A Human's Struggle to stay Human

Yet another Thursday has breached the week. “Thursdays in Black” is a campaign of solidarity and advocacy against all forms of sexual and gender based violence. The precise history could be accessed in the link below. https://www.thursdaysinblack.co.za/about Violence on the grounds of sex and gender are proliferating all over the world. India in no way could shy away from this ignominy. It’s a matter of indignation to see women being crushed to pulp in a nation which deifies women. All the more India is homophobic too. We normally tend to think that homosexuality is against Indian culture. Ruth Vanita through her book “Same-sex Love in India” nullifies this argument and corroborates the fact that homosexuality was indeed practiced in India. No domain could be left scot free; Society, church and academia continue to perpetuate and legitimize gender based violence both in overt and covert forms. For such a time as this it becomes imperative to educate the masses about th...

In a nation like India where anything could easily be relegated to taboos there even disability cannot evade the stereotypical apprehensions. We might sound accommodating when we resort to the use of euphemisms like ‘differently abled’, ‘special child’ etc. but that is not true. Nancy Eiesland, pioneer of the Theology of Disability opines; Euphemisms for persons with disabilities have abounded in recent years, including ‘differently abled’……These people maintain that Euphemisms deny the fact that disabilities do exist and reinforce the idea that disabilities must be camouflaged to make them acceptable for public. [i] Our tendency to sanitize disability through euphemisms itself is the clarion call that there is absolutely no space in this world for something which is not ‘normal’. The ‘abled’ are engaged in the imprudence of making the disabled feel accommodative reprimanding the fact that the disabled are already an integral part of the diversity of God’s creation. It is...

Homes are not just defined on the coordinates of time and space rather it is an emotion. The grief of leaving our homes could make us sick (homesick). Then imagine the trauma of those refugees whose emotion of home is colonized by the bureaucrats and the systemic evils of the world. Houses could be built but homes are not the niche of an architect, they evolve; not just out of the blue but through sheer sacrifices, compromises, endurance, hope and pain. Homes are the concrete expressions of human abstraction. When people are made to be homeless it is not just rendering them space-less rather you take a toll on their humanness. Devoid of homes means devoid of emotions and bereft of emotions humans are just a mass of flesh. Theologians and faith leaders add impetus to this. Eulogizing the ordeals of exile through the intervention of a Divine force makes suffering and endurance sacrilegious. Resilience turns to be an inert cognizance in this entire process. What has gone wrong...

Ever thought of dismissing the speculations and apprehensions of a child as absurd? Then today being the World Day against Child Labour could be an occasion to rethink this illusion. We Christians seem to be indolent towards the fact that we continue to follow the God consciousness of a lad. At the age of twelve, Jesus at the temple chose the metaphor of Father to describe God. Do not we foster the same till date? Children are the most beautiful creation of God and childhood the most envious period. It is so important that even God while incarnating did not choose to take a leap. This is an age when relationships survive without the burden of names, when innocence spills over, when imaginations and actions are not at odds, when emotions are freely expressed without the fear of any sort, when smile and laughter are genuine and much more. These are the dominant versions of articulating the whims and fancies of childhood.   How far are they true? We seem to be so rel...