1. WHY do we hurt most those we love the
most? Yes, we do. They dither from the pre-
scribed. Challenge our idea of love. Expose
to us our dependence and in turn ,vulnera-
bility. And up comes the picket fence
around the lush garden of love. Self-aware-
ness forbids expectation — the other is
faultless. Must correct the self. Resolution,
then, is withdrawal. We abandon the other.
Go into our safe place. Stoically martyred.
Unfortunately, it’s Sunday morning.
Drop the bedtime story. And climb down
from the illusory higher ground. Picket
fencing, read self-preservation, has no
place in love. To love is to attach. Be
attached. To be attached is to be protective.
And yet we hurt our parents. Repeatedly.
We reject our close friends. Consciously.
And we lash out at our partner.
Nonchalantly.
Does love bring out the worst? Why do
we degenerate into people we aren’t even
acquainted with? Who’s Jekyll and who’s
Hyde and what are they doing invading
your space? Don’t shrug and acquire my
scorn — it’s patented. Love does embolden
you to fall to depths unimaginable. This
even as you want to give your best. And
even as all you want to do is give. What you
give is a lot of what you didn’t know you
had. And you give this shit
without any realisation
whatsoever. Blissfully unaware …
Effortlessly you slip into this new per-
son. This new, insecure you. This new
in-love you. Of course you have learnings.
You tread with caution. But as the barriers
are broken and you exposed, proffering
yourself, you are rattled. Once upon a time
you loved with gay abandon. Now … gaiety
jolts. Makes you sit up. Question. What if
the now exuberant flame goes pfft? You’re
older. Much. Acquired your calm over years
of turmoil. Howsoever dull your life, it
works. Is comfortable. Then, love happens.
Attachment follows. Vulnerability ensues.
Stop. Turn it off. Shoo.
To love is to desire to be loved back. To
love is to be cared-for and to care. To love is
to be invested. To love is to allow the other
that certain power over you. To be defense-
less in the face of love. Yes,
v-u-l-n-e-r-a-b-l-e. Breathe...
Vulnerability is misrepresented. Yes, it
defies adulthood’s primary lesson: inde-
pendence. But isn’t adulthood acceptance
too? For how can you love without attach-
ment and how can attachment not yield
vulnerability? Fortunately, it’s a positive
emotion. Hold on to it. To feel vulnerable is
to feel love. And to feel loved.
Now that you perhaps look at vulnera-
bility with that certain je na sais quoi;
here’s succor. Look carefully. Is she just as
defenseless? Just as invested? Just as gush-
ing? You’re okay. Love rests-assured in
reciprocal vulnerability. And this, not in a
one-upmanship bid. For her readiness to
bleed doesn’t reduce your torment. Isn’t
retaliatory. But it comforts. Validates?
Helps you journey from self-preservation
to self-awareness. And back to love.
And yet she’ll let you down a few times.
Hurt. Bleed. But don’t abandon the post.
And once equanimous, do the three-step.
(1) Communicate uninhibitedly. For how
else will she know? (2) Demand shameless-
ly. For how else will she imbibe? (3)
Appreciate unstintingly. Handhold her
with patience and love. The understanding
that she’s trying. The acceptance that she
will falter. And the realisation that you’ll
hurt again.
For what if you’d never met? Never felt
this depth of emotion? What if you never
heard her laugh? Or felt her touch. Nor her
warmth. Or her sparkle. Your eyes never
beheld hers. Her dreams. Her fears. Her
need of you. What if she’d never made you
laugh or cry? Never escaped into your
arms. Not wept on your chest. Never
bruised your back. Or soothed your soul.
What if she was not in your life?
You’d be safe. Unbreakable.
Invulnerable. But would you be loved?
Be grateful for love that evokes vulnera-
bility. For she who makes you laugh shall
also silent tears from you evoke. Accept it.
Love her for it. Detachment is misunder-
stood. It doesn’t mean a cold, unemotional,
i-me-myself state of being. It means allow-
ing both pain and joy to leave you
unperturbed. It means detaching from ego
and offering the self to the other. Self-
preservation is for the unloved. The alone.
Throw caution to the winds. Hurt. Love.
Hurt. Love.
