Help please!

So I'm starting to get the hang of this blogging business. As you can see I got a bit bored of my standard-issue template so have begun experimenting with different formats. This will probably go on for a while yet before I settle down and decide on the blog's final "look". So I would really appreciate your honest views on the various incarnations I try! First up is a yellow-and-green homage to Delhi's auto rickshaws. What say you?

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Chris

The Slut Walk comes to Delhi

You may have seen on the news that the Slut Walk reached Delhi today (if you don't know what the Slut Walk is, click here). I was intrigued at how this very Western phenomenon would take shape in India, so I dragged myself out of bed ridiculously early on a Sunday morning and took myself up to the centre of town.

The event has been given a second name here: the "Besharmi Morcha", which translates as "shame walk" rather than the more confrontational English name. This in itself is rather interesting. There are plenty of words in Hindi that would be a fairly accurate translation of the word "slut", but the organisers clearly felt that for one reason or another they would not be appropriate. I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of this here, but there is a really interesting blog post by an Indian writer here, which connects this to the (undeniably true) assertion that the walk in India (as elsewhere) has made by far its biggest impact among the professional, educated elite rather than the poor and marginalised who are the biggest victims of sex-related crime.

Controversies about the event itself aside, there was no doubting the sincerity of the participants (around 300-400 showed up). Interestingly, there were at least as many men as women and I would estimate that the volunteers organising the walk were about three-fifths male. Unlike elsewhere, there was very little flesh on display: the participants wore mainly jeans and t-shirt or salwar kameez, or if they were really daring, shorts, while the organisers wore sober white t-shirts:

This was no surprise: Delhi remains far more conservative than the other cities where walks have taken place, and in any case any outrageously dressed walkers would have distracted from the more important messages about violence against women, a notoriously severe problem here. This point was emphasised when a rather statuesque German lady showed up wearing a sleeveless top with the word "slut" scrawled on her arm. She would have attracted no attention in London, but the Delhi photographers swarmed after her like wasps at a picnic.

Participants had clearly been encouraged to create their own slogans and make their own placards. There were some interesting results, from the pithy:

To the sincere, but maybe slightly wordy:

To the slightly surreal:

To some rather tortuous pop culture references:

While some of the chaps on the walk came over as a little confused...

There were also some very telling placards that highlighted the difference in issues faced by women in India to those in the countries where previous Slut Walks have taken place: I doubt London or Toronto saw any signs reading "Don't Side With Foeticide".

The media seemed unsure of what to make of it. Most of the interviews I saw taking place were with the various (mainly female) foreigners who had shown up, including the aforementioned Teutonic Goddess. One rather camp man with a floppy fringe got a lot of attention by becoming highly animated whenever he had a camera pointing at him. "I have a message for such men," I overheard him say at least three times, "Get some libido-suppressing pills!" I would have thought that local women would get more attention, but on the evidence of what I saw, they were not the priority.

The walk itself was over in about fifteen minutes, after which there was an energetic piece of street theatre (all in Hindi, but the message was pretty clear):

And that was it. Gradually the crowd dispersed, placards having been waved and slogans chanted.

I'm not sure what the event achieved in the end. There will be a fair amount of media coverage, but there was no direct engagement with any policy makers or other leaders. But I think the criticisms in the blog I linked to at the start of this post are more pertinent: the Delhi event may have had some important things to say, but in taking its inspiration from a movement that started in Canada and spread to the UK, the Netherlands and Australia it's questionable how relevant it is for the vast majority of Indian women, who face a different set of issues.

The position of women in India is complex. Certainly the notion that women can hold powerful positions is not unknown here. Indira Gandhi was one of the twentieth century's most powerful and longest-serving leaders of either gender; and the city of Delhi as well as the states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu (together accounting for about a third of the country's population) are led by women. The president, the speaker of the lower house, and the leader of the opposition are all female. And then of course there's Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress party and, according to Forbes magazine, the ninth most powerful person in the world.

But the world of politics is a rarefied one, and it often bears little resemblance to the daily lives of a country's citizens - particularly, it seems, in India. Whatever qualities they may have as individuals, it can't be denied that many female leaders here - including both the Mrs Gandhis - would be unlikely to have reached the positions they did were they not member of powerful ruling clans. This is not to downplay their achievements once in office, but it would be a mistake to think that the existence of these powerful women reflects a society in which opportunity is open to all regardless of gender.

