So That’s What Wheatish Looks Like
Another article in Today’s Times about the independent career woman in India. This picture is classic.
on Friday, November 23rd, 2007, 11:37 pm in Brown, India, Women, wheatish › 
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What’s worse is there’s absolutely no indication on the screen that they’re using an image editor, or anything that would make it actual “work,” though I’m assuming that’s what it’s supposed to represent.
It looks like they pulled up a picture of a guy from the internet and are giggling over him.
:P
This might have been the point. The article was mostly about the change from “father’s house to husband’s house” to “father’s house to own house, possibly to husband’s house.” Increased independence and whatnot.
My father sends me every article written by Somini Sengupta. Ever.
That’s because Somini Sengupta is where its at, yo. This was a great article. And that too right after her awesome Bangladesh articles.
I think it’s more of a “learn more about the Motherland” kind of thing. Or a “why are you a teacher and not a writer for the Times so I can see your name in print every day.” Le sigh.
I for one welcome our new underwear-ogling overlords.
Oh my bad tamasha. I was just expressing how I’m a fan of Somini.
With regards to the other thing, anyone can expect whatever of you. But you gotta do your thing, right? I think being a teacher is cool. Just so long as you don’t teach history. Boring! Nah, just kidding.
Dowry ‘†and deaths at the hands of women’�s in-laws who consider their dowries to be inadequate ‘†prevails.
The quote above is from the article (associated with this pic) by Somini Sengupta….sloppy writing. Yes dowry is prevalent…but a reader could easily walk away from this assuming that murder is the most common conclusion to an Indian marriage
Generally the photo editors write the captions.
I am not talking about the caption…I am talking about the article that these pics are from
Louiecypher, that bothered me when I read it, too. And while this article, overall gets a B- from me, I am not greatly impressed with Somini Sengupta in general.
I suppose the best I would say of her is that she is probably no worse than any other correspondent that the Times sends over, and it is probably also wrong to expect her to be better merely because she is of Indian ancestry. To me, the lack of analytical depth and historical perspective in her knowledge base manifests itself early, and often, in her reportage - exemplified by the sentence you quoted.
The problem that one faces is how do you offer criticism of a SAJA sanctioned journalist without being lumped into the “Crank/reactionary India apologist” category. It’s almost like you have to preface whatever you say with “I know life is much worse for women in India compared to the West but…..”. You would figure that when the NYT wrote about Kalpana Chawla they would be able to add some nuance, that Indian women in India are a much higher % of engineering/science students (i.e. the feeder degrees of space programs) than white American women in the US. So while India is certainly well behind the West in the situation of the vast majority of its women, its elite top 1% are more likely to produce astronaut candidates than the Western upper middle class. I swear some of these desi NYT journalists know less about India than some kid who did a summer abroad while at Middlebury
Louiecypher, I don’t know if SAJA is ‘approving’ or ’sanctioning’ any journalists as such, but I agree with your point that gender oppression has a class dimension - and class privilege can often negate many, if not most of its effects, at least some of the time.
And I join you in the hope, largely unrealized so far, that papers ike NYT would feature reportage with depth, perspective and nuance. One thing this article left me wondering was how broad the trends it uncovers have become, or indeed, whether the story was really a feature about this particular group of women, and them alone.
You’re on your own with comment about the Middlebury kid who did his summer abroad, though :)
The title cracked me up. I clicked expecting a discussion on it.
lol. Random hate on third party, that is reactionay
I was working and living in Delhi, sans parents, more than a decade ago. I guess I must be a freak, but then so must be all my friends, my sister, cousins…hell, there were a lot of us. Thats the problem with these stupid articles, they completely negate the experience perfectly middle class ordinary folk like me were having. I guess the world wasn’t flat then, and therefore couldn’t have possibly existed.
I’m not a fan of Sengupta. The Times used to have white people writing cliched, shallow claptrap in a Western voice. Now they have a brown person. She’s marginally better, but the voice is the same, so what’s the difference?
