IIT-H sacks gay activist Ashley Tellis

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/IIT-H-sacks-gay-activist-Ashley-Tellis/articleshow/6034644.cms

HYDERABAD: In an AMU redux south of the Vindhyas, Indian Institute of Technology (Hyderabad) management sacked gay rights activist and faculty member Ashley Tellis, apparently discomfited by his sexual orientation. The academic, with around 20 years of experience, was shown the door last fortnight less than a year after joining IIT-H.

Being on probation, Tellis's services were terminated summarily. However, reliable sources said he was asked to leave for his "unlawful behaviour" and "deviant mischief". IIT-Hyderabad director Uday Desai did not take calls and his office said he would be available only after June 21.

It's learnt that Tellis's exit from IIT was being planned by the management ever since AMU's S R Siras was sacked for being gay in February this year. Tellis has filed a right to information (RTI) application seeking reasons behind his sudden termination and intends to have a face-off with IIT-H.

Tellis was assistant professor with the liberal arts department and is a well-known voice in the gay rights movement in the country. A published author, Tellis has a PhD from Cambridge University and a long teaching career. He faced strong resistance at IIT-H from the day he joined. "Ashley's entry was controversial with several groups among IIT faculty not wanting him in. There was internal bickering and resistance right from the beginning," said a source. Prior to Tellis's appointment, several faculty members had objected to his appointment.

"There were group mails sent against his appointment, asking the IIT director not to appoint him," a source said.

Some faculty members blamed Tellis for being too candid in discussing gay issues on campus. His article on `man-boy' love in a national daily further ruffled feathers. "The institute has a humanities wing but it is meant for technical education. It was found that students were extremely annoyed with Tellis's behaviour," said a faculty member.

However, a number of students disagreed with the faculty members. "He was one of the best teachers. Not many students had problems with him until the administration and other faculty members began asking questions about Tellis's behaviour in classroom," said a student. Students were even told to "be careful" with Tellis and "report abuse", the student said.

When contacted, university authorities refused comment saying only the director was authorized to answer these questions. "Tellis is no longer with us. We do not know whether he was sacked or left on his own," said an official in the director's office. A scan of IIT-Hyderabad website revealed that Tellis's name has been deleted from the faculty list.

Director in charge U V Varadaraju, when insisted upon by TOI, said, "Prof Desai is out of station." Sudheer Chella Rajan, HoD of Liberal Arts Department and Tellis's boss could not be reached despite attempts.

Tellis's close associates said that this is not the first time he was targeted for being gay. He had complained of being forced to quit or being terminated for being articulate about gay rights even earlier. His stints at Bombay University, where he taught in 1991, and later at St Stephen's College, Delhi, too weren't pleasant for Tellis, and he quit both jobs.

"Tellis was under constant pressure of being sacked even during his stint at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad," said one of his associates.

Dr. Ashley's take on the Education System: What's Right or Wrong with It

Q 1. Being an academician, you get to interact with many Indian and foreign students on a regular basis. Do you see any difference in the way students of different nationalities approach the Humanities and the Social Sciences? Are students taught to become ‘thinkers of tomorrow’ at most places? Why or why not?

I have taught mainly in the Anglophone world – India, the UK, the US – and so the tradition is basically the same. Of these, the worst students are the US ones. This is because of the particular brand of shameless and self-righteous individualism on which they are bumped up through the school education system since the retrograde 60s when student evaluations came in and a mindless disregard of the teacher and of pedagogic authority entered US academia in the sheep’s clothing of democracy. Students in the US do not know English at all (they learn it phonetically and not through reading and writing – they only watch TV – and fall of what is known there as the fourth grade cliff when they are suddenly asked to read and make sense of sentences. I’ve had some of my most frightening moments as a teacher in the US where you give a magazine article to 18 year olds in a Freshman Comp class and it is on f...... basketball and the salary cap – something they are very familiar with and they can’t tell what position the article is taking on it, can’t read what the article is saying. It is frightening. The amount of I’s in their paper are terrifying, worse still the ‘I feel that’. A student once read an Alice Walker essay (‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’) as anti-Black and anti-women and said she had the right to feel and interpret it that way! Another read a Shakespeare sonnet (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) as being about getting a tan! The US undergrad population is among the most insane populations in the world and not just the ones who bring guns to school and shoot everyone down. I mean every US teenager is insane. They are anorexic, bulimic, tripping on stuff, on Ecstasy, on Prozac, illiterate, unable to write a coherent sentence let alone an argument and they don’t want anyone brown telling them this. I feel so bad for the legions of Indian grad assistants who have to suffer them as TA’s. The racism they receive is astounding, much worse than Australians randomly beating up Indians that obsesses the media here. But no one, least of all the TA’s themselves want to talk about it. So obsessed are they about being in he US and living “the American Dream.’ The American Dream, my f...... a...! Grad students there are not much better. I have never seen a more self-righteous bunch of underqualified a........ ever. Their ignorance is matched only by their arrogance.

