Chained to the stove and jabbering to my clique- I'm no more liberated than my great grandmother was.

Gossip, chatter, nag, rabbit, yak and natter- These are terms used to refer to women's conversations, implying that women's talk is superfluous and rather pointless. Women's talk is often described in terms seldom used about men's talk. Men, it would seem, attain significance in brevity. Research has shown that men, on the whole, talk far more than women. The stereotype, however, continues to thrive.

Cell C have recently developed a niche product called 'Winc', 'women incorporated'. A mobile phone package designed specifically for women, 'empowered by Cell C'. I'm not sure what the numbers are like but hot on the heels of the First for Women insurance products women seem to be a lucrative market. I like the First for Women advertisements, they are quirky without being patronising. Cell C however left me feeling disenfranchised. Truth is, I do not appreciate any empowerment from a cell minion. Women can empower themselves, acknowledge that and then I'll think about parting with my cash.

Cell C's pricey print campaign, sported a bare-shouldered blonde in an uncomfortable looking pose attempting a wink. Beneath the yellow tressed one, 'Now all our favourite things in one cellular package'. The use of the word our instead of your is clever copywriting. It is an attempt at the creation of a feeling of empathy and collaboration between Cell C and the target audience. Especially clever when one considers that women purportedly desire from their relationships, collaboration, intimacy, support and approval while men, conversely, allegedly place a greater premium on status and independence and are less concerned about inequality in their relationships.

But how exactly does a package for women differ from the usual stock?

• 'Winc is the first and only cellular package designed just for women and empowered by Cell C. So, speak your heart out, connect and tune into your clique when you really need to with WINC' The assumption that women talk more than men and would thus require extra text messages to send to the women in their 'clique' rankles. I feel like I've been spoken down to. The last time I was accused of having a clique I was in high school.

• 'Women in charge: hot tips and advice You have access to www.winc.mobi, your very own, exclusive mobi site that offers discounted content such as discounted content on recipes.....' Oh the joy. Of course that's where I'm supposed to be; chained to the stove while jabbering to my 'clique'.

• 'Women in care: toll free calls to Lifeline. You can call Lifeline, free of charge. LifeLine offers confidential, emotional counselling for gender violence, rape or any other issue that's getting you down.' Why enumerate the reasons one would would want to call Lifeline for? I'm sure if I'm suicidal or if I've just been raped I'll thank Cell C for not billing me.

Frankly my dears, I'd rather slit my wrists.

From Sarkozy's ruminations about enforcing a ban on the burqa in France, to Al Azhar's proposed ban on the Niqab in Egypt, right down to Cezanne Visser's double D's, men in superior positions in patriarchal societies continue to dictate how women and womanhood is manifested in public spaces.

In the words of Marianne Thamm writing in the Sunday Times Lifestyle some weeks back,

'When little girls begin to lose interest in the world around them and show signs of becoming preoccupied by what they see in the mirror, it is time to act. Get Visser in to do some motivational speaking. With her new outfit courtesy of the Department of Correctional Services and her former DD implants in a display case, she will serve as a fantastic deterrent to young women tempted to shed those unwanted brains in order to win the approval of men.'

For Sheroug, 20 bits of nonsense

Even as the most prolific bloggers among us question the friendships the blogs have spawned, there remain certain friendships which ill deserve time under the harsh light of doubt. One among the vast number of friends I'm grateful to have made through blogging is Sheroug of 8bits of cofee fame.

This is in honor of Sheroug, who a few days ago, said her I dos. For Sheroug, who held firm on what she wanted and had the backbone to stand up for it, you are a harbinger of hope for everybody struggling to piece together the courage to want something more than what the present dishes out. She’s also the only woman I know who’d consider a dose of Valium to steady herself for the big day, she’s been unabashed about animals with rears the shape of hearts and an affinity to caffeine that is rival to none. Sheroug tagged me to blog a certain number of trifling details about myself well over a year ago and I’ve had this post humming in my drafts since. My edits are in brackets.

1. I started off my university life wanting to be an economist but was coerced into doing languages instead.

2. Studying languages has been a coercement well worth its infringement of human rights.

3. I’ve become rather scatter-brained. It comes from having too many windows open and an unwavering faith in the capacity for women to multitask better than men.

