Ghulam Azad's Comments Against Homosexuals

Ghulam Nabi Azad’s startling statements about Indian homosexuals exposes not only an idiot but more importantly the cancerous chamcha culture that grips the Congress.

I met Azad many years ago at a function hosted by Sonia Gandhi, who had then not even hinted at her ambitions. Azad was pompous to the point of absurdity but when Mrs. Gandhi entered our midst I have never seen such a change in posture. He went from being the sultan of greater India to a groveling buffoon. He nearly head butted the floor with his whimpering bow and I’m sure if I had looked his knuckles would have been bright purple from the force he pushed together his namaskar. It was not dissimilar to someone on the brink of starvation begging at an intersection. When Mrs. Gandhi left our circle his fellow Ministers laughed their heads off and told him he was a chumcha, admittedly an excellent one.

When you are assessed for your ability to kiss royal posteriors and possession of obscure vote banks you will always get an Azad. Individuals who are so removed from reality that you have to purchase tickets to their world to have a conversation.

His statements that homosexuals were hard to administrate because unlike prostitutes they didn’t congregate in readily recognizable areas is sensationally bananas.

Azad, not yet even remotely discouraged, then generously bestowed another profound pearl of wisdom. Homosexuality was not only unnatural but that homosexuality was brought to India by foreigners.

Bring out the men in white coats with two straight jackets. One for Azad and one for Mrs. Gandhi.

Investing any responsibility in this incompetent (that involves anything more complicated than the demands of a rickshaw puller) is equally mad. Mrs. Gandhi’s constant five cents that the windows to Government need to be cleaned and MP’s held accountable is now a further heavily devalued currency. The window has not been cleaned as so much as it has been smashed and we have had an unsettling peek at her bathroom cabinet. Cabinet ministers that could not run a brothel.

If Azad had had the intelligence to remember mid sentence that his Empress was an erstwhile foreigner he would have died from a major cardiac event. That he didn’t is very unfortunate because he continues to administer the mortally important health portfolio, that he clearly does not, without a pinch of ambiguity, have the marbles for.

This fact is cold steel solid when you consider where the statements were made. In an HIV conference. The equivalent of rocking up to a Holocaust memorial in a Volkswagen or asking for a jumbo box of condoms at the Vatican gift shop.

Many of my dearest friends are Indian homosexuals. I am very proud to call them friends. For six years I lived next to a Delhi Hijira colony full of characters. Their sexuality is only a part of their identity. Though I will indulge in some bigotry.

My stereotype of an Indian homosexual is quite prejudiced in that I believe they are almost without exception above average citizens. High achievers in business and the corporate world with their strong sense of civil behaviour. I also believe in my prejudice that they have a predisposition for getting the job done right.

To alienate this community that could be at least 50 million Indians is not the brightest move. Twice the population of Australia could be natural dancers and know their flared jeans from their skinny jeans.

A phenomena I have witnessed is that a considerable amount of Indian students studying in Australia have come out of the almirah. It is of course much easier to do here rather than Rajouri Garden.

A gay friend very bravely went back to North Delhi, a bastian of conservatism, and shaking like a leaf told his parents he was batting for the other team. His Father’s reaction would have been less violent if he had told him he was batting for Pakistan.

Indians will forgive you for being gay but they will never forgive you for not procreating. His Father’s response?(After having a stiff peg and a lay down) “Beta, you have to stop being naughty and get serious”, as his Mother handed him some homeopathic medicine and told him about some girls she had lined up.

Azad’s jurassic attitudes help reinforce these impractical ideas. The Congress leadership needs to purge itself of unqualified dinosaurs living in fractured realities. Ministers who hold position for their chumcha skills not any administrative flair.

Indian gays need to be recognised in a society that badly needs them. They need to be embraced by competent members of the State and welcomed to share the exciting burden of lifting India higher and yet higher.

Cut Off From Reality

The last few days have seen Delhi University colleges reach new heights for cut off marks. SRCC announced a stratospheric 100% cut off with St. Stephens, in a close second for absurdity, with 97%.

Things have changed since my days in Sri Venkateswara College, or Venky for the English medium types. Even then getting admission was not simply a matter of turning up and bribing your way into the sports quota. (Many Venkyites were track and field champions who didn’t have the stamina to run after the Mudrika(ring Road bus) for more than the length of a bus stop.)

Many readers will be very upset that I gained admission by quota. Not as a scheduled tribe person or a backward caste member, despite those groups being a more apt description of my character, but as a bloody gora. This was something I didn’t advertise, as my very first day in College was a full blown riot in the dark days of the Mandal Commission, that saw volatile nationwide protests against quotas for education and jobs.

I spent that first day with my eyes wide open like a possum caught in a car's headlights. I saw future friends, through a light haze of tear gas, address the students with a frenzy that you don’t see in New Zealand unless you are a mental health nurse. That has never left me. That raging passion for a fair chance from having studied madly for the larger part of their lives. Often at the cost of a childhood.