Funny, I feel the opposite way. Not only was that not an option for my cousins a decade ago but they didn’t even know that others were doing it. I thought she was right on in pointing to a big social shift in the acceptability of certain practices.
Tell me, please, what does authenticity sound like? Is it never criticizing Indian social practices? What does it mean to “sound white”? I’ve never understood what it meant, but I hear it frequently. Obama isn’t really black, he sounds too white! What, because he doesn’t talk street all the time? Tell me, what is the politically sanctioned way of sounding brown so that I can follow it and sanction Manish when he does not.
It means writing something less Neanderthal than cows, spicy and oppressed. Tell us something we don’t know.
Even the most half-assed, undereducated scribe at a Bombay tabloid writes more interesting copy than some of the lightweight NYT crap.
By the way look up these words: cliched, shallow. They have meanings.
Sounds like you agree with her substance but find it trivial.
Fair enough, but you’ve lived in India and seen these changes first hand. OTOH, the broader readership of the NYT has not, and did not know that India had such restrictions on women before and that they were loosening now. I’ll bet you would have found the same story interesting if it had been in a country you didn’t know.
Yawn. Not true, said for effect, and a shallow and cliched objection. (See, I can use these words without specificity, making it seem like I’m offering a critique when really it’s an ad hom crit).
No, it’s boilerplate. It’s like they change the date stamp and hit the publish button. Times reporters wrote this same exact story six months ago and six months before that.
If you think that’s ad hominem, you clearly don’t read the Times on India much. And here are DNA and Mid-Day for comparison. Study up, Paschim puttar.
1. Is the story about an important social topic?
2. Is it an accurate depiction of fact?
3. Were the facts in this story not known to the mainstream readership of the paper?
4. Is the topic one which is being discussed often in the home country?
If so, how is it shallow?
Perhaps you say cliched because you know it all already. That’s why you blog for a small brown audience, because you want to say penetrating and insightful and clever things that would be lost to an audience that wasn’t familiar with these topics in great depth already. But novelty (and it isn’t really cliche any more than Morrissette’s examples were ironic) is in the eye of the beblogger.
Ennis:
… a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women. November 23, 2007. By SOMINI SENGUPTA. [Link]
… a rapidly expanding economy has helped to transform the ambitions, habits and incomes of India’s middle class in ways that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago, not least for young women. February 26, 2007. By SOMINI SENGUPTA. [Link]
Yes, it requires reading skills.
The two stories you quoted are different enough. Both about women, yes. But would you say that two articles about India’s car industry, one about a cheap car and the other about a luxury car, are repetitive?
My last response to Blogwati and I’m out.
B - you said that SS sounded “white” was “shallow” “cliched” and didn’t write as interestingly as the ToI. Those are pretty harsh criticisms. None of them were substantiated though. When pushed you dropped the white, and you never explained why you think that her writing belongs in the same category as a publication as low as the ToI. I’ve read articles side by side from DNI and other journals, and the DNI coverage of the same story, from the same sources, is always worse.
What you ended up saying is that she repeated part of the same broad story as she did when she was talking about women in the airline industry, and that you were uninterested in this story about work and women’s social choices because it’s not news to you. That’s a far cry from the sweeping things you said earlier, a lot more constructive, and a lot easier to engage with.
I guess I prefer concrete and constructive over sweeping, seemingly clever but really ad hom crit. This is especially true since I blog. I don’t mind if people dislike my writing, but it annoys the bleep out of me when they leave sweeping dismissals without any engagement with the specifics of the piece. That’s probably why I felt the need to defend SS. She’s not my favorite journalist at the NYT, I don’t jump to read her work, and it doesn’t move me much. But that’s a far cry from calling it whitebread, shallow, cliched and tabloid. I don’t see the evidence for any of those four claims after several rounds of comments, so I’ll let you have the last word.