Yessir, ji madam.

What does it mean to respect somebody? Is personal expression integral to respect, or must it be enacted in socially acceptable terms to be meaningful? Is it possible, within an institutional setting, to eschew existing socially acceptable expressions of respect and create another vocabulary; what sort of consequences would such an experiment entail?

I ask these questions in the context of a seemingly innocuous conflict I am faced up with: the use of first names while addressing those senior to me. The terms ma'am and sir make me uncomfortable, as do, indeed, all terms that require me to address persons as positions. The fact that ma'am and sir have such evidently classist roots does nothing to endear them to me. But they are seemingly ubiquitous. When I began referring to a university professor by her name to my parents, my mother (a teacher, herself) chided me several times about being disrespectful. My mother, however, was also the person who would come back fuming from work, disgruntled by the superficial ways in which students sometimes ritually enact respect <cue: "good morrrning ma'am"> but do not mean it in any kind of depth. Whenever I've conversed with anybody about the rationale behind sticking with terms like ma'am and sir instead of simply calling people by their names, respect has been central. I thought, therefore, that it would likely be useful to unpack the idea of respect, a little bit, to make sense of the confusion in my head. As always, the confusion is deeply personal and to do with a month of intense agonising about the ways in which I wish to negotiate working within institutions. This question of names, positions and respect speaks to, in many ways, the bigger questions one is always faced up with, while trying to, simultaneously, work within a system created by others and remain one's own person.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines respect in two ways that are relevant to this post:

1. A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements
2. Due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others

The second, I think, we owe to all human beings. Some would say all creatures, but being non-vegetarian I am a little unsure of my footing on that debate: can you respectfully kill? But if we view ourselves as engaged in the messy business of living, then is killing for food part of healthy (and essential) competition; in which case, is respectful competition, enough? I'm not sure. Anyhow, for the mean time, we'll run with it being essential that we be considerate towards the feelings, wishes and rights of all persons. I do not think position or seniority has anything to do with this understanding of respect. Should someone higher up in terms of educational qualification, seniority, age, status deserve more consideration by virtue of their position, than a person say at the foot of the same ladder? I should think not. In fact, we call that expectation of greater consideration, which folk who're at the top of the ladder tend to have, 'entitlement' and we tend to wrinkle up our noses at it. This cannot, then, be the respect that is spoken of, when we think about why we use ma'am/sir.

The first definition is evidently more complex. A feeling of admiration is something that is deeply personal; for instance, I do not admire all my professors, even if they've all got the same educational qualifications or are at the same position in my university. This reminds me of something rather cliched that my parents often said to me: respect is commanded, not demanded. If I am told to refer to a person as ma'am or sir as a symbol of respect for their position or seniority, it sounds to me like a demand, though a fairly hollow one. I can address a whole horde of people as ma'am or sir, but respect (as in, admire) maybe two of them. What value should one attach to that symbol then?

If I were to decide to address somebody as ma'am/sir, perhaps I would be enacting a well-worn socially acceptable ritual of respect. But I think something else is at play when institutions make it mandatory that persons in particular positions be addressed in particular ways. In those settings, I think the use of ma'am and sir is used to reinforce authority and create a sort of distance between the two persons involved in an interaction. It serves as a means to constantly remind one of the power imbalance that exists, and to reify it. It is of little wonder, then, that the military is one context within which the practice is most rigorously observed.

Does that make the requirement unequivocally problematic, I don't know. I can see why it is important for certain sorts of identities, especially, to set up that distance and to assert authority. A brahmin man can afford to be pally and on first-name basis with his junior colleagues yet be able to assert authority when required. The same behaviour from a woman in the same position would likely result in a certain familiarity on the part of the junior colleague, and could well lead to the woman's authority being undermined. The examples of differential readings of and responses to similar behaviour can be multiplied. The point is that this overt assertion of a difference in positions can sometimes be a person's only tool towards being taken seriously in that position. What does one do, then?