Coming to Indian students, most suffer from the opposite syndrome. They are too diffident, too intimidated by mediocre, insecure teachers and too cowed down. Indian students need to learn some attitude from US ones, though nothing else, because there is not much else to learn from US students. But Indian students are smarter, more able to process complexity (it is all around them) and less sheltered (the University system is very much in the social and not completely isolated from the rest of society, like in the US

British students I liked a lot and found them the perfect mix of Indian and US ones but I taught there a decade ago and I hear they have become obnoxious now because the UK has become more and more like the US. After all, politically, the UK is the US’ left testicle.

As for the approach specifically to the Humanities and the Social Sciences, developments in these areas force a critical engagement. Here it is Indian institutions lagging behind because most faculty do no research and do not keep up and are insecure about other teachers and students who do. I find students open, receptive and producing amazing work once introduced to developments and given a free hand. If at all I continue to work in educational institutions, most of which are moribund and highly inimical to rigorous and interesting intellectual work, it is because I have always, at least up to now, met interesting, brilliant, marvelous students. They are few, the jerks are many, but the few make it worth it. There’s also the largest middle set who are underconfident and trying and it is the biggest pleasure working with them because you can see them move.

As for this “thinkers of tomorrow” nonsensical rhetoric, I leave it to VCs and what they mean by it is very different from what I mean by it. The Director of the Institute I currently work in (IIT Hyderabad) keeps urging us to “think out of the box” by which me means get corporate capital for the Institute and for our research from big industry. Not much thinking out of the box can ever come from that but he uses the lingo completely unthinkingly. He has only one book on his shelf in his office and that is by Nandan Nilekani. Need I say more?

Teaching at an IIT has been most instructive (it is just my first year here and probably my last as well). It shows you how irrelevant most of Indian society thinks the Humanities is. These guys don’t give a s... about it or us. I’m teaching a course to MTechs and PhDs here (all Science PhDs) on Technical Commuication and also making them read epistemology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) and they are hating me and it. I don’t know what they are going to do when I reach Haraway and Latour. They are not used to thinking reflexively or critically about what they do at all. They do not ever think about questions of ethics or environment or politics or corporate interest when it comes to their research, which I find astounding, given how intimately tied up with all these things their research is.

I think there needs to be a serious dialogue between the Hard Sciences and the Humanities and the Social Sciences. This has began in the West and while the difficulties are enormous, some productive work has been, and is being, done. This is the real challenge before us, to set up this dialogue. This for me is what the thinkers of tomorrow must do. If we are to have a tomorrow at all.

Q2. What do you feel about all-girls/boys schools? Parents who favour such institutions claim that they teach students ‘morality and good values’, hence are better than the other schools. Do you agree? Don’t you think such institutions give an incomplete idea of the ‘real world’ out there, which has all kinds of people jostling for survival?

I think all single-sex schools should be converted into mixed schools. Single-sex schools are sick and pathetic. Already, sex segregation in our society has wreaked, and continues to wreak, horrendous effects on both main sexes and genders and a host of others. We all know what “morality” and “good values” are. Nothing but the perpetuation of sexual ignorance and upper caste, misogynist, f..... up ideology passing off as historical and philosophical truth. Of course such institutions give people an incomplete idea of the world out there and not because of some stupid conception of different kinds of people jostling for survival but because it creates impossible chasms between one major chunk of the world and another (heterosexual men and women). They just do not know each other at all and we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to help them understand one another when we could be doing much better things with our lives.

Q3. What does being ‘educated’ mean in today’s world?

