Interview: Ileana D'Cruz

October 2014: She may be one of the South’s biggest superstars and rising fast in the Hindi film industry, yet Ileana D'Cruz keeps it real, knows what’s important and doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

The cover of Women's Health.

Fresh-faced Ileana D’Cruz is quick to bust the myth that looking superstar-good comes easy, even for someone as naturally pretty as her. She’s in the middle of a shot, music blaring, when I arrive at Studio 8 at Bandra’s Mehboob Studios, and I notice how uber particular she is about the angle she presents and how carefully she goes through the shots on Arjun’s computer. (“I have a big arse,” she tells me later.)

That beauty is beyond the skin-deep for Ileana, more than the make-up, cosmetics and the Photoshop, is the first thing she establishes when we settle into her vanity van for our chat: “A happy woman is a beautiful woman. Being a happy person within makes you a beautiful person.”

Beauty & Body

We talk about her skin and body anyway—it’s such a big part of her profession, plus she’s the new Pond’s Girl. “I’d like to say that I do it all by myself, but I don’t. I’d like to say it’s easy, but it isn’t!” she says honestly. Dermatologist Dr Jayshree Sharad, whose book Skin Talks Ileana has been tweeting about, manages her skin; she works out “like crazy” with celebrity fitness trainer Yasmin Karachiwala, doing Pilates and crunches—for two hours a day (sometimes three), at eight in the morning, every single day!

She isn’t on a very strict diet, just moderates her food and tries her best to stay away from unhealthy stuff, having a little rice and sometimes a little dessert. “The time I went on a very strict diet, and cut out carbs and sugar, I really shrunk. Crash diets don’t work, nor are they healthy.”

“Sex was probably made to keep you in shape. And it’s pleasurable, so why not?!”

Luckily, she doesn’t really have a sweet tooth: “But when I’m PMSing, I crave sugar to another level… sometimes, I wonder what’s going to happen when I get pregnant, this is just PMS!”

Family First

Apart from her fear that she’s going to “bloat like a balloon” when she gets pregnant (she’s already been looking up on how to get ones body in shape after a baby), Ileana can’t wait to have kids. Family is very important to her, and she lives down the road from one of her three siblings, her older sister whose son’s pictures she’s always posting on Instagram. “We are all very close. I still cry when I miss my Mum,” who’s in Houston where Ileana’s brother and sister are studying; Dad’s in Goa. “My sister and I catch up. I babysit when I’m not working. We always do things together, and keep making calls to Mum.” This keeps her a little disconnected, and is probably why she doesn’t have many friends in the industry. “There are a few who I am quite fond of and who I trust. But it has always been family for me.”

Ileana was born in Bombay, and when she was nine or ten, her mother moved with the kids to a small under-construction house in Goa. “Dad was still working in Bombay. My mum did everything single-handedly—she got the house up, she got the water running, she got the power going.” She recalls them having to put buckets on the terrace to collect rainwater. “It was really hard initially.” So it bothers her when people say that she’s lucky, that she’s got everything: “You cannot take anyone or their journey for granted.”

Despite the meager money, those were amazing, untouched, innocent times, the “happiest days” of her life. “Some days we’d put mattresses on the terrace and would fall asleep, and wake up in the morning with squirrels running around.”

In Her Skin

When the opportunity came her way, borne out of a meeting with Marc Robinson arranged by a colleague of her mother’s, Ileana was initially reluctant to be in front of the camera. “When I was in my early teens, I was really rowdy, a tom-boy running around, climbing trees, catching frogs. But when I got to college, I became really shy, I wasn’t sure of myself.”

And, like all of us, Ileana was very self-conscious about her body. “The boys would say ‘She’s so fat, look at her big arse!’” Now she’s proud of it—“Men like big booty!”—and, inevitably, our conversation turns to the video, Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’. “Oh my god,” she says astounded. “I mean, where did they get arses that big… I thought mine was big but that’s huge!”

It was her family who encouraged, inspired her to seize the day. (Inspiration is a big theme in her life, and she has the Latin ‘Inspirare’ tattooed onto the inside of her wrist.) As her confidence grew, she began enjoying her work and getting good at it. And she’s learnt to dress for her body, sticking to silhouettes in black, burgundies, deep wines, dark blue and bottle green, irrespective of fashion trends.

Filmstardom

She’s been part of the South and Hindi film industries (but doesn’t like being called a ‘star’). They’re different, she says. For one, the South is way more mass market. The actors’ involvement is lot less, sans script meetings; there aren’t emotional or promotional aspects to films. Plus, she doesn’t know the languages. “It’s really quick, which is why I have done so many films there, probably four in a year.”

Barfi, Anurag Basu’s 2012 masterpiece marked her entry in to Hindi films. “It took me three months to decide if I wanted to do it or not.” At that time, she had really big offers coming from the South. Here, there were Ranbir and Priyanka, and she even didn’t get the guy in the end. Plus, there was a clause in the contract that allowed the director to do away with her role.

Leading cinematographer and debutant director Ravi K Chandran, who also straddles the South and Hindi film industries, and has recently shot Ileana for the Pond’s commercial (“stunning—lovely skin, nice smile, gorgeous eyes”), understands her fears. “She’s a very big star in the South, especially in the Telugu industry. Every hero, every director wants to work with her.”

It was a big risk—that’s paid off, she thinks, despite the flop (Phata Poster Nikla Hero, 2013) and semi-hit (Main Tera Hero, April 2014) that have followed. “As much as I loved working in the South, I got into a very comfortable zone. I needed the change.” Happy Ending, scheduled for a November 2014 release, has her playing an author alongside Saif Ali Khan, Govinda, Ranvir Shorey and Kalki Koechlin.

She says that, although she loves her work, it is not her life. “Most of them make it their life and an obsession,” she says about fellow actors, “but for me, while I love it, it’s great, it’s exciting, I can do without it. The minute you get too attached, it is going to bring you down.”

It’s no wonder that she has such a healthy equation with this capricious career. Her father is famous for having told a reporter that he would rather have her home, living a normal life, instead of working 18 stressful hours a day; early in her career, her mother yelled at a director who kept Ileana hungry all day and then marched her off the set.

The Women's Health cover story.

At Home

“I’m a real homebody,” Ileana declares. Unusually, she has no household help, and cooks, cleans and runs her home all by herself. “I like the fact that people tell me I am crazy in the industry. For me, this is just a way of staying grounded.”

She’d be a couch potato if she could, watching cooking shows on TV all day. She’s always experimenting with food, and bakes a lot, desserts, donuts and pizzas (all of which she sends to her sister). While she likes sketching, her true love is singing (her Twitter profile says she’s a “professional bathroom singer”), which she would pursue was she not “terrified of rejection”.

I ask her about her relationship (she’s said to be dating Australian Andrew Kneebone). “I’ve never been really open about it. I just feel it is really unfair to my partner, because he becomes part of the media, which can be too offensive and aggressive.” When the time is right, she’ll tell the world. For now, “As long as my family knows, that’s all that matters.”

