In response to this, there came an article from Sushil K. (Asst. Editor). Click here for article.
I did not like this response much so I wrote him a mail (cc to Ashley Tellis). You will like it more if you go through the above articles first. Here goes my email-
Hello Sir,
I am a regular reader of Indian express and I also read the Ashley Tellis article about family on 6/2/2010and your take on that today 7/2/2010. I am in much more agreement with Tellis rather than you.Moreover your response to his article is very weak. Tellis has raised many questions about the family but you have responded to only one or two of his points, and that too not very convincing. You think that Tellis lives in a perpetual state of hate(you even generalised this to all gays but on what basis ?)but I can tell you he do not. He not even hates his parents. He is actually"Living in a greater state of awareness than you and most of the people in this country". I have no personal access to Tellis, I have never emailed him earlier, I am saying this based on my opinion formed by reading his articles every weak, and I am great fan of him.Because he is among the very few truth speaking people in this country, unlike you the "Politically correct" lot. Your only argument is that when a family comes to know about a gay member, it is equally shocking to them as well so their rejection of this is understandable. Tellis has written in his first line that "My family did not value Love ..."Now what is the meaning of Love for you. Love means 'unconditional Love', and that is not the case with most of the Indian families.The amount of love you receive in a family is directly proportional to your capabilities(e.g. your earnings) and your submission to family orders.Have you seen "Taare zameen par" ? Do I need to tell you why Eeshan awasthi did not receive as much love as his elder brother from his family ? Do I need to tell you why he faced rejection everywhere in family and school ? Do I need to tell you why lots and lots of people have cried after watching the movie including Aamir Khan ?Do I need to tell you this is the scenario in most of the families ?You may be part of an unconditional love family , but most people are not. You are an editor of national newspaper but you have very poor observation of your surroundings. I have lived in Chennai, in comparison to north India, far more women go out and do jobs, but the way a man treats his wife or daughter is as pathetic as all over India. In today's paper there is a survey about women in Kerela(on front page).They are all suffering because of this "Great family Love". In yesterday's paper (6/2/2010) there is a news about a 16 year old girl in Turkey, buried alive by her family. Her father and grand father are in custody now. Now I don't need to tell you that this kind of great show of love by family happens in India also. Tellis has raised this issue by saying "Heterosexual children are not allowed to choose their own partners, taken to court on habeas corpus, beaten, imprisoned, killed, accused of abduction and kidnapping, hung in the town square by their family". But you do not say anything about it. I think you don't even read the paper properly.I give you one example. If a young girl in any part of this country declares to her parents that she is in love with a lower cast man and want to marry him(say a tamil brahmin girl in love with a north India SC). Now what will be the response of her family. Obviously it will be rejection first. There will be very few families who will ultimately give in for the sake of love of their daughter and accept the relationship but most of the families will never accept this and may even kill their daughter. The first category of the family is the "unconditional love".Unfortunately they are very few. You say about Tellis that "He forgets that not just 'he' but his very 'gayness' is a product of that "private ownership" of sexual reproducibility inherent in the family". Are you trying to suggest that you have no right to criticize your family values ?If someone is born in a terrorist family then should he not criticize terrorism ?Overall, I just want to say that you should come up with stronger stuff, because I like Indian Express and you write in that. -
Regards
Jitendra
As expected I have not received any response from Sushil K. , surprisingly I got response from
Ashley Tellis(In fact I should not be surprised. Truthful people have nothing to hide). Here goes the response -
Dear Mr. Dimri,
Thank you for your email.Thank you for being able to see that the point is not about individual families but the family as an institution.You are right to point out that the family is not base on unconditional love even when it claims to be and that is assesses and values people in crass terms. Think also of how families treat the girl child in relation to the boy. The other gender realities you point out yourself.Your Taare Zameen Par example is a good one in relation to how the family treats him but also, in the long run, a problematic one. The only problem with that film is that in the end, after claiming that ‘every child is special’, it recuperates the dyslexic child into the grand narrative of success and achievement, after which the family (and the school) accept him. I found the film anti-child and anti-disability.When Mr. sushil says I am a product of the family, he may b facually wrong and there are many millions of people born outside the family. Because people are born in the family, that makes the family okay? Your terrorism example is a good one and I think the family is a terrorist institution, actually. It terrorises people, especially women and children. The family is the real terrorist in our country and the world.Thank you once again for your letter and I hope you think of writing for the NIE.
BestAshley
PS: I’m sending you a copy of the response I sent to the paper to Mr. Sushil. I am not sure if they will carry it so I wanted you to read it
And here is what Tellis(Thank you for sending this to me) wrote as response to Sushil K. for his article -
Sushil K T’s response to my article was so naïve as perhaps not to deserve a response. He spends the first almost half of it speculating mindlessly on my biography when the whole point of my article was that one can multiply examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ families ad infinitum but the basic structural critique of the family remains. He has no answer to that structural critique so instead he offers cheap biographical accounts of reverse family trauma when he knows nothing about my family.
But let us try and make some axiomatic sense of what he is saying. So, he is saying that we must understand the ‘horror’ and the ‘trauma’ of parents of have gay children. Why? What is this understanding based on if not the implicit assumption that heterosexual is right and homosexual is wrong? With what authority does Mr Sushil speak for “everyone on the planet”? My article was in response to one that appeared the previous week (by Aniruddh Vasudevan) who portrayed an extraordinary family (his own) accepting love of all its members as a basic principle. So, Sushil is, simply, first and foremost, factually incorrect and making a universal principle out of a personal prejudice.
Suresh is intellectually incapable of seeing that the point is not about his family or mine but about the institution of family. He also knows nothing about the gay movement if he thinks what we want is to be accepted as normal. What we are, in fact, saying, is that the very concept of normal is to be questioned and done away with.
By not seeing the family as an institution, Suresh shows his mind is full of wet mud and no clarity at all. His last eugenic fantasy only shows the utterly dangerous stupidity of the man. As for hatred, I am proud to be full of hatred. Hatred can be very productive and useful. As B. R Ambedkar put it: “I want to tell my critics that I regard my feelings of hatred as a real force. They are the only reflex of the love I bear for the causes I believe in and I am in no way ashamed of it.”
