“People living with ADHD who may have normal or above normal IQ are able to find different hacks that will make up for the drawbacks they face,” says Dr Divya Nallur, psychiatrist. “But alongside this they are also likely to be underemployed in their occupations, as compared to peers without ADHD having a similar educational, social and economic background as them”

Stigma and discrimination both play a role when it comes to disclosing ADHD at the workplace. Fear of being discriminated against at the workplace is a real concern that causes a person to not share their problem, shares Dr Satish Ramaiah, psychiatrist, People Tree hospital. Although, he adds, there may be situations where a workplace might be amenable to making accommodations and the scenario is not that bad. But because of existing stigma the person doesn’t end up speaking to their manager about it.

Lakshmi (name changed) a Chennai-based corporate lawyer has ADHD. She shares that despite not disclosing that she has ADHD it’s difficult to ask for accommodation. “It’s difficult to phrase this as an individual need, I’m trying to couch this (asking for an accommodation) in the language of what is relevant for the organization. On the other hand asking for this as something I require means having to deal with the fact that I don’t feel valued at my workplace and it feels too much to ask.”

In one of her videos on her YouTube channel ‘How to ADHD’ Jessica McCabe discusses accommodations at the workplace for employees with ADHD. “Accommodations are cheap, easy to implement, and doing so results in an increase in productivity. So why is it not happening?”

There’s very little awareness about ADHD and how it affects a person, says Dr Ramaiah. This lack of awareness translates to inaction on the front of providing employees with ADHD the accommodation they require. To effect change Dr Ramaiah talks about a three-fold method: Awareness, acceptance, and accommodation:

● Psychoeducation is the first step. In his practice his communication to a client’s manager consists of making them aware of how ADHD affects their employee
● This is followed by helping the manager reach a place of acceptance about this neurodevelopmental disorder and its effects
● And finally, listing what accommodations will help the client be productive at the workplace

From procrastination to productivity

To show an instance of what counts as reasonable accommodation in the case of an employee having ADHD Dr Ramaiah cites the example of one of his clients, a scientist with ADHD who works in a research organization. Considered to be brilliant at their work, it was frustrating for their workplace to find that they weren’t able to complete tasks on time. The following set of recommendations were shared with their workplace:

● Appoint a mentor who will help them break down the work into smaller chunks
● The mentor must keep deadlines for each of these smaller chunks
● The review process by the mentor must happen often, say twice a week to see how the client is progressing with their work
● At the start of the day the client must make a list of what the day’s plan is and paste it in front of their work desk
● They should make use of a calendar to organize their week
● They are someone who is easily distracted and also very self-conscious, so it would help them to have a space to work where they’re not in the midst of the larger office space and its bustle

Tips for managers

Dr Nallur shares a few pointers for the manager of an employee who has ADHD —

Small tasks, quick deadlines: Assign the employee a small task, or a single task. For example, saying “Fetch me coffee” will get the job done, as opposed to saying “Fetch me coffee, take a print-out, and purchase office stationery items.” Or “Submit a report on this particular topic to me by tomorrow morning,” followed by “Finish the second part of the report by today evening.”

Saying, “You’ll need to complete this project in three months time” is not going to help at all.

Understanding impulsivity: ADHD causes the person to behave impulsively. This may translate to outbursts at work, issues with anger.

“ADHD is not an excuse for bad behavior, and it’s something that can be treated in therapy,” says Dr Nallur, “But if the manager is aware of what is causing this anger it helps to recognize the person’s behavior as stemming from a real problem, and something that some leniency can be exercised towards.”

Hyperfocus: An ADHD strength

As per Dr Nallur a person with ADHD can often hyperfocus on a task, be very thorough and detail-oriented in what they’re doing. And because they’re able to think very fast, out-of-the-box thinking is another advantage.

A long meeting, a task that is boring like paperwork may be difficult to manage. But being offered a challenging task will hold their attention.

This means that for people with ADHD it becomes vital to identify what their interests are, and what they see as an interesting challenge. Once they focus on those topics they can really excel in them. These strengths and weaknesses can be identified with the help of a clinical psychologist or occupational therapist.

