An open letter to the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Darjeeling.
We human beings have intricate layers which gives us multiple identities in any socio- economic set up.In my case I am a human being,a woman,an Indian Gorkha, a student belonging to a middle class family and so on.
Its almost ironical even with so many identities, the people from the place I was born into, is fighting for its own identity.A demand for a separate statehood dignity .
I want to ask the people who are ready to lay their lives for the sake of their identity, who are you fighting for? What are you fighting for?
It's almost a paradox, when a person who acts as a vanguard of claiming back the honour of our identity as a Gorkha,is the same person who is blind towards the complex intricacies of an identity of a human being. A person who uses "female degradation" as a popular narrative to evoke some sort of pseudo nationalist sentiments,a sort of gendered classification as a basis of judgement. For him , a "pothi"(a female gender) when makes a first move or raises her voice is equivalent to inviting "lodar"(bad luck) to oneself and hence for her ' own safety' should not speak her mind out . In addition to that, the congratulatory comments of the people in his post made me question my own morality for a second.
However, it's not your fault entirely . You are simply a symbolic reflection / representation or a product of the collective conscience of this society we live in.When Pataal Lok provided a 10 second scene calling a sex worker " a Nepali Randi" the entire Nepali speaking community was enraged. I was too. But when I probed into the matter deeper I felt like nothing but a hypocrite because when the same thing happened at my own home or my locality, I simply used to push it under the rug or just brush it off.
In the end, it is no one but I,myself who was at fault who encountered oppression and subjugation on the basis of gender, sexuality , race etc and yet chose to remain silent.When a close female friend was scared to smoke in front of her boyfriend but he himself does it openly infront of her,I remained non chalant. When I was mad at my male allies or any men for that matter I yelled at him with various effeminate names or choose to keep quiet when others did the same.When my father expected my mother to cook all the meals during this lockdown even when he is comparatively sitting idle, I didn't utter a word.Its the fault of the 'symbolic mother ' who chose to keep quite. Its the fault of her mother who taught her daughter to behave that way. The entire construction of gender is at point of contention here . Nobody is born hating, these are the little tacit encounters,in life that send subliminal messages to our brain for normalizing hatred. Some might even call it , ' Gender construction' .The more important thing is if we've learned all of these ,we can unlearn it too.
Therefore, it's high time sir.I choose to speak against it. I don't want to feel like a hypocrite anymore. These subtle tacit statements with sexist undertones that too made by a respectable public office holder can be tomorrow's reason why underage kids(boys as well as girls) think it is cool to discuss, objectify or degrade their female allies or a female in general or at worst plan to gang rape them even kill them infact or become an object for young masculine boys in their boys room chats . I refuse to lose my agency on what I do and how I do it .
It's me and not this society which tells me what to do and it's high time that you must understand this .
Thankyou .
We human beings have intricate layers which gives us multiple identities in any socio- economic set up.In my case I am a human being,a woman,an Indian Gorkha, a student belonging to a middle class family and so on.
Its almost ironical even with so many identities, the people from the place I was born into, is fighting for its own identity.A demand for a separate statehood dignity .
I want to ask the people who are ready to lay their lives for the sake of their identity, who are you fighting for? What are you fighting for?
It's almost a paradox, when a person who acts as a vanguard of claiming back the honour of our identity as a Gorkha,is the same person who is blind towards the complex intricacies of an identity of a human being. A person who uses "female degradation" as a popular narrative to evoke some sort of pseudo nationalist sentiments,a sort of gendered classification as a basis of judgement. For him , a "pothi"(a female gender) when makes a first move or raises her voice is equivalent to inviting "lodar"(bad luck) to oneself and hence for her ' own safety' should not speak her mind out . In addition to that, the congratulatory comments of the people in his post made me question my own morality for a second.
However, it's not your fault entirely . You are simply a symbolic reflection / representation or a product of the collective conscience of this society we live in.When Pataal Lok provided a 10 second scene calling a sex worker " a Nepali Randi" the entire Nepali speaking community was enraged. I was too. But when I probed into the matter deeper I felt like nothing but a hypocrite because when the same thing happened at my own home or my locality, I simply used to push it under the rug or just brush it off.
In the end, it is no one but I,myself who was at fault who encountered oppression and subjugation on the basis of gender, sexuality , race etc and yet chose to remain silent.When a close female friend was scared to smoke in front of her boyfriend but he himself does it openly infront of her,I remained non chalant. When I was mad at my male allies or any men for that matter I yelled at him with various effeminate names or choose to keep quiet when others did the same.When my father expected my mother to cook all the meals during this lockdown even when he is comparatively sitting idle, I didn't utter a word.Its the fault of the 'symbolic mother ' who chose to keep quite. Its the fault of her mother who taught her daughter to behave that way. The entire construction of gender is at point of contention here . Nobody is born hating, these are the little tacit encounters,in life that send subliminal messages to our brain for normalizing hatred. Some might even call it , ' Gender construction' .The more important thing is if we've learned all of these ,we can unlearn it too.
Therefore, it's high time sir.I choose to speak against it. I don't want to feel like a hypocrite anymore. These subtle tacit statements with sexist undertones that too made by a respectable public office holder can be tomorrow's reason why underage kids(boys as well as girls) think it is cool to discuss, objectify or degrade their female allies or a female in general or at worst plan to gang rape them even kill them infact or become an object for young masculine boys in their boys room chats . I refuse to lose my agency on what I do and how I do it .
It's me and not this society which tells me what to do and it's high time that you must understand this .
Thankyou .
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