From gay abandon to gay acceptance!

From gay abandon to gay acceptance!

These days I do feel very often as if I am a distant cousin of Rip Wan Winkle! You know what I mean. It is as though we have been asleep for a century and wake up to a totally new world with which we are not quite familiar. Many happenings of the modern days make me feel anachronistic. Sixty seven years in the history of mankind is like a speck of dust in the vast Sahara or even smaller than that. At the same time, the same sixty seven years make me feel more ancient than the Cro-Magnon man! How times have changed! When pictures like Do Bigha Zamin and Mother India were released, critics raved about the acting of Balraj Sahna, Nirupai Rai and Nargis in those unforgettable movies. Today, critics reviewing trash like Kambakht Ishq rave about the innumerable kissing scenes of Akshay Kumar, Denise Richards and Kareena Kapoor!

When we saw the petite Audrey Hepburn acting as a lissome princess escaping from the rigours of a royal life for an awesome ‘Roman Holiday’, the gay abandon with which she relished her freedom made us speechless and again as the flower girl Elisa Dolittle in My Fair Lady singing ‘All I want is a room somewhere’ without a care in the world, we were struck by her joie de vivre. As Kamalji has pointed out in his thread ‘I was a gay once’, it was a kind of existence where we were soaked in the joys of the present without any thought of the next moment. Max Babi, a native of Gujaret, in a poem titled, ‘The din of the weeds’, writes,
The vineyards after the harvest
sleep like comatose mothers.
The palm trees sway and dance
with their minds elsewhere.
Only the weeds due now for a
total genocide, celebrate life in
gay abandon.
The word gay signified an existence where even the fear of death had no effect on the individual.

The Rip Wan Winkle that I am, I wake up from my inexorably long slumber and what do I see? The word gay is again being mentioned all around but not in the way I had known it as a picturesque word denoting an even more picturesque existence. Today the word represents a community that is trying to emerge from the shadows to fight for its legal recognition. I am too naïve to comment on the ethics of this phenomenon but as a man who has been brought up in a culture that believes that God has blessed every living being with a feeling of sexual attraction towards the opposite sex only for the purpose of procreation, I find it hard to imagine a scene where Noah would only admit pairs of species of the same sex into his blessed Ark!

More than anything else, I am sad that this word would no longer represent jollity and unbridled mirth. This has become a word that a puritan would hate to utter in public and the ‘impuritan’, if I may use such a word, would consider as symbolic of his hard-won freedom! I concede that the people who fight for it may have good reasons for their fight. After all, who am I to sit on judgment over an issue that has become a fashion to defend these days even by people who loath it?

I’ll tell those people, who find it hard to digest, a story that I read recently. There was a hardcore orthodox Brahmin family of South India. A young prodigy from this family distinguished himself so much in academic pursuits that he soon found his way to US for advanced studies. On one of his vacations to Chennai, he told his parents that he was in love. The panic stricken parents feared the worst. They started imagining the worst. Was it an American? An Afro-American? In a trembling voice, they asked the boy if the object of his love an American and when he said no, they felt very relieved. When the parents further asked if it was a Brahmin or non-Brahmin, the boy confirmed that it was an orthodox Brahmin family like theirs.

The greatly relieved parents asked the boy when they could see the girl to which the boy replied, “Girl? There is no girl. It’s a boy that I am in love with!” All hell broke loose in the family but they soon had to reconcile to the inevitable. When someone asked the grandma of the boy for her opinion, she said ‘Who bothers if it is a boy or girl? Be thankful that he has chosen his partner from a Brahmin family’!

 

My dear Vijji
Thanks a lot for being the first to write a FB! And it made me feel very warm and glowing!
I am glad you liked it!
Sri

 

Dear Viji
I am happy that the first FBs are both from Vij(j)is! Viji is a guarantee of success. Hope this thread of mine succeeds and it finds readers. I am happy you liked the post. I mentioned that story in the end with a purpose. That grandma represents the quintessence of Indian mind. For her the community is more important than the basic issue! I like her ready acceptance of a very controversial decision merely because he is of her own community!
Sri

 

Dear Sri
Just as I was typing out this thread with one finger as usual, my grand daughter entered. I panicked and covered my PC with a towel. She ripped it open and saw the title. I just wilted under her 'Et tu Brutus' look!

You are right about how youngsters perceive this word. It will never again signify a crefree soul taking wings!
Sri

 

Dear Chithra
You have already been lodged in the Hall of Fame and number of FBs should no more be a concern for you as in the case of ordinary mortals like me. HOF is like the slippery 'uriyadi' for me!

The grandma of our story has already gone a step further and says, 'boy or girl, it is from our own community'! I agree with you that it is worrisome. Unfettered freedom should make people more responsible. Years back, gay relationship was cited as the major reason for AIDS. It is strange that the country is going gaga over the Delhi court's verdict! Freedom is great but at what cost?
Sri