म।

How the princess often has to act like a prince to adjust to a patriarchal society, to be looked at as equal — I had to do the opposite. I was treated like a woman, a princess, through my childhood, my adolescence, and even today to an extent.

I was the second child, born 8-10 years after my sister. A late, prayed-for child. My parents visited shrines, temples, took oaths to have me — the “child of blessing,” a male heir. And then I was born sickly. Pneumonia just after birth. My mom had to undergo hysterectomy, stop eating oily food, follow a strict diet, never leave me alone. I was not even able to crawl till I was 2. I was too weak to walk, talk, or even make proper noise. My dad was in the Middle East, hadn’t even seen me. When he came back and saw this silent, sick, near-lifeless child, he took it upon himself to teach me to crawl, to walk.

And so I was raised inside the house, wrapped in protection and prayers, pampered and brated off with love that rotted me in ways I still feel. My sister, on the other hand, had freedom — night stays, picnics, outings with friends and their families, even hikes with boys and girls in mixed groups. This was a tier-2/3 city in the 2010s — very surprising freedom. Meanwhile, I was never allowed to go out with friends, never allowed to eat at anyone’s place. My freedom was “you can play cricket near the house but be back before 6 PM.” That was law. Break it — you get beaten.

Class 5 — I came home late, got beaten. Class 7 — same thing. Class 11 — came home at 6:30, beaten again. My sister once came home at 8 PM — nothing happened. So when people say men are privileged, women aren’t — I look at my life and think, what privilege? My sister had more freedom than I ever did.

And here’s the crazy part — my freedom came only when she gave hers up. When she started saying, “I don’t want to go out, you go.” That’s when I was allowed to go anywhere. My independence was not mine — it was borrowed from her disinterest. I became a male handyman for her errands.

There were moments that made me wonder if my parents even thought of me as a boy. I used to think, maybe they think I’m a girl, I should tell them I’m a boy. My childhood was dolls, my sister’s lipstick on my lips and on the doll’s face, getting beaten for ruining both the lipstick and the doll — and beaten again by my dad for “doing what girls do.” That was the first step to being allowed outside.

Slowly, autonomy came in tiny doses — first, going to school without my mom escorting me, then being allowed to play outside (still under strict hours). But the major freedom came when my sister refused to do chores and sent me out instead.

I understand now why women say they feel oppressed. I’ve felt that oppression. I’ve lived it. Till today, I still need permission from my mom to go anywhere. If I go somewhere without permission and they find out, the next day the restrictions are even tighter. Yes, it sounds normal — everyone asks permission — but with me, it’s not just courtesy, it’s survival.

I think most women are parented with fear. Society is unsafe, so parents go overboard. A female freind of mine whose father is toxically overprotective — if she comes home late, he beats her. I get where he’s coming from — Delhi can be dangerous — but beating her? That’s just crazy.

And then I know another freind, who lives in Bengaluru, whose father doesn’t work, takes all of her mom’s earnings, cheats on her mom. He’s just a straight-up toxic man. So yeah, I’ve seen both kinds of fathers — the ones who are overly protective because they know how bad society can be, and the ones who are the reason society is bad.

I don’t hate my parents for this. I understand it now. I was a weak child. I was a high gamble. Letting me out could have gone wrong. Their parenting probably kept me alive. But that same overprotectiveness made me socially awkward, bad at decision-making, clumsy as hell. From the choice of my underwear to the choice of my friends — everything was decided by my mom or my sister.

When I was 16 and a half, they finally let me leave my hometown for college, to live alone. That was a big step. At 20, I finally went on my first trek with my brother — and that freedom tasted good.