Australasians have it so very easy. For me to have qualified for a seat in DU on a level playing field is a comical concept. I certainly wouldn’t have got in the sports quota as sumo wrestling in India is still in it’s infancy. My Kiwi exam marks were an almost perfect inverse of the now ridiculous cut off marks.

Not everyone is disadvantaged enough to have an unfair advantage, such as being a Kiwi. This lack of opportunity, despite securing an average of 80% plus, is a matter of life and death to many students.

The tragedy of the annual suicides that darkly come with the admission season is proof to that. Young boys and girls who have pressures that many western children would simply not withstand for a mere morning. The years of family discipline that enforce daily hours long shifts of calculus and Shakespeare. Parents petrified at the thought of their loved children ill equipped in a society that has no Centrelink and then strongly projecting those intense fears on already stressed kids.

Frustratingly, these tragedies are not only driven by justifiably neurotic parents and elite colleges conducting ‘branding exercises’ but by the reality of sheer numbers mismatched by finite seats.

Delhi University has 54,000 seats with over 125,000 applicants. "It is a grave crisis that we need to look into. At least six more DU's are needed in the national capital region to meet the skewed ratio of demand and supply," said Pillai, The Vice-Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Other solutions have been put forward including a much wider program of evening classes in DU’s 70 colleges. This would have been a policy from heaven in my day. Our Doordarshan era dance parties were stifled by girls having 4 pm curfews. I think you’ll find students will have no incentive to graduate within 8 years and the necessary introduction of abnormally large crèches.

All this injustice is good news for Australasian education institutions. In fact it might give impetus to a phenomena where the intellectually less fortunate Indian students are the foreign students rather than the cream.

As when Malaysia exercised it’s prejudice against ethnic Chinese aspiring students and Australian and New Zealand Universities enjoyed a windfall, as they still do. The continued and strongly increasing prejudice of the Indian Government against her own aspiring students, albeit a universal prejudice, will ensure greater numbers will look abroad.

But what about students who do not come from business families who can afford foreign fees? What about students who don’t come from business families that can support perfectly good students that don’t have impossibly perfect scores?

They will have to live in a society that has very little opportunity for a ‘respectable’ position without a graduate qualification. It can be a nightmarish reality to exist in a vacuum of opportunity.

Young seventeen year old innocents know this. I feel deeply sad remembering the tears when friends saw their posted results. The student sitting next to me in an exam who was caught cheating. How he wept and begged with pressed hands to be excused. It was like he was begging for his life. He was.

Henry, King Of The Intellectually Less Fortunate

The recent fine imposed by the Broadcasting Standards Authority of $3000 for Paul Henry’s racist observations on Sheila Dixits name was pathetically limp wristed. It also could not have come at a better time for Henry as it coincided for the launch of his memoirs “What was I thinking?”, and provided him thousands of dollars of nationwide advertising.

How there was no fine imposed for his repugnantly racist questions about the Governor General is bewildering.

Random House, his publishers, who admit to him being a ‘complex character’ probably very wisely decided to launch his book at the same time as the judgment.

The book has sold 4,000 copies in it’s first week which is litmus test not so much of Henry’s contribution to New Zealand society but on sections of the society.

It seems New Zealand is suffering another intense brain drain but now from experts refusing to leave. Any citizen who spent the 30 odd dollars on his memoir and not on a bucket of KFC needs to reassess their life’s philosophy. Then check in to a mental health facility.

But these imbeciles who endorse Henry’s character mostly need to broaden their jaundiced horizons. But I really hope they don’t.

That would mean mixing with them. That would bore me to death. ‘Yes Dave, Indians eat eggs’, ‘Yes Susan, India does have elephants but they are not the main mode of transport’. My wife was asked in Onehunga how on earth could she be television producer when India didn’t have any electricity. She sweetly replied Indians watched TV by candlelight.

These stratas of society really should remain just stratas. Easily identifiable mono culturalists. Bitching and moaning about immigration and globalisation as they speed off to have a curry after an hour shopping at The Warehouse. Marked out and easy to maneuver around.

They are welcome to tune in for TV breakfast shows run by fellow bigots. That means for a few hours they are off our roads. It worries me greatly that Henry is back in radio and his disciples might be simultaneously operating dangerous machinery and listening to tripe.

I am also told within their raving loony ranks are National Business Review journalists who propose that Dixit should change her name. On the contrary, it is a cruel fate that Henry’s name is not reminiscent of a Punjabi abuse. It is also fateful that he did not poke fun of goras with truly ridiculous names in New Zealand’s political sphere. Chris Carter had an assistant with the very judgmental name of Badcock and another man suffered friction with being Christened James Cockburn.

What I will agree with Henry is his anger at the New Zealand Government apologising to the India Government for his appalling behavior. That was setting a precedent for the Government to accept responsibility for precious dandys who pollute our culture.

We can barely tolerate them at home but internationally they are an intense embarrassment.

(Image stolen from nz-tees.spreadshirt.com)