holiday, death, quest, love

As the holiday session clumsily rolls towards its end, I tell myself just couple more hours and I can go back to work. Not necessarily because I like my work, but because I do not like being alone. Now the question becomes why am I alone, I have a family in town who loves me, have friends who care for me. But the truth is I have always felt left out and melancholic even when I apparently had everything. This is how I was created, and this is how I learned to hate and whip myself.

One of my friends asked me recently if I have noticed my pattern for romantic pursuit. I exactly knew what he meant, and I at the same time hated and loved him for at least being another person other than me who took time to see the pattern. Still I asked him, pretending to not know what he was getting at-“what do you mean?” “You have always tried to attain the somewhat unattainable”. I laughed, we both did. But for me the laugh was more like challenging the concept of “unattainable”. Somehow to buy into that to me would mean to step out of the bubble that I have in my head. In the bubble everything was possible, distance, education, body, state of being (singlehood or not) nothing mattered. In contrast to outside world, the bubble in my head has always told me am worth it and people should know it.

Death came to me as a concept when I was four. Losing one of my closest people at that point, who still remains a part of me, I asked “why do people die”. The answer was simple; when we get old we die. This logic of death frightened me, does this mean all will die? And does this mean as am the youngest I will be left alone? A selfish anger and pain made my connection to death very early in my life. My four year old self stood in the dark balcony and cried often, I told god how unjust his rule was. Telling him that I wanted to die before my mother, grandmother and sisters left as I did not want to be left alone. The disappearing tears in the darkness of the nights were in a way death to me, death to my willingness to live to leave a legacy. I would rather die with everyone around me than live long to perhaps leave a legacy of a lonely man. My insecurity with my existence created a sense of self-pity, an apparently miserable state of mind, but for me that was a romantic idea that told me-few more days and then I can leave. Since I can remember I wanted to die, to prove my existence was worth it, I imagined everyone dropping whatever they were doing to come and mourn my end. I imagined and felt a cruel joy in finally having a triumphant moment, the last smile if I might, when I was worth people’s love and time.

My need to be surrounded by love, my self-centered idea where people will love me back the way I loved them, even in this writing when I try to be harsh to myself, I still leave a trail of pity- a subtle cry saying love me please. As I grow older I see that helpless selfish kid in me more and more. Please look at me, please love me, please tell me I am worth it. And the funny thing is I want all these from people who I want and I think should say these-people who often never even take time to look at me. The more difficult the person, the more I want it from them. My friends smiling face, “you have always tried to attain the unattainable”.

Why do I write about my life proving to the world that I am an annoying needy person? Even when I write all these words I know kind words would be thrown at me with genuine intentions. But would that change anything? Would that end my craving to be taken care of? To be loved? Honestly, it is not that I had a completely loveless life. My mother and grandmother loved me unconditionally. My sisters loved me with all possible conditions growing up, but then they were kids too. And now as our lives criss-cross less often their love has become more unconditional. But once again the quest for the “unattainable love” is perhaps in my gene. My therapist often has to remind me that I am intellectualizing my emotions rather than feeling them. Perhaps I stopped feeling and instead intellectualized love, belonging and death. After all feelings can hurt, pierce deep within and bleed invisibly.

I often ask if the lack of a dead body proves lack of death as well. Aspirations, dreams, longing and the failure to get any of these the way one wanted, aren't that also in a way several deaths? All these and much more did not have a separate body than the one we were born with. Just because that lump of bone and flesh and certain chemical and electrical impulses keep repeating, that does not discount the thousand deaths that happened already. I once saw a jute mill by the Ganges when I was a kid; it was closed for a long time the machines, the people coming in and going out, the productions all halted. But still the building stood, reminding what it was and lamenting what it could have been. Perhaps I am like that closed down jute mill. What I was and what I could have been. 

From Thanksgiving to Durgotsov, a journey through racism, rape and genocide

Since this morning, I have felt uncomfortable after seeing so many people wishing each other Happy Thanksgiving. I had to keep my self-righteous self at a check and not judge anyone and be angry. Thanksgiving, a holiday that has efficiently erased the historic reality of genocide with a much benign story of families coming together and eating a fat bird. So many (including me when I first moved to this continent and bought into the dream of assimilation and integration) “celebrates” this holiday probably not know what they are actually celebrating. And then being angry now when I have a better understanding of the holiday and judging others will be appropriation I feel as it was not my people who were killed on this day and days and years and centuries to follow. But as an ally and as a person coming from a land which was colonized, vandalized, and impoverished by the same colonial rule, I can only say to some extent i know how much it hurts.

But then i started thinking about my own festivals. Growing up in Bengal, we had a saying, we have 13 festivals in 12 months, and that is true. And the most important festival of all, the festival of the Goddess Durga, Durgotsov, has been closest to my heart. Like so many Bengalis, my family and i celebrated this by worshiping the clay idol of a ten handed goddess killing a demon, Mahishasura. As a matter of fact she is my “personal god” (having 33 million gods in the Hindu pantheon, a lot of us get to “shop” our personal gods based on our convenience and character). But today when my race sensitization is sharp, I do not see the beautiful smiling face of the goddess killing a demon, the philosophical narrative saying she represents the good winning over evil fades. The only thing that stands out is a fair skinned person killing a dark skinned man and when it is done, she gives a smile and proclaims divinity. Where does this lead me to? I had no conflict with my religion and my sexuality, but today I have a severe conflict between my faith and my queer politics. Once I had this one realization, stories after stories from the mythology and scriptures came back to me stating the same story. A fair skinned “god” punishing an immoral dark skinned “demon”. Take the example of Ravana, the bad guy of the epic Ramayana in its most popular North Indian narrative. He was fighting to get his own land from which he and his people were displaced by the Devas or the fair skinned Aryans and at the end he had to die as a demon although the author of the epic described him as a just king and ruler, but he had to die. I wonder would he die if he was a fair skinned person. When I first had this disturbing question, my brain tricked me by giving me two very popular examples, where two dark skinned characters are given very important divine role in the religion. Krishna (the name literally means the dark one) and Kali (once again meaning the dark one, till date dark skinned girls are taunted and humiliated by calling them Kali). I will start with Krishna, as he is the more popular and “less violent” one. He participated in a battle where two Aryan clans collided and at the battle field he gave his speech which eventually became the most important Hindu text in modern times, The Bhagwat Gita. But if one follows his life, from childhood to death, it is full of deceit, privilege, and coming up with unfair war tactics (he could have been employed by the US army as the chief advisor for doing all wrong things and coming up with a justification). And after all these he got divinity. Same with Kali, a naked woman at times  wearing a skirt made of human hands and a garland made of the heads of the demon she decapitated, with her long dark hair untied and screaming and shouting and terrorizing demons. A gruesome depiction with a wonderful and profound philosophical explanation. She is the mother who kills, and invokes the idea that death is essential for birth to happen. But for both Krishna and Kali I wonder why did these two people get divinity? Is it because they both went against their own people (darker people) and helped the ruling Aryans to gain the supremacy? Was it because they maintained the status quo? Before I lose my mind completely and fear losing my faith and live next several weeks and months in dissonance, i want to share one last story. The story of Manasha (the goddess of snakes), a woman born from Shiva (an appropriated deity from the pre-Hindu era that Hindus just claimed and added later in time) and a tribal woman from the planes of Bengal. She fought with the Gods, to get her right as a legitimate child of Shiva and hence claiming divinity. Shiva’s main fair-skinned wife Parvati (another name of Durga) was extremely unhappy with Manasha and her claim and did everything with other gods to resist her divinity. At the end Shiva agreed to give Manasha what she wanted, but only in parts. She was granted divinity, but she will only be worshipped after the worship of Shiva has been done, so she did not gain the Sovereign status of divinity that she claimed for the land she belonged to.

