It was Day 2 of Mood Indigo and after standing in queue for over an hour, we managed to get passes to the Euphoria concert that evening. The day had been good with some amazing competitions and the built up to the concert had been brilliant with Papon entertaining the 6800+ crowd at IIT Bombay. The concert had been highly anticipated and Euphoria did not disappoint! The energy they brought to the whole place was simply amazing! And with that ended yet another day at Asia’s largest college festival…
It wasn’t until the next evening that I logged on to Twitter and saw Palash Sen trending. On further investigation, I learnt that some of his comments during the concert last evening had “hurt” one of my female colleagues who went on to write a blog about it which has been now blown into a full-fledged controversy. WHAT? Really? It was such an amazing concert! On reading the blog I felt disappointed that it was written by a fellow student at India’s most prestigious institute. If the world calls us the most intelligent kids in the country, shouldn’t we be more tolerant and appreciative of humor? And sadly, Palash Sen was quoted completely out of context. Disappointing is how I would describe this whole episode and here is my humble attempt at justifying some good humor that happened at IITB.
So my fellow student says that Palash Sen asked the students in attendance if there are good looking women in IIT. Standing in probably the 3rd row from the stage, I saw that as a genuine question to the crowd. His words went “IIT ki khubsoorat ladkiyon” which tells me that he probably wanted to dedicate the next song to all the girls in IIT or something. And since in our culture, we are taught to treat our women with respect, he added a prefix “khubsoorat”. I mean, how would just “IIT ki ladkiyon” sound? He is, after all, an entertainer and cannot afford to be boring on stage. Yeah the majority of the crowd did say a loud NO in unison with a shake of the hand but hey, that is what we feel. If you go back and check the gender ratio in IIT Bombay you will be surprised by how skewed it is. In a democracy, we are free to express what we feel aren’t we? Like writing blogs and stuff? So we did answer that question and unfortunately the answer was NO from almost all IIT Bombay male students and no. I’m sure Palash Sen would not have expected the answer he got from the crowd as there were, after all many pretty ladies on the campus during the festival. The innocent question sadly, has been misunderstood as an attempt to humiliate women and make them feel small.
… Article Continued in part 2…
View full article at my blog here.