It means making money, money, money. It means nothing else. Education means nothing in today’s world. In India, it means a medical degree and an engineering degree, then an MBA and then you f... up the country, while making money, and while claiming you love the country.

Q4. Do you believe that children from poor families cannot have brilliant minds? Or that men are smarter than women so education is meant only for the more ‘deserving’? What about LGBT people and their right to quality education? Who decides what is being taught and to whom?

Are you out of your mind? Are you tripping on something? I know a million brilliant poor students and practically every woman I know is smarter than practically every smart man I know, at every level. Of LGBT people, only hijras are denied education in this country and we should have hijras allowed admission in schools and colleges. If they can now vote in some places and stand for elections, they can also go to school. Tamil Nadu might lead the way.

As for who decides what is being taught to whom, that is, of course, context-specific. If you go to Rishi valley, you get a certain perspective you do not get in a government school run by s..... Jesuits (like the one I went to). However, we are who we are, in the long run, in spite of schools, despite them, not because of them, unless of course they destroy us completely, which, thankfully, they seldom do, whatever Illich or Foucault might claim.

Q4. Do you feel privileged at being associated with some of the best Universities in the world? How has mainstream education impacted you, especially because you finally chose to stay in the academic field, when there are many other things you could have possibly done with your life?

Of course I am privileged but I fought hard for this privilege. I come from a piss poor family. My school fees were 5 Rs in Class V and 6 Rs in Class 6 and we could not afford it. I had no clothes and no shoes and lived on hand-me-downs. I fought my way out of that. I did not get a scholarship to Britain for 3 years despite excellent grades and recos because I was not from Delhi (Stephens, LSR. Miranda) or Calcutta (Presidency) or Chennai (Stella, Loyola’s) or IISC in Bangalore or an IIT. I need the chhap of a big place because as a half-dalit, half-Christian, black-skinned, malonourished militant homosexual and feminist, I knew I would never be taken seriously otherwise.

Mainstream education impacted me very little. I did my PhD at Cambridge and it was the most mediocre place I’d ever been, apart from the most traumatic as I was not of the right class at all.

I visited, attended seminars and so on in all the top schools in the US and found them incredibly substandard. I think much more intellectual work happens in a University like the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalala in Wardha where Ilina Sen runs the most brilliant Women’s Studies MA or in Tezpur University in Assam where Amiya Das teaches Sociology and carries truckloads of books from DSchool’s library for them. I am not being facetious here, I am quite serious. Brand names are just brand names. Oxford and Cambridge are s... compared to the red brick Universities in Britain.

As I said, I chose to stay in academia because of students. However, I am now contemplating leaving the University and academic institutions forever. I will not cease to be an academic. I love academic work and will always do it but I am not sure I want to be in a University/Institute any more. These places kill all the real enjoyment of education.

Q5. What do you think is the best thing a teacher can give his/her student within a deeply problematic education system? What has been your experience as a teacher? What do you value in a student?

The best, and, indeed, the only thing a teacher can give a student, is a training in the method of thinking, showing the student how to use the tools in a particular discipline to read and change the world. I am from the Humanities, so speaking from the Humanities, I train students to read closely, to write carefully and to think about how to transform the world on the basis of that. It is what Spivak calls the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires,” that’s what a Humanities education effects. I am not interested in the project of telling students what to think, only how to think. Where they reach with that is up to them and I retain the right to fight with them about it that is, about where they reach) till I die but I will train them in how to read and write also till I die.

Part of this is, of course, to become aware and question the epistemic limits of knowledge production within the structure of the University system, what are the problems, what are the possibilities. They realise that better than I do because they are at the receiving end of it in more ways than I am.

I have no regrets about the roughly two decades, since I finished my MA in 1991 that I have been teaching, in one form or another. I will continue to teach for the rest of my days. Teaching is joyful and amazing and one learns so much oneself in the process.