So when i feel conflicted on my role and on my stand with my faith, i turn my attention to my own skin colour, dark, too dark for so many (including me). But how did that happen? Considering I am a Brahmin? The highest Aryan Hindu cast? The Sanskrit for cast is Varna which literally means skin colour, and the cast system always tried to maintain the purity of the skin colours. The Brahmins only were allowed to marry another Brahmin else they were outcast. But then with time we mixed, mixed with people of the land that i call home now. i do not know if my mix was a way to maintain the status quo, or a brutal rape on one of my ancestors. i just know in this one body and mind i am fragmented, with my privilege as a Hindu, Brahmin male and brutalized and demonized with my dark skin, broad nose and thick lips. And hence when i stand in front of an image of Durga killing Mahishasura from now onwards, a part of me will be proclaiming my divinity, ability to intellectualize, and the other part will cry in anger and rage and in despair. 

Chidagnikundasambhuta

I was listening to Lalitha Sahasranama, the thousand names of the mother goddess this morning, which I often do and started thinking about names, their significance and a word from the prayer, Chidagnikundasambhuta. Like so many things in my tradition, your name is your Karma, it is just not a name to differentiate you from other people, but it is a reflection of your personality. Considering the name is given to a new born, this might sound a little farfetched, but then the whole tradition understands everything as a divine plan where you are just acting your role. I know how discomforting this idea of pre-determined is, it takes our personal will away and our choices. But what if our will and choices are also part of that will? It is both empowering and disempowering, as you might feel it was determined already, I might as well not participate and be inactive! The scholars will argue then your inaction becomes the plan, so damn unfair!

If I come to my name, sambuddha, it has a wonderful story, or so I like to think. After I was born my mother and my grandmothers from my mother’s and father’s side independently came up with this same name. And the surprising thing is this name is not at all common in the Subcontinent.  And so was I named, sambuddha, the one who is truly awakened! It was indeed a lot of pressure on a new born, but I so much think my name has formed me as I have redefined my name. There was a time someone told me even if he did not know how I look in a room full of people, he would take no time to find me, find sambuddha (and it was when I was in India where the name is still uncommon but anyone could have had it). That was one of the best compliments and at the same time the scary thing to happen to me. I cannot even hide and be anonymous. My spirituality has been beyond my understanding of my creation and creation in general, it has been my everyday mundane life. My politics, my sexuality, my science, my hookups, my falling in love and falling out of love.  To get to where I am right now I had to walk through several infernos, where I and my ideas have burnt and burnt again. The pain and at the same time bliss of waking up from my slumber to go into another has prepared me and is still making me worth my name, sambuddha, the one who has woken up! I wonder if this journey will ever end, or to be honest if I want it to end ever. You can think of this essay as some narcissistic effort to proclaim the greatness in me, may be it is (and an effort to get likes on Facebook as soon this will end up there), may be it is another inferno I am walking through where my desire to express and connect to others is burning and turning to ashes. Or maybe it is just a way I was supposed to react, my signature way to react to words and thoughts. I wonder if we will ever get annoyed or even find it boring when a solution of copper vibrates, rotates, jumps from one state to another and glows with its colour with the exact amount of energy each action requires, everything predetermined! But then there remains the quantum mechanical uncertainty where it can do things that we cannot predict, but still there is a pattern in those uncertainties and hence still remain predetermined.

And that brings to my recent most favourite word this morning, Chidagnikundasambhuta, one who is born from the fire of pure consciousness. I feel the fire around my consciousness, I feel the heat and see my consciousness burning every moment to get to another conscious state and then that burning again. So to me this morning sambuddha is the same as chidagnikundasambhuta!

I am angry, again. And this time I cannot even contain my anger, it literally feels like I will burst in rage. The reason, I went to a chanting “concert”, I was expecting appropriation, but what I did not realize was my reaction. So to give some background, this is a pretty well-known person, a westerner, who proudly claims that her CDs with chanting are #1 in Amazon world music chart, #1 in Amazon world age chart (whatever those mean) etc. The program that we were given at the door advertises two upcoming events at Blue Spirit Resort in Costa Rica where you are promised of finding the light of love and the love for your beloved through chanting, and obviously if you pay the exorbitant cost for the resort!! Before the concert started, I was calming myself by telling I will just be at the moment and not intellectualize the whole situation and will overlook the whole capitalist, classist and racist plot of selling religion. But the moment it started my brain started burning in anger. On the stage four white people (am sorry for using such a lose broad term but if you keep reading you would know the reason) and a man of colour, wearing super expensive Indian or Indian inspired outfits started chanting Sahana babatu. Instead of being happy about how they have adopted my Hindu culture I started getting very angry, not because I feel I own the culture. But because they just do not know what they were doing, the history and the politics. They “explained” the meaning of OM as a very beautiful sound and invited everyone to join in chanting OM! What they forgot to mention was, for thousands of years women and Shudras (the lowest cast of the four Hindu casts) were barred from saying that word. As almost everyone joined in chanting OM, I was transformed to a horrific scene, where hundreds of priests chanted OM followed by various Vedic chants  to drown the scream of a widow who just woke up from her intoxicated stage and found herself sitting in the burning pyre of her dead husband. In that moment when these performers sold the calmness of the sound OM to privileged white people, they failed thousands of women who were burnt alive to this OM chanting.  I am not saying any human cruelty can take away the calmness of OM but just telling a one sided story of OM takes away the strength of that word. If instead they just mentioned the pain of thousands burnt and killed using that same sound I feel the chanting would have been more complete. But I guess bringing this topic up will bring the smell of charred skins in that air-conditioned room and will fail the whole business strategy.  

I sincerely hoped that I would be able to calm down with the second chant. But unfortunately as it started I felt weak and helpless.  First of all the chant was in incorrect Sanskrit, and the translation was so incorrect that I have no expression. They translated the Sanskrit word Guru as guarding angel! If they had any cultural or theological reference I am sure they would not normalize Hinduism to a Christian concept! For three hundred years of colonization we were shamed for our culture, heritage and religion and were robbed of our languages. And right at that moment I saw them as the white race having the audacity to take my language from me and distort it and to sell it for their own profit. I felt helpless as I know they are still more powerful and they write the history. Already so much of my own history has been rewritten to suit the white race, so many of my gods have been shunned as the whites did not understand them, and so many words have been wrongly translated that we have lost the true meaning of the words.  But right at that moment  I refused to give an inch of my heritage to anyone without making sure they know what they are talking about.

The whole torturous evening continued with one wrong after another. They invoked Hanuman by playing flute (once again no cultural connection between the God and the instrument chosen). I could not stop seeing the grand dome of Babri Mashjid being demolished while hooligans shouted Jai Bajrangbali, Glory to Hanuman.  The deafening sound of screaming kids who along with their families were slaughtered in the riots following this incident filled my ears and brain, but the audience around me somehow did not see the fear in my eyes and kept “invoking” Hanuman.        

