By Theertha Raj
Aditi Mittal, one of India’s top comedians, recently teamed up with BBC’s Radio 4 on a two-part radio series called the A Beginner’s Guide to India. Following up on satirical ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Pakistan’, performed by Sami Shah, the broadcast is an attempt is, the BBC says, to “look at an undoubtedly significant and increasingly important country from a point of view that is rarely heard”. Whatever, we just want to listen to Mittal take on the broad expanse of potential humour that is our nation. In the first episode she decides to inform the world about women in India. She talks about everything from the opening of the Indian economy in 1991 to Indian women politicians, from foreign undies procured by aunts in foreign to underappreciated women athletes. Here are some of our favourite Mittal lines in this episode:
1. “To count number of female comedians, they literally had to invent the number zero”
2. “India is currently the largest democracy in the world. In that, it has the largest population in the world that participates in an election. This is probably because it has the largest population in the world. Saying India is the largest democracy in the world is like saying the Earth is the liveliest planet in the solar system.”
3. “This economic liberalism was exciting. I remember standing in line for three hours when the first McDonald’s opened up. Almost 60% of the children in that line that day were convinced there was a farm inside.”
4. “For a long time, India produced the finest track and field stars, primarily because the infrastructure required was legs and ground. These were two logistics that could not be bought or sold in corruption, so they survived.”
5. “Even today, a woman running on the streets is strange enough that most people would look behind her to see who’s chasing her.”
6. “And imagine a woman with muscles. What was she going to demand next? The right to open the jar all by herself.”
7. “We all know that a woman’s hymen is responsible for her family’s honour. I for example, lost my family’s honour to a bicycle.”
8. “Why I didn’t end up choosing politics then becomes self-evident. If you had to be a female politician in India, you had either be somebody’s sister or mother. I already had enough family breathing down my neck, dictating my life. I did not need to court populations of people into calling me their relative.”
You can listen to the full broadcast here.