Tuesday, May 28, 2013

There're "Men" in Men-strual


  1. I read excerpts from Rita Banerji's Sex and Power (Penguin Global, 2009, pg.49)
  2. http://genderbytes.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/is-it-a-crime-to-menstruate/#comment-7539)

It neither holy nor unholy; menses are a part and parcel of the female fertility phase and we all know that. Haven't we all men and women, come to life just because our mothers were fertile i.e. menstruating normally in their lives.

As an unexplained phenomena in the ancient times, one can understand that in ancient times, menses must have confused people and associated them with strange things.

Man has always wanted to explain the world around him. So strange explanations have been written for many natural phenomenon in the holy texts of all major religions. However to see something like this being practiced in today's world with grave stringency is a bit oafish. But I understand that it's not just India's problem.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

New Insights

Married life has been giving me new insights every now and then for almost a year now. It's been both good and bad. But I've only recently started to appreciate my wife. Of course it has been recent because  she's changed a lot and still is continuously doing so. I guess that a husband and wife do grow together, so we're no exception. I admit that just after marriage, the ideal-world bubble burst with a loud bang for both of us. 

Facing one complication after another, there came a time when we both found ourselves cornered enough to call it quits. Like every couple I know, after marriage, the thing that starts to bother you is "I didn't think that he/she was like that". That feeling of estrangement can grow pretty intense. Nobody thinks they'd face it but many do; from the examples around me, I reckon that most do.

Almost a year down the line, what I've grown to appreciate about my wife is her innocence (ok ok there are times she's over-clever but that's any woman's inherent trait) and the way she's genuinely interested in doing good things for people around her. I love how steadfast she is in trying to make things work in our relation and how she takes care of so many things. What I'd call to be any man's great fortune is something sublime yet  insanely powerful. It is the power of your wife's belief in you, in your strength to carry on, in your thinking and in your actions (almost!!).

Thankfully I have a wife who gets me to talk things out even when I'm stubbornly reticent. She's changed tremendously over the past months; I'm sure I have too. I've changed in a different manner, I've grown to see beyond what meets the eye. I see all the calculations that people make in their relation with me and I've begun to respond in kind. I understand that this money and power crazy society isn't the place I wish to spend my life in. But I also reckon it's not good to be without money either...but that can never be the central focus of my life, neither can I be friends with people like that. The last one year of PhD too has given me insights into the scientific temperament and that of the society. I believe I've begun to behave more like a man (of course, with my own unique outlook) moving away from the goody boyishness I was so fondly known for...the effing world left me no choice!

 I found someone who could look beyond the parochial outlook of the world society around us. We've both learnt to forgive each other and those who mean something to us in our lives We're still learning to not get hurt by people derive pleasure out of hurting us (and we're almost there). It's not like we don't have problems and it's not like we won't have them in the future but the good thing is that we know that we'll find a way. I have this new-found respect for my wife and even for my parents and I'm happy with this change. I'm still not very theistic (maybe I'll never be because of my extreme dislike towards rituals and alters) but have found new love for the allegorical words of the Bible that seemed so superficial and meaningless some time ago.

Proverbs 18:22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

lovely quotes

Came across the following quotes on a website http://www.apneasupport.org/about7752.html when I was searching the meaning of a term I came across in a scientific article.
Here goes:



  • The untreated Sleep Apnoea sufferer died quietly in his sleep..Unlike his three passengers who died screaming !
  • STRESS: The confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body's desire to kick the s#!@ out of some a** hole who richly deserves it

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Interesting stuff on racism

Here's an interesting article from
The Center for the Study of White American Culture (A multiracial organization) 
COPIED and PASTED FROM EUROAMERICAN.ORG

