"And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share...
No one dare
disturb the sounds of silence."
I have been listening to this Simon and Garfunkel classic most of my life. But yesterday, as I listened during my evening walk, ahead of writing about the impossibility of speaking up about everything that happens, I was struck by how apt it was. "No one dare disturb the sounds of silence."
I too have been reading about the controversy over Padmavati, and have retweeted a couple of articles and posts I agree with, but have not said anything. Of course, I have views on this but I have not aired them, for many reasons. Today, I am wondering if they are reasons or excuses, and I have to conclude that maybe they are both.
You wake up in the morning and turn on any news source or pick up an old-fashioned newspaper, and there is a barrage of information that you can barely process. If you let one grab your attention and start to respond, you do little else in the day. And I tell myself, I run an organisation that works on gender violence awareness day in and out. Surely, my time is best spent doing my work. A hundred philosophical aphorisms support my view from Voltaire's 'Il faut cultiver son jardin' to a refrain of many Tamil spiritual teachers, 'Chumma iru.'
But someone threatens to behead a woman and I have nothing to say.... how do we reach that point?
It's not just the threat to an actress for doing her job. It is that entire flood of news, each item of which is devastating to someone's life and symptomatic of horrible, inhumane traits deeply embedded in our society. Like the incident my mother read about yesterday, where a five year old boy followed a girl of his age to the bathroom, forcibly pulled down her underwear and raped her by inserting a pencil up her vagina. What is the reaction you can have to something like that? My first thought is that he is learning this from the adults around him. Violent abuse is a widespread habit and normalized in many households. Who is doing this to whom within his line of vision?
And just where do you begin to fix such a horrible world?
Decades of hard work by the women's movement and the exigencies of filling up 24/7 news have brought us to a point when in a day, we hear not about one or two or even three incidents like this but several and then one or two are chosen for their dramatic values and replayed to us over and over. We tune out in order to function.
The result is that we normalize cruelty and inhumane behaviour over time. For instance, when Gauri Lankesh was killed, we had actually created enough room for people to say, "But you know these were her views." The point surely was, no matter what her views and your disagreement with them, it was wrong to kill or hurt her. But we have missed that point completely.
With Padmavati, we are debating historicity and freedom of expression and all of these are very important, but the bottomline is surely: since when have we come to accept violence as the normal language of disagreement between people? Since when is it normal for us to be distracted by relative trivia (was she real or not?) and governments to remain silent about physical threats? And then, if the government was to use my own logic, then it could arguably say, "If I took a position on everything that happened, who would introduce demonetisation or collect your garbage?"
When do we speak and when do we let something go? This is a really hard decision. This blogpost is not about my sharing an epiphany on this question but simply working my way through it by writing.
First of all, as I said, it is hard to react to everything that happens--one does not know everything that happens, one cannot be in responsive/reactive mode all the time, one wants to think things through... that said, when do I decide that it is time to say something? When does an issue feel critical enough that it is important for me to speak?
Second, do I have something constructive to add? Usually, no, and that is one reason I stay silent. My tweet or my blogspot would add nothing that is not already being said. On some issues, I stay out all through. On others, I voice my support by signing a petition that makes sense to me. On a few others, I say something by placing it in a broader context, historical or comparative, which is what I am trained to do. But then, in the face of escalating violence, is being selective important or should one just push back all the time?
I don't know much about most things that happen. I know a little but "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as many school autographs reminded me. Should I wait to learn, should I leave it to experts to lead or should I say, at this moment, it is the heft that counts--all hands to the deck, all voices into the chorus that must push back this silence.
Finally, we are quiet because we don't think it will make a difference what we say. This is the silence that breaks my heart. Where do we go from here? We abdicate our right to protest because we don't think it makes a difference. Governments--this one, any one--are not going to pay us any attention. We are schizophrenic about buying into everything the government tells us but not trusting that it will pay us any attention. Why are we investing so much in a government that we cannot hold to account? My mind says to me now, "Don't go down that road today. Don't digress." Yes, but it is also part of the problem, no? Citizens are quiet when citizens are helpless and when citizens secretly agree. I don't know which one scares me more.
There is the silence of the hive or of ants as they go about their work. And there is the silence of those that will not speak because they are in denial. Which one is mine? I am realising I have to ask this question every single moment of the day if my own silence is not to be read as tacit consent.
I genuinely don't know.
Postscript (added 25.11.17)
The best comments on the Padmavati question have come from this cartoonist:
https://twitter.com/CartoonistSan/status/932823465366732800
https://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status/825412746963333120
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share...
No one dare
disturb the sounds of silence."