4. I’ve just eaten a packet of Doritos Taco. Too much junk food does not intelligible writing make. (I’m drunk on jasmine infused green tea)

5. Everybody knows I’m a bibliophile, it’s become a bit of a pressured position, some people expect me to have read everything.

6. Oh, and the quotations thing, but everybody knows that as well.

7. I am an ardent believer in, “An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.”....

8. I can’t be too honest about myself here, too many of you know me now, I can’t destroy the well formed opinions.

9. My favourite poem, Stars by Emily Bronte

10. Joint favourite, Mirror by Sylvia Plath

11. I’ve become cluttersome.

12. I coined that word, “cluttersome”, to describe my habit of shoving in my paper tray all things that look too painful, too tiresome, or that would require more than one braincell to digest. Cluttersome and blehringitis, my buzzwords for the moment. (All proceeds from blehringitis to be sent to Crimson Shimmer)

13. This is the view from my bedroom window. (I look out to a garden and pool on most days)

14. I am disconcerted by the absence of the sound of water crashing into the pool.

15. I have no idea what next year holds for me. (It’s been a year most kind to me in some ways with some unforeseen kicks to the guts)

16. I am about to turn down an excellent job offer, one that I’d always wish for. (I’ve done that again a couple of weeks ago)

17. Because I want to spread my wings a little next year. (Because I am betrothed to me magazine)

18. Or I might have them clipped too, well if it’s an ever after kind of clipping.

19. I’m being more cavalier here than I’d ever dare to be in reality.

20. Gosh, that’s a whole twenty bits of nonsense!

Allah ma3k ya habibti.

After reading The Language of Things

The Language of Things is a remarkable book, well worth its rather hefty price tag. It begins as a critique of contemporary consumerist culture with witty one-liners and knowing insights into what exactly makes us go shop-shop. Many of the points Sudjic punches out within the first few pages echo some of my deepest reservations against my own spendthrift, accumulating ways.

Never have more of us had more possessions than we do now, even as we make less and less use of them. The homes in which spend so little time are filled with things....They are our toys: consolations for the unremitting pressures of acquiring the means to buy them and which infantilize us in our pursuit of them.

I was compelled to sit up and read closely after that opening paragraph, so much so that I bought the book, adding to the stack of unread books on my shelf, but determined to own it, an ironic exemplification of Sudjic’s opening salvo. He goes on to add, ‘Like geese force fed grain until their livers explode, to make foie gras , we are a generation born to consume.’ It’s been many years since I’ve recovered (of course not entirely) from my obsession with shoes. Long before I knew the sexual connotations of a slinky pair of stilettos I collected them with gusto, happy for the happiness it brought me in its acquisition. But it was a brief interlude from my real passion, books. As much as I buy them I am suffocated by the guilt of consuming too much, angry with myself for being so easily seduced by binded words and remorseful at the interview that inevitably follows with my parents, ‘Yes Mum, I know you bought me a whole lot of books in India. No, I do like them. It’s just that these...I know there are more important things....’ Sudjic has become somewhat biblical with words well adjusted to my predicament:

In my own life, I have to acknowledge that I have been fascinated by the glossy sheen of consumption while at the same time nauseous with self disgust at the volume of what we all consume, and the shallow but sharp emotional tug that the manufacture of want exerts on us.

Unlike my fetish for shoes, my booklust is redeemable in its perceived nobility. But at a more basic level it functions exactly like the Imelda Marcos impersonation. It is driven by a want of objects. Our individual worlds are not constituted of beliefs, ideals and values; they are only the mortar to the bricks that our possessions. The parable of the person with the least possessions having the least to answer for in the hereafter peals an ominous sounding alarm bell. Our drive to pad our lives with inane things has become an intricately drawn out process not untouched by class and constantly philosophical about exactly what luxury is.

Sudjic is after all the not a Marxist social critic but rather the director of the Design Museum in London. He takes the view of design as a kind of language:

...design has become the language with which to shape those objects and to tailor the messages that they carry. The role of the most sophisticated designers today is as much to be storytellers, to make design that speaks in such a way as to convey these messages, as it is to resolve formal and functional problems. They manipulate this language more or less skilfully, or engagingly, to convey a kind of story....

