New shoots on the old tree of patriarchy

 We still have pretty solid patriarchal roots in our social soil depriving women of their well justified position in various spheres of life. Take the case of football for example. Despite the best of facilities, fat pay cheques, world-class infrastructure, promotional tours, global level support staffs, the Indian men’s football team is ranked 107 in global ranking. Now consider the Indian women’s football team. Nobody talks about them because they hardly get any priority in the gaming scheme. In comparison to the men’s football team they get maybe just five percent attention, resources and focus. Still they are ranked far higher than the men’s team. The Indian women’s team is ranked 60 in the world. They have been twice runners up in Asian championship. The men’s ISL league matches are played under glaring floodlights, while the women footballers struggle in their league under merciless hot sun as their matches would start at 8:30 AM and 4 in the afternoon. Who would spend extra money by lighting floodlights for women’s football game? Let them play under the sun. It hardly matters to the organizers.

Recently Kerala Blasters men’s football team walked off the field during a match. The club was heavily fined for this breach of sports’ ethics. Who suffered the consequences? Will you be able to believe it? To offset their financial loss the club suspended their women’s team. The women pay for the men’s folly and unwarranted conduct! Isn’t it hilarious? Patriarchy is so deeply entrenched in our system that directly or indirectly women and girls have to pay when their interests clash with the males.

Take the ongoing wrestling saga where the champion daughters are fighting for justice. They are pitted against a powerful man. There are allegations of sexual harassment and severe breach of professional conduct on his part. But the system seems to be protecting him. In fact, there are thousands who are questioning the girl wrestlers themselves, asking for the proofs of molestation. As if a girl is always walking with a spy camera to present in the court as evidence. Very sad and disappointing.

The workshop within

 How will you even touch someone softly if you haven’t felt the gentility of your own fingers on your skin? How will you even offer a smile to someone if you haven’t showered your own smiles at the representative of divinity, you true self, within you? How will you embrace someone if you haven’t given a warming bear hug to your soul like a beloved? How will you even touch someone’s life in a healing way unless you haven’t healed your own invisible scars? How will you make someone joyful if you haven’t enjoyed its treasures first? How will you understand someone’s pain unless you have understood the value of your own tears? Charity begins at home. All this has to start from one’s own dear self. Till then whatever we do in the name of all the gifts mentioned above is nothing but a lip service, a theory without experiential reality, a mere pretense to fulfill a duty, or even facelift measures to beat our own weakness, fear, insecurities. Others are just an extension of this very own self. So it’s better to start with the self, the nearest source to experiment all these truths and then build upon the larger scale.

A suitable distance and noble proximity

The inspirer of lovers and the innocent muse of little children, the moon is always there in its orbit around earth. We expect it to be there after dark nights, its crescent first increasing then decreasing. How come it’s able to fulfill its natural duty with such unerring precision? It’s born of centripetal and centrifugal forces, the forces of opposing nature. The centripetal force of earth, born of its gravity, pulling the moon towards it; the centrifugal force, the outward force on moon when it rotates, saving it from crashing into the earth due to the its gravitational force. Perfect balance, harmony and precision!

The same is the connection between two humans, be it business partnerships, matrimonial alliance, friendship, communication or any situation involving a connection between two human beings. There has to be gravitational pull, the attraction. This attraction is born of our hopes, expectations, insecurities, vulnerabilities, strengths, weaknesses, dreams and aspirations. But the pull can be really hard. It sees us crashing into each other as if the other person is the last salvation point. We forget that he/she is also a human being with similar strengths and weaknesses. Then follows the pain, dilemma, blame and even suffering as we try to free ourselves from the other person, feeling suffocated, our sacred self violated, our sense of freedom jeopardized.

How to keep moving safely at an optimum distance in the trajectory of any type of relationship? We have to maintain the pull, but too strong a pull will see us being sucked into the privacy and vulnerability zone of the other person. Similarly, the outward-bound centrifugal force of testing incidents and situations will try to pull us apart, pulling us against the forces of attraction. It’s always there to make people fall apart because without it the force of attraction has no meaning.

It’s only the see-saw balance between these opposing forces that sees an object moving in a safe orbit about another body. Similarly, it’s the attraction and the challenges to that attraction that make the trajectory of a relationship between two humans dynamic in nature. It gives it mobility. The mobility makes it a journey. And the journeys are meant to make us learn lessons, to evolve and be wiser. Wise people know the importance of love, kindness, care and share.

So all you people there, be careful in your role of a friend, partner, husband, wife, colleague. Maintain the attraction but don’t allow it to pull you too much into the inner sanctified zone of the object of your attraction. Don’t simply fall over people, making them feel burdened with you. Respect that inviolable individuality in a person. At the same time, don’t allow the outward-bound forces to break the fragile bond of attraction and fly you away into the unknown, out of the trajectory of that person. Don’t be too far. Don’t be too near either. Keep a teasing distance to keep it fresh and alive. Too much of intimacy and too much of space are both bad for a relationship. Harmony is the product of a balanced equation.

With some space in between, each of the two persons can feel comfortable and can see the other in true light. We need some space to watch, to witness, to appreciate, to note weaknesses and thus guide and give support. If we crash into each other, with too much intimacy, it somehow disturbs the sacred individuality of the person. Then we see a blurred picture of the other person because he/she has crossed the zone of observance, comfort and bonhomie. It turns into a transgression. That’s why two persons, who might be almost perfect to others outside, after coming into too proximity get confused about their respective identities, make it complex and then find themselves almost intolerable to each other. They take each other as transgressors.  