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An edited version of this interview was the cover story of Women's Health in October 2014.

Is Feminism Relevant Today?

September 2014: My take on the evolving conversation around feminism today.

The other day, at a gathering of distant relatives, I was introduced to this older lady as a “feminist writer”. After the polite hellos, she said, “So, you’re a feminist, huh?” I nodded. “Well, I don’t think feminism is necessary nowadays… Look at all walks of life, women are now equal. At the forefront even.”

What is Feminism?

It was the first day of feminism class in our all-girls college in New Delhi. Dr Abraham walked in and asked us whether we were feminists. We all nodded yes. “What is feminism?” Three years before, I’d written an essay on the subject to get into college, and to Dr Abraham I remember answering “freedom” and “equality”. Thus began my journey of understanding this complex subject, but even now, I always reach back to my first answers about what it is. Then, simplistically, I thought it was about women being equal to men, and freedom being the ability to live life without gender constraints like men in India seemed to. Now, I see feminism as a way towards an egalitarian, utopian world for everyone—man, woman, either, neither, irrelevant—by addressing the issues faced by the gender that bears the brunt of gender discrimination.

Now, I’m not unfamiliar with the arguments against feminism. Those who advocate them fall in to two broad categories: those who believe that women are genuinely the weaker sex that deserves to be subjugated for religious or sociocultural reasons, and those who believe, like the lady from the party and many subscribers to the Women Against Feminism movement, that women are already ‘equal’.

The End is Nowhere Near

To the former type, I have nothing to say (not here, idiot). It’s the latter reason, especially coming from those living in a country like India, that actually astounds me. As a rookie many years ago, one of my interview questions to British author Helen Cross was whether she was a feminist. And she answered that people don’t really ask that in England “because they just sort-of presume that everybody is, because it’s kind-of beyond that point”; she said she was asked that a lot here because it was an “active and dynamic” conversation.

I especially don’t understand it when the women here say that.
A) How do YOU think you got here, wearing jeans, having careers, taking selfies in your bikinis, living with your boyfriends, eh?
B) Are you really ‘equal’ and ‘free’ from any sort of gender discrimination—at work, on the street, in your relationships? (Answer ‘no’ straightaway if you get a male friend to drop you home at night.)
And C) Is every single woman around you as ‘equal’ as you—is there really no family you know where the son roams wild and free while the daughter’s expected to obey, or woman who has been harassed for dowry? There, you have your answer.

This is not to say that countries where women are highly emancipated, like the UK or US, have done away with gender discrimination and no longer need feminism. While they, for the most part, may not have to contend with issues as basic ours, women continue to bear the brunt of lookism and media stereotypes, battle the glass ceiling, and deal with sexual violence. In India, we deal with the whole range of gender issues—from child marriage and dowry to ‘First World’ concerns like those listed above, judgement-free promiscuity, maiden surnames and independent choice.

Take this week, for instance. A leading movie star has taken a leading newspaper to task for a headline that calls attention to her cleavage with an open letter about choice, reel/real (an quick summary here), spawning much conversation about double standards—the newspaper’s, the film industry’s and even hers. In another India not so far away, the grave of a toddler girl, suspected to have been buried alive and rumoured to be a ‘goddess’, became an impromptu pilgrimage site for hundreds of villagers, who came to offer prayers, fruits, flowers and money.

While I have oftentimes wondered at the futility of writing about ‘evolved’ concerns when there’s so much work on the basics that is yet to be done (read what I've written about it here), I’ll end with this: Feminism is beyond the bra burning and the wild lurch from domesticity to feminazi; it’s beyond first wave and second wave; it lives in plurals and pluralities, evolving as society has, addressing a problem here, another there. It is a means to an end. And until genders are equal on all levels, the feminists’ fight is far from over.

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This column appeared on 3QD in September 2014.

Interview: Shruti Haasan

September 2014: She rocks red lipstick, a white ganji and leather neckpieces, but she can also let her hair fall in soft curls and take pouty selfies with shaggy-haired dogs. It’s the reason actor, singer-songwriter Shruti Haasan is the 'Kolaveri' Diva.

The cover of Women's Health.

She started out as a star child and went on to being a child star, so it’s surprising that Shruti Haasan says she has never felt the pressure, the burden of expectations, let alone wilt under them. “I’ve always been encouraged to find my own voice, be my own person. That’s been so important that I really haven’t bothered about what anyone else is doing, including my parents.” She’s got her name tattooed on her back in Tamil—she’s got to be serious.

On this muggy pre-monsoon Mumbai day, the shoot’s running a bit late (as shoots are wont to do), and I am ushered in to chat with Shruti Haasan as her make-up is being done, big curlers are being set in her hair, her food is being ordered and the style team is discussing what she is going to wear.

As people buzz around her, I can’t help but think that this attention must have always seemed natural to the daughter of superstars Kamal Haasan and Sarika. Not true, she says. “Both my parents are very simple people. Except when it was the night of a movie premier or someone was receiving an award, I didn’t really feel like I was extra-special… it was an ordinary upper-middle-class kind-of upbringing.” Of her childhood, her father says, “Apart from helping Shruti grow the way she wanted, we did very little.”

Getting Here

What she does conjure up is a childhood in Chennai, bursting with the arts and creativity: “My parents aren’t religious, and the arts have been the only standard god in our lives.” She believes art is all encompassing, an idea she embodies as an actor and singer-songwriter, dancer and model; as does her multitalented younger sister Akshara (who is an actor, screenwriter and assistant director). Growing up, she says, the movie set always felt like an extended home. So is she home then, at home, living the life of an actor; at 28, doing seven big movies this year. “To be honest,” she says, “music is my soul-calling and acting is something I just stumbled into, though it doesn’t seem like this would be likely.”

Music is what classically trained Shruti has always wanted to do, and it was her primary pursuit for many years. She sang her first song, in her father’s Thevar Magan, at six, and continued to sing, write lyrics and compose music for Tamil and Hindi films. She studied at the Musicians Institute in California, and was the vocalist of the alt rock band The Extramentals that played blues and rock with slight pop and Hindustani influences. “Music was my mainstay. It isn’t now, but it was. I don’t get to do as much because my schedule doesn’t allow it and there’s really no time to practise with a band.” She counts Lamb of God, Incubus, Tori Amos and Aqualung among her inspirations, and loves danceable ghati Tamil songs—though not the chart-topping ‘Why This Kolaveri Di?’: “When you’re the Kolaveri girl, it’s not so exciting!”

