I am sure, you have by now, aligned yourself to the
realities of the Susan chronicles. If not, after you have read this post, do
please stop by and read. (See below).
There is absolutely no reason why anyone, worth their salt
in terms of wanting to break out and form their own social group, should study
Sociology in India. You may want to know the reason why.
After spending a lifetime fighting the system and trying to
set sail on her own, our protagonist, Susan, highly empowered by Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged and her well endowed Sociology teacher at college, she decided that if
Dagny Taggart of Atlas Shrugged could do it, so could she. She broke all rules
including the biggest one called family, and formed a single unit, all by
herself, only to get lost in the maze of the family once again. When she went
back to her teacher many years after, because she could not forget the impact
her bosom made on her, and many of her friends lurking around in dark and dingy
corridors, her teacher could not place her in her mind.
“But I was your favourite student, wasn’t I whom you pursued
to do my Masters?” Susan interrogated feeling rather annoyed to have lost her
place in her teacher’s mind.
“Oh of course,” her teacher quipped, ‘I have a favourite in
every batch. Besides you went on to do your Masters in real life. That is real
Sociology.’ Susan was dashed!
Imagine, dear reader, having come a long way, all Susan
heard was a list of students who had married, had children and were one big
family just like her teachers. Her teacher confessed she could not relate to
the one Susan had been telling her about – the life of a single woman, singled
out in society, living in a maze of other families, all going along as life
should be, going with the flow! There was Sunita, getting married one day, and
Krutika having a baby the next and Mala becoming a grandmother on yet another occasion,
it was evident from the scene around her, that Susan had got it all wrong, in
the first place. What made it worse is that the family of ‘singletons’ coming
together to make one big family, all single, but not ‘paired and cohabitating’
in the real sense of the term, had also taken a nose dive somewhere and got all
mixed up, in butch and femme talk and landed in the bed with dramatic
consequences – Who is going to be the man? And if one was a ‘man’, was ‘he’
going to read the papers all day and not participate in household chores? The
argument can go on and on, but in a nutshell, getting out of one accepted
structure and evolving another often undergoes a ‘me too’ first, which is
exactly where, Susan’s problem was. Clearly she had not got out of one, only to
walk into the other, where the figures dominating the unit, were clearly butch
and femme, with defined roles which sometimes went out of hand.
“Are you not supposed to be that docile doormat, lady in
waiting? But you are showing me a side of yourself, you never displayed while
we were courting? You are like a man!”
“I am not a man! You are the man, but you behave like a
woman!”
Let us not go into the philosophical angle of such
discussions. Suffice it to say that gender is fluid and what you might be and
feel this moment, may not be the same the next. There is no argument on this. Did
we not hear about this highly philosophical adage, change is the only reality
and this too shall pass?
Susan is in a mess. The more she has tried to get out of the
system, the more it has followed her. Breaking out has not been easy, but what
is harder for her to accept is that the brand new ‘family’ she was planning to
make, consisting of singles only, has eluded her so far and again and again,
she is at crossroads, which one to negotiate is always a tough choice. Most
often one that makes her bounce back to where she started from.
Needless to say, there is going to be much hullabaloo on the 24th in India’s capital New Delhi and many are going to walk the streets demanding, their place under the sun and rejoicing in it. Susan is contemplating joining them, but she is wary and wants to know, whether they have really broken the cast, really, or are they all going to scream and shout in broken voices like adolescent boys, the winter having caught their throats nicely.
There is a plus, in all this though, Susan has concluded. While the
rest of Delhi is busy getting married, having children, grandchildren, and
going with the flow, the Delhi Pride March may let out a big sneeze, and many
of its traditional junta might catch
the cold!
Even then, there is a disturbing voice nagging behind her.
“Don’t be so cock-sure and stop being so butch!”
Stop by to read: The Susan Chronicle I
Video credit: Queer Ink
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