Of faith and sensitivity
In the West, parents have limited tenure. 16-18 years is usually the amount of time a parent spends invested in their offspring. Post which, chances are the kid will grow into an adult and fly out into the world of grownups. In the East, things are drastically different. Here, parents take their parenthood to their pyre. When a person becomes a parent, the child ends up occupying the largest estate of their resulting identity. It’s a two-way traffic though: children nurtured in this style, despite the suffocation, they will end up being dependent on their parents. If, by a strange twist of enlightenment, somebody wants to escape the tentacles of their parents (and their esteemed parenthood) and wants to carve their own decisions — related to career or love — they will be looked down upon by the parents (obviously) as well as the relatives and immediate neighbours. To naive eyes, a child expecting a breath of autonomy is an insult to the parents who gave up so much of their own autonomy to raise their kids. But on closer inspection, the picture becomes clearer. It’s not about the “child” wanting to be technically free. It’s about the parents losing their parenthood; without which, their identity turns hollow. After all, who are they, if not parents?
Speaking of our subcontinental culture — to me, it’s stunning how similar Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Nepali societies are — parents and their accumulative ethos have shaped the post-colonial history. There is an advanced emphasis on the concept of security more than anything else. Is education (15 years is a long time) secure? Is your job (35 years is not long enough) secure? Is your marriage (eternal bond, if you may) secure? Is death (announcement is highly important) secure? Without the element of surety, all the above-mentioned societies crumble. We aren’t prepared for the ideological version of the 2008 financial crisis. Our basics are in tune with the IQ of our parents. They take most of our decisions for us. They decide, without deliberations, a lot of our choices and they often do it with our best interests in mind. So much so, we desis expect our parents to find our gods and morals for us. Later, we are surprised when they want to find us our life partners too.
When couples break up, several equations go for a toss. If the coupling — to use a millennial jargon — has been on for a considerable amount of time, it stops being about just two people. And that is what sucks the most about the decimation of a relationship. Friends on both ends can get awkward because more often than not, it becomes a choose-a-side game. Gets worse when parents are involved, particularly when they are fond of each other. I am breaking up with you but I really like your father’s sense of humour and your mom’s fish curry. Not to forget the pets, the unspeakable nodes of all human relationships, who wonder what happened between the two protagonists that one of them stopped showing up at their door. Can’t even say out loudly — “I miss your scent, hooman!”
I often imagine how people go through the ritual of ending their relationships. Where do they start and how do they end? None of my friends and acquaintances have gone through dramatic breakups anyway. I am sure things rarely get as tense as it did in Marriage Story (2019). Yet, to the best of my understanding, I hope it sustains the fibre of humour.
Girl: “I think this is not working.”
Guy: “Really? I thought we were doing great.”
Girl: “Yes, we were doing great but like 3 years ago. Now we are on the downhill.”
Guy: “Damn. Is it because of something I did?
Girl: “No, the problem is you don’t do anything. You are the exact opposite of ambition.”
Guy: “How exactly?”
Girl: “You don’t have a plan for the future. Our future. You are too happy with the way your life is going. How long do you think you can carry on like this? At what point are you supposed to say that enough is enough? When do you think you’ll reach that stage of growth in life? Do you even have any dreams left? Or did you even have dreams in the first place? I don’t even remember who I fell in love with. I am so done with this soul-sapping routine of having to spend my time with somebody who doesn’t want more from life. All my friends have boyfriends who are aiming for the stars and you aren’t even interested in looking up.”
Guy: “So, it’s not me?”
Girl: “Yup.”
Guy: “It’s you?”
Girl: “Yup.”
The good news is that our generation is eager to stand up for something. The bad news is it isn’t sure for how long. A desire is burning within us to set things right, to arrest the rot in the system, to give birth to a future that is prone to forgiving our past. There is so much to do and there is a common thread of activism as well. Yet, every now and then, we can note the fragrance of privilege suffusing the climate of change. You see, the trouble with being privileged is you can’t really substitute your upbringing and walk in somebody else’s shoes like a pro. To be fair, empathy comes from a place called heart but experience reaches those who don’t show their back. In the political sphere, you’ll observe how seldom you come across an individual who can combine these two Es. Bernie Sanders could be one of them. Let’s see. As for our local problems, it’s advisable to lay our hopes high on this generation. You never know how the goodness of heart might just trump the odds. Which is why you don’t want them to sit down anytime soon.