The Here & Now

Now, Shruti says, she’s equally (but in a very different way) passionate about being an actor. Considering she chose to prioritise her acting career rather late in the day, it has certainly picked up, and the seven films she has in her kitty all have big stars spanning the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu film industries. In Hindi, there’s Welcome Back and Rocky Handsome with John Abraham, Gabbar with Akshay Kumar, and Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Yaara with Irrfan Khan and Vidyut Jamwal; Hari’s Poojai with Vishal, and an untitled film with Vijay and Sridevi in Tamil; and an untitled Telugu film with Mahesh Babu. This is really the kind of life she has always wanted—being busy, travelling and not having a moment to think. “There’s something really fun about travelling with a movie… Having said that, if my entire film career was in this room, I’d be happy doing that as well.”

The only thing she doesn’t like about her job right now is how much she has to pack and unpack. On days that she’s home in Mumbai and not working (which is rarely, she laments), she likes spending time with her friends, watching TV and cooking. Given the recent rumours linking her to cricketer Suresh Raina, I ask her if she’s single, if she has a “good friend” hidden in her closet, and she laughs: “No, I’m really single. My good friends are my good friends, other friends are other friends… though none of those exists at the moment!”

The Women's Health cover story.

Body Balance

Shruti’s favourite cuisine is Tamilian—it’s what she enjoys cooking and what she indulges in when she’s not watching her diet: chicken biryani, ghee-laden sambar and potato curries. She has to make a conscious choice to eat right and workout whenever she can because, of late, she says, she’s developed a tendency to put on weight. While a nutritionist has guided her in the past, she has now figured out what works for her body and carefully balances her proteins and carbohydrates. As far as exercise goes, she says she has never worked with a trainer. “I’ve always had a leaning towards athletics and I understand my body. I do some basic cardio, dance and work with my body weight, at a gym, at home or in a hotel.”

Like most of us, Shruti’s tried crash dieting and has also been through phases of manic working out, where she has been “addicted”. “But then, you’re just not a very nice person, plus it’s really not good for you. It starts showing in your personality, on your face, because your body needs fuel to be happy, and my fuel is food.” Though today she’s not working out as much as she used to—it fluctuates according to the type of role she’s playing—for the most part she sticks to a diet and exercise plan she’s devised and is comfortable with.

As the stylists bustle around, our conversation veers towards her fashion sense, and she says she is not very fashion conscious and what she wears depends on her mood—catch her at a party or at an awards function, and you’ll see what she means, her style can go from boho to glam. “I would say that my dressing sense is very eclectic. It’s not about what’s in fashion or what’s trendy or who the best designer is—it’s never been about those things. It’s just about the mood and state of mind that I'm in.” She doesn’t have a favourite designer either. “I may like a piece from this designer or that, but not the rest of the collection. I like to mix and match.” Her team jokes that she may not have more than one outfit from any particular designer in her wardrobe! One thing’s for sure though: black is her all-time favourite. “I am always wearing black. I believe that once you’ve discovered black, you are just sorted for life!”

By showing her mettle in the acting arena, and by taking very public stands against stalkers and those who recently leaked pictures of her from the film Yevadu (she’s filed FIRs in all cases), Shruti is certainly making her voice heard. She comes across as a balance between right-brain artistic and left-brain sensible, with a fierce independent streak. Making feminists proud, she asserts: “I’ve got things to do and bills to pay. Financially, mentally and physically, I am responsible for myself.” Asserts Kamal Haasan: “Whatever she is, is her making now—her music, words, wisdom, all.”

No daddy’s little girl, this.

KAMAL HAASAN ON SHRUTI 

“From the time Shruti would fit the length of my elbow to my palm where her head rested and she straddled my biceps, I discovered she was a rocker; her younger sister was a walker. Shruti would sleep only when she was rocked to sleep and Akshara had to be walked around. Shruti did not do extraordinary things except a few astounding ones like reading any material you gave in her hand when she was seven months old. Newspapers, tablet strips, chocolate wrappers, anything she would read alone, in a language only she understood, a language of her own.

I think apart from helping Shruti grow the way she wanted, we did very little. Whatever she is, is her making now—her music, words, wisdom, all. From the crook of my arm to standing four inches taller than me in her heels that give her a giddy height, I still can recognise the Shruti I have known. She has just begun.

Moving aside from my bias as a father, just watching her as a curious and maybe an envious peer, I see her travelling great distances and attaining greater heights even without her heels. Shruti is a special child as a human and an artiste. I never believed in blessing so I applaud even before her true performance has begun.”

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An edited version of this interview was the cover story of Women's Health in September 2014.

Public Display of Divorce

July 2014: Breaking the taboo of divorce in largely conservative India. 

Conceptual photograph courtesy Sahil Mane.

A Bit of Background

Last year, I put up this status message on Facebook: "Today, the 15th of February, is the 10th anniversary of my first wedding. It's interesting how far both of us, my ex-husband and I, have come since our divorce in 2006. And how different life—lives—would have been if I had stayed. Oh, thank god!"

People have always asked me why I talk about my divorce, including this article featured in Mirrors across India a few weeks after I got remarried two years ago. I have several reasons.

I got married to S— when I was 19 and he was 30, back in 2003, when the world was different, I was different. After one failed attempt in July/August, we got separated in December 2005, when I moved to Mumbai, and divorced 10 months later.

First, a caveat. I spoke casually about being divorced much before I got remarried, much before I found love with Sahil. I spoke about it when I was down, devastated and broke; when I was single; to friends and strangers; and at job interviews. I even spoke about considering one the very first time I met a woman who is now a friend—a young divorcee herself, she said (and I remember this vividly), "Are you sure, Tara*? I find now that I am perpetually ‘<Insert her own name> the Divorcee'." I put that in right upfront, as I realise it could seem convenient to talk about it now, when all has turned out okay. For instance, though there were many years in between, my grandparents didn't tell anyone in Dehradun, the small town in North India in which they live that I was divorced until I got remarried (the veritable ‘happy ending').

[I realised this when I had gone for my granddad's 80th birthday celebrations a few years ago, only to be startled by questions of "S— kahan hain, beta?", "Aapke husband Indonesia se nahi aa paye?" ("Where is S—?", "Your husband wasn't able to come from Indonesia?") That's when I pieced together the story they had been telling, or letting brew, partly grounded in the truth—my ex-husband is, indeed, currently in Indonesia, just with a different wife.]

Because of this, I've been asked this over and over, from the curious as well as the concerned ‘what is the need to wash dirty linen is public', I'll tell you why I speak about it.

From a personal point of view, it is because I believe in being the same person in all situations (which does not mean one doesn't respond to context). I never had a word for it, and so use my friend Jordyn's one: ‘integrated personality'. Also, secrets that don't really make a difference to ones life are overrated, and too much baggage. I have been divorced; that's one of the things that has happened in my life.

Perhaps I needn't remind/inform the thousands of ‘friends'/followers on Facebook and Twitter about my divorce. But, at the risk of sounding pompous, I do it for grander sociological reasons. A) I'd like to help relax the social stigma around divorce for those concerned and their families—there's still a lot of that in India, and B) I want people who are going through it to know that, well, it's okay, even at the worst times.

