The Secret Door is presented by Safestyle UK

(Hawk-eyed observers will note that this is a clever piece of marketing for…a doors and windows company.)

So, where does the rot lie? Indeed, it lies woven into our long standing encounters with the roles ascribed to ‘decency’ and shame, corruption, legal systems in need of reform, our persistent encounters with right-wing persecution of minorities and a long litany of other such.

…

It is time for sex, sexual touching, in/appropriateness of conduct and protection to be discussed in the living room. It is time to look very closely (and swiftly) into our preventive measures (we have few) against sexual crimes.

Crime and class

One unhappy idea to emerge from the debate around the crime comes from Arundhati Roy. Namely that the sikara’s middle-class status is what has fuelled media and public outrage against rape. Unfortunately this is probably true, given that no other rape in Delhi has been given this level of coverage, despite the fact that a woman is raped every 14 hours in the capital. Probably more, in fact, since those statistics stem from officialdom, and not all rapes will go reported as Liberal Conspiracy points out.

Though it may not seem apparent at first, India’s attitude towards class is as important to this story as its attitudes towards women.

Southwest Delhi

With a map and some context, it is worth noting that the sikara was attacked in one of the wealthiest parts of Delhi.

The blue pin shows Munirka, the area of Delhi where the sikara, a young medical student, boarded the bus where she would be raped. About seven minutes’ drive away is RK Puram, shown by the pink pin, where I lived in my grandparents’ house for three months in 2009. Taking a charter bus – not a public bus - west for the sub-city of Darka, the sikara’s route would have taken her past the end of my road.

This area of Delhi is not a slum. Southwest Delhi is one of the wealthier areas in the capital, in part due to its government accommodation now being sold off to the super-rich anxious for proximity to the city’s few green spots. It is perhaps one of the reasons why the crime drew this level of media attention in India. If you think these incidents are uncommon in India more widely, a quick scan of Google will tell you otherwise.

Life in Delhi

Shanti Niketan, the area of RK Puram in which I lived and which the charter bus would have driven through, is mostly occupied by steel, rubber and sugar magnates. One of them had even funded a children’s playground at the end of the street. To the Western eye, the area is nothing special, sitting as it does on the increasingly busy Rao Tula Ram Marg highway. Compared to the rest of Delhi, however, it’s basically Chelsea.

My grandparents’ house was one of the few remaining government houses in Shanti Niketan, with the rest sold off and demolished either by the aforementioned magnates, or builders looking to capitalise on the growing demand for property in Delhi. It consisted of a front bungalow, a larger back bungalow, a garden and the servants’ quarters. Tenants occupied the front house, I was in the back. The drive was fronted by a large, red gate, which was sometimes guarded – not unusual in an area occupied by diplomats.

Although I had come to Delhi to explore the capital and travel onwards into Rajasthan, it transpired that I was rarely allowed outside that red gate, and never unaccompanied by a servant.

The servants

With the Indian media usually coy on class and existence of servants, it is hard for me to say whether servants are finally becoming obsolete in modern India. I assume not, given my family has no family friends in India who do not have servants.

In my case, we employed two regular household servants. Bharathi, the cook, and Nalin, the driver. To both, it was unthinkable I should ever venture outside the house without either one of them. They cooked whatever I asked for, made my bed, and brought me my tea. It wasn’t a dynamic I was particularly comfortable with, but it is a dynamic that upholds much of the current class structure in India.

Autonomy in Delhi

Delhi is not an easy city for ramblers, with dust paths for pavements and human and bovine faeces littered about the place. Ostensibly for this reason, I was never permitted out of the house on foot, and was instead driven anywhere I wanted to go by Nalin, under the instructions of my parents (who were 5,000 miles away).

I took the opportunity to escape whenever I could, much to Nalin’s consternation. It was only after a long lecture over the phone that my mother managed to impress on me, if not quite the actual danger of the city, her fears of said dangers, imagined or otherwise. “It isn’t you I don’t trust,” she would say. “It’s all the other goondas.”

In short, I spent many months in Delhi holed up in a dark, crumbling house, permitted out only with a chaperon and – in stark contrast to London – never just to ramble. Do women in India get to just…wander about without purpose? I certainly never did. Driven by the desperation in my eyes one morning, Nalin walked me to the end of our road in Shanti Niketan to the children’s playground built by one of our industrialist neighbours. It was the only spot of green within walking distance, and once I had exhausted its circumference, Nalin asked me in perplexed Bengali why I wanted to go and just…walk about.

