Some Western countries have a silly season, usually summer, marked by vacations and adjourned parliaments, when the stuff that makes news is the hat a countess wore to a garden party or Richard Branson’s latest leap off his inter-galactic ship. But in the social media era, it seems to be silly season through the year.
I first read that Oxford University is to encourage students to use the gender-neutral ‘ze’ instead of ‘she’ and ‘he’ so that transgender students are not offended. Before I could wrap my head around this idiocy, Facebook was invaded by stylish people expressing “deep shock” that Saif and Kareena had named their newborn ‘Taimur’. They posted breathless stories of Timur the Lame’s barbarities and uploaded history books. A Martian reading the Internet could be forgiven for imagining the discussion was on famine or war and not the christening of an actor-couple’s baby.
Is there anything we are not going to be outraged by? I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw that had a bunch of water fowls addressing a press meet. Behind them is a banner that says National Disabled Water Fowls Association. And the spokesperson… er… spokesfowl is complaining: “How do you think it feels to constantly hear Bush being described as a ‘lame duck’?
Every day, someone says or writes something that we find unpalatable or perhaps a bit too truthful. And off we go on our outrage trips. Some of us stick to social media, but some of us want to be taken a bit more seriously, so we throw ink, burn effigies or bomb magazine offices.
History has a particularly annoying habit of being true. It reminds us that we were indeed once ruled by the Mughals and the British, and that it is entirely natural that streets and cities were created and named by these erstwhile rulers. That these are as much a part of our past, our cultural genes, our sculpting as anything else, and yet we are still ‘offended’ by history and we are still trying to rename, recast, refute.
Recently, the CBSE removed a section on Nadars from history textbooks because the community protested that it was offensive to suggest that their women had once been forced by upper castes to keep their breasts uncovered. Meanwhile, Brahmins are offended if it’s pointed out that they cornered all the privileges, and ragi farmers are offended if you say they grow ragi. In fact, I wait everyday to be told that the caste system itself was a pernicious British invention.
I support the honorific ‘Ms’ rather than ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’, so you might ask why I am irked by ‘ze’. I think the question is one of proportion. Of how much this is about trying to create an equal playing field and how much about mollycoddling our tender sensibilities. We fight for a ‘third gender’ column on official forms and ask that the ‘Father’s Name’ column be removed because these are practical, much-needed solutions. But when my ancient uncle sends a wedding invite addressed to Mrs. Roy, I don’t get traumatised and seek counselling; I just dress up and attend the darned wedding. We look for solutions, not sanitised Utopias.
Someone is harangued because they said ‘visually challenged’ and not ‘blind’. Someone else is denounced because they said ‘differently abled’ and not ‘disabled’. It’s hard for people to keep up with politically-correct terminology, which, in turn, tries to keep pace with the struggles for pride, identity and rights. The struggle must and will go on, but let’s also cut some slack shall we? As we delight in how ‘fair-minded’ and ‘liberal’ we are, we are also becoming impossible prigs. If I must choose, I would rather have intent and sensibility without semantics than the opposite.
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Meanwhile, on another and much happier note, the United Nations has revoked its decision to make Wonder Woman from DC Comics its honorary ambassador for women’s empowerment. I found it rather amazing that from a world population of seven billion, the UN could only find a big-breasted, over-sexualised, white American comic character as its ambassador for women’s rights. Wow.