Thanks to Pavitra Jayaraman for her editorial guidance. Dr Satish Ramaiah and Dr Divya Nallur for the time they took to share vital information on ADHD. And the Chennai-based lawyer for being vulnerable and open in sharing aspects about living with ADHD.

References:

• ‘How to get the best out of an ADHD employee (just LIFT!)’, by Jessica McCabe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvRnhV5GnjU
• ‘Employing a person with ADHD’, https://adhdireland.ie/for-adults/employing-a-person-with-adhd/#toggle-id-5
• ‘Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the workplace’, https://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd-in-the-workplace/
• ‘Fact Sheet: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Topics’, Dr Russel Barkley, http://www.russellbarkley.org/factsheets/adhd-facts.pdf

“Humans like their sex categories neat, but nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t actually have a line between the sexes. If we want a line we have to draw it on nature.” — Alice Dreger in ‘Sex Typing for Sport’

26-year-old athlete Pinki Pramanik from Purulia, West Bengal was arrested on charges of rape by her live-in companion. Since 14 June, 2012 when Pramanik was arrested, she became the object of prurient curiosity. The crime she was charged with — rape — proved to be false and influenced by motives connected to a land dispute.

What the media and the public tried her for was for ‘pretending to be a woman when allegedly she is a man’.

Pinky was meted out horrible treatment in jail where she was detained in a male prison and manhandled by police officers — shots of her being groped while being taken into the police van kept playing on 24/7 news channels. She was also sent without her consent for a gender verification test to a private clinic that was not equipped to conduct any such test. The unverified test results were publicised by the police and widely reported by media. If the hellish nature of these incidents weren’t enough, all this was also exacerbated with an MMS of a video taken during the medical examination that went viral on the internet.

Gender verification controversies that involve media circuses are not uncommon. See for instance the case of Caster Semenya, who found out by way of news reports that the flurry of medical tests she had been undergoing were to find out if she was a man or a woman.

Or, the case of Santhi Soundarajan who was stripped of her Asian Games 800 m medal after failing a gender test conducted by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF). She later attempted suicide. A news story from 2012 showed her working as a daily wage employee in a brick kiln.

An oft heard refrain in both Pramanik and Soundarajan’s case has been: why can’t India have taken care of its athletes the way South Africa stood up for Caster Semenya, calling her ‘our heroine’ and ‘our girl’. One of Pinky’s lawyers, Dr. Mitra, goes on to speak of the sort of honour that our athletes deserve. An EPW article quoting the doctor states: “She (Pinky) has won medals for India in a field in which few men or women from this country excel. Yet, you would not think so if you read or watched media coverage of the arrest of (…).”

This pride-of-the-nation argument shifts focus from the larger problem of discrimination faced by transwomen, intersex persons and cis-identifying women in the field of sports.

When South Africa supported Caster Semenya it also gave her a feminine makeover and put her on the cover of the country’s YOU! magazine. It would be an understatement to say that this action missed the point.

Gender Testing: Background and Other Factors

Gender verification has to be spoken about while keeping in mind the history behind it, influential factors such as politics, mindsets, activism and most importantly — medical discourse.

The International Olympics Committee’s first gender tests were very crude and involved women walking naked around ‘judges of sexuality’ who would check genitalia to ascertain that no men competed with women.

Better results at international sport events at the time were seen as proving the superiority of one political system over the other. Women from the Soviet bloc regularly outperformed those from the West. Western sport officials and journalists reacted to this by questioning the femininity of victorious athletes from socialist countries.

In the 1960s, technical progress provided a method that allowed the testing of chromosomal sex at a reasonable cost. Despite the ambiguity of the test results, officials made use of it.

This was later changed to something called the Body- Barr test that began in 1968 and continued for a while (where some cells are painlessly scraped from the inside of the athlete’s cheek and as long as the person adhered to the chromosomal combination of the sex under which they were competing, they were permitted to compete) followed by an introduction of a DNA polymerase testing until there was a complete discontinuation of tests in 1999, decreed by the International Olympic Council (IOC).

