New Gender Values

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Teachers are human. They need periodic nudges to remind them how powerful they are.

The demands of a regular school day tends to lull them into thinking an efficient run through has been good enough. But every teaching day gone by without having inspired a child or forced them to think has been a monumental, criminal waste.  It is one more day of abandonment; another 24 hours we have left them at the mercy of the Radio FM blaring its Fevicol song, the late night serial eulogizing weeping women or a facebook update celebrating risky behavior.

For all the bluster of India’s economic forges, equality is struggling to happen here. There is a swelling unease at the widening chasms: Indo-Pak, VIP-Aam Aadmi, Police-Citizen, Traditionalist-Progressive, Dalit-Brahmin, Penthouse class-Basement underclass…all brewing under the dark shadow of corruption, a hazed out bureaucracy and our dyslexic government. Watching this national hutspot going bad is the mushrooming middle class, nursing its heartburn and fighting down a reflux.

The regular textbook can hardly justify and limit knowledge exchange taking place in the classroom under these circumstances. Students need help, more than at any other time in Indian history, to make sense of their environment. Indian ionosphere is sick with toxin. There are dishonest advertisements, sexually charged songs, irresponsible messages of pornography, pressures of competition and the constant struggle for acceptance and a dignified existence.

Parents are just about able to keep the physical nurture of their progeny going in a system that will not guarantee them efficiency nor safety and certainly not any facility. That leaves the teachers with class rooms that have become the new ground zero, the only spaces with a semblance of sanctity, authority and naivety conducive to instilling healthy beliefs. The software wiring of young minds has to happen in schools while the students are young enough to harbour an inherent sense of right and wrong, fair and unjust.

Teachers have to remind themselves often of the huge investments they are making in their students. Their children listen to them. Classes have to be told that the human reality is changing and that we need new recipes for survival. They have to be spoken to of the skewed gender ration that is threatening peace and democracy in the nation. It must be explained how we are creating bare branches on family trees by killing baby girls before they are born. What are the surplus men going to do? They will live and roam in loose groups of unattached, unemployable cess pools of anger, with a nil stake in societal order; all the time blaming successful women for their own failures.

This generation must not grow up thinking that girls are fairy tale characters, and boys prince charming on horseback. Let them appreciate that the two genders are real people with real problems. They will see that the roles that worked when we were a farming community no longer apply in our modern, industrialized, information driven democracy. Girls deserve permission to be as naughty as boys who in turn ought to feel free to use their tear ducts! Boys should be able to study psychology and girls should be able to join the National Defence Academy. Far more than femininity or masculinity, it is humanity that our survival needs cultivating today.

In time, the young will grow up to realize the challenges ahead; the immutable but bitter truth that whenever a power equation is threatened, balance has to be wrested; it has never been given on a platter. For this, they have to develop an ease with discourse, debate, dissent. The current rigid hierarchical structures employed in most schools heap shame upon them. They need liberation to follow their hearts and listen to their own voices so they can grow up with a strong sense of self-esteem. It will be the modern young’s duty to contest and protest.  Every word, every thought, every gesture counts. Fundamental rights for all, irrespective of caste, colour, creed, gender, status, religion is the goal we are staring at and these are not just western values; they are universal, humane values.

The human race is in a process of evolution, of evening out power. The rich have fortressed themselves, much like the Ostrich. While the rest of us wait for speedy justice, accountable leaders and a protective police force, we can embrace gender sensitization. We can change our behavior, beginning with an empathy with our own and the other gender. It is time to examine long held beliefs and question the realities everyone thought they knew.

A very close, inter dependent and transparent world is growing around us. No one can survive in this spacecraft like claustrophobic closeness unless they are good human beings. Gender sensitization is a step in that direction. There is a call for systemic changes.  If we do not alter our ways, we are going to leave behind a terrifying world for our children. We owe our young the space and freedom to achieve their highest potential.

Teachers are not merely uniquely placed or wholly equipped to prevent gender becoming their students’ destinies; they in fact are the only ones in any position to do so.

Note: With cerebral inputs from Aqseer.