The trouble with demanding the use of sir or ma'am, though, is that I feel it reduces two people to two positions. There is something impersonal about the use of these terms that pushes aside the softer, caring parts of me. In essence, I feel that with me, personally, to insist that I address somebody as sir/ma'am is to ask that I enact respect and recognise authority, while reducing my ability to actually be considerate and compassionate. I have found, interestingly, that each time I have connected with somebody senior to me, I've found a way by which to refer to them by their names or by nicknames that they accept, and worked around the sir/ma'am conundrum. But that is not always going to work; there are some people and some organisations that treat their norms for addressing people as non-negotiables. Being faced up with one such situation, I have been wondering about what I should do, and how I should process this.

I've come to realise two sets of things: first, that not every disagreement between my personal preferences and an organisation's norms, irreconcilable as it might be, threatens my fundamental values and second, that while standing dramatically firm and true to oneself is often valorised, most meaningful engagement happens in the grey area of give and take. I would be taking myself a little too seriously, if I raised every conflict situation to the level of a moral dilemma. In this particular case, then, if somebody insists that I refer to them as ma'am/sir, I'd do it, to the extent that the insistence does not in any which way quell democratic speech within the institution. Perhaps I will learn, with time, to use the terms shorn of the negative connotations they carry for me, and perhaps then I will find it easier to see the person, despite the stress on the position. Or perhaps those who insist on creating that distance will just have to live with the fact that while they gain something in doing so, they also lose out on a range of possibilities in the process, if that means anything to them in the first place.

If I ever have somebody junior to me working with me, though, I know I would be happy to have them refer to me by name. And, knowing my proclivity towards bluntness, I would probably also not hesitate in giving anybody who took that as license to be disrespectful, a piece of my mind. I am also sure that if I ever run an organisation, it would not welcome essentially gendered terms like ma'am and sir. But these are castles in the air. Right now, I've got to go back to figuring out whether, when you want to say belonging to ma'am, you can say ma'am's or you must use madam's. All help on this front would be welcome. :) 

full disclosure

I had a friend. Whom I loved very much, perhaps a little blindly. Many things should have told me that it's foolhardy to trust someone that implicitly, but I soldiered on, regardless. This friend meant a lot to me, sometimes she gave me the courage to be myself, sometimes she stood up for me when nobody else did, and sometimes she didn't. She's in many way the anti-thesis of me: gorgeous, smart, articulate, and an immense amount of fun to be around. I think we had fun together, though I do not know what her take on that is (I can be a dreadful bore). But, hidden amongst all the being-tight-buddies-ness were these sudden moments when she wielded the power to make me feel like as small as humanly possible. I didn't have the language to describe what I felt, until I read this article, recently. She, it turns out, was incredibly adept at 'jellyfishing', a concept described thus:

"The thing about Rebecca is, she's a jellyfisher. You have a conversation with her that seems all nice and friendly, then you suddenly feel like you've been stung and you don't know where it came from. You'll be talking about jeans and she'll say "Yes, well, if you've got cellulite jodhpurs, you're best in something really well-cut like Dolce and Gabbana"- she herself having thighs like a baby giraffe—then smoothly move on to DKNY chinos as if nothing had happened."

Each time I brought it up, I felt silly and a little stuffy, because I was taking offence at what was ostensibly a joke, or a lighthearted statement. I guess jellyfishing hurts you when you're insecure about yourself, and she seemed to have the unnerving knack of picking at my deepest insecurities. I do not know whether she did it deliberately or she didn't even realise what she was saying. What I do know is that it hurt, and despite my raising it as a concern several times, it didn't stop. It was something I could deal with alright, when I was happy and engaging with the world around me. But this one time, when I was low, working on depressing material (district court rape judgements), and feeling entirely alone in the world, I think it broke me. And I always thought that was an incredibly dramatic phrase, until I literally felt something inside me snap and understood what it meant. I figured I needed to get away, and I did; you know, for all the hungama people make about break-ups, the whole losing a friend, one who has possibly seen you through several break-ups, thing cuts just as deep, if not deeper. I didn't just lose one, I lost three (and I don't even know why). At one shot. And it felt like my world was collapsing around me.

