Kaospilotpatrik’s Weblog

The background story of India and love is the very much matriarchal society witch still is India. This is changing by the minute when money is the new religion. We are talking about the urban areas where expertise and education is much more important than the old casts and marriage status. The teenagers has to deal with this and I compare it to the social clashes that you might see in Sweden, where dating among Swedish inhabitants as teenagers is an everyday thing, or as common as ketchup. But at the same time some children of immigrant’s might face problems where their two worlds collide into a new world order. This because their parents are used to pre agreed marriages.

So the internet in India is growing. So is the influence from other countries where love and the freedom to express love is all over the news. So of course Internet dating becomes a “safe” place to communicate and learn how to meet people of the other sex. This makes it also more possible to make friends of the opposite sex without having to deal with the interference of the rest of the family or society.

Some 51 percent of the Indian Urban inhabitants with access to the Internet use internet dating sites “48% frequent matrimonial sites, and 44% belong to the social networking site Orkut. 37% of all Indian internet users undertake both online matrimonial and dating/friendship activities, up from 9% last year. “[1].

Text messaging is also huge, even bigger actually. This is because the dating sites require more money to use than a mobile phone and the cost of a text message. Today, almost everybody has a mobile phone in India

As I see it is of huge importance that men and women from an early age learn to form relationships. These relations are the ones who will form the society of tomorrow. If India wants to be a part of the new world economy, they have to learn how to communicate and form relations in all forms of society. The gender class is a huge issue here, and there is a clear distinction for the rights of women and men. The cities is getting more and more westernized in the matchmaking and dating area but still has a long way to go.

Will India be able to learn from the missteps of the west regarding ecology, energy and education?

This question as its putted can only be answered with a yes. Cuz they will and they have already done that. This dos not mean it will be like that in all different aspects of the problem.

If you also would like me to motivate I would appreciate it if you told me so. But I can do that anyhow. Actually the way you put your question like a yes or no answer, is how the old world used to be. Nowadays I believe that is not what we need to focus on. Again it is the process of continuation and reflection over our daily life that can save this planet from extortion. So India is as I said already learning. They have more engineers in this country probably more than in the rest of the world together. They lack common knowledge as I mentioned earlier in the answer to Allan Webber such as the illiteracy rate is 40 percent or 450 million people. So there is some work to be done here. How much of a difference can one make if you live in a world where reading is a part of your own freedom and you do not understand what the train sign says.

India is a growing economy. They talk a lot about their economy and their middle class is exploding right now incomes wise but of course also knowledge wise. They do so by trade, a lot of that comes from America and China. These influences will be the standards that we set for India to develop as a growing economy in the 21th century. No growing economy or even a small Buddhist nation like Tibet is today given the opportunity to grow without having clear discussions with the rest of the world on who they are, how they think, and what they can contribute with. So this is very much a global thing. A wont to tell anybody thinking about that India needs to learn faster how the world cannot take much more of a non proactive approach to the global issues that they are the ones that needs to work with these issues. How can you tell a child that is growing up that they do they wrong thing all the time, not providing them with what you think is wrong and also at the same time behaving in the same way. We as westerners not only needs to walk the talk but also understand that it is a global problem we are facing if we want to solve it. India will not learn alone from us but learn from their self as the west did when they explored what didn’t work.

Will they recognize earlier in their economic & social development that material resources are finite yet human resources as creativity innovation & expression are infinite?

First of all you can’t compare Indias situation with the one of the western world their isn’t really the two. A part of the British empires big wealth is based upon the act of war and terror against India They where the one who in the 1850 got read of the guru schools and wanted to educate the Indian people in a more civilized and fact wise way. This could be the big reason why India today doesn’t reflect so much on their impact of the rest of the world. Before that they were one of the wealthiest economies in the world. Today India can of course exploit other countries by warfare and trade such as the US also has done in Iraq in the name of the black gold. But every situation is unique.

In this question also you say that human beings is infinite. Well I don’t think they are. They are just as mortal as the Dinosaurs. Therefore nothing is infinite in its form and what we believe will also be finite some day or rather transformed. All tough I do agree that if we want the human resources to last longer we need to consider how to save the things necessary for human beings to live. Rember again though the very poor and not so educated people and how that gap between them and the rest of the world is something that other people really benefits from in the short run but kills everybody in the long term. If someone digs a whole in the ground the stuff that used to be in that place is now somewhere else.

