The author as rock star

It only ever happens at the Jaipur Literary Festival

A literary festival is where authors come to feel like stars. But when they want to feel like rock stars, they come to the JLF. And if you have ever attended the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) you will know why. This is where you will find authors of every ilk (historians, scientists, economists) encompassing every genre (spy thrillers, literary novels, biographies, autobiographies) from all over the globe coming together in the Pink City to paint it (entirely metaphorically) red. 

Last year, I attended as an author-speaker to talk about my novel, Madam Prime Minister, and moderated a few sessions. This year, I was there with my Spectator hat on. And so, for the benefit of those of you who weren’t in attendance, here are some of my impressions. 

• When you are at the JLF, it is hard to feel pessimistic about the future of reading. The place is crawling with young people (some of them still in their school uniforms) who don’t just love books; they live and breathe them. They crowd the bookshop, looking for titles and authors they admire and for those that they have yet to discover. They line up with patient good humour to get their books signed at the end of every session. And they have intelligent conversations about books with everyone who is willing to engage. 

• Actually, truth be told, at the JLF, it is easy to feel optimistic about the future in general. This is a place where the right wing and the liberal wing can debate in a civilised manner; where there is space for every opinion across the political spectrum, so long as it is expressed with respect and decorum. And where disagreements are treated not as mortal threats but as an inevitable part of life, to be both embraced and examined. The JLF proves that civility can and does exist in political debate - even if it is missing in our TV studios. 

• There are all kinds of literary stars  in attendance at the JLF. And then, there is Shashi Tharoor. It would be no exaggeration to say that Shashi is the Shah Rukh Khan of the literary world. And nowhere is this more obvious than here, where Tharoor is surrounded by a ring of over-muscled bouncers wherever he goes, such is the hysteria of the selfie-seekers who hound him. His sessions are always standing room only. And woe betide the author who is unfortunate enough to have a session scheduled the same time as Tharoor. He or she will have to sit in a half-empty hall, while the audiences surges to listen to Shashi. (I should know; last year, I was one of these unfortunate authors!)

• Books are the main attraction here, for sure. But people-watching comes a close second. There is such a cross-section of humanity here that you can be entertained for hours just watching the crowds. There are the grey-haired worthies, who always sit in the front rows and clamour to ask questions at the end of every session. There are the young girls who have turned out in their Sunday best, teetering along on heels that were not made for walking on lawns. There are the journalists, scurrying after ‘celebrities’, trying to coax a ‘quote’ out of them for their papers and digital outlets. And then, there are the authors themselves, trying gamely to navigate the kind of attention they hardly ever get in the real world. It’s as good as watching a show. 

• And then, there are the parties: held in one impossibly glamorous Jaipur location after another every night, culminating in the Writers Ball, which ends the Festival. There is music; there is dance; and so much fun is had by all. And then, it’s time to pack away those glittering outfits, until it’s time to play at being rock stars again the following year. 

On the campaign trail...

In this election season, some free and unsolicited advice to our politicians

Election season is upon us in all its maddening glory. Newspapers are heaving with poll-related news, telling us the caste breakdowns of constituencies, how they voted the last time, and what chances the principal political leaders have this time round. TV news channels have suspended regular programming to bring us live speeches from Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal whenever they speak at party rallies (which is pretty much every day). And even in the real world, all conversation seems to revolve around the elections, and what kind of result they will throw up.

In this season of poll-mania, it is hard not to get caught up in the madness. And so yes, I have succumbed as well, mainlining the news reports, following the social media accounts of politicians, and yes, watching the endless reports on the electoral fights in Varanasi, Vadodara, Amethi, Rae Bareli, Amritsar, Gandhinagar, Bhopal, and other key constituencies.

Which is why, this Sunday morning, I feel compelled to offer some free and completely unsolicited advice to all the candidates in the fray. 