What I value in a student is an openness to the world. That is all one needs really and you’d be surprised how hard it is to come by. Most students have to be beaten into it. But when you meet a student who is open to the world, eager to learn, reading, writing, thinking in class and on the page, it is a pleasure beyond all other pleasures. S.. pales in comparison. I have had the pleasure of having more than one student like this. Shad Naved in St. Stephens, Naina Manjrekar in Miranda House are two of my favourite Indian examples. They have made my life worth it.
(Dr. Ashley Tellis is Assistant Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, IIT, Hyderabad. His areas of interest include Twentieth Century Women's Poetry (Irish, English, US, Indian),Gender Studies (especially Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies, Dalit Literature and Culture (especially Marathi), Postcolonial Theory/Studies, Literary Theory, Northeastern Writing and Cultures, Black British Literatures, African Literatures, Latin American Literatures).

Interview with Dr. Ashley- Part 2

CONTINUED from last Question-Answer Session

Q6. You said last time that the world is hegemonically heterosexual and that any other kind of social behavior, as I understood it, tends to get labeled in terms of ‘deviancy’, ‘abnormality’ or ‘queerness’. Would you then go a step further and correlate the rigid sense of the ‘normal self' that is made out to be desirable in majority opinion, but actually feeds into rising levels of violence and intolerance in society today?

I did not say any such thing. I said various other identities get erased, rendered illegible by the heteronormative order. I also explicitly said I hated the word ‘queer’ so please do not attribute it to me ever. I loathe it. I then responded to your question of what I find in common among these various identities which I said is the violence at the hands of the heteronormative order which, unfortunately, was and is not enough to help us get together and fight it, though I said that was the struggle for me. Therefore, it does not involve any step further to say that a majoritarian, ‘normal’ self is posited against several deviant selves. That’s just saying what I said in different words.

What’s more important and in some sense the more difficult question is how to put the struggle that I refer to into action. How to get people who should be fighting together to come together, especially, as I said, we are divided across lines of class, caste, gender, sexual orientation and location. For me the biggest barrier to us coming together is not heterosexuals but NGOs. I think NGOs, the upholders of the so-called f...... ‘queer movement’ are the most criminal elements in society and inhibit any real coming together and transformative social change, happy as they are with bourgeois entrepreneurialism and report-based voluntarism. In Hyderabad, where I live, if you try to do any voluntary, non-funded work, the NGOs can get really nasty. There is no real ‘movement’ in Hyderabad at all apart from strict NGO shit, unlike say Bombay or Delhi Bangalore, or even Chennai, where some noises are made outside these spaces in terms of a ‘movement.’ Hyderabad is a perfect example of a comatose NGOised space.

Q7. Why do you think a person is violent in intimate spaces, for instance in cases of rape- marital or otherwise? I also feel that only a hurt person can hurt others, so how can such a violent person be healed so that s/he stops further abuse? Do you have any ideas that can be applied in extreme cases of violence and those not so extreme?

People are violent in intimate spaces because that is where they are at their most vulnerable, most naked, in every sense of that word. I don’t believe in nonsense like only hurt people hurt others. People hurt people and ALL people are hurt people. The processes of psychic formation and socialisation are foundationally hurtful and cause a map of hurts. I also do not believe in this s..... idea of healing. I leave that to New Age activists in California. I believe in theorising our hurts in our lives and seeing that we hurt each other the least. There is no complete stopping of abuse. Abuse is in many ways a given in our lives. It is about minimising it and learning about each other. Extreme cases of violence just call for separation. It is quite simple. More complicated forms of violence require serious dialogue and the willingness to change oneself. For example, I have a friend who is polyamorous and yet she keeps having relationships with men who are monogamous and who get hurt by her wanting other men. Now she is very honest and ethical with them and tells them she is not monogamous and does not want a monogamous deal. She even goes to the extent of trying to understand their pain and ethically offers to leave if they are hurting ‘too bad,’ to use your earlier phrase. Are they justified in feeling violated by her? Hurt by her? Who is being violent here? We seem unable to think outside boxes. I was aghast at how conservative the JNU students I spoke to that night were. People in their 20s, studying, and yet upholding family and marriage and monogamy. That would be unheard of for my generation when we were in our twenties, not that long ago. I think we are becoming a more and more conservative society as we go along. And everyone wants one alternative. What is your alternative they ask. Arre bhai, form your own f...... alternative. Why do you want to be led by the balls like some stupid f...... donkey? Why talk all this talk of plurality and diversity and what not when all you want is one f...... alternative. The question is how willing are you to change your beliefs, your value system and re-invent yourself. Ask yourself that. Honestly.