This cosmic law holds even supermassive galaxies in balance. Human relations are a cakewalk for its application. So hold hands softly, don’t crush; embrace gently, don’t squeeze; softly brace, don’t clutch; speak gently, don’t shout; hold talks, not debates; make love, not just violent lust; just smile, don’t snort; listen and make your point; laugh and make her laugh; gently support but slowly undo the dependencies; don’t lead or follow, just walk together; hold hands but not pull him/her into your direction, walk on a common path. These are the little tools to maintain that sacred space between two humans.

So there has to a sacred space in between, the space defined by healthy attraction, which is just sufficient to undo the outward forces of distraction. Not too near; not too far. At a perfect distance. If we meet each other at this perfect distance, we too can keep revolving around each other in an optimum trajectory for a long time.   

The seekers of truth

Mahatma Gandhi said: "The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should be so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of Truth."

It's such a beautiful statement. This humbling melts the rigidities in us, the cold hard blocks that prevent a free flow of the self, putting us out of sync with life. And in the absence of a free flow, we get stuck up at a place, in a particular situation, in the past memories, in negative emotions. We negate life. We become rigid, lose our vulnerabilities, our softness. We take up a stern visage as a defense mechanism. The things, people and situations that take a little strike at our rigid opinionated self, our ego construction, are nothing but humbling tools, to break the wrong edges in us, to reshape us, to mellow us, to help us flow, to get as near to truth as possible. Keep flowing. Flow is evolution. And stay open to any chance of getting humbled. They are blessings in disguise.

Subtle dangers to democracy

 The recent trends in Indian politics are very disturbing. The present government says their goal is Congress-free India. Now can you visualize a democracy without opposition? A political system without effective opposition is as good as autocracy.

Let’s try to understand it through a true story about Chinese premier Mao Zedong. The all-powerful leader ordered his subjects to kill sparrows so that they won’t eat grains in the fields and thus there would be more grains for human consumption. The people treated him as a God and on his instructions the entire Chinese human population turned enemies of poor little sparrows. So the sparrows vanished from the Chinese skies. A sparrow-free China it became. But they had forgotten that sparrows don’t eat just grains, they eat pests and harmful insects as well. So with the predators gone, the pests and insects reigned supreme and chucked out entire croplands. It resulted in a terrible famine that lasted for three years.

Similarly, if opposition, that is Congress, is chucked out of the political system, the pests and bugs of predatory tendency to misuse and manipulate power will chuck out our democracy. A healthy opposition is a predator for the bugs and pests of autocracy. The government has to understand that Congress doesn’t merely eat their parliamentary seats; it eats the pests of autocracy as well. The government is legitimate in its efforts to come to power again in 2024 but why shout ‘Congress-free Bharat’. Say we will defeat Congress. If you openly declare that you want to finish the opposition, it only means you want to run this country as an autocrat.

The hallmark of a true democracy is the reach of law and ethical principles followed by the leadership that enable either the law to act or enable a leader’s conscience to step down in case of infringement of duties or any other inappropriate behavior. A lockdown-time little private party cost Boris Johnson his British premier position. Can you imagine anything like this in India? Here the grossest transgressions of duties and misuse of power by the politicians are treated as routine affairs. When there is no fear of the card-castle falling apart in case of the slighted mischief with cards, those in power will take their positions for granted.

Sadly, there are many instances when cloud-piercing cries of genuine suffering go reverberating across the corridors of power and fall on deaf ears. The main reason being that they emanate from poor people’s mouths. And there are so many instances when real thugs, ruffians and rascals are seen getting victoriously crowned after manipulating and hijacking the system in an apparently legalized and institutionalized manner. There are episodes where your soul suffers nightmarish convulsions witnessing the manipulation of the system by the strong, wealthy and powerful. Their eyes shine with a malevolent, piercing sense of pleasure in bypassing the norms and your helpless guts give a disgusting constriction. You feel so helpless. All you can do is to watch in a severely sustained silence.

The show of power is still a frightful lot in the country. And the strongmen of the game, through their titillating tutelage, nurture a cringing breed of yesmen who handover the consequences of misused power to those lower in stature to them.  

There a lockdown-time party can see a prime minister bowing out; here even serious allegations of sexual harassment won’t budge a parliamentarian from his powerful seat. We have a lot of work to accomplish to be a real, strong democracy.

In a really strong democracy, the strongest of the strong can be taken to the dock in case of stepping over the laws. Take America for example. Their ex-president is being put into the dock for official mismanagement and discrepancies. It can happen only in a strong democracy, where official institutions are bigger than individuals occupying constitutional posts. America rules this world because they are the strongest democracy on earth. We are of course the largest democracy but the quality of democracy needs a vast amount of improvement. Here individual leaders are bigger than the seats they occupy. It creates two categories of justice: one for the privileged and the other for the common people.

Yes, we are a constitutional democracy on paper in every sense of the term. But in practice we are missing a lot from the great principles in our brilliant constitution. It will take some time to get a leadership that follows ethical principles and listens to conscience, and institutions and authorities independent enough to penalize even the strongest. I would say we are a work in progress as a democracy which is a good thing and far better than autocracies and pseudo democracies like Pakistan where there is a shadowy deep state pulling the strings. I firmly believe that there will be a day when we will be world’s strongest democracy as well, not just the largest. The strongest democracy is the benchmark where the most powerful is under the same chance of penalization as the weakest in case of falling off the lawful limits.