Criticism for the Chromatin Test

The reason why people were tested was so that women do not have the levels of testosterone that are supposed to be present in a man, so as to give the former an unfair advantage.

Also known as the chromatin test for its reliance on chromosomal combination, this test ended up excluding some intersex persons who were not provided any extra benefit by the presence of the Y chromosome — a condition known as complete androgen insensitivity or cAIS.

On the other hand there existed intersex persons whose chromosome combination did lead to higher performance in sport but no disqualification as per the test from women’s sport events — through the test’s lens, the individual possessed unquestionably female chromosomes — a condition known as partial androgen insensitivity (p-AIS).

That there existed difficulty in understanding how to go about creating a level playing field through the tests, in light of greater advancement in the scientific field is probably the only thing there was a consensus on in the committees concerned.

The question of ‘natural advantage’ was becoming dicey.

The IAAF’s stand as of 2012 states that women with CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia), adrenal tumors, and cAIS are allowed to compete as Women. However, the IAAF policy doesn’t specify which conditions disqualify an athlete from playing as a woman and that line is still missing.

As per IOC’s 2012 rules, the main issue is that of functional testosterone: athletes will be disqualified to compete as females if they are found with testosterone levels typical of males and if they possess cellular receptors that respond to the hormone’s effects, which include boosting muscle mass and strength.

Criticism of 2012’s Rules

As per these rules, if the IOC and the IAAF try to draw the sex division line at some level of functional testosterone, how were they to justify where they drew it? What degree of error and how much daily and lifetime variation should they tolerate?

2012’s rules on hyperandroginy as per the IOC state that the test is not one of sex determination. Activists have disagreed with this claim, stating that the testers consist of gynaecologists and geneticists — which means that there shall still be gender testing.

“You would have to have evidence that women beyond a certain testosterone level in fact performed consistently better than women below that level. There is no data on that. Zip”, says Rebecca Jordan-Young, Associate professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College.

This above criticism points out many situations where fairness is moot — even if one is looking at testosterone levels, then, can it be so that the lack of adequate testosterone in a man permits him to compete in the women’s category? Once a standard is established, will it be possible for people to artificially reduce their testosterone levels so as to continue competing in the women’s category? See: cases where men who are permitted to take testosterone under therapeutic exceptions, like in the case of men with the Klinefelter Syndrome.

Since a definite standard had not been established in 2012, it was understood that just as there are women taking advantage of their hormones, there are men doing so too. Only, fans and officials were bothered about ‘pretenders’ in the women’s category and not otherwise.

As a counter to this, suggestions were made that the sex testing be nothing more than gender verification; if you were raised as a girl you get to play as a girl. But having one’s gender in sports be determined by one’s life history would contradict the IOC/IAAF “Stockholm Consensus” on transsexuality, which allows athletes to play in their post-transition genders and requires a high-surveillance, medically managed hormonal shift.

Medical Discourse, Heteronormative Narratives and Media Attitudes

On Beauty

Baron Pierre de Coubertin — founder of the International Olympic Games — wanted the Olympics to remain a male-only club. If we look at women’s sport from the historically dominant androcentric viewpoint, sportswomen question the traditional gender order. They violate conventional ideals of femininity on the one hand and are perceived as intruders into a ‘male domain’ on the other.

For a woman to be a part of sports, being athletic and competitive is in stark contrast to all the other media-based boxes she is pigeon-holed into.

Patriarchy conditions us with a certain idea of women’s beauty that finds traction within the media; latter goes all guns blazing if an individual meets the requirements of this gaze. Sports reportage is almost never without some mention of the sportswoman’s physical appearance and is extremely callous and derogatory if these beauty norms are not adhered to. Speculation that snowballs into suspicion and finally leads to gender testing is mostly directed towards ‘women who look like men’.

The media ends up perpetuating various gender stereotypes by presenting sportswomen in ‘typical’ gender roles. For instance a report may focus more on the individual’s role as a mother than in performance of her sporting arena.

