Things in Life

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When I was a kid, in school, I first came to know about the women's rights movements.

As I did not have a sister, my interactions with women outside family were limited. If one has a sister, interactions are normally more as sister's friends keep coming.

Studying in a boys' school also added to this non-interaction. 

The idea of equality in intelligence struck me very early. I made it a point not to mix with girls who are not intelligent, and who do not love mathematics.

As I grew up, the idea that rights are to be earned occurred to me. 

Half a decade in Culture Studies strengthened that idea. Inborn stubbornness stopped me from accepting reality sometimes.

An urge from within provoked me to read Second Sex. 

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Sooner older and later feminist texts followed, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Judith Butler. 

That led me to writing an MA thesis on the development of feminism in the only urban society I knew at that time - Calcutta.

The idea drove me to a utopic distortion - a genderless society. Along with that, Foucault's History of Sexuality stepped in.

And my last full time girl friend walked away :)

Engel's ideas on private property and family, and its connection to gender, and my limited reading on Evolutionary Biology urged me to apply the half-baked thoughts to my own life.

Much later, when a friend from film school equated love with BDSM in everyday life, for the majority, I came back to the real ground.

A lot of writing by relationship experts showed me, in a renewed way, the politics of romantic relationship, in modern Indian society, and abroad.

I still remember, I argued with a documentary filmmaker and a French doctor, in Calcutta Zoo, on an individual's endless capacity to love. I said, it is very much possible to love two or more persons at the same time, and with equal intensity. I tried to hate private property and the idea of marriage, and of family.

But I forgot it is one thing to search for a norm, an ideal condition; and it is completely a different thing to deny the reality.

Denying the reality, for an ideal, is more dangerous than owing allegiance to that reality.

Loving many persons at the same time with equal intensity may be possible. But, showing that love through action may not be. One can not be with many at the same time, unless one is god.

If my partner is with someone else, at the time of my need, it would be pointless.

The idea of marriage, family and private property evolved not for no reason. 

That does not mean equality should not be sought.

As entropy rules the world, it is to be sought repeatedly, in each generation of our civilization.