Indian girls have it tough even before they are born. The most recent census indicates that the gender balance has swung alarmingly in favour of males in recent years: for every 1000 boys born here, there are now only 914 girls. In Haryana, it's just 861. Apart from the social problems India is setting up for itself by creating millions of future young men who are unable to find wives (already foreshadowed in the existence of people smuggling operations bringing in brides from Bangladesh and West Bengal), what's even more disturbing is the evidence that rising prosperity may actually be making things worse. As wealth and education rise one might think that an enlightened approach to gender relations might take root, but in practice it gives access to more sophisticated technologies to determine the sex of a foetus and to take action as a result (such practices are strictly illegal but still widespread).

If a girl manages to be born, she still faces a society where domestic violence, rape and abuse are all too common. Attitudes towards women are so ingrained that the perpetrators of such acts are significantly often themselves women, particularly when it comes to "dowry deaths" - when newlywed women are murdered by their husband's family for bringing insufficient cash and goodies with them when they enter into the marriage. (The practice of dowry really is repugnant, and reflects the degree to which women are devalued - it is essentially considered necessary to bribe a man's family to get him to take a woman as his wife.) Of course, as always with India, you have to beware of generalisations: things vary a great deal from state to state. But there's no denying that its treatment of its women is a stain on India.

Things are starting to change, albeit slowly. Two generations of Indian women have grown up under democracy, and those who have also had the benefit of an education are demanding a different world. I recently finished reading Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai, one of the angriest books I have ever read, which portrays the situation of women in Punjab through the tale of a young girl accused of a multiple murder and a social worker's efforts to uncover the truth. There's a heartbreaking scene that has the girl and her sister discover the skeletal hand of a baby buried in their backyard - their sister, murdered by a family that only wanted boys.

Books like these and events like the slut walk are part of a growing movement calling for change. The government, too, is doing its part: it has reserved 33 percent of seats in local democratic bodies for women, and is trying to do the same at the national level (I'm not a fan of quotas like these as I don't think they get to the root of the problem, but it is at least action), and it has invested in a public awareness campaign including posters like this one I spotted at a bus stop a couple of weeks ago:

This litany of challenging issues helps explain why the women on the Delhi walk dressed conservatively, and why the word "slut" was not translated: questions of what women can wear and what language is used may be important, but they are hardly the top of the agenda here. Ultimately, calling the event the "Slut Walk" seems really just to have been a way to get it more attention - it was really a protest against sexual violence in general, a related but different message to its forebears elsewhere in the world. Sadly, though, without the "slut walk" tag it would never have attracted as much publicity as it did - partly because of the controversial term and the (unfulfilled) prospect of scantily clad participants, and partly because the participants themselves were attracted to being part of a global, progressive movement as well as to making a statement about gender relations in India.

But you have to wonder if poor, marginalised and illiterate women in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar are going to have their lives changed by misnamed "slut walks" by privileged city dwellers, government posters and angry books. And how exactly does one go about changing the mindsets of over 600 million men who have been raised to believe they should be in charge of a wife - a wife they will find it increasingly hard to find?

Vineeta is Unwell

I had a meeting on Wednesday afternoon near my flat, so ended up coming home from work a bit earlier than usual. Vineeta, my maid, was there when I arrived (I could tell by her flip flops outside the door) but when I walked into the flat she was nowhere to be seen. Until, that is, I very nearly tripped over her prone body lying on the floor of my living room.

I'm fairly sure she had decided that she needed a lie down, rather than actually fainted, but when she realised I was there and jumped to her feet she looked truly dreadful - drawn face, unhealthy sheen, coughing, the works. Vineeta was clearly not a well lady.

Despite her clearly fragile state of health she was clearly embarrassed to have been caught lying down on the job and to my great consternation immediately set about cleaning my bedroom. Having tried to communicate that she should go home, I ran down and brought up Anil, our driver, to provide translation. It took some doing, but eventually Vineeta agreed to take a couple of my ibuprofen and go home, and I asked Anil to drop her home. (He told me later on that she did no such thing, but carried on to the next house she was due to work at.)

Anyway, Vineeta didn't turn up on Thursday so I assumed she had wisely decided to take a day off and recover. However, she arrived at my flat this afternoon as my colleague Rajat and I were busy planning round my dining room table. She looked, if anything, even worse, and told Rajat she had not been to the doctor's. Rajat and I set about trying to get her to do so.