For a year, I refused to acknowledge the existence of any problem. I laughed with other friends and acquaintances about how lazy I am, and how hard it is to get me out of my bed. But I could not express to them the absolute torture of lying in bed, listening to an alarm ring endlessly on, but not be able to will myself to get up and turn it off. I withdrew from friends, because I felt drab, and boring, and whiny, and being around people just seemed like too much effort. Nothing excited me: not the papers I was writing, not the events happening on campus, nothing. But I went through the motions of daily living, because my ego could not come to terms with admitting to feeling so hollow and fragile. I had been hurting myself since I was around thirteen, and just when I thought I'd finally got out of that phase, it all began again. I never cut myself; prolonged, invisible pain was more my forte; I'd bludgeon myself with something neither too blunt nor too sharp, until I bruised, or sustained a surface cut. Sometimes I'd sit in class, squirming in pain and discomfort, and those would be the only things I'd feel; every other emotion and sensation was a strange haze. Sometimes days would go by, without me getting out of my room (except to go to the toilet) or meeting anyone. And the more I pushed people away, the more they, well, allowed themselves to be pushed away, I guess.

Is it depression, if you've steadfastly refused to go to a psychologist and the only word you have for what's in your head, is your own? Maybe it isn't. But this one day, as I sat somewhat talli in my room, idly contemplating suicide and thinking that jumping off the hostel roof is kind of daft, 'cause one would only break bones, not die, I realised I had a problem at hand. I didn't feel like I deserved to live, or that there was any need for me to. I'd lost count of the number of nights I'd fallen asleep sobbing for no reason whatsoever, and woken up with sticky eyes and a blocked nose. And I decided to damn my ego, and talk about it to people who mattered to me.

That sounds a whole lot easier than it really is. How do you explain things to people when you don't understand them yourself? If you're even remotely aware of society around you, how do you justify your completely irrational, and self-absorbed, anguish in the face of the relative comfort and privilege of your life? How much can you whine about how tatti you feel, without boring the person before you to tears? I've never really talked about my emotions and insecurities with many people before, and now that I'd begun, I felt like a dam had burst and I simply could not stop. At around the same time, a friend and colleague got drunk and asked me why I pretend to be super-human all the time; why can't I be vulnerable. Does somebody have to 'show' vulnerability to be granted the right to be perceived as a human being? Aren't we all vulnerable, by default? But the deal with feeling as fragile as I did, then, is that pretending to be super-human is no longer an option. Somebody I am working with made a passing (and lighthearted) remark about the demons inside my head being a cherished addiction. And, to my intense surprise, I found myself furious and hurt at the same time, railing against him in a reaction that was grossly disproportionate to the remark. For days after that, I dreamt of hurting myself and they were pleasurable dreams, you know, the sort that said, "Go on, Ninni, do it; you need to feel the pain; you deserve the pain." in the most lulling sort of tone. Once, I woke up and did just as the dream suggested. I hated the effect that one little statement could have on me. I talked about my reaction to it, with a trusted friend and my parents, who unanimously called me a drama-queen. I sort of agreed with them, and felt sheepish. When you think about it, though, it puts you in quite a bind, doesn't it? If you don't express vulnerabilities, you're pretending to be super-human; if you do crack when you're feeling vulnerable, then you're a drama-queen. Ab karey bhi toh kya karey?

But people can be so immensely beautiful. Sometimes, support comes from the most unexpected sources, and in such doses that you wonder what you've done to deserve it. People who wake you up in the morning and wait outside your room until you pick up your lota and go to the loo. People who're willing to work with you despite knowing that you're as whiny and prickly as humanly possible, and little bit clingy. Old friends who tell you you're not alone, and they've been in your place too, and that things get better. And as I talk to people and am honest about how I feel, I realise that there are just so many others who've lived through this in the time that I've known them, but we'd never really have spoken about it until I brought it up expressly. Having refused to talk about it for a whole year, myself, I can totally see why. Describing things in your head can be a very risky venture: people have the annoying tendency to tell you to 'stop being lazy', 'get a grip on yourself', and that it's 'all in your head' (well, duh). Perhaps some part of this is because we do not talk about things in our head the way we talk about fevers and loosies, and more conversation will dispel myths regurgitated by people who mean well. And for those who resist your gentle nudges towards sensitivity, send 'em a copy of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' with “of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real,” highlighted in neon pink.

---

Was that an abrupt ending? Well, sorry, I ran out of things to say and the energy to attempt to say 'em well. Maybe I'll revisit this post later and end with a flourish. Maybe I won't. Meh.

