To make our point, let us begin with a story of a salon. It might have all the necessary noise of being new and the first-of-its-kind but, finally, it is quite an unremarkable story. ‘NYC’ in Hauz Khas market in Delhi. It sells itself as India’s first LGBT salon. Its owner, S. Mehta, recently filled up all possible online LGBT forums with its ads, mass-mailed on to Delhi listservs, and dropped tiny text-ads into unwitting facebook groups, robustly selling it as the latest asset of Delhi’s LGBT community. I am not quite interested in how an otherwise 7 month old – some say not-doing-too-great – business venture is viably repackaged as an LGBT paradise in the wake of the Delhi high court judgment. After all, post the repeal of Sec. 377 in July, we are only to expect more of this happening around us, more spectacles of the pink rupee. Nor am I presently interested in how a reigning sense of LGBT community is proffered by such spectacular announcements of things shared – be it historic events or commercial joints, shared among few or many – but instead, I am interested in the all too common rhetoric that this salon uses in its publicity. A rhetoric that is becoming so widespread as to become almost commonsensical. And this is the rhetoric of comfort.

‘NYC’ offers itself as full of modern luxuries. It makes the promise of ultimate relaxation like all those hotels, modern day yoga classes and week-long detox camps do all the time. ‘We aim to give you the Time to relax so you never feel pressured. The Comfort of our surroundings that are designed with your every need in mind.’ They guarantee a total experience, but only in one sense, i.e. they totally exorcize any possibility of discomfort. Theirs is an ‘oasis of calm’, a regularized ‘chic, cozy feel’. And this ‘wonderful environment’ is made available ‘for indulging in valuable ‘me’ time.’ It is a common enough strategy of the hospitality and beauty industry to offer such a perishable version of the human senses that every little thing begins to hurt. At its center is a concept of the individual so vulnerable to harm – be it dirt, noise or touch – that the smallest of troubles are enough to cause a wholesale breakdown in this precious sense of calm. To go through the brochures for even the smallest of airport lounges or hotel rooms is an effective revision in this lingo of absolute comfort. The idea is to placate you ad infinitum.

All of this pegs itself onto a peculiar climate. This is the climate of an ever-lowering threshold of what can count as a disturbance. These environments – which are narcissistic in the real sense of the word, being entirely self-referential – rest on the exclusion of more and more things that are being seen as superfluous. So much so that some of us seem to be living amidst a massive elimination of what is increasingly seen as extra sound, extra vision, extra touch, even extra air (that is what the concept of an oxygen bar survives on). One of the ‘NYC’ ads ends with a caveat: ‘NOTE: We do not have body massages available for obvious reasons. This is a clean and Legit Salon!’ This entire battery of exclusions of all possible senses reaches a sort of logical climax here. Even that sensory friction – necessary to orgasm, and so common in all the shady Delhi massage parlors that ‘NYC’ wants to distinguish itself from – is banned here. All pleasurable haptic beats a retreat, ‘for obvious reasons’.

One might have suspected this rhetoric to be a hospitality and beauty industries’ gimmick and left it at that, but it seems to have gotten around. It does this by setting itself up as the ultimate heuristic – as the prized solution provider. Now the underwear giant Hom launches a range especially for left-handed men and calls it ‘revolutionary’. Why? The briefs have a horizontal opening, unlike the earlier vertical Y openings, making them ‘perfect’ for left-handers who, Hom claims, were the ignored lot in an era of underwear which favored the right-handed. ‘The horizontal opening is more hygienic, offers maximum comfort’ and it is especially made for left-handed men. It is their peculiar panacea, their final delivery from troubles. This has all the necessary trappings of a political voiceless-to-voice campaign. It is also obvious that one of the major breakthroughs of this rhetoric of comfort is the progressive discovery of newer and newer discomforts and what count as such. For a solution to be marketable, there needs to be a credible problem in place. Predictably enough, the various criteria for anything to be coined as a problem seem to be radically shrinking. The corresponding search for solutions is heady, and ‘revolutions’ come day in and day out. There are stickers in different shapes and sizes which pose as revolutionary products to prevent your trouser bottoms from getting caught between your sandal and your feet – avoiding, what its marketers call, a foot-wedgie! Every day, we seem to be discovering newer dimensions to social embarrassment (a foot wedgie!) and of its increased possibilities. There is a growing field of things that have to be and can be avoided, problems that have to be and can be skirted. These are very lucrative findings for those who promise deliverance. Hom promises its left-hand loyals a saving up of ‘up to three, often vital, seconds when they visit the loo’. What the rhetoric does is to shrink your time almost infinitely and discover, for you, an ever-mounting number of problems in that given time. This is the horribly pressured temporality of a modern urban lifestyle – a lifestyle that almost defines the aspirations of the upwardly mobile. The real marker of privilege becomes first and foremost this: that smaller and smaller things become troublesome, become matters of concern. The privileged being is a more ‘aware’ being only in this sense: she is always alert to would-be problems, those crisis-points in the story of comfort.