What a struggle. First she refused point blank (in between coughs). Then she said she'd go home after she'd done the breakfast washing up. Then she finished the washing up and started sweeping the floor (after which she would go home). Next thing I knew she was wiping down the surfaces. There was another Talk. She agreed to go to the doctor's, then two minutes later was in my bedroom gathering up the laundry.

At this point I decided direct communication was necessary, marched into the bedroom, took the laundry from Vineeta and said "out!" loudly. She giggled, coughed and left the room. Two minutes later I had to repeat this process when she made another assault on the kitchen surfaces.

Getting Vineeta to stop cleaning and go and attend to her health was starting to make the US debt ceiling negotiations look like a co-operative little chat.

Lengthy negotiations with Rajat followed. After repeated guarantees that (1) I wouldn't fire her; (2) I wouldn't report her to her other employers; and (3) I wouldn't dock her pay, Vineeta finally agreed to go do the doctor instead of finishing off her shift at my flat. I gave her 150 rupees to cover the cost of the prescription (Vineeta does not make much money and has an unknown number of relatives depending on her for income), and made her promise to take it as easy as possible. We also made her promise to show us the prescription when she returns to work (since otherwise there was every possibility she would skip the doc's and give the 150 rupees to her family).

I really hope she went to the doctor, and I really hope her other employers recognise how ill she is and cut her some slack. From her point of view, she can't risk losing her income with her family relying on her - hence my battles to get her to lay down tools. Of course if she doesn't get herself well she is taking an even bigger risk with her income, but you can understand why that doesn't hold much weight with Vineeta.

Sick leave is an unaffordable luxury if your family is depending on you to eat and your employers are under no obligation to keep you on a day longer than they feel like. Life here can be very unforgiving.

Sensory overload in Old Delhi

What with all the excitement this week I never got around to posting about last weekend's bit of exploration. It was a return trip this time, to what is commonly know as "Old Delhi", though it is in fact substantially younger than a lot of the bits of the city I have already written about.

Old Delhi grew up as Shahjahanabad in the 17th century, to the west of the Red Fort, and was the last capital of the Mughal empire. It's the birthplace of the Urdu language and in its day was apparently a graceful city full of beautiful palaces and serene canals.

That's hard to imagine these days. After my first visit in January, when I battled up and down the main thoroughfare, Chandni Chowk, and left feeling more sweaty and tense than anything else, I was far from sure that I wanted to go back. But, aware that I hadn't really given the area much of a chance to endear itself to me, I decided to give it a go.

Old Delhi is the very antithesis of it southern neighbour, New Delhi, with its wide open spaces and grand airs. It is crowded, frenetic, intimidating and overwhelming. Everywhere you look, people are engaged in commercial activity. Everything is on sale in Old Delhi, much of it concentrated in highly specific bazaars, so that if you know where to go you can be sure to find what you are looking for. The people are different here: raucous, pushy and occasionally a bit dodgy: this is the only place in Delhi where I have found myself consciously keeping an eye on my bag. The kids elsewhere in the city stare at me; here, they ran after me down the street calling me a rascal (at least, I think that's what they were calling me).

The street layout of Old Delhi is a true labyrinth. There's no point trying to navigate; you just have to wander where your feet take you and trust that eventually you will emerge somewhere near a recognisable landmark. That is if you survive without being run over by a bike, scooter, rickshaw or wagon, all of which career along the narrow alleys like they're on the M1 and only stop when absolutely forced to (usually because they are in each other's way):

The buildings are mostly twentieth century and uninspired, though every now and again Old Delhi taunts you with a hint at the beautiful architecture of its past that lingers in scraps in its present:

There must be a thousand secret routes through the streets of old Delhi. Apart from the alleys and lanes themselves, mysterious flights of stairs hint at first-floor walkways, and countless gateways lead to hidden courtyards. A favourite scam played on foreigners here is to offer to guide them to some sight and then lead them down into the bowels of Shahjahanabad to rob them, knowing that however fast they are they will never manage to negotiate the maze to catch up with a fleeing mugger. Unsurprisingly, this generally works.