Of 'the common man' who refuses to shake hands with me. :(

Yesterday, I started bleeding, as women of a certain age are wont to do every month. I groaned inwardly, because, well, menstrual cramps are a bummer, but also because the next day I was to go for a public meeting about a problematic land regularisation scheme relaunched by the Telangana government and then catch a train to Bangalore after that. My immediate reaction was to think, for a tiny little while, whether I could somehow wriggle out of the meeting, postpone the trip back home and just snuggle into bed with my fluffy blanket for a couple of days.
With that came a flash of anger at myself. 'Menstruation is normal,' I thought, 'it's not a bloomin' illness! You can't simply renege on all your commitments once a month for the next two decades! What kind of feminist are you! What kind of work ethic is that!' So I squared my shoulders <ow, cramp> and thought about what I'd need to take to be completely prepared for the obstacle course more commonly described as a woman's search for a toilet in a public space. Sanitary napkins: check. Toilet paper: check. Bag with a roomy external pocket in case there is no dustbin: check. Newspaper: check. I booked an OLA cab ('cause while exercising this option is evidence enough of privilege, OLA is the only one I could possibly afford) and spent a restless night in my local guardian's house, too afraid of staining her sheets to be able to sleep peacefully.

I went for the meeting with a male colleague. I was the outsider in every sense of the term: language, expertise, the works. What I didn't expect was that I'd be one amongst five women in a gathering of, at least, two hundred and fifty people. So when the president of the organisation that was conducting the meeting shook hands with only my male colleague (we both met the president for the first time, together) and discussed the woes of the 'common man', he meant it literally. The dais had eleven chairs, all for men. Not one woman spoke.
At some point in the meeting, I realised I needed to go to the loo. Trying to be considerate, I went around all the seats instead of cutting across someone's line of vision. I needn't have bothered. Eyes followed me through my entire journey. To be intensely scrutinised as you trot towards a toilet is an incredibly discomfitting experience. I kid you not. But in the embarrassment of the moment, I had failed to focus on something more central to the entire woman seeking toilet experience: the toilet door. It was locked. Ladies: locked. 'Maybe they just lock their loos by default,' I thought, hopefully. Men: open (and in use). They had two toilets for men, both open. Perhaps they got it opened when they went to use it? So I went to a woman who was working in the kitchens adjoining that area and asked about the ladies' toilet. She shook her head emphatically and asked me to use another toilet that didn't have any gendered labels attached and was, presumably, for the staff. Or perhaps it was Ladies' toilet No.2, minus the label? Either way, I entered and shut the door, only to be subsumed within an all enveloping darkness. So I opened the door again, looking around, bewildered, to find no sign of any switch, or even a bulb for that matter. There was no cistern, forget a flush. No lota or any sign of flowing water. No hook, and most definitely no dustbin. I stuck my phone between my teeth, with its flashlight on and pointing downward, tied my bag to the door handle, fished out the toilet roll and stuck it under one arm, and changed a sanitary napkin with the other hand, trying hard to drop nothing and keep my salwar from turning the same shade of brown as the floor I was standing gingerly on. I rolled up the used napkin, covered it in plastic and paper, and stuck it in the outside pocket of my bag, because where else? I left that loo feeling like I'd accomplished a major acrobatic feat, and wondering at women who deal with this, and worse, every day, for all of their lives. This is by no means a new or startling experience; it's normal for any woman who treads paths outside the mall-restaurant-theatre-club-home circuit, but I think it hit me harder because it happened at a 'public meeting' about a seemingly progressive concern that affects, in the view of the organisers, 'the common man.'

The meeting raised several interesting legal and social concerns, but when someone asked me what it was like, it took me a while to be able to articulate any of it because the overwhelming sensation it left me with was that I wasn't part of the public for whom the meeting was called. I was an aberration, that people did not know how to deal with. Ladies weren't expected there; neither were women who lay no claim to being ladies. And oddly enough, common though such exclusions are, it hurt. One wonders, is it because women don't occupy such spaces that men do not know how to behave in their presence, or is their discomfort/hostility the reason why women do not show up for such events? Obviously, the answers are far more complex (and it's evident that both these processes feed into each other), but I do wish that just once in a while, a man would stick his hand out towards me and introduce himself; and that the Ladies' toilet would be unlocked for 'public meetings'.

an unusually happy election post.

