Recently, the Kerala High Court had to order a girl to talk to her parents. Why? Because they did not approve of her relationship with another girl, leading to a scenario where the girl refused to speak to them and went to live with her partner.
This was one of those rare cases where something delicate like this actually came on record, forcing us to stare at a very real problem of our society: not questions of sexuality, but simply the right of an individual to make a choice.
It’s a joke how many of us chat about how we ‘had no choice,’ and the ability to make decisions had been taken away from us. Such conversations easily descend into cynical talk about ‘free will’ or the nature of the state, and yet, for all the idealism, when it matters, we just give up.
Take the Kerala case. Someone has chosen to live in a particular way, with a certain person and has decided to adopt one lifestyle. These are choices she has made and the only real reaction should be a function of expression – either dissent or approval.
Instead in this case, the parents decided to go to the High Court, to force their 21-year-old daughter to return and start talking to them again.
The girl herself admitted that she had moved in with her partner willingly.
It is these people who make tough decisions and then face the consequences who are the strongest of all. Even as the rest of us talk about empowerment, we shy away when it comes to putting it into practice.
Empowerment is not the end result but a process, and the freedom of an individual to choose is one of the key building blocks – let us not break the foundation of this structure by preventing others from making the choices they deem right for themselves.
This post appeared on http://www.dailymail.co.uk on August 12, 2013. Read the original piece here.
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