Stigma-Shigma & Blah

To be fair, I have never faced much social trauma about the divorce.

Surprisingly, though it was my progressive father who pointed out the flaws in my marriage, it was he who told me to go back the first time I left. To be fair, he was dying then, and knew he was leaving Ma and I with nothing: so having me ‘settled' was important. Nonetheless, I left about a year before he died, and he was okay, as long as I was focussing on my career. My grandparents, older people in a small town, probably felt the social stigma more. It's no wonder then that, when Sahil and I were living together refusing to get married, my grandmother gently said, "He's a lovely boy from a good family, he loves you a lot. Shaadi kar lo, bete, tum toh divorced bhi ho." ("Get married, child, you're even divorced.") Without malice, she was tenderly implying that I wasn't that eligible a match anymore.

But personally, I faced nothing. Not in my career, not from my family, not from friends (handpicked liberals anyway), certainly not from my best-friend-turned-partner-turned-husband, and not even ever from my lovely in-laws, who'd known about it from minute Sahil and I had become friends. I realise I could have had it worse, much worse. And I know people, particularly women, across India and other traditional countries do.

In my first workplace in Mumbai, about eight years ago, many people in my office were divorced, four-five of twenty. This was probably a function of being at a KPO, at that point, and soon after in the English media, young industries teeming with educated urban youth, and not in more conventional ones like banking or manufacturing. But recently, on a family visit to Dehradun, my aunt sat counselling our lovely neighbour, whose wife wants a divorce. The bit I overheard was her gently telling him that, though we belong to a traditional family (well, I'm probably the exception), two of my father's first cousins; the only grandchild, me; and so many others we know are divorced. Clearly, divorce is an urban epidemic.

I know ideology is immune to reason. So I don't expect to convert conservatives, traditionalists and conformists, but, nonetheless, I ask this: so, socially, what is the big deal about divorce? A woman lost her hymen (which I hope she wasn't preserving for marriage anyway); a couple lived with each other, someone thought s/he'd be happier elsewhere (or worse, the partner thought s/he'd be happier elsewhere), and they separate to live independent lives. So? So fucking what.

Of course, women bear the brunt of the social censure, as they do for most things under patriarchy. And just as one of the reasons for the divorce epidemic in urban India is women's earning power and independence (we don't need to take shit anymore), it is this very aspect that will immunise you against the social censure you could face from family and society. Family is whatever family is, but generally, surround yourself with people who'll understand and support you, or at least mind their own business. Grow a thicker skin, and get and stay financially independent.

No Gain Without Pain

Not dealing with social censure is not to say that divorce was a cakewalk. It wasn't. At 22, I left Chennai for Mumbai with little money, a broken heart, no job, an on-and-off boyfriend and no maike** as my parents were without a home during my dad's illness. There were days of crying and hopelessness, but at the base of it all was an understanding that this was a choice. I would rather be here, braving the pain and the pressure, than be back in a marriage I did not want. (And, I know this is simplistic to say about divorce, but hey, I've been through enough painful breakups to know this: even if your spouse is the one who wants out and you think it's being lumped on you… would you really want to stay with someone who doesn't want to be with you?) Though times were much worse than in the marriage, I knew that, eventually, I'd be happier. Eventually.

When the Mumbai Mirror article came out, I didn't even know. I was in Delhi on work, not that I would have known if I were in Mumbai as I read the newspaper only later in the day, much after Facebook and Gmail-checking (heck, I go online even before I brush my teeth)! So when I went online, I was damn surprised to find an unusual number of friend requests, messages, followers. Huh? What was going on?

Before I could get to reading the messages, my mother-in-law called. The article was out, and she wasn't happy, neither was my mother. (Though when I asked my mother why she was unhappy—wasn't she the one telling me to use my writing to make a difference to people's lives?—she couldn't say why.) Then, I read the messages. Some were from people, both men and women, who weren't divorced, just commending me for being so "gutsy". But quite a few were from women who empathised, talked about the pain they had been or were going through, and generally just talked. And this divorced aunt who'd fallen apart after her divorce—well, she called me and said she was happy to see hope. Go figure.

Divorce is painful. Do I go so far as to recommend it?

A long time ago, it's been many years, I read a little snippet in The Times of India's juicy ‘World' page. It was about this divorce lawyer in America who was drawing flack for printing t-shirts that said ‘Life is Short, Get a Divorce'. I've remembered this line all this while, and it is truly what I feel. If you're unhappy, and you believe whatever you think lies ahead after the divorce (don't focus on the immediate pain and chaos) is better than where you are, go for it. I totally recommend it.

If I could go back and do it again, would I?

If I could go back and correct the course of my life, would I have got married, at 19, to S—? No, I wouldn't. I think one must choose life partners more wisely than I did, if at all, at a more mature age than I did. S— is a great guy, don't get me wrong, just not the guy for me. But hindsight is always 20/20.

But if I could only go back until a point after the marriage, would I get divorced? Hell yes, I would get divorced, definitely. Those that find love and happiness in their first marriages have better EQ than I did, or are plain lucky (my second husband certainly is, and our relationship, with or without the ‘marriage' tag, is certainly ‘it' for us). But giving love and, indeed, life another chance by getting divorced has totally been worth it. It was worth it when I was bawling my eyes out; it was worth it when I dated the nitwits, despairing about finding love again; it was worth it when I thought I would stay single, big deal; it has been worth it in the long run. And so too for Shiv: he is remarried to someone much more suited to his personality and lifestyle, and has two children as well.

So far, I've only talked of the advantages of getting divorced in relation to being unhappily married. Through the divorce, I also discovered that it has advantages over never having been married. Really!

For one, it freed me from a lot of social pressure. No more was it anyone's responsibility to protect a social ‘ideal' and my modesty, and that I was no longer a virgin was no longer a secret. So I could party, fuck, and be free.

Secondly, it cut out the traditionalists, conservatives and judgementals from my life. Anyone who wanted to befriend or date me had to be chilled out and liberal, and see me for who I am as a person.

Finally, through the experiences of a failed first marriage and divorce, I grew. We are all living creatures, changing and evolving. What we see and deal with changes us, makes us richer and deeper.

A long time ago, Sahil had said something very beautiful. Though he wished I'd never have had to go through the pain of the divorce, he was damn glad I did: "It's your journey that makes you the person you are, and I love you the way you are," he said. "And, if you hadn't got divorced, you wouldn't be with me!"

So, yeah, focus on your silver lining. And smile!

**Maike: A married woman's parents' home, culturally considered a place of solace or refuge, where she returns to get pampered right before and after delivery, and during marital trouble.

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This column appeared on 3QD in July 2014.

Not People Like Us!

July 2014: Sociocultural and economic factors play an important role in the way we address issues of justice and sexual violence in India.