For the longest time, we didn't hear of the possibility of a woman becoming the Student Bar Council President in NALSAR. It was an unthinkable. Our first election, we heard that the men were being made to conduct internal elections in the 'Boys' Hostel' so we tried to do the same in our own hostel. It failed miserably because several of us felt that this curtailed students' right to contest elections, and nobody was really making us do it. So we didn't, and felt rather pleased that a principled stance won over the clearly politically expedient one. The next morning, we went in for the elections; the men came in with their candidates fixed (and their proxy candidates fixed too), and we spoke of fair democracy. Needless to say, all the eight representatives we had that year were men. This was, we were told, expected. Seniors I respected told me to stay out of politics in NALSAR: it's dirty, and there is no way you can make a headway into Boys' Hostel politics.  

Why were the men in our batch pushed, in this incredibly organised manner, into selecting candidates and voting purely on the basis of gender? Why did anybody have such hold over them? And why was this not the case (thank goodness it was not the case) with the women? Why did men replicate the model they themselves had found oppressive the year before? And why, when stories of assault, threats of harm to come, slander, harassment were an open secret, was the administration (then) absolutely uninterested?

The first thing I figured was that the administration, an evidently patriarchal one, was not uninterested, it was deeply interested in keeping status quo going. That meant permitting elections to be rigged so you had a SBC that was in your pocket. It's easier to be letting a university run down to the dogs when its students don't protest against it, isn't it? 

The second epiphany happened as I noticed the manner in which first year students greet seniors differently, based on gender: there is always a "hello bhaiya" from men to men, there is no such system with women. This is a hierarchy that is built into the manner in which men are accepted into the fold in NALSAR. It is a hierarchy that plays an incredibly important role in elections conducted two weeks after students get to NALSAR, especially where any other measure of candidates is absent. 

The model was replicated year after year, albeit with some inclusion of women at the committee level as the number of women students increased (thereby increasing the risks involved with women running internal elections, as the class of 2013 did, once), for the simple reason that it worked for those it served -- there was deal making (and breaking) amongst men (even if the subject of the deal was a woman candidate), it was easy to rig, and figuring out the way 40 voters would vote (and threatening them with violence if they did not vote according to what was asked of them) was a whole lot easier than actually running a campaign on a manifesto. Running an underhand smear campaign against rival candidates, in the cosy comfort of hostel rooms, in situations where the probability of the rival doing the same to you were minimal (especially if they were of a different gender) was simpler than discussing ideology or policy inclinations. 

Things came to a head with the last elections, with men muscle-flexing and openly threatening juniors while elections were being conducted, and with defamatory statements being made with pride, in the electoral college. It was, frankly, a depressing election, personally and for the institution. The University needed to decide for itself -- was it going to tell those who were effectively being rendered voiceless by the system that they should just learn to play the dominant set at their own game, knowing all the while that the game in question is premised on coercion (for junior students) and horsetrading? Or were we going to rework the manner in which elections happen in NALSAR?

A committee was set up to review the Constitution (elected committee, open to everybody's candidature, etc.) and draft a new one. We did that, and then opened it up for debate. Parts of the debate were truly insulting, parts were saddening, but what it did do is throw open the question of representational equity for the entire student body to consider, publicly. If women were viewed as equal political beings in NALSAR, then why was there only two women who'd ever held any position in the Executive Council in the SBC? Were there other prejudices at play? Caste? Region? Religion? What exactly the CRC's draft constitution said is a subject of another post, but these conversations I think, were integral to the manner in which these elections worked out.

For these elections, a transitory Constitution was put in place. It had direct elections for the President, indirect elections for all other Executive positions, and it introduced the concept of manifestos. The Executive was expanded to include a President, a Vice-President, a Treasurer, two General Secretaries (one male and one female) and two Joint Secretaries (following the same formula). As a Constitution, one has several problems with it, especially the fact that it (incomprehensibly) has four secretaries and three other Executive Council members, but it was definitely a change for the better.