In the middle of all of this sits one of the greatest treasures of Delhi: the Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque (and given that India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world, there are some big mosques here). It is enormous - it takes about twenty minutes to circumnavigate - yet the surrounding streets are so densely packed that finding it proved trickier than I had anticipated. Eventually, though, the alleys gave way to the ochre minarets and white domes of the mosque, sitting serenely amid the maelstrom:

The serenity doesn't last long though, because right outside the main entrance to the mosque is the Meena Bazaar, one of the busiest wholesale markets in the city. The view from the mosque down the wide steps and boulevard leading up to it is like looking at an Indian Where's Wally ("Where's Wali"?):

It was a slow day down the shops.

I have to admit that braving the crowds was a bit of a challenge for me (as anyone who's been on the tube with me at rush hour knows, I'm not all that great with lots of people in close proximity). But once I'd done so there were just too many extraordinary sights, sounds and smells to worry about claustrophobia. I was particularly taken with the stalls selling an extraordinary diversity of nuts, scattered in heaps on cloths spread out on the ground:

And the rather lovely kites on sale, fluttering on lines above the busy shoppers' heads, also caught my eye:

But my absolute favourite was a mystery to me. Slightly removed from the main drag, a rather portly gentleman had set himself up next to a waterlogged parking area. In front of him was a huge bubbling cauldron filled with a reddish-brown sludge, and arranged around him like a defensive wall were around 20 pots of various spices and nuts. Speaking in a gravelly, hoarse voice, he kept up a constant salesman's patter to a crowd of some forty men like some kind of Indian Frank Butcher. Every now and then one of his assistants would get up and add something else to the swampy concoction, on which the eyes of the crowd were fixed like glue:

Sadly, after four classes my Hindi is not quite up to following such rapid-fire hard sell, but I did catch a few mentions of the words for "Indian", "children" and "boy". Given that all the watching crowd were male, I'm hazarding a guess that the pots of goo he doled out when his pitch was over were intended to boost fertility, and in particular to guarantee conception of a son. I could be wrong (if anyone knows any better please enlighten me!) but whatever the purpose of the product was, it was a fascinating spectacle.

Anyway, I left Old Delhi for the second time feeling rather more positively disposed towards it. I would still go back there with a certain amount of apprehension and with a careful eye on my possessions and moving objects in the thoroughfare. But I will go back, because it can't be denied that this Delhi is the most vividly, excitingly alive of all the Delhis I've seen so far. You just have to take a deep breath, dump the map and jump on in.

A brush with the law

If I made Haryana sound boring in my last post, I apologise for the misconception. My brief visit there ended up being one of the more eventful couple of days of my sojourn in India so far. Not really in a good way.

To begin with: this was pretty much my fault. I'm aware that it's a good idea to have your passport on you when travelling anywhere in India that involves staying overnight. I'm aware that a state close to the border with Pakistan has particular reason to be tight on security regulations. And I'm aware that things are particularly edgy at the moment given recent events in Mumbai.

However, despite being aware of all these things, I managed to leave my passport in my flat when we set out for Sirsa.

When we first arrived at the hotel in Hisar and I was asked for my passport and visa, I thought it would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. After explaining that it was in Delhi, and being vouched for by the people I was travelling with (mostly Indian, all of highly respectable professional organisations), I left my contact details and promised to send my visa and passport numbers as soon as I was back in Delhi so they could fill in the forms. Feeling a bit silly for the oversight, I had a light dinner and headed up to my room to write Monday night's blog post and then headed to bed.

At six o'clock on Tuesday morning I was awoken by a loud banging at my door. Emerging into the corridor, dressed in a towel and with my hair in disarray as only my hair can manage, I was faced with the sight of no fewer than six men, headed by a slight but stern looking man in police uniform, who marched over the doorway and into my room. "Passport!" he demanded.

I tried to explain, as I had explained the previous night, that my passport was in Delhi. "No!" he responded, "you have to have!"

At this point my befuddlement started to give way to irritation, and I may have said something unhelpful like "I can't magic it out of thin air". Not the wisest course when faced with a provincial policeman in a bureaucratic country in a situation where clearly you have failed to follow the rules. His response was a curt "get ready to go!" Go where, I foolishly asked. "To police station!" he replied with evident relish, "get dressed, you go now!" I spluttered a bit. He made towards me and for a moment I thought he was going to drag me to the police station in my betowelled state.

At this point I started to be actually quite scared that I was going to be cast into some cell in provincial India and that the people I was working with on the project would have to bail me out. This would not be a positive step in establishing myself in India. I gave him every form of ID I had and he vanished with my driver's licence, leaving me to yell out something feeble and English like "this is disgraceful!" at his retreating back.

