Six degrees of stigmatization

'I'm made to feel like an outsider because of my accent/ because I don't speak the local language'

'I'm made to feel out of place because my food habits are different (e.g. I'm a vegetarian)'

'I'm made to feel uncomfortable and intimidated because I'm a woman'

'I'm made to feel excluded because of my religion'

'I'm made to feel inferior because of the colour of my skin/my ethnicity'

'I'm made to feel inferior because of my caste/tribe'

'I'm made to feel embarassed because of my sexuality'

'I'm made to feel it doesn't matter what I think because I have a mental illness'

'I'm made to feel like I don't count as a person because of my physical disability'

'I'm made to feel like a pariah because I have HIV'

These are some of the responses from a rather large cross-cultural study on stigma. The responses are graded, with the experiences more likely to be reported being on top. Most of us would have experienced at least one of the above emotions at some point in our lives. And most of us would sympathize with the people who gave those responses. Poor people. Terrible. So far, nothing unexpected.

However, if one were to look at the responses as a whole, a glaringly obvious contradiction lurks somewhere between those lines. Suppose you are someone who has experienced say, racism, as members of most diasporic populations have, at some point. Now, that is something which is guaranteed to get the average migrant up in arms, whether you're a wannabe corporate raider or a corner shopkeeper. And that experience is also something which brings with it a shared sense of righteous indignation, empathy and collective belonging.

But does that translate into a similar empathy and respect for another group of stigmatized people? Erm..., not really.

Which means that it's not okay when you're called a nigger or a Paki or white trash or a god-botherer, but it's perfectly okay to go home and knock your wife around. Or go round preaching mass extermination of Muslims as a final solution. Or call your bank manager a faggot or Behan chooth Bhangi ke bachhey (technically translated as sister-fucking scavenger's son, in current Indian parlance).

Which means that many of these people who are whining about stigmatization, discrimination and glass ceilings are actively (and passively) stigmatizing and discriminating against each other. Hypocrisy, anyone?

P.S. The hypocrisy, of course, becomes less likely as you go down the scale, since the more vulnerable you are, the less likely you are to pick on someone else.

This post was triggered by two, slightly unnerving conversations. The first was with an indignant evangelical Christian who perceives herself as socially isolated in secular London society, but thought nothing of advocating criminal prosecution (whew!) of a teen patient who had to terminate her pregnancy. The second was with a vegetarian Indian scientist who feels gastronomically persecuted in England, but rounded on me angrily for being part of a profession that supports 'these loose women and homosexuals who spread HIV' (I remain speechless).

Sab deshvasiyon ko swatantrata divas ke shubhkamnayein

After 59 years of building on those fine, cast iron democratic foundations, let's not blow it. This is our century. It awaits, to be won over with warmth, generosity and confidence. And let's show some grace and sensitivity while doing it. To the largest and unlikeliest democracy in the world and it's millions of deprived, as they eagerly await their turn, in hungry expectation.

P.S. Have pulled the Bharatbala vid since it turns out they are a bunch of arseholes who don't pay their cast and crew.

Scarlett Johansson has collapsed!

Scarlett Johansson has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
SCARLETT JOHANSSON HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Lapland
there is no rain in Brazil
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Scarlett Johansson we love you get up.

With apologies to Frank O' Hara ('Lana Turner has collapsed'. Lunch Poems. 1964)

And that's the end of summer. Or is it?

High School massacres and Khadi clad professors

I’ve tallied three medical schools so far (one more and I’ll be certifiable). The first was so insufferably self-absorbed with it’s own sense of importance that every time it drops a bit in the rankings, it is A Matter of Great Joy. I hope they drop out of sight one of these days. The second pioneered the idea that healthcare could be delivered at a pittance to a vast swathe of rural India provided foreign capital could be married (yes, married) with local, collaborative planning and implementation (and yes, I have just written that sentence without batting an eyelid). They did public-private partnerships as a matter of course before anyone in India had even thought of the phrase.

I didn’t exactly like the sound of it, and went there reluctantly. It changed my life. So now I go round there on an annual pilgrimage, as a sort of good luck talisman. This time, I dumped Kevin on my very political professor who trots the globe in all of 4 khadi shirts (and some frighteningly patched up pants).

“Why do these kids kill all these people?” he asked me, rolling a fag with utmost concentration.