Nalin’s fear was justified in constant, subtle ways every time I visited India, despite its surface layer of modernity. The women-only carriage on the brand new Delhi metro. The male catcalls at any woman who revealed a shoulder, or legs. And there was my own half-forgotten assault, which took place ten years earlier.

India’s endemic rape culture

Maybe it’s strange that I was insistent on roaming Delhi alone, given that I’ve been subjected to sexual harassment. Perhaps my mind’s just glossed over it. My experience is not comparable to the sikara’s, but like many sikaras in India, I failed to report the incident to the police. Nor did I tell my parents.

I was 14 at the time, on holiday in Goa with my parents and maternal grandparents. We had taken a boat for the day from Baina beach to a nearby islet known locally as Bat Island. My parents and grandparents went off to explore the rockier side of the island with one of the boat crew; I was left by the shore to go snorkelling with a local instructor. At no point were my family more than 1km away from me, if that. Having come directly from Baina, I was in nothing more than a swimming costume and life jacket.

I struggle with the details beyond this. I don’t remember the instructor’s name, or his face, or where on earth I would have put my glasses.

I have a dim recollection of swimming out with a snorkel mask, guided by the instructor alongside me. It was a long, slow moment before I realised he was gripping, rather than guiding me, by the arm and holding me fast in the water. Another before I realised where his other hand was. Even then, I hadn’t particularly grasped what was going on. Everything seemed infinitely slow, before I began to thrash. After about a minute, he let go.

I feel that I got off lightly. It has taken me a long time to realise what might have happened. Nothing has dawned more slowly, or more awfully. Such is the strength of my acceptance that this is simply how India is.

Perhaps this is why I initially avoided reading about the sikara‘s story. I managed to avoid it for about a week after it first broke. Something in me baulks at UK media coverage of India at the best of times, perhaps it’s a difficulty with watching your peers coldly analyse something so close.

To help me fill out some of the geographical details of this post (like where, exactly, the sikara’s bus stop actually was), I skimmed UK and Indian media coverage of events. I know – of course I know – that news reporting necessitates a flat, unemotional tone. But at best, UK coverage sounds bystanderish. At its worst, it seems to have brought forth the nation’s most irritating neuroses about its relationship with India. If anyone can point me towards any sensible commentary, please link it in the comments. This emotive piece from Tavleen Singh, who also lives in Southwest Delhi, is worth a read.

Flat coverage and a strange aversion to detail (it took me hours of searching to establish the whereabouts of said bus stop) made it difficult for me to build up a picture of events in my mind. Which exact cinema did the sikara visit? What was she watching, and who, exactly, was her male companion? What of his fate? But in the flat, newsy blandness, there are some details that stick in my mind with startling clarity. The sikara‘s youth. How she was raped for almost an hour. A metal pole.

What next?

For all the calls for a policy/legislative overhaul, I don’t see the culture changing any time soon. Despite being born and brought up in the UK, where I take liberal values for granted, it is a considerable mental effort to imagine an India where I could wander without a servant escort. This is a country where sikaras who look to the police for help are often raped for a second time from the police themselves. Where a rich man who, on the slightest suspicion his servants have stolen from him, can order the police to beat them up. And where millions of sikaras have been ignored over the years, simply because they are from a lower class, or caste.

My life after Anonymous: ‘I feel more fulfilled without the internet’

*On Davis’ arrest, I said (quite thoughtlessly) that he looked like Neo. Apparently this became a thing.

Shame follows Michael Fassbender (sometimes we follow a little too much of him) playing a lonely sex addict in Manhatten, unable to form romantic connections and getting off on his impersonal encounters with prostitutes and porn. In an interview with Salon, Shame’s director Steve McQueen says the film is firmly rooted in the dilemmas of 2011:

We’re making a film about now. It’s not a costume drama, it’s not something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. It’s about now, and for me — I don’t care what anyone says — I think cinema has a responsibility. You’ve got HBO and AMC doing whatever they’re doing, but cinema has another way of doing things, which can actually be closer to how we live today than any nine-part series on television. Absolutely. We can do that, and people are interested in seeing that and having a conversation about it.