As an attempt into understanding that language this book is vital reading. It is delightfully written, interspersed with images and quotations that in many ways embody that language. As Sudjic well points out it is a language that is key to understanding the man-made world.

Tapping up the appeal of the moleskin

Any kind of object can offer a soothing quality.... The Moleskin notebooks, with their characteristic hardcovers, rounded corners, slender proportions and built in elastic band, are to this decade what the Filofax was to the 1980s. Their appeal is not the neurotic organising impulse of the Filofax, but in the faint memory that the notebook contains of a simpler past- not our own necessarily, but a more generic idea of what life was once like even if it never was. On the band that goes round them below the shrinkwrap, they also describe themselves as the 'legendary notebook of Van Gogh and Matisse, Hemingway and Chatwin', and so seem to suggest talent by association.

Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Things

Picture Credit: Saaleha Bamjee-Mayet

I share, you share, why share?

I do schmaltz too often on this blog. Too often I'm inclined to warm, giddy feelings and like a child at a fair for the very first time I jump up and down excitedly screaming, 'Look, look!'. I want to share. I think it explains too, why I enjoy entertaining, it's heartwarming to have people share in what's mine, albeit for a short while . I'm not altogether a people's person, I'm clumsy in most social settings. I'd dearly like to be quiet and unobtrusive and smile at the world in passing but nothing makes my heart flutter like opening my palm for others to also revel in the butterfly within. I'm a sharing sort of person. I write because I want to share my thoughts, my ideas and often, the only way for me to make sense of my feelings is by sharing them. I'm wondering if this predisposition to share is in fact a display of selfishness, of a constant need to keep myself bolted to the focus of the moment.

Writers are like trees, they grow together but each to their own potential. Like trees, writers help each other grow to their own strength by competing to be their best.
Yu Hua

Sundry Sunday Thought

There are no signs pointing out happiness on this road. This road is made up as I go along. It's not here, not there. I've tried to find it in a map book; they're still scrambling to update their latest edition, or so they say. It's a gravel road. The pebbles crunch beneath my feet. The sun beats down unrelentingly but the way ahead is unlit. There's a speed limit but there's no one crouched in the bushes monitoring it. I'm a little behind on it. Okay, I'm a lot behind on the speed limit. But no one's watching. It's a gravel road straddling the Tropic of Nowherecorn and it's desolate except for the idea of it.

Waiting- A Free Writing Challenge

Parasputin made up the rules:

a) choose a topic
b) set a timer for 5 minutes
c) switch off your monitor to reduce the temptation to edit
d) write continuously, no edits

I obliged:

a) I chose a topic by consulting The Writer's Block, a little book of ideas interspersed with bits of literary nonsense designed to 'jumpstart the imagination'. I eventually settled on:

b) I set a timer and dug in:

The order in the pharmacy irritated me; neatly metred rows of cosmetics, aspirin, Dutch medicine, bandages... Everything was neatly stacked, nothing out of place. And the smell, a mix of people, medicine and cheap perfume; I could feel my insides rebelling against it. I take a step forward, a sigh weighing heavily in my chest. Winter evenings at the pharmacy; the queue stretches interminably long. The four pharmacists at their booths, like ticket vendors at the cinema, eye the clock with a weary eye. Seven o clock seems far away. A young child walks away on uncertain legs, sucking merrily at a tube of Gaviscon. His mother is unperturbed chatting to another woman, ‘They say no swine flu, elko kone hamjaaveh? My sister’s three kids go to school there. Aasia, the smallest one, she’s in grade five now, so fast they grow up neh.... Ja, she said only eight children in her class today...’ Her voice trailed off as she continued. The other woman, clucks her tongue and feigns the appropriately disapproving expression. I could tell she was not really listening. Her eyes seemed far away. She was well dressed, her court shoes peeking from beneath tailored pants, her blazer unruffled at the tail end of the day. Standing beside her in my ratty jeans and mismatched scarf I felt gauche. I looked at her again from the corner of my eye, admiring her poise and patience. She waves the little stub of white paper in her hand absently.

c) The urge to edit is overpowering but I enjoyed the exercise and have posted my effort untouched. Dignity is overrated anyway.

d) I tag Saaleha, MJ, Aasia, Waseem, Nooj and anyone else up for it.