Q8. ‘There are many genders in the world’, please elaborate. Is ‘genderisation’ same as ‘socialization’?

What is there to elaborate? There are men, women, hijras, gays, lesbians, ‘queers’, MTFs. FTMs, transpeople, so many f...... genders and identities. Genderisation (what a terrible word - does it even exist?) is socialization and we need to contest it. Fight it. Reinvent ourselves, question our own cherished beliefs.

Q9. If marriage is a bad institution, then is institutionalizing non-marriage as bad? Which is a lesser evil and why?

Who is institutionalizing non-marriage? I do not like any form of institutionalisation. No one is offering any institutions of non-marriage. Non-things can’t be insitutionalised by virtue of being non. Institutions are, they are not not. ‘Evil’? I don’t believe in that word. I leave it to George Bush to bandy such terms about. But I think non-marriage is much better than marriage. Non-marriage is a sky open with possibilities. Marriage is a prison.

Q10. What is your view on spirituality? I am asking this because most intellectuals have problems with spiritual practices since they believe them to be hogwash or methods of mass control/hypnosis in an age of well-to-do sadhus and babas.

I do not believe in spirituality. I leave it to the sadhus and the babas and the likes of Alice F...... Walker. I am an old-fashioned feminist Marxist. I believe in the world of materiality. I do not believe in meta things. I believe in fighting the good fight with the idiots around me, though spirituality might help in dealing with men because they are so stupid, only spirituality might be able to save us from them.

(Dr. Ashley Tellis is Assistant Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, IIT (Hyderabad). I am grateful to Neha Wadhawan  for introducing me to Dr. Tellis.)

Interview with Dr Ashley, IIT (Hyderabad) after his lecture on 'Gay Rights in India' in JNU

The following five questions struck me while I was listening to Dr Ashley, who was invited to speak on 'Gay Rights in India' at Godavari Hostel Mess (JNU) on 14.01.2010.  We were a group of about 50-60 young boys and girls, awestruck at his brutal honesty, courage and sheer strength to carry on in such a harsh world, where 'falling in line' is what is taught at homes, schools, colleges and later at work places as well. There are little spaces left anywhere, where people can just be, just simply be, without fearing or anticipating judgment. Most of us live in duality of sorts that gives us one face for the world at large and quite another, privately.  When the meeting ended, all I could do was to go up to him, shake his hand, and exclaim 'you're beautiful.'     

Q1. Your areas of interest include Gender Studies (especially Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies), so the first thing that comes to mind is that what is it that you find common in all these ‘categories’ of people since they’re all clubbed to together and within broader 'gender studies', I'm assuming 'gender studies' implies 'women studies.' What do all these terms mean to you? Are all these rigid identities?
What is common to all these categories of people is that they are erased by the heteronormative order. The world is hegemonically heterosexual and people in these categories are rendered illegible by the hegemonic formation. For example, as a gay man I have no law to protect myself from institutional harassment because of my gayness which I have faced in every institution in which I have worked in India. Hijras (who can be considered transgender) are not given ration cards, till recently could not vote, are not given regular employment. Women, who want to marry each other (you may call them lesbian though it is not a word they identify with) are prised apart from each other by family, community and state. They are thrown out of jobs, out of families, forced to have medical examinations, very often commit suicide. So, what we have in common is suffering at the hands of the heterosexual, heteronormative order. We don’t quite see ourselves as allies of each other. We are cut across lines of caste, class, gender and regional specificity, among other things. But, for me at any rate, the struggle is to get us to fight together.

Gender Studies embodies a different realm which is that of academia. It implies the new Women’s Studies, which argues that gender is not only about women, hence Gender Studies and women are not only about women, in the sense that the gendering of women is more complex than the simple production of the category ‘women.’ From this statement alone, it would have become clear to you that there are no, for me at any rate, rigid identities. However, that does not mean I embrace the empty neoliberal category ‘queer’ either. For me that word empties identities of all material and analytic purchase. To me, that is a rightwing term. So I settle for identities that we presume are always contingent and blurred to us but we are also aware that this is not the case to the hegemon and that fixed conceptions of us have very real material effects in the world.

Q2. Would you agree that men can never understand women adequately or vice versa since both have a different body (and mind) and hence different ways/environment in which they are brought up in family (and society)? So when men and women grow up speaking different languages, can they ever actually understand each other?

