I joined Write Leela Write a little over a year ago, still fresh from the prohibitive atmosphere of a leading university that insisted it's women walked around with gunny bags covering their legs. In a superficial sense, my university experience endowed me with a very solemn and sober appearance. I had learned to wear formal clothes to bed, my speech patterns harked back to a Soviet manner of deference and I had developed a rigid and uninspiring gait. However, an apparition of the person I had once been still remained, and thankfully, Rheea and Kala possessed the wisdom to discern this and decided that not much harm could come from hiring this flannel wearing dweeb.
The process of unlearning began soon after- I was allowed to admit that my real career goals lay in noir themed detective work, I spoke about how I felt that cauliflower is a demanding vegetable, that ketchup is an abominable condiment and how Don Delilo is nothing but a typically male novelist...for emotionally fragile white guys. No topic was too holy, stereotypes have been confronted, the Thane Maharastrian community has been a constant soft target and pipe manufacturing honchos have been taken down in our hallowed environs of outright freedom.
While my blog piece does carry a frivolous tone, I think it does find a place in the noble reactions to the incidents that have taken place in our republic over the past few weeks. In a close knit, collective society like ours, we need to ask ourselves if the environs we find ourselves in are truly 'free'. Whether it's in home or the world beyond, we need to have an understanding of the levels of autonomy that we are allowed to exercise with our speech. Sometimes, we find that the hardest place to speak our minds is in the places that we spend most of our time at- home with family, or at work with your colleagues. I'm just glad that the inherently vile nature of cauliflowers has been exposed in my office.