Agents of Ishq’s founder Paromita Vohra talks about the philosophy

that underlies this unique cultural sex-education project at Dasra

Philanthropy Week 2021.

 

How do we as children learn to become adults?

Most of us are taught that being a grown

up is about learning to fit into the world and to adjust better to it

so that it rewards us for our adjustments with success. This often means

curating a part of ourselves that is acceptable to the world.

If we really stop to think about it,

those parts that we are taught to minimize and reduce are the very ones

that are pleasurable, emotional, sexual...the world of desires,

longings, confusion, pleasure, doubt, pain, feelings. We see these

variously as taboo, as inefficient, as “too much”. They are meant to be

controlled in order to fit into the world. There is something these

stigmatized parts of ourselves have in common. They cannot be counted.

And because they cannot be counted, they also cannot be controlled. But

does that mean they do not count?

If we are being taught to belong in the

world – or even mostly given chances to fit into a world, that in itself

creates inequality, injustice and exclusion – are we really helping

create an equal world? Can we really imagine equality and justice if we

treat parts of society as lesser, stigmatise and marginalize it, thereby

doing the same to parts of our own selves too? When we treat parts of

the human being as unequal, can we imagine equality, let alone practice

it? If we edit out parts of ourselves that do not fit in and are

included in a homogenous and homogenizing system, can this really be

called inclusion? And if it is merely checking the boxes of how many

identities it includes, without being changed by those, is it really

inclusive, or is it always leaving something out or someone out? Is our

idea of inclusion actually in danger of being built on an idea of

exclusion?

When we started Agents of Ishq we did a

landscaping exercise in which we learned a very interesting thing about

young people who were participating in programmes meant to provide

justice, equality and inclusion. They spoke about some subjects very

easily in public and these subjects were always to do so with violence

or difficulty. The subjects they discussed with a trusted trainer or a

few friends, were often to do with the difficulties of social freedom,

vis-à-vis their home and community. And then, there was a long list of

topics they never discussed with anybody -- and those were always to do

with hurt, pain, self-hurt, shame, desire, longing, and pleasure.

We often talk about how school teaches

us to pass exams and just write the answer the teacher wants to hear.

That is what we carry out into the world too. We are trained to say the

things the teacher, the trainer, the instructor, the boss, the funder

wants to hear. Think of how we talk about sex – we talk about it as

violence, disease or exploitation. We do not talk about it as pleasure,

possibility, creativity or life itself– all of which it also is. So

naturally, when we talk to people about sexual health and sexual rights

in this way, people respond with the more less definable parts of their

wishes and desires.

We pay attention when people talk of

these negative experiences, because that confirms to us that we are

helping them. The other experiences that we do not count, maybe because

we do not have the language to count them in and learn from those

accounts, are also accounts, but not the ones that tally up nicely. They

are accounts of experiences which build the knowledge of people and the

world as much as anything else.

When we do this, we are in danger of

seeing people in terms of a lack, not in terms of their capabilities. We

risk seeing them with an unequal gaze, rather than as co-travelers in a

journey of change – which is simply another word for life.

So, where do people go to experience

those hidden selves? They go to the world of enjoyment – Bollywood,

Tiktok, the internet, pornography, books, music, fashion, taking

selfies. It is a world that we treat as inferior and normally tend to

not take seriously, because it is pleasurable. It is a world we treat

with embarrassment or shame because it accommodates human emotion and

pleasure and even when we are in it, we refer to it as our guilty

pleasure. What could we learn if we paid attention to these parts of the

self and the world? This is the question we asked ourselves when we

started Agents of Ishq.

We created a space that was saturated

with pleasure – it was enjoyable, it incorporated the popular culture

that young people enjoy – from Bollywood, to the internet meme – and it

was non-prescriptive. It was about sexual health and rights, but it was

also about sexual desire...the world of emotions and feelings, doubts

and relationships. Information, education, enjoyment, pleasure, emotion,

sex, love, desire, rights – all of these were treated on the par and

questions about sex were given equal place and importance. We believe

this made us Agents of Ishq. And then we asked people – do you want to

be an agent of ishq?

We didn’t say that we want to reform

them; we asked them what they wanted to be and they replied with an

incredible diversity of interpretations of the term agents of ishq. We

think that these experiences changed the way we thought and reshaped the

space. We are used to telling others what is good for them, but the

truth is, people struggle to carve out a life for themselves – one that

is about health and opportunity but also about happiness and

self-expression. Their experiences are a place of rich wisdom and great

learning that can reshape our imaginations. As people began to share

their ideas and experiences two unique things happened.

One was the co-creation of the space

that got reshaped on mutual terms and which we can’t stress that this is

the central tenet of pleasure enough that mutuality and consent,

something that shaped itself together and also sowed the seeds of its

future growth.

The second thing that happened was an

organic and incredible diversity because people were not being brought

in only on the basis of identity but of their experiences. They were not

being asked to enumerate their difficulties so that they could be

categorized as an identity but rather to share what they had learned

from their own lives. There were no boxes and so, no hierarchies; as a

result it created a place where people meet on an equal footing without

erasing their differences. This genuinely inclusive frame where you

don’t check in with an identity card alone, while keeping half of your

complex human self out of the picture, is a place of solidarity and

connection which also acknowledges that there are great differences

amongst us which cause us difficulty. This creates an intersectionality

of identity but also an intersectionality of the human being - each

person complete with all aspects of themselves, no part lesser than the

other.

We believe that the purpose of justice

is to allow us to be who we are, and to be respected for that as a

whole. If we cannot accept people as complex wholes, but treat them as

enumerable, quantifiable commodities alone, we cannot imagine a truly

diverse world – because the frame we are fitting people in is one of

sameness, a single imagination, and a single story.

People often ask us if we have been

trolled since we talk about sex on the internet. The answer to that

question is surprising. We have never been trolled. We believe it is

because of the fact that we do not speak a language of aggression and of

reforming somebody who is imperfect and needs to be fixed. Rather, we

speak a language of exchange, inclusion and love which honours the human

experiences and gives it dignity through art and offerings of pleasure

and enjoyment. This, we believe, creates a confidence in the self, a

belief in the right to be human - which is also a human right - and a

world where we do not need to fear change, but can define change on

mutual terms and walk towards it, hand in hand.