You Changed And Truth Got Lost

Please, come inside my bedroom door and tell me what to do. Tell me how to sleep, how to walk and how to eat. Because sexuality is as natural to me as these actions are to any heterosexual in our country. But please, disregard the fallacy of your backward arguments and continue dictating how I live my life because you can't open your mind to other possibilities, and continue living in the gutter you've dug for yourself.

Please, go ahead and dictate my life, regardless of the fact that we live in a country that flourishes in poverty, a country that can’t seem to feed itself and continuously starves. Disregard the millions of children who can’t get an education and are forced into labour and prostitution. Disregard the criminals you seem to be okay with running the country, and instead, sit and decide what the citizens of the country you make laws for should do behind locked doors.

Go ahead, we don’t mind at all.

We don’t mind that each and every day our politicians loot us of money that our country so desperately needs. We don’t mind that we’re alienated by the government of our own country, denied the right to question authority.

After all, who needs democracy, right? Let’s all regress back to an India where the Indians had no say in what happened. After all, its not the firangs ruling over us now, right? Its absolutely okay for Indians to rule over Indians with an iron fist.

So go ahead, tell us what to do. Tell us how we are wrong, how we don’t have the right. Tell us how we are abominations and that we are cursed, foul creatures sent by the Devil, by Asuras, to darken the world that your God created.

But don’t think that we’ll sit here quietly. We’re not your slaves, and you are not our colonial masters.

Please, instead of going on and on about how we are “modernized”  and a country slowly reaching a “developed” status, have a look inside your own mind. You can’t think beyond your stereotypes and your discriminations.

How can you truly be modern, global individuals with a mind set like that?

What I can hope is that the youth of today will not become like you. We will not allow you to ruin our country for us because you can’t progress with new ways of thinking.

Go ahead and stay in your gutter.

But don’t drag the entire country with you.

Love or Hate?

I stand upon my balcony,
And stare out at the world,
Quietly thinking of where we went wrong,
Was it when we dared to love,
That our hate became so very strong?

Was it at the moment,
That the cords that connect,
Our fragile bodies to our mothers,
Are cut and we are separated?

Is it because we no longer believe,
That any of these things will work,
Our dreams have been replaced,
With Cynicism and Realism?

We let ourselves dream,
Of worlds unknown and unseen,
Only when we hold a book,
So that pages of words will lead.

But then why, my friends,
Do we find it so hard,
To apply that imagination,
That courage?

We fear it, 'tis true,
Because we know not where it leads,
Why should we let our dreams lead us,
To unknown paths and darkness?

Instead we watch a world,
Filled with bloodshed and tears,
With heavy hearts and guilty minds,
Because we are too afraid.

We dare not let ourselves love,
For hate comes so easily,
It hurts much less,
But it bleeds much more.

Our dreams are shattered,
Stomped on by those,
Who declare themselves,
As the ever-present Authority.

But who are they,
To tell us what we can dream of?
Who are they,
To tell us we cannot love?

Is it wrong to want to help another?

Is it wrong to love another?

Why should we care about those pointless things-

Race?

Gender?

Sexuality?

Economic Background?

Why should they dictate to us in any way at all?

At the end, my friends,
The decision is yours alone.
Will you stand tall and give your love,
Or hate and stand alone?

Deviant Sexualities

I have a project for my Sociology class that's coming up soon. I'm supposed to make a bunch of possibly questions based on any topic in the syllabus.

I took the idea slightly more abstractly, and while the chapter I chose to work with was Deviance, the actual topic of the faux survey was The Awareness of Sexuality in India.

The reason for my choosing this topic are numerous. The other day, I was sitting with a friend and her friends, and one of the guys said, "Oh God, the gay guy is checking me out." Other people look at the same boy with a sense of confusion, a sense of disgust or a sense of shock. In reality, the boy has done nothing to do with any of them. He is merely more fashionable than most, slightly more flamboyant than most. He carries himself with grace that most girls and guys don't have, and walks with his head up.

What I didn't understand was, why should it be an issue if someone with a 'deviant' sexuality checks you out? I've had several lesbians check me out, some of whom have even bought me drinks.The reality is that they are actual human beings, and no, they will not rape you. They, like "normal" people, will fall in love, have sex with people who, like them, like a gender they "are not supposed to".

People tend to forget this. They understand that you have your own preferences, just like they do. Their "condition" is not contagious. You will not "go gay" if you hang out with a homosexual. Asexuals are not people who have necessarily been sexually abused in the past. Bisexuals are not sluts. Not all gay men are men who identify solely to the female sex.