• First off, a quiet word for the men. No matter what the provocation, do keep your shirts on. Or your kurtas. Or even your banians. Nobody needs to see those man boobs or jiggly bellies even if you are taking a ‘holy dip’ in the Ganga (yes, Arvind Kejriwal, I am looking at you). This nation has suffered enough. It doesn’t deserve to be traumatized any further. 
• Ladies, please be advised to post a cordon of heavies around you to keep away the gropers, especially the ones that belong to your own party. Congress candidate from Meerut, the film star, Nagma, learnt this the hard way. She was first filmed being manhandled by a Congress MLA, who later claimed that he was only trying to say something in her ear above the din of campaigning. Nagma brushed that off but a few days later was seen slapping a man at a rally when he got too close for comfort. Maybe next time, she should keep the pepper spray handy. (As indeed should all the women candidates out there.)
• Remember, this is the era of electronic media and social media. You may be making a speech in one state but it is heard across the country. So, don’t use arguments that don’t travel well. Narendra Modi, for instance, made a vow at a rally in Jammu to free the state of J&K from dynastic rule. Chief minister Omar Abdullah was quick to respond. “I dare Namo to make exactly the same speech against dynastic politics in Punjab or Maharashtra. Come on, money where your mouth is,” he tweeted. 
• This should really go without saying, but it makes a complete mockery of the election process if you make speeches threatening to kill your political opponent. This is an election. You are supposed to beat him by the ballot not the bullet. But nobody sent that memo to Imran Masood, the Congress candidate from Saharanpur, who was filmed making a speech in which he threatened to chop Narendra Modi to pieces. He has since been booked for hate speech. And we can only hope that this serves as a salutary example to others.
• Say one controversial thing every day to keep in the news. Better still, time your statement so that it makes the primetime TV news bulletin. There is no better, or cheaper, way of staying in the limelight. Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP colleagues have perfected this art. It’s time other political leaders played catch-up.
• Use social media to bypass traditional media and get your message across to the voters without any intermediaries. Shashi Tharoor has first mover advantage in this regard. But since then, other politicians have also seen the endless possibilities of this strategy. Narendra Modi, Shivraj Chauhan, Sushma Swaraj, Digvijay Singh and RPN Singh have accounts on Twitter, and Arun Jaitley is fast becoming a presence on social media as well. 
• It may be a good idea to hire stand-up comics to write your lines for you because – let’s face it – you are really not that funny or witty on your own. There are, of course, exceptions like Arvind Kejriwal who came up with this classic: “If Advani wants Modi to listen to him, he should drop the ‘v’ from his name.” 
• And if you do make a witty remark in the course of an interview, then don’t get too over-excited. And for God’s sake, don’t look off camera and smile proudly at your support staff, even if they are applauding you from the sidelines. (Yes, Amar Singh, I do mean you!)

A tale of two women

Sunanda Pushkar and Valerie Trierweiler; and the many parallels between their stories

Two women have dominated the headlines over the last couple of weeks. One of them is Valerie Trierweiler, the now former First Lady of France, whose first public appearance post her separation with Francois Hollande at a charity event in Mumbai created quite a stir. The other is Sunanda Pushkar, the tragically deceased wife of Union minister Shashi Tharoor, who graced the columns of page three while she lived and was splashed all over the front pages after being found dead in a five-star hotel room days after she had ‘outed’ what she believed was an affair between her husband and Pakistani journalist, Mehr Tarar.  

But while their stories played out many thousands of miles apart, the parallels between the two women are all too apparent.

Both had been married twice before, had kids from their second marriages (three sons for Valerie and one for Sunanda), before finding love a third time around. Both were strong independent women who took pride in being successful professionals, Valerie as a senior journalist for Paris Match magazine and a television presenter and Sunanda as a businesswoman (her declared assets included several flats in Dubai valued at 93 crores; and that was just part of her wealth). Both resented being perceived as arm candy for their powerful husbands. When Paris Match put Valerie on the cover calling her Hollande’s ‘charming asset’ she tweeted her outrage “Bravo Paris Match for its sexism. My thoughts go out to all angry women”. Sunanda, for her part, ascribed the IPL scandal in which she became embroiled as an emblem of the sexism and misogyny of the Indian media.