Rather shaken, I sat down for a few minutes before deciding that if I was liable to be dragged down the nick at any moment I should probably make myself respectable. In the shower I realised that I could probably access a scanned copy of my passport photo page that is saved on my personal drive at work. That took about 10 minutes, after which I proceeded downstairs with my open laptop held in front of me like a shield decorated with my own mugshot.

By the time I had done so and got myself downstairs, a crowd of about 12 people (I have no idea where they all came from!) was gathered around reception, most of them talking loudly about - so I gathered from the looks I received - me. There were, happily enough, no further threats to throw the book at me, and with the help of one of my Indian colleagues I was able to persuade them to let me go with strict instructions to send through a scanned copy of my visa page as soon as I was back in Delhi (this I did first thing this morning, though this was not enough to stop the local police making several calls on my colleagues who had remained behind in Haryana, who of course were entirely unable to help them).

Well, lesson learned: never leave home without your passport if you are a foreigner in India. On one level I find it hard to be angry with these guys, even though they overreacted so badly. No doubt their forms are examined by their superiors and they will get in deep trouble if there are anomalies. And as I said, there are good reasons why security issues are to be taken particularly seriously in this part of the world.

But on another level, I feel hurt, angry and frustrated. Hurt because it was drummed into me so forcefully that, at a fundamental level, for many Indians I am an outsider who may be tolerated, but not trusted. Angry because the number of people in this world who can wake me up at 6 am and not make me angry can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and because of the harassment suffered by my innocent co-travelers as a result of my carelessness. And frustrated because, for Pete's sake, there are enough real problems in this country that would make far better targets of so much police time and energy than a foreigner - one who is in clearly reputable company and who has been vouched for by upstanding Indian citizens - who has temporarily mislaid his passport.

Still, I survived without incarceration and am safely back in Delhi. Hopefully a little bit wiser and probably a little less naive about the realities of living in India. I guess in the end that is no bad thing.

Road trip reflections

I'm writing this in a hotel in Hisar, about 140 miles west of Delhi in the state of Haryana. I'm en route to Sirsa, a town about 60 miles east of the Pakistan border, where we are involved in a project. This is my first time out of Delhi since I moved here, and only the second time I've been outside of a major city in India (the last time was in Kerala in January).

There's not an awful lot in Haryana to interest travellers. It's unrelentingly flat and agricultural, and our route here was a repetitive series of fields punctuated by identikit dusty villages. My attempt to get on with some work was thwarted by the variable quality of the roads (a couple of shuddering potholes and my stomach resolutely refused to let me look at any kind of screen or printed matter), and looking out of the window quickly lost its appeal (brightly coloured saris, playing kids and stoic cattle are all picturesque in their own way, but after a couple of hours tend to become a bit less exciting).

So maybe that's why I've been a bit reflective today. I have been thinking anyway - as I imagine has everyone - about the horrendous attacks in Norway last week, and I had ample opportunity for further ruminating on the journey here. So apologies that this post is going to be a bit glooomy, but this is what's on my mind.

I can't help but compare my reaction to the events in Oslo with my reaction to 9/11, almost exactly 10 years ago. For me, the circumstances are quite similar: in both cases I had recently arrived in a foreign country (in 2001 it was Korea, where I arrived in August), was feeling to some degree bewildered and isolated, and was staying in a large, mostly empty and somewhat cavernous apartment.

I remember very clearly watching the news coverage from the USA and feeling like the bottom had dropped out of the world. I didn't know anyone in the 9/11 attacks and I don't know anyone hurt or killed in Norway, but despite the distance of events in 2001 they provoked an extraordinarily profound sense of fear and confusion as I watched the towers fall in my lonely flat. I don't think any event before or since has shocked me to the core so utterly - even including the July 2005 bombs in London, which of course struck much closer to home.

My reaction this time has been different. Shock, yes, dismay, sympathy for those killed and their families, and concern that such awful events could happen in such an unlikely place - but my sense of horror and terror has not approached what I felt in 2001.

There are plenty of reasons. New York and Washington are, of course, iconic and familiar in a way that Oslo is not, so even though in 2001 I had only visited New York once (just as now I have only been to Oslo once) I felt that I knew it well. The sheer dramatic impact of watching those two behemoths of capitalism at the World Trade Centre topple could not but magnify the impact on people watchin events unfold. And while we didn't expect Norway to be attacked because it is largely peaceful, we didn't expect 9/11 because, at the time, the USA seems invulnerable. Both events shook what we thought we knew about the world, but the implications of 9/11 seemed mind-boggling (more so, perhaps, at the time than in hindsight, but still true today).

