Lesbians vs. Gays vs. Hinduism vs. Modernity?

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Farzana,

Ashok Row Kavi`s letter is very poignant. As for the rest, my mind crashed navigating the anfractuous path of your logic obscured by the fog of information.

Simplicity is terribly under-rated.

Satire

#172 by FarzanaVersey

`` While the true facts of Godhra remain a mystery ``


Like, may be, more than 25 women and children set themselves ablaze to malign muslim community ?

Oh!!!! how devious they are. Muslims sure deserve a free pass to commit mass murders because the evil non-muslims just commit suicide inorder to malign muslims.

#171:

I had read a comment about the court case against `Dev`. You are right that the case itself is about communal clashes that could flare up. The full story of the legal battle is available on http://www.rediff.com/movies/2004/jun/19dev.htm...I took my time to respond because I wanted to double check.

The Poetry of Healing Doctor, Who Took Time Off to Write, Uses New Book to Chronicle Struggle With Being Gay and Hispanic
The Miami Herald, Inc.; Thursday, February 20, 1997
Fabiola Santiago; Herald Staff Writer

---

Tucked between poetic sentences about love and healing, between lines that speak of death sentences and life choices, is the story of the little boy Rafael Campo used to be. So intertwined are the pain of growing up a gay man in a macho culture and a Cuban in an Anglo world that his memories of alienation meld into one.
When he returned to suburban New Jersey after spending several years living in Venezuela, some of Campo`s new elementary school classmates beat him up. They called him ``faggot,`` or maybe it was ``spic.``

``I cannot remember which,`` Campo writes in his new book of essays, The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor`s Education in Empathy, Identity and Desire (W.W. Norton, $23), a chronicle of his struggle to reconcile being Hispanic and gay.

``My sense that I was in some way different led me to write,`` Campo said during a recent visit to Miami Beach. ``I began writing at a very young age to try to heal the fractures, the differences. The act of writing represented an opportunity for healing. Not only was I different ethnically from my peers, but I began to understand I was different in terms of my sexual orientation as well.``

Born of immigrants

Campo, 32, was born in New Jersey of immigrant parents who met in college. His mother is Italian. His Cuban father came to the United States after the Cuban Revolution. One of his fondest childhood memories is the voice of his father reading him poems in melodious Spanish. Raised in a bilingual household, Campo spent part of his childhood in Venezuela and part in New Jersey, where his impeccable grades in public schools won him scholarships to Amherst College and Harvard Medical School.

``I thought medicine could provide me a camouflage, or shield me from those in the majority who could never understand my being different,`` said Campo, who now teaches and practices medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital of Boston, where he is an internist.

In his book, he writes, ``As a child of immigrants, I imagined that my white coat might make up for, possibly even purify, my nonwhite skin; learning the medical jargon might be the ultimate refutation of any questions about what my first language had been.``

Tried to deny differences

Throughout young adulthood, Campo tried to deny to himself and hide his sexuality and heritage from others. His gnawing need to write made him an even greater target of ridicule, even within his family, who thought writing was ``queer and sissy.``

Medical school, he felt, ``could contain me and straighten me out.`` On campus, he and his friend Jorge Arroyo, who later became his lifelong companion, shut out their sexual feelings for each other by chasing girls like other college men.

``I thought I could cure myself of my own emerging identities; perhaps drinking too much guava nectar and listening too intently to merengues had made me too obviously Cuban, or masturbating too much had made me gay,`` he writes.

Meeting Arroyo, who is Puerto Rican, at predominantly Anglo Amherst brought him closer to his identity as a Hispanic American, Campo said. Their developing friendship and later love -- ``confirming what we had known for almost two years`` -- gave Campo the courage to accept who he was. They`ve been together now for 11 years.

Medicine to literature

And medical school -- a training process he found ``so demanding and dehumanizing, with such disrespect for the suffering people`` -- gave him the motivation he needed to take a risk and do something many considered outrageous. In his third year of medical school, Campo took a detour to go to graduate school and study literature.

In the process, he wrote two books of poetry, The Other Man Was Me, published by Houston`s Arte Publico Press in 1994 and the winner of the National Poetry Series Prize, and What the Body Told. His essays also found readers not in scientific publications, but in prestigious, popular magazines such as The New York Times Magazine and the Boston Review.

In writing The Poetry of Healing, Campo has broken with at least one taboo in the Hispanic community -- the code of silence when it comes to gay lifestyles.

