<img style="float: left;" title="Mayank Shekhar" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2022/oct/Mayank-op_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="84" />Like there are two Indias, there really are two Irans&mdash;although it&rsquo;s fair to suggest there are two &lsquo;every place&rsquo;, depending on how rich/powerful you are, and what you can get away with anyway.&nbsp;
But no, the &lsquo;two Irans&rsquo; seem a special case. Given the first thing you notice as you enter its capital Tehran (as I did over a decade ago)&mdash;is witness how dramatically distinct a society can be from the state that governs it! It feels unique. &nbsp;
By the state, I mean Islamic clerics, who rule with the iron-hand of religion, relegating their subjects behind an iron curtain. Being a man, the other men you meet in Tehran&mdash;majority of them young, walking around ruins that used to be nightclubs once&mdash;seem entirely pluralistic/secular, if not atheists, interested in fun, females, and football.&nbsp;
They&rsquo;re equally obsessed with the Internet, deeply curious to establish connect with the outside world. As I could tell with my host, Ali, who&rsquo;d taken days off from work, to give me company, and was in tears, when we finally bid goodbye at the metro. These Persian Muslim men, I noticed, make it a point to identify themselves as separate from Arabs.&nbsp;
What about the incredibly stylish women, besotted by shoes, and designer-label headscarves, in public&mdash;to make peace with black-uniformed &lsquo;moral police&rsquo; on streets? Guys tell you they wear &lsquo;the pants at home&rsquo;&mdash;the patriarchal term for who&rsquo;s the boss, when state-rules can&rsquo;t apply.&nbsp;
Also, more women than men attend college, and from advertisements on streets, they appear totally into martial arts as well&mdash;in every sense, merely reflecting the generations before them.
How did the present state come to be? All arrows point to the people&rsquo;s self-directed Iranian Revolution of 1979, which was a nationwide movement to dislodge the US-backed Shah of Iran. While the economy was tanking, their ruler was seen to be reveling in the riches. By all accounts, this mass uprising&mdash;led by Leftists, liberals, and what sounds like an oxymoron, Islamic-Leftists&mdash;had little to do with religion.
Only the person they replaced the Shah with, as a consensus candidate, was the Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled in Paris, to eventually establish the Islamic republic. He publicly offered representative democracy, returning power to the people, and for himself, a life of quiet retirement. Which isn&rsquo;t how it quite panned out.&nbsp;
And that may well be true, regardless, for when you mix religion with politics&mdash;all that remains then is religion! A society/economy is further doomed, I guess, if religion trumps rights of humans itself&mdash;unless you&rsquo;ve found oil under your feet, no?&nbsp;
For all of the dynast Shah&rsquo;s faults, he offered Iranians, personal freedoms&mdash;hardly ever interfering with what they wore, read, sang, wrote, serenaded, etc.&nbsp;
The Islamic dictatorship, over a monarchy, reversed that. Years of music archives were destroyed. Step by step, censorship in all aspects of life put in place&mdash;starting with the hijab (and dress-code) for women, introduced only for the workplace first, in 1981.&nbsp;
As the Persian master-director Majid Majidi told me, the Iranian Revolution also miraculously brought forth the &lsquo;Iranian New Wave&rsquo; in cinema&mdash;with filmmakers figuring alternative ways to express their humanism, instead: &ldquo;Until people began to watch films from Iran, they felt it was a harsh place. Their views changed drastically. Fanatics have nothing to do with Islam.&rdquo;&nbsp;
This artistic response, on the face of it was apolitical, in the sense of leaving the state alone. And that&rsquo;s because Majidi, a devout Muslim himself, still sees Iran&rsquo;s cultural-religious nationalism as a passing phase: &ldquo;Governments come and go. People remain. Films, unlike newspapers, don&rsquo;t get stale in a week. Cinema is made for generations.&rdquo;&nbsp;
Only that all religious fundamentalisms, while elementally competing against each other, appear to unanimously agree on one thing: the lower status of the woman still. Where was the brave pushback against such unhinged politico-religious power ever going to come from?&nbsp;
It was just so many women, I observed, at the protest headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, much after the Arab Spring, in 2012. Likewise the faces of the leaderless, social-media led, anti-CAA protests in New Delhi (2019-20) were women too.&nbsp;
Unsurprisingly, ones in Iran, to also boldly say they&rsquo;ve had enough of the moral police&mdash;responsible for the death of a suburban woman, Mahsa Amini, because she wasn&rsquo;t wearing her hijab right, at the Tehran metro.&nbsp;
Unaccounted hundreds have died in the anti-hijab/pro-choice protests since. Thousands arrested. Internet restricted. WhatsApp, Instagram banned.&nbsp;
But I&rsquo;ve been surrounded by Iranian women still, casually swiping, chatting with them, over days, since. How? On &lsquo;travel mode in Tehran&rsquo;, on a dating app! Given no defiance can be greater for a country, where a woman can&rsquo;t even be physically alone in the same room (not even in office), with a man, who&rsquo;s not her relative.&nbsp;
You travel across this digital world, under the radar, of sartorially liberated Persian women, in chilling/party/bikini pix&mdash;with bios that read, &ldquo;My life, my rules&rdquo;&mdash;you know something&rsquo;s gotta ultimately snap in the unsustainable, semi-schizophrenic chasm, between their private lives, and expectedly public selves.&nbsp;
&ldquo;The situation is bad. My country just wants to kill people,&rdquo; Mitra (name changed), 37, tells me. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the future?&rdquo; I ask Mitra. She drops a prayer emoji. I do the same.&nbsp;
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper
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What has Internet and Iran taught me about its nationwide, lethal/brave protests against the hijab?

Because the future is female…

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Because the future is female…

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