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Sometimes a casual sensory experience may trigger memories that the mind had tucked deep within. Writer Julian Barnes has a term for this – IAM (Involuntary Autobiographical Memory); memories that the mind had not saved voluntarily, but just tucked away in some deep recess of the brain. The trigger to remember these forgotten stories can be anything from a certain smell, taste, a line in a report or even a visual of a fast-fading past. 

This columnist came across two such instances almost simultaneously. Come Women’s Day on March 8 and the usual avalanche of misreporting and media-created myths about feminists is let loose.

One such instance was a smirking reference to assertive and stubborn feminists’ vocal push for equality. They were, as usual, labelled as ‘those bra- burning types.” The second was an iconic black and white photograph of a group of women from Raini village who participated in the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, hugging forest trees they wished to save from loggers’ axes. 

‘The bra-burning feminists’

This was a much reported incident from 1968 reported in various New York papers. The bare bones of the story were that a bunch of feisty feminists took out a parade to condemn the beauty pageant culture popularised by the media and fashion designers. The women alleged that fashion parades that guzzled so much space in the media were no more than a presentation of women as eye candy for men who judged their rankings on the basis of their vital statistics on display in bikinis.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Three women demonstrators were reported to have been incensed enough to burn their bras in a drum near the Chicago river. The mainstream media in the 60s and 70s expectedly smirked and termed such incendiary feminism as a........

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