What happens when you make a film about now is that it does have an aspect of social commentary because it’s urgent, there’s an immediacy about it. Particularly about the Internet, about pornography on the Internet, and about how that affects us, how we navigate this maze of sexual content that’s all about us.

When I came out of the cinema, my immediate thought was to wonder what several young male friends of mine would think if they watched Shame, given their attachment to online porn. Simply put (and this is simplifying hugely), Fassbender’s sex addiction and the ready availability of porn and prostitutes essentially destroy his ability to relate to women in the context of a relationship. Sex is shown without tenderness, and when offered the opportunity of a meaningful connection, Fassbender’s character can’t get it up. Instead, he gets off on a series of rough, brief encounters, some of which directly recreate scenes from pornography.

I wouldn’t like to give you the impression that online porn is the main focus of the film – it actually plays a relatively small role. McQueen weaves it into the fabric of  daily existence, perhaps as the average porn viewer does, and it is this which is so clever. Much of the initial porn debate focussed on how graphic content – readily available online and less easily regulated than paid-for porn – might encourage rape. Many studies concluded that porn was “harmless” in this respect, which is probably true, but few stats focus on the impact on everyday relationships – something McQueen attempts to address. This prescient piece in the Guardian from 2003 is a good companion piece to Shame on the relationship of sex addiction and porn. ”Pornography does damage,” says one psychologist, “because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships.” It’s a subject where it’s all too easy to get all Daily Mail and prudish. Light viewing it is not, but Shame is a thought-provoking, subtle and overdue look at the cause and effect of sex addiction in the online age.

The evening kicked off with a keynote from EMI’s strategy SVP Jim Brady, where he said selling (physical) records no longer helps artists, which I’ve already reported on for StrategyEye.

But an equally fascinating part of the speech was Brady’s summary of changing attitudes towards music consumption over the last twenty years. He outlined three models of  contemporary music consumer – whom he dubbed Tower Man, MP3 Man and Homo Spotifyicus – and their evolving music habits.  I’ve posted a transcript of that section of the speech below – worth a read in full for an idea of how the majors are trying to frame the pace of change.

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The Tower Man

We’re in the early 90s, life is blessedly uncomplicated. The digital disruption has yet to arrive – we have what we would call the well-behaved pre-digital music fan. He – statistically it’s a he – listens to radio, he reads NME or Billboard, he watches MTV and on Saturday he goes down to his local high street record store and buys what he’s been listening to. We call this man Tower Man after the late-lamented Tower Records retail chain which shuttered in 2006.

Buying music is really is the only way Tower Man can control the listening experience. He doesn’t control radio. So music is a scarce good – ownership is hugely important. In fact in many ways, Tower Man defines himself by the music that he owns, by his wall of CDs and you’ll often find him quietly judging others by their wall of CDs. You know who you are.

MP3 Man / iPod Man

Let’s now move to the second half of the nineties and the arrival of what we call the transitional music fan. The MP3 codec’s been around for a while, and by 1999 it’s formed Napster and Codester and an endless variety of stirs that offer free digitised music. Labels lose ‘monopoly control’ over the availability of the music.

For the tech savvy music fan, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. But only if you’re particularly tech savvy – the technical hurdles are quite considerable for the large majority of music fans. You might think all that access to all that music that the case for ownership would diminish, that music would feel less rare. But Early MP3 Man grew up musically in a time of scarcity, and the ownership habits of his parents are still ingrained. He’s got one leg over the digital fence. He reacts with the normal reaction – he starts to hoard. College networks start crashing, labels start suing, piracy becomes the topic of every music conference you go to and the market shifts in a fundamental way. CD sales start to decline, nothing new there. Of course MP3s also offered a high level of convenience, more than the CD or cassette. Music fans have shown quite consistently they will pay more money for music convenience. [...]

Apple makes a typically late, thoughtful entry into the  emerging mp3 player marketplace. In 2003 it launches iTunes and our MP3 Man becomes iPod/iPhone man. So your entire music collection all on a cool little gadget so now you don’t have to break the law to join the digital revolution, you don’t have to be tech savvy  – but it does tempt a bunch of new fans across that first digital divide.

