This was not the first time I was told that I make everything personal. Neither was it the first time I got emotional about an argument that seemingly had nothing to do with me. Neither is it going to be the last.
We all are growing up in a world where objectivity is apparently the only way we can have discussions and debates. And I keep wondering why we would be talking about something, if we did not feel for it? Why would we be having any discussions and debates if we did not have an entry point, an opinion, a feeling, a stake in the issue we are talking about? And unfortunately we are also living in a world where certain people get to decide what is objective and what is not. The more “unemotional” person in the discussion gets to call everyone else “too emotional” about the issue being discussed.
Is it privilege that shields people from not needing to have an opinion? Is it entitlement that lets people have an opinion and believe with all their might, that their opinion is the only valid opinion there is? Is it ignorance about another person’s lived experiences and their points of entry that makes some people so self righteous? Do they think they know better or do they think other people don’t know enough? Beyond all of this, do they realise the toll that their “objective debate” is taking on another person?
A few months ago, an upper caste, upper class Andhra boy explained to me very calmly, that father Stan being denied a sipper in jail was not the problem of the system but the mistake of a “few bad apples.” With tears in my eyes I told him, Vara Vara Rao is family. My voice breaking, I asked him how he explains Sai Baba and Sudha Bharadwaj and every other person wrongly incarcerated by the states. He held my hand and told me “Aila, you are too emotional about this issue to talk about it.” And may I add, by this point, this boy had been a chartered accountant for 7 years and I, studied and published a research documentation on the living conditions in central prisons of Telangana (if the concern was credentials, I was far out-ranking this 30 year old, while I was 22).
My problem with objectivity is simple: It does not exist. It does not exist in the real, messy everyday life. You can be objective about how many corners a right angle triangle has, but how can you be objective about lives? About incidents and history and politics and psychology and economics and philosophy and everything else in between? How is objectivity even possible?
I am too emotional. I am emotional about a dog that I didn't even want to have, how do you think I am not going to be emotional about human lives? I absolutely do not understand how any person expects another person to be unemotional about things. I am emotional about every issue that I give a damn about - whether it is human rights or my doll being called creepy. Because I give a damn about it!
If you have not cried your heart out about an issue, is that something you even really care about? Because if you have not cried about something, I refuse to “debate” you and “discuss” with you about it. I refuse to engage with people who do not feel! And I refuse to accept any methodology of research, any pedagogy, any relationship in my life that is not based on “Being emotional.”
Care enough about something that you cannot discuss it objectively. Give a damn about something in your life that you cannot debate sensibly. The world could use more people who care enough to cry at night about the state and the society. And the world needs more people who take the political personally and not just the personal politically.
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