oN mY WAY...............The journey from being an autonomous unit that moved around like a bubble hitting the floor and rising up by itself to an indi

The journey from being an autonomous unit that moved around like a bubble hitting the floor and rising up by itself to an individual who is trying hard to be part of that super glue in society which the theorists call “social capital” has been made rather briskly.

But somewhere it feels incomplete…I see myself as a loner ,as one who is still complete by herself ,who is self sustaining and whole ,I like to call myself independent.

Lately I saw the need to balance the weight of this sensibility by a counter practice .One that incorporates, that pulls people together and quite essentially breaks that cocoon which we build in years, that super ego which sometimes becomes the only thing we possess.
I had quite honestly been disastrously bored with sitting in the class room trying hard to get principles and ideals of social work in my head .When you are not practicing something and the words being used to explain the idea are dull and don’t even sound weird enough to attract your attention , you sure are in a mess. It spells the absolute collapse of all pedagogy.

Well, in some saner moments of a lower degree of frustration , I decided to give the idea of a social worker a chance and take a deeper look into the intricate details and the sustaining mechanisms of this market .I choose to call it a market that buys and sells suffering, not just the cure to physical pain that a doctor will sell nor the mental agony that is a psychologist s means of living but the whole and all of suffering in all its shades .When there is no problem there is still perspective that looks at the “problematic”…so the woes never really go away, happiness remains illusionary and temporary only to be soon replaced by a new Sinicism, a new skepticism and a new doubt. I remember Marx….and the call for the new critical mind, the idea that one should and must doubt everything. I was a product of that doubt.

Now as I look back I see the harm that that trail of thought can do to someone, it can keep you in the cupboard and keep you happy too. There has been attempt, irrespective of the silly space called the class room to be at least a molecule in that great adhesive.

There are spaces that are creating alternatives to society that already exists and this is not the highly educated crème de la crème; as they sip their special coffees and talk about revolutionary theory, there is thought and action being put together by those who go through the pain and the anguish. Those whose fears are invisible and whose voices have gone unheard .The insecurities which have never been articulated are suddenly vented and then there is visibility all of a sudden of things that have always stayed in each individual ,relegated to the dark corners of the mind and captured by the chains of self denial .These are spaces where tears and trauma become tangible, they stare you in the face like they are your own, with capacity to be part of your own emotional baggage ,more precious in many ways; unlike media coverage where they appear to us like stories of a distant land, of an alien set of people.
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They called it a workshop in training HIV people how to lead their lives and deal with the stigma and the discrimination that it brings along. ”Workshop” sounds mechanical, clinical to the last bit, perfectly manageable and without any errors. Sadly, life is all about imperfections………….but that’s what makes it beautiful and keeps it going. I tried to tap into those imperfections, the details of a raised eye brow, the slight flicker of a suppressed smile, and the pair of moist eyes. The way sita had felt scared of going out of her house to look for a job, a dead husband, the “dirty” disease, a child who is also a victim and the added burden that came to her from birth, that of being a woman, no degrees, no education, no green paper, and she had said with a glitter on the face” you just have to be brave sometimes”. What happened when jhanki lost her husband and was turned out by her family, abused and hurled? Her fears translated into strength not due to some great external forces but simply a result of the force of circumstances. She believes in that, “once you start doing things you learn gradually”, she told me with an air of simplicity and conviction. Then came the lioness ,I call her so because that is precisely what she is, you must know Pooja to agree with me ,she loves red, like she loves life and she is not afraid of her blood any more even though as a child she ran away crying at the sight of it. They are bound not by misery but by their common pursuit of happiness.

In the class room they call it “process”; I hate that word .To them it is the creation of “social capital”, to me they are women who have conquered life.