Checkmate!

While a few traumatised women have gained the courage to out their tormentors, it is high time to re-educate our highly educated employees that women are equal to men and will be treated as such

- Anuja Chauhan

I THINK IT may be here. Finally. Women are talking about what has been done to them in the past few decades, new names are tumbling out thick and fast, and men are looking at women part stupefied, part petrified—the sort of reaction one would give if the family’s pet dog suddenly started to speak. What has the dumb animal overheard? What forgotten cruelties, what beatings, what deprivations does it remember? How damaging are its revelations? Does it not understand that we did not know any better then; does it not understand that was the norm?

As I write this, the newest name to emerge in India’s #MeToo gutter-spill is that of actor Alok Nath.

And the irony is complete. He played the benevolent patriarch in a bazillion treacly soap operas and movies of the 1990s, he was the presiding deity of the sanskari Hindu joint family, all cherubic innocence, beatific smiles and reverentially folded hands. If India has a Bill Cosby equivalent, then Nath is definitely the man to fill the slot, the desi version of all things folksy, home-grown and wholesome. And now, writer-producer Vinta Nanda has taken her courage into both hands and shared with us harrowing accounts of rape, violence and intimidation at this man’s hands in the 1990s, when he was at the peak of his career.

Naturally, we’re all nauseous.

A SLOW-COOKED ANGER