Neanderthals

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The country is in the throes of an inexplicable regression.

Cover up or get raped! This sentiment currently riding India’s public spaces gets steadily strident and sinister. Stay safe with traditional clothes. Dispense with jeans and shorts if you want to preserve your modesty. Cleavage is sure to invite dirt. So watch what you wear and how!

The sneaky, lying voices emanate from everywhere. A clicking of the tongue that originates from the inside of homes, extending to the legislative cabins, echoing on roads, TV studios, peepal panchayats, school corridors and police stations; why will women not listen and stick to the Indian mores while picking their clothes. More and more, in this pluralistic, populous, progressive, democratic home of the Indus Valley Civilization, half the citizens are being told to shore up against the other half under layers of clothes. There is a siege within; a social deceit in the avowed “good and safety” of women.

The diktats are not new. What is scary is the deliberate denial of the collaborative nature of correction needed. There is a vengeful focus solely on the molested. No one will talk of what the molesters ought to do. It is presumed that he can’t help his testosterone throwing him into epileptic spasms of salivation and penile erection at the sight of female flesh. He is XY, the most potent sample of a biped and beyond redemption as far as lust and lechery go. Legs, arms, midriff, silhouette, even eyes at times, he is not fussy; it can all set him off like a pack of crackers. Horrors of horrors, they would have you believe he is particularly turned on by a whimpering, resistant, petrified and unresponsive victim of sexual assault.

So you have these loathsome creatures rubbing their prized maleness against you in buses; the boob pokers who will elbow into your chest pretending to look elsewhere as the young, growing girls wince with pain and shame; ass grabbers, snaking out of the crowd to grab a handful. Fairly dutiful around their immediate family women, they then step out into the streets, these roving masses of testosterone, stripping women with their eyes, doing them right there in public, boring into them.

Lo and behold, the unchanged, continuous, purest descendants of the Neanderthals. A girl’s upbringing has metamorphosed but quite clearly the baby boy book has not been updated. As a matter of fact, their growth has been in the skill of double dealing. In the same breath that he uses the word “sexy” with intent to compliment, he blames victims of rape for having invited sexual assault with their “hotness”. On the one hand item numbers extol ‘jawani’ and ‘badnaami’, on the other there is this all pervasive moral din over culture and tradition. The rules are different. A guy sporting his tight butt in body hugging jeans is celebrating his masculine frame but a woman sporting a low neckline is begging to be violated. Biceps on a man state power; a trim waist on a woman spell invitation. The horrific sanction extends to men in positions of trust and responsibility. Try sharing the chiller with them and they will be quick to tell you how men will be men and how even boys are not spared. 

The numbskulls do not want to see that it is not about the right to expose but about the right to exist without shame, fear and guilt.

I have two daughters and I am scared witless. How do I have them balance their education with conformity? Having brought them up to breathe progressive notions, how do I sell oppression to them guised under the cowl of tradition? What good really is the visible progress made by the successive generations of women in their family if the end goal is the go back into hiding? Do they need, for their own survival, to acknowledge that no one really cares for the autonomy, dignity and authenticity of women? That just a scratch below the skin of modern civilization is the molten, pre-historic “burn the witch” hatred. That the men in their lives may view their independent thinking as an attack on their masculinity, deserving to be mocked and put down. And that the tool they will call in might be rape wherein lays the truth that sexual harassment is not about sex. The deal is about power, control and domination.

It has been said over and over and bears any amount of repeating. As much as the violations grow so must the protests amplify. To summarize therefore and reiterate and register again and yet again:

Rape is violent

Rapes are mostly committed by men women have little reason to suspect

Rape has nothing to do with the dress of the victim

Rape visits the weak and the timid, kids included


What you and I can do right away is to:

Stop laughing at rape jokes

Boycott movies that glorify rape

Speak out when the victim is blamed

Engage men in addressing this criminal attack on those who hold up half the sky

The ax forgets but the tree remembers. In remembering, we can give this daily, horrific occurrence a language that will snatch it out if its "unspeakable" yellow, ticker tape.