The true digital fan – Homo Spotifyicus

As a music industry, we spend a lot time getting to grips with iPod man and rightly so. But we can’t get too blinkered by them – let’s move forward to the late Naughties. This is when we see the emergence of a true digital fan, and they are quite different from the previous two. For them, commercial music has never really been scarce, never been hard to access. We call that generation Homo Spotifyicus, sometimes Facebook man. And for Homo Spotifyicus, music is just around them all the time. [It's in] many new radio stations they might listen to over the internet, it’s in their parents’ CD collection (they have access to that), it’s on their elder siblings’ iPods, its on YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, it’s in the TV shows they follow, it’s in the films they watch, ads, video clips on Facebook, even in the computer games they play. True digital fans do not have  a very strong ownership habit. What matters is instant gratification – being able to access that song straightaway wherever they are. To borrow a phrase from another arena, they’re not looking to collect Mr Right, they’re looking for Mr Right Now, musically. Of course we know there are open porous borders between these three groups of fans.

I genuinely dislike these photo filter apps – the most popular being Instagram and Hipstamatic (even the names are intolerable) – and find it surprising that a generation of super-connected people choose to filter their lives through an artificial aesthetic which belongs to the 1970s. Pop culture’s nostalgia for history, to recast the present against the golden haziness of the past is hardly anything new, as testified by the ongoing popularity of retro dramas like Mad Men, or (in the UK) The Hour. But the tendency seeps across the media more widely, to interesting, if not always commendable, effect. Take Foreign Policy, which chose to host a photo essay on the war in Afghanistan dubbed “The War in Hipstamatic“. The essay consists of a series of highly coloured photographs of the war in Afghanistan which recall, to borrow Hipstamatic’s own chirpy tagline, ”the look and feel of plastic toy cameras from the past”.

A filtered photo (complete with faux Polaroid edging) of a soldier in Afghanistan, from the Basetrack media project and presented in Foreign Policy's "The War in Hipstamatic"

The NYT’s Damon Winter has won plaudits earlier this year for a similar project – so clearly not everyone feels quite as offended as I do by this. Indeed, Winter writes an articulate defence of his choice, saying that using Hipstamatic has no effect on the actual content of his war photography. It is worth reading in full.

What has gotten people so worked up, I believe, falls under the heading of aesthetics. Some consider the use of the phone camera as a gimmick or as a way to aestheticize news photos. Those are fair arguments, but they have nothing to do with the content of the photos.

I disagree. Recasting Afghanistan in grainy colours feels, at gut level, like an insult both to journalism and the soldiers who face a much greyer reality on a daily basis, and the aesthetics actually distract from the content.

Of course, you could ask how far this snobbery should trickle down, and to what extent using any filters in photography is trickery. The simple answer is that I don’t know; I’m not inherently against people experimenting with Diana cameras or or Polaroids. But with more and more people taking retro photos as the norm, rather than the novelty, this insistence on recasting the present is going to get tiresome at best.

Newspapers must be pretty confusing if you’re a non-Twitter user. The Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, would be missed by her “followers” before she enters the Celebrity Big Brother house, said the Standard. Republican candidates spar over their scientific beliefs (or disbeliefs) via status updates, according to the Guardian. The media’s always had its sources of information – but few have been so prolifically or prominently publicised as Twitter, much to the puzzlement of its readership, which asks itself why it should care and, increasingly, whether it should join in.

Why would I use Twitter?

The reasons for using Twitter are manifold, and rather than try and think them all up, I asked people why they use the site.

“	Writing a post about joining Twitter for non-journalism, non-geeky friends who are curious. What do you personally use Twitter for, please?
	shonaghosh August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh well, predominantly to feel part of a crowd of successful writers that I am clearly not part of in real life. Tragically.
	nellstevens August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh good for mid-football match updates #nffc
	simonlp August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh News, updates, random links…
	eleanorturney August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh news and making fun of Jesse
	elliottchilds August 23, 2011

“	@shonaghosh replying late in non-Twitter fashion but as an expat I use it to feel less removed from London life…
	SongsIlike August 23, 2011

Following your niche interests

Already, this is quite different from Facebook. On its homepage, Facebook tells you to “Connect with your friends” – by contrast, Twitter’s tagline is “Follow your interests” – and you can really follow specific topics to quite a niche level. One of my niche and slightly pretentious interests is finding ace things to do in London, usually based around design, modern art or literature – so I follow @Proteinfeed which, if you click the link, shows a bunch of quite cryptic but always-intriguing links. Unlike Google, where you have to know what you’re looking for to begin with, there’s often a kind of serendipity about discovering things through Twitter. Another feed for discovering beautiful art is @Brainpicker, who is arguably far more effective on Twitter than she is on her site.

