freedom and democracy

Excerpt from The Diary of a School Teacher, by Hemraj Bhatt (trans. Sharada Jain)

While watching T.V., I came across a news item about a Madhya Pradesh teacher who had advertised in the newspapers for a female friend to massage him and fulfil his sexual needs. The police, on reading the advert, conducted a sting operation on the teacher and took him to the police station. Here, they asked him vulgar questions again and again – just to enjoy themselves at the expense of his discomfort. The teacher, on his part, was visibly ashamed and kept apologising, saying that he would never do something like this again.

The TV channels played this clip on loop. Several questions came to my mind. What do these channels want to convey by showing such news? What is worth showing and what is not? What was so great about conducting a sting operation on a poor teacher?

In a country and in a society where nothing is immoral if done on the sly, who gave the police and the TV channels the right to define morality?

This teacher could have fulfilled his desires without the advertisement. Then the police and journalists would not have known about him. But he expressed his feelings. What does freedom mean in a democracy?

Hemraj Bhatt (1968-2008) was a assistant primary schoolteacher in a government primary school in Uttarkashi. He was the only official teacher in a school for 51 children, ranging from classes 1 to 5. He began keeping a diary which was translated and published after his death. His reflections provide insight not just on his daily struggles to provide meaningful education to his children but also on the entire education system itself. Read the full diary here.

a friend and a therapist

Friends you can count on are rare. Friends who help you through depression are an even rarer subset. But should your friend also be your therapist?

I speak for myself when I say no, she should not. In the throes of depression I cannot see things which are fairly obvious. She makes the decision to be the calmer of the two and attempts to show these things to me. But this decision comes at a cost--she has to overcome her own fear and shock and try, at all costs, not to display it to me. She has to discard everything she's doing and concentrate entirely on me. No matter how she's been feeling, she must rally enormous emotional forces from within herself and use them to systematically counter every argument my corrupted mind throws at myself, at her.

But every time this happens, she is put in a terrible position of grappling between love and helplessness. Unlike my therapist, she has had no training in clinical psychology; any strategies she comes up with are ones she creates on her own, based on her intimate knowledge of me, the connections she makes from the history we share and her learnings from previous conversations. She never stops learning, she never stops trying for me.

But she's my friend. She's not a therapist. She comes from a position of love, and it is this same position which overwhelms her each time these conversations happen, because it is beyond the scope of our love to provide me with ways to cope with depression. Her love convinces me that I need these strategies, but it cannot always provide them to me. There is nothing right or wrong about this, and neither is this a limitation: this is a fact.

If you have someone like this on your life, don't take them for granted. Talk to them whenever you need to, but if you want help, go to a therapist or a doctor. Just like self-medication, forcing them to be your therapist is harmful and unfair on both of you. Remember that every breakdown you suffer from, they suffer with you, and somewhere it is worse for them, since they do not have medication or therapy to fall back on. You should.