Both wanted a strong identity for themselves in public life. When Hollande was elected President, Valerie declared that she was not going to be ‘une potiche’ (French for trophy wife) and would have her own agenda in the ‘Madame Wing’ of the Elysee Palace. Sunanda, too, didn’t believe in mincing her words while going against the declared position of the Congress party on such contentious issues as Section 370, which she maintained discriminated against Kashmiri women, both Hindu and Muslim, on property rights.

Unfortunately, the central irony of the lives of these women was that despite their best efforts to project themselves as public entities in their own right, both found fame only because of the men they married/lived with. It is hard to believe that national TV channels would have interviewed Sunanda Pushkar and sought her views on political issues if she hadn’t been married to Shashi Tharoor but was just another attractive, successful, late entrant on the Delhi social scene. And certainly, Valerie Trierweiler would not have been invited to Mumbai to promote a charity if she was just another French journalist and not the partner of the President of France.

Another striking parallel is how both suffered, albeit in different ways, because of Twitter. Valerie sent out that now-infamous tweet, supporting a rebel candidate in a French election against Francois’ previous partner, Segolene Royal, because of her pathological jealousy of her former love rival. Segolene lost the election but Valerie lost in the court of public opinion, and many now believe that may have marked the beginning of the end of her relationship with the President.

Sunanda’s indiscretion on Twitter was even more explosive. She sent out a series of messages on her husband’s Twitter account to ‘expose’ his alleged affair with a Pakistani journalist, Mehr Tarar, whom she dubbed an ‘ISI agent’. Tarar responded in kind. Tharoor hastened to clarify that his account had been hacked. Sunanda was having none of that. She gave interviews to insist that she had sent out the tweets in question. And a messy situation got messier and messier.

Sadly, both Sunanda and Valerie found their private lives unraveling in a spectacularly public fashion around the same time. But while in Valerie’s case, it was Closer magazine that revealed that her partner had been cheating on her with a French actress, Julie Gayet, Sunanda’s privacy was invaded by Sunanda herself. And while Valerie survived her heartbreak despite being rushed to hospital after ‘taking one pill too many’ (according to some reports in the French media), Sunanda was found dead in the Leela Hotel of what was described (as I write this) as a possible drug overdose.

What lessons can we draw from the lives of these two women, who lived, loved, rose and then fell dramatically in the public gaze?

Well, first off, don’t hitch your wagon to a man, no matter how much you love him (as Valerie insisted to the end that she did) or how much he worships you (as Tharoor clearly did). Relying on or reveling in the status you derive from a relationship is a dangerous business, no matter how glamorous and desirable it may seem at the time. So, don’t sacrifice your career for a ‘job’ from which you can be fired at any time without any due cause.

And secondly, remember that it’s called ‘private life’ for a reason. It is not supposed to be for public consumption. Because while people may express faux sympathy for you, once your back is turned they will be pointing and laughing. Until, of course, the laughter turns into tears.

Kitchen Confidential

Why is the woman who cooks dismissed as downtrodden while the man who cooks is seen as emancipated?

Growing up, I never once saw my father enter the kitchen. He did not know how to cook; in fact, I doubt if he even knew how to make a cup of coffee for himself. The kitchen was always the exclusive preserve of my grandmother, my mother, and the other ladies of the household. The men never ventured inside; no, not even to fetch themselves a glass of water.

It may sound strange now, but this was pretty much the state of affairs in every home. Women did the ‘womanly’ things like cooking, cleaning, serving, fetching; yes, even the ones who held down jobs outside of the home. And men did ‘manly’ things like go out to work and bring back the daily bread (to be toasted and buttered and served up to them with a strong cup of tea). Men were very much the hunter-gatherers. And women remained nurturers and carers.

