Love in the Time of Xenophobia.

Last night I dreamt that I was standing at my parents’ door, with a special someone I wanted them to meet. 

 

I used this wait to look at the man I had agreed to get married to. As he looked back at me I found myself falling deep into the love I knew there was in his big black eyes.

 

How much I love thinking about all the things I love him for! How lovely it is to have the kindest, bravest, purest heart in the entire universe all for yourself! How perfect it is to find just how perfect perfection is! “Could you hear me think I love you”?

 

I love the shade of pink his lips turn after I kiss him. He always knows the right words. In this big bad world, he is my beacon of honesty.

 

If he’s ever been behind me it’s only to catch me if the winds push me back. In tough times or good, he’s always beside me. In my mind he’s always in front of me. My inspiration!

 

On a Saturday night, he always knows the place to be. When I am angry, he makes me want to not be. When he’s angry, he’s just my baby. When he picks me up with his big strong arms, I am his. When we make love, he is my fantasy. He attracts me like no other.

 

He always knows what I will like. He couldn’t have given me a prettier ring. He couldn’t have bought me a prettier home. He’s polite and caring. He’s every woman’s dream.

 

As I hear footsteps behind the shut door, I think with a naughty pride -with his dazzling smile, tall frame and broad shoulders, he’s the real world’s Prince Charming. Well, except his skin is the color of the darkest chocolate and he still has his beautiful Egyptian accent.  

 

My dream ended with my mother collapsing at the door.

The French and The Burka I

I remember a girl in my high school who wore a white headdress over the required white school uniform. Today I know that the headdress is called a hijab and is not tolerated in the schools of the secular state of France.

 

The French, in a controversial move in 2004, banned the hijab (Muslim headscarves) and other “conspicuous” religious symbols in French schools. According to the French, “ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system”. So off went the hijab, the Sikh turban and the ( and may be more justifiable) kirpan, a traditional Sikh dagger, from classrooms all over France.

 

Like a lot of other nations, France is constitutionally secular. What’s different about La France is that she makes sure that all her citizens take secularism seriously. The irony in this whole thing is how the French make their secularism sound so fundamentalist!

 

[Secular Fundamentalism! Talk about the politically incorrect. Why is irony always a tragedy?]

 

Am I against this French idea? Not exactly.

 

I was born a Hindu but recieved most of my education from a Catholic school. I idolize the Dalai Lama and hope to read the Koran sometime soon. A lot of my beliefs are built on the Jain philosophy that all life is considered worthy of respect. I wish to learn more about Judaism some day. In all genuineness, I call myself secular.

 

To a French school or elsewhere, I would never wear anything that manifests a certain religion. Of course if I am required by law to follow a dress code, I would. It might sound very hollow, but in almost all situations I would put the Law before my religious beliefs. I chose to be secular and hence I should endorse this revolutionary French idea. But yet this isn’t about me right, I am not in France.

 

How secular is too secular?

 

My God doesn’t require me to wear a certain kind of clothing. To me God is above what people wear. But I believe that clothes are a form of human expression, an essential form of non-verbal communication. Clothes say something about you, and if you want to say something about your religion in the way you dress, should you be stopped?

 

I could bring up the Goths and Emos too you know, but thats the kind of thing you learn not to do when you prepare for the LSAT :)

 

The French mean well. They don’t want school kids to be segregated by religion. A fair one that is but I don’t think enough thought has gone into this legislation. I feel by banning the “religious displays” they are verifying for the kids and possibly others what was probably going on in their minds already - that your religions really do make you different. And “different” is a sub-species of Homo sapiens that we humans haven’t managed to make peace with.

 

Is eliminating difference any answer?

Part II coming soon

Nine One One

On this day 7 years ago, an act of hatred and religious extremism killed 2752 people in the world’s largest and arguably only superpower. It took less than two years for the victim country to fight back. Yet another act of hatred, and of patriotic extremism, killed over 1,000,000 people in the modern world’s longest and arguably stupidest war.

 

Every month, since whenever, my fellow Indians lose their lives to terrorism. Every other big attack seems to follow an unbelievably recent one while everyday shootings in the beautiful valley of Kashmir don’t even make headlines anymore. Tens of thousands of people in this multi-cultural land of Gandhi, have lost their lives for nothing. Yet I am proud my people haven’t and would never fight a “War on Terrorism”.