I don’t think I can emphasise this discovery element enough. Yes, newspapers, magazines and blogs can all provide you with quite specific information – and I’m certainly not disputing their value. But firstly, unlike some of the above, Twitter is free. Secondly, if you have carefully followed a very set group of niche tweeters – that no mainstream newspaper or magazine will ever discover – which is entirely tailored to your interests, then that, surely, has to be better than something designed to appeal to the masses. I admit that that following people can be time consuming – but I would argue it only requires an initial burst of work, of finding people to follow, before your feed becomes invaluable.

Twitter as a news source – floods of information

I was asked this by my friend Claire Hance via e-mail. She says she doesn’t use Twitter, but has frequently seen it referenced in the media and is tempted to try it:

…to me Twitter feels like another layer of complication in the myriad outlets from which we can garner our information. We can read newspapers/ magazine website, and when looking for more specified info, can use blogs/ special interest websites/ guides. So why is a space for mass short bursts of minute information in a (what seems) fairly muddled arena so useful[?]

I would agree that as a source of general news, Twitter can add unnecessary complication. And if you aren’t too fussed about knowing about news first, and knowing every aspect of the story as it emerges, then I would advise against following any news journalists. Much of Twitter’s reputation as a source of news comes from the fact that many of its most active users are journalists, or would-be journalists. Being one myself, I suspect that it will have an increasing role in relation to news, and particularly emergencies, as time goes on. Imagine if a bomb went off in London. You still have phone signal, but the news crews haven’t reached the disaster area yet, and the rescue services have yet to piece together what’s happened. Often, then, an effective way to find out what’s going on is from a social network – and Twitter, being mostly uncluttered by photo features and so on, is a much cleaner service to use for this kind of thing than Facebook, which isn’t really geared to handle ongoing streams of information.

Of course, bombs don’t go off every day in London, and a continuous stream of live, rolling updates from places which are struck by tragedy or warfare can be exhausting, and sullied by unverified information and rumours. And that is damaging to journalism, and unhelpful for readers. I would say that you don’t always have to follow news sources all the time. It is possible to stop following people without offending them.

There are many more points I could address about Twitter as a valid source of news, but, another time.

Ego and networks

Relative Twitter newcomer, @Agshorsley emailed me her own reasons for using the service, which I found remarkably refreshing.

I think primarily the reason I signed up was because I found it a good place to talk about myself (aware of how horrible this sounds) without having to constantly update my facebook status. I hate those people who update their status every 15 minutes and yet sometimes I would – horror of horrors – find myself updating my status 2-3 times a day. Basically, simple VANITY drove me to sign up.

Ego, as with all social media, is a huge part of Twitter - I use it to post links to my journalism, in a naked attempt to become more widely read. But, I would also say that networking (grurgh) is a huge part of this. Even if it is ego-driven, like @NellStevens, I use Twitter to talk to tech journalists who I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet, let alone discuss the future of Nokia with as a peer. And this networking aspecting doesn’t just need to apply to writers and journalists – there are many influential marketers, PR types, politicians, designers and even lawyers who use Twitter, and if you’re ambitious and know what you’re doing, it is entirely possible to break into these circles – which offline might once have remained closed – through social media.

A common misconception

A final email from a naysayer, who shall remain anonymous:

When I hear [Twitter] being talked about on the news, or on tv, it generally is quoting celebrities (pop stars, footballers, comedians) saying, in my opinion, not very much.  I see it is a big, constantly updating collection of facebook statuses for people to tell others absolutely nothing of genuine interest about anything.  It just seems to be yet another form of faceless communication, combined with a further outlet for the cult of celebrity.

Of course, Twitter can be outlet for banal celebrity crap, and if that’s all you follow, then that’s all you’ll get. In much the same way, you could watch Panorama, or you could watch Jeremy Kyle. But on the other end of the scale, you can also hear what it’s like for rebels on the ground in Libya. If your Twitter feed is banal, it is because you are following banal people – more serious is the site’s impact on accurate reporting, and the spread of rumours. Always best to take things with a pinch of salt…

And um, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’m here.