“Social deprivation,” I pronounced, with the solemn certainty of the truly ignorant.

Anyway, he was busy and so couldn’t cook lunch as promised. Since I was ticketless, he deposited me at his travel agent’s with a warning that the bus would stop for dinner at a potentially diarrhoeal joint. He suggested that I pack dinner. Having slept on planes and buses for a few nights on the trot, I went to sleep after a nice lunch. By the time I’d gotten up, it was too late to pack dinner. But when he came back to drop me to the bus in the evening, he was carrying a largish, white polythene bag. ‘Food’, he grinned by way of explanation, handing it to me once we’d wound up our Sage Discussion of South American Politics.

I opened it once inside the bus. It contained the following-

1. A packet of Krackjack biscuits;
2. A packet of crisps drenched in chilli, labelled ‘Snack’. I’d just told him that morning that I like to eat chilli crisps at loo breaks in the middle of the night.
3. A large bottle of cold Bisleri;
4. A packet of a local sweet puff pastry, labelled ‘For your father’;
5. Two neatly wrapped paneer and vegetable roomali rolls, labelled ‘Dinner’; and
6. A large bar of Cadbury’s fruit n’ nut chocolate, labelled ‘Dessert’.

He missed the beer. But still, the man is very nice. He also has a hip wife with lethal Hotness Quotient (HQ). Now we know why I keep going back. Guru-chela relationships and all that.

Older women? Well, why not?

A classmate and sometime close friend (we've drifted, since then) got married recently. I got to know about this when I was in India. The question is, why am I writing about it?

Well, firstly he married someone I know. Someone 17 years older than him. She's a professor (was our professor); he's a fledgling specialist. Secondly, the possibility that they were having a relationship was something that was suggested to me throughout college. Since I was a close friend, many of these suggestions were actually point-blank queries directed my way. I would earnestly deny this, since I knew they were neighbours, that the families were very close, that he called her 'aunt', and that this was why he picked her up every day. I was on that car on many occasions, as I was at her place, and had noticed nothing to suggest otherwise. I was, of course, probably being kept a little less than well informed, but this fills me with nothing but utter, subversive delight. Bully for them.

Thirdly, both families are Muslim. Muslim society being somewhat more conservative than many others, this May-October romance and it's culmination must have been conducted under tremendous tension.

Finally, I was informed of this by another professor, a very hip, ostensibly liberal ex-Miss Calcutta, who presented it with an air of mild distaste, simultaneously saying that she was happy for them but that she believed ' it's not sensible to have such an age gap, especially if it's the woman who's older'. Her husband, by the way, is about 12 years older than her. Du-uh? And this was the tack most of my old accquaintances appeared to adopt (to varying degrees) in conversations over the ensuing week.

Another Indian friend, well into her thirties, married someone 8 years younger than her. This did raise eyebrows, but didn't appear to provoke all that much discomfort. The fact that both came from liberal, highly educated backgrounds perhaps had something to do with this. Which leads me to wonder, is there some sort of unspoken age-gap cut-off which determines whether such relationships are okay or not?

The reason why all this has come together in my head is because someone in the UK (a child psychiatrist, no less) had a baby a few weeks ago. This, and specifically the fact that she was older than the average norm for maternity, provoked a storm of protest, with everyone from the British Fertility Society to evangelical christians jumping onto a finger-wagging, disapproving bandwagon. And funnily enough, an overwhelming majority of the people calling up the BBC Radio London talk-shows in indignant outrage were women. Why?

It would be easy to dismiss this as simple ageism, but I suspect there are a lot more isms (and non-isms) involved here. The old fertility argument, whatever it's validity, is being, of course, demolished by the remarkable advances in fertility treatment.

So why is it okay, and even worthy of fawning media appreciation, when a Shashi Tharoor or a Rupert Murdoch (and umpteen other men of all races, creeds and political persuasions) marry and/or mate with some young babe when they are well into senile dotage and sire children, but not when my friends in India and Dr. Rashbrook do the same?

And why are so many women so deeply uncomfortable with this?

P.S. And now I'm thinking of Nafisa Ali, Arundhati Roy, Diane Keaton (who's been spoken for by a certain Mr. Reeves), Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Yeoh, J. K Rowling, Deepti Naval, Jane Fonda, Monica Ali, Tina Turner et al. All so utterly gorgeous, dateable and desirable......but then I digress, however pleasantly.