When the Pressure Cooker (finally) Whistled

I have been using food-related anecdotes to begin and flavour many a personal/political story. Yet I know that this loaded metaphor is often used by those whose politics, or lack thereof I am trying to contest.

All the 'ethnic' food and leisure precincts that have sprung up in Australian capital cities in the last decade or so are such battlegrounds of meaning-making. First, there are the store-owners who may have arrived as students, and after struggling to bust the proverbial bamboo ceiling in their chosen field, they decide to set up a small business. Then, they are trying to cater to not just their own regionally or linguistically defined community, but also fellow 'ethnics' who may use similar ingredients, as well as the occasional curious 'outsiders' who may want to cook up a curry for their exotic new date, or try aloe Vera juice recommended by their nutritional coach. Finally, outside of this neat business-client relationship are a wide range of actors and agents attempting to claim this space for their own ends. The community leaders get photographed in the area for a particular festival - this is published in the community paper which is placed in stacks at the store counter and next to the DVD aisle - this is then digitised and publicised through various social media networks - which then gives an impression of the area to bigger players, mostly local politicians. The story then goes that a string of stores of a particular kind justifies using pretty little titles:  'Little India', 'Little Vietnam', 'Little Italy'. This serves the dual purpose of keeping these precincts from getting 'big', and also showcasing the 'multiculturalism' of the thriving, dynamic metropolis.

This showcasing is not just akin to putting on a display for aesthetic reasons. There is a particular marketing of ethnic difference by all parties involved that goes largely unquestioned in the celebratory pho and falafel picture that is painted of multiculturalism. Sure, the people involved in the transaction talk to each other, but one is usually identified as the Asian, and the other as the cosmopolitan consumer. I recall a particular episode of the ABC2 series 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' where a white resident of Cronulla shows his solidarity with the local Lebanese community during the infamous riots in 2005 by going and eating at a nearby falafel shop. It is also reminiscent of the 'Vindaloo against Violence' movement that was started by a bunch of well-meaning Melburnians in the aftermath of the attacks on Indian students in their city in 2009-2010. I am heartened that there are those in our cities who value fellow residents who may not hail from the same ethnic or class background, but also bothered that their picture of these people is a picture of their 'authentic food'.

This brings me to why I have resisted learning to cook my own authentic food for so long. It was not just a case of wanting to display more cosmopolitan tastes by declaring that I was better at baking that at making curry. Weak sinuses and a revulsion to hot food meant that onions and chilli - two essential ingredients in a wide variety of Indian meals - were replaced with shallots and paprika in my culinary inventions. I also took great pride in adding French and Italian cheeses where they don't traditionally belong. Fancy some bocconcini on your yellow dal? I highly recommend it. Fuck tradition. It should go in the waste, not the recycle bin.

Except I was embarrassed when a fellow Indian friend stayed over one night, and was surprised that most of the spices in my pantry had either expired or were unopened. I went on to buy not just brand new fragrant masalas, but also a fancy little steel set to store them in. They now take pride of place on my tiny kitchen bench, and sit happily amidst pie pans and Tia Maria. Because of their high visibility, and during a recent amorous/domesticated life phase, I used them rather frequently to cook up everything from my favourite red kidney beans (rajma) to the humble but delicious okra (bhindi). Still, the pressure cooker my mother got me a few years ago remained out of reach on a higher shelf and gathered dust in its unused emptiness. Would using the pressure cooker be my ultimate cosmopolitan test? Did I not need to know the rules first to bend and mend them?

On my way back from work one day, I stopped at a Nepalese grocery store to stock up on their steaming fresh momos. I then remembered that I was out of my usual lentils that cooked quickly. Failing to find them in this store, I picked another kind, vaguely knowing in my gut that they might require more patience, and perhaps even more tradition. They stayed bundled up all semester long, until I realised the time was nigh to get tips from my mum, and get that pressure cooker off the not-so-reachable heights. My first attempt at using it was a classic fail - putting the cooker on high heat to try and get it to whistle quicker. It ended up making most of the water evaporate! For my second go, I was gentler and practiced slower cooking and more generous seasoning. The results were probably still not authentic enough (soupy, yet not mushy like a curry), but I was reasonably sure that I had passed my own pressure cooker of a test.