One only needed to open the papers or keep a lazy eye on the internet to be taken aback, afresh, at the spate of horrific crimes against women that have recently put Bengaluru and UP in the news.

Sisters raped, murdered and hung from a tree; sisters gang raped over seven days; 11th standard student raped, murdered and disfigured; and, finally 32-year-old gang raped to death—that’s UP. In Bengaluru, girl kidnapped, along with a male friend, and sexually molested in a car at knifepoint; female doctor stripped; 16-year-old apprentice nun in a Christian seminary raped in the day; and six-year-old raped in her school by teachers. And, the spotlight’s back on women’s safety, like it was in 2012.

When I wrote about the Delhi Rape Case, someone in UP told me: “Such cases are par for the course here, it’s just because it happened in Delhi that people and the media are reacting.” While the brutality and frequency of the UP cases have succeeded in getting them past our apathy, the Bengaluru cases have pricked our thick skins because, well, let’s admit it, it’s Bangalore, the cosmopolitan IT hub with its breweries and bars, old-world clubs and many English channels on the radio. And these are People Like Us. 

These, the sociocultural and economic aspects are especially relevant in understanding the way the media and people of India address issues of justice and sexual violence. Us in metros, part of the educated, social-media-using SEC A, the coveted target audience for much advertising and the English media, are considered, and consider ourselves, an entitled bunch. The ‘Stranger Danger’ of India shouldn’t touch us in our gated communities, chauffeured cars, reputed schools and golden cages. We sleep-walk to our attached bathrooms at midnight; when we hear of a girl raped and murdered when she left her home to relieve herself in the fields, in a faraway village somewhere in UP, we think, “This would never happen to me.” When it does, to us or to PLU, living in cities like us, living lives like ours, doing things we would do, making choices we would make, we’re reminded of the fragility of our lives and lifestyles, and we’re outraged.

The PLU/non-PLU divide is the new-age class divide, based on but not limited to complex factors like the religion, caste, culture, haves/have-nots, Us/The Other biases of yore, and education, access, location, English, consumerism, liberalisation, money, the internet, media. In The World Before Her, documentary filmmaker Nisha Pahuja portrays this gap as a yawning chasm, a polarised duality that demands women chose between Indian and ‘Western’ values. In actual fact, we live in a diverse and populous land in the throes of change, where cultures and classes are crisscrossing, clashing and coming together all the time. And we’ve got to strive for a little more mutual understanding, a little more common ground.

Says Sowmya Rajaram, Junior Assistant Editor with the Bengaluru tabloid that exposed the Frazer Town car abduction case says, “Arguments that pit cities against each other (Delhi vs Mumbai or Mumbai vs UP) make it seem like rape is a malaise that can be treated with just a simple city-switch (‘find a job in Mumbai where it’s safer to travel at night’), or a rise in economic standing (‘get a car, you’ll be safe from gropers’). Rape is a consequence of the attitudes entrenched all throughout our chauvinistic society.”

I am not, for a moment, suggesting that PLU don’t commit or endure sexual violence, that we’ve all collectively, uniformly acquired a Zen-like disengagement from patriarchy and understanding of our rights and the rights of others. We do need groups like Win Bangalore Back, that was started as a Facebook page as a reaction to the Frazer Town car abduction case and now has 19,000 members engaged in the gender conversation. And Russ Peterson, one of the 10-12 people running the campaign, tells me that they intend to continue: “We want to channelise this outrage, and continue to address the issues of sexual abuse, the responsibilities and accountability of the police, and the rights and responsibilities of the citizens.”

Not to sound patronising, but, for their sheer number, it is the majority that we have to understand, educate, engage, empower. The majority that is heterogeneous and complex, speaks different languages, lives in places out of our earshot or teem in the crooks of urban life, culturally transitioning, not reached through books and newspapers, not as aware of human rights and feminism as you or I. “It is time the protestors moved beyond their anger that often comes from a place of privilege, and clamoured for a holistic, empathetic understanding of rape culture,” says Sowmya. More grassroots campaigns are the order of the day. And for any real good to come out of all our drawing-room conversations and online outrage, it’s time you had a heart-to-heart with your maid.

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An edited version of this article appeared in DNA in July 2014.

Thoughts of Things

June 2014: I spent a whole year without shopping. Here’s why, and what I learnt.

Conceptual image courtesy Sahil Mane.

We consume more in every successive generation, more as we get richer, more as quality of life improves, more as the population explodes, more as mass production makes things cheaper, and so I’m compelled to believe that environmental concerns aren’t alarmism but plain common sense. I, you, we’re the target audience for millions of brands owned by thousands of corporations, vying for our attention—that they often get, along with our money, begging the question of indoctrination and the commercialisation of our tastes, needs and wants. And these corporations big and small… who are we making rich and what ethics do we end up supporting, literally buying, with our money? (Slaveryfootprint.org has a simple, if simplistic, survey to tell how many slaves work for you.)

Truth be told, I’ve never been overtly concerned with possessing or attached to things, and it’s not like I shop a lot. I’m no ascetic: I dress up to look good and pander to the pull of fashion, and I’ve spent as much on the experience of a meal, a holiday, an adventure, rescuing an animal, surprising a loved one, a massage, as others do on jewellery, clothes and gadgets. Plus, I bought two houses as soon as I could: homes to fill the emotional void of an unstable childhood. And how can you ignore the better utility of a Mac and iPhone vs the PC and Blackberry, irrespective of the cost and show-off value. Of course, I need to feed my pride and ego with other things, let me not be confused for a saint. But brandishing brands, having things for the sake of having things, keeping keepsakes, ascribing objects with emotional value… never and decreasingly has that been for me.

Things, however, have always found me. Circumstances conspired to make me the proud owner of a houseful of hand-me-down things, courtesy my parents’ migration to Australia and my ex-husband’s transfer to Indonesia. At 23, in a house the size of a matchbox, in a new city where other strugglers like me slept on mattresses and could count on one hand the dishes they owned, I drowned in sofas and Kenwoods, artefacts, a king-sized bed, a sofa set and a rocking chair. Eight years later, my home is almost purged of all these expensive things, once pregnant with memories and too precious to give away (though not necessarily necessary nor my aesthetic).

While I’ve brandished this personality trait about as a matter of pride—a disinterest in the abject materialism that characterises our age, a sort-of bastardisation of the Hindu detachment ideal—there was a flip side. I'm not sure whether this is an Indian or generational trait, a bit of both perhaps, but my grandparents held on to the things they bought, treating them lovingly and maintaining them: they still use a sewing machine that they got as a wedding gift over sixty years ago. Unlike them, I took my lack of attachment to things to mean a use-and-throw attitude, never bothering to maintain them, replacing them easily and cheaply (I’ve always been a street shopper, even when I could afford not to be) when they broke or tore. Then, didn’t this make me consume as much as others who glutted on things?