I definitely believe that men and women can and should understand each other, especially as they seem so invested in each other. I do not belong to the lesbian separatists of the 70s in believing that men and women are two mutually incomprehensible and incompatible species. Having said that, I have to agree with them that men do not know very much about women and vice versa. This is especially apparent to me in India where most of my work has been conducted. The project for me then is to acquaint men with women in serious and engaging ways. This is my work as a male feminist. I work mainly with men seeking to make them understand women. It is not easy work, I assure you and after decades of it, I do not know how much I have achieved and in moments of despair I am given to believe I have achieved nothing at all. But this is serious and necessary work and I fully believe that one must continue to do it for as long as one is alive if one believes in gender justice and gendered equality. To say men and women can never understand each other is to make it seem like ontology when it is merely ontic that they don’t. They have a real need for each other and needs from each other they should learn to convey these needs better. Men need to realise that women happen to have minds too and feelings and that bodies are not separate from these. The moment of understanding each other can never be an arrived state but might always be a process. Communication even within genders is never perfect and can never be. That’s the nature of human communication. But we can try to make it the best possible. I think of a world where there will be no rape, for example, and I think that world is perfectly possible. But men need training and so do women.

Your question does, however, reinforce the male/female binary and thereby also heterosexism. There are many more genders in the world. We all need to talk to each other even if I sound like British Telecom ad.

Q3. When we speak of ‘self-identity’, do we look at it from the way that self appears to others, who’re watching and judging us all the time? What is a ‘real’ identity then, is it something one thinks about oneself privately or something one builds for others to believe, or both, or should we care about it anyway?

Identity is how we choose to narrate ourselves to ourselves and to the world which are simultaneous processes. There are various available models of this. Ego psychology in the US, psychoanalysis of the British and European kind, and so on. We are always trying to tell one kind of story about ourselves both to ourselves and to others. However, I think we need to be suspicious and vigilant about these self-constructions. We need to ask epistemological questions of the way we frame ourselves. For example, when we say ‘I am not that kind of person’ or ‘I would never do that’ or ‘I tell it like it is,’ we must ask what model of self lurks behind these formulations. Just asking that sort of question of oneself – who is this I and what is its authority? – is a good start. This is especially so in today’s world where identity politics is so dangerous and is predicated upon the erasure of other peoples and identities, like the genocidal Hindutva project. Or what we stupidly call ‘ethnic politics’ or even LGBT politics. I think one always has to be out of oneself a little, see oneself from another’s point of view to see the limits and possibilities of how one constructs oneself.

Q4. You said you’re against institutions, particularly conventional marriage between heterosexual or homosexual couples, since partners end up playing the masculine/feminine role in the relationship anyway, in most cases at least. But don’t you think when we grow up ‘needing’ something so bad, it’s difficult to let go of the fixation of marriage (and family), even though we may intellectually agree with you that marriage is the ultimate weapon of oppression and control exercised by one human over another and that it cuts off people from the larger social context/concerns?

I would answer that we have to interrogate this phenomenon of ‘needing something bad.’ Why does needing something real bad make it okay to go about getting it? Why do we not ask ourselves whether it is ethical to need that something real bad? We blame rapists for needing sex or power so bad that they go about and rape but what if they just gave you your own justification back and said they just “needed it so bad” that the women’s consent became irrelevant. Needing ‘love’ bad is a bit like rape anyway because it involves cutting people’s limbs off to Procrustes-like suit the need we want to make for them. We call this violence ‘love,’ dress it up with Archies cards and bouquets and songs of Whitney Houston or Himesh reshammiya hysteria and that erases or drowns out all the violence and we are okay with it. I think every monogamous person is actually a rapist and a criminal who kills, pillages and plunders under the guise of ‘love.’

Your binary between head and heart, intellect and emotion, is too unreconstructed for me. You need to ask yourself – intellectually – why you feel this guzzling – emotional – desire to drink someone’s life blood, restrict their movements, their desires, their imagination and who knows what else and call it your “bad need” for emotional security or some s... like that. And why you need to f... them over and call it love.

