The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

377: WE CAN EXPECT SOMETHING POSITIVE THIS TIME.

I don't how true it is but it is great - that today was only the fourth time when the Supreme Court reopened a curative petition - against its own order.

Gay rights activists say so claiming that they are now quite hopeful with the development that saw the Supreme Court forming a five-member constitutional bench to look into legality/criminality of the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (377 of IPC) - that there would now be a positive outcome - based on their demand of decriminalizing 377 again - based on related developments the world over including in the conservative Catholic Ireland that legalized gay marriages last year - based on their just demand to finally give expression to gay rights in India.

If homosexuality has been a taboo - it is basically for political reasons that have decided how societies orient and reorient their structures - that how societies have been orienting and reorienting their layers in every stage of civilizational graduation - and homosexuality has always been there - discriminated and persecuted - for something that is so personal, so intimate that should have no concern about it.

The Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code - that criminalizes gay sex says - "Unnatural offences.—Whoever voluntarily has carnal inter­course against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with 1 [imprisonment for life], or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Explanation.—Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section."

Well, that is a lot - in fact a loadfull of stuff for complete harassment.

Who am to decided what is natural or unnatural for someone else's sexual preference - an activity so intimate - so if anything is unnatural in all this - it is banning gay sex or homosexuality.

Hope, with today's development in the Supreme Court and with yesterday's development in the Madras High Court where a judge observed that it is the high time that we legalize homosexuality in India, the road ahead will see going back to the days which began after the Delhi High Court decision in July 2009 that decriminalized 377.

The four years, between the 2009 decision by the Delhi High Court and the 2013 decision by the Supreme Court, did much positives for the gay people with the LGBT community coming out in the open to open assert their sexual preference. Yes for the whole LGBT community - we, as a society, need to accept the fact that alternative sexual preferences have always been there in our society, and that that is also a way of life.

The two years since the SC decision in December 2013 have been a downhill journey, especially persecuting for those who had started breathing free in that four-year period with arrests and humiliations.

Scrapping 377 could be an opportunity for politicians after the apex court put the ball in politicians' court observing 'Parliament was the appropriate place to repeal the IPC section'. But as expected, our conservative politicians didn't make any move in the last two years.

Today, the Supreme Court could have taken the route the Delhi High Court had taken, decriminalizing 377 and issuing directives to the government in this regard. But even this one, constituting a constitutional bench shows there has been a serious mindset change since December 2013 and we can expect something positive this time.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/