Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 35

On mirrors and foggy lenses

For the first time in years, I found my
toes literally curling in fear during a film. My stomach was in knots
and my knees were drawn up to my chest. The film was 'The
Whistleblower', set in post-war Bosnia and based on true events. One
scene was especially difficult to watch. A young woman was raped in
front of many others – to teach her a lesson for trying to escape
and as a warning to

More (or less) racist

I was traveling a few years ago,
reading a book. The family seated opposite me began to eat. They
offered to share their food with me, and I declined. But the young
wife was rather insistent. 



After I’d said ‘no’ twice, she said:
“It’s okay. We’re not from a low caste. We’re upper caste.”



I suddenly felt weary. This was a
literate woman, trying to be friendly with a stranger on a train.

questions of what to drink and how

The question of water




The official cause of death was
'cardiac arrest', brought on by exhaustion and dehydration. Parvati
Jadhav was tired, stressed and needed to drink more water. A year
ago, Jadhav died in a hilly village called Dolara, district Thane.
According to news reports, people counted on a government-supplied
water tanker. 1,400 people needed 20 litres of water per day, or

The naked and the humiliated

This week, a childhood memory comes to mind.
As high school students, we were sometimes asked to help 'mind' small students.
These were toddlers, barely three years old, and already frightened at being
put in strange new uniforms, forced to sit still on benches with dozens of
other kids in the room, crying and screaming. 'Discipline' was definitely in
short supply.



One of the

What's wrong with us

Heard about the father who killed his
daughter in Murshidabad district? She was ten years old and,
according to reports, she was resisting her father's decision to sell
her off. This isn't the norm, I know. But some fathers (mothers too)
sell children (boys too) or even kill them. Some just give in to a
violent impulse. And even if such incidents are not the norm, they
happen often enough to

Another poem

was published recently in the Prarie Schooner, as part of a special 'feast' themed issue. This one is called 'Chicken Claws at Midnight' (upon which I was not feasting. The stray dogs were).

where blame lies

There's a new app called 'Trial by timeline'. Amnesty International (New Zealand) offers to make a quick calculation of what crimes you might be guilty of in how many nations, based on what you've been sharing on Facebook.I was found guilty of 'socializing with an unrelated male', consuming alcohol (based on party photos where, in fact, I was not drinking). 'Suspicious activity' included two

How I came to writing

This post was written as a special essay for the AuthorTV blog.I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. And this wasn’t because creative writing or writers weren’t valued in my family. My maternal grandfather, Ali Jawad Zaidi, was a scholar and Urdu poet. His day job was to serve the Indian bureaucracy in one capacity or the other, often in posts that were related to communication or culture. On

Heartwards ho!

"Love Stories # 1 to 14... enters this terrain with such assured grace and insight, the reader is completely absorbed in the experience of the characters, scouring the depths of loneliness that come with being in love, and without it...  The tone here is always compassionate and the feeling you get at the end of the book is uplifting."

From a brief review-cum-interview with Sakaal Times.

Trauma on the stand – when do we stop putting rape victims on trial?

Had done this piece for Femina magazine in 2010. Posting it here now because it is still relevant.

It isn’t hard to picture – a raped
woman seeks justice but is humiliated and harangued further as her ‘virtue’ is
called into question. It sounds like a tacky 1980s Bollywood film plot, doesn’t
it? The great tragedy is that if they didn’t get anything else right, in this
one respect, filmmakers