The unending pain continued for me as the performers proudly shared their experience chanting in a “prison” with movie like heavy doors and where some people have lived for more than 25 years. The auditorium applauded their greatness when they told us how a “prisoner” for 25 years said he felt free after chanting with them. By this time I was praying to my god for having mercy on me and giving me an opportunity to leave that toxic place. My prayer was answered as they announced they will take a break after a Sufi chanting. As the words  Allah and OM echoed in unison in that artificially created and protected space, I ran, ran as fast as I could, before they could call me mad, tell me I should be happy that they are accepting my culture, tell me my fears and feelings are wrong or before they convince me with their capitalist ideas. 

My politics and me

A girl got molested in my University back home, and her friends sat on a dharna (agitation). No arm, no bullets from their side, just a raging cry, we won’t tolerate, won’t give up. And then at the middle of the night the VC of my University calls in cops, to save him and his “poor” colleagues. Police come in my campus, drag the students out and molest them again for agitating against molestation. My city wakes up with the news and thousands gather, to march and to show we are not compliant, and we are not afraid. And thousand more, like me so far from my own soil, my own sweat and blood, we feel perplexed. What and how can I be part of the expression of the rage that we all share. A part of me is also afraid to express any feeling, as so many times my friends have told me I lost my “right” to be angry with anything back home when I left them. Yet, I will not be compliant to them, as we are not, I will still show my anger and despair. I will share my story the story, the story of the origin of my politics, of my city, Kolkata.

My first political memory is my grandmother talking angrily about the rape at Bantola by police constables. I did not know what rape meant as I was around 8 when this happened. The whole city practically erupted, I am sure there were thousands of angry students who marched and said we will not sit still, we will take everything personally. Being an eight year old the only protest that I remember from this incident is from the “pujo lighting” (a religious festival dedicated to the mother Goddess, which has become a social one now and the whole city is decorated with light). The “decoration” read-Rokhok na Bhokhok, “saviors or devourers”. The anti-police feeling was planted in me since then and has grown ever since. I have seen several more political statements in pujo lighting, protesting against railway scams (rail gari jhama jhom tahelka.com) and everything that happened in the past year. Even the clay idol of the mother Goddess would often be changed from her traditional, from the scripture, image to show corrupt politicians being killed by the mother or Her as a flood effected refugee carrying  four kids to a shelter. This is the city I grew up in, where Gods also take part in human politics and protest with us.

I grew up with stories from the 60s and the 70s, when Calcutta was the worst nightmare for so many. When students with promised extra ordinary future left college and university to create a new society, to make the world more equal and just. The sky and the rivers turned crimson with their dreams and blood for years. Hundreds were beheaded by the same cops in a Kali temple near my father’s house. As I listened to these stories my mind drifted to a world, where I am fighting with my comrades, and we die but we pass our values to thousands more. I grew up seeing my friend’s alcoholic father, too scared to wake up from his communist dream to face the capitalist country we were presented with in the 90s. I got inspired to break rules from my family who in the 40s lived in a commune as equals and were having babies outside wedlock.  

Every day in collage during lunch hours I will hear students from different political wings shouting slogans, taking their squads, clapping and intimidating, I saw dreams in their eyes which often were my dreams too. You can ask me what I did during this time. For long I was so ashamed when faced with this question, as I was too busy dealing with my own emotional turmoil and was seldom part of student politics. But now I know the value of what I did, I argued with everyone I could on an issue that affected me and thousands like me since 1947. I shouted and screamed saying we refugees have rights, you cannot call us second class citizens anymore, this country, and this world is as much mine as yours. The fear of not having a land, fear of getting uprooted overnight and literally kicked out of a place we called home for generation gave us the burning determination to prove our worth.

Unrest is rest for me, anger is comforting and tells me am still a mortal. My anger does not give way to an apologetic statement trying to justify itself. Politics is not a fancy that I intellectualize; it is a reality, the only reality to survive for me and for so many. I provoke, I love to provoke by my writing, by my existence and often just by being angry.  And at the end, I am so glad that I was born in an economically poor country, where I had to fight for everything,  and for giving me my anger, my politics, and  my identity. 

Dissonance and me

Cognitive dissonance! The words sounded so fancy to me that even before understanding what they meant in reality I was about to post it on my Facebook update. Fortunately, my therapist was prompt enough to suggest that might not be the greatest idea. This brings me to my second revelation I guess, yes I go to a therapist, fighting my cultural and social stigma around all things related to mental health and seeking help for it. And the reason for these visits, an extreme sense of isolation and fear of being left alone for the rest of my life will be my third confession. And now before I proceed I quote the dictionary meaning of the word dissonance, as I am going to use this as a theme to my life. Dissonance is “a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements”.

 The dissonance most probably started the moment I was conceived as a result of an unplanned passion, and it has stayed with me ever since. As a person I am a planner, I plan my days and nights, my weeks and months ahead of time, I always have a plan D jotted out in case A, B and C fail. But even after planning everything in such details, I am perpetually confused.  The shadow of this dissonance has always chased me, nearly choking me at every other moment with its tight grip. Perhaps the uncertainty of my father’s  willingness to keep me or not affected my mother’s pregnancy, which in turn seems to have added a new set of genes in me,  genes for insecurity and that has grown bigger and bigger with time and makes up a big part of me now. Ironically, the moment I was born, this dissonance in my father’s mind faded for a while. After two “failed trials” and two girls in less than six years, he was finally able to produce an off spring with the right “tools” who would keep the family going forward. As the family celebrated the dissonance between the assumed and reality smiled, as if saying too early to assume anything.

My dissonance with myself andmy society started early on. It was my cousin’s wedding, and I was this adorable eight years old kid wearing a traditional Indian outfit and soon became everyone’s center of attraction by virtue of my nonstop talking. But the memory that stands out is how I felt when my cousin’s 20 something male friend came up to me and pinched my chubby cheeks. I did not know how orgasm felt back then but the excitement of that moment was similar. The dissonance in this situation was this incident happened in a very straight-traditional wedding set up. While I felt a rush of excitement when a man touched me my brain looked around and picked up data for future, the data being happiness is equal to a man and a woman in a wedlock producing kids.  And hence at that moment the journey of self-denial, self-harm and at the same time self-healing had already begun-a dissonance between the perceived and felt. I would go to bed every night hoping when I woke up next morning, Iwould feel  some attraction to my sisters’ female friends. A Hindu by birth, I had plenty of different gods to pray to every night; seems my romantic promiscuity started with my promiscuity with devotion to different gods.  Anyway, gods often answeredmy prayers, though just partially.  I was never attracted to my sisters’ female friends, but always was drawn by the teenage girl gossips that they brought in. while all these praying was going on in the dark of the night, I whipped myself to like sports, to act like a man, to talk about girls and breasts, and fulfill my male role in the society.  But reality looked different than all my efforts, instead of becoming this straight cool dude, I became this vintage personality at the age of 14 who lived in the 1920s. So dissonance became a reality, a teenager in the 1990s who likes to live a life of 1920s! Much later on I remember telling my closest ally, my mother I feel suffocated in the mould I made for myself.  