Ghalib says, Dil hi to hai na sang-o-
khisht dard se bhar na aaye kyun
Royenge hum hazaar baar koi hame
sataye kyun…
PS: translation? Quit the self-preserva-
tion club. Ghalib will speak to you…
Nupur Mahajan is a sum of many parts. Ideas
are her business even as her creative streak
sees her straddle television, advertising,
publishing, radio and brands. Reach her at
nupurmahajan@icloud.com.
The views expressed in this column are the
individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
PEOPLE are always saying it’s about loca-
tion, location, location.
Right now some residents of
Kamathipura are saying it. These gents (at
least only the gents contingent was visible
in newspaper reports) have written a letter
to the Chief Minister as a start to their
campaign to have sex workers removed
from one of India’s oldest red-light dis-
tricts.
According to them, the area’s associa-
tion with sex work comes in the way of their
professional progress. That address on
their application forms prevents companies
from hiring them. If this is true, that’s an
unfair discrimination.
So you’d imagine they’d want the Chief
Minister or whoever’s in charge of a fair
and just society (becoming so hard to tell
na?) to haul up the people who are dis-
criminating against them isn’t it? No such
thing. Instead they want action taken
against their neighbours, the sex workers.
It’s Revolution 21st century ishtyle as usual,
yaniki, let’s become strong by oppressing
someone weaker, rather than challenging
those who exert unjust power over us. Let’s
fight discrimination by discriminating
against others — also called patriarchy in
another form.
The resistance to looking at sex work as
any other form of work comes from both,
the inability to see women as multi-dimen-
sional people, which includes a
professional dimension; and an inability to
see sex as just another part of life.
Kamathipura is what mostly remains of
what was once a widespread, stratified
pleasure district running across Bellasis
Road, Falkland Road, Pila House etc. Here
is where there were playhouses (Pila House
being a corruption of Play House) and later
the first cinema halls, as also, workers of all
kinds, British soldiers, tawaifs, mujrah
dancers, Chinese dentists, international sex
workers (the foreign women giving Safed
Gully its name) and further, towards
Kalbadevi, with its bazaars and classical
music halls. This geography is a map of
worldly human pleasure — from commerce
to music and cinema to sex; in it is the DNA
of much of Bombay’s character — the
entertainment industry, business, a cosmo-
politan, professional sphere. The fact that
the term bazar is often used interchange-
ably for market and kotha, acknowledges
the aspect of work or trade inherent to sex
work.
By disconnecting sex from this continu-
um — of life, pleasure and work — and
locking it in some dingy room of our con-
sciousness we only add a layer of shame to
human existence, which becomes the root of
constant violence to ourselves — and to oth-
ers who embody it, like sex workers.
That’s why it becomes easy to render
sex workers invisible, and for a few people
to claim they are “the” residents of
Kamathipura, as if the sex workers are
not. And then suggest they should be relo-
cated to some non-residential area.
Perhaps they meant Nariman Point? No,
they meant somewhere where there’s no
one; no means to earn a living for the sex
workers.
Sometimes people critique the moral
critics of sex work by saying “as if they have
never gone to a sex worker.” This isn’t a use-
ful argument because it only seeks to
displace shame from one body to another.
It still makes sex sound like it’s an aberra-
tion and commercial sex sound like the
most degraded activity.
By making such populations invisible,
we allow for utter neglect. Kamathipura
receives little municipal attention, sanita-
tion and water being scarce. Such neglect
makes criminalisation easier — and allows
entire neighbourhoods and people to be
written off as beyond repair, setting the
stage for new notions of middle-class
respectability. Which must be housed in
new middle-class abodes.
Also known as gentrification, yaniki,
redevelopment. So, let’s not guess who’ll be
moving soon.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-
based filmmaker, writer and curator working
with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at
www.parodevi.com.
The views expressed in this column are the
individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
tweet talk
Barack Obama
@BarackObama
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killer blues session in heaven
tonight.” —President Obama
on the passing of #BBKing
Truly.Vulnerably.Deeply.
paro-normalactivity
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Sexworkandthecity
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nupurmahajan
Residents of Kamathipura have written to the
CM to remove the sex workers from the area
ILLUSTRATION /
AMIT BANDRE