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.