This phase continued until I was 24, I did everything to make myself invisible in the crowd, gained weight, grew a huge moustache, wore the most unappealing outfits so on and so forth. At this stage my dissonance was between the realization that I am higher than average smart but I was unworthy of anything that world has to offer. Although, dissonance is a very discomforting mental state, yet, by this time I was seasoned to live with it. Hence things were going pretty well, until I met this guy when I was 27 and he 21. We started going out and he somehow convinced me that to be attractive you do not need to be a certain type, and to wear colours certainly you do not need a six pack abs. And this woke the sleeping dissonance in me. My whole understanding of attractiveness and body-type was at stake. On the one hand I enjoyed being with him and having sex with him, on the other, my deep-rooted understanding that I did not deserve him as I am ugly made things complicated. At the end there was a new understanding from my end which opened me up to new possibilities of attraction and attractiveness and new sets of ideas gave away to the old idea of unworthiness. Little did I know every time I go from one idea to another, I break one dissonance and pave way to a new one.  

By this time, I was starting to be comfortable in my own skin, which basically meant I knew for sure I was different from the rest of my family and most of my friends, and I was beyond fixing. Around this same time I started taking more interest in my rights as  a gay man, which basically in Indian subcontinent was nothing, other than my privilege of being a male and being allowed to be sexual in society. My idea of being gay at that time was a man who sleeps with another man, and the definition of being a man was limited to having a specific body organ. I also cultivated an intellectual, super urban, leftist, gay, male only friend circle and a very normative boyfriend and we all had this holier than thou attitude towards everyone and everything. In my own understanding being gay was still limited to having sex with another male who will be presented as my best friend to the society and the roles became a little more intimate behind the closed doors. Hence no wonder when I met this girl from India living with her girlfriend in the small town of United States where I moved in subsequent years led to a complete breakdown of my understanding of a gay life! I saw for the first time someone of my kind not being scared or ashamed of her love and celebrating it.  It was a real scary moment where I knew it was time to let go of old set of ideas. So finally I took the big step, came out to everyone I thought I needed to and soon I became the stereotypical skinny jeans wearing, yoga practicing, all knowing, poetry writing, and always sexual person who would very easily become the center of any gathering by virtue of having an alternative life style. 

But as I said dissonance has always stalked me close enough and most of the time without my realizing how close it was. My next stop in this story of series of dissonances started in a very mundane way. It was a hook up where the guy I was about to hook up with told me before meeting me he was ready to do whatever as long as I did  not ask him to get naked. I heard a weird inner voice or felt a déjà vu moment when he said this but I was just as usual horny and did not care. So there he was, with a bright smile, I have not seen such a smile from a person I am just going to have a one night stand with in a long time. He was so sweet and pleasing I actually started liking him, but still we played by his rule. More intimate we got, the more my science trained cause-effect deduction based brain started racing to solve the puzzle. And in less than a couple of minutes I knew it. I knew that I was in bed with a man who was born with a vagina. Right at that moment when the brain was overpowered by affection and lust, I just did not feel any difference. So we had these wonderful several hours together where he finally revealed his secret to me. We both cried and laughed at the silliness of the society and said good bye in the early hours of the morning. But little did I know the dissonance will pin me down in its worst possible way in subsequent weeks. When it came, hell broke on me. My whole understanding of a man, his body, of my sexuality and identity was bulldozed. I did not know how to explain the whole situation, I stopped eating and sleeping, tried hating myself which I have always been very good at, being a jerk and being happy that I am finally attracted to both genitals now. At the end I intellectualized the whole situation. The worst thing one can do of a reality is to intellectualize it and dehumanize it by reducing it a concept. Slowly and eventually I have moved past a lot of  these confusions, am sure there are still more left, but I am at a far better standing now. I have stopped making intellectual assumptions about experiences that I have not live, for instance in this case knowing I have not lived the life of a trans-man I have no right intellectualizing him.  The most important realization for me right now is I do not need to know what body part you were born with to accept and appreciate you as a man, woman, neither or both.

At the end I have realized why I felt so excited about the words cognitive dissonance when my therapist told me that, I have somehow lived my entire life with several dissonances and will most probably continue doing that. I have transitioned from being extremely religious to suspicious of any religion, from being extreme nationalistic to believer of no-borders, from being hating myself for being able to love more than one person, emotionally and sexually at the same time to accepting and loving that. And I am waiting for the world to give me my next dissonance, so that I can break every possible construct that I live by today. 

The Grindr generation

After fighting a bad depression for a week I suddenly see a ray of light on my face, and I fight out of it with a new essay, which I have decided to name the Grindr generation. For the grammar Nazis, though am completely aware of my lack of sense of spelling (a friend of mine recently told me I have queer spelling, blessed be that person), this time I am sure I am using the right one. As I am not talking about the grinder that we use in the kitchen, but the smart phone application for gay, bi and questioning men for finding friends and hook ups. There are couple more like Scruff, Tinder and OkCupid that I have used and still use. To make it clear, I was not born or even raised in this mobile app generation, to be honest I was born before the internet came, but as we all as evolving creatures, I have learned to use these and be patient with these. Since the computer came, the face of socializing has changed completely. Especially the cruising has become a completely different story, I personally feel it has become a little bit safer as we do not need to go out in public and get arrested or harassed. But then the society has also changed or so would I like to think. I remember when I was in my early 20s I would log in to Yahoo Messenger and go to a room and will type m4m, which stands for man for men, rather than going to a shady park which people from my previous generations did.

And then with smart phones came the apps, I do not know how pro-equality the CEOs of these app companies are, but this is one more example of need based capitalism, where the sexual and social needs of a group of people are exploited by a corporation who has no empathy towards the users. If this has started to read like a tutorial for using these apps, am sorry not my aim. I just want to talk about how this has changed our way of interaction. So what happens in these apps that you upload a picture of yourself, mostly selfies and if I am talking about gay-apps, mostly of your ripped shirtless torso, and then you “describe” the totality of you in couple of words. I will be very honest, most of these pictures are very attractive to look at and help me in my “extracurricular activities” (wink, wink) but when I get in touch with my activist-feminist self I frustrate myself knowing I still use these. However am not going to make it a self-blaming self-pity essay now, as I have learned to accept myself as I am. So what most of us do in these apps, we scroll through the pictures, read those five word “bios” and try to decide who is my “type”. I will not even go in length about some of the bios which says am looking for a date but no Asians please, and how they insist that that is their “preference” and not racism (certainly not, they never said kill all the Asians, which would be the only way you can be racist), or the ones which would say am not looking for a hookup but then will have a highly sexualized self-photograph! My not so young brain sometimes gets a little skeptical about these. But the most interesting thing about these apps is the “blocking” game that happens there. So what happens is you look at a picture and you do not like it, or you get a message from someone who is not appealing to you, easy just block him and he will never show up in your list. I wish the world in real was like that, we could just eliminate the faces that we do not find attractive (who wants to take time to know if there is an incredible mind behind that “ugly” face). I just wonder if this “blocking” in virtual world is starting to affect our brains in reality. Then as the app has to make money out of our sexuality, what they do is, to see guys beyond a specific distance, either you have to pay them or keep blocking people that you do not like who are close to you as that opens up few spots on your page to see new faces. I have spent hours and days on these apps, hoping I will have a good conversation that will lead to a real meeting. Often I have hooked up with people from here, but the overall mood is no one takes chatting here seriously! So what happens, especially in a place like Calgary, where there are not enough gay spaces, you and all others are always on Grindr (am using this app as an example, no hard feelings and no pun intended), checking each other out with utter judgment towards each other and completely not talking! And from time to time you block people you do not like. The funny thing is if you are a free member, you have a limit to how many guys you can block in one day, but as you start paying the blocking gets unlimited. Yay! Long live capitalism! So what I am complaining about is more the attitude than the app. We can use the same technology for good or evil depending on our intentions. Instead of realizing how lucky we are to have internet and apps to get to know people, we just do not take it seriously or take it for granted and decide to live in isolation rather than talk to people. There is a perplexing reality of human mind, scarcity entices our mind and we find the scars the most desirable, the moment things get a little easier we just get bored of the situation. Now before you give me a look of judgment, I must clarify, I myself decide who I want to talk and who I do not want to be friends with all the time. But more than often it is based on my series of conversations with them not just by looking at a photo-shopped picture that you took when you were in your best “shape”! (I in fact saw once on Gridr someone offering to take “attractive” pictures for other people for becoming more popular on these apps).