The pressure test for Australian multiculturalism in the present day is not dissimilar. There needs to be an exercise of personal and collective agency on the behalf of the migrant communities that affirms their cultural history, and also allows them to experiment with new forms of belonging in shared spaces. This allowance is also something that needs to become part of media and political discourse - where the trajectory of particular cuisines is recognised, but not covered in cling wrap so it can't breathe. Our communal whistle emanating from this pressure cooker may take a while, but it could be a delicious brew that transcends both capitalist logic and vote-bank politics.

The 21-Step Guide on How to Avoid Marking

1. Write a blog post on how to avoid marking
2. Tell yourself that this is merely 'creative procrastination'
3. Do every Myers-Briggs Facebook quiz on your personality type (guess mine!)
4. Plan a documentary on cosmopolitanism in suburbia
5. Begin shooting said documentary
6. Read about cosmopolitanism
7. Read about urban diversity
8. Plan to write a prosaic book on the poetics of space
9. Realise it has already been written
10. Wonder why you didn't realise your dream of being a foreign correspondent
11. Picture yourself in war-torn region, holding a microphone
12. Justify the non-realisation of above dream by blaming the GFC
13. And digital media for shrinking old-fashioned journalism budgets
14. Until you feel like you sound like your student who wants to be a newsreader
15. And that you are probably too neurotic to be 'neutral' in a war zone
16. Although you wish you did more than just research and write and teach
17. This is not a career quiz, but you are a 'creative documentarian'
18. Who need not worry about the academic and the creative battling away
19. And rest assured can get back to the pile of marking
20. With the hope that clever words may be inching closer and closer
21. To the heart of the latest worthwhile matter.

Coming Out of...the Good Girl Closet

All I feel like doing these days, after a rather hectic teaching semester, and a rather emotionally turbulent last few months, is couch-surfing with an easy yet insightful read while listening to 'late night jazz' on Spotify and sipping lemon and ginger tea. If out with friends, the tea is replaced with red wine, but my headspace remains in the same easy-breezy couch mode. I have found that this is rather conducive to revealing the full spectrum of my personality to those new in my life (this is the vast majority of people I interact within a daily basis as I only moved to New South Wales a year and a half ago).

What do I mean by the 'full spectrum'? Trust me, I am not being deliberately obscure. It both surprised and amused me when a farewell card given to me by former colleagues had a number of them proclaiming they would miss my calm and cool presence. Yet, I am pretty sure that those on the same floor as me, or next door to me, wouldn't necessarily describe me as even-tempered. A few others even expressed their interest in finding out how I established a social life so quickly in a new city! This, for a socially shy person, was an even bigger surprise! I wondered what of myself I was projecting, or if all of this was largely a matter of perception.

I have little idea of how my new work-mates perceive me. I do know that I am more interested than ever in tearing down the good girl facade. I recall a friend in high school telling me that she thought of me as a 'goody two shoes' when she observed me from a distance, but changed her view entirely when we became close. I turned out to be the irreverent one, hiding Ayn Rand's 'Fountainhead' under my Maths textbook.

Of course I don't need a camouflage anymore - there are no parents or teachers to please in adult life. There are bosses and colleagues, but one can only go so far with facades. I can see how they served an important end in my first proper academic job. As a 27-year old in a coveted position, I wanted to look and feel the part. That is possibly why and how I pulled off coming across as calm and collected,  the general opposite of my artistic and volatile self. I also made friends out of the sheer desperation of not knowing anyone in a new city. In my latest abode, I have seldom gone out of my way to be social. Instead, I have chosen to listen to whatever rhythm my body is sounding out, veering between intimacy and solitude. I have still made friends - only slowly, and I hope more organically. Most think of me as busy and crazy rather than calm. I can live with that!

