Kya aap White ribbon mein shraddha aur imaan rakhte hain?

Do you have faith in the White ribbon?

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Feminist, blogger and activist Anasuya Sengupta, in an essay called ‘Fundamentalisms of the Progressive‘ wrote,

‘One of our campaigns was to wear a white ribbon for peace (the White Ribbon Campaign for Peace, India) – we used it both as a symbol and as a talking point, to begin conversations about violence of all kinds, including what we call ‘communalism’ in India (the rousing of hatred against particular communities). Initially, some of our friends scoffed at us, and wondered what an insignificant white ribbon could do, to change attitudes and animosities.

But the interesting thing was that there were so many people – both young and not so young – who were unable to be political in the same way as they saw ‘activists’; they felt this meant standing at street corners with banners, or going on rallies, or shouting slogans against the government. They found this too ‘political’ (in their understanding of the term), and yet they were deeply disturbed at the kinds of violence being perpetrated in the name of religion.

So for these people, wearing a ribbon was the beginning of a series of conversations they had with others, which began other processes of change, at least in terms of breaking the silence around violence.

And because it was something everyone could do – and have conversations at whatever level of politics and ideology each was comfortable with – it wasn’t intimidating in any way, and yet gave a sense of belonging to a community against violence, and speaking up for peace.’

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Do you believe in pluralism and justice?

Are you Secular, liberal, free thinking?

Do you believe that all religion has in its essence ways of leading a soulful, integrated and fulfilled life?

Do you believe that religious extremism has done us no good?

Say No to religious bigotry.

Wear a White Ribbon today.

Post Gujarat

Dear fellow human-beings and women,

In the past few days we have seen a brave intercession in the country’s political sphere. In what is becoming an increasingly stifling atmosphere for diversity and difference, it’s time to take a backseat and readjust our gaze.

To speak for all women in India one needs to stifle some aspect of one’s identity so that your voice comes through and is easily translatable. But to speak today, I’m going to stop trying to stifle the angst that is keeping me so narrowly focused, or else, I would just buckle-up and abandon the fight. So I speak as a woman and as a Muslim.

After Gujarat 2002 the psyche of the nation was shocked beyond belief that it was actually possible that the fabric of the country’s humanism had eroded. Had 60 years of being citizens of a secular republic not had any effect on us?

If what we saw in Gujarat is the success of a laboratory experiment in Fascism then it is important to analyse with great care its philosophy and hypotheses. To know how the symptoms were bred and where the zeal came from, to look at both perpetrator and victim and the real difference between them.

What effect the massacres of Gujarat have had upon the women in Gujarat will show itself in time. Because implicit in the understanding of sexual violation and rape as a means of extermination is a thinking that is at its root the gravest danger to feminine life.

Can we talk about this easily? No. Because we are suffering from it. There is no tenderness in the act of disclosure. No safe vantage point where our grief will find utterance. We’ve buried ourselves with and in it in order to exist so as to safeguard some other means of being. We will try to reach it, point fingers at it and leverage it on other indirect causes but our loss is as clear as the silence and rebuttal after an outrage. Nothing that can be said carries with it any meaningful articulation when it comes to this. Where there should be pain, agitation, aching and remorse there is grim intolerance set in sullen eyes, all too willing to look away.

What distance or gap could separate a woman from another’s pain? It could only be the vindictiveness that makes one want someone else also to suffer and feel what you have been through. This only means that the difference between pain is just of degree. When inhumanity is bred, that process is one of pain. In cold blood. Wanting to put someone else through the endless road to doom that you are already walking. Because you have been bred, not to immunity but to the vice. Because you can see better but you don’t want to because you didn’t have any better. When one woman is violated, all women are at shame. And all men are to blame. And this makes the massacres of Gujarat a telling systemic register for the sexual ethics in our ‘nation’.

Hope is still a better vision of the world because one has the imagination for change. The deepest precipices are written over but the outcry needs to be addressed first.

We all have been wronged.

More from the Feminist Front in Ultra-Violet.

And if you disagree with what I have said, because you can feel, then, lets come together.

 

 

Sexual Harassment affects OUR well being.

Imagine a woman who walks the street everyday, she confronts harassment everyday. She braves it ; she has to get to work. Has a job to do. Falls sick, gets depressed, has a low self esteem…Continues to walk the same path.

Imagine a guy who thinks women are just prey to his motives. Stands by the same street, jeers at the same women. Leers, gawks, squats, spits, says bad things, cusses…Everyday, imagining the women are getting pleasure out of his pleasure. Living in the same dreary universe.

Imagine a woman who works in an office, faces harassment, domestic worker, wife, politician, CEO, engineer, activist, lawyer, actress, waitress, teacher, nurse, school-girl, dancer, singer, news-reader, sex-bomb, media tycoon, modesty blaise character, graphic artist, deep thinker, garment factory worker, embroideress , seamstress, oracle, philosopheress, home-maker, air-craft pilot, historian, architect, camera-woman, photographer, jazz musician, talk-show host, chef, farmer, scientist, astronaut, lecturer, principal, psycho-therapist, educator, doctor, theologist , dentist, surgeon, grass-roots entrepreneur, film-maker, novelist, artist…All facing harassment of various degrees.

