On the
way home from a particularly intense and meaningful session of the Sunday Adda,
I hopped on to a bus. Normally, on a Sunday evening at 8ish, I would just take
one of the many autorickshaws plying the fixed route between the Adda spot and
close-to-home. But, this is durga puja season, and all the Bengalis and their
uncles have gone ape-shit crazy. Normally deserted, horror movie setting
streets have looked like middle of the day at a busy shopping destination for
the last couple of weeks. Traffic, non-existent to the point of scariness under
normal circumstances at that hour, has been standstill and crawling
it-will-take-forever-to-get-there over the last few weeks. So, not chancing
waiting another hour in the insane auto queue, I just jumped into the first bus
I saw that was headed in the right direction.
Miracle
of miracles! There was a seat! So I parked my more than ample behind, and
settled in to ruminate on the fantastic session we had just had talking about male
gaze, comfort levels, policing of women's bodies and clothes, movies, books,
feminist theories, Freud, Woolf, and SO MUCH more. In the intensely slow crawl
to where I was going, many people got into and off the bus, of course, some
noticed, some not, in my post adda zen state.
One pair
I did notice consisted of a young guy and a girl, probably in their mid 20s. They
got in, and seeing the crowded, standing room only, state of the bus, chose a
corner near the doors to stand. I sort of vaguely, peripherally, noted the
animated conversation they were having, and concluded – probably erroneously –
from the body language and particular nyakami of the woman, that they were a
couple or at least romantically interested in one another.
Soon, a
seat opened up across the aisle, and the young man promptly rushed across and
took it, leaving the girl standing where she was. The first reaction I had was
anger. A clear, knee jerk, what a creep, he-should-have-let-the-girl-sit, what’s-wrong-with-men
type of reaction that came from some lizard brain conditioned part of me. And that,
the reaction I felt, that spurt of anger, immediately made me uncomfortable.
People who
know me can vouch for how vehement I am about equality, about the abilities of
women to negotiate this world without being constantly infantalised and babied
(as chivalry does), and so on and so forth. The woman was not older, physically
differently abled in any way that I could see, or pregnant (that I could see). Any
of those would have made me ok with my anger, because I would be angry with
anyone, of any gender, not giving up their seat in those cases.
But here
were two similarly aged, similarly abled people, and yet my first reaction, my
instinctive (conditioned?) knee-jerk had been of anger simply because the “man”
had taken the seat. Putting myself in that situation, if one of my male friends
had dared to offer me a seat “just because I am a girl” I would probably have
beaten the shit out of them, or at least handed out an extensive and caustic
tongue lashing laced liberally with feminist theory and egalitarian rhetoric. I
DEFINITELY do not want a world where ANYONE gets special treatment (either good
or bad) simply because of something like gender.
So, time
for introspection I guess. About conditioning and its effects. About how
successfully I have been able to resist conditioning. About how many of my received
notions I have been able to ditch. About why/how I have seemingly retained some
(unconsciously or consciously). And so much more.