On a personal level, 9/11 came at a time when I was personally quite vulnerable and unhappy. I don't in any way wish to compare my experience with that of people who were directly affected by the events that day, but the loneliness and isolation I was feeling at that time seemed to double in intensity - not only was I out on my own in a strange place, but suddenly the whole world seemed a lot more strange and hostile than it had before. Of course this was mostly just a raw emotional reaction brought on by being at a difficult time in my life, but my memory of those feelings tells me they were very real. Today I am in a very different frame of mind and am much more able to deal with what the world has to throw at me.

Oddly enough, I don't think that my different reactions are down to the difference in the number of people killed in the two sets of attacks. We all know that numbers cease to mean very much beyond a certain point. It's hard to comprehend the tragedy of a thousand people being killed, and much easier to engage emotionally with one death. We just don't have the emotional resources to apply grief and horror proportionally to events of greater scale.

But my fear is that all of this rationalisation is nonsense, and that actually I've just become accustomed to random events of great violence springing up in unexpected places. I grew up in a country that was regularly the victim of terrorist attacks. All my life I have known to ask about unattended bags and, to this day, I often pop litter into my bag to dispose of at home out of habit rather than look for a rubbish bin (which were frequently absent in the UK in the 1980s as they were favoured places to plant a bomb).

But in my adult life the frequency, scale and spread of terrorist attacks has grown, and technological change has changed the nature of security threats in some terrifying directions. Attacks from Iraq to Manila, Mumbai to Oklahoma City, seem to be a standard feature of news reports today in a way I don't remember them being before (am I right here, or am I romanticising a past that has always been just as violent?)

I don't want to live my life in fear. But at the same time I don't want to lose my capacity to respond emotionally to the deaths of innocent people. If this starts to seem normal, that's when we really should be scared.

How to flirt (with women) in Hindi

I've studied a few languages in my time and have encountered some fascinating and frustrating linguistic oddities (the harmless-looking Dutch word "er" stands out for its deceptive fiendishness). But I think this one from Hindi, which came up in my most recent lesson, has taken the cake. This, apparently, is language where a misplaced vowel could see you being accused of sexual harassment.

Let me explain. Hindi, like many other languages, is gendered, and as usual in such languages adjectives have to agree with the gender of the object they are describing (verbs do too, in complicated ways that I haven't quite got my head round yet). The linguistic gender of people, unsurprisingly, follows their biological gender.

However, whereas in Spanish one would naturally refer to a man as "alto" and a woman as "alta", for instance, in Hindi you can't do that if you happen to be a man. If you are talking to a woman - or even about a woman - and you use the feminine ending, this apparently implies that you are showing a sexual interest in her. Just by drawing attention to the fact that she is a woman, you're basically seen to be leering at her. Instead, you have to use the masculine plural ending.

For the (male) foreign student of Hindi this opens up a minefield of social perils. In the UK, you just have to make sure you respect personal space and watch how long you hold eye contact for, and you're unlikely to be seen to be crossing any lines. Here, say "i" instead of "e" and you're making unwanted advances (which in my case would be ironic as well as annoying).

I have to admit I find this rather hard to fathom. As one of my classmates put it, why go to all the bother of having gender in the language if you're then going to deny the fact when it comes to talking about people?

But of course languages aren't designed, they just evolve to reflect the society in which they are used - and Hindi is spoken in a culture where the sexuality of women is an enormous taboo. The fact that merely acknowledging a woman's femininity is seen as inappropriate behaviour is astonishing to me on one level, but entirely unsurprising on another - it comes from the same place as the rules that say men on the metro must give up their seats for women. There is an old-fashioned idea of chivalry here that is hard-wired into the mindset and even the language itself.

If that was all it was, it might be dismissed as interesting and harmless - a way to make sure that behaviour between the sexes remains appropriate. But actually, there is a much, much darker side to all this that I will write about another time - the "Slut Walk" is coming to Delhi next Sunday and that seems to be the day to talk about gender issues.

For now, I'll just concentrate on remembering that I have to talk about women as though they were a group of blokes - or risk acquiring an unlikely reputation as a ladies' man.