Today's editorial page of Times of India shows Taslima's photo, she quoting that her maid thinks her to be poor and laughs at her that she doesn't have a mobile phone whereas the author is merely amused at the ubiquitous cell phone and doesn't use one nowadays. I don't know how she manages, though we all can, if we calm our minds, but it had really become a necessity. How do you communicate when there is an emergency and you can't immediately reach someone in person? Taslima can do so because she is an international figure and writers and media people throng her almost always and she can have other means of reaching out. But it's true that she's the only person who cannot be called a freak or a attention seeker when she does something different. May be she's the only woman who has never been untrue in her life, though at times she has become silent, being tired of a harrowed and hounded existence and has wanted some peace.
I have read so many collections of her; novellas, poetry, columns, autobiography. It has been very natural to fall in love with her, because she has been immensely courageous to bring to light the truths that no woman or even man dared to. May be I have understood her clearly because I have seen and felt these truths from a very close distance. Men have hated and despised her because she has shreded their fake images into pieces and has exposed their ageold hypocrisy in their treatment of women. But how enlightened man would be if he understood what she wanted to speak and tried to raise the society from the dirty dogmatism and egocentric existence and wanted women to be treated as human beings. It's only natural that no man could love a woman like her, because man has always loved to see a woman in the traditional image of her shy, demure, subdued, soft and sacrificing self. So loudly her autobiography screams of her mother's pain and agony of being ignored, subjugated, underestimated, commanded, destroyed, degraded and tortured . I remember a few lines from one of her books where she has written that there is nobody in her city to hold her hand and look into her eyes straight and tell that he loved her. She has not found a man who can bear her truths and love her. She had met men and had fallen in love, but all of them either lied or cheated or simply were too small for her highly evolved consciousness and felt insecure and uncomfortable before her truths. She never found somebody she could respect and love. She openly stands up for sexual freedom, but to me, it is just an outcome of her frustration in not getting true love. She at last accepted that men only need to use women to manage their homes, to bear their childen , to obey them and to serve them and be happy with whatever happiness they get in exchange. There is nobody to uphold their capabilities or taents, their rationality ot their sensibility. As there was no love to be gotten, why live without pleasure? After all, sex is also a mere biological need like food and ablution according to her. I never subscribed to this view of her chasing pleasre uninhibited because I still belong to the species of women who connect sex to a pure and loyal emotional bonding, and that without pure, dedicated and singleminded love, sex becomes a mechanical excercise and animalistic pleasue which, as human beings, we should keep away from so that the societey doesn't jump into a valueless brutal and chaotic existence. Without pure emotions, there cannot be peace in human consciousness. But whenever I think about Taslima, I feel really sad that there cannot be a man in this suncontinent who didn't have the courage, the personal height, the unlimited conscious to bear her immnse truthfulness and daring to expose the ageold hypocritical dogmas and customs that have forced woman to be the second sex and have not allowed her to express herself as a human being. Couldn't there been a man with an expansive mind, who could have understood her and would have loved her?Is there really so much of fear in man that he can't ever be an evolved human being rather than remaining a puny little man. Can he ever break the shackles of his ego and become unlimited like the shy. Yes, there is risk in it. It is easy to live a safe life, to work, marry a woman, bear children, gather money, build houses, buy cars, pretend to be busy in diffeent circles , have some good diseases and die with caring or uncaring children. But what about living like wind? What about exlploring truths? What about questioning things? Will the Taslimas would have to die disappointed, sad and bored. Would there ever be men...unlimited... like the sky?