I have been listening to this Simon and Garfunkel classic most of my life. But yesterday, as I listened during my evening walk, ahead of writing about the impossibility of speaking up about everything that happens, I was struck by how apt it was. "No one dare disturb the sounds of silence."
I too have been reading about the controversy over Padmavati, and have retweeted a couple of articles and posts I agree with, but have not said anything. Of course, I have views on this but I have not aired them, for many reasons. Today, I am wondering if they are reasons or excuses, and I have to conclude that maybe they are both.
You wake up in the morning and turn on any news source or pick up an old-fashioned newspaper, and there is a barrage of information that you can barely process. If you let one grab your attention and start to respond, you do little else in the day. And I tell myself, I run an organisation that works on gender violence awareness day in and out. Surely, my time is best spent doing my work. A hundred philosophical aphorisms support my view from Voltaire's 'Il faut cultiver son jardin' to a refrain of many Tamil spiritual teachers, 'Chumma iru.'
But someone threatens to behead a woman and I have nothing to say.... how do we reach that point?
It's not just the threat to an actress for doing her job. It is that entire flood of news, each item of which is devastating to someone's life and symptomatic of horrible, inhumane traits deeply embedded in our society. Like the incident my mother read about yesterday, where a five year old boy followed a girl of his age to the bathroom, forcibly pulled down her underwear and raped her by inserting a pencil up her vagina. What is the reaction you can have to something like that? My first thought is that he is learning this from the adults around him. Violent abuse is a widespread habit and normalized in many households. Who is doing this to whom within his line of vision?
And just where do you begin to fix such a horrible world?
Decades of hard work by the women's movement and the exigencies of filling up 24/7 news have brought us to a point when in a day, we hear not about one or two or even three incidents like this but several and then one or two are chosen for their dramatic values and replayed to us over and over. We tune out in order to function.
The result is that we normalize cruelty and inhumane behaviour over time. For instance, when Gauri Lankesh was killed, we had actually created enough room for people to say, "But you know these were her views." The point surely was, no matter what her views and your disagreement with them, it was wrong to kill or hurt her. But we have missed that point completely.
With Padmavati, we are debating historicity and freedom of expression and all of these are very important, but the bottomline is surely: since when have we come to accept violence as the normal language of disagreement between people? Since when is it normal for us to be distracted by relative trivia (was she real or not?) and governments to remain silent about physical threats? And then, if the government was to use my own logic, then it could arguably say, "If I took a position on everything that happened, who would introduce demonetisation or collect your garbage?"
When do we speak and when do we let something go? This is a really hard decision. This blogpost is not about my sharing an epiphany on this question but simply working my way through it by writing.
First of all, as I said, it is hard to react to everything that happens--one does not know everything that happens, one cannot be in responsive/reactive mode all the time, one wants to think things through... that said, when do I decide that it is time to say something? When does an issue feel critical enough that it is important for me to speak?
Second, do I have something constructive to add? Usually, no, and that is one reason I stay silent. My tweet or my blogspot would add nothing that is not already being said. On some issues, I stay out all through. On others, I voice my support by signing a petition that makes sense to me. On a few others, I say something by placing it in a broader context, historical or comparative, which is what I am trained to do. But then, in the face of escalating violence, is being selective important or should one just push back all the time?
I don't know much about most things that happen. I know a little but "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as many school autographs reminded me. Should I wait to learn, should I leave it to experts to lead or should I say, at this moment, it is the heft that counts--all hands to the deck, all voices into the chorus that must push back this silence.
Finally, we are quiet because we don't think it will make a difference what we say. This is the silence that breaks my heart. Where do we go from here? We abdicate our right to protest because we don't think it makes a difference. Governments--this one, any one--are not going to pay us any attention. We are schizophrenic about buying into everything the government tells us but not trusting that it will pay us any attention. Why are we investing so much in a government that we cannot hold to account? My mind says to me now, "Don't go down that road today. Don't digress." Yes, but it is also part of the problem, no? Citizens are quiet when citizens are helpless and when citizens secretly agree. I don't know which one scares me more.
There is the silence of the hive or of ants as they go about their work. And there is the silence of those that will not speak because they are in denial. Which one is mine? I am realising I have to ask this question every single moment of the day if my own silence is not to be read as tacit consent.
I genuinely don't know.
Postscript (added 25.11.17)
The best comments on the Padmavati question have come from this cartoonist:
https://twitter.com/CartoonistSan/status/932823465366732800
https://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status/825412746963333120
1 comment:
Excellent. I wonder about this too. I also can't decide if I'm reacting too little or too much, and sometimes the silence is a way to figure out what is a proportionate reaction. Then something else happens and I forget to react to the first thing.
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