Discussing Rape in Conflict and How Men Can Help

Feminist activist from around the globe gathered for a discussion panel with six leaders of The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict attempting to answer the question “Is it possible to stop rape in conflict?”

The event, held in the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center on Monday, featured two of the six living female Nobel Peace Laureates, Dr. Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams. Ebadi was award the prize in 2003 for her fight to protect human rights in Iran. Williams won in 1997 for her International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Rounding out the panel were Patricia Guerrero, director of the League of Displaced Women in Colombia; Susanna Sirkin, creator of Physicians for Human Rights’ Program against Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones; and Dr. Denis Mukwege, founder of Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the few hospitals in the region that treats rape victims.

Before the discussion began, feminist author Robin Morgan offered some context, reminding the mostly female audience that, “there is a direct correlation between the violence of a state and the treatment of it’s women”.

Guerroro discussed how rape is a part of the power struggle in Columbia.

Ebadi explained how female political prisoners in Iran are raped in jail to further humiliate them.

Mukwege shared stories of mass rape in the DRC, where women, sometimes 300 or more, are raped in village centers.

“Rape is not just a weapon of war, but a strategy of war” he said.

Mukwege has performed approximately 15,000 operations on women for rape related injuries.  

Rape in patriarchal societies becomes a way to insult the males, explains Ebadi, “part of our work is to change this culture.”

The only male member of the panel, Mukwege encouraged other men to speak out against rape.

Audience member Joanna Hoffman, from Women Deliver, appreciated this appeal saying, “By not speaking up, [men] contribute to the silencing that often happens.”

Moving forward, the initiative intends to mobilize males.

“One component of the campaign will be male leaders who will publically discuss a man’s role in intervening,” said Birkin. 

Mumbai Music

I grew up living in a city of 20.5 million people, living in 230 square miles. Thirty two percent are living under the poverty line, surviving, on less that a dollar a day. The human spirit is literally palpable in the heavy humid air of Bombay, an odorous mix of sweat and the city.

My best friend, a born and bred New Yorker who moved to Bombay when she was twelve, now acts as a faux advisor to fellow foreigners. She tells the incoming immigrants how you have to tune out the sound of the starving. The begging taps on the car window, homeless children playing in the street, you have to forget about the melody of Mumbai for a while.

The high school we went to, the American School of Bombay, was for all of the city’s foreign nationals or expat Indians (other Indians who’d forgotten how to be Indian like me). It was in what would be considered a commercial district. Large open grounds with a few shiny business buildings springing out of them. It was where the stock exchange was, two of the most well known private schools, and the new U.S. embassy was in construction. Yet none of these is what the neighborhood was known for. A few blocks from our school is Dharavi, with an estimated population of between 600 thousand and over a million people, they can’t really say for sure. So, every day when we would leave school through security gates, where security was Indian men wearing U.S. flag pins on their uniforms, and take the drive home. There was always a red light at the end of the road, and in Bombay a red light means you turn away from the windows, and ready yourself for the possibly barrage of the poor. Near one of the largest slums in Asia, this light always guarantees them. That combined with rush hour traffic, meant a good five minutes at this light every school day. This is why my friend has learned so well how to tune out the tapping.

My friend had another way to survive the constant guilt. We had another rule. If we ever had food or drinks when we arrived at the light, we would hand them out the window immediately. We road home together after some sport practice, and as always the light caught us. A young boy, he looked twelve but with the malnutrition the children growing up in slums face he could have easily been fifteen or sixteen. He left a group of younger children and tapped on our car window. The moment we heard it my friend pointed at the large plastic bottle of water I had been drinking since after practice. I handed it to him immediately. He smiled, his eyes shown slightly hazel, blending with his tanned brown skin. But before he sipped the bottle, he took it over the young boys he had been standing with, making sure everyone one of them got the water they craved. By the time the bottle got to him, there wasn’t a drop left. Still he smiled, holding hands with the youngest boys and walking away down the side of the road.

My friend hadn’t noticed the aftermath of our gift, and I didn’t know how to begin explaining it to her. How sometimes the symphony of life holds hidden moments of joy, and that sometimes you have to open up blocked ears or you’ll miss the magic of the music.

From Bollywood to Russia (With Love)

A few days ago I was sitting in the room of my Azerbaijani friend Anar. Amidst other mindless catching we somehow land on the subject of Bollywood, the Indian film industry named after my home town Bombay.

"I've told you how Disco Dancer is my mother's favorite movie, right?" he said and began singing a song from the 1982 film, "Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy."