Q5. Another point you made about was sex being ‘better’ than love for it IS what it appears to be, so it’s more authentic in that sense, while love is 'complicated stuff' and people say it all the time but mean it differently etc. So, are you saying that since you think sex is better than love, so you don’t love at all or mix both when you’re deeply involved with someone? Can you actually separate both emotions? Not sure if women can easily separate both, since most of the times, they grow up internalising the two as one, so for most of them, this is their reality and they're stuck at that level. And most men grow up thinking of the two as separate, so probably looking at it that way is their reality too. Please tell me what you think.

I said sex is better than love. I did not say sex had no love in it or that love has no sex in it. These are three different questions. I think sex is best because there is the least bit of dissembling involved in it. Whether it is good or bad sex, sex does not lie. Love , in its hegemonic form, is about lies and subterfuge and mind-f....... and psychic games and role-playing; a whole armoury that f...... up heterosexuals (pardon the tautology) have devised over centuries.

But love does not have to be that. I have a model of love, for example (and to answer your question, I definitely do love) and that model can be defined more or less negatively first, in terms of what it is not, in relation to the heterosexual hegemon: my idea of love does not believe in institutionalisation of any kind, does not believe in monogamy, does not believe in possession, does not believe in control, does not believe in compulsory reciprocity, does not believe in compulsory geographical proximity, does not believe that sex is a vital and crucial component of what one feels (you can love someone without wanting sex with them) or has (you can desire someone sexually and love them but not have them sexually because they do not want you sexually and that does not affect the nature and texture of the love at all). In terms of what it is, I would actually like to say that a) it is not one thing, one solid, consolidated thing b)I hesitate to define it because it is contingent and fuzzy and uncertain, c) it pulses in and out, can be fiercely powerful now and then and can subside for long periods, d) is not prone to stay in little boxes no matter how many you make to put it in and e)it resists the narrative impulse because narratives are great in the bourgeois form of the novel but in life they crumble and disseminate into a million way more interesting sparks.

When I am deeply involved with someone, I mainly celebrate this love. Right now, I am in love with a Jat from Haryana, who assures me he will never ever love me and that he is not gay but sends me sober messages about how he loves the way I suck his d... and semi-drunken ones about how he wants to be my boyfriend and he does not love me so much that he wants to know why I have not called him for two days and calls me his ‘best friend for life’ (puts me in what my gay friend calls the common grave of friendship) and yet does not like it when a friend he introduces me wants me too; a half Tripuri-half Khasi, who loves me but does not think he can ever sleep with me but who when he smiles at me makes me want to die with his beauty; a sardarji who asks me if I will love him when he is old and no longer handsome and who will never sleep with me and who is married and abidingly unhappy and does not even know it and not because he’s gay or anything but because he does not know the person he married at all; a Telugu boy who holds me like no man has ever held me and stills my trembling body even as he speaks of how he will marry and hates his earlier boyfriend for his possessivenesss, while I assure him I will not cook his pet rabbit like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and he smiles when I tell him that I love him so much I want a million people at least to share that love and to chomp on his d... like I do; a Delhi Mallu ex-student who I’ve loved for 10 years and who does not even call me when he visits the city I am in and when we meet I can’t even look at him because his maleness does not even allow my gaze to stay on his body or his face, it bounces off…. I could go on. My point is simply that all these men love me and I love all of them and always will and I will never stay with or marry or be with or want to be with any of them and not because I can’t choose to be but because I can’t think of a stupider idea. I hate much about these men and love much. I celebrate them, I work on them and that is love. Not f...... marriage and children, a house and a car. F... that s....

Sex and love are not both emotions. Sex is mainly motion and love is emotion; but both have elements of the ratiocinative and the undertow of the psychic drive. These can and must be described in language for us to understand that when two or more people love each other or indeed when one person loves the self, there is a need to communicate what exactly one means when one says one loves someone or when one tells oneself that one loves oneself because only then can it become relational, when two or more psycho-biographical histories meet in the self or between selves. It is an emoto-intellectual complex much like the image was to the Imagists.

Women need love more than sex and men sex more than love: as dominant sociological narratives, these are true enough but as I just said, sex and love are both emoto-somato-intellectual and so women are righter and better at it than men. Men need to grow up and see the connection between their d...., hearts and minds. I’m going to try and help them do that for the rest of my life if it’s the only thing I do. Wish me luck.
(For more photos, click here.)