I am grimly aware that I am slowly becoming a spoilsports at many friendly gatherings when it comes to appreciating certain events, jokes or even worries. No no, its not that I am transforming in to boring dull personality. I regularly find myself in a company where laughter is spontaneous and loud. I still retain same old humor with word plays and self-deprecation. It's just that it is changing. And with the change are coming weird looks, allegations that I am trying to be over judgmental or moralistic. Some even whisper that I have lost it. Suggestions to "just take a chill pill" and relax and to be "normal" are common too. This is a marked departure from my earlier reputation of a fun loving guy who had some decent access to humor store.
If that was not enough, there are problems on the opposite side too. Things that infuriate people around me don’t seem to matter much to me either. It seems like I am taking the "chill pill" when I shouldn’t. Things like Obama chewing gum during parade or some movie star blurting a controversial statement, a love affair, bad play by the favorite sports team, in fact most of the controversies on news outlets like TOI and CNN don’t seem to provoke me.
Following the gruesome Charlie Hedbo incident that happened recently and the amount of discussion it generated I decided to look at the humor department first. Here is an excellent post that made me analyze my world.
The curious case of lost humor
This is what seems to be happening to me. If I identify myself to be in company of group X. Let there be a group Y where X and Y are not so friendly and Y is the under-privileged among them. Then degrading, murderous, insulting, offensive jokes about group Y do not impress me. In fact, based on the degree of malice in them they provoke negative response from me. This does end up spoiling the, otherwise, giggly mood in the gathering. Me trying to explain my position makes the matter worse.
I have been accused of trying to capture the moral high grounds, but on a little pondering I realized that it was the opposite. It was a result of being humbled with a flood of information that found its way to me few years ago. This new information made me lose whatever rationale I had to convince myself for laughing at misery of the said target groups. I think that the only reason we are able to laugh at jokes that degrade others is because somehow we have convinced ourselves that they are less of a human than us, it also sometimes require us to be convinced that we are a victim of them. When the parameters to these two functions are altered the response is altered too. It is in these situations that those who retain original parameters find the folks with new parameters- abnormal.
Examples of changing parameters
I will give you few examples. They will also demonstrate that I too have my origins in "normal" behavior. Some of these put me to shame even today, not because I think less of who I was then. What I feel embarrassed about is how come, for so long, I was uninformed about so much. How, when I could have been more helpful, I must have hurt those around me due to lack of sufficient information. It is very interesting that many of these changes involved only a few hours of education.
Contempt of Transgendered:
Perhaps the most shameful of all contempt I ever participated in was by holding the Transgendered community as a butt of many jokes that are common among school/college students in places I grew in. Using derogatory names for them like "Chakkas" and teasing others as if they were one was something I engaged in. I recall many jokes that friends and I occasionally cracked and laughed till our belly hurt. They were to be laughed at, to be shunned and to be scared of if you were caught alone. It wasn’t till I accidentally started reading about their side of story. That how they were fully human as me, perhaps more because I am not sure if I would remain a human if the society treated me the way we treat them. I am sure there are better resources out there, but a documentary I saw almost had me hate myself for not ever pausing to check on the other side, whose insult I was occasionally rolling in. A lot can be said here but for the purpose of this article I will leave it for another day.
Contempt of Dalit(depressed section of Hindu society):
While the contempt of transgendereds was limited to insults and laughing at, I can perhaps convince myself that as a school/college boy there was hardly I could have done anything for them. The contempt of Dalits however hindered me from fulfilling my responsibilities. There were numerous jokes (mostly fake) about how incompetent they were, how unworthy they were of reservation. They were represented as free riders and threat to our career. If they were part of your "project/viva team" you were so screwed. It took me many years to open my eyes to their plight. Books like Untouchability in rural India and books and writings from P. Sainath educated me about many things that I wish I can meaningfully share with my friends someday. I am not going to argue about reservation here because that is not the purpose of this text. Forget about if they deserved to be there on that. What I am saying is that if I pride myself as someone who has some amount of kindness in me, doesn’t it feel weird to have engaged in this mockery of depressed and those struggling? How do I resolve my self-assessment as a "helpful person" when I did not, for a moment, paused to help a classmate for something he/she was struggling with? How could I engage in laughing at their situation? Do you see my problem? I owe a lot to my classmates for helping me in my studies, being someone with hearing loss my class notes were always sparse. So basically as a "struggling" person I wasn’t shy of seeking help, then what stopped me from giving some? Now do you really think I will laugh with you on a joke that involves Dalits?
Contempt of Blonde/Sikh jokes
Who can laugh at Blonde/Sikh jokes. I'll tell you, one who has not really known them. After knowing some of the smartest folks from these set it is hard to not question why mentioning Blonde/Sikh was central to a joke? The saddest part is knowing the origin of the midnight/12'o clock jokes about Sikh. Story goes that it originated when the Sikh started midnight raids on invader Nadir Shah's to protect the civilians of Delhi. Precisely the people who will later on crack the midnight/12'o clock jokes about Sikhs.
Contempt of Blacks ...[essay still in progress]
