Going radio ga-ga retreat

By Sandip Bhattacharya

I was exiled to a desert island recently. Not quite. I spent a long month in an old tumble down house in an eastern city. The house had no television, a small palm-held radio of uncertain volume, no car and I didn’t have a great deal to do. So it was like a desert island. The books I had read, most of them, during earlier stays over the years. There was no Sarat Chatterjee or Bankim Chandra collections and only on a few scattered volumes of Tagore. I re-red old classics like Thomas Hardy’s. The Return of the Native, Charles Margan’s The Judge Story, an old Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and the Penguin book of Comic and Curious Verse. In the desert I had one redeeming asset – a powerful 15-band radio and the BBC World Service. They enriched my month.

International affairs, music, religion, debate, discussions, world history, interviews, interview-cum-discussions, musical quiz programme, sport, science, travel, woman’s hour, foreign correspondent’s dispatches, all these I listened to and the end product was immensely satisfying. Quite a few years ago, I used to know the head of the cultural department of the Ford Foundation who had his office in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe. It was a time when British governments, particularly Conservative ones, were forever threatening to prune grant to the BBC World Service. My friend told me that one of the projects the Ford Foundation was considering was a largish grant to the World Service to keep alive what it thought was an international asset.

Take Shostakovic’s Violine Concerto no 2, written for and played by David Oistrakh. Take a series on the lives of Mendelssohn and Mozart, Edward Greenfield playing classical requests from his endless collection which brought Maria Callas and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Take the musical quizzes with three participants and a moderator, where else could I have heard them with such startling clarity? Because the BBC has so very many Indian listeners there is an attempt now to slot in programmes with an Indian content. An interview-demonstration, for instance, by Rave Shankar and his daughter. Not so hot, I’m afraid. Maybe the English programmes over Deutschewelle and Dutch Radio are also good, I have heard their news programmes but never such a glittering array as the BBC produces, For instance, I had never imagined that programmes about religion in Focus on Faith or patterns of Faith could be so fascinating or one on the icons of Cyprus, that Third World issues could be batted out so frankly. For young people-and older ones like me-there is the BBC World History and I was thrilled by a programme on slavery. Than there was new writing and new music under the wrap of Meridian.

Every now and again there was something to get indignant about. In a programme on Le Corbusier on his birthday one of the participants, very knowledgeable about Chandigarth and who has visited it several times, said that Le Corbusier had thought that India would be the "watershed" between past history and modern technology and then added. "But alas, that didn’t happen".

There is more than a smitch of truth about the remark but where has one planned city changed the course of history and the trends in a country? The technology of exceptional high grade done anything to change the US having the largest prison population in the world or of 30 per cent of British children (according to UNICEF) living under conditions of poverty?

After a good many years I heard the icon-like Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. I had always taken him for a liberal. But over the China Straits affair he fully supported the US policy of putting the cushion below Taiwan with huge arms supplies, planes and ships, forgetting that another journalist, at least as distinguished as Alistair Cooke, Walter Lippman, had urged a "Two Chinas" policy decades ago at a time when the US allowed a pimple like Taiwan to represent in the UN the most populous nation in the world and Cabot Lodge kept tilting against the windmill for years. Who even remembers him now? Cooke was very incensed at the US losing out on several committee of the UN’s Human rights Commission but omitted to mention that the US had not signed the Kyoto Protocol on global warming or the one on the proposal for an International Criminal Court. He had a world of praise for Woodrwo Wilson who is rated in history as one of the most radical of American president and Cooke had some very snide remarks for Yasser Arafat. One had the wish to take up a pen and write to the BBC’s Write On or some other reaction programme.

It was wonderful to hear Ibn Batuta given the appellation of "the greatest travel writer of the world". A six-part series on Jesus Christ was narrated by the great actor Sir Derek Jacobi and Jesus was described as the most influential man in history, but I feel sure that a series on Buddha would have been just as inspiring. But, as I said before, I have nothing against the Focus on Faith and Patterns of Faith programmes.