Researcher Margaret Carlisle Duncan states that, ‘female athletes are sometimes photographed in poses that bear a striking resemblance to those of women in soft-core pornography, demonstrating media’s tendency to sexualise women in sporting fields.

The mindset of those covering women’s sporting events is one-dimensional at best and callous at worst. Sample some of these excerpts from news clippings and old headlines:

1. ‘Polish blond Eva [sic] Klobukowska (21) turned into ‘‘Adam’’/ ‘Klobukowska Misses Test For Misses’
2. You won’t dare call ’em the weaker sex . . . Iolanda Balas of Rumania and Mary Rand of Great Britain . . . could well steal The Times show if the male contestants don’t watch out. . . . Leggy is the word for Iolanda, who stands half an inch over six feet and weighs 159. And beauteous is the word for the Rand girl, who spurned several very lucrative offers for modelling, not to mention movie tests.’ — Los Angeles Times of 25 January 1965
3. ‘One thing that held back women’s track [in the US] . . . was the image given the sport by such athletes as Tamara Press of the Soviet Union. In some ways . . . she obviously had more male characteristics than female. Parents in this country would see pictures of her and decide that if that was the kind of people they had in women’s track they would get their daughters to go swimming or something else.’ — Los Angeles Times; 2nd July, 1970 (the same article called Tamara Press ‘too mannish’. Others noted the ‘boyish appearance’ of her sister Irina, or referred to them as the ‘Press brothers’.)
4. ‘The women skiers, among the most beautiful and feminine in the Winter Olympics, are both amused and chagrined by directives that they must be subjected to tests to determine if they are really women. ‘It seems a bit ridiculous and a wasted effort in some ways,’ said Karen Budge of Jackson, Wyo., a slalom specialist. . . . It certainly is in Karen’s case. She is a willowy blond, 5-foot-8, with the figure of a Las Vegas showgirl.’ — Los Angeles Times, 1968
5. ‘an 18-year-old peachcake from Jackson, Wyo., with a brace of blue orbs that would melt an entire ski slope or set off a whole cantata of wolf whistles. . . . In its suspicious probe of where the hormones are among Olympic women skiers, the IOC will be a whopping loser in Karen’s case.’ — Los Angeles Times, 1968

Four years after the publishing of the article (of above excerpt number 4.), the then president of the IOC Avery Brundage, declared himself satisfied with the introduction of gender verification as it had served its aesthetic ends: ‘They are more feminine now,’ he said according to the same newspaper. ‘And he’s right,’ the journalist added, ‘this year’s Olympic roster will bulge with beauties.’

Strength is seen as primary in relation to men’s sports and outrightly disassociated in case of women. Look at some instances of how game rules differ in sports: In men’s tennis, the first player to take three sets wins the match, while in women’s professional tennis only two sets are usually required to win the match. Men compete in the decathlon, which consists of ten events, while the women’s heptathlon consists of only seven events. Bodychecking is allowed in men’s ice hockey whereas it incurs a penalty in the women’s game.

To quote an American Pentathlete : ‘The official explanation is that this test protects us from impostors and from women who are really men, whatever that means. No, I don’t believe it. I think they’re really saying, ‘‘you’re so good, we just can’t believe you’re a woman, so prove it.’’ Male sport officials and journalists have developed a wide range of strategies to avoid paying full tribute to the achievements of female athletes.

Discrimination against Intersex Persons

Sports officials persistently emphasised that they were not aiming at negative tests but rather at deterring intersex athletes from competing in women’s events.

That Pinky Pramanik gets gawked at by many people is in line with the vilification of intersex persons. Tainted with judgment, an excessive urgency to restore ‘normalcy’ in the person, poor understanding of the situation and worst of all, pity.

Following is a passage written by English physicians Christopher J. Dewhurst and Ronald R. Gordon who wrote ‘The Intersexual Disorders’, this was around the time when medical and surgical approaches to intersexuality had neared a state of rigid uniformity:

“One can only attempt to imagine the anguish of the parents. That a newborn should have

a deformity … [affecting] so fundamental an issue as the very sex of the child … is a tragic

event which immediately conjures up visions of a hopeless psychological misfit doomed

to live always as a sexual freak in loneliness and frustration.”

