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.

Arundati Roy, & The Corporate Hindu India

This is rubbish, outlandish innuendo and utter nonsense. I want to scream so, that people may take note. My Blog readers are only a few so this post will not reach out and only the few who read this may take note. The only way to reach this bizarre observation of Ms. Arundati Roy to the notice of many is to highlight this in Twitter and Facebook so the spiraling information gets moving afar. Also I’m further convinced that one should always be skeptical before being judgmental, be it even the commandments from the good Lord himself.

Arundati Roy, is a person whose views, analytic opinions and articulation that has impressed me. Her book, “The Shape of the Beast” and her many writings , foremost being the essays, “Walking with the Comrades”, and the well balanced piece on the Parliament attack and sentencing of Afzal Guru. Her acumen in distancing from the Anna Hazare fanfare was well justified, to me in hindsight. But she foresaw and that is one of her special ability. Her novelette though not a great creation ringed bell for me as it was moored in the times I grew up and many scenes she poetically wrote in prose brought back instances from my childhood days. I could empathize with a person who was my age and grew up in the same social times.

Now after listening to a video lecture she gave in the USA, I feel angered and revolted by her callous, ill-informed and untruthful comments on certain incidences in India’s early post independent days. Her erudition and the information that percolates to her repository have either deserted her or she chose to go into an India bashing offensive -playing to the gallery. In the bargain it may have done much harm to the country and how India is perceived in the West. (The video link is given here and I would suggest that people listen to the portion in question, which is in the very beginning of the video).Check this link-     http://youtu.be/jDqlqSIPgjU

Ms.Arundati Roy alleges that India is a Corporate Hindu State that has been perpetually at war with its own people, starting from the moment she gained independence- the Muslims in Hyderabad and Kashmir, the Christians in Goa, the natives of the North-East and recently with the Sikhs in Punjab. She claims that the Indian Army has been perpetually waging war against her own people.

This is utter nonsense and at total variance to history and facts. Yes in the central heartlands of India, now there is an ugly bourgeois war against the indigenous people – the tribes, and blessed by big businesses who want to eliminate or dispossess the tribal once and for all so that the rich and untapped natural resources can be exploited. But what has the Indian action against the Portuguese in Goa, against the belligerent Nizam in Hyderabad and against the terrorism of the renegades in Punjab got to do with corporate manipulations and Hindu agenda?

Elsewhere Ms.Roy has opined that Kashmir was never a part of India. Can she tell what is India and when did the concept of India come about? She must be aware that the political India is an idea of the nationalist movement and a post-colonial metamorphosis, a fact. Nowhere on the planet has a country been demarcated and fenced soon after creation of the planet by the Lord as believers would like to believe? Nations evolve. Social, natural, political and historical factors play much part in the evolution of a country. Is Ms. Roy endorsing the British cunning in leaving what was called India to fend for herself by drafting a very crafty instrument of partition and exit where in the six hundred odd princely states where given the choice to join the two nations or stay independent? Yes indeed the country was partitioned on communal lines and the rulers of the tiny kingdoms were free to join the Indian Union or the country formed on communal and theocratic ideology-Pakistan. Going by that yard stick there was nothing irregular in the ruler of Kashmir opting for the Indian union. If Ms.Roy argues that the Muslim majority states must go to Pakistan based on the communal partition agenda then what right did the Nizam have in staying aloof with Hyderabad – a Hindu majority State? And again no sane man or a practitioner of State craft would want a recalcitrant and belligerent little kingdom in its midst, which Hyderabad could have potently become? Is she not aware of the atrocities of Nizam –post independence and the large-scale forced conversion of Hindus to Islam?

As for Goa where she claims that India fought its own Christian population, one can only laugh at her silliness. Post World War -2 the colonial structures all over the world disintegrated. And what right did the obstinate Portuguese have to stay in Goa with their anachronistic colonial dispensation? Moreover, is Ms.Roy not aware of the nationalist movement in Goa that was in sync with the freedom movement all across the sub-continent? Her argument may even serve to smear the nationalist movements against the East India Co and the British rule in India!

The then US President John.F.Kennedy said denouncing the Indian action in Goa, “the preacher has been caught coming out of the brothel”. Their representative to the UN branded India the colonial aggressor. Ironically, Ms. Roy seems to be echoing those sentiments fifty years after.  

Yes the criminals and thugs sponsored by the Congress were unleashed in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s killing. They wrecked the most dastardly communal frenzy upon the hapless Sikhs. But what went about in Punjab in the early 1980s and the Frankenstein that Sikh religious frenzy created (apparently aided by self-serving politicians themselves) was Kafkaesque that could have snowballed into a greater disaster. Tactically the Indian government erred when they sent the army into the Golden temple when they could have smoked the terrorists out. But that was no war against the Sikhs.

The matter of the north eastern states is far more critical when it comes to the process of nation building. With diverse regional and tribal loyalties it was a herculean task to integrate the minds than the land into the Union. Ms.Roy must be also aware of the long years that it took for the integration of the fifty states into the Union and federation of America. There was in the years since independence resistance from tribes and regional outfits in the north east which snow balled into insurgency and conflict with the Indian State and the army was deployed. There has been covert and not so secret logistical and material support to the insurgents from across the border too. The historical separation of the north east during the colonial period created problems for the national formation and integration post-independence. In the north east a sense of incompatibility grew into resentment and being made a part of the union especially when the Indian government cold shouldered local aspirations.

 Ms. Roy should understand that it is not the Hindu corporate agenda that brought about as she alleges military action in Goa, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Punjab and the North East, but matters that are diverse. The shortsighted vision of successive governments in New Delhi has contributed to the alienation of Kashmiris, but that is a different story. Pray what is wrong in Punjab now? While in North East the internecine animosities among tribes and their regional loyalties may have to be grappled with for more years while nation building.

What does Ms. Roy subscribe- a perpetually unstable cauldron of tribal, ethnic and regional loyalties at logger heads like in Afghanistan or an evolutionary process of nation building. Or is she still voicing the colonial mindset that should bring back the Portuguese to Goa, the Dutch to the Coromandel, the Danes to Tranquebar, the British East India Co  back to Calcutta and we still will have to find some space for the Spaniards.

Erudition, knowledge and the courage to articulate it earnestly and candidly is indeed a splendid gift. But using those special qualities to spread innuendo, corner pats in the back, some acclaim and applause in elitist arenas is tawdry.

Vox Populi

He was a man who was born (as some may say) with a little more than normal craving for alcohol. His brother, who was a year younger to him (but they grew up like twins) would in later life recall how one day while they were in the early teen, were sent by their father to supervise the felling and collection of coconuts in the  grove  the family owned. Seeing the master’s young boys the adiyanmar (workers) took extra care in gratification. They served them pure toddy that was tapped at dawn. To the amazement of all the “little big brother” gulped a few pots of the highly stimulating drink and moved about unassuming.. This was astonishing for all because even veteran and seasoned drinkers seldom accomplish that feat in even time and move about without being tiddley.

Later in life, some of the folks who knew him would exclaim that his story was one that of a man who was driven into alcoholism by an impossibly termagant spouse and a marriage that rocked sans peace and quiet. Others would argue that his was the case of excuses to do something he could never resist and his body chemistry was such. Yet some others who knew him and his wife would sigh that she could make a wreck out of a passive and sober man.

Having known him, it will be nigh impossible for one to disagree with the last opinion.