Paradoxes

She reads the letter from a faraway land
The soldier's words bring tears to her eyes
The child licks on a razor blad dipped in honey
In love pain and joy are not separate

-Jan and Ash's Chinese poem
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I was working with a campaign to end violence against women sometime ago, and our main focus was domestic violence. Domestic violence being the violence, emotional or physical , one suffers at the hands of one's near and dear one's. The violence of loved ones.

As part of my work I had to conduct workshops for young people ,who would then design their own material to talk about this issue with their peers. For this purpose, I gathered posters of work against domestic violence, from as many countries as I could. I would then screen the posters one-by-one and ask the group to react on whether they think the kind of message on the poster appealed to them, and if they thought that they could use these kind of messages for their own discussion materials.

Once in a small town called Bhawanipatna, in this obscure rock-oven of a district called Kalahandi, in Orissa, we had organized a workshop where I met this guy who left an impression.

The group for the workshop was enthusiastic, and we set in with work immediately. We went through poster by poster and the group was forthcoming about their reactions to the same.

I particularly liked an African poster of this strong woman with her hand raised to the sky, with the words " We are a rock, a boulder, if you touch us you will be crushed". Because I was personally fed up with material, especially from some parts of South Asia, where the posters had extremely morbid and scary pictures of tortured women and pleas to end the violence. How could one end it I thought when the poster itself seemed to re-inforce these images. This poster of this strong woman standing to fight back seemed enticing to me. But the group, fed on a healthy dose of Gandhism, said that one could not fight violence with violence.

I shrugged my shoulders and put up the next poster. It was from the U.S.A, it had a picture of a heart with a bandage across, and the words "Love is not supposed to hurt". After translating what it meant in my struggling Hindi, the group went "Ahhhhhhh" and everyone nodded. And a girl right in front said, that this appealed to her, because love is supposed to be so wonderful and not the kind where the man hits the woman to show her that he loves her. There was a general consensus and everyone agreed that this kind of message was strong and one which we could use.

But then right from behind, a guy who had not spoken yet, but who in the tea-breaks would go into the corner to practice his cricket shots with his imaginary bat, raised his hand. He hesitated before saying "But .......love hurts, when I look at this girl I'm in love with in class... and .....she doesn't look back, it hurts. When I want to speak to her so badly........... and I can't, it hurts. When I see her sit with other people for lunch, I hurt deeply inside. When I feel .......that maybe ........she will never know how much I love her, nothing hurts me more".

Few in the group tried to supress giggles, but I had a lump in my throat as I looked at this boy with new eyes. But at the end of that discussion the group decided that they dint think that poster was appealing, as someone then said "Dil tho aakhir dil hain na, meethi si mushkil hain na".

That workshop happened sometime ago, but I look back fondly at that conversation, because it taught me something deep. That though certain things are clear to define, one cannot get carried away with definitions alone.

(PS- I am very wary about publishing this post, because it is vague and has a message which could be misconstrued. Let's please discuss before opinions are formed)