Heteronormative structures signify a binary understanding in sports as well as law. Statements such as — “the Olympic clothing is more than enough to make sure that there shall be no men competing as women” don’t take into account several conditions such as ASI and more.

Clinical studies have a profound influence on the type of tests that are the order of the day.

It was after the famous John/Joan case (where female reassignment seemed to work initially but the individual later changed his name and went on to marry and adopt children and live his life as a man) that chromosome count came to be seen as the more important indicator as compared to the size of the phallus. Even this approach was proven to be privy to error, as explained in the ‘criticism for the chromatin test’ section of this essay. These approaches didn’t take into consideration culture, upbringing, and wilful desire to change — all of which should be the primary source of gender identity to begin with.

It is relevant to stress here that there must exist critique for any model of gender verification that uses the binary for its rules and regulations as foundation, however fair the test may seem on the surface.

In a study published by a German scientist on intersex persons and setting standards, many more chromosomal conditions were shown to exist aside from those that are commonly known.

That a definitive, clear policy must exist has been time and again proven in the face of the extremely dangerous, safety- belt free investigations that have led to near tragedies in the past. Those of Caster Semenya, Santhi Soundarajan and Pinky Pramanik to name a few.

As per academic and intersex activist Anne Fausto-Sterling, biologically speaking, there are gradations running in sexes. It mustn’t be thought of as a spectrum consisting of five sexes, but of points in a multi dimensional space; making sex an ‘infinitely malleable continuum’.

The immediate need to perform surgery and let the person go back to ‘normal’ is a large part of the discourse. This aspect features also in studies that attempt to remove elements of bias, are pro-choice and humanitarian. They demonstrate a lack of understanding towards the idea that an intersex person might have a more unique set of health problems, but that their natural condition isn’t necessarily classified as a disease to be cured.

For a while now, experts on gender development have distinguished between sex at the genetic level and at the cellular level (sex-specific gene expression, X and Y chromosomes); at the hormonal level (in the foetus, during childhood and after puberty); and at the anatomical level (genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics). Gender identity presumably emerges from all of those corporeal aspects via poorly understood interaction with environment and experience. What has become increasingly clear is that one can find levels of masculinity and femininity in almost every possible permutation.

In conclusion to what continues to be a growing body of research to add to the debate, it seems relevant to mention that Fausto-Sterling’s proposal came in for this one single point of criticism for its focus on gentialia by Sussanne J. Kessler, who states, that in the everyday world gender attributions are made without access to genital inspection: “(…)what really has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the flesh’s configuration under the clothes.”

Secondary Sources:

1. Stefan Wiederkehr, “We Shall Never Know the Exact Number of Men who Have Competed in the Olympics Posing as Women’: Sport, Gender Verification and the Cold War”, International Journal of the History of Sport, 26:4, 556–572, accessed July 6, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523360802658218.
2. Alice Dreger, “Sex Typing for Sport”, Hastings Center Report, Vol. 40, Number 2, March — April 2010, pp. 22–24; The Hastings Center.
3. Alison Redick, “No Quick Fix”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 16, Number 3, 2010, pp. 482–484.
4. Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough”, The Sciences March/April 1993, p. 20–24.
5. Rebecca Jordan Young and Katrina Karkazis, ‘The IOC’s Superwoman Complex: How Flawed Sex Testing Discriminates’, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/ioc-supwerwoman-complex-flawed-sextesting-policy>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
6. Owen Anderson, ‘Transvestites in Sport: The Olympics Gender Identity Process’, < http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/transvestites-sport-olympics-gender-identity-process-138>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
7. Helen Shen, ‘IOC Rule on Testosterone Test Sparks Debate’, < http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-29/health-wellness/32469903_1_testosterone-female-athletes-new-rules>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
8. Oren Yaniv, ‘Caster Semenya Forced to Take Gender Test is a woman….and a man’, < http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-09-10/news/17931933_1_caster-semenya-test-results-photo-spread>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
9. Jonathan Dugas, ‘Caster Semenya’s Sex in Doubt, as Reports of Sex Testing and Potential Disqualification Surface’, < http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/08/caster-semenya-male-or-female.html>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
10. ‘No Way to Treat A Human’, < http://www.epw.in/editorials/no-way-treat-human.html? ip_login_no_cache=71e82707f82412017484db7b689749a1>, accessed on September 25, 2012.
11. Anirban Bandopadhyay, ‘The Woman Accused of Being a Man…and of Rape’, < http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/sports/the-woman-accused-of-being-a-man-and-of-rape>, accessed on September 25, 2012.