There were some men of our acquaintance who knew how to make a decent mutton biryani or a chingri malai curry, but their excursions into the kitchen were treated as momentous events that were marked down in the calendar months in advance. And even then, they were assisted by a flock of women who did all the dirty work – peeling, chopping, cleaning – for them. Once the mise en place was set, the men would sweep in to do the frying, sautéing, roasting or whatever else. And then, they would sweep out leaving the kitchen in an absolute shambles, to take their place at the dining table to be served like the kings they were.

I am glad to say that things have changed since then. Men no longer treat the kitchen as alien territory. Nearly all of them know enough cooking to be able to feed themselves in the absence of a mother or a wife. And many of them actually enjoy cooking, and take pride in their achievements behind the stove. But even so, based on purely empirical evidence, the bulk of the cooking in most households is still done by the women (either the lady of the house or the hired help).

What intrigues me, though, is how cooking has become another battleground of sexual politics. New-age feminism seems to think that a working woman who still cooks (or is expected to cook) at home is downtrodden, the victim of an age-old patriarchal system that decrees that the kitchen is a woman’s preserve. She is buying into sexual stereotypes and letting the sisterhood down with every perfect chapatti she rolls out.

On the other hand, a man who works outside the home and comes back to cook for his family is seen as an enlightened being. We even have a name for him. He is called the New Age Man. He is confident of his masculinity and not afraid of being in touch with his feminine side. He does not buy into any kind of sexual stereotyping. He is equally at ease in the boardroom as he is dexterous at the chopping board. We should all be so lucky as to end up with someone like him!

So basically, a woman who loves to cook for her family is a sell-out. But for a man, cooking for his family is a unique selling point. Can you figure this one out? No, me neither.

Why should the same impulse – to nurture and feed your loved ones – be seen through two such different prisms depending on the gender of the person concerned? Why should a woman be mocked for doing something that a man is congratulated for?

Clearly, as we enter into the second decade of the 21^st century, gender stereotyping has come full circle. But while men are admired for stepping out of their gender-defined roles, women are pilloried for staying within them.

I can still hear the jeers that greeted Sunanda Pushkar Tharoor when she admitted on national television that she enjoyed being a housewife and cooking dinner every night for her husband. How could she possibly say something like that, her critics tut-tutted. Didn’t she know that women were expected to be emancipated from housework now? Being a woman of substance meant having a career outside the home. Admitting to being a homebody, and worse, confessing to cooking for your husband (and actually enjoying it!), was a complete no-no.

And yet, I am sure if the tables had been turned, the public reaction would have been quite different. If Shashi Tharoor had said in an interview that he loved going back home after a hard day at the office and rustling up a nice meal for his wife, he would have been hailed as the epitome of the New Man, an ideal that every male should aspire to.

What is going on here? Why is Sunanda’s goshtaba or tabak maas bad while Shashi’s meen moily or avial is good? Why this double standard when it comes to appraising a primal desire: the impulse to cook for those we love?

The truth is that all of us are good at some things and rubbish at others. Some women enjoy the prospect of cooking for their families while others wouldn’t be caught dead before a stove. Similarly, some men love the idea of cooking while others steer well clear of the kitchen.

So, here’s a novel idea. Why not allow each one of them to do as they please – and what pleases them – without any value judgement? That’s not asking for much, is it?

Storm in a T-cup

Given the amount of squabbling on its timelines, should we just rename Twitter as Bicker?

Just a thought. Do you think they should rename Twitter as Bicker? It certainly seems apt given how it has rapidly become a forum for people to squabble about everything in short bursts of 140 characters. Lovers quarrel bitterly; ex-wives and ex-husbands vent venom; new partners give full rein to their jealous rages; and everyone throws insults around in a no-holds-barred fashion. Nothing is private. Nothing is sacred. And nothing is off-limits.

A couple of weeks ago, we watched agog as French politics descended into soap-opera territory via Twitter. President Francois Hollande looked on helplessly as his current partner, the journalist Valerie Trierweiler targeted his former partner (and mother of his four children), Segolene Royal, in a vicious tweet that hit Royal just where it hurt the most.

