Phoning it in

Could you bear to switch off that smartphone; or are you too scared of missing out on that important work email?

Say what you will about the French – admit it, the words ‘rude’ and ‘snobbish’ are hovering close to your lips – you have to admit that they have life sorted. They eat loads of butter, cream and cheese, wash it down with red wine, smoke a cigarette afterwards, and still remain thin and healthy (the rates of heart attacks here are among the lowest; what the rest of the world calls the French paradox). They work the least number of hours in the week (35, since you ask) and yet have a standard of living that rivals the best in the world. And it is a country in which even a Monsieur Flanby (French for ‘wobbly custard’) like Francois Hollande can have the most ravishing women fighting over him. What’s not to love, right?

And now, apparently, things are getting even better for les Francais. News reports last week had it that their labour unions had negotiated a new deal with the employers associations, according to which employees would no longer be expected to answer or even look at work emails outside of office house. So, while the rest of us wage slaves are anxiously peering at our smartphones just in case the boss has mailed us about (yet another) work emergency, the French are faffing off, sitting at a café, smoking a Gauloise, sipping an aperitif and wondered what to cook for supper.

Well, okay, I exaggerate. Like all things French, there is a bit of hyperbole and myth making going on here. (And yes, French women do get fat and their kids do throw food around.) It turns out that this ‘agreement’ only applies to people who don’t work the 35-hour week, and they are required to steer clear of work emails for 11 hours at least (the 6 pm deadline beaten to death by the media was a figment of the over-active imaginations of some reporters and columnists).

But all of this begs the question: if you were asked – indeed, required by law – to put away your smartphone for 11 hours and not even sneak a peak at it to check if something had gone catastrophically wrong at work, could you do that? Or would a part of you always be nervously wondering about what you were missing? What would be more stressful for you at the end of the day: staying connected with work or cutting yourself off completely for a period of time?

Speaking for myself, I have to admit (a bit shame-facedly) that the first thing I do every morning, and indeed, last thing at night, is check my emails. And the very thought of being parted from my smartphone, even for a couple of hours, makes me panic just a little.

And I suspect that it is much the same for most people in our hyper-connected generation. Staying in touch, staying connected, and remaining available for work throughout the day (and night) has become a part of life for us. And even if we resent the hold our workplaces have on us thanks to our smartphones, like Pavlov’s dogs, we have become attuned to clicking on to every email that pops into our inboxes, and typing out a reply right away. Anything less, and we feel that we are slacking off.

There are those who maintain that being hyper-connected actually allows them to take more time off than they could in the pre-email and pre-smartphone era. Now at least it is possible to leave office early enough to take your kids for a game in the park and deal with out-of-work-hour emergencies on the phone. It is easier to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks without worrying about what will happen in your absence, because you can always check in virtually every day. And working from home is now a genuine option in a way that it never was before.

But in a world where work is only an email away, is there any way to genuinely switch off and relax? Is there any way to enjoy some real downtime without worrying about what’s going on at the office? It is even possible to carve out some personal space when it is impossible to get away from the professional sphere?

Well, there is only one way to find out. Switch your smartphones off before you start dinner with the family. And switch them on only after breakfast the next day. If you still have a job by the end of a week, then you may be on to something!

The dichotomy of the burkha

It turns women into highly potent symbols of the faith even as it renders them invisible

The incessant coverage of the Ban-the-Burkha row that erupted after President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke in favour of outlawing the offending garment in France and the decision of the Belgian Parliament to outlaw the burkha in public, put me in mind of an email that a friend forwarded to me a few months back.

There was a photo attached to it, featuring a group of eight women, standing in front of a shopping mall, while a young man crouched in front of them with a camera, all set to take their picture. All the women were wearing black burkhas so the only thing you could see of them was their eyes peering out from behind the nikab.

The caption of the photograph read: What is the point of this picture?

Call me politically incorrect – or something stronger, if you will – but I must confess that the mail made me chuckle.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of clicking someone’s picture if you can’t even see who it is in the photograph? And given that there was no way to tell who the women were behind the burkhas, why bother with a picture at all?

Surely, the point of holiday snapshots is that we can look at ourselves later and relive the memories of days spent on vacation. But is there any point of taking a picture in which you can’t identify anyone in the frame?

See, that’s the thing about the burkha.

It robs a woman of her identity the moment she puts it on. In a sense, it turns her into a non-person, cloaking her in anonymity, rendering her all but invisible in society.

But that’s just on one level. On another, it also makes a woman more visible than ever. She may be obscured from our view as an individual but as a symbol she becomes more evocative than ever.

And as a symbol she evokes myriad responses. To some, she is a vision of the purity of Islam. To some, she is an embodiment of the medieval obscurantism that plagues that religion. And to some others, she is simply a victim of gender injustice.

The image she presents is more political than it is personal. And that’s because in a very real sense, we don’t actually see the woman beneath the burkha – she is devoured by the imagery that her dress conjures up in our minds.

And that, in some ways, is the central dichotomy of the burkha. On the one hand, it bestows anonymity on women and on the other it turns them into visible and potent symbols.

There are many layers to the burkha debate. Muslim women may claim – as many do – that they wear it out of choice. That they feel safe behind its all-enveloping embrace. That it is their choice to cover themselves just as many Western women choose to reveal themselves in public. But for every woman who says and believes all this, there are many who are forced into wearing it because of parental or societal
pressure.

So, should a government ban this garment from public life so that those women who do not desire to wear the burkha don’t have to?

There really are no easy answers to that one. There are feminists who will argue for one position and liberals who will make a convincing case for the other. And both will have compelling arguments to buttress their beliefs.

But even though at a visceral level I believe that no government should legislate what women should or should not wear, I have a sneaking sympathy for Sarkozy’s view of the matter.

Because what the French President is talking about has as much to do with women’s rights and gender equality as it does with the right of a nation state to define its own cultural mores and its societal values, to create its own distinct identity which all citizens are expected to conform to.

Calling the burkha a sign of subservience rather than a sign of religion, Sarkozy told the French Parliament: “It will not be welcome on French soil. We cannot accept in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. This is not the French Republic’s idea of women’s dignity.”

And quite frankly, I can’t see much wrong with that statement. Shouldn’t France have a right to stand up for the cultural values it believes in and which are enshrined in its Constitution?

Think about it. If a French woman were to be seen in a sleeveless blouse or even with no headscarf in such Islamic states as Saudi Arabia and Iran, she would be arrested by the religious police and thrown into jail.

The rules in these countries are very clear. If women want to visit or live here they have to follow these rules – or else. Even the intrepid Christiane Amanpour has to cover her head with a scarf when she is reporting from Iran.

Everyone falls in line when it comes to respecting the cultural mores of Islamic states. So, why this hue and cry if Western countries try to impose their own cultural ethos on immigrant communities that have made their home in their midst?

After all, rather than being stigmatized as outsiders, these communities are being asked to assimilate, to respect the host culture, to become one with it rather than flaunt themselves as the Other.

What could possibly be wrong with that?