Winter of Lonliness

    “How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.” C.S.Lewis

Well, briefly visiting people- people who one may have known, some not met before, some distant relatives and some social acquaintances. All this, the result of a social exercise that one have to set about, however dismal some of those brief visits and social encounters are. Honestly it is a thankless endeavor, having to call at houses you never wanted to, bare your teeth in a muscular exercise called smile - to draw back your parched lips and grimace baring the frontal teeth to some you may not even want to notice on the road; some trivial, some petty, some haughty, some charming, some stoic about life- theirs and your and some gracious for your remembering them.

A few of them would be eager to annoy with their seemingly innocent but tactless, rude and misplaced enquiries, about something that one  wanted to let behind and  be forgotten; then when they notice a slight trace of discomfort in you they hammer in the nail with a wry smile- what can be called specious empathy. Smile inside with a brutally sadistic comfort before seeing you off.

Sometimes, how one wishes that one need not have to talk. Often it is pleasurable to not speak, to be quite, silent, in a mute existence!

I have been on social calls for the past few weeks necessitated by a forthcoming wedding in the family. So when entrusted with the uncomfortable job of going to homes and inviting folks there is nothing much one can do besides accepting the hazards of the exercise.

Brushing aside the forgettable invitees, I was troubled to see a gentleman who I have known since I was little-seen him in his prime and always compared him with the most handsome men in the tinsel world. A man who is a doctor by profession and whose family had close family ties with my maternal grandfather. I remember often visiting his well-known clinic when I was little and also even in my teens. They were wealthy physicians over three generations and were respected and well-known.

Old age- when money, social positions and nothing else matter; it catches up on you swiftly that you realise that you are handicapped even before you bated an eyelid. . He is in his mid-seventies and was widowed some years ago. That I have known devastated him. 

The loneliness of old age! It must be the matter of the desperation of the mind over what ails the body was what I guess I saw in his face – a man, physically a shadow of what he was. But he was alert and cocooned up in his bedroom watching the cricket Test live. A walking aid was kept next to him. In the course of our brief conversation he spoke about his fascination for cricket, asked me if I played. He enquired about everyone, though sometimes he was unsure. He stood up while I was leaving and with folded hands thanked for remembering him.

When I was driving back from his house, I wondered how many among the rest I met over the past days would ever stand for a moment and think of the fragility of life, of the ephemeral youth, our helplessness in between the brazen existence we often display.

Oh Lord I Have Sinned for I'm "Gay"

In the USA, there was this highly polarised trial which was called, "The Monkey Trial’. A widely acclaimed film, ‘Inherit the Wind” was made on the subject. Well that happened in the twenties of the last century, at a time when Public or government funded schools were prohibited from teaching or discussing the Darwinian theory of natural selection and evolution. Americans, those days preferred to fantasise in the creation of the World sometime in 6457 BC by a vengeful and omnipotent person called God. Looking back those were antediluvian times in the American psyche, (not that much has changed there in other matters).

However, back here in India, today, we have a Supreme Court that prefer to rule on matters that touch our daily lives in a insouciant manner and based on their beliefs and ideology rather than testing the subject on the fundamental principles of the constitution. The two judges who ruled that the Victorian era logic of the Article 377 is fine for them personally (sic) and need not be struck down. Strangely for a judicial school that is often accused by some of intemperate judicial activism in directing the executive on policy matters, this new found revelation that sexual relationship between consenting adults of the same sex, even in private violates the anachronistic  Article 377 is strange.. In toto, the supposedly learned Judges opined that one’s sexual orientation is not a personal matter and can be directed by the executive. Isn't this contention ridiculous and pathetic than the “Holy Inquisition” when dissent was termed heresy, when women were branded witches and burnt at the stake?

This reminds me of the time I was an adolescent and a teenager, when I  withstood homosexual advances- from strangers inside the cinemas, and even a couple of  friends.. Personally it was nauseating and repulsive to me and I evaded such solicitations. The fact is homosexual tendencies, at least transient ones do plague some during adolescence and teen.  Wonder if someone would deny this. In some cases they stay put  in the person and I have known some who were socially well placed,who have lured young chaps to satisfy their carnal needs and in some case may have even sodomised young boys. Well here it is a different matter than from consensual liaison between adults. It is a fact that there are heterosexuals who have gay flings outside their homes. There are marriages that fall apart like cards because one of the partners has homosexual orientation too.

I guess that homosexual orientation is a condition. Rather than being sophist it is necessary that such inclined people are either helped psychologically or let them be as they are with equal rights to privacy like any other.

The question of morality is a fallacy here. When copulation with multiple partners and virtual orgy is depicted in the explicit sculptures of the Chandala era in Kajuraho, when temples have artistic sculptures of high breasted goddesses baring their bosoms, when scriptures elsewhere promises catamites in Paradise if a believer kills an apostate , why this hypocrisy? 

Transgender and Transvestism as well as bisexual orientation is not a crime  like rape, sodomy, murder or robbery. The right wing Hindu groups who bray about the need to uphold Indian culture and that the reversal of Article 377 is against Indian ethos must look back at the puranas and folklore wherein we have number of instances of men and women with the so called unnatural sexual orientation. There has been no instance in those works that tells us that such people were hounded by the society. So we have to wonder if we are actually going forward or into an age which evens the puranas and scriptures cannot comprehend.

The Court certainly erred in their decision and by leaving it to the legislature to amend or maintain the statute as they chose; it abdicated its responsibility in safeguarding the right to privacy and of something as private as sexual predilections.

The BJP, who claim to be the custodians of Indian Culture, ethos and heritage have openly endorsed the anachronism of the Court. In their opinion homosexuality is against Indian culture. Then tear down the sculptures in Konark and Kajuraho. The Church is tactfully silent. Perhaps skeletons are too many in their closets that any overt comment may vitiate the matter for the clergy. Or the Church prefers to still endorse only the heterosexual relationships of man and woman (husband and wife) - as approved by God. All other forms are unnatural carnal acts - sinful , abominable and candidates for eternal damnation. As for the Muslim clergy and politicians they are understandably apprehensive and silent amidst the  hullabaloo the Judgment has created. The reason is not far away to seek.

The matter is not the question of erosion of morality, sin or the abysmal depths the society is going into. Homosexuality has been an orientation since ages. Anthropologists explain that even animals are oriented to homosexual behaviour. It is the specious puritanical views that is the problem and that which restrains from accepting something that has been, that is and that will be.