White Fear of Black Men 

Posted on  by  

Bonnie Berman Cushing

I have been devoted to a white anti-racist path for close to a dozen years, but I still stiffen with fear and a state of heightened awareness when I find myself alone on a darkened street with one or more Black men nearby.
As a dedicated student of anti-racist facts and principles I know intellectually that white people are five times more likely to be attacked by another white person than by a Black one and that two-thirds of the rapes committed in our country are by white men.  I am aware that the vast majority of corporate criminals are white and that most of our politicians who have declared war –  bringing death and destruction to millions –  also have the same skin color as I do. My own experience includes a mugging at gunpoint and a date rape – both at the hands of white men.  And yet I have never found myself anxiously responding to a white male or males on an evening walk the way I do in the presence of Black men. Why, exactly, is that?
I believe there are several reasons for this disturbing phenomenon and that it certainly isn’t limited only to me, but also to most (if not all) white folks – and many people of color as well.  History, psychology and media all play a significant role. The myth of the predatory Black man stands on the shoulders of centuries of stories and images shared from one generation to the next, sometimes directly and sometimes in coded messaging (such as admonishments to lock the car in certain neighborhoods or clutch your pocketbook closely on certain elevators and streets).  Our collective fear of the Black man has a rich and detailed history, one that by this time has practically been encoded in our national DNA.
A Black woman, writing under the name M. Gibson, expressed this truth succinctly in a comment on a blog site shortly after a police officer killed Oscar Grant in Oakland, California:
As a nation we seem to have very short memories. Fear of the black man just didn’t start overnight, and it didn’t just happen during the course of our lifetime; like any singularity it has to have a beginning. Its origin has been embedded in this nation’s consciousness since the Nat Turner revolt; a pathological fear that the oppressed will one day rise up and inflict vengeance upon the oppressor.The fact that so many unarmed young Black men have been killed by police officers is tragic testimony to this underlying fear.  I quote another blogger, Carmel:
Why ask what Whites fear about Blacks? Why not ask what Blacks fear about Whites? More Blacks have been killed by Whites in our country than the other way around. I don’t even know the number of unarmed Black men who have been killed or attacked by police or simply just pulled over for “Driving While Black.” When was the last time you heard of an innocent White man being riddled with bullets by the police?
In a 2010 radio broadcast Rush Limbaugh, one of the voices of right-wing America, brought it more directly into present times when discussing the Obama Presidency:
It’s Payback Time. This woman’s going to find out what it was like, in Obama’s view, for other Americans to live as they did in this unfair and immoral country for the 230 years we’ve been around. In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on…”
No wonder Obama and many other Blacks who have managed to achieve prominence in our society have had to maintain a calm demeanor, even in the face of insult and aggression.  To appear as the “angry Black” is to trigger these deep seated fears in our collective consciousness and to undermine any real agency with the public at large. AsTan-nehisi Coates wrote in his September 2012 article for The Atlantic entitled “Fear of a Black President,”So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.
In addition, there is a psychological defense called projection –  when one accuses someone of having traits they refuse to acknowledge in themselves –  that also explains some of the reason white people fear the violence of Black people. Instead of acknowledging the past and present forms of violence Black people have suffered at the hands of whites, it is projected on the victims themselves.  M. Gibson gets it right when she writes of the white fear of Black sexual violence:
During those times the white man feared miscegenation above all; he feared his saintly white women being sullied by an over-sexed bestial black buck. The white man held onto this erroneous belief/fear even as he himself raped black women without fear of reprisal.
And then there are the media, which continue to broadcast images of Black men in handcuffs and behind bars on nearly a daily basis (and this is by design, not accident).  It is due to news coverage that most of us first think of Black men when we hear of drug dealers, rioters or perpetrators of domestic violence.  This is true despite the reality that white people have, and do, participate in mob and domestic violence in higher numbers, and that whites comprise more than 70% of drug abusers and dealers in our country.Popular culture also supports and feeds on these images. Quentin Tarentino was awarded the Oscar for his script of the blockbuster hit, D’jango Unchained, which tells the story of a freed slave enacting revenge on slaveholders and their kin.  The vision of D’jango, wielding a bullwhip, guns and a bomb against his enemies speaks directly and powerfully to our subconscious (and in many cases, conscious) fear of Black revenge for past atrocities.  Apparently it pays artistically, monetarily and politically to exploit these fears – and until the costs outweigh the benefits, the media will continue to reinforce them to the detriment of us all.
I understand I will have to check my racist assumptions and continue to unlearn the lessons I have inherited about Black men for the rest of my life.  I will always need to remind myself I have been socialized to collectivize the violence of Black individuals and individualize the violence of whites. I will need to intentionally counteract that socialization.  This is part of my legacy as a privileged white woman in the United States, and I take it on both sadly and gladly.
I will end by quoting another inspirational blog entry, by abagond, from a site that asked why whites fear blacks:
Moral blindness.  Every single black person in the eyes of white people is the sign of a terrible crime from their ugly past, a reminder that their life is a fraud, that they are pretty much nothing more than armed robbers. But it is hard for them to simply own up to their past and make it right. Instead they deny, shift blame, lie, twist facts and make black people into these creatures that they look down on, laugh at and yet, oddly, fear. It is a failed attempt to be at peace with themselves. This is why whites need to give reparations more than blacks need to receive it.