Equality
You declare you see me dimlythrough a glass
which will not shine,
though I stand before you boldly,
trim in rank and making time.
You do own to hear me faintlyas a whisper out of range,
while my drums beat out the messageand the rhythms never change.
Equality, and I will be free.Equality,
and I will be free.
You announce my ways are wanton,
that I fly from man to man,but if I'm just a shadow to you,
could you ever understand?
We have lived a painful history,
we know the shameful past,but I keep on marching forward,
and you keep on coming last.Equality,
and I will be free.Equality, and I will be free.
Take the blinders from your vision,
take the padding from your ears,
and confess you've heard me crying,
and admit you've seen my tears.
Hear the tempo so compelling,
hear the blood throb through my veins.
Yes, my drums are beating nightly,
and the rhythms never change.
Equality, and I will be free.
Equality, and I will be free.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Being the strong free Me
Being the strong free Me,
is not the easiest thing on earth...Being the strong free Me,
means living my power, and not my fear.
Fear of the stranger of the other here can refer to the fear of person from other community, other religion, other regions, or even other gender. Fear for me is not an end product of the socialization process or the one generated by experience, and stranger too is not somebody who fits the frame of a individual with a grotesque face (as Lombroso points out), a body constitution of an alpha male or someone with facial or even physical features different to that of my familiar culture. For me it is largely a resultant of articulations and conclusions I have made from media and the direct experiences were also shaped by its content placed in a particular perspective, probably one of the worst fears I had and still posses in latent form is of coming in contact with a person with Mongolian features, the terminology I would use would not be Sino-phobia (the fear of strangers) as phobia in crude psychology would refer to intense fear of an object or person with physiological symptoms such as sweating and palpitation, here in my case it is a fear not in it’s pure form, but meshed with disgust, which I developed after watching a news clipping on a cannibal Chinese woman who would kill her visitors and refrigerate their carcasses. The scenes from the news seen at the age of five incorporated a strange fear of people with same features and later led to a generalized fear , where I would hide behind my acquaintance on seeing people with similar characteristics, later it graduated to frequent nightmares where I would see Chinese men kidnapping me and cutting me into pieces, a Freudian interpretation might also venture into unconscious motives and perform a hair split analysis but cannot prescribe a cure, because I still experience a vague undefined fear mixed with dash of disgust which force me to avoid a Chinese, or for that matter a classmate from the Seven Sisters without even knowing them.
Fear engraved in my mind by media also went to the extent of fearing my father after watching news clippings of rapes of minor, here my father is not a stranger but belongs to a community or a large group which is collectively strange to me, the other gender. The fear in this case got inflated to such an extent that having a member of other sex at home was itself threatening, I remember how I use to wander in my neighborhood park after school hours or escape from any contact with my father, I would bolt myself from inside in my room to ensure that he doesn’t get to talk to me. This however, drew me away from him and even after twelve years those gaps of affection remains void. The fear again generalized from a stranger to a population at large including the one’s closest to you. This fear later culminated into a hatred for every male authority figure, and for a woman it was not difficult, there were many cues available from society ( as Pakistani Poetess Kishwar Naheed points out in her poem I am Not That Woman…”you don’t walk a mile without being reminded constantly by jibes and lusting gazes, that you are woman”), media and from personal life which reinforced the already extant fear.
The fear spread to other domains include the fear of the non-existent, the much talked about, hyped and exaggerated about , the fear of the wandering spirits without bodies, the one shown by movies as wearing white flowing garments and strolling in the streets at odd hours to suck out the blood. But, again the blame will have to be borne by media, the movies particularly. The so called horror movies ornamented with scary colorful lights and daunting and intimidating sound effects, the fear is so gripping that the scenes reverberate in my ears and eyes. Here the stranger is not a concrete person but a vague and formless situation wherein we attribute mishaps to an external force which has all the recusant force. Here too I clearly understand the etiology of my fear, it is externalization in sheer sense, transferring all my negatives to a non-existent external entity and then running away from it because I ‘fear’ to encounter my in-human side, my other hidden, fierce, unconstructive, and damaging self.