Love stands staunch and upbeat, that has haunted me in so far my endeavor of the world that I have resided for 21 years, and I believe (or hope to), with my own conscious experiences for at least 7-8 years. I dont’t remember how I was introduced to this word, coming from an Indian family where such word or feeling is openly talked, at least in much of a romantic sense, rather only in an obligatory sense of care for children, respect for elders. Because of my skepticism of my experience and no actual complete reliable memory of my childhood, I can only associate my first association with such a word through cinema or through social groups of friends, and from them again the same, so forth and so long, till we meet at same question again of the “first cause?” of who termed the word love or defined it. Regardless of both, due to my oblivious nature to concern into the question of point, present what I believe is the bigger problem: from Plato’s Symposium to Žižek calling love inherently evil, we all are oblivious to what love is and how do one gets to know of it. So here and forth, I propose something that is not true and facts, rather abduction done with whatsoever relation I had with love and whatever inferences made through love and by love.

The premise I put forth is something that is not extraordinary or revolutionary, that is not said before, but I do, I believe, that love can be known through love for thyself. A person who can’t love the self can’t really know what love is, and same can’t be reciprocated to the other who he deems himself to be in love with. Note here, the word he, or pronoun that in general parlance would signify a man, are used in most gender neutral form and way. Going forward, to know what you feel for other, in any regard, that too in love, you must, must feel the same for yourself, and that can’t be held true if one neither knows what love is, if he doesn’t feel the same for oneself to begin.

To further addition, I believe love is the very state a person is, not something to be or some extra ordinary way of being. That is why preferably believe one must feel such for oneself to know what it is. That is also my critique of the term “self love”, that truly disgust. It makes love for oneself, that I honestly and in earnest believe is the state of being of a person, rather than something that must be explcityly stated. As I will explain my stand, it will become clear, with some inconsistencies due to the grammar of language, that love for oneself requires self to be in grammar; but I, as Jiddu Kirshnamurthy believed, in love there can exist no self. So, self love as term can’t really exist, as there can only exist the love, the verb of love, the being of love, and not any noun or pronoun to it in addition.

Now to one the most profound thing one can say to other, the three magical word, as often described by media and cinema, with immense use of such. It, to me, has lost all meaning to begin with. Regardless, I believe such statement or mixture of word is nothing but vain, a urge to loved rather than a declaration of love for other. "I love you" stands with an imaginary question mark, awaiting a prompt response as acceptance, rejection, or congruence of such plea and urge in vain rather than in love. One will never say one loves oneself and wait for an response, though even annoncoing love for oneself or self love is counter intuitive to begin with. Regardless, in that, what exist is just love for self rather than wait for response for acceptance for such love.

Love, how often and will always describe, is something that is the very means and goal of the same, but "I love you", as through it own vanity our disregarded use has made it something of means for a goal of being in love, where love has been something of search of acceptance and, when often lacks such, none accpetance in any form could ever be enough. Further, love might or might not exist in spectrum, but thing or being in love will do things in love, for love, as it remains the mean and goal of same. Even a sick body, which might take medicine, will take medicine not just be healthy as an obligatory thing one must do to take care of oneself; one will do such is the very mean and goal of one’s love for oneself. If not, than one would not care to take meds to begin with. Care, good health, or anything that is explicit and an influence will never truly cover love for oneself or love as whole, though form of love may be different in way one expresses it to oneself, but the mean and goal will, regardless, will always be same, that is love. Grammatical failure is in love as premised earlier there must be no self the regard of self is with ego, ego reside within the self itself to putforth simply, i and you exist as subject-object which makes it something where there exist a proper distinct of two even in acceptance of two individual, there can be no object of love to begin with love is just being or verb acting upon verb and if being generous than on subject itself and both are subject to this whole and not in parts.

Introduction: Why This Debate Looked Convincing — and Why It Isn’t

I recently came across a widely circulated debate online, often framed as a clash between Javed Akhtar and a Muslim cleric (Maulvi) in Lallantop a youtube channel. The comment sections beneath the video are almost unanimously celebratory, praising the cleric as a “logical theist” who allegedly dismantled atheism through philosophy and common sense.

At first glance, the performance is impressive. The confidence, vocabulary, and rhetorical control give the appearance of intellectual authority. But when the arguments are examined carefully, the debate reveals something far less admirable: a controlled narrowing of acceptable reasoning, inconsistent epistemic standards, and philosophical sleight of hand disguised as clarity.