Another thing that came up in my studies was that a lot of religions aren't very anti-homosexuality at all. Hinduism, for example, actually has sacred texts in which gods, demigods and rishis are shown in gender transcending roles. There have also been various examples of explicit same-sex liaisons between kings and queens. What makes this particularly amusing is that regardless of the presence of this in SACRED TEXTS, modern Hindu families are often against homosexuality and consider it a sin.

The entire phenomena in itself was interesting because Indian Society hasn't even managed to respect heterosexual relationships.

Also, while a lot of people are slowly learning about the Kinsey Scale, not many people in India have any idea what  it is.

For those of you who don't really know what it is, I'll try and explain it to the best of my abilities here. The Kinsey Scale is a scale that measures sexuality, in short. Its a scale from 0-6. What Kinsey found in his survey was that very few people were completely heterosexual or homosexual.

This is the scale-

0 Exclusively heterosexual.
1 Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual.
2 Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual.
3 Equally heterosexual and homosexual.
4 Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual.
5 Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual.
6 Exclusively homosexual.
X Non-sexual.
F The test failed to match you to a Kinsey Type profile. Either you answered some questions wrong, or you are a very unusual person.

Some texts describe it differently, and often the term non-sexual is replaced by asexual, but regardless the idea is this- very few people are completely heterosexual or homosexual. A large amount of people are actually a 2 or a 5. By this I mean that, an individual may prefer the male gender, but he/she might have leanings towards the other gender.

A lot of college student I've spoken to have actually related to this. After all, most of us think that college is also a time for experimentation.

So in the end, the question is this- does the society you live in forbid you from admitting you are a 'deviant' individual?

The answer, usually, is yes. Predominantly, the only reason that people hide in the metaphorical closet is because people ostracize them. These 'deviant' sexualities are just like 'normal' heterosexuals, they too wish to be part of a group, to feel love.

Yet another issue I came across of that of bathrooms. You'd be surprised at how much bathrooms play a role in our lives. I actually came across a video on youtube, by York University, in which a professor describes her findings regarding this in her book about Bathrooms.

Its surprising that bathrooms play such a huge role in socialization. I wasn't even aware of it, but somehow, the separation of men and women in this area is actually an attempt to socialize you into keeping yourself withing the gender boundaries. If you are a man, you go to the mens bathroom. Similarly, if you are a woman, you go to a woman's bathroom.

Note how even here, there is a very strong heterosexual dynamic.

What would a transgender do? He or She is not accepted in either. [ Just a note here, a transgender is an individual who does not ascribe to the stereotypical gender his anatomy is socially related to. A person could be born a man, but then realizes that the way they feel is not connected to this gender, and may be living as a woman now.]

Similarly, men and women feel uncomfortable when a homosexual enters the bathroom with them. In the eyes of a heterosexual, a person with sexual inclination towards that individual's gender has entered an area that is considered private. Immediately, there are lnks drawn and yet again the individual is ostracized because they are different.

My question is this- why does this happen? Why should we feel uncomfortable if a woman likes us romantically? Why should we push away people who may just be wonderful individuals, just because their sexuality makes us uncomfortable?

Think about it. If you were a heterosexual in a world where homosexuals were the predominant sexuality, the 'non-deviant' sexuality, what would you do?

All your anti- LGBT rights sentiments are automatically useless, aren't they?

Think about it. Maybe you could make a difference. Because 'deviant' sexualities are not threatening in the least. They are not alien life forms trying to take over the world.

Frankly, we have bigger issues- famine, war, drought- and if people got over their own insecurities, maybe we could actually help other people rather than being uselessly caught up in this cycle of discomfort and hurt.

Homeless Deaths and Apathy

She calls out to the man on the street
"Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?"
 

This is a small excerpt of Phil Collin's song, Another Day in Paradise. I'm sure most of you have heard it at some point of your life. Its a rather honest song, speaking of the bitter and harsh realities of the world we live in.

 

This first verse speaks of a homeless woman. It's cold, and she, being homeless, does not have a bed to sleep in. This is the case is many cities across the world, but what I'm trying to talk about here is the recent headlines regarding the deaths of various homeless people due to the bitter and harsh cold in North India.

 

India has roughly 1 billion people, according to the World Bank estimate in 2011. Did you know, that according to the Action Aid programme in 2003, there are roughly 78 million homeless people in India? That's 7.8 percent of our population.

 

How many of you take notice of these people? How many of you go out of you way to help them? And no, school/college club activities don't count. How many of you have stepped out of your home to look at the outside world. For us, it is just "another day in paradise". For them, it is a fight for survival every day, in a concrete jungle filled with apathetic people.

