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Indian Express
4 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
This Pride Month, let all colours of the rainbow shine equally bright
Written by Samata Biswas On Sunday, one of the most widely circulated Bengali newspapers carried a literary supplement cover dedicated to the many contentions regarding human sexual orientations, penned by a Sahitya Akademi-winning author. Best known for his novel documenting the lives of trans women in Bengal, this article, on the occasion of Pride Month, was, however, riddled with inaccuracies and prejudices, prompting many Bengalis to ask again: What does 'Pride' mean, and whose voices were systematically erased to create human HIStory? It is, by now, well known that the uprising against governmental persecution and police brutality of sexual minorities in the neighbourhood of New York's Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969, is now commemorated across the world as Pride Month. In India, with the recent decriminalisation of sexual 'acts against nature', corporates and institutions have begun to celebrate Pride Month with a vengeance, offering consumer choices as the freedom to choose one's partner. It is also ironic that the United States now both celebrates Pride and undermines the rights of transgender persons, cashing in on the Stonewall uprising led by prominent Black trans women activists like Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many others. Recent US legislation has gone back to claiming that there are only 'two sexes'. The illustrious author chose to ignore the word queer in his discussion of LGBTQ people, and placed bisexuals in the same category as paedophiles. Paedophilia, childhood trauma and grooming have long been used to discredit marginalised sexual orientations; it was a shock to find similar sentiments repeated in an article purportedly celebrating Pride. The word queer, with its long history of being a term of shame attributed to people whose sexual orientation was suspect, has been reclaimed by the community for more than 30 years now. It is now the most widely accepted umbrella term to describe a plethora of genders, sexual orientations and identities. The academic field of queer studies recognises diversity while also recovering hidden and submerged voices from before. Think of, for example, the recent book Queer Cambridge, in which Simon Goldhill describes a hidden community of gay men who lived and worked in close proximity to each other (in fact, along the same staircase in Cambridge) in the early 20th century, shaping much of what is today known as British culture. While the contributions of these individuals (including Rupert Brooke, Alan Turing and E M Forster) are well known, Queer Cambridge uncovers the queer connections and community that they forged and strengthened, creating new bonds across generations. Queer pride should also be, and often is, about uncovering such voices and connections. Mainstream, heteronormative society usually marginalises and hides such stories, histories, loves and events. Trans men are often infantilised, trans women made subjects of violence, lesbians made to hide in the shadow of friendship, while bisexual people are simply not recognised. For bisexuals, the author reserved his harshest condemnation: bisexual people can love both men and women, they do not care about the gender identity of their partners, and may even be attracted to trans women for a brief period before moving on and ruining their lives. Between Sigmund Freud's invocation of an anatomical or physical component of bisexuality to this author's association of bisexuality with disaster, the bisexual identity is in general maligned or unrecognised. One reason, of course, is the general belief that bisexual people have it easier, 'passing' for straight in a heterosexual world. Passing is often the only line that saves queer people from violence. Passing as straight, or cisgender (for trans persons), in a homophobic or transphobic atmosphere may potentially keep harm at bay, while also undermining queer and trans expressions of sexuality and gender. The suspicion and distrust of bisexuals encompass the belief that they can summon straight privilege at will, disown their queer identities and partners on a whim, and abandon queer causes. While literature and culture celebrate dazzling bisexual figures like Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo and Billie Holiday, and books like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends become runaway hits, the bisexual experience continues to be denied legitimacy due to its disavowal of any kind of fixity. This Pride Month, let all colours of the rainbow — and the ever-evolving Pride flag — shine equally bright, and none at the expense of the others. The writer teaches English at The Sanskrit College and University
The Hindu
06-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Internship for undergraduate students, mandatory under NEP, remains a challenge for West Bengal colleges
Colleges in West Bengal are struggling to meet a new requirement under the recently implemented National Education Policy (NEP), which is mandatory internship to be undertaken by all students in order to get a degree. As the policy, implemented in 2023, a student can exit college at any time — after a year, two years, or after finishing the full course — but not without doing an internship. This is turning out to be a challenge for colleges with many practical problems cropping up. 'While the NEP document makes the internship sound like an exciting world of opportunities, including interning with a farmer or a shopkeeper to get hands on training, many practical problems are raising their heads. What can be the relevant fields for a student of literature to intern in? Are they just the traditional fields such as teaching or journalism, or can content creation also become a field to intern in? Our colleges and universities do not have the resources to place all their students as interns, and some organisations are even charging money from the interns, instead of paying them,' Samata Biswas, professor of English at the Sanskrit College and University, said. Also read | Budget 2024: Internship scheme with ₹5,000 monthly allowance announced for one crore youth Some colleges are being optimistic about it. Jaydeep Sarangi, principal of Kolkata's New Alipore College, said: 'Earlier, classroom teaching was all. Now, training, certificate courses, internships and placement drives are equally important. In our college, for example, students are trained to prepare soap, phenol, sanitizer, floor cleaners, etc. as part of their internship so that they can stand on their own feet. We train students to go for start-ups as government jobs are limited.' Gour Mohan Sachin Mandal Mahavidyalaya, located in a village outside Kolkata, has tied up with a firm that will train students in IT and get them certificates from Infosys Foundation. 'Finding internship opportunities for a large number of students was a problem, particularly in a rural college like ours. Only when online internship was approved by the affiliating university (University of Calcutta, in their case), we could find a way out. We signed an MoU with an organisation for providing 80 hours of internship in blended mode in IT that will earn them certificates from Infosys Foundation. Classes have begun for the course,' said an associate professor at the college. Dr. Biswas of Sanskrit College and University added: 'The internship sounds like an exciting idea on paper, but only colleges and universities with a lot of money (essentially private ones) can implement it effectively. We haven't even begun. Because we aren't offering multiple exits, we still have a semester to get it right. We will place them with organisations that we know.'