Royal, standing for election to a parliamentary seat, was being opposed by a dissident from her own Socialist party. So her former partner and now President of the Republic, Francois Hollande, sent out a message of support to Royal to bolster her chances at the polls (after all, she had done her best to support his presidential campaign). That was enough to make his current partner (and now the Premier Dame of France), Trierweiler, see red. She allegedly called up Hollande to remonstrate and then said chillingly, “Now you will see what I am capable of.”

And thus went out the now-infamous tweet, motivated by what insiders called Trierweiler’s ‘blind jealousy’. In it, she wished good look and ‘courage’ to Royal’s opponent in the poll. All of France was appalled, the French Prime Minister publicly rebuked Trierweiler and asked that she be more ‘discreet’ and ‘know her place’. And Royal announced sadly, at an election rally, that she felt ‘wounded’ by the tweet and that she deserved respect as a woman, a politician, and a mother.

But the damage was done. When the votes were counted, Royal had lost the seat, and with it the chances of becoming President of the National Assembly, the third-highest post in the country’s political structure. A bitter Royal quoted Victor Hugo to say that “Traitors always pay for their treachery in the end” and her four children, for good measure, stopped speaking to their father’s current partner.

So what started out as a storm in a T-cup ended up taking down the reputations of all the protagonists in the drama. Valerie was exposed as an insecure, vindictive woman who could not control her insane jealousy of her partner’s former lover. Hollande was shown up as a man who could not manage the women in his life (so, how on earth would he manage France, ran the sub-text). And as for poor Royal, her political career imploded in the aftermath of Twittergate and looks extremely unlikely to revive any time soon.

But while nobody in their right minds can condone Trierweiler’s scorched-earth policy on Twitter, there are some political spouses who have gained from their tweet-wars. Most famously, there was Anne Romney who went on Twitter to take on political commentator, Hilary Rosen, who said in a debate on CNN that Mrs Romney “had never worked a day in her life”. Anne Romney was quick to retort, “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work”. Her tweet got her the support of every stay-at-home mom, and many other women besides.

Of late, though, Twitter wars have tended to be increasingly undignified, even downright tawdry at times. Take the current battle royale raging between British multi-millionaire Ben Goldsmith (son of Jimmy and Annabel Goldsmith and brother to Jemima Khan) and his estranged wife, Kate, a Rothschild heiress. Ben called his wife’s behaviour ‘appalling’ on Twitter (because she had called the police on him) while she responded with a series of tweets saying that there were two sides to every break-up. Meanwhile, Kate’s alleged lover, the rapper Jay Electronica (yes, really!) put in his two-bit worth by tweeting #LoveIsOnTheWay. Yeah, real classy, this lot.

In India, too, we have had our share of Twitter wars. The most famous was the one waged by Lalit Modi against Shashi Tharoor (about the now-defunct Kochi franchise of the IPL) which resulted in Tharoor losing his job as minister and being consigned to political wilderness while Modi lost control of the IPL and was banished from the Indian cricketing scene to languish in exile (in London, though, so it can’t be all that bad).

More recently, we saw Karan Johar take on Priyanka Chopra for a story she did or did not (depending on whom you believe) plant about how some star wives and certain directors who were close to them were giving her a bad time. A livid Johar tweeted about how some people were ‘lame and spineless’ and needed ‘to wake up and smell the koffee’ and not ‘mess with goodness’. Of course, he did not mention Priyanka by name, but the inference was clear – and Twitter-sphere was abuzz in a matter of seconds.

So, what do you think? Does Bicker work better than Twitter? Or do you have a better idea? All suggestions welcome at my Twitter handle (given below). And may the best name win.

Loss of faith

To feel betrayed, you need to have trusted in someone to begin with

How do you think the average Pakistani cricket fan reacted when news of the latest scandal to hit their cricket team broke? When the British tabloid, The News of the World, ran a sting operation on a bookie who boasted on camera that he could get the Pakistani team to do anything he wanted? And when the next day’s play – when two Pakistani bowlers bowled no-balls in exactly the same overs as he had predicted – proved that he wasn’t lying?