``I don`t think Latin culture is more homophobic than the Anglo culture,`` said Eduardo Aparicio, who publishes Perra, a magazine for South Florida`s Hispanic gay community. ``It`s just that there is a different code of behavior: You don`t flaunt it.

``In the Anglo culture, you verbalize all these things, you talk publicly about sexuality, you demand your rights through laws, you give testimonials on TV,`` Aparicio said. ``But in Latin families, what occurs is an acceptance without talking about the issue. That, however, doesn`t mean there is a rejection. On the contrary, there is almost a sheltering, a need to protect from others. That`s why your mother will tell you, `It`s OK, but don`t tell your cousin or your uncle.` ``

Breaking the silence

Telling his parents he was gay was difficult, but the distance that the silence had put between them was more painful, Campo said.

``Being able to give voice to some of this has allowed me to have a dialogue with them, and they have accepted me,`` Campo said. ``Healing is to love when love seems not possible. They have been able to love me despite this issue, which is still very difficult for them in many respects. My partner, however, has not been so fortunate. His father has practically disowned him.``

Campo said his willingness to reveal himself also has enriched his practice of medicine. His patients, many of whom are Hispanic and are living with HIV, often ask, ``Are you married? Do you have children?``

``I`m very open with them,`` he said. ``I haven`t had a single patient react with anything but acceptance. It`s part of the therapeutic relationship. There is so much power in the ability to talk about issues, to share in suffering. They can understand the pain I felt in being rejected in the same way I try to understand their pain and suffering in living with their illness. It`s amazing how that provides the opportunity for a deepening of the relationship. I think I`m very lucky that way.``

Campo is developing a course on literature and medicine, ``a way to share some of the writing I found so useful.`` He plans to keep writing about how culture and identity affect the healing process.

What he learns every day is so important it must be published, Campo said, despite his fears of others in his profession who may not be so tolerant of differences. After all, he said, he has already conquered his greatest demon.

``Now, I realize,`` Campo said, ``that for a long time, what I had feared most was my own humanity.``

MARICE COHN BAND / Herald Staff TIME TO HEAL: Rafael Campos, a doctor in Massachusetts, reads from The Poetry of Healing, which he wrote in his struggle to identify himself as gay and Hispanic.

CAPTION: photo: Rafael Campos (a)

Jang,

Perhaps one day you`ll write something as humane and intelligent....

sridhar

I respect your faith in Baba, but I think in today`s world you should not shy away from questioning. Others may not look at him in the same manner that you are doing and they have the right to differ, although I agree that it should be in a manner that tends to accomodate you emotions.

More important that this, I think people who are Baba`s disciples should come forward and take the initiative in answering the questions that are asked. Otherwise you will run the risk of being of the same quality who invoke kuran to justify all kinds of heinous things going around. I am sure you dont want to fall into the category of apologists that we see here in hordes.

Not relevant to the topic, but since I mentioned it in one of my posts...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/752851.cms

Patronising Secularism: Watching Dev Through Muslim Eyes
FARAH NAQVI

[ FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2004 12:00:00 AM ]

Hamlavar ban kar aaye the, badshah ban kar raaj kiya ab gaddar ban kar aish karna chahte hain (they came here as invaders, ruled like kings, and now want to have a good time as traitors), declares Om Puri, `the bad cop` in Dev about Muslims. As my (Muslim) friend and I cringe in the darkness of the cinema hall in Ahmedabad, the titter of laughter which greets this grotesque description hits us. It`s the way people laugh at an inside joke. `We` are on the outside. Nothing has changed in Gujarat.


The lines are sharply drawn. And so, we watch the rest of the film, feeling very much like two `Muslims`, surrounded by a sea of tittering `Hindus` whose first instinct — sympathise with the paranoid Muslim-hater Om Puri — is only gradually won over by the secular moral narrative of the Hindu hero Dev (played by Amitabh Bachchan). But even this is a sad, compromised victory. For what Dev peddles is `soft` secularism, the preferred parivar version of Gujarat 2002.

Dev is about Gujarat. Make no mistake about it. Ignore Govind Nihalani`s protests that his film is `really` about Mumbai, Meerut, Bhiwadi and every other riot in the country. (That the location of the film is Mumbai rather than Gujarat is a matter of irrelevant detail.)