Several things mark these elections out as being different from those held in the recent past. First, they were preceded by three days of debates on electoral politics in NALSAR, where all students were welcome and so first year students did not enter a system entirely devoid of context. Second, the question of representational equity was on lots of people's minds, especially women who wanted to create their own systems which aren't oppressive but can still bring in results. Third, the elections happened a good month after college re-opened, giving first year students ample time to settle down and find their bearings. This facilitated an open election where you could discuss candidature with first year students and things weren't carried out in a clandestine manner through one night in a Boys' Hostel common room. This is not to say that attempts weren't made, of course, but that there were a critical mass of students within the batch who resisted this coercion. Fourth, the election of the President was direct, candidature needed to be declared in advance, and rigging the entire system to get a President of your choice was no longer an option. Slandering the other side and her friends could only get you so far, and possibly could backfire (as I think it did). Politics was out in the open, and boy was it refreshing! Manifestos had an impact on people's choices. There was a Presidential campaign that was put together by a large number of small groups of students and was based on what the person stood for, not who she was standing against. People were discussing politics openly, even jovially. It felt empowering, if nothing else.

If excited comments and pings from seniors from college are anything to go by, women have spent years in NALSAR feeling frustrated by the system. This is very clearly a moment of celebration, not only because we have a woman President (YAY!) and women won other gender neutral positions (like that of treasurer), but also because the terms of reference are no longer traditional Boys' Hostel politicking. Alternative are no longer unthinkable! But the desire to treat this victory like a paradigmatic shift must be resisted. The University needs to get a functional Constitution in place; it needs to seriously consider questions of representation, and methods of election. We have opened up, a great deal, to women's participation in politics, but it is still possible to malign a person in this space for being an assertive woman; it is still a legitimate campaign against a candidate (it was against this year's President) that she is a "Gender and Sexuality Forum" candidate; principled stances are still seen as unrealistic; several identities still attract prejudice. I live in the hope that, someday, I'll find a Facebook post by my juniors talking about a firebrand feminist winning a position of power. Now, wouldn't that be nice? 

From Azad

An open letter from someone who has something to say.

I am an Indian Muslim. Apparently, some of my self-proclaimed leaders were some of the people to have appealed against the Delhi High Court judgement.

But I just wanted to tell you that the distance between us is not as much as they think it is. The distance between us, in fact, often is the jail cell. The distance between us, is the distance between S. 125 and S. 377. In fact, we are closer than even we want to believe. For a lot of you, and for a lot of us, the policeman does not represent security. He represents the spectre of state violence, he represents for us, the “colonial legislation”, but he represents the very reality of our lives: that we are marginalized, that our living and dying in this country is based on premises of obedience, on some “ancient traditions” that are summoned whenever uncomfortable questions of identity are raised. Words like assimilation and integration and unity are thrown at us, and we are expected to suspend our lived realities and live in the margins.

We are also living in these miserable times when our friends are openly the greatest supporters of this discourse of development and growth and other things like those. That, for them, their privilege makes them easy purchasers of dreams that our tormentors sell. Our friends maybe attending protest rallies in the evenings today, but each morning, they are subscribing to narratives (and to political forces) that would push us farther away from this mirage of a mainstream. Our suffering is, in a very convoluted fate, now linked. And I hope our resistance too, is.

So while I attend a pride parade here, oppose colonial legislations wherever I can. I expect, as part of millions who suffer, for you to reciprocate. 377 wasn’t the sole British vestige of oppression left in this land. AFSPA exists. Freedom of Religion Acts exist. So does a legislation that criminalises the lives of transgendered persons in Andhra Pradesh.

Our oppressors seemed to have united – the All India Muslim Personal Law Board could not spare money for hundreds of young men who became victims to this narrative of war on terror, but appealed zealously against the Naz Foundation judgment. The Board does not find time enough to reform oppressive provisions in Indian Muslim Law (that even Pakistan has), but it has found time to go after your freedoms. In it, it has found a wonderful ally in the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has never, otherwise, lost a chance to spew venom against India’s marginalized.

In our tormentors’ vision: we are all the same. Dalit, Women, Muslim, Trans, Homosexual. But we have identities that have been suppressed. And I wish to assert my own. And maybe you would too. I am protesting against the Supreme Court verdict. Are you attending the protest for the rights of Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians – which, by the way, was also at Jantar Mantar?