This article is not an attempt to “disprove God,” nor is it an attack on personal belief. It is a critique of how arguments for God are constructed, insulated from scrutiny, and rhetorically elevated despite their internal incoherence. More importantly, it questions whether “Does God exist?” is even the right question to begin with.

1. Controlling the Battlefield: How Inquiry Was Quietly Restricted

The first major red flag appears before any argument is even made.

The theist begins by dismissing entire categories of reasoning:

Scientific arguments are ruled out

Logical arguments are sidelined

Emotional arguments are rejected

What remains, we are told, is “common sense.”

This move sounds reasonable, but it is intellectually dishonest. You cannot disallow logic and science, then quietly reintroduce philosophical metaphysics when it suits your conclusion. Philosophy is structured reasoning. Metaphysics is logic applied to first principles.

Yet this is exactly what happens. Rigorous methods are banned, only to be smuggled back in under the label of “common sense,” despite being highly contested philosophical frameworks.

This is not debate. It is gatekeeping inquiry.

2. Belief, Faith, and a Convenient Collapse

The atheist in the debate draws a distinction:

Belief as epistemically and ontologically grounded

Faith as unprovable, and therefore irrational

This framing is imperfect. Many beliefs — such as belief in other minds or moral realism — are not strictly provable, yet they are not dismissed as stupidity.

However, the theist’s response is worse.

He collapses belief and faith entirely, arguing:

Belief can be wrong

Faith can be wrong

Therefore, the distinction does not matter

This is evasive. The distinction matters precisely because beliefs are typically responsive to evidence, while faith is often defined as persistence despite the absence of evidence.

By dissolving the distinction rather than clarifying it, belief in God is shielded from epistemic accountability.

3. The Necessary Being and the Abuse of Contingency

The centerpiece of the theist’s case is the classical contingency argument:

The universe is contingent

Contingent things require explanation

Therefore, a necessary being exists

In abstract metaphysics, this argument has a long history. But its application here relies on a double standard.

The Core Problem: Special Pleading

Contingent objects are treated as:

empirically observable

epistemologically grounded

The “necessary being,” however, is treated as:

empirically inaccessible

epistemologically unverifiable

ontologically undefined

If contingency requires explanation, then explanations must meet some standard of intelligibility. A being that cannot be observed, tested, or distinguished from non-existence does not explain anything. It merely renames ignorance.

For a Muslim theist in particular, the argument collapses further. The God being defended:

has no physical representation

cannot be drawn, seen, or empirically detected

is known only through revelation

Calling such a being “necessary” does not make it explanatory. It makes it conceptually immune.

4. Suffering and the Collapse of Moral Coherence

When the problem of suffering is raised, the theist’s position becomes internally inconsistent.

On one hand:

Justice is described as a human concept

Nature is morally neutral

On the other hand:

Suffering is justified as part of divine justice

This is a contradiction.

If justice is human, God cannot ground suffering in it. If justice is divine, then nature is morally structured — which the theist denies.

Importantly, suffering does not refute the existence of a bare metaphysical cause. But it does refute a personal, just, intervening God — the very God religious belief depends on.

5. Prayer, Intervention, and the Time Problem

The theist insists that God is:

outside time

before time

not subject to temporal sequence

Yet religious practice insists that:

God answers prayers

God intervenes

God changes outcomes

These claims cannot coexist without contradiction.

A being that responds, chooses, and intervenes is functionally temporal. One cannot invoke timelessness for cosmology and temporality for devotion without doing serious metaphysical work — work that is absent from the debate.

6. Dinosaurs, Revelation, and Selective Silence

When confronted with the absence of dinosaurs in religious texts, the theist responds:

“Religion and science are different subjects.”

This sounds reasonable — until examined.

Religious texts historically make claims about:

origins

creation

human history

cosmology

natural order

They are not confined to private spirituality.