The other major fear which unlike the above mentioned ones stem from the direct experience. The fear of the colour orange, the fear of the calling ‘Jai Shri Ram’. For an Indian the colour saffron signifies valor and courage but an orange flag at gates of a building, a man with an saffron gamcha, or a hermit clad in a saffron gown, do not give me strength of calm and strength, but leave me shivering to the tip of my spine. As I recollect stories of Christians being attacked on different parts of the country, of churches being vandalized, of missionaries being burnt alive to death and of ‘The Bible’ being torn apart into paper bits; by guardians of culture and nationalism, wrapped in saffron , I am engulfed by a terror or a fright being a Christian myself. In a family where Hindu communal forces are seen as a panic cue, even a neutral color becomes an object of alarm and dread. Not just me but my entire family fears an east Timor styled mass violence against ourselves, and we live under the constant fear of such a day approaching where we friendly Hindu neighbors would be the first one to ignite the first straw of our roof. Here the saffron clad sadhu or sadhvi is not the stranger but, the ideology that makes us different from them is the stranger, the perspective that re-categorizes people sharing same geographical boundaries is the stranger and I fear that stranger ideology.
I fear everything that delimits me, that places me in the category of another , that makes me feel vulnerable , that threatens my security and well being, and everything that possess the ability to injure me. And every such object , person , place, situation or ideology be it the product of socialization or leaning or inheritance, I fear it.
Being the strong free Me,
means being in my power,
in a world full of fear.
is not the easiest thing on earth...Being the strong free Me,
means living my power, and not my fear.
Fear of the stranger of the other here can refer to the fear of person from other community, other religion, other regions, or even other gender. Fear for me is not an end product of the socialization process or the one generated by experience, and stranger too is not somebody who fits the frame of a individual with a grotesque face (as Lombroso points out), a body constitution of an alpha male or someone with facial or even physical features different to that of my familiar culture. For me it is largely a resultant of articulations and conclusions I have made from media and the direct experiences were also shaped by its content placed in a particular perspective, probably one of the worst fears I had and still posses in latent form is of coming in contact with a person with Mongolian features, the terminology I would use would not be Sino-phobia (the fear of strangers) as phobia in crude psychology would refer to intense fear of an object or person with physiological symptoms such as sweating and palpitation, here in my case it is a fear not in it’s pure form, but meshed with disgust, which I developed after watching a news clipping on a cannibal Chinese woman who would kill her visitors and refrigerate their carcasses. The scenes from the news seen at the age of five incorporated a strange fear of people with same features and later led to a generalized fear , where I would hide behind my acquaintance on seeing people with similar characteristics, later it graduated to frequent nightmares where I would see Chinese men kidnapping me and cutting me into pieces, a Freudian interpretation might also venture into unconscious motives and perform a hair split analysis but cannot prescribe a cure, because I still experience a vague undefined fear mixed with dash of disgust which force me to avoid a Chinese, or for that matter a classmate from the Seven Sisters without even knowing them.
Fear engraved in my mind by media also went to the extent of fearing my father after watching news clippings of rapes of minor, here my father is not a stranger but belongs to a community or a large group which is collectively strange to me, the other gender. The fear in this case got inflated to such an extent that having a member of other sex at home was itself threatening, I remember how I use to wander in my neighborhood park after school hours or escape from any contact with my father, I would bolt myself from inside in my room to ensure that he doesn’t get to talk to me. This however, drew me away from him and even after twelve years those gaps of affection remains void. The fear again generalized from a stranger to a population at large including the one’s closest to you. This fear later culminated into a hatred for every male authority figure, and for a woman it was not difficult, there were many cues available from society ( as Pakistani Poetess Kishwar Naheed points out in her poem I am Not That Woman…”you don’t walk a mile without being reminded constantly by jibes and lusting gazes, that you are woman”), media and from personal life which reinforced the already extant fear.
The fear spread to other domains include the fear of the non-existent, the much talked about, hyped and exaggerated about , the fear of the wandering spirits without bodies, the one shown by movies as wearing white flowing garments and strolling in the streets at odd hours to suck out the blood. But, again the blame will have to be borne by media, the movies particularly. The so called horror movies ornamented with scary colorful lights and daunting and intimidating sound effects, the fear is so gripping that the scenes reverberate in my ears and eyes. Here the stranger is not a concrete person but a vague and formless situation wherein we attribute mishaps to an external force which has all the recusant force. Here too I clearly understand the etiology of my fear, it is externalization in sheer sense, transferring all my negatives to a non-existent external entity and then running away from it because I ‘fear’ to encounter my in-human side, my other hidden, fierce, unconstructive, and damaging self.
