Expecto Patronum

I am a little too lazy to go back and check if I have written about this already in an earlier blogpost. Even if I have, I like to believe it is worth repeating :)

Harry Potter books have helped me in a very real way. Some years ago, I suffered from chronic migraine. I still wince at the memory of those days when the terrible headaches would last for 48 hours or more. I would darken the room and lie curled up. Then at some point, I would start hearing buzzing sounds in me ears, then I would threw up, and the headache would begin to subside. But more difficult than the migraine itself was the pool of depression it left me in in its wake. It was absolutely terrible, dark and lonely.Getting back to work/ study was immensely difficult. Since, for some reason, I found it hard to explain myself to my professors, fellow students and colleagues, I tried to deal with it by attempting to get back to work with vengeance only to feel overwhelmed and burnt out very soon. It was very frustrating for me and several others around me.

I am glad that it was around that time I started reading the Harry Potter books. When I first encountered J K Rowling's description of a dementor attack, I was stunned to see how much it sounded like a description of these attacks of depression: like all happiness has been sucked out from within me and for several miles around, like it was just one endless stretch of bleakness. The depiction of the dementors themselves as dark, hooded creatures gliding soundlessly over their victims struck me as the best allegory to how these phases of depression crawled over to me. The wizards in the Harry Potter books conjure the Patronus charm to defend themselves from the dementor. What a wizard requires to do to conjure a strong Patronus is to first seek refuge in his or her memories of happiness and love and cast the charm from there. For the dementors, in J K Rowling's imagination, cannot withstand the power of even the remembrance of love and happiness. 

It appeared to me that this could be a tool I could use to combat the onset of depression. As I usually found it hard to be verbally articulate about how I felt during these phases, it helped to have a visualization that someone else had taken the trouble to come up with. Thankfully, I have not gone through a migraine for sometime now, but depression still sneaks upon me in various ways. To this day, the Patronus charm works for me. It is quite wonderful.

Sickness and Health

Note: Here's something I wrote and shared with a bunch of friends by email sometime in late October 2009. I was in Washington, DC, and could not perform at a festival as planned. My knee injury had acted up, and I had to take a call and refrain from performing at the event which was, in fact, the main reason for being there in DC.My personal angst at not being able to perform notwithstanding, the festival and shows were a great success. Dakshina's (the company) team of seven dancers presented "Karna," a new work created by Daniel Singh and me, very beautifully.

My dear dancers,

I don't think I need to tell you that I was quite saddened about not being able to dance in the festival this past weekend (the last weekend of Oct 2009). It sort of became acute on the second day (Saturday), when it felt like everyone was dancing and it was only I who could not. So, after the matinee show on Saturday, I came home to cry. I did not want to sulk in front of everyone. But I am sure I did that too!

I also quietly admitted one truth to myself: that besides feeling bad for not dancing, I was jealous of you all. I just decided to face that fact, have a good cry, and get it over with. And that's what I did. 

Something really beautiful and paradigm-shifting happened after that. While walking back to the theater, I found myself humming the lines of a song that I have not remembered in months. It is a song by Subramanya Bharathiyar, one of Tamil's most dearest poets. The lines of this particular song go like this:

காயிலே புளிப்பதென்னே கண்ணப்பெருமானே - நீ 

கனியிலே இனிப்பதென்னே கண்ணப்பெருமானே ........

How do you taste so sour in this raw fruit, Oh, Kanna!

How do you taste so sweet in this ripe one, Oh Kanna!

And then, 

நோயிலே படுப்பதென்னே கண்ணப்பெருமானே - நீ

நோன்பிலே உயிர்ப்பதென்னே கண்ணப்பெருமானே 

You are what lies enervated in illness, Oh, Kanna!

You are what springs alive after a fast, Oh, Kanna!

Never before has the song made sense to me in the spectacular light in which I occurred to me at that moment. If I love my dancing, agile self, I must also love my healing, wounded body, for it is all "Kanna" finally! If I can offer my dancing body in prayer, I can offer by limping one too! :) That shift was tectonic in scale. 

I wanted to share this experience with you.

On the Criminal Law (Amendment) Draft Bill, 2010; Sexual Assault, etc

I have been part of several discussions on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Draft Bill, 2010, which proposes crucial amendments to the sections of the Indian Penal Code that deal with sexual assault. Here's something I wrote for the New Indian Express, that was published on 30 May 2010, as part of a larger feature on this Draft Bill.

http://expressbuzz.com/magazine/overhauling-definition-of-rape/177336.html

Gender and biological sex are two different things(Opinion | Aniruddhan Vasudevan)There are sure to be other takes on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Draft Bill, 2010 from the queer perspective, considering that the LGBT spectrum is wide and covers several sexual orientations and gender identities. This is just one. 