Their fear after all, is that, one day all of us will be attending each others’ protests. Let us make their fear a little real.

-Azad.

377 rage

Disclaimer: This post is likely to be inarticulate as hell, but I need to write to clear up my thinking. 

I felt a great deal of anger at the Supreme Court's 377 verdict. When I heard, from a senior at college (whose blog post on Legally India on the Delhi High Court's judgement was the first thing I ever read by a nalsarite) that the Court had upheld the appeal, I spent a couple of hours covered in goosebumps at the idea that the highest judicial body in the land could make such a decision. I spent the day, as hopeless facebooking farts like me are wont to do, posting stuff on facebook, reporting abuse when I came by homophobic comments (there is great pleasure in hitting that report abuse button, sometimes, I feel) or arguing with people about the judgement and the Court's ideal role. Then the judgement came out, and I frankly was not surprised that it had no content worth engaging with. 

The cause for my anger was, at the most basic level, the fact that people I know and care about (and even some I don't care so much about) are being judged and declared to be criminals for no discernible reason. Beyond the personal, though, the worry for me was that our society, and our institutions, are still colonised. We still think in certain moral terms, we have yet to throw off so many of the shackles that were used by the British to confine us. To my mind, this judgement is part of a continuum that legalises illegitimate state violence and intrusion into the choices of individuals and of peoples. Despite all the articles on why we should all care, not only the LGBT community, I wonder if the verdict is really being seen as a part of a larger malaise. I wonder if calls for solidarity are meant to extend both ways. On comment chains on facebook, I found it common that those bringing up other concerns of violence that are not getting requisite attention were told not to side-track from the point. Whither solidarity? What is the point? If the point is merely that Section 377 exists and has been upheld to be constitutional, so do the Andhra Pradesh (Telangana Area) Eunuchs Act, AFSPA and very many others that are just as damaging (if not worse) symbolically and in action. Are they not the point too? Are they side issues? Do they not deserve global days of rage? Is it individual movements' fault that they do not have access to such publicity?

One of the images that caught my eye, in the many that are doing the rounds on the internet is a picture of the press meet at Chennai:

I could not get my eyes off the battalion of cameras in this photograph. To have access to such publicity is not merely the work of the movement (though that is definitely not to be discounted). There are definitely class elements to it. More importantly, however, it is an issue that corporate media finds, sells. If packaged in fluffy, byte-sized snippets on love over all else, it makes very few people uncomfortable. But love isn't fluffy and easy on the mind. Love is powerful, it scoffs at petty institutions and can be deeply subversive. The call for dignity of the individual has the power to change much that is wrong with Indian society. That is pretty radical stuff. This is a moment that could lead to deep thought on what we want the Indian State to stand for or it could be a moment about Section 377 of the IPC. I worry that it is only going to be the latter:

Fanon, aptly said: "The colonial world is a world divided into compartments.… In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and ‘bewilderers’ separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native."

Ours is a State that merges the worst of both, and we have much to agitate about. And that agitation cannot happen if we're unwilling to let others 'sidetrack' from the 'point'. To have social movements divided into compartments is what suits governing institutions, not movements. I have felt an unsettling discomfort at the pit of my stomach about the Global Day of Rage, not because the rage is unwarranted, but because of the narrowness of its construction. A recognition of privilege by those leading the LGBT movement would, perhaps, turn the protest against unwarranted State violence and coalesce with others fighting violence and labelling. The movement calls for solidarity, but at this moment, it ought also be extending solidarity.