As this idiom of comfort catches on, our bodies will undergo a thorough change. We will discover newer body parts that can get dirty and will therefore require regular cleaning, acne and pimples that will be pathologized to the degree that frequent visits to the skin clinic become necessary, and more body parts that can pick up fat. There will be an increasing ‘awareness’ of germs that dangerously hover in the air, that reside in handshakes and jump onto you from toilet seats, necessitating plastic surfaces that are spanking clean, and sanitizing liquids for all circumstances. We have forgotten that ‘infected’ does not mean ‘ill’. This was the one realization that Sontag called the invaluable notion of clinical medicine – infected but not ill – that the body, at any given time, ‘harbors’ many infections. This realization is being superseded by the new putative body all around us – a body which is the reality for the rich, and the aspirational imperative of the middling classes. A body which we find in ‘NYC’, in popular hand-wash ads, or in the barely abated swine-flu scare. ‘Infected but not ill’ begins to seem like a contradiction in terms. We are teetering at the edge of a specific image of the individual – an individual that is shown to be so vulnerable to pain, dirt and violence that everything around her assumes threatening proportions. The stages of her day-to-day living become, to an unprecedented degree, painful, dirty and violent. This is the hopeless opposite of the very root sense of the word ‘comfort’. For the old French ‘comforter’ implied ‘to strengthen’. The Latin ‘fortis’ meant strong. But here we see a reverse process. Comfort is tied in with strength, but always in a negative index – the more comfortable you are, the more vulnerable you become. This is a draining out of strength. Strength, that is, of all sorts – not only physical but also affectual, interpersonal and moral, as we will try to elaborate.

One of the striking features of this idiom of comfort is that it has seeped into an odd place, i.e. relationships. There is a whole genre of literature presiding over this theme, with hundreds of self-help manuals telling you how to manage a ‘perfect’ and ‘comfortable’ relationship with your spouses, lovers or friends. They invest huge amounts of energy and ink in this prototype of a totally ‘productive’ and ‘perfect’ relationship. This genre, of course, rests on a hopelessly obvious paradox: that the more these kinds of publications become widespread, the more they sell and influence us, the more obviously they will become symptoms of their own failure. Of the failure of their peculiar models of how we should relate to each other, and of the continual (and necessary) botching up of their intended lessons by their readers. For example, Jody Hayes’ Smart Love (1990) made a whole lot of pious noise about ‘balance and mutuality in the relationship’, ‘desire for long-term contentment’, ‘loving detachment (healthy concern about the partner’s well-being and growth, while letting go)’ and long-drawn ‘cycles of comfort’. Predictably enough, the strict no’s for Hayes were the keywords of frenzy, of unhealth and of discomfort: obsession, fusion, addiction, immediate gratification, imbalance, control, power. There is an extremely sorry concept of intimacy here, and of how we are given to each other in intimate situations. It is a horribly undersized picture of how people – always clumsily – arrange their asymmetries in order to relate to each other. Hayes’ might be a bad attempt at normalcy, driven by the all too correct fear of inequality, but she is part of a general climate. A climate in which a whole lot has been made of the prototype of a pure, equal, well-balanced relationship. This is the acme of the idea of the relationship. The relationship – which some have claimed – is our modern day secular means of salvation.

Anthony Giddens published The Transformation of Intimacy in 1992. The book is a record of the rise of the most reflexive of all genres – the literature of self-help, particularly the know-it-all relationship manuals, which carry in them an unprecedented promise – that you can, if you’re self-reflexive enough, find and plan a perfect relationship. Yet Giddens’ book is also a symptom of this rise because, at some crucial points, it begins to read like those very books it sets out to study. Especially, when he comes close to sharing his own dreams of what a perfect relationship should be. In his last chapter, ‘Intimacy as Democracy’ – in which he hopes to elaborate on what he calls the ‘radical democratization of the personal’ – Giddens sets off on a doomed project of finding one-to-one ‘equivalent mechanisms’ in the political sphere of democracy, and in the context of what he calls the ‘pure’ relationships. As if all the ways of loving could be sufficiently understood by some stunted keywords from the political theory of democracy: free and equal relations, respect, consensus, autonomy, accountability, and removal of arbitrary and coercive power. Sample some of his dry sentences: ‘[a]utonomy also helps to provide the personal boundaries needed for the successful management of relationships’, ‘[w]e can envisage the development of an ethical framework for a democratic personal order, which in sexual relationships and other personal domains [he means friendship and parent-child bonds] conforms to the model of confluent love’ or ‘[t]he possibility of intimacy means the promise of democracy’. He makes us a little giddy by the time he reaches observations which sound like crisp media bytes: ‘Who says sexual emancipation, says sexual democracy’. Giddens’ last chapter, it seems to me, wants to override all his earlier stories about the necessary contradictions of this all too ‘pure relationship’ – contradictions that are inherent to it and never quite allow it to be realized. His ideals in this concluding chapter seem to climax in a phrase that could very well be the dictionary entry for ‘oxymoron’. It is also something which undoubtedly marks the foray of that idiom of comfort, which we’ve been talking about, into the world of our relationships. This is when he pleads for a fostering of ‘non-destructive emotion’.

