Of This and That

It’s raining here incessantly as if the Monsoons have been mandated to empty their entire cargo of clouds solely over Dharamshala. Although it is undeniably beautiful outside: all smoky and mysterious and Gothic; it does tend to get boring for one is confined to one’s coop of a home by the constant rain. And to top it all, when this coop is dark and musty and full of fungi having a field day in the humidity laden atmosphere, it does make one feel a tad bit depressed and a whole bit lethargic.

Well, every cloud has a silver lining and therefore, thanks to the depression and the lethargy, I discovered TEDx talks on YouTube. Impressed by these thought-provoking discourses on varied thought-provoking topics, I snooped around the Internet and learnt that the TED is a non-profit (??) organisation that deals with ideas and their dissemination. I binge watched a few TEDx talks viz. one by Sue Klebold, mother of the Columbine High School shooter, another by Monica Lewinsky (yes, she of the Bill Clinton fame), a talk on laughter by a cute Neuroscientist about how it comes in two forms - social and spontaneous and one called “A Queer Vison of Love and Marriage” by a queer married African American couple. I say queer, not because the husband was a transgender man (a ‘trans’, who had transitioned from a woman to a man) and the wife a heterosexual woman, but because such a union is unusual, strange. I would never use the term to refer to their sexual orientation for it is derogatory and I personally harbour no prejudices against the LGBT community. Absolutely none, even though I work in an institution which has absolutely no acceptance of such orientations and where the only connotations I have encountered are either loud crude jokes or scandalised silences. But I am definitely curious and insanely so, for being a cis woman (that’s the trending term for those heterosexual), I cannot quite figure out how someone could be attracted to another of the same gender. So it was only avid curiosity that led me to continue listening to them, but after the first one and half minutes, I was hooked. Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan were warm, eloquent, humorous, poetic and very much in love; and there was something mesmerising about the way they spoke of love and humanity and the path towards inclusivity. They talked about many issues, all pertinent; but what caught itself in the brambles of my soul was one beautiful line spoken by Kim Milan, the wife. She said: “we are creating a world we have literally never seen before, organising families based on love and NOT on blood….” Immediately, something I had heard or maybe read many years earlier came to mind: the ex Miss Universe and the beautiful Sushmita Sen telling her adopted daughter Renee about how she was born, not from her mother's womb but from her heart.

Of all the beautiful things that Kim Milan spoke about, it was this one line that echoed through my mind because in it I found an echo of my present state: you could say my family was kinda queer too, with two dogs instead of children and therefore based on love and not on blood.

I think the problem with the world is that it doesn’t quite understand love. It understands only logic and therefore gives legitimacy to the ties of blood and or as in the case of the LGBTQ community, the conventional heterosexual relationship. And because it cannot explain or figure out the workings and algorithms of love, it is either suspicious or it simply derides and declares these ties as illegitimate.

Case in point was our application to buy land here in Himachal Pradesh. (Now don’t say: kahan se kahan kheench rahin hai. Do listen me out).
I have already written about the draconian Section 118 under which no outsider may buy land in Himachal. In case you read my blogs, you would know of how my application for permission to buy land in Himachal was rudely rejected by the govt of the State. Well, determined to fight it till the end, we drove all the way to Shimla to pursue our case with the state machinery there. At Shimla, we were told that the only reason why our application was rejected was because the bureaucrats could not understand why we wanted to settle down in Himachal at all.
“Aap to Bangal ke hain…..why Himachal? Itni dur ghar se?’ Asked the Babu in the office, his face wearing a genuinely puzzled expression.
“We love your State.” I naively tried to explain to him. “It’s such a divinely beautiful place, God’s own country….” I told him earnestly, enthusiastically. He stared back at me, face blank. He could not understand why I would want to settle down in a place just because it was beautiful.

“Ghar aapka kalkatte mein hai….”, he said, as if trying to drill some sense into me. He understood the ties of blood, but could not fathom the ties of love. I could explain further, but good sense prevailed and I desisted. Other Half and his friend took over from me quickly, before I could wreak more damage. They then put forward reasons to the Babu using semantics he could understand: things like post-retirement medical practice opportunities and other such prosaic things.

Our application is still languishing in Shimla, awaiting reconsideration and the prospects do not seem too bright.

And that is why Kim Milan’s words touched my heart. And that is why people like the Milans, however abhorrent to the mainstream consciousness, are essential in these times, for they are going about creating a different world, a world we have literally never seen before, a world organised not on the basis of blood but of love….....