The essential concern is one of freedom of individuals to hold their views and pursue their life style, whether it is sexual orientation, attitude to religion, having a drink of their liking, the question of who to love and how to express ones love. Modernity with its associated cultural phenomenon of enlightenment brought a new sense of individual rights and freedom; they brought freedom from the tyranny of the church in controlling all aspects of people’s lives, including that of science and intellectual thought. It is this consciousness of individual rights that became the bedrock of modern democracy and secularism. This is being assaulted from all direction. And, this is happening in a state that touts of its literacy, development and exposure to the global community.
Religious fundamentalism is raising its ugly head and all sorts of communal outfits are calling the shots and dictating terms to the political class both of the right and left persuasions. Both the political class and the religious obscurantists pay obeisance at the altar of mammon, the god of wealth. They cannot appreciate love, its finer manifestations, its tenderness, its giving in total self-abnegation; they only know violent intrusion with callous disregard for the other. That is what they call love; and in the dark of night they seek their illegal gratification. Since they do not know love, they become intolerant of all true and genuine expressions of it.
Is it a sin for two people to fall in love with each other? Is it a sin to be in a legitimate public space like a restaurant and share intimate conversations and enjoy their togetherness? Will driving them out of such public spaces to seek the privacy of a closed space in a filthy place sanitize our society and solve the moral degeneration that we face? Kerala is facing a rapid degeneration of values in all walks of life, much of them facilitated by those who pretend to be custodians of all moral virtues - the religious communities. Hypocrisy is their hallmark; their self-indulgent life style is masked by a veneer of religiosity; while they remain engrossed in individual piety, the public space is totally disregarded and left littered with moral ineptitude and turpitude. They take particular interest in keeping their private space clean; but they have no qualm in littering and dirtying the public space.
The Kerala society also suffers from sexual repression. They cannot acknowledge and appreciate one’s own sexual urges. Repressed sexuality does not remain idle. It expresses itself in such perverse behaviour including extreme religiosity, fundamentalism and sadism, in ways that we cannot often fathom. Intolerance and jealousy of all expressions of sexuality are such manifestations of repressed sexuality. To appreciate love, sex and many other finer aspects of life one should have a different sensibility than that of pure material calculations of life. This is fast disappearing from the social psyche of the Kerala society. The younger generation is more honest and are better equipped to appreciate friendship among sexes. Unfortunately, the older generation is still caught up in their repression and unable to guide them to more sublime expressions of love. Intimacy when enjoyed in lasting commitment to one another becomes a sublime spiritual experience.
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