Let me put this into context. It would like travelling to Thailand to teach English, and finding your students in the small province of Chang Rai have not only heard of Across the Universe, but have their own critiques of each Beatles cover in the film.

I was floored.

Anar then explained the story behind his insider knowledge of the Indian film industry. When his mother was growing up in Azerbaijan, and indeed during much of his early life as well, the country was still part of the Soviet Union. In the USSR, as we all know, the West was the ultimate evil. In addition to no economic exchange, no culture was allowed to pass from the West to the East. So the films that were shown in movie halls all across the Soviet Union were imported from India. Bollywood movies have always been a celebration of color, melodramatic but never to be taken to seriously, and at no time in the film industries history was this truer than the 1980s. So Gorbachev placated his harrowed population with loud songs and disco dancing.

I thought of my own mother. When she was a child, growing up in Calcutta, India, Sound of Music was her favorite movie. Movies would only play on the weekend, she told me once. Her earliest childhood memories are of piling the whole family into a small, old Fiat and driving to the movie theater to see Sound of Music. She's fifty one years old now, and can still describe these trips with perfect accuracy.

Cinema, as a cornerstone of pop culture, is often considered a limited concept. Movies, only matter to those who's language they're in, or to those who live in the countries they're set it. It's so easy to assume that  the films of a nation stay within only that nation. I think it's because we forget that films, like most other art forms, are just stories. And stories are always something to be shared, whether it's across coffee tables or continents. 

On Music

There’s an ocean colored wall in Germany where the drain-pipes are placed so precisely that when rain water sprinkles from the skies, it provides a musical melody for passersby. It’s called the Funnel Wall and it’s located at the Kunsthof-Passage in Neustadt.
I’ve always envied the way music can be pleasing in all stages of it’s creation. Listening to musicians make their art can be magical. I can sit for hours listening to friends strumming their guitars. They start with simple notes, slowly adding slides and bends, building, shaping, spilling songs from their minds into their fingers. It’s like getting a glimpse of the journey they take before arriving at their destination.
Music can exist in the most miniscule of moments. All it takes is a few notes in just the right combination to convey even the most complex of emotions. Some friends of mine and I were listening to the Beatles the other day. One them commented on George Harrison’s title choice.
“I love how a guitar can weep, moan and howl,” he said.

It’s true, a guitar can guilt trip, a sax can be sexy, and violins can get violent. There’s an odd emotion instruments can carry in between notes. Music can move. A solo can make you shake sometimes. A favorite song can feel like a hug from an old friend. Music that moves exists only when the artist says something rather than does a series of trained actions. It’s not just the sound of a valve opening and closing, or a string being strummed but the placement of pauses and the communication of something more. One of my favorite song lyrics aptly explains this something more, “music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger break down and cry”.
I think that’s what gives music such universality; everyone understands the emotion embodied in a note. We’re constantly exposed to new instruments we’ve never heard of. Yet, even those who’ve never set foot in Africa can understand the doldrums if played on a djembe. Music has an ability to transcend culture, creed, ethnicity, or whatever other barriers human create to close themselves off from each other. That makes it the most successful method of communication I’ve ever seen, or, in this case, heard.

Family

I woke up to a text message from my mother this this morning; “to let you know, Brishbua passed away this peacefully on Ganesh morning”. Bua, in Hindi, means paternal sister. It’s one of those things I’ve always loved about my language, how every familial relation has a word. There’s not just aunts and uncles, there’s a specific word for our fathers younger brother (Chachu), or your mother’s sister-in-law (Mami). Everyone is given a title, their rightful place in the family tree.

Brish bua was my grandfather’s oldest sister, the grand aunt. My grandfather was the youngest brother of five sisters so our frequent family reunions were run by the matriarchs. Brish bua was the queen of these, always the older sister. Yet, she never had the imposing qualities most family heads hold. She was a small woman in her late seventies, wrinkled like an old tree, every line a short story in a life well lived. She would always speak softly, to the extent that half your time talking to her would be spent leaning in closer.

Growing up, my brother and I would be taken to her home every few weeks for a Sunday brunch between all the family members who currently lived in Bombay. The first thing I’d always notice walking into her house was the shoes. All the shoes of the arrivals would be piled up in the foyer, right by the door. There were never less than 20 pairs, some segments of the family attempting organizes, pairing their shoes in neat lines. Others, like us, just left our shoes wherever we could find the space. This wasn’t a new sight; I saw the parade of shoes every time we entered a party or gathering in Bombay. Shoes were always taken off at the doorway, so as not to bring outside dirt into our homes. But still they were the first thing I would look at walking into Brish bua’s home. I’d use them to try and get a gauge on who was already here. When I was younger I’d look for other shoes from the kids section, trying to find the cousins and avoid the grown ups. Now I just looked at the shoes themselves, as a collective, realizing slowly that only one pair of those seeming endless shoes actually lived in the home I was about to enter.

