The Sensitive Third World – LGBT

You cannot help but notice them, standing on the pavement, at signals – faces shining with a heavy layer of pancake, statuesque bodies clad in wispy chiffon saris or satiny, tight fitting salwar kameez, bangles on their hairy arms. So difficult is their live's today that people belonging to the third gender find access barred to malls, workplaces, even hospitals.

For some to be born as a female trapped in a male body or vice-versa, the gender of the soul to that of the body did not seem to match. It was like growing up in a confined body that you don’t recognize. For a long time in India, children born as hermaphrodites were handed over to the community of eunuchs. When these kids grew up in a community which demands that a man feels sexually attracted to a woman and a woman gets sexually inclined towards a man, these community people were called as hijda, chakka, sixer, enunchs. That is what it came down to and like all we care!

What I notice in some parts of the society who respect the sensitivities associated with sexual desire and demands that there has been a growing awareness of hermaphrodites and many young parents are contemplating corrective sexual surgery for their children. Though the genitals mark your identity, it is the hormones that decide your behavior. A misconception is when there is a sex change, society feels a person has changed his sex to get into a relationship with the opposite sex. But the fact remains, they do so to get a new identity and to have a relation with their own self, which was somewhere lost and definitely not for others.

Let’s face it, the double-standard mind-set that we have today says, it’s important to accept ourselves, but for a child as he/she grows up, what is fed is, people around you should accept you in the first place so you get self-acceptance. And that builds a lot of pressure. We bring up kids where the ultimatum is to get married. In situations like these, they are left abandoned because many don’t understand the sensitivities of this and they don’t see the family lineage going forward (I include the females because they will not bear kids in their womb to take the family forward). They start to live in denial and trust me there is no slow poison as lethal as living in denial.

First off, recognize and realize that having a certain sexual orientation is not a disease which pronounces a person as terminally ill. It’s a mix of biological, hormonal, genetic and psychological variances. If you ask a heterosexual to become a homosexual or bisexual it is not possible, then why force or give an option to opt out of it for a person who is a homosexual.

Everything in the society is clearly demarcated as male and female, right from how a child is supposed to play, what toys the child chooses to play with is so closely monitored to the responsibilities that he or she takes up at home or in the world outside on becoming an adult. Everything is so clearly outlined as the ‘man’ or the ‘woman’ thing to do. Baffled by the ‘abnormal’ behavior of a child when he/she confesses the liking's or that of a transgender child, many parents punish them – sometimes quite brutally – and unwittingly make them feel like a freak. When the so called “normal” kids play outside, they are warned from befriending the kids who fall under this “LGBT” category out of fear that these “normal” kids might as well develop the same inclination and as a result might ridicule the family. What is important today is to teach them that people who they interact with are as normal as the assembled “Male” and “Female” community.

Not so long ago, I was one among those many people who was always scared of interacting with people who din't belong to the quintessential community. I twitched my face every time I saw them. I ran in the opposite direction the moment I realized they were approaching me for money. I always felt inconvenienced in their presence. But as I “educated” myself about them I understood one important and quality emotion that they all have in common - they are never in search of sympathy. All they want is a life of dignity. This is only possible if we actively include them in the mainstream, so that they can have a dignified life as normal as anyone of us desire to have. What is stopping us from giving them the respect and acceptance they deserve?

Today, as I wait for signal to turn green, or in an auto, or in any public transport and I see a transgender approaching me, I do hand over money with dignity and smile back. It feels nice to be reciprocated with the same warmth. It is thus important to accept them socially and interact with them with equal ease like you and me.

Oh and one more thing, I now call them as my “smiling friends”.

Kintsukuroi – More beautiful being broken

The closer you look the less you see – A dialogue from a very famous English movie "Now You See Me." Taking a cue from this movie while I was reading through a magazine one Sunday morning, I came across Kintsukuroi. For the tongue twisting name it had like all the Japanese names, I decided to read further more to understand what it really is.

Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of repaired pottery, but it's something more than that. Along with repairing the broken pottery with gold lacquer, it is also about understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

These days, would you even consider a broken ceramic bowl worth repairing, let alone consider it more beautiful for having been broken? Probably not. No, of course not. But slow down a minute. Consider the bowl, made by hand with malleable clay and fired to a couple thousand degrees, forever altering its molecular structure.

A handmade object, like a bowl or cup, is revered for the care it took to make it, its beauty, and its purpose. But broken, the object is demoted and loses its honor, so to speak. Repaired, however, can raise the object to a whole new level of appreciation. Often we expect repairs to be seamless and to make the object appear to be ‘new’ again, whereas this art pays homage to the idea that there is a place for ‘better than new’.

Take a step back and think. Sometimes life flows seamlessly from one perfect moment to the next, but often times we face struggles, insecurities, and set-backs that leave us broken. And we wonder what will become of the pieces. That is when I realized that this art form has come to my rescue. I immediately fell in love with the beauty of being broken.

Having been restless with every passing day, I feel liquid grief pulse through my veins. Sometimes the grief reaches its peak and my skin grates with a thought, life is so - insane. To start what I call as the central truth, nothing is right, everyone vexes me and I have a phantom of milestones to dwell on. Now the collective sum of this distressed past and some irretrievable broken instances, a shadow chases you with a placard in hand "You can run away, but you can't hide". While you sit down to gather these pieces, this art form helps you know what your mind, body and soul wants, to understand what it needs and what it doesn't. It teaches you when to be a part mathematician, part engineer, part nurse, part artist and part mystic.

As I try to superimpose my life with this art form and attempt a point-by-point refutation, I have suddenly become characteristically......fragile. I can't seem to endure the thought but it is inescapable. At times I feel, this is the reason why I was put on earth. By the time I bring myself up with every fleeting day, I sense I am slammed with the guilt and I act guilty. But this act of guilt helps me understand my true self, puts my shattered soul at armistice and being as one and pushes me to believe that I might have been bitter but the physics says you are not bitter unless you have been through a bitter experience. This allows me to understand that as long as I am not puffed up by happiness and success, the failures and sorrows will equally not break me from failing to accept rejection and rejecting acceptance. It teaches you to fix what is important, inevitable and not get carried away by the symbolism. 

This practice eventually puts life in perspective. It is a continuous process. Having retrospected the incidents in life I feel a lot more at peace. The art also teaches you never to regret, because at one point that is exactly what you needed in life. Its a strange thing for us humans to be so purposeful, yet irrational; so driven, yet so uncertain. Kinstsukoroi, allows you to be all this and more and be receptive towards the broken self  and look beautiful in your scars.