 

How many of us are even aware of the various thing happening in our country when the media does not report it? How many of us CARE before the media TELLS us to care?

 

Granted, the media is doing their job. They are to report what goes on the country and the world, but now, the unfortunately truth is that we don't care. We don't care about the millions of children dying in Africa. We don't care about the children and students in America who get shot. We don't care.

 

What do we care about? Ourselves.

 

He walks on, doesn't look back
He pretends he can't hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
Seems embarrassed to be there.

 

They beg, they endure, they cry. They want to be able to afford food for themselves and their children and themselves. They want to be able to send their children to school and not have to destroy their childhood to make them work so that there is food on the table. They want to be able to depend on something, to have a constant that they can lean back on. That yes, we have this.

 

But they don't.

 

We walk past slums every day, and many of us make disgusted faces at the unsanitary condition. We consider them a black mark on our country. We displace them to make more buildings for people with money to own, but never stop to think of the people who had made their HOME there. But we never stop to think, WHY are they unsanitary?

 

We don't realise it. We don't see beyond the "ugly" facade.

 

So when they die, no one cares.

 

Where are the human rights institutions?

 

I think the better question is, WHERE ARE WE?

The Plea of a Dreamer

I suppose that most of you think we're naive. That we have a world view that is rose-tinted and that when we step into the BIG BAD WORLD, that world view will be shattered. Others think its cute, that it is merely a stage that we will grow out of.

But what most people don't get is the simple fact that without the Dreamer, there would be no change. Without the Dreamer, there wouldn't be a world. Without the Dreamer, there would be no transport, no countries, no laws.

Because without a Dreamer, there is no innovation. The Dreamer strives on Idealism. It is his petrol to his car. Without the belief that there CAN be a change, the Dreamer is merely a Cynic, cleverly disguised in the garb of the Dreamer.

So when we 'grow up', as you say, we can become anything. The Cynic faces the 'harsh reality'. Others will go to the path of the Sentimentalist, and seek and place emotional value in every occurrence in the world around them, allowing it to shape them as it will. As Oscar Wilde once said, in his play Lady Windermere's Fan, "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.”

The Dreamer's path is the path that very few choose, and even then, many veer off this path to safer and more compliant paths. This is not because this path is more difficult than any other path. Its is because the world we live in, regardless of its need for Dreamers, tries to crush all innovation, any ideas that may displace the "ruling ideology".

Sociologically speaking, this is normal, and the compliant often end up attempting to socialise the thought process into the possible deviants- Do not try anything out of the ordinary or too risky. There is no harm in staying on the safe side. In Sociology, it repeatedly stated, particularly under the Marxist perspective, that society runs on conflict. There will always be people who are oppressed and then those who rise up on top.

In our society, it is the Dreamer who take on the role of the Oppressed and the Cynics and Sentimentalists who take the role of the Oppressor. Regardless, there are people who stay strong and endure the taunts of society. The taunts that tell them that they are naive and that they look at the world through rose-tinted eyes.

But it is the Dreamers who stand tall in history- Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Buddha, Maria Montessori, the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi.

These are all men and women who stood tall in the face of adversity, willing to believe that their dreams were not stupid, were not naive and were attainable. They reached for the sky and they got it. They lost a lot on their way there, but they gained just as much.

So when you tell us that our dreams are 'invalid', when you tell us that they are all pipe-dreams that cannot be actualised, when you tell us that we are naive little 'children' who know nothing about the world, remember this. We may be young, but that means our eyes aren't jaded like yours. That means that we often see the world for what it is, and not what people want us to see it as.

Because while there is nothing wrong with being a Cynic or a Sentimentalist, there is nothing wrong with being a Dreamer.

Because we are the people standing up for our rights. We are the people working to change the world, to stop global warming, to end war and striving for peace. We are the ones who want equality, to have safe roads to drive and walk on. We are the ones to stand up and make a stand against the disgusting habits of society while so many of you stay at home and pity others.

So when you look at us with that scorn in your eyes, it is not because we are inferior. It is because a part of you wishes to be like us. And you need to understand that there is nothing wrong with that desire. But making us feel like we are the ones who are wrong, like we are the ones to blame will only take this world several steps back.

So here on, please see that we too have our use. We are not useless. We are not stupid. We are not naive.

We are human beings like you, out to heal a world filled with hatred and misery that is so deeply embedded that an entire species feels it like a unanimous, collected heartbeat.