The Dirty F Word

I mean Female of course. Also Feminism. One likes to get things clear at the outset.

When a nation's resources are usurped, its decisions made by an authority outside of itself and its economic independance stunted, you call it Imperialism. When the same thing happens to a woman, its just the way the world is. When certain ascribed identities - castes - are denied entry into temples, you say its discrimination and grossly unfair. When a woman is kept out by a temple, you bring up the fact that a temple is in fact, private property, and can frame its own rules. You don't care so much when text books use the word 'man' for all of human kind or where it could have used the world 'people'. Heaven forbid if the text book said 'white man'. When a particular racial group is denied employment, a political crisis grips the media and the world. When a girl is prohibited from leaving her home to work, indeed, not allowed to seek employment, its family tradition and conservatism. When the upper classes, upper castes, the rich, the aristocrats, the manistream, the majority dominates or monopolizes something to the detriment of corresponding opposite groups, it's injustice. When men dominate a field, its perfectly normal.

It's all quite logical actually. Discrimination against half the world is Not Relevant.

Let's just accept that it isn't relevant to deliberate upon patriarchy and women's empowerment. Not intellectual enough, and quite disconcerting to say the least. It's both more important and more intelligent to talk about racism, imperialism, caste bias, communalism and tribal issues. But a group that constitutes 50% of the world's population doesn't qualify as a cool enough debate. It never has. Gender studies are a bizarre and irrelevant discipline to spend your academic years studying. Women are something that loud and screechy women NGO workers talk about, and ugly dishevelled women academics.

It's something a teacher once said during a lecture on 'Instability'. It is assumed that instability is a consequence of fairly widespread inequality. And yet, women who constitute half of the entire world's population and have been subject to the grossest forms of violence, discrimination and subjugation, have never caused any political instability.

They're Irrelevant after all.

The Right of a Nation to Exist

The idea of rights is in the nature of evasive fireflies. Difficuilt to pinpoint, capture and determine. In the context of international affairs, there are conflicts, and in some of these conflicts, the rights of some nations to exist has come under the scanner. The right of Israel to exist has been qustioned by a number of Arab states and a considerable portion of the Palestinian people. Zionism has been considered discriminatory and it is asserted that a nation created by people moving into a nation already someone else's, is unjust.

But conflicts are so much more complicated than that. And hard as it may seem, the only way anything can possibly move (given that time travel still has a few glitches to be sorted out, in the scientific sense) is forward.

If you don't recognize Israel, the reason you give is that the creation of the nation meant unfair occupation of Palestinian land. Can you accept the United States of America, a land Europeans took from Native Americans? Can you accept Pakistan - created of a partition along communal lines? Can you accept Australia - which pushed the aborigines to make way for European settlers? Can you accept the dozens of African nations whose boundaries were drawn up in straight indifferent lines by the Imperial powers? Nealy every single nation of the world today has in its past a war, invasion, manufactured boundaries and fractured ethnicities.

Would you deny the right of these nations to exist? Then why deny that right to Israel? Only because it was created in living memory and the conflict has escalated in the recent past? Annihilitic doctrines cannot resolve a situation of clash between politics, interests and identities. These are sensitive things and must be sorted out realistically and in a manner that creates justice, not destroys the opposition.

Think about it. What nation has the right to exist? Then again, what nation has a compelling enough reason to be singled out to be not recognized?