Fahadh Faasil is an excellent actor. His portrayal of a character in ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ who smiles in a way that would give Heath Ledger’s Joker competition is very scary.

Faasil’s character is at best, a somewhat angry, patriarchal figure and at worst a person who gravely assaults the women in his family and a non-family member, is abusive to varying degrees and has some serious rage issues.

In a scene towards the latter half of the film, his mother-in-law says, “Please call the police, Shammi (Faasil’s character) is mad”.

A very popular and constantly debunked narrative on social media since 2016 has been that Donald Trump has serious mental health issues. People who live with mental illness constantly clap back to say, NO, to be a person drunk on power, to be misogynistic, to be abusive is a function of toxic masculinity; do not conflate this with mental illness.

In case of incidents of shoot-outs by the ‘lone wolf’ Caucasian cis man, often, news reports follow of the person having a mental illness. In response to this, people who live with mental illness talk about how they have managed to exist so far without feeling the need to shoot anybody. So no, mental illness can’t be the ascribed reason behind this hate crime.

A visual portrayal is very often a lot more alluring and arresting than written material. It lives on in popular memory for long and becomes a topic of discussion by way of example, remembrance, humor and other emotions it elicits.

In a ‘Kumbalangi Nights’ scene, Faasil’s character eerily switches between looking very sad to smiling in a sinister fashion. This reminded me of the Shobana-starring Malayalam film ‘Manichitrathazhu’. It has been re-made in different languages with its Hindi version ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa’ featuring Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan amongst others. In the original, Shobana’s character has dissociative personality disorder and the film ends with her starting to receive psychiatric help. Even so, it gives a bad rap to persons living with dissociative personality disorder.

PDs (personality disorders) are highly stigmatized. As compared to depression and anxiety that have in recent years received high media coverage, a person with a PD is still considered to be someone who is very difficult to get along with, is not fit to hold a job, can’t be in a loving relationship. There is a large amount of literature available online that is full of such inaccurate information.

The question of whether mental illness does affect a person where harm can be caused to yourself or another is not something that hasn’t been explored. As per the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, a mental health professional can divulge information about a client if there is a real danger of them causing harm to themselves, someone else or property.

There is a lot to be said, asked and discussed about how mental illness affects a person’s behavior in such aspects.

But this discussion and these questions can’t be used to justify and explain away abusive behavior by a person. Doing this increases the amount of stigma for already misunderstood mental illnesses.

Like film reviewer Nandini Ramnath said in her combined piece about ‘Uri’ and ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ in Scroll.in, it is the better-made film that is far more insidious when it comes to propaganda. The Rs 300/- crore-at-box office scoring ‘Uri’ is well made and foments more danger than ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’.

Faasil’s acting is terrific and this marks more problems for a country full of opinions that read, “Call the police, he is mad.”

Who Dis? New Plot

The Amazon Prime show ‘Pushpavalli’ stars comedian Sumukhi Suresh as the protagonist. Directed by Debbie Rao (also director of ‘Better Life Foundation’ on YouTube, released by Them Boxer Shorts), it contains 8 episodes of Season 1 as of now.

The story unfolds after Pushpavalli (played by Suresh) moves to Bangalore from Bhopal, where she lived with her mother.

Pushpavalli meets Nikhil at a food conference in Bhopal where latter is attending in his capacity of a bhindi-exporter from O.K Rao exports.