Plagued with these macro and personal realisations and questions, on the first of May last year, I decided to go on a no-shopping experiment for a year.

There were rules, of course: I could replace something that was irredeemably, unfixably broken in my wardrobe and home; I could buy something if it was truly needed (not only wanted); the rest I would make up as I went along. Obviously, groceries weren’t part of this moratorium. I found that my learnings at the end of this year are closely aligned to my reasons for embarking on this embargo in the first place.

Shopping, Happiness & Addiction

They call it ‘retail therapy’ for a reason. It’s been proven that shopping makes you happier, and even the most disinterested shopper can’t help but feel a frisson of excitement at the buying and savouring of new things. That high can be quite addictive.

May was okay: I was newly motivated, plus I replaced my badminton shoes that were truly broken. In June, I finally picked up some things that had been with my tailor since February. By July I was craving hard, the withdrawal symptoms at their peak, but I didn’t cheat. And, you know what, like any addiction, the craving faded away.

And though I found myself looking forward to my birthday and anniversary presents with an unhealthy, feverish excitement, I learnt a few things along the way.

* While retail is therapy, studies have shown that the happiness from an experience—watching a film, travelling, enjoying a meal—is much longer lasting. This is true, and what I’ve believed all along.

* When you buy what you truly, truly need/want, and not just when you give in to a craving, there’s a special thrill in an occasional indulgence (I bought a pair of shoes for a wedding in January, a bag in March).

* A surprisingly effective way to feel the same joy-of-the-new is to ‘discover’ something you haven’t used in a while—when I finally got to a tailor with my bunch of things to mend, and when they finally came back, voila, I had a whole lot of things I hadn’t worn in a long time, good as new.

*I’ve also started an informal barter system with a couple of friends, trading things I’m bored of in my wardrobe for similar stuff in theirs. Oh joy!

Choose Quality Over Quantity

Or spend more time, effort and energy maintaining stuff that wasn’t built to last.

Maintain & Mend

I now wash clothes by colour groups, follow the ‘stitch in time’ adage, get the oil checked in my car and pack my laptop away at night (on more than one occasion before, I’ve woken to the sound of it crashing to the floor, from beside me on the bed). New India is at the beginning of the consumerist cycle, with newfound spending power and the lure of glittering foreign brands and aspirations. That less is more, and the idea behind the developed-country-cars-public-transport quote are lost on us. In the meanwhile, counterculture movements across the world, including veganism, are going back, growing a certain ‘awareness’ of things and seeking fulfilment beyond them—back, ironically, to the ways of my grandparents.

Borrow

July last year posed a challenge: I had a Big Fat Indian Wedding to attend, and my wardrobe’s sparse Indian selection would just not suffice for the six functions. Even if I considered this a mitigating circumstance, I reasoned that I’d only be buying clothes I’d only rarely wear again. I borrowed almost everything I wore from friends and family, and it worked!

At the end of this year, I am certainly richer (much richer) in wallet, but poorer in wardrobe (which has certainly started to feel the pinch, and I’ve truly be struggling for fresh clothes and shoes). I do need new upholstery, and a fresh bunch of cushion covers will certainly be welcome.

Of course, I’m not recommending that we all become monks or even that you spend a year living without shopping. I am just saying that we each need to think more deeply about the choices we make. A dear friend, who once held down a high-powered job in the fashion industry, is now a raw food eater and avoids multinationals like the plague. While this year has not set me on her extreme path, I’ve come away a little more mature, with a little more Mindfulness and with better priorities.

2014: Less is More.

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This column appeared on 3QD in June 2014.

Interview: Lisa Haydon

April 2014: Riding high on the success of Queen, golden girl of the moment Lisa Haydon talks about her journey from supermodel to actress.

The cover of Harper's Bazaar.

She appears at the table just after the cover shoot, plonks herself in to a chair, and greets me with a warm, “Hi, I’m Lisa. Will you eat?”—No—“Do you mind if I eat while we chat?” She is make-up-free, wearing a white, layered hakoba ruffle top and jeans, and is absolutely breath taking with her flawless raven skin, collarbones to die for and unreal body. We chat as she munches through her lunch, and I appreciate that this “Indian version of Angeline Jolie” (the words of her first booking agent, not mine) isn’t just uniquely beautiful, but fun and free-spirited, mature and oh-so-smart.

The success of Queen “feels really, really good.” In this coming-of-age travel-comedy-drama, she plays Vijay Lakshmi, a liberal hotel maid and single mother, the catalyst for the introspective journey that Rani, played by Kangana Ranaut, undergoes during her single honeymoon. “I didn't think about it too much when I signed this project with Vikas (Bahl, the director). I just loved my character so much that I wanted to play her.”

For the raving urban masses and praising critics, Queen gets it right, placing its women in shades of grey and not slotting them in to binaries of good/evil, and ending on a progressive, feministic note. “There’s this one verse from the Bible—‘Unto the pure all things are pure’—that my mum used to read to me growing up,” she tells me. Considering we’ve heard nary a bad word about the film, we agree that the audience forgets to judge Vijay Lakshmi because she’s authentic and natural, and comes from an honest place. “There are no pretences about the way women are. Rani’s character is just letting loose, discovering life and learning from Vijay Lakshmi—who burps, snorts when she laughs, is a single mom, drinks, smokes, has a lot of sex… And none of these things makes her a bad person.”

I prod Lisa about the similarities she admits to sharing with Vijay Lakshmi. “Our lifestyles are very different, she’s a little more carefree in the way she executes her life, but the heart and soul might be the same. Playing her was a bit of a catharsis—for two-three months shooting in Paris and Amsterdam, I became her, drinking, smoking, sitting with my legs wide open. When I returned, I quit drinking, I’ve stopped going out and I ran the marathon; I felt like I needed to cleanse the wildness out of me.”

She credits Vikas for many things—for a “comfortable and interactive” experience and for recognising her uniqueness. For his part, Vikas pays her a huge personal compliment by saying he auditioned her five times for the character he had originally written, but soon realised she was “ten times wilder and more free-spirited” than the character he was creating. “Inspired by the way she is, her body language, how comfortable she is with her body in any environment, I actually rewrote the character to make her exactly like the spirit of Lisa in real life.”

The Harper's Bazaar cover story.

The real life Lisa was born in Chennai to a Malayali father and Australian mother. She lived in Australia and the US before moving back to India in 2007 to be a model. “It just kind-of happened. I was working as a waitress in Sydney and wanted to make extra cash, and my sister (Mumbai-based model Mallika Haydon) told me to try modelling. I know somewhere deep down I must have always wanted to be a model, not because I wanted to model but because I wanted the lifestyle. Not a wealthy one, but a travelling, bohemian life, full of experiences.” Armed with photos shot by a neighbour against the white wall in her bathroom, she was signed by her first booking agent. In India visiting family during Fashion Week 2007, Mallika, who she calls her “trailblazer”, pushed her to meet Marc Robinson and give it a shot. “It all just started snowballing from there, with magazine covers, endorsements and TV commercials. I was travelling, doing all the things that I wanted to do but wouldn't have been doing in Australia.” She went back, packed up her apartment and has been in Mumbai since. “I didn't look back.” She’s recently single, having called off her engagement to long-term beau DJ Karan Bhojwani.

