“Something needs to be done.” Kuchh toh karna padhega.
It used to be a secret elite mantra. A sorcerer’s trick for the psyche. A neurological hackathon. For days when you were hyper aware that the world around you was maybe turning slightly worse than how you’d first found it, murmuring these words could do magic for your confusion and rage.
I was in twelfth. A girl was born nearby. The family was upset, I’d heard. Those who weren’t upset were, at best, being wise. “Ab kya ho sakta hai,” the wise ones had said to the family, gloom taped to their lips. By reminding the parents about the humbling, practical dead-end that was their fate, the wise ones had unsuccessfully hoped to cheer them up. Meanwhile their two other daughters, in between their quarrels for who would give their sister her first ever gift, were trying to make sense of the heaviness floating around.
It was a maddening feeling. To be around adults obsessing over what was born, instead of who. To be around these middle aged children who’d waited nine months in excitement and anticipation, not for a new life that they would soon care for and nurture, but for an embodied penis with a personality on the side. To be so consumed by social norms that you were taking it out on a two minute old. And to do it in full awareness of kids who looked up to you.
I don’t remember much past that. I remember the blue and white hospital walls and the nauseating dissonance within them. An unfamiliar familial farce at play.
And I remember the magic spell: Kuchh toh karna padhega. It chanted itself in my head, like it always does. And it worked, like it always used to. Melting any rage building within my muscles, turning any will to protest into harmless, timeless conviction. I could now not act, not do anything, and simultaneously tell myself that I will speak up eventually, when the time is right. It worked.
Like it had worked when school was proving to be a hard place to be effeminate (a shocking realisation at that time, even though it’s so very obvious now, as most of life is to someone living for the first time). Like it had worked when a traumatised homeless woman had found her way into our streets and the whole neighbourhood was treated to mythical grapevines of her origins and past. Like it worked every time my religious broker proudly told my surname to landlords who, I’m sure, wished to ensure I wasn’t an Ali or an Aziz. It worked every time I took a metro and found myself caught in the web of awareness that some men’s eyes had woven around every woman stuck in the tube with them. To the pains of social malice, Kuchh toh karna padhega worked like a balm. Nothing needed to be done right away. Present problems could be bookmarked with hope, and left to be solved later.
A month back, a christian school principal in Pune was beaten, clothes torn, and chased in his own building by criminals whom the newspapers garlanded with the term hindu ‘activists’. Just yesterday, a gujarati muslim girl student who came first in her courses was removed from the list of students congratulated in the academic ceremony. In state after state, governments bulldozed the houses of people without any notice or court warrant or legal precedent, making us the only country besides Israel to have a social elite cheering at others’ loss and misery. And I still can’t bring myself to express what happened in Manipur in more words than these.
We don’t live in 2014. There is no garb of decency hiding the sickness of our society. Our darkness has always roamed free in our families, politics and social gatherings, but it had never been handed the mic, never been allotted the centre stage, never been pampered with powers to shape our common futures. The social disease, the psychological corruption, the moral infection of purity and hierarchy that governs Manu’s cult has now spread like a pandemic, swallowing any decency that the traditions of bhakti, shraman and tapasya had hoped to nurture. A land of diversity, of a rare experiment in human unity has been dissected across every possible difference and turned into one point four billion units, all fighting to come to the top, or at least avoid the bottom.
In such a deeply insecure society, where everything outside your control is the only thing defining how you will be treated, in such a deeply ailing nation that is not ready to face its diagnosis, ‘something needs to be done’ doesn’t do anything anymore. The magic phrase reeks of an era bygone, when resistance was still a virtue, and not legally and socially damned.
In the name of religion, caste, community and society, generations of families have been destroying their mental health, they’ve been trading love for control. Kids were birthed for status, they were assigned jobs for status, and they were married like cattle for status. Every move was to ensure a rise up the ladder of hierarchy, every action was to signal purity and superiority. Domestic violence, female foeticide, honour killing, all synonyms, all the same tools of control: the great tuitions before society’s annual report cards could decide if you passed or failed.
And now that this disease of control and submission has found its way to the reigns of power, now that the fungal has been confused with the familiar, and voted to rule and ruin us, we have found a new mantra, the deriding ‘what can be done’, kuchh nahi kar sakte. It is the three wise monkeys, all bundled in one. Those whose superiority is being embalmed, massaged and caressed, and whose decades old fantasies of having a country in their religious and caste image is being tickled, are so lulled by the charm, they seem to have forgotten that their pensions are shrinking, their kids are losing opportunities of good jobs and education, and their retirements are turning smokey with smog and blood.
The society had always been sick, but now all the white blood cells, all lymph nodes, all warriors of our immunity have been crushed, bulldozed, lynched, horse-traded, internet shutdowned, burned, maimed, dissected.
But there is a way to heal. There is a sanjeevani booti to reverse the destruction unleashed by the diseases of our ego. The task is herculean, because it needs, not one, but all of us to lift a mountain on our heads. (The truth is we’re as alive as the hope we carry. And I aim to live my life fully alive. I do believe a much better world can be created, a perfect world can truly be designed. Heaven can be dragged onto earth, and anything we set our laborious bodies and minds to can be transformed to reality with the right direction, discipline and focus. And the old mantra was right all along: something needs to be done. So it is time to face our disease, and do what’s right.)
The sickness of superiority meets its match in, first and foremost, humility. The upper castes must collectively abandon our notions of the past, and with it all claims of superiority, of pride, of chauvinism. We may feel that we had ancient languages, pristine culture, holy traditions, but so did every other civilisation. We must look at history, not as trophies of ancestral pride, but as a study of where we came from. By finding our humble place in historic pastures, we must strike an axe at the altar of supremacy. And as all philanthropies, this charity too shall begin at home.
If we are to set right what’s been wronged on the national stage, we need to start by ending the dictatorships of our families. We need to break the controls elders have on our bodies and minds, and we must claim ownership over what we will do with our lives, especially our married lives. We need to assert our individualities, our self image, our self respects. Withhold your labour of love, care and attention if the ones who claim to have the same blood as you don’t treat you with respect. Thunder with who you are, reclaim your citizenship in your families, and break the tradition of unwarranted surrender to parents, partners and children.
The age of entitlement over another’s soul can and must be quashed. By reclaiming spaces of self respect around us, we will find ourselves pushing for spaces of respect for all. By abandoning ages of traditions around purity, distinction and greatness, we will allow the light of reason, science, humility and humanity to come in. By making India Manu’s personal hell, we will make it the heaven on earth we’ve always dreamed of but never dared to work towards.
We’re at a crossroads we’ve never faced before. There are no kings to overthrow, there are no foreigners to kick out. The greatest calamity we face, the threat to our collective futures, is our own demons, our own grand fantasies come to life. What can be done, the hopeless, the ignorant and the opportunists amongst us say, as we silently milk the benefits of these horrors, bribed and mimed for a few years, till the hate machines inevitably turn against us. What can be done, we say, knowing fully well that all the work to be done is ours. Something needs to be done, the rest of us realise. And it needs to be done now.
Kuchh toh karna padhega. Abhi. Issi waqt.
So are you in?
This is a thought provoking piece and at the same time it fills me with hope. If all of us decide to do something, even if it is a miniscule change, together we can move mountains.