A lot of the show’s ‘present day’ chaos is interspersed with sepia colored shots of days from the conference where the meet-cute occurs. Every flashback sequence is cut to a signature piece of instrumental music that remains haunting in its signaling of the past as perfect and leading up to Love.

Despite a rocky start, Nikhil chooses to consciously spend time with Pashu (Pushpavalli) while ignoring the overture of her college classmate who had attempted to get his number.

Pashu is immensely likable and her connection with Nikhil appears genuine and hope-inducing on many counts.

This recent past highlights a series of meetings that would make for solid romantic aftermath. But ‘Pushpavalli’ is a rom-com in as much as ‘Get Out’ is a film about finding yourself.

Since the protagonist is someone who is a terrific person in your eyes, you really want her romantic aspirations to be fulfilled.

What happens in the show is amazing because it’s as if the scriptwriters decided to create a voodoo doll of the rom-com template and slow-burn it while you continue watching your Love Actually lenses shatter.

No, Pashu, No!

As a viewer, my love for Pushpavalli first faltered at her bartering of private work-data in exchange for information about Nikhil.

It is a testament to my brain-mush that my mind briefly winced at this and moved on to couch this act as assertive and indicating an admirable will-stop-at-nothing-to-get-what-she-wants attitude.

My heart sank when I realized that she isn’t above getting her colleague into serious trouble so that she gets the time she needs to quickly steal the data she has promised the informant. Her colleague loses her job due to the accusation made by her.

This soft corner for Pashu is because her character is very well written.

I figure that if you learn so much about the vulnerabilities, likes and dislikes of a character, you feel connected to them and begin rooting for them after a point, no matter what.

This story’s joy doesn’t only lie in how it slays the romcom model but also in how it is not afraid to seriously mess with the viewer’s predictions of Love and their investment in the lead character’s likeability.

The scene featuring Kenny Sebastian’s character tearing into Pashu, where he makes offensive comments about her had me feeling murderous towards the former. There is a visceral pain that this scene brings to head where now if the universe understands kindness, there *will* be Love between Nikhil and Pashu.

But no, a world of discomfort unravels instead. As the episodes progress, Pushpavalli enters Nikhil’s home when he isn’t around, cuts vegetables for a dinner she is clearly uninvited to, gets caught lying, steals a dog and fakes a birthday.

In one of the scenes, Nikhil is visibly troubled at Pushpavalli having landed at his place without him ever having shared his address with her (props to the show’s sound team for the night-full-of-awkward-cricket-noises room tone during this scene). Here, she catches hold of his hand and says with virgin-pressed premium Trust hued voice, “Nikhil, I will *always* be there for you.”

There’s something uncannily familiar about this line and its tone, but also there isn’t. When this dialogue is usually uttered on screen, it is said by a man.

This man can later morph into a number of different meme-template characters: kisi ka kandha (someone’s shoulder, said sardonically by the guy himself) or the friendzoned guy, the guy who is part-friend, part-stalker, whose actions of care and abuse are deeply intertwined. Or, as is also often the case, the guy who actually ‘gets’ the girl because tum-hi-mere-tr00-friend feelings abound (you’re the one friend who has always been there for me).

The reason this line (said by Suresh with excellent muted ferocity) doesn’t get uttered on film by women is that a female protagonist who is yearning for love can appear assertive and go-get-tish, but all the different things she is, still fall within the category of Nice. Mostly. No, always.

If she does have to be grey, she is shown to be this by going full-on Kajol-Gupt on you. There isn’t a permitted, performative in between.

Let’s call this out now: Pushpavalli’s feelings for Nikhil are real. Pushpavalli is an awesome person. Pushpavalli is also a shady person and is OK lying a lot and getting others into trouble so long as she is moving forward towards apparent romantic fulfillment. When this continues past a point of a vocal and clearly uttered “NO” by Nikhil, it becomes harassment.

It is important to remember, that before hell breaks loose, Pushpavalli’s rom-com arc after having moved past its soft-music-about-the-past-stage, is given space for permitted and performative creepiness.