It is for us to seriously consider: what is this thing called non-destructive emotion? More broadly, what is an emotion that does not in any way undermine you? What sort of a moving experience is that which does not drive you ‘besides yourself’, where you remain unshaken, untouched, not even slightly misplaced, i.e. where you essentially remain ‘unmoved’? What sort of love or relationship would this make for? And what sort of idea of an individual – that which is the central unit of the political theory of democracy, Giddens’ presiding theme – are we dealing with here? And finally it might be to wonder about the all too evident and widening gap between two sorts of literature that have always tried to understand our various relationships: the self-help manual and poetry. Poetry that dramatizes the same conflicts as Self-Help, but without any efforts at pedagogy. If poetry has even a fraction of ‘real precision’ (which Arundhati Roy recently claimed for it when she cited Faiz Ahmed Faiz in her field notes on democracy), then there might be something to those vilified keywords that many tell us we should already leave behind: inequality and imbalance, i.e. basically any keyword which is a sign of a power game. Auden’s call to his lover to lay his sleeping head, ‘human on my faithless arms’ is not a soggy moment among lovers; at any rate, it is not only that, because it is also an evidence of the fact that we always broach the other – lover, friend or spouse – with an incomplete knowledge of him. That the ways in which we will be disposed to each other will – not only sometimes, but always – have a remainder; variously, this remainder will take the form of a secret, an assumption, an afterthought, an excess or a regret etc. Which is to say that it can take the form of any situation where knowledge is distributed unequally, i.e. creatively. It is also a reminder of the fact that whatever equality might mean in democracy, it certainly never implies sameness or symmetry.

When you are not able to handle some task, it is said that ‘you’re not equal to it’. It is only in this sense that we are never equal to each other, that whenever we accost each other, we make timelines, emotions, moods, opinions clash; a clash which always leaves behind it a necessary gap that cannot be bridged over. Auden’s evidence recurs in the Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali (‘What will suffice for a true-love knot?’ he asks, in Even the Rain), and in the British-Indian Imtiaz Dharker (who in Battle-Line tells of ‘distrustful lovers / who have fought bitterly / and turned their backs; / but in sleep, drifted slowly / in, moulding themselves / around the cracks / to fit together, / whole again; at peace. / Forgetful of hostilities / until, in the quiet dawn, / the next attack. / Checkpoint: / The place in the throat / where words are halted, / not allowed to pass, / where questions form / and are not asked’) or in the melancholic Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (who concludes that absolute pleasure only takes the form of a memory, never of living experience; ‘It wouldn’t have lasted long anyway – / years of experience make that clear. / But Fate did put an end to it a bit abruptly. / It was soon over, that wonderful life. / Yet how strong the scents were, / what a magnificent bed we lay in, / what pleasures we gave our bodies’). It might be considered unfair to compare the bookish precepts of political theory to some of the most frenzied poetry we have of unrequited passion. But it seems to be the important thing to do, to realize how a particular dream of a chronically non-destructive environment is being sold to us. To realize how the genre of Self-Help insidiously makes of radical democratic ideas – be it freedom or choice – only lifeless codes in an egotistic narrative of self-development. Self-Help lessens the circuit of effect of these concepts and effectively foils them. And to realize how those solid precepts of democratic theory – equality and rights, those which we constantly invoke to raise our voice against the many forms injustice can take in our immediate worlds – are being turned into half-baked versions of coziness and comfort for us to sit back and consume. For us to grow perfectly, properly and undisturbed.

