India's Lonely Honeymooners

It kind of sounds crazy that a Bollywood film should inspire thoughts on alternate sexuality. But it happens. While watching the film, Honeymoon Travels late at night on a DVD, some thing resonated. Watching Vikram Chatwal, the suave NRI and Karan Khanna come to terms with their sexuality on their honey moon as they tell their aghast wives that they are gay; I could not help but remember the normal notions and stereotypes that we have created around them and how distanced they are from the real thing.

Vikram and Karan are fundamentally decent people and not some ogres; they in the movie sound genuinely bewildered, confused and perplexed by the deal that life(first) and society(subsequently) have dealt them and genuinely want to do the right thing by their wives, by their family and by the established norms of society, which is why they got into this jam of getting married to a woman when they are gay in their orientation. The pain and agony of Karan, the small town simpleton who does not even understand the concept of being gay but tries hard to understand and rationalize his attraction towards another man is heart wrenching.

And of course being gay and lesbian is a relatively straight forward thing ; sexuality after all is a many splendoured thing and the typical man and woman will live and die without knowing and seeing even the tip of the archetypal iceberg of this thing called alternate sexuality- so many are its manifestations and so complex its expression.

If there is an are where the media in the Western media in particular have muddied the waters for us in India real bad, it is in attempting to script only the titillating bits of the story – of chronicling celebrities who are gay – be it Alexander the Great or Oscar Wilde or many other contemporary figures. By trivializing alternate expressions of sexuality into the realm of speculation and spice, it has glossed over many other angles.

If the spot light is not on celebrities , it is on only particular kinds of behavior; the constant discussion on gay marriages and whether they should be permitted or not – which countries have permitted them and which have not have obfuscated the fact that marriage is in any case not only about sex and that their sex life is not the only thing on the mind of any one – be it straight or gay. The rampant stigmatization of any one even thought or perceived to be “different” in main stream society can lead to a situation where such men and women find companionship only among their own – a fact that is hardly discussed or talked about.

Those who are gay have some breathing space – at least in the cities , if you move in the right circles, you know the gay bars and that sort of thing, but for the others, the tunnel is darker. A cross dresser, a bi sexual – as most gays in India are, a eunuch or transgendered ( not necessarily the same), live on the edge of a more slippery and darker abyss. A picture of ridicule, abhorrence and disdain, they live not even on the fringes of society, but outside it – obscured by their own initiation rites, customs, hierarchy , festivals – a deeply rooted counter culture if there was one.

I wonder what the prescription is for a country of India’s complexity but I suppose it has to begin with a more cogent understanding that sex and sexuality are different things altogether and whereas sex will always be an explosive issue in a supposedly conservative society, expressions and articulations of alternate sexuality and its destigmtization are the sine qua non of a humane society. Funny is it not , that we are so busy ferreting out the minorities and the marginalized in our midst that we have ignored the most despised, the most stigmatized, the most marginalized of them all ? They may not be hankering for reservations and quotas but they unfailingly need and deserve our acceptance !

Where Are Our Nurses ?

Recently, I was in conversation with a friend who is in the business of preparing Indian Nurses to go abroad and work – brush up their English, sharpen their professional skills, assist them with their visas and placements and so on. She told me that business was booming and in spite of tightening immigration laws in many places, nurses, particularly Indian nurses were always in demand. She further told me that in places like the Philippines, there was actually a shortage of doctors and many health facilities were closing down as doctors were choosing to work as nurses. Last year, The Asian Pacific Post lately reported that about 6,000 doctors in the Philippines are studying to become nurses so they can find higher-paying jobs abroad. A doctor working in a government hospital in the Philippines earns only about 25,000 pesos (446 dollars) a month. A doctor could earn around 8,000 dollars a month while working as nurse overseas. Apparently, the phenomenon is slowing beginning to happen in India too.

If people migrate overseas for economic benefit alone, it is possible some times to sit back on our moral high horse and berate those who if they had stayed back might have contributed to the nation’s development. After all, the annual NRI jamboree, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, has just gone by and the Prime Minister has called upon overseas Indians to invest in their country of origin, not just financially, but intellectually, socially, culturally and emotionally as well. But the surprising thing is that it would seem that India’s nurses do not migrate, just because they want to be richer than you or me.

Although financial remuneration is an issue , dissatisfaction with working conditions and unhappiness with prevalent social attitudes towards nurses have been identified as being of crucial importance for the international migration of Indian nurses. It was found that nurses working in the private sector and from some linguistic and religious groups were particularly prone to migration. Nurses working in the government sector seemed to be more worried about being unable to adjust to working conditions abroad and therefore less keen to migrate. The fact that they enjoyed better pay scales, a more relaxed work atmosphere and more facilities may have also played a part here. What seemed to be vital to the decision to migrate for a large number of government sector nurses belonging to the so-called `Forward' and `Middle' Castes was that they were being crowded out of promotional avenues as a result of the government's policy of Reservations in Promotions for Scheduled Castes and Tribes.

Although the migration of nurses from India and the reasons for the same are relatively well documented, it may be safe to say that India has not just a social caste system but also a professional caste system where some professions are praised to the skies and some are berated. For instance, although the medical profession is rife with unethical practices and graft eating away at its very vitals, doctors are held in high regard. Nurses on the other hand, work longer hours for measly pay and emoluments and with hardly any social recognition and stature. A lot of effort and activism is going on in fighting social inequities and rightly so. But a lot still needs to be done to correct professional imbalances and reduce the gap in the pecking order. Only then can we afford to criticize nurses and others who are looked upon with professional and social disdain when they quit our shores and look for financially and occupationally lucrative pastures.