The issue is not that religion failed to teach paleontology. The issue is that texts claiming divine knowledge confidently assert false views of the natural world while remaining silent about realities that dominated Earth for millions of years.

Silence is not neutral when revelation claims omniscience.

7. The “Metal Detector for Plastic” Argument — and Why It Backfires

The theist argues that God cannot be detected because our tools are unsuitable — like using a metal detector to find plastic.

But this analogy collapses once we observe that:

Some people claim to have detected God

Many others, using the same human faculties, have not

The majority of humanity does not share these experiences

The most reasonable explanation is not divine selectivity, but psychological phenomena: bias, cultural conditioning, or hallucination.

At this point, God becomes not an external entity, but a mental object.

8. What Remains of God?

When stripped of:

empirical access

epistemic grounding

ontological clarity

moral coherence

God is reduced to:

a pre-conclusion

a psychological construct

a projection of meaning and authority

This does not imply believers are lying. It implies belief is subjectively real but ontologically unsupported.

9. When Personal Belief Becomes Social Power

I do not claim absolute certainty that God does not exist.

But I do reject the religious God — omniscient, omnipotent, morally authoritative — not only for epistemic reasons, but for social ones.

When belief moves from private meaning to public authority, it produces:

tribalism

moral exclusion

political domination

intellectual stagnation

At that point, belief is no longer harmless.

10. A Better Question Than “Does God Exist?”

The deepest flaw in the debate is the question itself.

Instead of asking “Does God exist?”, we should ask:

Why does God need to exist at all?

Not could God exist. Not might God exist. But why must God exist?

If God is claimed to be:

necessary

fundamental

ultimate

then the burden is not to show that God is possible or helpful, but that God is required.

So the challenge becomes:

“Give one objective, unavoidable reason why reality needs God in order to exist.”

Not contingency. Not intuition. Not tradition. Not psychological comfort.

A necessity — something that collapses without God.

No such necessity has ever been demonstrated.

11. The Burden of Proof and the Myth of the “Negative Claim”

Atheists are often told they must “prove God does not exist.” This misunderstands atheism entirely.

An atheist does not begin by claiming “God does not exist.” Atheism begins with non-belief, not denial.

The structure is simple:

One person defines God and claims God exists

Another person does not accept that claim

The second person is not making a counter-claim. They are withholding belief.

The burden of proof lies entirely with the person asserting:

“This God exists.”

Conclusion: Why Many People Are Atheists

If someone could demonstrate:

a genuine, unavoidable need for God

one that cannot be explained without invoking God

and cannot be reasonably countered

then belief would be rationally justified.

But no such necessity has ever been shown.

That is why many people are atheists — not because God has been disproven, but because God has never been shown to be required.

"Beautiful" though, is a beautiful word.

Yet it feels primitive in essence, especially in a world overflowing with grand words like liberalism, socialism, communism, feminism, and countless others. Beauty standards haven’t disappeared, nor has the idea of love at first sight. Beauty, in its very essence, is nothing but primal, a relic of instinct. It is how one might imagine a human of early descent, unshaped by intellect or understanding, acting purely on his senses, the same senses he relies upon for survival.

And so he does now, in pursuit of “love” or “beauty,” anything that aligns with the socially acceptable standard of it. Those who appreciate people solely for their beauty are, in truth, nothing but primal.

Perhaps it is me who cannot appreciate beauty. But my distaste for it does not stem from inability; it comes from the horror of beauty itself. One who searches for beauty outside himself lacks it within. And if one lacks it to begin with, can he ever truly find it? Appreciate it?

This sheer madness, this illusion of varying standards, makes beauty as the ultimate measure of worth both disgusting and primitive. The same argument applies to love: one who seeks love does not possess it, and one who does not possess it cannot truly love.

Now imagine these two horrors intertwined. As I have written before, it becomes almost animalistic to seek beauty because you lack it, or to seek love merely for the ecstasy of being loved by another equally deluded being who rejoices in the illusion that she is loved, when neither truly is. That is the real nightmare of romance and love. One could go further and say that the rise of words like “true” or “pure” as prefixes to love has turned the very word “love” itself into an empty banner, such a shame.