 

Is there a thing about war that justifies the orphans it leaves behind? What patriotism  renders life in own land more precious than death in another?

 

“Either war is obsolete or men are.” – Buckminster Fuller

Ignorance

I sheltered my little flame within a crystal jar.

 

The air light or strong,

Found all glass and no warmth;

Crystal with carvings I thought were beautiful

Bliss!

 

I saw my little flame flicker.

Then all glass and no warmth -

Crystal with carvings I couldn’t see anymore.

 

My flame didn’t die!

Flames don’t die, they sleep may be;

Sometimes they leave like mine

To kindle and breathe.

 

There is no escape without captivity.

Strange, Stranger or Neither?

Some time ago I took this American guy to an Indian restaurant for the first time. No, this post isn’t about the food. After we left the place he told me that one of the male employees at the restaurant had been staring at me inappropriately till he caught his eyes in the act. “Oh well!” I thought. “Indian men don’t know how to behave in public”, I said. No sooner had I said those words my years as a teenage girl in India flashed in front of my practiced eyes. No, this isn’t about the incorrigible Indian men either. In fact, it’s about one particularly incorrigible Indian man.

 

In about three months I’ll turn twenty-one. That’s how old the stick-figure said he was about five minutes after he suddenly sneaked up beside me on his bike (Or did he say twenty-three?) I was on mine too, at the same time, on the same trail I went biking on everyday. This was eight years ago when I was barely twelve.

 

It has always been difficult to shock me. I did not flinch or gasp when he appeared unexpectedly. I recognized the face, he lived somewhere near where I took my dance lessons. He said his name was Rohit. Regardless, he was since known as Ashwini.

 

(Why Rohit became Ashwini is another story which will be more relevant if I ever decide to analyze my best friend’s amazing sense of humor and one of a kind personality on my blog.)

 

Ashwini was everywhere. Near home, at school, at the bus-stop, the candy shop and all those places a twelve-year old would go to. He was becoming almost as inseparable as my best friends, who were becoming increasingly bothered by his inescapable presence. I wondered what would they have been like if they really knew what was happening.

 

Ashwini was good at sneaking but sometimes he just wouldn’t bother. He knew where I lived, where my friends lived and he knew when I would be alone on the street. He would just walk up to me and then talk a little bit. Once he tried talking to me in Hindi, which wasn’t his language but was mine. I still remember his words and I sometimes still amusedly wonder if he really knew what he was saying. “Aaj aapne kya sabzi khaya?”

 

He once came to me and said that he was suffering from jaundice and was prescribed bed-rest but ignored his doctor to come see me. Another time he asked, “Don’t you know I love you?”

 

Self-introspection always retains some bias. But let’s try and analyze what was going on in my mind all those years ago while I was being smothered with all this maniac attention from this stranger, this stalker. I know one thing I wasn’t pleased. Sometimes the displeasure edged frustration, but looking back I find it so strange that I really wasn’t that bothered.  I was embarrassed in a way, who wouldn’t be – the guy chose to wear bell-bottomed pants … and those were the nineties. I even shied away from telling my friends and parents how vigorously I was being stalked. But I wasn’t scared from this guy. Didn’t I notice he was a foot taller than me? And did I mention he was at least 9 years older than me. Did he not know that I was only twelve?

 

Although he never sexually abused me, some people whom I’ve spoken to about this say he was a pedophile.

 

Was Ashwini a pedophile? Or is there a possibility that he just did not realize that I was only a little girl? Was he truly in love with a child about a decade younger? Or was he just fooling around with me?

 

Regardless, I chose to give him the ‘indifferent’ treatment for the three years he continually followed me around the whole town. Sometimes I would yell at him and ask him to leave me alone. But generally I gave him the ‘I don’t know you stranger (although I have seen you a million times), so don’t talk to me’ look. I sometimes wonder, by not taking a tough stance against him, did I make big mistake? Ashwini is still out there somewhere, but is he victimizing some one else as I type? I was lucky in the fact that he never affected my blunt and naive (read dumb) soul too much, but would all twelve-year old girls be as cold (read dumb) and insensitive as I was?

 

I pray to God Ashwini did better. And that I, was just a phase.