As a supermodel in the Indian film industry, she has faced her own challenges: “The main one is that I know I’m a deep thinker and not just a pretty person, but because you model you have to put yourself in that box in some ways. It’s hard to deconstruct that opinion, it takes time, and the only way you can is by being given an opportunity.” She’s taken it slow, starting with a small role in Aisha (2010) as Aarti Menon, a New York-returned yuppie, after being spotted in a coffee shop by Anil Kapoor; then dancing to raunchy beats wearing hair-extensions, falsies and skimpy clothes in Rascals (2011) made her feel like a misfit in the industry and almost made her quit. “I recognised that if I do too much of this I’m going to get caught in a rut and not be able to showcase what I want to, or be taken seriously as an actor. So I waited for the right script to come along. Everything happens in its own time.”

In the meantime, she designed clothes for Sher Singh, a licensing association she is no longer pursuing. And has started an organic skincare line called Naked. “You know how they say you are gifted or have certain talents. I think this might be my gift, because, though I haven’t studied too much about it, the recipes come my mind. I get them lab-tested and somehow they always work.” She uses only her own products on her gorgeous skin, and wears no make-up on a regular day. “For a day meeting I’ll put on some under-eye concealer, mascara and a little blush. In the evening I like to go a bit deeper, using brown that has purple tones, something a little more glamorous but still nothing too much. I think less is more in many areas of life.” 

She continues to balance her modelling and acting careers, and is fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani’s campaign girl for the year “because of looks but more so because of the spirit and values she embodies,” he says. He is thrilled she has been acclaimed in Queen. “Lisa is a true ‘it’ girl for me, modern of spirit and effervescence, with an honest spontaneity and a dusky sexiness that is so India Modern.” I ask about her personal style for this summer, and she says she’s going white. “I like the subtlety of an androgynous look, and mix-and-match my clothes.”

Always, and especially now, after Queen, Lisa doesn’t see the things that set her apart from others in the film industry as hindrances but as USPs. She knows that improving her Hindi is going to be an ongoing process, but “at the end of the day, I don't give in to any of the things that people would consider weaknesses—the fact that I'm tall, or that I have raven skin, or that I have this accent. They are my specialness.” As urban Hindi films begin to portray the cross-cultural diaspora of our metro-going-on-cosmopolitan cities, she feels there is space for someone like her right now. “I think that in this day and age there are many people like me who feel they are Indian—I’ve spent most of my life in this country—despite their ethnicity or where they grew up. And I know there will be people like me in our films.” This is not to say that she wants to always play this character or get stereotyped; and she intends to work on things that are not her strong suits in order to play varied roles.

She doesn’t know when her next film with Viacom 18 will be out, and she hasn’t signed anything since Queen. “I’m waiting for something worth my salt.” On going over our conversation, I realise that biding her time is a recurring motif in the journey of this inspiring woman who wants to do good work on her own terms. “This is now the beginning of the Lisa Moment,” says Tahiliani.

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An edited version of this interview was the cover story of Harper's Bazaar in April 2014.

The Body Complex

March 2014: Some thoughts on diet and exercise, food and drink, and health.

Conceptual photograph courtesy Sahil Mane.

I’ve been on one diet or the other since I was in my teens. Most have been the very definition of crash (cigarettes and Diet Coke for a week, anyone?) and, later, I’ve tried more wholesome, longer-term lifestyle ones (that I would soon abandon and revert to my yo-yo crash-trash diet cycle). First, it was only for aesthetic reasons, to lose weight; the lifestyle diets, Eat More Weigh Less and the like, started when I started to encompass health and fitness as a goal for my body (duh)!

Diet vs Exercise: A Gendered Choice?

While all of us recognise that the key to a healthy body is a combination of good-for-you food and exercise (and not smoking, limited drinking, etc, and the absence of genetic and birth defects) most people fall in to one or the other category—some preferring exercise, unable to control their need to eat, drink and be merry; others preferring to diet or at least practice diet control, unable or unwilling to exercise. There are the some that do both, as we all should, and those, of course, that do neither.

I’ve realised that the choice, whether to diet or exercise, both or neither, is quite personality driven. Dieting is passive, to not eat; exercise is active, to get off your butt… And, in light of this fact, I hate to admit that my observation, that more women choose to diet, more men choose to exercise, falls in to gender stereotypes. Though there are exceptions all around; and my casual survey, of friends and boyfriends, and numbers from my local gym, has a small sample size, one could analyse my observation to bits. Is it because women are more driven by aesthetics, we are judged on them from an early age; and power, muscle, sports are traditionally male? Then there are the questions of time, priorities and lifestyle factors, and socioeconomic and cultural positioning. Also, men or women, individuals negotiate a complex social, familial, ethical, religious, consumerist, emotional, psychological and gendered relationship with food and drink.

Our Relationship with Food

I notice these complexities in my own food choices: the memories my mother’s chocolate cake triggers, the struggle to be vegetarian for ethical reasons, the battle to not eat fattening and unhealthy fast food the MNCs tell us we should desire, the sugar addiction of the body and the mind, the lying, the cheating, the denial, the bartering. When I cave, which I often do, I berate myself for letting my tongue win in a battle with my brain, how stupid! An unhealthy and overweight friend, who tells me she doesn’t eat much, not too much junk or sugar at all, and that her weight is only because she doesn’t exercise, does, in fact, take very small portions at meals. But she sneaks soda and cakes, biscuits and the things she gathers on her 2 AM raids of the fridge past her own rules.

Take how social and private-time drinking is more accepted, expected even, in men more than women, of a certain age, stage, religion and cultural environment. My father was in the Indian Navy, to whose officers the government provides subsided alcohol. Aside from rampant alcoholism, this flush affects the levels of ‘normal’ consumption in our households. While my father’s daily drinking and fumblings have left me with an instinctive dislike of alcohol, a friend, a fellow child of a Naval officer, drinks every evening, alone or in company, convinced it is just normal, no more than his father drank. Go figure! As I said before, everyone has an ongoing saga with food and drink.