Smells Fishy: Cosmopolitanism in Australian Suburbia

I came to live in a BIG city, not an ethnic ghetto

The Palm Sunday rally in support of refugees, Sydney CBD

With apologies to all those who are offended by the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘ghetto’ placed next to each other. I will not call on my right to be a bigot here; rather, I will call upon that form of postcolonial political correctness aptly termed ‘strategic essentialism’. Perhaps my new inner-city latte leftie status renders that defense null and void! Truth is, at the ripe old age of 30, I still like to think that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is not merely the preserve of the intellectual and cultural elites. And, I only have anecdotal evidence to prove it. What a bad scholar!

So, almost six months ago, I made the brave decision to abandon my North Wollongong apartment (with roomy bedrooms, a living area where you could distinguish the kitchen from the dining and lounge rooms, a balcony of real proportions, and only minutes to the beach and university). You see, I craved to live in a ‘big city’ - it was almost as though the ‘small’ places I had lived in thus far in Australia (Brisbane and Adelaide before Wollongong) were bringing on some kind of premature maturity. Again, I intend to cause no offense to all those south-east Queenslanders who consider Brisbane the big end of town!

During my eleven months in Wollongong, I would make frequent weekly and weekend trips to Sydney to get my big-city fix. I fondly remember those days of getting misty-eyed at the sights of the tunnels of Central Station, or heaving a sigh of relief on reading the ‘Welcome to Sydney’ sign when approaching the Sutherland Shire on my drive down from the Gong. In all fairness, the suburb of Thirroul, just eight kilometres north of Wollongong, is probably more ‘gentrified’ than the Shire, but the latter’s proximity to inner-city Sydney mattered more in those days. I think it is time for another apology - pardon me, current and former residents of Sutherland. Your beaches are formidable, but they are just not for me!

I am certain that I saw much more of the Sydney metropolitan area in those days of living in Wollongong. I wouldn’t hesitate then to catch a late train back from a Sydney Festival gig at Parramatta, or hop on the line to see friends in Chatswood, or drive ‘all the way’ to Ryde for a seminar at Macquarie. In the last few months, nestled ridiculously close to a major inner west train station, I barely venture beyond a two-kilometre radius of my tiny one-bedroom unit. When the coffee shop across the road from my place displayed a ‘closing down’ sign, I was mortified. Now I would have to walk a few hundred metres further for my morning fix! Yet, I was also half-happy at turning into a smug Sydneysider. I had heard that this was a stereotype I could use in public, and even wear as a badge of honour.

Still, I ventured into foreign territory - Manly, Cockatoo Island, Kings Cross - mostly for street photography-related escapades. I even attempted a short drive to Kogarah to get specialised Indian grocery items and conduct ‘ethnographic research’ for a research article. Last Saturday, I took the train to Parramatta to attend a community briefing on proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act. Yes, I was a little skeptical that the session was intended for ‘subcontinental communities’, as opposed to being directed to the residents of Parramatta and surrounds at large. Still, someone was doing something and I was willing to cross the mighty inner western frontier to get to it.

I know I am too new here to complain about the ethnic ghettoisation of Sydney. I do love this Harbour city - public infrastructure issues, dirty politics, and all. I like the idea of ‘having the option’ to travel to this or that suburb to sample food and click away to urban photographic glory. However, when the opportunity came up over Easter to travel with a friend to the Villawood Detention Centre, I cancelled at the last minute. I could give you a million reasons for saying no - ranging from not being emotionally ready to not knowing anyone inside (I have since arranged to register as a ‘Villawood Vollie’ and go through an induction process). Most of my reasonable excuses at the time were reflective of a geographical and psychological inertia that I have come to inhabit since moving to Sydney. Memories of lives past punctuate once in a while to interrupt and disrupt this tendency towards inertness.