It is true that this Supreme Court verdict is a blot on our judicial history. As Cover would say, not only did it reach a decision that can be termed morally reprehensible, it showed no commitment to its stand, for it gave no real reasons. To my mind, that is the bigger evil; the idea that a State can choose to turn down people fighting for their ways of life, without needing to reason it out to its people, without committing to its position. This is a moment when we can force this accountability upon our institutions; it is much much bigger than any one problematic provision.

just get on a diet already

Right. So I have always been chubby. ALWAYS. From when I can remember, I have had pudgy fingers, wobbly arms and a tummy. It might have something to do with the fact that I inherit my body structure (right down to the stubby toes) from my paternal grandmother who is round, as was her mother, as was her mother and so on (you get the flow?). My great-grandmother lived to be over ninety, with her critical faculties all in place. My grandmother is still puffing on, and she's nearly eighty. My mother, however, insists that if I "don't get rid of that fat" I will "waste my education" because I will "die early". Apart from the fact that this seems statistically unlikely in my family, I frankly don't care enough about living for very long anyway. My maternal grandmother thinks out aloud, sometimes, that I look 'quite nice' and as long as I do not put on any more weight, I'm sure to be find someone who wants to marry me. I do not know whom she is reassuring, the idea of marriage really frightens me, especially to someone who needs me to fit a certain weight bracket.

Family expectation related woes aside, some things have changed in the time that has passed between my being a chubby baby and a 'fat' adult. When my parents would tell the family doctor that their daughter was overweight, half a decade ago, he'd pooh-pooh them into silence and say that I'll lose the 'puppy fat' soon enough. Now doctors are falling over themselves, during routine medical tests, to tell my parents that their daughter is overweight, and detailing grotesque consequences unless I lose weight at the earliest. Maybe they mean well, I most certainly do need a lot more exercise, but I wonder if the collective paranoia (inherited, I feel, from a weight-loss infatuated white West) puts me off exercise more than it lets me do the things I like.

For a fat person, exercise is a 'weight-loss' thing to do; you walk into a gym and they bloody tell you how much weight you need to lose and how. As a child, I would play cricket; I enrolled myself in tennis classes; I enjoyed throwball; I sucked at kho-kho but played it nonetheless. As a child I loved dance class; I loved theatre. Somehow, in one way or the other, society found it necessary to inform me that fat people don't do these things; that fat actresses can't be 'heroines', that I should stick to recitation for Teachers' Day celebrations (dancing isn't my thing; despite the fairly awesome scores I got in my practical dance examination and all that) and that sports are for winning and fat people aren't fast enough or good enough to win, so bye-bye. And as a child, I didn't know better than to believe those who told me these things were out of my reach - my slim peers, my teachers (yeah, one used me as an example of  'something you'd weigh in tonnes'). Now I look back and feel stupid about letting myself be defined by selfish, oppressive gits, but it is hard to unlearn things you've spent a good part of your life internalising. I was told I could not possibly be sexually attractive; years after these comments, I still can't be physically intimate with anyone because I'm fucking scared they will find me repulsive, and leave.

So, one by one, I stopped doing all of the physical exercise I enjoyed doing. As a rebellious adolescent, I let myself go--ate all the fatty food I could lay my hands on, dressed in baggy clothes, stopped exercising--in order to stick a finger up at society. Then the same god-damned society came back to me and said, "Sorry bro, you're fat, you need to exercise." Well, yeah, that is what I was doing, isn't it? Instead, now, I must 'work out' because it will make me 'feel good' in gyms or in my house watching youtube videos, with the sole objective of losing weight being healthy. There are some who go at it with maniacal persistence. I do not have that sort of tenacity, because I do not care as much. But what I find really saddening is that I was exercising, I was healthy, and I was doing things I enjoyed. And now I am struggling with myself, in order to get my lazy butt up to go for walks and do a crunch or two. I wonder at the hypocrisy of it all.

PS: For those who write back, if anybody writes back, saying "but you can play tennis, dance blah blah blah again" yes, I am aware; just being able to do it despite years of conditioning telling you otherwise isn't really cake-walk. It is doubting myself, all the time; it is feeling like a repulsive being because of the tyres and the stretch marks; it's wondering whether it's worth it, just to hear those comments again. This isn't to make myself out to be some sort of victim or anything, it's merely to point out that the 'self-help' rhetoric sounds like synchronised farting sometimes.

PPS: I don't know whether people ordinarily face up with this, so maybe the use of the term 'society' is unfair. Possibly I was stuck with an especially despicable sample.

PPPS: It's all a capitalist conspiracy, really; make no clothes that fit the fat folk (or call it the Plus size and charge them double the price), shame them into going to the gym (guaranteed weight loss) and laugh all the way to the bank.