman is slowly waking up to shed her marginal secondary status, realizing that it is her choices that determines consumer trends, the strength of the rupee, the health of the country, and the quality of our politics. This is power feminism. Noticing and building on that. Once women realize their potential as a collective, we can determine the economics of money politics. Where and how we choose to spend, on us, the family, children, education, health care, travel, industry, and the nature of employment opportunities that roll back as a consequence.
I've worked long enough in the media to understand the nature and quality of our reportage. From being told to report only on the `beautiful people' and `no cows please,' the hogwash of Page 3 and the striptease of belonging to the `Who's Who' brigade, to working solo on campaigns that talk about change, action and responsibility. The latter has made up for the heat burn we sustain as components of a wheel powered by the greenbacks of advertising. The media hardly talks to the rural women (because they don't make pretty pictures?). The media rarely addresses issues on a sustained beat about women bearing the brunt of unequal distribution of prosperity. The media can and must work to empower the rural woman to exercise her right to vote, to decide the quality of her rupee and give her an expression through instruments of meaningful media. It is time to learn new ways for the woman to create a complete transformation of the political landscape as a majority, to demand and determine the use of our power. To take that leap into understanding that we are not, in a democratic system, an oppressed minority, at the mercy of others. That when we use our power - we are not even in the co-pilots seat, we are flying the plane. Dare to try?
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