Edited By: Aneesha Chandra (UG 21)
My memory has served me peculiarly well in remembering moments when I encountered new ideas and the subsequent process through which I imbibed and assimilated them. A young twelve-year-old me used to find homosexuality weird and disgusting, no doubt because of the crass, and outright false, nature of popular conceptions. One day during lunch break, a more woke friend who probably knew what “fuck” meant way before I did came along and said something to the effect of: “You know that being gay does not make you attracted to all men. It’s like how being a straight guy doesn’t make you attracted to all women.” To this date I don’t know why, but that bit of casually delivered lunch break conversation threw me off. I suppose something clicked within me, despite my anxious hormone-ridden brain.
Suddenly, the foolishness of my preconceived notions dawned upon me. I thought to myself, Dostana was a dumb piece of shit. I did not have the vocabulary then, but I had grappled with the horrible idea of homosexuals being hypersexual beings and after some reflection, conclusively judged it to be false. On a slightly different note, it worked to my benefit because in that same year two of my friends got into a “relationship”. We were all so worried about their “future” and the struggles they would have to face for a lifetime. Youth is whimsical in more ways than one, I suppose. Now, almost a decade later, I still marvel at how happening my life was in class seven in an all-girls school. As far as teenage memories go, it was a winning judgement in a sea of cringe and shudders.
College has made me acutely aware of the fact that ideas do not exist in a vacuum. Perhaps this sounds obvious, but often we forget that every single thing that crosses our mind has had its origin in an idea that we acquired over the course of our life. We always seem to think that our ideas arise from a universal truth when in fact they are a product of our immediate context. Ideas do not arise from reality. Reality is a creation of ideas. The relationship is the exact opposite of what we have been led to believe. A layman’s argument against homosexuality is that there is no such thing. In one of his sets, stand-up comedian Abhishek Upamanyu says that when he told his mother that he has a friend who is gay, she told him “aisa kuch nahi hota”. The same phrase is also repeated to those who speak about their mental health issues. The power of normalcy is so potent that it is conflated with what is real. That which is not normal is banished from reality itself. Ideological battles, like any other, are rarely just and the trail of discarded ideas is not necessarily less legitimate than the ones that have persisted. They won out because of their prominence and constituted an agreed-upon reality. Sadly, an agreed-upon reality is not always one that is true to our experiences.
The ability to critically and swiftly create a new normal is the mark of a good learner. No wonder we are all so good at it as children. Our sense of the normal and the legitimate is tenuous. The given-ness of a thing is not as unquestionable. We know until something comes along and then we know no longer. We learn again and life goes on. There is no violence in the act of changing. As most of us would have observed, age tends to adversely affect our ability to learn. The ossification that has come to be almost synonymous with aging is perhaps the greatest crime that we commit against ourselves. We are often told that it is unreasonable for us to expect our elders to change because of how long they’ve been a certain way. Collectively, we rob ourselves of the change which we all wish to undergo because we are convinced that it is too late. I wonder sometimes that had we taught our children the greater value of confusion over correctness, perhaps we would have more functional adults. Confusion and reconciliation, the grand cycle of all worthwhile learning — How I savour these moments when they happen to me. Every now and then I encounter those of us who understand the magic of being proven utterly wrong. And I feel so warmed. Their flexibility and openness assure me that there is still hope in our world.