Technically speaking, smoking is banned in public spaces in India. Yet, you’ll see individuals challenging the law by dragging in and out their cute little cancer sticks. I am yet to see somebody getting reprimanded by a person of law for smoking. In fact, during my time in Mumbai, I was astonished to see that nobody, not even the worst chain-smoker, ever smoked on railway platforms. The logic behind this behaviour could rest on the successive trains showing up within minutes, leaving little to no time for somebody to light up their cigarettes. But that would mean nobody ever sits on the platform benches lost in their thoughts. Perhaps smoking laws, like most laws, work when people see the collective benefit. Since nobody would dare smoke inside a local train in Mumbai, fearing reprehension from co-passengers, the law trickles down to the platforms as well. But, still, all these theories leave the window when you see upwardly mobile folks dragging on their e-cigarettes inside fancy commercial buildings. They have truly risen above the clouds of law.
History is for those who believe in nuance. Otherwise, it’s a playground for propaganda. If you hate Hitler — which is a natural reaction given the pile of dead bodies his decisions left behind — but don’t want to understand the circumstances that led to the decline of Reich and the rise of Nazism, then you face the danger to letting proto-Hitlers assume influence, if not power, in the not-so-distant future. Call this the curse of history; it repeats when you’re not looking without bias. As a society, we tend to side with our chosen victors from the annals of the past, overlooking their iniquities. Two wrongs don’t make one right, and in the same spirit, two wrongs don’t make one right enough to ignore nuances. Evil is evil — the size and its persuasion don’t matter.
Speaking of perception, isn’t it funny that this government is hell-bent on suggesting that Harappan civilization was way into vegetarianism? There is no civilization in recorded history that actively subsisted on plants or plant-based food. When the locusts had destroyed the crops, the Jews were permitted to consume those nasty bugs because it’s kosher in their holy book. That’s called practicality, not scriptures. Yet, in 2020, there is a strong wind in India that wants to paint the great Harappan civilization with a brush certified by Brahmanism. Especially when there are more than enough evidence from our wise books of the yore — the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, etc. — that meat consumption was pretty normal back then, even amongst the scholarly class (Brahmins). Why then is there this inane drive to disown the nuances of our history? Only two words can explain such a unsavoury taste: blissful ignorance.
Sheryl Sandberg wanted women to ‘lean in’ in the corporate world. Her idea was to encourage more women to participate and aspire to reach greater positions in their respective careers. Good thought, without a doubt. Yet, we have a long, long way to go before there are substantial changes meted out to women across the corporate spectrum. Turns out the lack of pay parity — cascaded with sexist attitudes — is one of the biggest reasons women feel demotivated at work. As of today, there are more men named John and Stephen who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies than women in the same position. If we take our eye away from American realities for a bit and focus on poorer countries like Rwanda and Bangladesh, female progress in professional spaces have been exemplary. These inspiring women don’t have a public figure like Sandberg to tell them to lean in. Mainly because their circumstances ensured that if they didn’t lean in and fought out, their families may not survive.
In a world fast depleted of love and sympathy, let’s try to be sensitive. It’s one thing to crack an edgy joke in a crowd that shares the same wavelength as you do, and quite another to be abrasive towards those who don’t expect (or welcome) your offence. We are all actors playing out different characters, so it’s necessary we understand our stage before delivering our monologues. Words are powerful but to keep it that way, they need to be disposed of wisely. To tell a pious namazi that his god is an idiot who understands only one language shows how immature you are in the field of faith. Similarly, downsizing somebody’s choice to be a vegetarian by making ugly references to beef doesn’t add value to your outlook in any way. We live in a complicated world, surrounded by walls of compromises. Our history isn’t a straight line. For instance, upper caste Hindus might like to believe that Lord Rama and his family didn’t consume the deer, whose skin they were wearing in exile. Muslims and Christians would love to assume that their forefathers weren’t forced to convert. The end results of these beliefs and assumptions direct us to a room filled with faith. To enter it, you’ll have to let go of your uppity. Or else, you’ll find yourself walking into walls.
