{"id":6842,"date":"2016-04-11T19:10:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T13:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=6842"},"modified":"2016-04-11T19:10:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T13:40:15","slug":"patience-helps-me-turn-my-mother-away-from-bigotry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=6842","title":{"rendered":"No Blackmail, No Derision: Patience Helps Me Turn My Mother Away From Bigotry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\u201cI<\/span> don\u2019t agree with the uproar against the Tanishq advertisement,\u201d my mother said, much to my surprise. \u201cI have the right to do what I want. If I want to celebrate a certain occasion, I can. It\u2019s not Hindu to control who gets to celebrate which festival. Like when I make biryani, it doesn\u2019t make me Muslim.\u201d My mother loves making biryani. Her Durga puja plan this year is to make biryani and get drunk.\n\nYet, she is also the kind of person who will say, that we should have a Hindu nation because \u201cMuslims have oppressed us in the past.\u201d If \u201cthey\u201d can have multiple Muslim nations, why shouldn\u2019t \u201cwe\u201d have a place where we come first? Mind you, she loves the British and has a bigger colonial hangover than the Big Ben in Kolkata.\n\nTalking to my mother about politics is hard. She is a complex woman, and in an age where increasing political polarisation is making everything look black and white, she reminds me that some people are grey. She was the first woman in our huge family who fought to go to work. She fought to send my sister and me abroad for studies, the first in our family to do so. She took out a gold loan on her jewellery so that my sister could travel around Europe with her friends in college. However when we were little, she taught my sister to not accept food from Muslim kids because \u201cthey\u201d eat beef. Thankfully, I escaped much of this conditioning as I was sent to boarding school where I slept and ate with kids from multiple religious and cultural backgrounds.\n\nIn December last year, working as a reporter in Delhi I\u2019d be out until 2am, hovering around hospitals during the CAA and NRC protests. Then I\u2019d come home emotionally and physically drained, and have to argue with my visiting mother about the twin policies. She\u2019d say that NRC was important to root out illegal immigrants. Then what about CAA? \u201cHindus should be protected, this is our country,\u201d would come the reply, along with the argument that the protesting students are not really students and deserved the violence meted out to them.\n\nBlack & white\u2026 & grey<\/strong>\n\nStill, as I said, she is a complex person. She loved my Arab ex-girlfriend who grew up in a Muslim home and was even okay with the idea of us getting married abroad. When my ex visited me in India, our help asked my mother about her religion before agreeing to do her dishes, and was gently schooled by my mother.\n\n

I am aware enough to know that my mother\u2019s grey will be a less privileged person\u2019s black.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nI am aware enough to know that my mother\u2019s grey will be a less privileged person\u2019s black. And it is privilege that protects me \u2013 I\u2019d be betraying the guy who is afraid to disclose his name to an Uber driver, or the person who has to worry about her family landing up in a detention centre, if I don\u2019t talk to my mother about politics. That\u2019s the least those of us with privilege can do. I\u2019d be a hypocrite if I were \u201cwoke\u201d online and then avoided talking to my mom.\n\nThe Social Dilemma<\/em> on Netflix explores how in the age of social media, fake news travels much faster than the truth because the truth is not as masaledar. You are now not only entitled to your own opinion, but to your own facts. The interviewees on the show \u2013\u00a0most of whom helped engineer social media sites and search engines \u2013 say that its short term impact could be civil war. I could easily see a civil war erupting in my home.\n\nLockdown has given me time to do the important things in life. Besides watching The Social Dilemma<\/em>, I read The Annihilation of Caste<\/a><\/em> for the first time. I also watch psychologist Dr Ramani\u2019s YouTube videos. In her video about cultural narcissism<\/a>, she talks about how nations with histories of trauma (like colonialism and Partition for example) tend to foster and value narcissism. It is seen as a positive quality in a dog-eat-dog world where some are able to rise the ranks against all odds by pushing others down.\n\nTrauma runs in the veins of the women in my family. So it is not completely surprising that my mother supports political parties like people support sports teams, feeling empowered by their wins even when at the cost of others.\n\nI have been talking to people about socio-politics for a long time. I was astounded when the boys in my high school didn\u2019t become less sexist when I pointed out their sexism. They continued to do the same things with a \u201csorry, Suryatapa\u201d for my benefit.\n\nPatience wins the day<\/strong>\n\nI learned how to talk to people in a way that creates space to question things, rather than just telling them what to think. But you are a fool if you expect me to practice such patience at home. My mother\u2019s conversations with me devolved to us taking jabs at each other. I started believing that she is a right-wing stereotype and vice versa. But we are not stereotypes. So even the jabs stopped landing.\n\n

Patience, and lots of patience, is the only thing that can save us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nA few days ago, I tried a different approach. I tried talk to her as family \u2013 tried to bring her over to my viewpoint rather than a high-octane correction campaign. I told her about the new things I am learning in the lockdown. That there is no such thing as a Hindu identity, for example. She herself sees other Hindus in terms of their language, caste and class. She will argue against reservation. She will praise her union leader for protecting her from bullies with the disclaimer \u201cbut he is from Uttar Pradesh.\u201d\n\nA clear Hindu identity only becomes visible when pitted against other religious identities, especially during communal riots \u2013 a political ploy as old as time. The point is to keep the \u201cenemy\u201d around or keep widening the category of \u201cenemy\u201d, to mobilise the majority voter base. As I kept talking, she went quiet. I sensed something shift. After a while, I heard her faintly say to herself, \u201cYes, it\u2019s true. The idea of a unified Hindu identity is a political ploy.\u201d\n\nI don\u2019t know what worked, okay? Maybe it was the fact that I wanted to talk to my mom about ideas that excite me, like her child. Maybe that\u2019s why she listened and something got through. Pretending that we are guests on those horrible \u201cnews\u201d \u201cdebates\u201d is not fun forever.\n\nAnd that\u2019s what I am going to tell my friends to do \u2013 talk to your family like family. Remember the things that you enjoy about them as people, and dance in those spaces. I\u2019m not saying that now her politics are changed forever. But I have managed to tie a thread from my world to hers. That is all we can hope for. Patience, and lots of patience, is the only thing that can save us. Because, my glorious champions of equality, our numbers seem to be dwindling every day. We won\u2019t win if we don\u2019t talk to them.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother had no problem accepting my queer Arab ex-girlfriend, but she still believes in the idea of a \u201cHindu nation\u201d. And I feel like a hypocrite espousing liberal values in public, but being unable to confront these challenging ideas at home. So I continued to talk to her \u2013 with love and patience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":6843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-family"],"yoast_head":"\nNo Blackmail, No Derision: Patience Helps Me Turn My Mother Away From Bigotry<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My mother had no problem accepting my queer Arab ex-girlfriend, but she still believes in the idea of a \u201cHindu nation\u201d. 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