Section 375 of the IPC, which currently deals with sexual assault on women above the age of consent, should be made gender neutral, at least with respect to the victim of the assault. The argument often made to restrict Sec 375’s applicability to women is that sexual assault is a gendered crime. While the language of law appears to be speaking of gender, it is, in fact, speaking of biological sex. 

In other words, while the law perceives “women” as possible victims of sexual assault, it in fact means “females.” Therefore, it has been impossible for it to understand gender as a much broader axis of power, oppression and violence. 

Thanks to this lack of understanding of gender as a matrix of social codes and transgressions and not as some ‘natural’ outcome of one’s biological sex, the language of law fails to perceive that persons other than women are also regular targets of sexual assault. The possibility of serious harm to bodily integrity is a matter that also concerns persons other than women; bodies that are other than biologically female. For instance, when a kothi-identified person or an aravani is sexually assaulted by a man, it is indeed a gendered violence, for it is the person’s gender expression that becomes the site of sexual violence. Why should such violence be considered under a very archaic and morally-loaded category, “Of Unnatural Offences,” under Section 377?

Our understanding of what it means to be gendered has expanded beyond the narrow perception of sex=gender. You could be biologically male (sex), but if you are perceived to step over the gender norms that are purported to pertain to that category, you could be a potential target of sexual assault. We can continue to understand sexual assault as a gendered crime, without discounting the sexual assaults perpetrated on women, by taking into account the reality that bodies of those other than biological females constantly do become targets of sexual violence. 

To deny the very possibility of violence on the bodies that are gendered in so many ways, and not only those that are biologically female, would indeed be a gross disservice to feminism which, in the first place, expanded our understandings of what it means to be gendered. In other words, to apportion victimhood, when it comes to sexual assault, only to women is a regressive move that only reinforces the false notion that both ‘the sexual’ and its assault locate themselves in (certain parts of) the female body alone.

— The author runs the Chennai-based Shakti Center

Creating their world under spotlights

A profile of my dear friend Taejha Susheel and me in The New Indian Express, 26 June 2010

Shut Up and Dance? Really?

I am delighted to see that this article has been published in a blog. I wrote it almost two years ago and had forgotten about about it! Please click on the title to go to the blog.

Death

Today has been a bizarre day. It brought in the thought, sight and sound of death. Of all days, I chose today to revisit my poem "Totentanze," published in Dance Macabre Issue XXXIV. I had written the first draft of the poem when I was sitting in a hospital one day, looking at my grandfather's bag of bones lying on a clean sheet. I wondered what the tubes running in and out him were for. They kind of looked beautiful as they crisscrossed in red and white, going here and there, and looked like American freeways seen from some height. I had sent this poem to Danse Macabre when they called for submissions on the theme "Dance of Death." 

Propelled by self-love and the desire to re-read one more of my published poems, I read this one again today. No sooner had I finished reading it than a mail arrived from a friend informing me of the suicide of a girl we know of. The reasons for which the girl terminated her life, and the several ways in which those reasons could have been better engaged with by her family came and hit me like a tidal wave. I refrain from sharing more here for fear of disrespecting her privacy. But this girl, whom I did not get to meet, will haunt me as do several others who have given up their lives because they love differently than the majority of the world does and that is somehow a problem for the world.

The afternoon, as casually as it smothered me with its salty summer stillness, brought in the news of someone else's death; someone who was old and had suffered. As I went to pay my respects, I could not help thinking of this grand old mystery that is death. Faces of all those whom death has plucked away from me flitted past my mind's eye. They almost appeared in front of me suspended in the solidness of the afternoon summer heat. Faces. Not voices. As I wrote somewhere else,

"Death smelled of a million things.

Of coffee from a half-drunk cup, the soap

that smoothed out the fall in the bathroom,

the old starch of the saree that strangled,

the car perfume fighting the blood stench

on the steering wheel, etc.

But mostly death was sound for me. It took

voices away. Many dear ones I mourn,

I have forgotten how they sounded.

I hear them in my own voice now,

as if reading them from a book..."

If there is a most respectful way to remember the dead, I would give anything to learn it. Until then, the aspiration should suffice, I guess. That and the desire to love and honour the living.

Looking beyond the world of toxins

A write-up of mine from the New Indian Express. It is based on my impressions about and my participation in the West Bengal state consultation on issues facing Men who have Sex with Men, and Transgender women.