To love because of beauty is nothing more than prostitution, where both merely act in the play of love. The man, instead of paying with money, pays with time, emotion, and sometimes even money, pretending to love only to cruelly destroy that illusion. And the woman, through her naivety or willful blindness, becomes the architect of her own downfall.

As for the man, was he ever truly alive?

One who cannot appreciate beauty for its own sake but only chases it; one who seeks love to fill an inner void; one who cannot see beyond the surface—such a man is, for better or worse, already dead.

Woman fantasies, woman fantasies,everything a man dreams is a fantasy of a woman.

Up on a pedestal,down to an abyss, all around, a fantasy of a woman. All a man fancies is a woman fantasy. Pretending not to caterto a woman fantasy

is again a woman fantasy.

You are seen pretending.

You have spent your whole life pretending. All you want is nothingbut the fantasy of a woman.You are fenced by woman fantasies,fencing yourself, consciously and unconsciously, both ways.

Woman fantasies are all you want.A man of lust and nothing more.You fancy women and nothing more.There is a woman inside you too, watching.Now there is nothing more to you a man running like a monkey,

I think one of the things humanity has done—what we have done to ourselves—is try to find ourselves in every story, every experience, every image. We look for ourselves in books, in movies, in stand-up comedy, in social media. And that’s the death of living. Not because stories betray us, not because experiences fail us—but because we insist on being the main character in every story we encounter. That obsession kills the ordinary joy of life.

I was watching this one stand-up comedian, a woman, talking about how her boyfriend would get jealous whenever other women flirted with her. She made a joke out of it, exaggerated, as a stand-up should. It’s not literal; it’s not a scenario meant to be dissected. But people started twisting it—“Oh, what if she’s faking it? Oh, what if her boyfriend really was like that?”—and the joke was lost. Why? Because they were trying to be the main character in her story. They weren’t observers; they couldn’t just watch and feel the humor. They had to insert themselves.

That’s the trap. You want to live every story as your story. You want to be extraordinary, central, impactful in the narratives of everyone and everything around you. And in doing so, you betray your own life—not in the ordinary sense, but in the extraordinary. The stories we live are stolen from others, and our own story goes untended.

We even do it with our bodies. We attach identity to them as if they were inherently ours, forgetting that a body is malleable—a vessel, a tool, a representation of the soul. We can change it biologically, medically, socially: man to woman, thin to tall, weak to muscular. And yet we insist on making the body us. That obsession creates constant dissatisfaction. Someone calls you fat, calls you gay, calls you weak—and it hurts not because of reality, but because you’ve projected your selfhood onto something transient. You can’t just be an observer of your own body. You must be it, defend it, perfect it. And every moment of that obsession is a moment stolen from life.

We’re trapped in hypothetical stories. Mullah Nasruddin illustrates it perfectly. He imagines having three children with his wife. As he shifts to “make space” for each imaginary child, he falls and breaks his leg. There’s no child, yet the consequences are real. That’s us. We live in stories we invent, replay scenarios that haven’t happened, and let them shape our feelings, our judgments, our fears. We suffer, react, and form beliefs based on fantasies rather than experience. And so we ruin connections, crush empathy, and fail to live our own lives.

Most people don’t just live life—they interpret it constantly. They criticize themselves, criticize others, make judgments, assign blame, project fantasies. They can’t observe. And observation is the key. Pain exists, but it isn’t “you.” A cut finger hurts, yes—but you are the observer of the pain, not the pain itself. Most of us forget this. We entwine ourselves with stories and bodies, and the ordinary act of living becomes extraordinary suffering.

Life has a natural buoyancy, like water. Water lifts, carries, keeps things afloat. Yet we thrash, struggling, insisting on controlling it. That’s why we drown, metaphorically. Not because life is cruel, but because we insist on imposing ourselves on every wave, every movement, every narrative. Hypotheticals become injuries. Imagined judgments become grief. We fail to notice what is real.

