![]() ![]() ![]() I resolved that from that moment on, I was going to work against these systems, and I began by having conversations with my mother. While attending a course on sociology in the first year of my post-graduation (at the same university), I was initiated into understanding the ways in which our lives are organized through structures and systems that are oppressive. On reading Bohm, a physicist who wrote about dialogue and the need to communicate, I wondered for the first time, whether I was listening at all. In conversations, I would often wonder if they were listening at all or if they were already thinking about how to reply to what I was saying.Īnd then I made a new discovery. ![]() I, for one, have found myself here very often with my parents, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. While drawing this conclusion from a single conversation could be considered too broad a generalization, it would not be untrue to say that we often find ourselves in positions like this, where we think the other person is not listening. And yet, fairly often, as the friends in the conversation pointed out, there seems to be little or no listening. Essentially, the university is a microcosm of the larger world we live in and it offers a fair amount of scope for engagement between these ideologies because they exist within the same shared space. What is taught at the university often brings to the fore differing ideologies and narratives, including extreme ones. This university teaches the social sciences and the students I passed were part of a postgraduate course in education. “Yes! When I say something, I am first labelled a feminist and then they go on to tell me why I am wrong and they are right.” “They don’t even want to listen, but will rush to defend what they are saying.” One afternoon, while walking through the corridors of my university, I caught a conversation mid-air, a distressed one. ![]()
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