The Weight & Health Correlation

I'm in the neither category, more often than not, oftentimes in the dieters-only, and, for bursts since 2010, in the ideal category, doing both. This was when I really got thinking about my body, spurred by my close friends, Jordyn, an anthropologist-turned-fitness-trainer; and Sowmya, whose healthy body image rubbed off on me. Though I’ve gone beyond a mere aesthetic view of my body, I continue to measure my health goals on the weighing scale, hoping to achieve my ideal aesthetic and height-weight chart weight. This is too simplistic, and a flawed equation for many reasons—skinny is not always equal to healthy, happy or even pretty; healthy is not always equal to skinny; health is related to diet and exercise, plus a lot more; weight doesn’t tell the muscle-fat ratio; etc. But it’s the simplest parameter to keep track of (not including smoking) in the absence of any glaring medical issues, and not so off the mark in some ways—if you achieve a healthy weight in a healthy manner, not through stress or illness or crash dieting, it indicates you’ve corrected your diet, reducing or removing the sugar, junk, colas, fast foods, alcohol and red meats, and started exercising.

A Well Oiled Machine

I’ve also had this sneaking realisation, for a while, that certain things you do to your body in your youth are irredeemable, never to be recovered again. Scars, of course, they tell stories and bear memories, but more than that. The weight that gets harder to lose every year will leave behind, if and when it goes, cellulite and sags. There are side effects of having once smoked or drunk excessively that stay behind in your body. Now, whenever the now is, is a good time to start taking care of it. What’s done is done, what age will do it will do, but you’ve got to do what you can.

And age will come, to us more than to the generations before us. Things that would have surely killed people before this explosion in medical science—cholesterol or heart diseases, typhoid or snake bites, well—the don't always anymore, or as quickly. We will live longer in our bodies now, and that’s scary if you don’t anticipate the yawning years ahead, beyond the wonders of youth, in bodies propped alive by medicine. Like a car you drive recklessly and don’t maintain early on…

Starting Now

Through December and January, months I can only describe as a long string of raucous parties, family time and travel, I was firmly in the neither category, and the scales told me so loud and clear (as did the groaning elastic in my stretch jeans, my belt and Facebook photographs, as though I needed more to underscore a point I was feeling already). I find myself plus-minus two kilograms of a certain weight (let’s just call it X, okay?), and when I finally wrestled myself onto the weighing scale in early February, I was two kg over the plus limit. Though I’m tall and carry it off, even X, to be fair, is seven kg above my ideal on the height-weight chart, ten kg above what I’d like to be, and twelve kg above what I was in college. And I can’t hide under the muscle-is-heavier-than-fat excuse, because, well, it’s fat.

My NOW to lose weight and get healthy was a month ago. I'm 30, 31 in a few weeks. It’s time to go analyse my relationship with food, break habits and patterns a la Pavlov’s dog. It’s time to go beyond crash dieting, dieting in fact, and adopt a lifestyle of wholesome eating and diet control. It’s time to be a better cook, with the ability to satisfy many of my cravings in-house. It’s time to remove, yes, remove, sugar from my diet—a food diary really helps me be honest to myself, and, with a little help from a homeopath and the trick of eating a lot more protein, I find my portions coming down every day. Having a glass of water before reaching for a sugary drink works like magic, poof, the desire’s gone.

And exercise. I’m just making more time, for badminton and swimming, spinning poi, dancing and walking and improvising; things I enjoy and make up for my gym-aversion. Not related to the scales, smoking’s on the way out, finally, and I should be weaned by my birthday.

The Raging Sugar War

My sugar addiction is the most problematic thing about my diet. Problematic, for several reasons. Consuming refined sugar is one of the worst things you can do to your body, empty calories is the least of them. It makes you fat, brings on other weight-related diseases, diabetes and cancer.

I consume a lot more than I should, aware and unawares. Most people do, even those that don’t have a sweet tooth. Sweet things have added sugar, of course, but so do a surprising and surprisingly long list of many savouries—bread, tomato ketchup, tins of tuna. Its percolation in to cuisines worldwide has been a dramatic one, a ‘success’ of the industrial age. My grandfather, born on the border of Pakistan and Russia, remembers there being only one dessert in his childhood, a staple at all weddings, a simple rice-milk preparation sweetened with jaggery. He came from a landed family, with access to the best food; refined sugar didn’t exist for them then. Now, it's everywhere, embedded deep in all cuisines, and fast and processed foods.

To beat my body’s craving, I must abandon the long list of savoury things that have sugar. To beat the addiction of my taste buds, I must of course abandon things that taste sweet, because, apart from the unwanted sugar, their other ingredients are invariably also highly processed and unhealthy, like flour, butter, and artificial flavours and colours. Even if they promise a zero-calorie or zero-sugar fix through aspartame or other artificial sweeteners that are so bad for you. Unlike fruits, where the nutritive value compensates for the high natural sugar, there’s little worth consuming in most desserts.

What makes giving up sugar hardest, that Jordyn’s succeeded to do for years, is the fact that we live in a culture of sugar, from sugary breakfast cereals to biscuits at tea time. It’s more addictive than cocaine, apparently, yet those battling it live in the thick of it. It hit me hardest at a recent party. As a non-drinker asking for something ‘soft’, what are my options that don’t have sugar, no ‘diet’ varieties either. Yup, Virgin Mary and salted lemonade, I got those two too. And?

Folie à Deux

On this new diet and exercise routine on my way to health as a long-term lifestyle choice, I’ve dragged my husband along. I’ve wanted him to lose weight with me before, because it’s nice to have a partner and it’s good for him too. It’s good for us, especially because we don’t intend to have children to burden with our bodies as we grow older. Over the years, I’ve been quite successful in taking him to the badminton court, pulling the card of companionship for the walking and the dancing. I have never been able to get him to diet.

The last time I got him to join me on a diet, it was six months ago. It was day one—the only-one-fruit day—of the GM Diet. The next day was the only-one-vegetable day.

We had survived on strawberries all day, until late in the night when neither of us could think of anything but food. But, unlike me, Sahil couldn't keep his distracting cravings to himself, for the ‘greater good’. Apart from tossing and turning like a fish out of water, he kept groaning loudly: “Sushi! Sushi!” he called out repeatedly, hoping it would drop like manna from the heavens. It didn’t. “Ummm, a burger with bacon.” (We’re pescetatian.) “French fries and cheesecake.”

“Shut up, Sahil!” I said, the images now in my head, making a saliva factory in my mouth. Eventually, we had to *ahem* do other things to take our minds off food.

“I’m not made for diets,” he declared during post-coital bliss.

“Well, you’re not made for exercise, apparently, and now you’re saying no diet. How exactly are you going to get slimmer and healthier?”

After a silent moment, he piped up: “I’m changing the diet. Let’s go on an only-sushi diet for a week.” Exasperated and sleepy, I reminded him how expensive it was, breaking a diet with sushi.

“Yeah, but I’m going to go, buy all the ingredients, and make it at home in the morning.”

He did, and at least I now have someone who can make me beautiful rolls of restaurant-quality sushi at home. This time though, convinced by the more wholesome, food-conscious diet I’ve proposed (not starvation, not crash, just controlled), convinced by the arguments beyond the aesthetic, he’s been more excited, inspired (and obedient). Fingers crossed!

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This column appeared on 3QD in March 2014.