Men. CEO’s ,Heads of State, urchins, clowns in the circus, jugglers, fire-men, cable-guys, electricians, businessmen, politicians, theologists, anthropologists, musicians, lighting technicians, real estate agents, marriage brokers, ice-candy sellers, guys, lawyers, judges, architects, clerks, office-boys, chartered accountants, management consultants, fathers, brothers, uncles, family friends, family doctors, family disgraces, holy-men, theorists, artists…All creating and perpetuating and churning out harassment.

Two stories from the Indian Express in the month of September. A 3 year old was raped by her uncle while she was left in his care. A twelve year old boy rapes a four year old.

We’re in this together. You make me sick. You, in the process are carrying out a sickness. It spreads like an epidemic. Soon, it gets into the air and a society is suffering in oblivion. We think we’re better than each other, but we’re all sick. We don’t know it yet.

Some of us survive but we’re heavily darkened. We don’t know how we would have been otherwise, what we could have been.

For now, I’m sickened by all this. You make me sick. I’m tired and coughing. Trying to do my job.

But I will not relent. If I do, then I might turn out like you. You make me sick.

Cough cough spit. It out.

I need more strength than this. Let’s make the sir cleaner, air out these putrid fumes.

Start treating me like a human being.

Spit.

More collective spitting.

We need to get to know each other. But first, ack Thoo.

It doesn’t get dirtier than this. Mucky mucky air. Thooo.I’m so sorry.The language I get is the language I give.For all practical purposes…In a hopelessly uncivilised world.

Here WE are.

you .

me.

us.

unearth.the.angst.be.hopeful.soar.

Us.we.ours.society.world.US.We.home.

NO.

The hopeless and the hopeful.OSSW’07 Day 5

The hopeful: But this is a good start. If we can have this every year or twice in a year, we can get some people thinking about the idea and maybe this will catch on, who knows.

So let us give it a try, eh? (Sounds good for me)

The hopeless: Borders have been drawn in blood. Mighty presumptuous or stupidly naive of us to ask for a ‘United India’. One should think of peaceful co-existence, rather than dominate and swallow the neighbour under the thinly veiled pretext of ‘Unity’.

The One State Solution Week was created in order so that voices from Bangladesh,India and Pakistan could share common concerns about a shared history of violence, religious intolerance and colonialisation, in the hope that strong peace keeping ties between the three ‘nations’ will make a stronger lobby for peace and security in the world at large.

The idea is to draw from a pool of writings and and create a platform where these voices can come together, in the form of a web-site or a wikipedia entry.The writings need to be about what you, with your locusts stand I feel about the idea.If you can draw from historical, political, literary or artistic discourses, or better still create your own artistic material, then it would be great.

For non-bloggers:Send your write-ups (original and not longer than 1500 words).Send them in at onestatesolution@gmail.com.

For bloggers: Blog your thoughts.Please keep them original, concise and crisp.Tag them OSSW’07 so that your post will be traceable.

And Yet another (chap)ter.

A man tried to grab my …

Yesterday.

I was cycling home on a dark street after going to the market.

I screamed, I knew in an instant what was happening. I called him names. Chased him, but he was too fast. Stopped and shouted ‘idhar aa saale’.

Onlookers were silent. They knew what was happening. It was important to me to be seen here doing this. But it stopped at that. I should have followed him, thrown a stone or something.

I told my neighbour, then a friend.

Two attitudes, neighbor, slight smirk, we knew it would happen. Don’t go out in the night. But somehow after I spoke to her she was emboldened enough to unload her own experience, to get out of the house, go to the neighbour’s and speak to them quite audibly. Something I’ve rarely seen her do.

My much older educated woman friend, smirk, subtle contempt, what were you doing out? And don’t scream bloody rape, it was just…

Isn’t this bad enough? Isn’t it bad enough that someone considers it his birth right to look, touch me?

And if this is bad then how bad is rape? Isn’t it horrible that rape is a lived reality?

I had the comfort that he was just some bum who I hope never to see again (and I’ll show him if I do), but I could come home and heal. I could scream.

With sexual violence the agitation is instant. Because it’s your body that is the target. In a spark you realize that your body is being violated by an alien something. With sexual violence aggression is probably good. Again, with caution. But since it’s your body that is the target of the offender, you must guard it and protect it.

I’ve heard people say rapists should be castrated.

Then if that’s the judgment how can you stand the subtle sexualisation you go through everyday? How can you stand the overt sexualisation you go through sometimes?

I think that all women in our society are victims of sexual violence or every sort. How can we not be because in a male dominated society, sex is often just a power-play between man and woman?

We need mass healing rituals for women.

How can you stand it?

If there’s any reason I’m reason I’m blasé it’s because I’ve been too consumed. So consumed that I play into the internalized idea of objecthood. I see myself as an object.

That’s actually why I gave up wearing the hijaab when I first gave up wearing it. But this isn’t about what you wear.