Now as I try to wrap up my essay here, for me whenever I think about meeting new people with the hope of making new friends or new romantic pursuits, I remember two scenes from two movies that I watched as a kid, Gone with the wind and Pride and prejudice. I feel ahh! Those were the days when people used to talk and meet and interact before they decided who they found attractive, as attractiveness is so much more complex than a ripped torso. I completely realize though that there were lots of gender role impositions, sexism, classism and everything that we as activists want to tear apart in those interactions. But I still find it more appealing than the way Grindr is. So people, as much as you enjoy nice bodies, please appreciate the privileges that we have right now in meeting people, and may be when you get a “hello” from a new person next time, take a chance and strike a conversation.  

My "queer" attraction

This is what happens when the instrument that am supposed to work with breaks down in lab and i have literally little to do in lab. i sit and think. i was thinking about my guilt feeling that i sense as i am getting paid by the government to do science but am not doing it (not entirely my fault, i did not break the instrument after all). and as i think about work related guilt, thought expands and i start thinking about guilt in general. how the society guilt trips us for everything we do. this is to such an extent sometimes i think if something feels  good, I know i must feel guilty for having that thing. i will talk about one particular guilt that i feel all the time. i am already feeling guilty for saying this in public, fearing and anticipating people will think i am "crazy" (sorry for using this word, i just read an article posted by a friend on Facebook and am trying not to use disability as a slang).  Anyway as am half of the time this “who gives a shit” kind of super radical person (the other half am conservative, confused or stereotypically), will go ahead and write it down.

So this “guilt” that I feel is for finding people (read men) attractive. As soon as I realize I find someone physically and/or sexually attractive the tremendous guilt becomes so overwhelming that I consciously start avoiding that person. There are several internal reasons for this guilt, but first I will talk about how others fan this guilt. It has happened several times that am taking a walk with a friend and a guy passes by us and I just say “oh! He is cute”. Obviously I do not say it shouting, but in a volume that I and may be my friend can hear it. The immediate response (totally unwanted) that I mostly get from my friends is “oh my god! But he is a kid”! The indication is as if am a pedophile and just raped someone. And my immediate reaction would be to feel extremely guilty about my attraction. But I have decided from now on I will fight the guilt, for several reasons. One, it is not my “fault” that I like men younger than me, go and open my brain up and fix the chemical reaction if it is so offensive. Two, just calling someone cute does not mean I will drag him to my bed and start having sex, it’s just a comment (although I know it as well that it is not a crime to feel sexually for someone, as long as I wait for consent and do not impose myself, stop sex shaming).  This happens more often if I make the same comment for someone who is already “taken” (yes if you did not know we are like a bag of potatoes that someone can own, UGH!). The first reaction from within and from surroundings is “how could you even think of liking him! The next thing you will try is to break them up”. (This whole reaction reminds me of a hilarious comment one of my older relatives made some time back. We were talking about a Bengali movie showing how a middle aged married woman falls in love with a young guy and the whole hypocrisy of the society about that. And this older guy just looked at me and said, this kind of feeling might happen with French women but our women (Indian) are pure!! ) First of all grow up and stop being melodramatic and stop making 1960s Bollywood movies, where the vamp in black dress, black lipstick and cigar will seduce the hero and the “poor” man will get distracted and at the end the vamp will pay for her sins and will die and repent.   Going back to the original topic, the guilt, there are lots of assumptions when this guilt is triggered. First of all and once again, just liking does not lead to me acting on it and trying to “break” people up. Second, just because that person is with someone else that does not “de-validate” my feelings. Its not my fault that I did not meet them when they both were single.  Third and most importantly, the assumption that these two people in love are completely unable to love more than one individual is so Victorian, and we all (including me) need to remember all the time things like bisexuality, polyamory, open relationships exist (yes they do however alien these might sound). And of course am not saying that I need to assume the other extreme (that everyone is bi, poly or open). Just be respectful to the people you find attractive as well as to your attraction and there are plenty of decent ways of having a conversation expressing interest and being open to both yes and no.  So what I am recently trying is, being mindful of my attraction, trying to understand if it is just a physical thing or both physical and intellectual. Once that is worked out it seems having the conversation is much easier and when the guilt is taken out from attraction, magically the objectification disappears (for me that happens, not sure if that is a psychologically validated thing). So as a caution, I do tell people these days when I find them attractive, please do not get offended or assume or read between my words. In general am a person who respects others and expect the same in return, hence the chances are slim that I would go overboard and do anything outside my own boundary.  

Just writing these things down and putting in public makes me feel more comfortable with my own feelings.  I feel more open to ideas and validated about attraction. Attraction is a “queer” chemical reaction that takes place faster than social seasoning and unless we keep questioning our social conditioning we will keep having conflict between feeling and acting on it. 

whisper in my ear the name...

I get to talk about sex a lot, but whenever the topic of love comes up I feel I have no entitlement to talk about it. After all in last five years or so I have been in love too many times. Sometimes I lose count and hence feel less legitimate to talk about it. Legitimacy, a strange word, which decides on the basis of average how we individually should behave. Granted, of all the loves that I felt, many were infatuations, but that does not discount my legitimacy to talk about it. As I did experience love, this truth came to me last night in a very strange still mundane way. And hence I sit down to write about my love, fragmented stories from this period have been told to so many but I never felt I have the right to talk about love. But today I know I do. I am listening to a song, a love song, written a century back, there is something magical in the voice and the instruments, as it broke open the darkness in me and the pure flow of joy makes me smile, though he is not with me, and we have no intention of getting together. But still love existed and that is the joy. The song “whisper, tell me in my ears the name that plays in your soul” took me back to a small room, with just one bed and a desk, and that damp feeling. It was his room in his residence, it took me back to the smell and feel of that room, and took me back to that evening when we two first touched each other. Our lips trembled in joy and in fear, fingers intertwined, and heart racing. We both made love to other people before, but in that moment everything was new, the pain, the longing, and the fact that finally we were there, “tell me, pour in my ears the name that fills your soul”.

I do not know why am I writing this today, not to validate, not to justify and not to prove, I just felt, it is a story worth telling. Everything in our love actually started with a song, his first text to me, after talking online and receiving my one sided texts for a long one year, was a song. That evening in November, looking at the setting sun, I sent him a text, a line from an old love song “I will not tie you with my charm…” and after couple of minutes the magic happened, he replied, from the same song “let me tie you with my love”. I was 29 he 25, but the story seems so juvenile. Then we met, and love happened so naturally. Though he always told me my driving to his place at the middle of the night on his birthday, with a small cupcake, and forgetting to get a matchbox and hence calling him to ask if he has one as I pretended to be a forgetful new smoker did the magic. On that cold January night we fell in love.