Her apartment was on the 16^th floor, with a beautiful bay view of Bombay. Walking in, it always smelled like home cooked food. My mother always says food from your mother’s hands tastes best, this transferred exponentially across generations. Brish bua’s simple vegetarian meals were always delicious, and always satisfied in a way that only family food can. Younger me would always glimpse up at my father during these meals, and I’d notice that he was eating like me for once. He was the child at the table too, savoring every bite of his meal, while trying to stay inconspicuous to the older generation at the table. He’d always ask for seconds with desert.

Brish bua would preside over the meal, sitting in her chair at the head of the table. She wouldn’t talk much, and when she did it was always a question directed specifically at someone. She’s ask my brother about college, ask me about my school projects. She remembered a stunning amount, photos from the play I had been in a year ago, the service project my brother worked on his sophomore year of high school. She was always genuine, checking up with every single member of the family.

I don’t know when exactly all of this changed, but it did. The brunches continued, the family get together’s never stopped, but Brish bua changed. There was the year she began needing help moving from seat to seat, one of the grand children chosen to accompany her each time. The lack of mobility wasn’t so bad, she would still ask her questions, still make you lean in closer to talk to her. But then, one year, Brish Buaconfused me with my mother, suddenly her grand daughter became one of the daughter in laws. My cousin Kiran became her mother. My father was his father. Eventually she started referring to all of the women in the room by her sisters’ names, and all the men by my grandfathers.

It’s’ not an easy thing to witness, the family rock falling apart. It’s not an easy thing to write, losing the ability to coherently understand the world. Words and family are two of the things I hope to keep a part of my life forever. Yet, both these things may one-day slip away from my mind, like salt through a sieve, memories and vocabulary gone so quickly. So how do you cope? You ask the specific questions, make people lean in closer as they talk to you, if only to spend a little more time with them while you still remember who they are.

On Physics

A friend of mine once sent me one of those online interactives. It displayed "The Scale of the Universe" on an animated slider. Man was in the middle, sliding the scale leftwards would zoom in to the smallest forms of life, ending on pieces of the smallest particles.

Turning the slider to the right would zoom outward. Displaying all things in between man and what man estimates is the size of the known universe. It was humbling to see presented mathematically, how one individual, as a human being, is such a miniscule piece of the totality of all life. A lot of people I know get depressed when they about the expanse of the Universe, I think it’s because of all the things between man and Milky Way. There are large, intimidating things in that space, their size makes us feel small and insignificant.

But then I turned the slider to the left. As I examined the smaller species on the planet, eventually moving to the microscopic particles, I realized that some of the smallest pieces of existence can be more magical than galaxies. Another friend of mine, who is fascinated by the physics of the Universe, shared with me one of the more recent studies done by quantum physicists. They took a ball-shaped particle of matter, and launched it towards a piece with a slit in it. The particle travelled through the slit, as expected. They then added more slits, three to four, and found that when the particle was launched towards its multiple targets, it registered as passing through multiple slits. The particle managed to change itself into a different form to make it through the piece by going through all of the slits.

As if self-manipulation of matter by particles wasn’t enough of a find, the physicists also found that when the particle was viewed with the human eye (rather than through a high power microscope), it wouldn’t split itself. Meaning that this particle would display different behavior when it was aware of being observed. The presence of a person changed how the particle behaved, literally mind over matter. Something within the brain, the act of viewing the experiment, changed the way the matter behaved. When I was told this story I remember blurting out, “That’s the closest thing to magic I’ve ever heard.”

But the craziest part is, it’s not mythical or magical, it’s pure science. It’s examining the potential of our Universe, and the potential our minds have. Telepathy, Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), Telekinesis, all these previously fabled skills stem from the simple notion that our mental processes CAN have an effect on the physical world. It’s not too unbelievable is it? Considering how even with all of today’s technological advances we know so little about how our brain actually works. We know the basics, what it means when certain parts light up on a PET scan, but we’ve barely scraped the surface when it comes to our mental potential.