Well, the words ‘shocked’ ‘grieved’ ‘embarrassed’ ‘saddened’ or even ‘angered’ come to mind. But do you think that any of the fans really felt ‘betrayed’?

I think not. To feel a sense of betrayal, you need to have had a feeling of trust to begin with. And while I am sure that the Pakistanis love, admire, hell, even idolise their cricket team, I am not sure that they trust any of their players as far as they can throw them.

I mean, honestly, how could they? Even the most naive Pakistani cricket fan is well aware by now that there is something rotten in the world of Pakistani cricket. Allegations of match-fixing have become routine over the last couple of decades. Charges of ball-tampering crop up every year or so, with such senior players as Shahid Afridi at the centre of the storm. And spot fixing – in which a player tries to oblige his bookie friends by influencing a particular period of play by throwing away his wicket or dropping a catch or, as happened in Lords on that fateful day, bowling a no-ball – is so common as to barely occasion comment.

None of this is such a well-kept secret that the Pakistani cricket fan has no idea that this stuff really happens. So, while I am willing to accept that Pakistani fans may be upset and annoyed, I don’t really think that they really feel let down by their national team. As far as they are concerned, all of this is pretty much par for the course.

See, that’s the thing about betrayal. It only hits you like a sledgehammer if you have no idea that it is headed in your direction at the speed of light.

Ask Elin Nordegren. The Swedish ice-blonde wife of Tiger Woods had no idea that her husband was cheating on her – let alone that he was doing so with an assembly line of busty babes. When she finally found out, it was as if her world had collapsed around her. As she said in an interview to People magazine after her divorce was final, she didn’t suspect him for a minute, so when the mistresses began to crawl out of the woodwork she felt very betrayed – and very stupid indeed.

That’s exactly how Victoria Beckham felt a few years ago, when Rebecca Loos sold the story of her affair with David Beckham, complete with accounts of sexually explicit text messages and raunchy phone calls. The Beckhams had built their brand on being a devoted, wholesome couple who only had eyes for each other and it must have come as a complete shock to Victoria to see hard evidence of her husband’s involvement with another woman. But the ones who probably felt the most betrayed were David’s fans who had bought into the myth of Beckham the family man.

It’s only when the world buys into a particular myth that a sense of betrayal kicks in. We all believed – or at the very least, we wanted to believe – that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were made for each other. She was our favourite Friend, America’s corn-fed sweetheart; he was the blonde God of good looks, the pin-up idol of every girl (and at least some of the boys). Theirs was a marriage meant to last.

So, when Brad Pitt fell for the dark, dangerous beauty of Angelina Jolie on the sets of Mrs and Mrs Smith (though they swore till they were blue in the face that no actual impropriety occurred until Pitt had left Aniston – yeah, right!) you could hear the sound of a million hearts breaking all over the world. Jennifer was, as expected, devastated and heart-broken, but all of us felt just as betrayed on her behalf.

It was that sense of betrayal that turned us against Shashi Tharoor when the IPL controversy broke. Tharoor was our middle-class hero, the squeaky-clean Malayali boy made good who had come back home to do his bit for his country. He was going to clean the system, making it as honest and incorruptible as himself. He was a politician with a difference; and he was going to make a difference if it was the last thing he did.

So, imagine the shock when it was revealed that Tharoor’s then girlfriend and now wife, Sunanda Pushkar, had been granted sweat equity worth about Rs 70 crores in the Kochi team that won the IPL bid, with minister Tharoor standing as mentor. You could argue that this was nothing compared to the blatant corruption that some of Tharoor’s fellow ministers indulged in.

But that wasn’t the point. The truth was that we expected better of Tharoor. And when he let us down, that sense of betrayal could only be assuaged by his resignation from the government.

I guess the moral of the story is: the higher we build them up, the harder they fall. The more the trust; the greater the sense of betrayal.

Sexism? Not quite

The Shashi Tharoor-Sunanda Pushkar controversy is about many things – sexism is not one of them

Sexism is real. It is dangerous. It is shameful. And it is alive and flourishing all around us.

