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Unorganised mein hi maza hai

Updated on: 10 March,2019 07:06 AM IST  |  Mumbai
Paromita Vohra | paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

Unorganised maza was something I was tasting after a while, as so many events about women gender feminism take on a corporate or academic format nowadays

Unorganised mein hi maza hai

Illustration/Ravi Jadhav

Paromita VohraUnorganised mein hi maza hai!" said N, who is part of a feminist organisation that has been carrying out a Women's Day talk series at Vadodra University for four years, to a hall packed with young people. Everyone cheered and clapped, even though we were running late because of the inevitable technical dramas that accompany non-corporate events. "But we're here together, that's the fun!" she added. "Celebrating that we're different, but not unconnected, no?"


Unorganised maza was something I was tasting after a while, as so many events about women, gender, feminism take on a corporate or academic format nowadays. A little while earlier, all dressed up, our earrings dangly, our pallus and dupattas colourful but not very neat, our hands full of tripods and rolled up posters and thailis we had got into a car, then climbed out, perplexed because when coaxed to start, the car would emanate plaintive beeps. "I think she has heated up" said N.


The car was pushed to the side of the road, colleagues were called for back-up. "Ya! It happens to her sometimes" said someone in a low voice, as if to not offend 'her'. After a bit we gave it another go.


The car started and we quickly called to cancel back-up and then hiccupped down the road. The car was old and our route curly wurly - or maybe that was the driving. Soon as signs for our event appeared, becoming more frequent as we approached, the car-stress was forgotten in our exclamations of "wow! Logistics team has done too good haan!"

I feel like I've been in many such cars with quirks, with many such humorously gritty women, not just around the country, but the world. Perhaps we can call this feminist jugaad - resources cheerfully taken as found, then extended and managed to make things happen, with some vim, vigour and jollying, or more sentimentally put, with some "saathi haath badhana" and making do. After all, new things don't happen if you just do what's easy.

At the event, a college band sang some feminist songs, including the now iconic Mann ke Manjeere. It seems there hasn't been another such song which emerged from feminist initiatives and entered the mainstream and popular space. Not surprising, because the mainstream has smoothly subsumed the alternative and given it a makeover.

Nothing reveals this as much as Women's Day which, when it is not celebrating some vaguely new-age womanhood wherein all women are awesome (we're not), prefers to airbrush or 'organise' feminism into inspirational linear narratives; well-lit tale of individual growth.

It's not that individual journeys aren't important - because their emotional granularity prevents social change ideas from being glib, simplistic and disconnected from life. But, their soft-focus close-ups leave out the wider view which includes collectives, overlapping histories and intersectionalities. They sanitise the social tension, the structural realities of class, caste and discrimination out of these stories.

The maza of the 'unorganised' – the more untidy, the less packaged feminism, includes the fact of more uneven journeys but also a stress on reshaping privilege, encountering difference and expanding the limits of freedom for everyone and not just yourself. It's a difficult maza, not effortlessly consumable. But there is something sustaining about what is effortfully consumed and how it nourishes us from within for a long time to come.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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