Chashme Baddoor

Illustration/Uday Mohite

At the start of the year, doing the now unthinkable thing, travelling on a long distance bus in another country, I woke up to find that my glasses had somehow fallen off my nose at night, and taken their own trip into the great bus beyond. No one on the bus spoke English and they were unable to help me find my glasses. I felt acutely vulnerable and disoriented, child's tears pricking my eyes. Only when I reached my destination and fished my spare glasses out did I feel in control of myself again.

As a speccy, when I read that someone had stolen the glasses of the activist Gautam Navlakha, currently in prison as an accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, I was puzzled. Spectacles are a strange object-more or less worthless to others, inordinately valuable to their owner. But of course, many chashumuddins have known bullies in school, who would steal our glasses or crush them, just to enjoy the sight of our frantic helplessness. It is a cliché because it's true, that bullies need to dehumanise others in order to feel strong.

Is being able to see a human right? In so far as our spectacles are an extension of our bodies and beings, perhaps the answer is an easy yes. What about a way of seeing-is that not also a human right? And should we care that human rights be an idea we hold on to, especially when we disagree with someone?

Some see the term human rights as liberal jargon, others as an imperialist agenda and still others as generating a kind of by-rote politics. We can and should discuss the limits of this political discourse in encompassing the complexities of human history and experience. Yet, at the heart of it all, no matter what the necessary nuances of the debate, we cannot really afford to lose connection with the central philosophy from which human rights arise.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the most translated document in the world, adopted by the UN on December 10, 1948, proclaims the inalienable rights all human beings are entitled to-regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. We are so used to this language that we sometimes lose sight of its heart, irrespective of ideology: that we agree, despite difference and even violent disagreement, to not strip others of their humanity and dignity, and thereby, also preserve our own humanity. These thoughts about equality and humanity, love and compassion are as much about the humans we are as how we treat other human beings. In the simplest sense, the idea of human rights is a commitment to being our best selves, one that we find echoed in art, spirituality and religion, too.

When we become alienated from our best selves, and our world becomes discordant, people sometimes say, 'nazar lag gayi', meaning not only that the evil eye picked us out, but bestowed us with its gaze, so that we see only the worst and answer only with our worst, grudging a man his glasses, an invalid his sipper, many unknown prisoners basic human dignity and the marginalised, equal advantages. May be, someone stole our glasses, too. Let's hope we find them soon. Or our elders used to say, Chashme Baddoor.

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

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