The Supreme Court’s judgment on gay sex quite predictably triggered furious reactions online. One comment, in particular, caught my eye as it compared this regressive verdict to the days when being left-handed was considered taboo in India.
I will say this for sure; it was pretty hard coping as a child especially when everyone around used their right hand. Being a southpaw, I did not think too much of it till kids in school would giggle and point out to this oddity. They reminded me that I was, well, using a dirty hand to eat and write with. After all, what do most people use their left hands for?
Things did not get any better when I discovered that my classmate, a fellow southpaw, had been forcibly persuaded by his mother to use his right hand. The result was a stammer that just about refused to go away. Thank god for my folks, they refused to believe that their son was a freak even though an uncle tried very hard to get me to eat with my right hand for a week.
By the end of the day, I just had to get used to the fact that I was going to be a minority in the classroom or at the dining table in weddings. It was also around this time that cricket entered my mind space and the first point of reference was the visiting West Indies team of 1974. Wow, their skipper, Clive Lloyd, was a leftie and so were Roy Fredericks and Alvin Kallicharan. And there was Bernard Julien bowling left-handed too. Suddenly, I did not feel so isolated any longer and perhaps this explains why I am still partial to the West Indies as a cricketing nation.
But this narrative is not about my traumatic days as a left-hander. The SC verdict on homosexuality only reminded me of our deep-rooted prejudices which start real early in childhood. If I was ribbed for being a leftie, some friends who were considered effeminate were quickly branded eunuchs. Likewise, those who were fat, short or myopic were taken to the cleaners. And all this when we were barely in our teens! Why on earth did we act like this? Wasn’t there someone to tell us that what we were doing was cruel and unacceptable?
Well, it took years to understand that we kids just picked up these behavioural patterns from an ecosystem which pretty much endorsed these lofty views. Hence, if you did not use your right hand, you deserved to be ostracised. And if you were not macho enough, you were branded a eunuch. It was a black and white space with no shades of grey.
I would like to believe India has moved on considerably since then but as the SC judgment shows, we still have a lot of catching up to do before we can say that we have completely evolved as a nation. I still remember how my journalism classmates from Africa had a rough time beyond the classrooms where they had to put up with racism taunts. Not much has changed since then and even now, we look at coloured people with derision. So long as the Fair & Lovely ads play out on TV, there is still a long way to go before we can claim to have completely evolved.
What bothers me about the verdict on gay sex is that this is a pronouncement from the highest court in the land. If I was branded a minority in my early days in school for being left-handed, I always had my parents to turn to for emotional support. But what does someone do when they are deemed criminals just because the law says so? And, pray, what happens to all those out on the streets stalking and killing women?
It is all very nice to talk about globalisation and the growing power of India. However, true convergence with the rest of the world can only happen when this country buries its archaic attitudes and becomes a tolerant and progressive nation. We may have the super rich in their Bentleys who will make it to the cover of top business magazines but compassion for our own people should be top priority. Till then, we will just remain a lawless nation with no sense of what is right and wrong.