姜小白对《Dreamers》的笔记(3)

“With every passing minute of our conversation, Srivastav’s tone becomes more authoritative. She still looks like a teenager, but one who talks like a Silicon Valley boss. ‘Together we control 1 million reach on Facebook alone through 50,000 pages as affiliates—popular pages on nail art, relationships, health and lifestyle. They should have at least 40,000 followers. They share our posts, we share revenue with them based on how many clicks they enabled. Ninety per cent of our traffic comes from Facebook. Usually, Indian and other clicks are non-premium. US, UK, Canada, Australia are premium. If I give $1 for 1000 clicks for India, I will give $7 for an American click.’ She uses a similar formula to calculate the payment for the company’s writers. ‘Over 150 writers across the world—Philippines, China, Spain.’ We are sitting at her desk, a long table she shares with eight other members of the content team. Some of them are currently reaching out to freelance writers in South America who can power exclusive Spanish-language content on their website. ‘The demand has been insane.”

“Things began cordially enough, with students rising from their seats, facing the person they were going to respond to, and following Khan’s instructions to remember to say ‘my dear friend’, ‘as far as I am concerned’ and ‘allow me to’ before launching into arguments and counterarguments.

The first one to speak was a boy from the front bench: ‘Friends, we have assembled here to give our opinion on topic of which marriage is best—love or arranged. Every marriage has advantage and disadvantage, but I would like to favour love marriage versus arranged marriage. I need my family’s support because I have to spend my remaining life with my family, but I have to spend more time with my life partner.’

The thought got a sharp response from a girl across the aisle from him: ‘According to my point of view,“I favour arranged marriage. Love marriages are candles that burn brightly but for a short period of time. Parents have more experience of life than us, and they’ll choose the best partner for us. In Chetan Bhagat’s novel, 2 States: The Story of My Marriage, he has written few lines about love: “A boy loves a girl and a girl loves a boy, but in India a girl should love the boy’s family and a boy should love the girl’s family, and the girl’s family should love the boy’s family and the boy’s family should love the girl’s family, because in India marriages are not between two persons they are between two families.”’

It’s a debate that can heat up any room in India. The class soon slipped into chaos. Students forgot they are not meant to lapse into Hindi at any point, or to cut others off mid-sentence, or raise their voice, or launch into personal attacks. As Khan struggled to bring things under control, the two rows stood up and faced each other in an all-out war: girls shouting at girls, girls shouting at boys, boys shouting at girls, boys shouting at boys.”

“How do India’s young women feel about the country and the world? Do they feel angry? Yes. Do they want upward mobility?

Certainly.

But I saw few of them participate in local politics. It’s too male, they said “in their defence.

Too unsafe. They find themselves blamed for the anger of young men around them, who see their desire to move up as a further threat to their status, and are wary of entering their drama of reclamation and revenge. Enough young women are drawn to politics to fill the female wings of the BJP and the RSS, but you don’t walk into a college or a neighbourhood in a small town and find a woman burning with rage about India’s lost civilization. And yet the young women I met saw politics in its barest essence: as power. What happens when one of them gets in the mood for it? Can a lone woman’s battle for political power go any other way than expected? I was about to find out.”