We were different, we still are, very, and we fought. He would hardly show his emotions, and it was left to me to know what he felt by looking at his eyes, ah! Those dark-deep eyes! I did read his emotions every time. We found a song for us, our love and our fights, once again an old one “I lose you every moment, oh my love! To find you anew”. I remember our trip together to the forest of North Bengal, in the train we wanted to share a seat, but could not because other people were there before us. We looked at each other and listened “I lose you my love every moment, to find you anew” the whole way. That trip was magical, the walks we took by the river on a spring full moon night, the cold air, and our walks without a single spoken word, but sharing thousand thoughts.

Then I remember the day we broke up, or may be the day before, we two separated by thousands of miles, and millions of misunderstandings and rage and anger. I was listening to a song, “you have me my love but still fear to lose” and I had to call him at the middle of his work day, just to tell him about the song, and then to break up. He did not fight, as he would never show emotions, and in a long time I refused to read his emotion, after all those dark deep eyes were not in front of me.

Several years have passed since we broke up, we have a very strange and bitter relationship since then. When you are so close and then the closeness is not there, perhaps you do not want anything else. We both have moved on, to me he has come back several times as a thought, a desperation to have him back, an anger, dismissal. For him I have always been a rage, for not reading his emotions that night we broke up perhaps. But how strange it is, after so many years, our love came back to me through a song, “tell me, and whisper in my ears the name that resonates in you”. It came back as calmness, as joy and as an understanding, yes I know what love means. I was in love and I was loved. 

Can we not have a conversation?

I was visiting my friend’s place recently, to meet her two kids, one girl of eight and a boy of three or four. Before going there I was trying to buy gifts for the kids, and trying too hard to buy gender neutral gifts. In a fairly “liberal” world that we think we live in, I found it incredibly difficult in even kid’s gifts that would not impose gender on them. Anyway I ended up buying chocolates, thinking everyone irrespective of gender and race loves chocolate.

When I got to her place, I was warmly greeted by her eight year old daughter, in her cute pink leggings and bouncing pigtail. Though she and I seldom met, she loved hanging out with me and we always managed to have a great time. While we reestablish our friendship and my friend was busy making me tea, I hardly noticed the shy little boy standing in the corner and looking at us. I did not even notice his presence until the time came when I realized I actually did not give the kids their gifts!! So I pulled out the packs from my bag and immediately one of the packs was proudly owned by my pig-tailed friend. When I turned to the boy holding the pack out for him, his eyes did light up but he was too shy to come and get it from me. Right then when was thinking how can I make friends with this little chap, I heard his sister harshly taunting him “are you a GIRL or what?” before I could believe my ears, she turned to me and started telling how embarrassing he was, he liked to play with her dolls, liked to wear her clothes, and even sometimes wanted to wear lipsticks, “what a loser he is!” While this eight year old spilled her embarrassment with her brother, I time traveled in past, suddenly I felt the clothes on me are too big and I did not have graying hair or glasses anymore, I was standing in my parents’ drawing room and my father shouting at me “For god’s sake be a MAN”. I did not know what did I do this time, I just felt tears welling up in my eyes, I looked at my sisters for support, and saw them giggling at me mocking. I tried hard to figure out what did I do wrong? Was it because I wore my mother’s necklace the other day when no one was home? Or may be somehow they got to know how I loved wearing my ma’s black and golden sari?  Or maybe because when my sisters and I were playing picnic I chose to be the mother and cook for them? I raced my four year old memory but still could not find what did I do wrong this time? I wish I had the brain of a thirty three year old back then and could say DAMN IT! Maybe I find colorurful outfits more attractive than my dull blue shirt and half pants, maybe I feel close to my mother as she never tells me am weird and so wear her stuff and feel connected to her. Whatever be it I just caould not figure out what did I do wrong and stood there in complete embarrassment. While all these thoughts were storming my brain my friend brought a tray with food and tea, and the aroma of tea dragged me back to present, where I saw the kids enjoying their chocolates, oblivious of all the insults and hurts that just happened two minutes back.  

My friend and I quietly start sipping on our tea and she sensed what was going in my head. After all she has been a big support in my coming out process. So before I could start a conversation, she told me she was fine with the possibility of her son eventually coming out as a gay man, and she would support him always. But this was not the right age for him, he would have to wait until he grew up and understood what it meant. After all I cannot expect her to talk to a 3 year old about SEX! “Wait”, the key word here, wait till he grows up, wait till the society around him tells him he is weird and is wrong and needs to be fixed, wait till he tries to kill himself as he is mad and confused, and finally when the wait is over, that magical day comes, when suddenly he gathers all his courage and wisdom to go against everything and in spite of fearing losing his closest friend, his mother, he tells her while they eat breakfast “ma I like men”. And then she will support him, will embrace his brokenness and his fear of everything around him.

 But he has to wait till that point, as homosexuality is of course all about sex and we cannot have that conversation to a 3 year old! I at least feel glad that when and if the time comes she will be there for him, that’s a big relief.

But while she kept telling me how inappropriate it was to talk about sex to her son till he can decide for himself, my mind got stuck on the phrase “wait till he understands”. When did I first understand that I like men, when I was five and at my cousin’s wedding I saw this 25 year old guy and I really wanted to talk to him? When I was eleven and my neighbour, who was twelve back then, came to me and asked me if I wanted to play a new game that he “invented” and then undressed me and kissed me and I did not know what it was but still loved it and wanted more? Or when blood rushed to my penis making it hard and weird when I heard my sister telling us how her handsome class mate looked in his shorts showing off his muscular-hairy legs? When did I first realize that I do not belong to the statistically significant 95% of the society? When I was told as a three year old that as the only Banerjee male kid I will one day marry a nice girl and will make my family proud by having male kids with her and I felt then and there I do not want to do that and at the same time felt wrong and guilty for already disappointing my whole family? When did I realize that I was wrong? When someone told me I should not like art as am a man and should only talk about sports and I knew I had no interest in that but still kept pretending that I liked it. Not entirely because I was scared to “come out” as that phrase had no meaning back then, but as I sincerely believed I was wrong.

I realize I have no specific date when I realized that I like men, but what I know is I always liked them, it was long before I became a sexual being, long before I started understanding words like heteronormative, gender identity and sexual fluidity. I know I cannot be critical to my family and friends as they had no clue about my sexuality until I told them, or maybe they did not want to know. But at least they have been loving and understanding enough to give me their warmth and support when I came out. But I think I can ask them for a favour, do not wait till your child is broken and is twenty something, till they attempt suicide several times, till they convince themselves that they are wrong and pretend straight, do not wait so long that they are too scared to fall in love. Just have a conversation, as for sure homosexuality is just not about having a sex talk with a three year old. 

Matsyanyaya

For a change today when I write, I do not write as a person of colour looking through his kaleidoscope in to a very white western world. Instead I look without any colour, being a species as complex and diverse as one can ever wildly imagine and simply name them Humans. My writing as usual is an outcome of my day to day interaction with people I have met in a continent which is predominantly white for last four years and through my conversation with my friends.