The other major fear which unlike the above mentioned ones stem from the direct experience. The fear of the colour orange, the fear of the calling ‘Jai Shri Ram’. For an Indian the colour saffron signifies valor and courage but an orange flag at gates of a building, a man with an saffron gamcha, or a hermit clad in a saffron gown, do not give me strength of calm and strength, but leave me shivering to the tip of my spine. As I recollect stories of Christians being attacked on different parts of the country, of churches being vandalized, of missionaries being burnt alive to death and of ‘The Bible’ being torn apart into paper bits; by guardians of culture and nationalism, wrapped in saffron , I am engulfed by a terror or a fright being a Christian myself. In a family where Hindu communal forces are seen as a panic cue, even a neutral color becomes an object of alarm and dread. Not just me but my entire family fears an east Timor styled mass violence against ourselves, and we live under the constant fear of such a day approaching where we friendly Hindu neighbors would be the first one to ignite the first straw of our roof. Here the saffron clad sadhu or sadhvi is not the stranger but, the ideology that makes us different from them is the stranger, the perspective that re-categorizes people sharing same geographical boundaries is the stranger and I fear that stranger ideology.
I fear everything that delimits me, that places me in the category of another , that makes me feel vulnerable , that threatens my security and well being, and everything that possess the ability to injure me. And every such object , person , place, situation or ideology be it the product of socialization or leaning or inheritance, I fear it.
Being the strong free Me,
means being in my power,
in a world full of fear.
Still I Rise!!!
“Still I Rise
You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may trod me in the very dirtDid you want to see me broken?Bowed head and lowered eyes?Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries….”
These are excerpts from the poem ‘still I rise’ by black poet Maya Angelou it is an open question targeted at men of all times, places , cultures and religions asking them as to what it is that forces them to hold so deep rooted stereotypes, that they see women inferior to all living and nonliving species. The poem holds true to our Indian society which very recently witnessed gory crime against a group of liberal women in a pub in Mangalore. The perpetuators were not perpetuators you see, they were moral police defending the culture of a complex and rich society which they thought was getting corroborated because some women with liberal thought were spending time with their friends. The perpetuators, oops! Sorry the moral soldiers targeted (no, the word molested cannot be used as it is against our moral, cultural and traditional values) these women on various grounds.
One, they were in a pub; two, they were in a pub at late night; three, they were in a pub at late night wearing clothes that indicated their sexual liberty; four, if all this was not enough they were in a pub at late night wearing provocative clothes with some men. Was all this not enough to agitate a group of people who were surging with ethnocentrism? Well, the so called custodians don’t realize that what they see now or get scared away by are mere modifications and mutations of practices those were prevalent in India even during ancient times and were very much a part of the rich culture we boast of. Did women in ancient India not involve in social drinking that enjoyed social sanctions? And this social drinking occurred on all festivals involving everybody in a community and at late hours. In the very state of Karnataka where the demonstrations occurred, the whole community during the 13th century consumed liquor made of jaggery and worshipped goddess Durga throughout day and night. Now if that has taken a different face in the 21st century, the objective still remains the same, being close to people who matter to you. Now where the issue of women being immoral does comes in? Nowhere, it is just an excuse on the part of fake moral police to exercise their aggression on women because their ‘sassiness upsets them”. Talking about dressing in a revealing manner, take these protagonists (or antagonist, whatever!) to the remotest villages of contemporary India (forget ancient India), where tribal women still live in nudity or semi nudity, not because they want to seduce but because it is a part of their indigenous culture. Ok now that certain Hindutva support groups have this compulsive obsession with traditional roots and values. They have to take this.The Sakas, a Hindu sect of India, have transmitted their traditions of nudity to modem India through the thousands of explicit sculptures that remain on the walls of the city of Khajuraho. Built about 1000 A.D., this temple at Khajuraho communicates its values to the modem visitor with a directness that leaves nothing to the imagination. "Tens of thousands of human and animal figures dance happily over and around the facade of these buildings.... Kings and commoners are depicted in joyous sexual union, completely naked except for beads, bangles, and decoration.
So who all are the new targets of, Oh Holy!! , Oh Pios! Ram Sena, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, will you demolish Ajanta and Ellora as Taliban did to Bamiyan Buddhas?
Even the fanatic Muslim fundamentalists are not free of allegations. Where does in the Holy Quran it is said that the women’s body or women on the whole are so impure , corrupt, and depraved that blessed benedictions will shower from heaven if you throw atrocities on them? Even Christianity is not untouched by the labeling, certain excerpts from the Bible are perfect examples of how women, who dared to think and raise her voice was labeled harlots and it’s Papal (referring to the Pope) version in the dark ages was the Malfecus Malfecarum, which was a handbook to identify liberal women as witches!
