What do gays and Sunny Leone have in common?
In an interview to Mail Today last month, Nobel laureate and president of the UK-based Royal Society, Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, explained why some people who occupy positions of power and responsibility are prone to biases and prejudices, despite the obvious harm their actions can cause to the society at large.
His reasoning was that people are not just defined by their profession alone but also influenced by a host of factors such as family, culture and religion, making any level-headed thinking difficult, especially on issues that are taboo or regarded as traditionally patriarchal in nature. He cited how even Nobel laureates in Nazi Germany, despite their scholarship, used to look down upon Jewish science as inferior.
Ramakrishnan's assessment cannot be truer in modern India. Two words that hogged public discourse in the country in the last few weeks were sexism and homophobia. If the first was the fallout of a rude and outrageous interview with a former porn star on prime time television, the second was the result of a legitimate fight to repeal a law that criminalises an entire section of population, roughly the size of England, for their sexuality.
Both sexism and homophobia reflect a larger societal trend and undermine the fundamental rights and issues of both women and homosexuals, by trivialising, normalising or even dismissing them by turning them into jokes.
But what do these jargons look like? Since homophobia and sexism can sound vague and abstract to many, the best way to understand these words are through examples of influential people and vested interest groups who perpetuate this culture. Here are some:
Sexism is...
1. When a senior journalist forgets basic professional etiquette and constantly mispronounces the surname of his female celebrity guest on television, and also makes a mischievous correlation between her entry into Bollywood and the rise in India's porn consumption.
(What the journalist didn't know was that mere association is not the same as evidence for a connection. It is like the stork theory, which correlates the rise in number of babies to the rise in number of storks, giving the impression that storks deliver babies!)
2. When a senior politician tries to defend rapists saying that boys will be boys and that they will make mistakes.
3. When a minister insists on boys and girls to sit on separate chairs and not together on a same bench in class as it can lead to unwanted desires.
4. When a senior politician advises women to stay indoors to prevent rape and warns them not to venture out in the dark just because India has achieved freedom at midnight.
5. When a best-selling women's magazine insists, rather strangely, on a written permission from family elders, for its adult women readers to take part in its contests.
Homophobia is...
1. When a little-known Christian group, unhappy with the latest Supreme Court decision to review Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), opposes it saying that homosexuality is an abominationin the Bible, conveniently forgetting that Christians had also used the Bible to justify slavery in the past.
2. When MPs make fun of their colleague Shashi Tharoor for introducing a private bill in Parliament seeking to decriminalise homosexuality, saying "Tharoor ko zyaada zaroorat hai is Bill ki" (Tharoor needs this Bill more) referring to his single status.
3. When a court issues a verdict ignoring scientific evidence, leading to the criminalisation of over 50 million people in one fell swoop.
4. When a minister offers to set up de-addiction centres on the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous to treat homosexuals.
5. When a yoga guru invites gay community members to his ashram saying that he can cure the bad addiction.
6. When a doctor of modern medicine talks like a politician and behaves like a yoga guru, offering complete side-effect free “cure” for homosexual “disease” within months.
Both the lists can go on and on, and are as repulsive as the Indian mentality that open defecation is the “healthier” and “cleaner” option. (Did someone say Indians have different standards of personal hygiene to Westerners?)
Just as an attitudinal shift is imperative for the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India mission), the pace of India’s progress too, is dependent on, as the Nobel laureate himself puts it, in cultivating a rational, open and tolerant mindset.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)