So there is now earlier, there is only now. And now India has the number one religious country in the world. This tales that used to be the walking sayings of Krishna and other mortals is now rules that the Indian society is based upon. This is a perfect example on the really high knowledge from the old Brahmins on the power of mind and belief systems. The global movement of achieving high spiritual values is bigger than anytime today. The collective Indian mass is freeing itself from old religious belief systems by going the American and capitalist way. While a lot of people from the west is examinating themselves on the spiritual paths. The will only meet when they both have missed eachoter. Dialoge though is the seed to the answer of the understatement of the question.          

As we as human beings is forming our behavior from the feedback we get from our environment we live in, this is what we need to work with. We need to talk, reflect and act thereafter, knowing the knowledge of learning.

Will India achieve a true global consciousness that recognizes the unique contribution of all cultures?

Yes as much as anybody else. So will Sweden do that. Yes they will. But as they do so the contribution and the states of the world will emerge at the same time. Today India is in a state of change and it’s the old boiled frog metaphor. Maybe this “true” global consciousness has already happened. And that is why you recognize it in a question. I am here writing about it anyway.

Thanks Patrik

What are the living conditions for homosexuals in India; socially, culturally and politically?

Politcally:

According to the law from 1866 it is still illegal to have sexual intercourse of unnatural kind in India and it has the maximum penalty up to 10 years of imprisonment. This means in practice that gay men are not allowed to have sex with each other but is allowed to be gay. Concerning women the law does not apply as they are not sought off to have intercourse while making love. However in the year of 2006 several gay men were arrested in a small rural village in India for being homosexuals. People started protesting against this as their where no proof of the men ever having sex, and as they also so it us an insult and an offence of the right of just being gay. I think this jus states how far the society and the gay men actually has come in reaching a safe place to meet. It also meant that the law from 1866 now still is under examination.

Socially and culturally:

To be gay in India means hiding from the society while performing an act of love. Even though the law is slightly more tolerable to lesbians the culture and the society of India does not allow them to have sex or show their love to each other in public. Today even though the first openly married lesbian couple In India does exist, its society still has very little to offer gay and lesbian love. One can only imagine what role the pre agreed marriage has in shaping the society sexually in India and other states with the same – no sex before marriage norms. It is though common that parents tell their male teenagers that having an attraction to other boys is a phase that will pass as they get married. In some cases this does not change, and the society deals with this often by letting the man living a double life. There is website were male gay men are looking for other gay men, and there is three different options to tick, one is single looking for a partner, one is married looking will not divorce and one is married locking for a partner will divorce when I meet a partner.

To talk about an open society for homosexuals we can also look at India´s old way of dealing with male transvestite and gay men. They used to “fix” the problem by calling them a special cast. Today you still meet a lot of men wearing women clothing and begging for money. In this way it´s legalized to be different.

Today the prostitution market for male prostitutes is really growing. In the city which are said to be the city of art and culture, Kolkata, male prostitutes are also said to be most common of all Indian cities. They do so to be able to leave the rural area and get a descent and rather open living as a homosexuals. It is freedom in one way and prison in another.

Another way of looking at the homosexual’s right to freely express their love is by comparing it to heterosexual’s right to do the same. The heterosexuals in this country are not supposed to show their love to each other in public at all. Even holding hands Is a sign of this bad manner. To see to male friends hold hands or being what we in the western world seems to be very close and intimate for being friends is common among Indians. How much this has to do with people actually being gay is hard for me to say. Another thing that strikes me is if not having a lover before your getting married and living so separated from the other gender could lead to what the society of India doesn’t want to talk about, more people being homosexuals.

Summary

My opinion of the matter of this question is that it must be very hard for homosexuals in India. This is first of all as it is still illegal to have sex as a gay man. The law helps very much to form the norms of the society. Start changing the law and the society will follow especially as the internet and other sorts of communication tools are narrowing down the globe. As India is finally opening up since the early 90´s the biggest democratic power in the world can soon no longer stand against the pressure from both within and without on how they treat about one tenth of their population. And us money pile in to the Big Cities, so must the free minded people.