There’s another spec in the history of the universe that also excited me, the God particle. It’s the colloquial name given by physicist to the particle they believe began the existence of life in the Universe, the thing that began that oh-so-big bang. Like most people my age, as I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself more jaded by the traditional notions of religion. You would think I’d be completely against the particle’s title, the inappropriate melding of scientific fact with the spiritual concept of God. But two things changed my mind on the subject.

The first was the realization that everything, every piece of known existence, all stemmed from this one single particle. One tiny, tiny spec on the scale of the Universe, began… all. Like most of my agnostic age, I’ve always believed in the existence of some sort of energy, some connection between all living things. Knowing that we are all partial decedents of the God particle solidifies that connection.

The God particle also lets me question human potential. If we all originated from the particle that created life, it’s not a ridiculous assumption that we could have all have a piece of that energy inside us. That somewhere in our minds we’ve locked the potential to create matter out of nothing, to turn existence into something we can mold.

So if that’s not enough to make you forget about feeling insignificant in the face of the Universe,the realization that we all have the potential for godliness, I will call upon another, writer’s words to turn you. In his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut satirizes religion, while simultaneously trying to answer existence, through his creation of the Bokononists, followers of the religion of Bokononism. In the creation story of Bokononism, God looks over vast fields of mud. He then says to the mud, “Stand up.” And some of the mud stands and begins life in the Universe. This is the only roll God plays in the origin of humanity. The Bokonists also have a unique set of last rites, as a Bokonist prepares to leave the world they recite, “"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."

No matter how terrifying it gets to contemplate our individual space in this more than massive Universe, we were the mud that stood up. We exist, and thehe possession of life, the adventure of it, the sheer ability to be in the randomness of existence, stays more meaningful to me than all the matter in the Universe.

कल (kal)

कल (kal)


I love the way words are like little definition puzzles. Understanding how a word got from a series of syllables to a having a concrete definition can always be a fun ride. It’s even more fun when you take it overseas. I love having my multicultural friends explain what words mean in their languages. My favorite part is asking them about the untranslatable words, the Spanish, German, Arabic, Korean, word that turn into be a phrases when expressed in English. The words that embody an idea that takes so many more to explain itself. I have one of these in my own language, my favorite Hindi word, कल (pronounced kal). The word कल means both tomorrow and yesterday, leaving listeners to figure out which one it is depending on tense and context. A concept difficult to grasp for my friend found unbelievable until the following:

I’ve always loved this word, mainly because of the idea that it represents. In Hindi, tomorrow and yesterday are the same. Past and future meld into one, what you did before and what you’re going to do now are both expressed through the same word. It readjusts your view to thinking in terms of today and everything else. There’s just now, and the rest of it.

It really encourages you to live in the moment, a notion that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like my fellow collegiate friends, I frequently find myself discussing “the power of living in the moment” or many other common post-modernist talking points that have always been found on college campuses.

I think about it a lot, the environment and people I’m surround by. It tastes like idealism, with some rebellion sprinkled in, and is soaked in hopefulness. But what worries me is how ancient the recipe seems. I worry that all this idealism, struggle for positive change in the world, is just a side effect of being “the Youth”. A natural reaction to reaching adulthood while still hanging on to the hopes of adolescence, that’ll fade out by the end of the decade.

Oddly unsustainable optimism.

This thought depressed me for a long time. I’d worry that all the enthusiasm and energy with which I approach my life, education, and future career would eventually wane. Every day I would get further away from this age, and the vitalizing, revolutionizing feeling that comes with it. It felt like growing up meant the passion that comes with youth had to age too.

I hated the finite nature of those catalyzing feelings.

But then I realized, just because the attitudes of youth eventually disappear doesn’t mean they aren’t a powerful force. Throughout the years young people, in the short time that they stay that way, have shaped entire generations. In the 60s, youth brought about the Love Revolution affecting the music, politics, writing, and every other cultural aspect of the decade. Even today, young people all around the Middle East use the technologies they’ve grown up with, social networking sites, to bring about dramatic change in the nations governments.

Youth has power, youth can bring change and being in this chapter of my life I feel like I have a sense of responsibility to my generation. When I turned twenty, an older friend said something to me that galvanized this feeling, “On my 20th birthday all I was thinking was, this is the beginning of the most life-shaping decade of my life.”

And he was right, this is the most directionally defining decade of my life.

So this is my advice to all the young people sharing my sense of social responsibility, wanting to catalyze some sort of change in this world before you become obsolete.

Forget about कल for a while, because all we have is today to make a lasting difference.