The `meaning` of a film is determined by its context, by how its audiences choose to `read` it. Certainly in Gujarat, perhaps elsewhere too, Dev is being `read` as the film version of the events of February-March 2002. And to those events Nihalani has done a grave injustice. For those events were not a riot, by any stretch of the imagination. They were a one-sided massacre. And Muslims were a cowering herd, not a violent mob. Yet, Dev has scenes of Muslim mobs retaliating, daring to torch Hindu shops (an acceptable version of events — communal violence as a clash between two `equal` enemies). Far worse, Nihalani reinforces the action-reaction justification for the carnage. (The burning of the Sabarmati coach at Godhra and the killing of the kar sevaks is here substituted by a motorcycle bomb which kills devotees at a Ganesh temple.)

While the true facts of Godhra remain a mystery (which we hope our new and esteemed railway minister will soon unravel), Nihalani does not engage with such bothersome detail. In his version, an evil Muslim don is responsible for the bomb blast which begins the cycle of revenge-massacre of Muslims. It`s all justified. The final approval comes from the mouth of Dev himself, the moral exemplar, the police officer with a conscience who embodies the secular spirit of `Indian (Hindu) nation`. When Farhan, an angry young Muslim played by Fardeen Khan, tells Dev to stop offering sympathy when the latter`s hands are tainted with the blood of Muslims, a furious Dev reminds his misguided Muslim friend of the Ganesh temple bomb blast, par is saare fasad ki jad kya thi ? (What started it all?) Tab kiske haath khoon se range the?`` (Whose hands were tainted with blood then?) he asks.

The audience hums in approval. Farhan is silenced. Godhra as the cause for Gujarat 2002 (the fasad ki jad ) is upheld. Dev invokes the `liberal` sentiment: ``It was truly terrible to kill so many Muslims, but really that burning at Godhra was so grizzly and somehow `they` always seem to start it all...`` Not only are Muslims blamed for the carnage, they are responsible for catalysing pretty much anything bad which happens in the film. Even when Muslims refuse to lodge FIRs despite being raped and pillaged, the fault lies with one of them — the Muslim don-leader has instructed them not to. (Anyone who has stood in Gujarat`s police stations and watched a hostile police blatantly refuse to lodge any complaints from Muslim survivors will fume at Nihalani`s storyline).

At another level, Dev is a narrative about an Indian nation whose salvation lies in soft, patronising secularism. The upright police officer mouths platitudes about the samvidhan or Constitution. He will not violate the samvidhan at the behest of the wicked CM, he declares time and again, with portraits of Gandhi-Nehru prominent in the backdrop. It would be fine if things stopped here. But his secularism is made greater, its generosity even more generous, because he has ample reason not to worry too much about the samvidhan . Dev lost his young son to a terrorist`s bullets. (The religious affiliation of the terrorist is never specified. Nihalani leaves it to our imagination.) In this, Dev is India, a nation wounded by Muslim terrorists. Yet, Dev is magnanimous enough to embrace all religions in his secular person. Secularism, the narrative seems to suggest, is not a matter of right but of patronage by a large-hearted and forgiving nation-state. Indeed, so great and inclusive is this secularism, that Dev even begins to see Farhan as his dead son, wooing him away from the influence of Muslim don Latif.

Finally, Farhan sees the truth. Only in accepting the moral leadership of Dev, the high secular Hindu, can the Muslim community get justice and salvation. Farhan (read as legitimate Muslim anger) is neutralised. Long live secularism.

Dev is insidious. It takes one of the most brutal communal carnages in modern India, and seeks to resolve its dilemmas by resorting to stereotyped image-making about Muslims, distorting the events of Gujarat, and peddling a watered-down, patronising version of the secular principle. At best, it`s another offensive film but one whose secularism will appeal to far too many people.

is a journalist expected to, at the very least, retract his/her claim when evidence is provided to the contrary?

i am referring to #113 and #144.

#168. . .anytime to accomodate your ignorant, nonsensical, toxic, long hot-winded responses.

#161 by Saminasha

that was beautiful. Did not understand it but beuty is about experiencing and not necessarily about understanding. Now I shall go see ``Paris is Burning`` again. Thanks Samina.

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#151

could i have expected anything different from u people?

brilliant response, sir. absolutely. please don`t even bother explaining what that means, because your passions on chowk are quite evident. it doesn`t even merit a defense, except to comment that to lump myself and urstruly in the same category, nay, even in the same nationality would be an insult to urstruly. for goodness` sakes man, there are people here who think you speak intelligently. please don`t prove them wrong.

So what if people are gay. I am gay and have lived in Pakistan as one. While I`ll probably never go back - boy did I have a great time there. Actually us gays are probably the most secular and tolerant folks back there - maybe you need more of us.