The people called on for comment (not just political but on science, psychology, etc.) are still mainly Britons and American, beamed as they are to India there are now quite frequent Briton of Indian origin and some Africans but few continental voices and almost none from Japan, Egypt, Indonesia, Cuba or Latin America. That is, I think, one obstruction to the BBC’s being called a World Service. But what a treat it was to hear Noam Chomsky on Agenda calling the US "the largest rogue state in the world", giving reasons.

It’s not London alone I heard. Dhaka and Kolkata also came in very clearly. Bengali spoken from Dhaka is much better than from Kolkata and there is a rash of phone-in programmes in both the countries. Women’s Hour produces discussions in Bengali which though good are but badly produced and hence with much too long passages. School quizzes in Bangladesh were appallingly poor. Apart from lovely rural songs and of course, the ever fresh Rabindra Sangeet there was the endless caterwauling of modern songs. As a compensation, I heard one early morning from Dhaka a replay of Mujeeb’s speech in 1971 when he said : "This time the fight is for independence".

What impressed me in the Letter Programmes was the immense hunger of people, women and men in the villages and small towns, for more information for the sparking off of new ideas and for entertainment which they are obviously not getting. Even if we couldn’t do then just as well as the BBC there is much, much that we can do – and probably never will.

Of course it would have to be for English medium schools only, though even that is something. But if our upper-form school students and college students have a compulsory listening session of the BBC World Service they would gain enormously. They could start with the 60-minute Newshour. That would have to be voluntary, perhaps, because it is in the evenings. As I said, from the latters from villages and small towns about the Bengali Women’s Hour programmes, I learnt there is great hunger for information. To give an example, I remember reading once in <I

>The Times of London <P>that the British Council Library in Kolkata in Theatre Road, (now Shakespeare Sarani) was the most used Council Library in the world.

Returning form Kolkata I didn’t press button my television for ten whole days. Didn’t miss it at all. Indian television is getting crammed with copycat programmes from the BBC. Why not a few copycat radio programmes?INAV

Will society lend a ear to Homosexuals?

By Uma Ramachandran

The lunch break during the conference on gays, lesbians, kotis, transgendered and bisexuals is lively. There is friendly banter all around. Dipika, Working for the Sangini project at the Naz Foundation, among other organisations present at the meeting, teases another girl, "Let me give you a kiss, Oh, but public mein problem hoga,no?" Another joins the conversation, and it all seems very regular.

And, it is. For them. And for the others at the conference. They seem comfortable, one gay boy can be seen applying mehndi for another, while others sit primly listening to the discussions. Outside, it is a different story. Unless, you are lucky, like Dipika. "I am safe, because I can pass… as straight. I have known since I was 10 that I was a lesbian. Little things about me were different. Like, when I walked down the road, I didn’t look down at the road like other girls, I looked around." She has come out in the open in society, but says, "If I am living with a female partner, will I have the courage to own up to it or let it pass?"

Kathy (name changed) is from the UK. She is teased when she walks down the streets in her country. "In India, homophobia is ingrained, it is not over." Boyish – looking Pamela (name changed), 27, from California, agrees, "Back home, people can tell from the way I look. And, they hate people like us. My friends have even been beaten up on the streets." Her father was also homosexual and realised it only after his marriage. It only made her question her sexuality even more and coming out took that much longer. Her father, she says, is proud of her for discovering herself so early, and her mother and brother have come to terms with it after seeing her happy with her new friends.

Friends are difficult to find in India. Dipika says, "It is difficult finding and meeting women one can fall in love with." The community is small, with few coming out.

Bixexuals find themselves on the other side of the divide. They can be part of neither group. Nimmi (name changed), who prefers to call himself homosexual, since other than men, the only woman he has been attached to his wife, He also has a four-year-old daughter, who questions him sometimes about his wearing mehndi. "I am preparing my daughter for later. I tell her that sometimes men like to dress like women and vice-versa." He sees himself as a woman and left home after he was forced to marry. Later, he came out into the open with his wife who accepted his attraction towards men. Life has settled into a groove after that.

Not so for Akshay (name changed). "I can’t tell you of the trauma I undergo with my wife. I just can’t be myself and don’t enjoy my physical relationship with her. Whenever she goes to her parents’ place, I put on her clothes and make-up and feel at peace. A woman doesn’t have to do things to feel like one. But, I know I am not a woman, and doing this makes me happy," he says.