Everything we do, everything we think, has consequences—real ones—even if the source is imaginary. We live extraordinary lives in hypotheticals, yet we neglect our own story. We critique ourselves endlessly and perform in everyone else’s narrative, leaving our own plot vacant. That is why loneliness, depression, and dissatisfaction thrive. That is why ordinary existence feels extraordinary in its suffering.

The real act of love — if there was one worthy of idealizing — was Feynman’s decision to marry Arline in the first place. He knew she was going to die. He fought against his family’s wishes to marry her anyway. That choice took courage, commitment, and a deep understanding of the impermanence of life and love. If we must look for a “gold standard,” it lies there — in the conscious decision to love someone despite knowing the ending.

But love doesn’t end with the decision to marry. It comes with the responsibility to show up — especially in the hardest moments. And this is where I struggle with the way Feynman’s letter is idolized. When Arline was dying, he chose to keep working. Perhaps he coped with the pain by burying himself in physics. Perhaps he thought that was his duty. People have different value systems, and I respect that. But to me, one hour spent by her side, one day holding her hand as she closed her eyes for the last time, would have meant far more to her than a letter she never got to read a year later.

That is why I see the letter less as a romantic gesture and more as a coping mechanism — a way for Feynman to process grief, guilt, and isolation. It is beautiful, yes, but its power is for us, the living, not for her. It does not rewrite the fact that presence was sacrificed when it mattered most.

So no, this is not a Romeo-and-Juliet story, and it is not a gold standard. It is a story of human complexity — of courage, avoidance, love, and regret. To turn it into an internet ideal is to flatten that complexity. Real love is not in letters written to the dead but in the hours we give to the living when they need us most.

अब पछताए होत क्या, जब चिड़िया चुग गई खेत।

~ म

I don’t like being labeled a feminist. I don’t like the term at all, because it feels like it dilutes the extremity of what I’m trying to say. A lot of people today argue: “Oh, we never oppressed women, so why should women now get special rights? If it’s equality, then it should be equal.” That sounds logical on the surface, but it’s bullshit when you look closer. Because there was never an equal playing field to begin with. When women get certain rights that might look like privileges to men, those aren’t actual privileges — they are corrective measures. They are society trying to balance a scale that has been tilted for centuries. If you only look at it from your narrow little “today’s world” perspective, then yes, it looks unfair. But if you actually zoom out, you’ll see that without these so-called privileges, women are still standing ten feet deep in mud while men are already halfway up the hill.

And I find it ironic how Indians love to romanticize “communal living” and bash the Western idea of individuality. But the moment it comes to caste, patriarchy, or systemic oppression, suddenly everyone turns hyper-individualistic. “Oh, but why blame me for what my forefathers did? Why should I carry the burden of crimes I never committed?” they cry. And that’s where the flaw lies. If it were an individual crime—say, I kill someone—then yes, only I should go to prison, not my son. But this isn’t an individual crime. This is a transcendental crime. A crime that transcends generations. Oppression wasn’t a one-off act; it was a system designed to place entire groups at the top and entire groups at the bottom, and then reproduce itself over and over again. You can’t erase hundreds of years of that with one clean slate and say, “Okay, now let’s all be equal.” That’s not equality — that’s erasure of history.

This is why I don’t like being called a “male feminist.” Even if I’ve personally never oppressed a woman, I’ve inherited the role of the oppressor simply by being born into the dominant side of history. And women, no matter how liberated they might seem, have inherited centuries of being oppressed. So when I, as a man, try to wave the feminist flag, it feels cheap. It feels like I’m trying to score brownie points from both sides. It reduces women’s struggle to something that needs male validation — like women can’t fight for themselves unless men stand beside them to clap and say “Yes, queen.” That, to me, kills the whole idea of independence.