So the other day I was walking with my friend, a very white man. We both were making racist jokes, but what I suddenly realized was that he has to be much more careful about his choice of words even around his friend than I have ever been. That made me wonder how necessary is this political correctness in our everyday conversation? It is true in recent past parts of the white race have done terrible things to people of different colours, but expecting them to be apologetic all the moment of their existence seems too much to me, especially knowing they personally did not do anything to harm a race.  In fact, I even believe if the white race came together and tried to end the “atrocities” of the coloured races of present day as they tried to do in the past, the former group has a big chance of being at the receiving end considering the coloured people constitute the majority of this world. And on the other hand it is not that in the history of our species, the whites are the only one who have colonized, brutalized, vandalized and everything terrible to other races. It has happened again and again, whenever there was a disbalance of power in this world. The apparently more powerful has invaded the meek one again and again, and all our hands are stained in blood, some is fresh and some has faded away a long back. There is a wonderful word in Sanskrit to describe this animal instinct in us, Matsyanyaya, the instinct of the big fish to gulp down the small ones. And the Hindu tradition justifies the presence of laws and Government and even political correctness to prevent Matsyanyaya because this is not a very desirable situation and hence needs to be prevented from happening.   I do still understand that political correctness is important at spaces out of respect but I would rather make those internalized habits rather than things that you are just supposed to do to have a face in this apparently “liberal” society we live in.

With that key word, “liberal” I move to my next experience. Every time I had to come out in recent years, and if I were coming out to a hijab wearing dark skinned woman I always anticipated hostility whereas when I was doing the same to a brightly make up clad white woman I always thought it would be easier. Interestingly in my personal experience, all coloured people I came out to, they all surprised me by being extremely accepting and made me extremely uncomfortable by making me realize that I have a big bias against my on “sub-species” when it comes to taking them as open individuals. On the other hand I had at least two experiences where the “expected” open race reacted in a way that did not exactly express acceptance. So I wonder if we put too much pressure on these poor white folks by expecting them all to be liberal, accepting and inclusive in their thoughts. After all they all are a product of a damaged social system as we are at the other side of the “darker” world.

What I take away from the history that as a species we all have written is we all have done terrible thing, and we have never learned from it ever. May be it is our time to realize the meaning of the word “Matsyanyaya” from the depth of our hearts for a change and not blame each other for doing wrong. Rather accept that we all have done wrong and learn from it. This I believe will help us, who have been betrayed recently heal and take away the burden of mandatorily being “liberal” from another race. 

Yoga, ganja, meditation, samosas or more?

I have met couple of people who want to experience the “Indian lifestyle” if they could. I never thought about that statement very deeply ever. But then another friend of mine told me the iceberg analogy of culture very recently, and I started thinking about the “Indian lifestyle”. For people who are not familiar with this analogy it says just like the tip of the iceberg does not actually give an impression of the extent of the real thing, the exposed and ever changing “tip” of any culture is its clothes, food, music and art which assimilates from everything around. Now if I take away the food and the colourful clothes and the music and the great art of India away, I wonder if any of my foreign friends will have any clue what Indian culture is actually about! It is even hard for me to think what exactly this “Indian lifestyle” then will be. But for sure we do not wake up and take an elephant or camel ride to the bathroom where we shower with exotic spices and then wear gold threaded clothes and once again ride a very compassionate Royal Bengal Tiger and go to a yoga class and meditate the whole day only taking break to smoke ganja! On the other hand, I personally had no experience waking up in a slum with my twenty siblings and shitting in open air and then going out for begging the whole day at the traffic lights. So it comes down to the fact that I have no exotic lifestyle to share with anyone. My mornings used to be pretty much the same in Indian as it is here in North America, sans the heat and humidity. So now that I know my cultural heritage is not entirely the food that I eat, or the music that I listen to, the question becomes what the hell this cultural heritage is!!

To answer that I will go point by point and try to explain how through simple words and gestures I realized that I come from a different culture. The other day one of my good friends planned to come over around noon with her little kid to help me with cooking for a big event that evening. It was not until two hours before she was going to be there that I realised that I never told her to have lunch with me!! My cultural heritage just assumed that she knew that a lunch time meeting at someone’s place meant having food together! I did text her immediately but alas! It was already too late and she had her lunch. When I told her about my whole assumption she thanked me and told me she will never want to impose on me. And there we stood two cultures, both right at their own points, one very individualistic and the other very communal. And I realized its not the food that makes us different, but it’s the value around the food that makes a big difference.

Then the second is my extreme discomfort with the phrase “you are very kind” even for the slightest thing that I do for my friends, like thinking about them when they are sad or something. Though I can sense what do they mean by “kind” but to me kindness is something much more profound. Somehow the word kind to me personally brings the image of the soft gaze of Buddha the Avalokiteshwara.  To be kind I have to do something extreme, like give blood knowing may be my body will not be able to replenish it. This might be a too extreme example but kindness in my culture is something for which we sacrifice a big part of us.

Now that I have used the key word from an Indian cultural perspective, sacrifice, I should elaborate on that. The whole upbringing of an Individual in India they hear how important is it to live for all and not for your own self, life is about sharing, about giving and not expecting in return. It’s all about finding joy in discovering your own self in everyone and everything, to feel that we are at the core connected. And that is the Indian culture to me, to move from I to we, from my to our and from individual to collective. And in our practice in sharing food, making garments, celebrating festivals, getting married, mourning a loss and even fighting it is all about finding bliss in us.

