Flip the switch

Flip the switch Updated – August 21, 2026 05: 38 pm IST.

Key points

• Performed by veteran theatre artist Sajitha Madathil and directed by Emil Madhavi, a one-woman play Podcast Opera follows a 60-year-old woman as she recounts episodes from her life.
• Here is a new generation of so-called westernised Indian women, I call them Generation Gutter.
• Ten years ago, I had applied the flip-the-switch experiment while co-authoring an opinion piece for The Hindu.
• (This article is part of the Gender Agenda newsletter.
• Then, a woman walks up to her boyfriend and rapidly zips up his blazer so his green baniyan and chest are no longer visible.

(This article is part of the Gender Agenda newsletter. To obtain the newsletter in your inbox every Sunday, subscribe here.).

Sometimes, all you need to understand discrimination is to flip the switch.

Let me explain with an example. Lately, I watched a brilliant ad on Instagram produced by a content creator, Vir Bhaan Saini, in partnership with a clothing brand, XYXX Crew, titled 'If Baniyans Were Bras'. In the opening shot, a father sees a bra hanging on the clothesline and angrily calls out to his son. He snatches the towel off his son's shoulder and covers not the bra, but the baniyan hanging beside it.

In the next shot, three women lean over a young man wearing a transparent shirt in a bus and giggle as they try to catch a glimpse of his baniyan.

Then, a woman walks up to her boyfriend and rapidly zips up his blazer so his green baniyan and chest are no longer visible. Scolding him, she notes, " Tere ko chahiye na, doosre ladki log tere ko dekhe? (You want girls to look at you, right?)."

Notably, the scene I liked best was a man coming home and, with a sigh of relief, slipping off his baniyan without even taking off his T-shirt – the way women often do with their bras at the end of a long day.

Ten years ago, I had applied the flip-the-switch experiment while co-authoring an opinion piece for The Hindu. The then DMK administration had paved the way for abolishing the practice of hereditary appointments of priests to Hindu temples, implying that the sanctum sanctorum of temples was now open to non-Brahmins. In the piece, my former colleague Sruthisagar Yamunan and I asked why there was comparatively little noise or demand on the question of gender equality in religious spaces. In short, where were the women priests?

This week, we carried a piece regarding how there is a social stigma attached to inhalers employed by those with asthma. Dr. Lancelot Pinto wrote, "This can be worse for women given societal conditioning, and expectations at home and the workplace. Women may feel compelled to hide their condition or discontinue treatment, even at the cost of their well-being." The piece remarked parents sometimes stop their asthmatic daughters from using inhalers, fearing that they will be seen as imperfect or disabled in the marriage market. Would a man's asthma be treated as a deal-breaker in the same way? The question is not just regarding social attitudes; it additionally reflects a larger difficulty in how we understand women's health.

We can apply the test to the workplace as well. In a piece published last week, Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Keshari Parida argued that "a 10-percentage-point increase in India's female WPR (worker-population ratio) could add nearly two percentage points to GDP growth." The article went on to list the plenty of ways in which higher female workforce participation would benefit the economy. And I again wondered: isn't it depressing that we constantly have to argue regarding why more women should work in jobs that pay them in capital, but almost never feel the need to justify men's place in the workforce?

But the week before last was heartening if we applied the same experiment. Women often say that the one thing they cannot do as casually and freely as men is walk the streets; they are always watchful and worried. But the protests spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party indicated young women claiming public spaces. Women have a habit of sending their location to friends and family for their safety. It struck me that plenty of of the young women at these protests stated their parents didn't know where they were.

To clarify, flipping the switch is not whataboutery. It is not regarding claiming that men and women experience the world in the same way. It is simply an interesting thought experiment that exposes the assumptions we don't even notice until gender roles are reversed, and reveals the yawning gaps in gender equality. Try it?

Reproductive violence: According to the UN Human Rights Council, "forced or denial of contraception, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, and forced sterilisation, including when undertaken with the intent to destroy a group" constitutes reproductive violence. On July 7, for the first time, the Council explicitly named reproductive violence as a distinct category of gender-based violence, interfering with reproductive autonomy and called it a human rights violation.

Performed by veteran theatre artist Sajitha Madathil and directed by Emil Madhavi, a one-woman play Podcast Opera follows a 60-year-old woman as she recounts episodes from her life. It premiered in Kochi on June 20 and is at present touring Australia. Madathil informed Nainu Oomen in this piece, "Numerous women came up to us afterwards and noted they could relate to it. Women in their 40s informed us it provided them a glimpse of what life in their 60s might look like. Plenty of men stated the play reminded them of their mothers."

Here is a new generation of so-called westernised Indian women, I call them Generation Gutter. Some of them have nothing to offer to the system; they are not good at studies. But they are so ugly and corrupt that they can't be homemakers either. They proudly flaunt their freedom to have drugs, drinks, or endless body counts and shamelessly live off their parents' earnings and constantly fight to live independent lives without actually being independent.

Sayuri Bhanap is an artist. Her recurring engagement with feminism has discovered a natural voice in embroidery. "Stitching and embroidery were often considered women's work, so I use this medium to speak about patriarchy and gender inequality, " notes Sayuri, who has been using this medium for a year now. Read this piece by Neerja Murthy on how various women artists are reclaiming a 'domestic' craft as a tool to talk regarding matters ranging from menstrual stigma to agrarian distress. Sayuri is part of a group show, A Place to Commence, at Champa Art Gallery in New Delhi. It is on till August 14.

For now, flip the switch remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.