And this is where I have to admit I used to be stupid. Back then, I used to argue with Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I would counter with, “But men are also made, not born.” I thought I was being clever, making a “gotcha” point about how patriarchy hurts men too. But I see now how shallow that was. Because yes, men are also made — but we were the ones shaping the mold. We were the ones benefiting from the system, even when it hurt us in some ways. It’s ridiculous to go to the people we oppressed and say, “Hey, this system that crushed you also gave me a papercut, so we’re basically the same.” No, we’re not. That’s like the guy swinging the sword crying that his arm hurts from swinging it too much. Sure, maybe it does — but you’re still the one doing the stabbing.

Here’s how I think about it now: if you were a German citizen during the Holocaust, you may not have personally killed a Jew, but you still lived in a society that benefitted from their persecution — cheaper homes, better jobs, better resources because others were stripped of them. And if you wanted to “help” a Jew back then, you had to do it quietly, subtly, because helping too loudly would risk getting them and yourself killed. That’s what allyship feels like to me today. You help, but you don’t make it about you. You don’t stand in the middle of the street with a loudspeaker saying, “Look at me, I’m helping the Jews!” because that puts them in more danger. Allyship should never become performance.

That’s why I’d rather be an ally than a “male feminist.” An ally sits, listens, understands, supports, but doesn’t hijack the movement. Imagine this: you fight your battle, I fight mine, and when we’re both exhausted, we sit down, share our scars, and talk. That is solidarity. That’s mutual recognition. That’s much more authentic than me running into your battlefield, waving a flag for you, and then looking around for applause.

And there’s a cultural analogy here. In Hindi, there’s a word — Moga. It’s used derogatorily for a man who listens to his wife, helps her with chores, treats her as an equal partner. Western internet has its own word for this: simp. Both are slurs thrown at men for simply being decent human beings. And yet, if I had to choose, I’d rather be a “Moga” than a “male feminist.” Because being a Moga means you are simply living your personal life with respect, love, and equality. Being a male feminist feels like performance, like tokenism, like you’re trying to make women’s struggle about yourself.

Now let’s talk about caste — because this is where the hypocrisy really shows. The same people who whine about women getting “extra rights” are the ones who whine about caste reservations, caste census, and affirmative action. They say, “But why should someone get benefits today for a crime that happened generations ago?” They conveniently ignore that oppression is not a museum artifact — it doesn’t sit in the past collecting dust. It reproduces itself every single day in ways you might not even notice.

People like to pretend caste is dead, but it’s alive in their unconscious. It’s alive in the jokes they crack, in the marriages they arrange, in the temples they control, in the neighborhoods they segregate. You think it’s gone because your college has a few Dalit kids, but that’s like saying racism is gone in America because Obama was president. Bullshit. And here’s my litmus test: if you can crack a “dark joke” about caste in front of someone from a marginalized caste, and they don’t feel hurt because they know you genuinely don’t hold hate in your heart, then fine — it’s just a joke. But if the same joke exposes your contempt, then it’s not humor, it’s oppression disguised as comedy.

That’s the same logic with reservations. Reservation isn’t about giving freebies. It’s about repayment. It’s about trying to compensate for centuries of locked doors and stolen opportunities. Caste census isn’t about pandering to vote banks. At its core, it’s about auditing reality — about seeing who has actually risen and who is still stuck in the mud, so policies can be adjusted. But of course, politics twists it into a weapon, so everyone screams. Still, the principle remains: you can’t create equality without addressing historical debt. Same goes for women’s rights. Same goes for caste. Same goes for poverty.

And here’s where Indian feminism loses me. Because much of it is inauthentic. Not because the women fighting for rights are wrong — but because too many feminists here cherry-pick their struggles. They’ll fight patriarchy in their air-conditioned urban lives, but stay silent on caste oppression. They’ll demand freedom for women in miniskirts but look away from the village girl who doesn’t even have the right to choose her husband. They’ll fight for boardroom equality but ignore the domestic worker scrubbing their floors. That is selective feminism. That is inauthentic feminism.