Perhaps I am over-reacting in conflating this with the sort of inaction or apathy that has contributed to bringing down socially progressive political regimes in certain parts of the world. But then again, the personal is political, and I moved to the big smoke so I could partake of its largesse - the concerts and the marches, the holes in the wall and the Victorian tea rooms, the groovy festivals and the daggy train stations. Sometimes I overhear the most cosmopolitan conversations at my local Vietnamese grocery store or onboard a train to a suburban destination. Maybe those of us who inhabit the proverbial cultural centre sometimes become so contained as to become a ghetto unto ourselves. While there is no harm in living close to one’s kith and kin, there is a lot to be gained from occasionally moving through seemingly uncomfortable frontiers, if only to see how the bigots live up there.

Rape and the Media: Beyond Taboos and Partial Truths

 

During a short stint at a prestigious undergraduate college at Delhi University in 2002, I and a number of my peers were shocked to hear a public figure’s advice on how to avoid sexual harassment when taking public transport in the city. “Just dress like a boy”, she told us, unreflective of the misogynistic message she was sending to young urban women. Most of these women, you see, were aspiring to be mobile career people, unhindered by the dogmas and archaic gender dynamics of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

In April 2012, when visiting another prominent South Delhi institution, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) for an international conference, I was struck with the high levels of campus activism and gender sensitivity in the postgraduate cohort. I also happened to be monitoring the nation’s numerous, and culturally powerful English-language television news networks for my postdoctoral research project (funded by Professor Graeme Turner’s ARC Federation Fellowship). Again, I noticed a remarkable increase in the featuring of previously taboo gender-related issues on prime time news, as well as talk shows on political and social subjects.

To give you a snapshot of the kinds of stories that were making headlines, these included the battering of baby girls by their fathers in lower and middle class homes in big metropolitan cities, gang rapes of minor girls, and reports on the failings of public schooling. In May of the same year, Bollywood superstar with a difference, Aamir Khan, brought such issues more conspicuously into the public and media spotlight by starring in and producing a 13-part Oprah-style chat show called ‘Satyamev Jayate’ (or, the truth always triumphs). The series had an overwhelmingly positive, class-transcending response, with the very first episode on the high prevalence of female foeticide dissuading hundreds from sex determination tests.

So what has changed in middle class India and its media in the last decade? And does the western world’s thinking about contemporary India reflect this change?

Many detractors would err on the side of political correctness, and argue that it is not even possible to talk about one India, let alone speak of this India as undergoing youthful, self-initiated, introspective social transformation. However, when I met Shoma Chaudhury, editor of leading news magazine ‘Tehelka’ at the Storyology conference in Sydney in July this year, she too noted that the tenor of the recent anti-rape movement was markedly different from previous instances of orchestrated civil society protests (such as the anti-corruption movement in 2011). Another visiting journalist, Mannu Joseph, told me that this was due to a vast increase in the number of young women working in the Indian media.

So, while empowered female media professionals are taking the reins in terms of spotlighting gender issues, and young urban audiences are clamouring for a shift in media and societal values, the media in the west seems to be taking its time to adjust its orientalist framings of this now transitioning society. Most stories on major world news satellite networks reported on the anti-rape protests, and the recent conviction of the four accused with nuance and adequate contextual information. There were even those that rated the Delhi reportage and responses as more gender-progressive than the victim-blaming discourse of the Steubenville rape case around the same time by the major US news networks.

However, some western media commentary began to give the impression that India was not safe place to visit for female tourists, and painted South Asian men with a rather broad, and a rather unflattering brushstroke. Noteworthy amongst these was the recent account of a University of Chicago exchange student who allegedly suffered constant sexual harassment, and was diagnosed with a traumatic disorder on her return home. This was followed by the account of an African-American student on the same trip who had similar experiences, but added that she also met Indian men who were extremely kind and supportive.

While giving a talk at a student feminist society at the University of Wollongong, I was asked how west-based feminists could support the movement in India. The answer lies not in telling people what to do, I replied, but in staying well-informed, looking past stereotypes, and expressing solidarity.