It starts even before birth, when families conspire to get rid of the girl child before she has begun to stir in her mother’s womb. It continues into childhood, when daughters don’t get fed as well as sons. It exists in our school and college system, where girls are more likely to drop out of school and less likely to sign up for higher education.

Sexism is endemic in the professional world, where companies are leery of hiring women of child-bearing age for fear that they will take time off to have babies (and for every cold and cough the child has thereafter); where women routinely earn less than their male counterparts for doing the same job; where the glass ceiling ensures that the representation of women in boardrooms across the country is abysmal.

Yes, sexism exists in our far-from-perfect world. And it’s something that every right-thinking person, whatever their gender, must oppose.

But if we are to fight this battle, it is also essential to understand the distinction between genuine sexism that poses a danger to the values of our liberal society and those issues that may involve a woman but are not sexist in nature.

An attack on a woman’s capability, integrity, honesty or decency does not necessarily become sexist just because a woman is the target of scrutiny. So long as the allegations are well-founded, based on facts that can bear close scrutiny, it doesn’t matter whether the target is a man or a woman. This is about accountability not sexism.

Take the recent brouhaha over former minister Shashi Tharoor and his girlfriend Sunanda Pushkar. Right from the moment Lalit Modi posted that now-infamous tweet about the ownership of the Kochi consortium, Tharoor fell back on what can only be described as the “sexism defence”.

The media, he declaimed loftily, could not accept that an attractive woman could also be a professional in her own right. It was demeaning Sunanda to suggest that she was his proxy in this deal, as if she had no identity of her own. She had achieved far more than he ever could in the world of business, blah, blah, blah.

Three days down the line, the lady herself jumped into the fray. Issuing a statement to announce that she had decided to return her sweat equity to the Kochi consortium, she said, “As a woman professional, I am shocked to find how easily parties with vested interests questioned my credentials mainly because I am a woman.”

Er, hang on a minute. Nobody was questioning Ms Pushkar’s credentials because she was a woman. We were questioning her credentials per se. How did someone who was a sales manager in a Dubai firm suddenly land a gig in which she stood to make Rs 70 crores in sweat equity without investing a penny of her own?

Was she a marketing genius whom no one had ever heard of? What made her worth so much money? What did she bring to the table that no other communications wizard/PR person/event manager could?

The answers to these questions made it clear that it wasn’t her professional capabilities that had gotten Ms Pushkar this sweetheart – or should that be ‘sweat-heart’? – deal. It was her closeness to the minister for external affairs (no, I won’t crack the obvious joke) that made her such a desirable party – especially given that he was taking such a personal interest in the outcome of the Kochi franchise bid.

It was the impropriety of a Union minister using his influence in a commercial deal in which his girlfriend – whom he intended to marry as soon as his second divorce came through – stood to benefit that was the issue here. If the sexes had been reversed, the issue would have remained the same.

Nobody is denying that Sunanda Pushkar is an attractive woman if your taste runs to blonde highlights and industrial-strength mascara. But her looks are not the issue here. Nor are her professional capabilities, such as they are. The issue here is that her boyfriend was a minister of the Union government who, by his own admission, had interceded (or ‘interlocuted’, or whatever he’s calling it these days) with the IPL on behalf of the Kochi consortium.

As long as these facts remained the same, anyone in Ms Pushkar’s position would have come under scrutiny. It had nothing to do with her being a woman, or even a glamorous woman, for that matter.

And yet, both Tharoor and Pushkar are pushing the sexism defence down our throats with a certain desperation, even though as reasonably intelligent creatures they must know that this simply won’t wash. And both seem unmindful of the fact that in the process, they are thumbing their noses at the millions of women in India who have to live with sexism every day of their lives – without a pay-out of Rs 70 crores to sweeten the deal.

Sexism is a serious offence. And it is a serious charge to make. So, those who level it should not do so on frivolous grounds – because to do that is to mock every genuine victim of sexism; to make fun of their misfortune; to heap insult on an already grievous injury.