Gatha: 2016-04-17

The poem talks about the subject of gender and identity, using the seemingly innocuous question “What do you want to be, when you grow up?” that is asked to children across all ages.

"What do you want to be, when you grow up?"

The terrifying lady

With the horrendous teeth

And jagged eyebrows

Asked us,

Her hair

A towering mass of grey

And her skin

A thick rubber sheet

Of yellow,

Her thick, brown, rope lips

Moved to bare

Thick, brown, nail teeth;

I don’t remember her name

(It was forgettable,

Like my own)

But I remember her piercing stare

As if

She was trying

To pronounce me dead

Or,

Even worse,

Living.

The thick air

And the stench

From her thick hair

Made me want to

Hiccup.

We were 10,

Standing in lines of girls and boys,

Lefts and rights,

Blues and blacks,

Blacks and whites,

And our ideas

Were a patchwork

Of mismatched colours –

The satin reds of wealth

Sat stained against

The cotton whites

Of poverty

As we rattled off

The words we knew

And had heard,

That had learnt to sit

At the tips of our tongues –

Some shouted

'Doctor',

'Lawyer',

'Engineer',

'Teacher',

'My Mum',

'My Dad',

'Not my Mum',

'Not my Dad',

Thankfully, no

'Heroin addict',

Or 'Dropout',

Or 'Artist',

Or 'Painter' -

We weren’t taught

To aim that high.

Some of us did, later, anyway.

We were just 10

And the glass ceiling

Was as tall as

6 foot 5

(The tallest Dad in the class)

And we learnt to say the words

From the Mums

And Dads

We wanted to be like,

And didn’t.

I stayed quiet.

I didn’t have much ambition,

My expectations reasonable

(Or so I thought),

The answer(s) I thought of

Were nondescript

Compared to the little boy

Swinging from the

Bars of the window

(At least he knew to use

The very thing that restricted him)

(I did not);

The jagged eyebrows turned

And they stared

At my oiled pigtails

(Made out of the hair

My Mum carefully tended to),

In sync with her teeth, they moved,

"And you?"

She turned to the left,

Her spit laced with the poison

Of inquisitiveness

Fell on my tongue

Just as I opened my mouth,

Trying to think

To choose

Between honesty

And honesty

(I knew nothing of safety, then),

(I thought I was nondescript, remember),

My eyes darted

Under the glare of her

Suspicion

(I bet she guessed. I bet)

And my lips moved in calm asymmetry,

With the grace of a

Puckered leaf

Blowing in the wind,

To choose one of the two answer I wanted to give -

I didn't choose 'Normal';

Instead,

I said I

Wanted to

Boy.

Prerna Prakash, is a first year law student who has a hard time writing about herself in two sentences because she never knows what is an important enough part of her identity to be mentioned; except that she loves French Fries. Everyone must know she loves French Fries.

children

What do you want to be, when you grow up?

The poem talks about the subject of gender and identity, using the seemingly innocuous question “ What do you want to be, when you gro...

As a third-year student at Jindal Global Law School, I have lived in Sonipat, Haryana for the better part of three years. If I’m being honest, I have lived on a huge, well-guarded campus with air-conditioned rooms and fancy buildings, and the most dangerous thing I’ve faced is those enormous beetles that fly around in the summer. I’ve had a highly privileged existence, in a bubble in Sonipat for the past three years. So I’m not going to purport to entirely understand the circumstances that caused the riots that spread across parts of Haryana, including Sonipat, in late February.

What I can tell you is that those riots were the result of protests held by members of the Jat community who sought OBC status from the State government. What I will comment on, however, is the violence that occurred during these riots – in particular, violence against women and the reactions (especially of members of the Jindal student community) to it. Violence is something that is rarely condoned officially, but which is often used as a tool in political protests to achieve certain ends. And that is exactly the problem over here – the senselessness and intensity of violence against women is doubly purposeless, as it achieves absolutely nothing with relation to the purpose of the riots.

It was a discussion about said violence that prompted me to write this article. On the timeline of our Student Council’s Facebook page, a spirited discussion began in the comments section of a link that had been posted, which detailed the alleged rape of women on the National Highway by protestors during the riots. According to numerous reports, the women had been dragged out of their vehicles and raped, and their clothes thrown away, leaving them naked and afraid. The High Court of the State had taken cognizance of these reports, and had requested the police to probe the matter.

The discussion took a different direction from what I had expected, with several students who belonged to the Jat community immediately taking pains to comment that either the women were lying and the reports were fabricated to affect public opinion, or that the rapists were not from the Jat community and had committed the act in order to defame the said community. That pained and surprised me. Here, we had reports of violent sexual assaults taking place – and so many people’s first reaction was to deny that their community was involved, and to cast aspersions on the rape victims itself. These same people, whose student lives were dedicated to essentially understanding and upholding the law, were so willing to bypass the orders of the High Court of the land, or to cast aspersions on the rationale behind that decision.

I didn’t think that this was a discussion of caste or community in the slightest; the perpetrators of the violence were unimportant, in so far as their caste identity was concerned. I was more concerned with the victims; with the fact that rape culture was so pervasive that people were more willing to disbelieve the stories of victims and numerous eyewitnesses, in order to preserve their idea of the functioning of their community. Rape culture is so deeply ingrained that intelligent students spent a great deal of time demonizing the feminists who were willing to listen to these women, and protesting that members of their community could not possibly be involved. Even if these women were not lying about the rape itself, they were most certainly lying about the identity of the perpetrators.

I, and numerous others tried to argue the point online, stating that the caste of the protestors was irrelevant. We laid emphasis on the fact that treating violence against women as collateral damage during civil or political unrest was trivializing the act of rape itself. The argument descended into a one that denigrated rape victims itself – portraying them as women who were prone to lying, and who conveniently use the backdrop of the riots to settle family scores. The fact that one of the accused (along with seven others) was said to be the brother-in-law of one of the victims was used as evidence of this. Somehow, the word of several community leaders who stated that their men would not commit such crimes, was considered the gospel truth. See, this big-shot said that no one was involved – let’s believe him because it suits our narrative, completely ignoring the fact that he has vested interests and could also have been completely unaware of the violence, since the protests spanned many districts and hundreds of thousands of protestors.

This is when such discussions can no longer be considered an effective use of the right to freedom of speech and expression. The comments thread on the article, and on many others that reported rapes, was a sad reflection of the internal thought process of a large portion of our population. When reports of rape against women come into the public eye, people rush to remove the blame from themselves – either men in general, or persons of a particular community, who want to deflect the backlash from themselves. There is not a thought spared for these women; all the sympathy is directed towards the poor men who “might” be falsely accused. The example of the riots is just one instance that exemplifies the patriarchal attitudes that perpetuate rape culture.

The subsequent derailment of the post – which could have been a productive discussion on the use of rape as a tool of subjugation and show of power during times of unrest, and the fact that people were okay with using such tools. Instead it descended into a game of “Dodge-the-Blame/Blame-the-Victim”, and several people, including women, indulged in this. Whether it was internalized misogyny or a deeply ingrained sense of caste-based identity, I am unsure; what I do know is that this is deeply problematic and that we need to change.

Madhavi Achaiah is a student at Jindal Global Law School