The illusion of absolute power is pretty exhilarating and is a serious turn-on, right guys?
The truth is that the reasons the perpetrators give are not reasons they are just excuses to subdue women and keep them locked in the bridal chambers. The motive behind putting up this write-up is not to initiate community mobilization as expected of prospective social workers, but to get rid of these notions in our own mind and modify our own attitude before we talk of ‘social work intervention’.
“….Does my haughtiness offend you?Don't you take it awful hard'Does my sassiness upset you?Why are you beset with gloom?Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.
You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise…….”
You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may trod me in the very dirtDid you want to see me broken?Bowed head and lowered eyes?Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries….”
These are excerpts from the poem ‘still I rise’ by black poet Maya Angelou it is an open question targeted at men of all times, places , cultures and religions asking them as to what it is that forces them to hold so deep rooted stereotypes, that they see women inferior to all living and nonliving species. The poem holds true to our Indian society which very recently witnessed gory crime against a group of liberal women in a pub in Mangalore. The perpetuators were not perpetuators you see, they were moral police defending the culture of a complex and rich society which they thought was getting corroborated because some women with liberal thought were spending time with their friends. The perpetuators, oops! Sorry the moral soldiers targeted (no, the word molested cannot be used as it is against our moral, cultural and traditional values) these women on various grounds.
One, they were in a pub; two, they were in a pub at late night; three, they were in a pub at late night wearing clothes that indicated their sexual liberty; four, if all this was not enough they were in a pub at late night wearing provocative clothes with some men. Was all this not enough to agitate a group of people who were surging with ethnocentrism? Well, the so called custodians don’t realize that what they see now or get scared away by are mere modifications and mutations of practices those were prevalent in India even during ancient times and were very much a part of the rich culture we boast of. Did women in ancient India not involve in social drinking that enjoyed social sanctions? And this social drinking occurred on all festivals involving everybody in a community and at late hours. In the very state of Karnataka where the demonstrations occurred, the whole community during the 13th century consumed liquor made of jaggery and worshipped goddess Durga throughout day and night. Now if that has taken a different face in the 21st century, the objective still remains the same, being close to people who matter to you. Now where the issue of women being immoral does comes in? Nowhere, it is just an excuse on the part of fake moral police to exercise their aggression on women because their ‘sassiness upsets them”. Talking about dressing in a revealing manner, take these protagonists (or antagonist, whatever!) to the remotest villages of contemporary India (forget ancient India), where tribal women still live in nudity or semi nudity, not because they want to seduce but because it is a part of their indigenous culture. Ok now that certain Hindutva support groups have this compulsive obsession with traditional roots and values. They have to take this.The Sakas, a Hindu sect of India, have transmitted their traditions of nudity to modem India through the thousands of explicit sculptures that remain on the walls of the city of Khajuraho. Built about 1000 A.D., this temple at Khajuraho communicates its values to the modem visitor with a directness that leaves nothing to the imagination. "Tens of thousands of human and animal figures dance happily over and around the facade of these buildings.... Kings and commoners are depicted in joyous sexual union, completely naked except for beads, bangles, and decoration.
So who all are the new targets of, Oh Holy!! , Oh Pios! Ram Sena, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, will you demolish Ajanta and Ellora as Taliban did to Bamiyan Buddhas?
Even the fanatic Muslim fundamentalists are not free of allegations. Where does in the Holy Quran it is said that the women’s body or women on the whole are so impure , corrupt, and depraved that blessed benedictions will shower from heaven if you throw atrocities on them? Even Christianity is not untouched by the labeling, certain excerpts from the Bible are perfect examples of how women, who dared to think and raise her voice was labeled harlots and it’s Papal (referring to the Pope) version in the dark ages was the Malfecus Malfecarum, which was a handbook to identify liberal women as witches!
The illusion of absolute power is pretty exhilarating and is a serious turn-on, right guys?
The truth is that the reasons the perpetrators give are not reasons they are just excuses to subdue women and keep them locked in the bridal chambers. The motive behind putting up this write-up is not to initiate community mobilization as expected of prospective social workers, but to get rid of these notions in our own mind and modify our own attitude before we talk of ‘social work intervention’.
“….Does my haughtiness offend you?Don't you take it awful hard'Does my sassiness upset you?Why are you beset with gloom?Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.
You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise…….”
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