Ajay (name changed), a happy-go-lucky bisexual, was shaky when he decided to come out at the conference. His first marriage ended after 46 days when he confided in his wife about his bisexuality. His second wife is still with him, despite knowing of his preferences. Sex is a natural fallout interaction and mental compatibility, he believes, and love may or may not be a part of it. "Sometimes, I feel the need to for a man and a woman together and recently, a group of us came together during a party."

Psychotherapist Neeru Kanwar would look at the safety aspect of such activities rather than the moral or ethical point of view. "It is important that the individual and his or her partners practice safe sex and come together only after informed consent," she says.

She also feels that homosexuality or bisexuality are caused by neurological and hormonal factors and cannot be "treated." One can only counsel and let the individual decide his sexuality for himself, she says.

Gay activist Shaleen Rakesh recently filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on the grounds that the Indian Psychiatric Association has not recognised homosexuality as normal behaviour. He says. "A boy was given non-prescription drugs and put through aversion therapy and hypnosis at AIIMS to ‘cure’ him of homosexuality."

The NHRC in another report said that the concern was not one of human rights but a social problem. While they draft a formal reply to Rakesh’s complaint, Dr Sandeep Vohra, president of the Delhi Psychiatric Society and member of the Indian Psychiatric Association says homosexuality is already accepted as normal by the medical fraternity. "We follow the guidelines given by the WHO under its International Classification of Diseases, which is updated every 20 years. Currently, it is the ICDX which is in practice, and according to this, sexual orientation alone is not to be regarded as a disorder. For instance, when a psychiatrist treats a depressed homosexual, he is looking to cure the depression, not the homosexuality."

He empathieses with Rakesh’s need for a formal stand on the issue, but says, "It is understood by us that the WHO guidelines are being followed. There has never been any need to pass a resolution to that effect. However, I will be putting up the issue before the Indian Psychiatric Association."

Aversion therapy, he says, is given in cases when an adolescent is confused about his sexuality and has had fleeting sexual encounters with members of the same sex which have led to him feeling guilty. "They are showed of pictures of men and women, and given shocks when pictures of males are viewed," he says.

Dr Kanwar, however, says, "This amounts to punishing the patient and not allowing him to respect what he feels," she says, Homosexuality, he says, can be of egodystonic and egosystonic. The second is the state where the individual is convinced of his or her orientation. "They do not come to us," he says. The first usually occurs between the age of 12 and 18 when it "is technically possible to have sex with either sex. Sexuality can be fluid at his time, and the adolescent is still figuring his or her sexual identity, be it gay, lesbian or bisexual." He terms it "sexual maturation confusion," but stresses that it is certainly not a disorder. He says homosexuality is a result of a combination of factors – social, biological and genetic. The absence of a father figure and dominant women at home can affect a male’s psyche, but only if accompanied by other socio, genetic and biological factors. They can also be exceptionally gifted and brilliant he accepts, without glorifying them.

Being transgendered, or feeling one is a man trapped in a woman’s body and vice-versa is a disorder, he says. The only cure is a sex change, he says. Here, too, they treat the body, not "curing" what the individual feels. In Delhi, complaints against psychiatrists can be addressed to a committee set up by the Delhi Psychiatric Society, he says.

Delhi-based clinical psychologist Sadhana Vohara, member of the Psychological Foundation, a trust which was established to facilitate the work of clinical psychologists, believes homosexuality is not a disorder and has no problems giving a written statement to that effect. "If I asked to do so, I will have no problems doing so," she says.

Gays also face other problems, namely, harassment under section 377 of the Indian Penal code, which prohibits any "carnal intercourse against the order of nature." Rohit (name changed), a gay, says he was once picked up by a policemen in plain clothes. "He told me his wife and kids were not home, When I saw his uniform hanging there, I was scared, But, he forced me, threatening me with section 377." Also raising a voice are the kotis, the ‘female’ partners in gay couples. A Delhi-based organisation, who will take up their cause, says, "They look up to the man who abuses them physically and mentally." "It will be soon a war of economics, with only the affluent ones being able to take care of themselves." About time for society at large to lend a ear! INAV