i woke up this morning and knew there was something very familiar in the air! and now when i am starting to write this essay, i know what it was, it was the writing bug in me that took a long vacation and now is back! so here i am writing about things that does not matter to anyone perhaps but me. life outside this virtual world is lived and loved mostly for others so i will gratify myself here.
  i have started to write on queer issues lately, or queer things that excite me or frustrate me, i will continue on that path. i will narrate a story of moving, and a story of expectation and dreams and of disappointments. for people who already have read my blog before, know where i am from and etc, but i will just give a quick sum  up. i was born and raised in india in a fairly liberal city and family though i was never comfortable accepting my orientation. it was more because we lacked role models there than the fact that i feared my family will be hostile. it is just like the time when the aircraft was not invented but still the idea of flying enticed us. after a long period of self denial and trying to "fix" myself when i finally realized that am "irreversibly damaged" (read born gay), i looked into places where being gay was not that big a deal. as i was in academics the search was simple, start looking for positions to continue with education somewhere in europe or in the states. i started that effort since i was 22 just after finishing undergrad but it worked out when i finished my phd and was 29! by that time i had a pretty stable gay friend circle in my home town, a stable "relation" with the most desirable man in town and a self proclaimed slut. but still escaping the land where no one wants to stand up and be a gay role model was important and hence the long flight to durham north carolina! now people who are not as ignorant and completely imbecile like me would be already laughing their ass off with my selection of the place. but let me tell you my dear with a brown skin and origin in a "third world country" you just do not have much option when you are trying to escape. and then i had this great offer for research from my boss at Duke (as you can see i have capitalized the D of Duke whereas i did not do it for any other place or thing which would grammatically need that. it speaks of my love for that school). so there i was in a small town of southern united states. with students from all over the world, but still very white, southern and twink in appearance. and i have to admit here i always felt attracted to men younger to me, and hence felt certainly delighted to be there. but the shock hit me in couple of months when i realized that damn white kids do not like nearly dead (read 29) brown men!! and hence my constant effort to look good enough for them started. i ran 3 miles 4 days a week, lost 30lb and started looking pretty good actually (not exactly by my standard but a comment that i often received from my friends). but still things remained the same and i mostly remained single, although sex was plenty. so plenty that at times i feared i would definitely catch a bug! anyway the scene was not completely hopeless as i dated couple of guys, fell in love, acted as an ass hole with at least one and was dumped by others (though i still like to feel i dumped them) and most importantly i came out of my decaying closet. now this process needs some attention. once in durham i met a girl, also from my own home town in india, and started to hang out with her quite a bit. i still remember the first day i went to her and her girlfriend's house and saw a picture of two of them on the fireplace mantle, i was shocked!! and yes you have read it right, i was utterly uncomfortable with the picture, but in a positive way. it for the first time gave me a role model of a brown person being openly queer. and then the rest is history. i came out to my family and friends who still loved me and i was this skinny brown fabulous gay man in town. amidst all these changes one thing remained the same, most guys i liked did not like me, and there could be various reasons for that, like am not their type, am obnoxious, not attractive enough or may be THEY ALL ARE RACIST!! and i picked the last one up as that suited my fancy more than any. so i started my campaign against all racist white gay men, and as i could not find the actual people who were racist, may be, i started my campaign with my friends, couple of them were fellow white men. anyway i did not find it important to be visible in gay socializing spaces, though continued to be excessively present at gay hook up places and tried to solve racism by fucking every possible white man who would take it. trust me though pleasurable, it did no good to the racism thing, if it ever existed.
  by this time i had already spent two years in durham, with a pretty big and diverse friend circle and it was time to move on. and during my stay in durham and my constant complain about white gay men being racist a lot of my friends suggested me to move northward where people are happier, calmer and gay marriage is legal. and fortunately i got a great position and government grant in university of calgary! now what do you call this? a joke of the millennium? or the bearded man sitting up there playing with me? really?! calgary of all places in canada?! my god! why didn't anyone tell me that it is like the texas of canada! anyway i moved to calgary, with the hope to meet more accepting people (read good looking gay men) but bummer! calgary though bigger in every way is much, much, much (i can continue adding "much" till my end but rather stop here as you get my point) conservative than durham. the reason could be, after all durham is a university town (however they deny) and hence inherently liberal. anyway after i moved to calgary and withing one month the brutal winter started, i took to my old way of "curing racism" by fucking white men. but in this mad fucking rush one day i had my epiphany, the same bearded guy or my conscience told me, enough, if you want things to change for you and everyone who does not appear in a queer map go out and do something. this time i took the advice, started participating in events and making friends, yay! life is wonderful! no wait i was kidding am still single and hate it that people do not find me attractive. but what i have realized is, if my theory of racism is right, it is partly because we are not visible in gay spaces. and hence i will work my ass off (no sexual connotation but i must not say no to anyone who needs my company as a compassionate man of love) to change that. i am so motivated right now that i think i know why i always came to not very liberal places in north america. may be the divine plan is to make me work for the liberalism! am sure every liberal place of present started like calgary or durham or may be worse and people worked hard to change it. to make a community, to make it welcoming so that when someone from far comes to that place with hope they have their arm stretched out in love. where pride is just not a once a year thing where you dance, walk and get drunk and go home with a stranger you met in the parade. a place where the pride of being able to stand tall and out and be yourself is year long, irrespective of snow and rain and sun. and by doing so you fulfill your moral and ethical obligation to tell people deep in that dark closet that it is fine, we love you even if you want to stay in that closet. if you cannot come out of it, we will go in your closet, close the door and will tell you you are loved. so this i think will be my life now, with a lot of work, a lot of depression, a lot of trail to change and to be loved and of course a lot of hook ups. i embrace it all.

my fragmented thoughts this morning

since last couple of weeks i have been fighting my various "addictions" and "dark feelings" which include my addiction to hooking up and always feeling low and left out. i am not trying this because i have developed any judgment lately, i chose at least the hooking up as part of my life as i somehow wanted to see if monogamy is the answer to happiness. it is an extremely difficult experiment to start with, in a society where couple-hood and monogamy and perfect love is just not advised but worshiped, it is just impossible at times to understand the "observations" that my non-monogamous experiment gave me if those were for real or just a fabrication of "socio-normative"  thoughts ingrained in me. whatever be it for the time being i have realized that as it is impossible to think completely outside the norms, at least for the time being i need to experiment on monogamy and see how it feels. although i am afraid the "positive bias" in this experiment will be equally challenging. 

my life long spiritual and otherwise struggle has been to stop differentiating between the so called good and bad things in the society. i call it spiritual as this same journey takes me to a path were the sense of "self" absolves or in other words the self is reflected in all. once that happens the pain of having and not having theoretically vanishes as there is no difference between me and you. the same way the deep spirituality in me has always told me that there cannot be any bad in this creation. it is just a check and balance, if there is no black there is no white. so essentially calling an emotion or act as negative or dark always bothered me. but once again the socio-normativeness makes me fall in the trap of things which are supposed to be bright and acceptable. 

i was talking to my therapist last morning when she asked me how would my life feel without intellectualizing it. a simple question at the surface but the answer is pretty unconvincing. i just told her i do not know how to just feel without the thought of it being intellectual. is it a handicap that i am born with or it is there in others too? are there people who just feel without the need to make up or break logic?

my coming out monologue

It took me a long 26 years to come out to myself as a gay man and another 3 years on top of that to come out to my family, trust me it was difficult. It was a long and excruciating process where I lost myself several times. I was so lost that at times I convinced myself that I was wrong and I needed to be fixed. The isolation and uniqueness of my feeling was always disturbing. I prayed every night when I went to bed that the next morning when I wake up I should be able to love the right sex, but of course it never worked. It frustrated me when people refused to see that I was a little different than the most around. They made fun of me, told me I will never be successful and will never make anyone proud. I learned to hide myself when I could not kick a football in my sports class when I was ten, and my friends made fun of me, “what a girl you are” they shouted and I retracted in the shell I made for myself. I learned to please everyone else, but me, when my father shouted on me, “be a man for god’s sake” just because I was cooking. I learned to be manipulative when my mother did not acknowledge that I never had interest in girls and to her defense she said “he is too busy with his studies”. But the most frustrating was when my friends did not “believe” my sexual identity just because I did not wear lipstick.

And then one day I snapped, I told myself to hell with everyone, to hell with all the rules and living for others, I will be as gay as it can get. I shouted wearing my skinny jeans and my pink shirt that I am gay! And no it is not because I was raised with two sisters, not because I grew up in a broken family, not because I never liked sports and always liked art, it is simply because I like men. Yes as simple as that, I like men, everything about men, the way we talk, the hair, the smell, the whole body, and there is no need for any justification. After I broke out of my closet, I thought I knew everything about myself, what I like, what I am going to do in next ten years. It seemed the cloud around my life has suddenly disappeared, and there I was, I could imagine myself with my man, my very intellectual and bearded man.

I sincerely believed that life onwards will have a lot of struggle, but less surprises.  And then that night I met him and my world changed again. I knew there was something very odd about him, no one smiles so much for a hook up. “I’m just a little drunk, hope you don’t mind” he said when I asked him why was he smiling all the time. As we started making out and undressing each other, he insisted that i do not take his pants off. "But how would we have sex then" was my immediate response, but he was firm on his point. As i gave up and continued with making out, my mind for some part wondered around for all possible reasons for his not getting naked. It took me actually couple of minutes to actually understand, i was in bed with a trans man. My idea of maleness and manhood has been shaped by the cis-centric society, that attaches ones identity to their genitals. i am a product of that society, my desires run deep and wild with popular gay porn where men have big dicks and they just fuck. It has taken me several months and would take several more years to unlearn gender. But right at that moment, in his arms, while he kissed me, my unlearning had already started. It will be a long journey now, an uneasy one. But i know i can do it.