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.