In saying, “Nikhil, you can *always* trust me”, the show takes its toupee off to pay ode to a form of lowkey harassment that has till date been copyrighted by male actors on screen.

A thorough disaster does come through afterward, but space for a female actor to steer that in between grey space of Attraction/Shadiness/Overkill was new to watch. I’m glad the scene exists.

Over and above the fact that by the end of it, I was left feeling a mixture of anger, sadness and more anger re Pushpavalli, that there are now more representations within a story whose focal point is a woman’s desire is kind of brilliant, I feel.

I can’t wrap my head around the Sydney Sheldon ‘Tell Me Your Dreams’ type prologue of the 8 part season; where Pashu’s eye gleam has gone full Sharukh-Darr on you. I just k-k-kouldn’t deal by that point (sorry).

This ending is a faultline worth talking about, in line with another show, ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

One of the main reason why Rebecca shifted cities was for a guy. To this extent, ‘CEG’ and ‘Pushpavalli’ are similar. In the former show, Rebbeca’s actions are very weird often. She crosses several emotional boundaries and her close friends also enable her behavior.

In CEG’s latest season Rebecca gets diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD).

As a YouTube video’s commentator said: This is a very big deal. The entire time the show engages in romcom world-building for Rebbeca — it’s all rather cutesy and endearing. That she gets diagnosed with EUPD is revelatory because some of her actions may now be understood through how the disorder affected her.

“BPD ppl are the worst!!1111”

EUPD (or as it is more unkindly known, BPD or borderline personality disorder) has a gendered diagnosis percentage. In that, 70% of those with EUPD identify as women.

Online literature available on the disorder portrays people with it as emotional vampires who will stop at nothing short of destroying your life.

How on-screen characters represent EUPD qualities is in alignment with the existing stigma. See Viola Davis’s character in ‘How To Get Away With Murder’, Sharon Stone in ‘Basic Instinct’, Winona Ryder in ‘Girl Interrupted’ to name a few.

I’m behind on my ‘CEG’ watching and don’t know how the show treats Rebecca’s diagnosis aside from the song before she gets her diagnosis called, ‘My Diagnosis’.

That this plot twist occurs in itself is remarkable though, because Rebecca is a very likable (aha!) character too, like Pashu.

If future seasons of Pushpavalli reveal for Suresh’s character to have mental health issues that need therapy and processing, I will be sad and upset about the Shahrukh-Darr-eye gleam in the prologue. There are enough problematic representations on screen and people do not need more of it.

Or, maybe the fact that my friend Ashwin said that, “what she does isn’t right, but the vulnerability comes through, so you like her”, might make a real difference to EUPD discourse. Too early to tell.

Tara + Srishti = ❤

Tara and Srishti live in the same PG as Pashu. Tara and Srishti are lovers, I thought. No, really. A friend on a Whatsapp group I am part of said they are sisters but I got a lovers’ vibe there.

There is this one scene where they both tell Pashu about a woman who killed her husband this one time in Bangalore. When Pashu asks them about what this woman did after she killed her husband, Tara and Srishti look at each other and then utter in unison with a shrug of shoulders, ‘coding’.

This short scene could easily belong to a Kuzhali Manickavel story. To murder somebody and work in coding seems like something the author would matter-of-factly state as something that one of her characters would do.

To kill your one-time partner and begin coding after also oddly makes sense in light of IT companies having begun treating their long-term employees with several cases of 0 prior information lay-offs. With no trade unionism making its way midst this now common plight in the IT industry, a plausible case could be built for someone casually switching from having committed homicide to a work culture that doesn’t see you as worthy of care and real investment.

Tara and Srishti also construct elaborate jokes that lead up very precisely to anti-joke punchlines. Sample the following exchange between the two —

“Let’s tell everyone, ‘you won’t get it if you’re not a 90s kid”

“But..not get what?”

“nothing! <grins>”

Having pithily summarised every available article dedicated to millennials in such few words, I’m shipping these too hard and am eager to watch a spin-off series featuring the co-habited lives of Tara and Srishti.