Adarsh bacche

Illustration/Uday Mohite

K, MY 11-year-old niece, informed me recently: "I take all pronouns". "So, would you like me to use ‘they'?" I asked. "I take all na. You can use ‘he' also."

"Well indoctrinated" my friend A laughed to me when I told her - a fair assumption, given I work on themes of feminism, gender and sexuality. But, in truth, I had done no indoctrination. My reasons - yes, you know me well readers - were ekdum khadoos. I get a Manorama face at the thought of the politically correct child constantly under construction by politically correct parents. I am an eye-rolling ulti-fier at self-congratulatory parental declarations about their child's moist pearls of wisdom, carrying their liberal elite, mera matlab hai, progressive legacy ever forward. I get the same feeling I used to get when ‘aao bacchon tumhein dikhayen jhaaki Hindustan ki' and ‘nanha munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' used to come on Chitrahar. Do the kids really feel this? I wonder. Or are they pleasing their parents? There is that famous Adarsh Balak poster, exemplifying an abstemious goody two shoes who prays, joins NCC, vaghera. Cool types always make fun of such people (making fun of others is what renders many people cool na). These charts have since been satirised and in them the Adarsh Balak does things that are less Rajendra Kumar and more Ranjeet: watch porn, snort coke and so on. These satires are amusing.

But when satires become too fixed in their approach, they start to feel pious too. When the counter culture becomes a template, the old Adarsh Balak is simply replaced by a new Adarsh Balak, mealy mothed in its own way even if it uses the eff word often. Yaniki, indoctrination.

Sure, K had met someone non-binary for the first time in my office and been intrigued and curious about what that meant. Yes, once K had asked about a picture of two women in my house and gazed with intent curiosity when I had said "that's my friend and her girlfriend".

But it's also true that K, like most young people, is in love with BTS, and the beauteous androgyny of Korean pop culture (K has also got a Korean name and plans to marry a Korean, but scorns Olly London). I think of my own teenage love for Freddy Mercury and what futures it hinted at. Or the casually accepted presence of family and friends who were divorced, teachers who lived on their own, alongside regular adarsh things of the time. Whispers, suggestions, instructions - culture, the icons we love, the music we love, the people we love - all help to make the particular shape of you if you can let them be.

One thing struck me about our conversation. How easily and joyfully K and her friends - and many young people - embrace this gender fluidity of being, which so many older friends resist, sometimes with determined dense-ness, even queer friends. How lucky they are to have these new understandings of self and others and relationships, which would have made growing up years easier for so many of us.

The world changes because many people live their lives against the tide, gloriously and eccentrically themselves, parting the seas of indoctrination for others to follow. How wonderful that sometimes this is greeted not with scepticism and denial, but curiosity and play.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com