This discussion can also have a bearing on the way we articulate our political campaigns. When we make our ideals out of this stunted concept of a person. One who is always incapacitated by violence, and for whom the encounters are always violent. Let’s pick one instance. Jagori is a feminist resource center based in Delhi. It launched a short 35-second film on sexual harassment called ‘Staring Hurts’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROuBkpfO_Z4). A girl enters a cafe, chooses her table and prepares to read. Simple enough. But wait. While doing all of this, she experiences an inexplicable itch all over her hands and her neck, her lips and her legs. As if there were mosquitoes all around. (Of all things for a gentrified urban cafe to have!) So much so that it becomes difficult for her to stay there in peace, being constantly disturbed. All this while, we see that a guy, a few tables away, has been staring at her, perhaps denuding her in his mind. In one shot, he is so pathetically lascivious that it would be hard for anyone to identify with him. The girl’s mysterious itch is explained by this coincidence. It is a video campaign against sexual harassment. The stare is the problem, is the itch. She retaliates and slams a book on this imagined mosquito and the next shot shows us that the guy is cupping his eyes, as if they’ve been hit. The enemy seems to be the eye, the tool of the harassing stare. Jagori ends its video with the text: ‘Staring hurts. Stop Sexual Harassment.’ I was excited the first time I saw the video. I thought it was quite effective in making its point. But I must say that the Jagori video runs into a necessary paradox and we should be aware of what that paradox is. It might not be something that it can avoid – not avoid easily, at any rate. For how do you build a campaign against sexual harassment without helplessly conflating the categories of flirtation (that which gives mutual pleasure) and those of harassment (that which is always carried on at someone’s expense), at the expense of their freedom to roam about, their freedom to dress as they like and their freedom from ‘harmful’ encounters?

The girl experiences an itch, a common enough experience, even harmless and easily dealt with. But she also experiences sexual harassment, which is the ad’s central conceit, that which codes this itch being experienced as harmful. Is staring per se the object of our dread here? Or is it staring like that? And is one stare always the twin of another, propelled by the same intention, driven by similar targets? And do we – women and men – always feel repulsed by someone staring at us and never hope to solicit it? As people experimenting in feminist practice, do we let go of the gaze as suggested in two word wonders such as ‘staring hurts’ – do we vilify the very act of seeing? Or, alternatively, how do we begin to configure this problem? It seems to me that it might be at best unrewarding and, at worst, dangerous for us to let go of the gaze, to make it our outright enemy. The gaze – which is also the gadget of so much pleasure, of productive signals and of chance meetings – that can be, potentially, wielded by both women and men. Zizek is conceptually correct – even if a tad too polemical, as he is wont to be – when he says that ‘[y]ou cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms’. Let’s quote him at length to make his line yield some sense and serious import: ‘Of course I am opposed to it [sexual harassment], but let’s be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t… [t]here is a moment of violence, when you say: ‘I love you, I want you.’ In no way can you bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too open an encounter with another human being.’

Will we ever concede that being hurt has many sets of meanings and that pleasure and volition are not wholly out of these sets? That when we voluntarily carry on our rituals of romance, love, courtship or flirtation – ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – we are always given to each other violently. That, at these moments, we always intrude upon each other. How do we concede the fact that there is always something discomfiting about desire (it takes you over, fills you up) and about the expressions of this desire (you lose yourself, you crave the other) without making it a political liability and without making it sound like it’s coming from the mouth of a right-wing freak? How do we begin to tell different stories of the gaze, even those of staring women? Like the one in Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tirohit (2001). Shree tells the story of two women Lalna and Chachho. They first see each other through their house windows. Chachho is surprised by this cheeky girl. She feels intruded upon by this young thing who stares at her from outside, who copies her actions. This visual mime soon becomes humorous. They make faces at each other. Each laughs across her house, cutting up its boundaries, and communicates by looking. ‘दोस्ती का हवाई सी-सौ’ (the airy seesaw of friendship). ‘Tirohit’ is that which cannot be seen, yet it is also that which is in plain view, which we could see if only we started looking in earnest. ‘ये वह बातें हैं जिनका स्पंदन-स्तोत्र भीतर है किन्ही के, जहाँ से नामालूम सा एक स्फुरण उठकर धीरे-धीरे हाहाकार कर बैठता है और घेर लेता है दो लड़कियों को जो साथ-साथ जवान हुयीं हैं और बच्चियां हुयीं हैं और बूढी हुयीं हैं पर जिन्हें देखने वाले उन्हें साथ देख कर भी साथ नहीं देख पाये हैं’ (these are those stories whose fountainhead is somewhere inside people, from where it rises almost unknown, a wave that ascends and slowly causes a havoc, now surrounding these two girls, who have grown up together and have been children together and have become old together but who have never been seen as such by those who see them). We cannot become so averse to the gaze that staring itself as a generic act begins to hurt us. It would be a huge loss in the range of experiences – that women and men are capable of – if we were to stop looking around. To stop looking at each other and to stop sharing the necessarily unpredictable signals through our eyes. ‘One of the sayings attributed to the Prophet… dealt with the role of the eyes and the licitness of the gaze: the Prophet said, ‘O Ali, do not follow one glance with another glance, for the first is allowed to you but the second is not’ (Orsini). We cannot listen all too piously to the Prophet and limit the wide net of our gaze. ‘Dawn breaks behind the eyes,’ Dylan Thomas had written. We cannot begin defining our political ideals of comfort as the total exorcizing of the extra stare – the stare that is variously superfluous or intrusive. This would be a stunting of the visual sense. This would be a capitulation to the rhetoric of comfort that threatens to engulf us and make of us half of what we can be.