If you look at the history of feminism, especially in the U.S., it wasn’t just white women demanding the vote. Black women, Asian women, working-class women had to push their way in, otherwise the movement would have collapsed on itself. Authentic feminism has to be intersectional, or else it’s just another hierarchy in disguise. That’s why Indian feminism, for the most part, feels hollow to me — it’s liberation for the privileged, wrapped in the language of equality, but blind to those who need it most.

And then there’s this ridiculous “divine femininity” trend — putting women on pedestals as goddesses, as eternal nurturers, as mystical beings. That’s not feminism. That’s just patriarchy wearing makeup. That’s still objectifying women, just in a flowery way. True equality means women get to be messy, cruel, brilliant, stupid, ambitious, selfish — just like men. To be treated as full individuals, not mythological archetypes.

When men say, “But patriarchy hurt us too!” I roll my eyes. Because that’s like the oppressor crying that his weapon was too heavy for him to carry. You were swinging the sword, my guy. Of course it strained your arm. But don’t tell the person bleeding on the ground that you too are a victim of the sword. That’s not solidarity. That’s comedy. It’s like those slapstick scenes where the assassin stabs someone, but accidentally cuts himself too. And then he cries, “See? I suffered as well!” No, you don’t get sympathy for that.

So, no, I will never call myself a male feminist. I’ll be an ally. I’ll fight patriarchy in my own lane, just as women fight in theirs. We can meet after the battle, share stories, laugh at the absurdity of it all, maybe cry over the scars. But their fight isn’t mine to lead, and mine isn’t theirs to validate. That’s the only honest way forward.

And if that makes me a Moga, then so be it. At least it’s authentic. At least it’s real. At least it’s mine.

but then you bring your umbrella out

when it starts to fall.

You say you love spring,

but then you pluck the flowers away.

You say you love rainbows,

but then you capture them in snaps

instead of chasing them.

You say you love summer,

but then you hide from the sun.

You say you love winter,

but then you’re afraid to hold snow.

You say you love life,

but all you speak of is death.

You say you love me,

but you turn cold when I arrive.

This melancholical life of yours

reminds me of this beauty I see—

broken apart, yes,

Let’s lay it straight—I’m not pitching this as gospel or some kind of bulletproof theory. This is observation, reasoning, and maybe a touch of personal disillusionment with the answers society gives. It all started for me when I saw a documentary: a woman went inside Tihar jail, looked rapists in the eye, and asked, “Why did you do it?” Most of these men—inmates for rape—didn’t flinch. They said, almost collectively, “We don’t see rape as a crime; the only regret is that nobody would marry the woman anymore.” That’s heavy. And if you put that through any philosophical lens, things get murky.

Let me drag in Immanuel Kant—his categorical imperative, that old gem. Kant says a moral law is real only if you can imagine everyone doing it universally. So if I justify theft, I have to live in a world where everyone steals. My life and property would always be at risk; society destabilizes. Theft and murder are shut out as crimes for this very reason—danger to all, crossing all boundaries: gender, caste, color. But rape? That’s got history warped around it, especially in societies that skew male. Rape is never felt as something “done to men”; it’s always what men “do.” It’s an act claimed, not suffered, and so, deep down, it skips being tagged as a true universal crime—at least in how men see it.

If rape doesn’t get universalized as a crime in the moral sense, it’s because men simply never see themselves as potential victims. And to be clear, I’m not saying this is right—just that this is what the social mechanism looks like. The whole framing of rape as a crime is modern, contemporary, tied to concepts that didn’t always exist: choice, consent, liberty. Those are very recent introductions into human rights, and for women? Even more recent, almost an afterthought, layered long after men got a taste of them.

Now, here’s the heart: even those ideas—liberty, consent, choice—weren’t always built for women. For most of history, nobody handed women those cards. If rape is a violation of choice, personal consent, liberty, well—those were never considered inherent to women to begin with. So, stacked against Kant’s rule, rape flunks the universality test; liberty and consent arrive too late for justice to catch up.

That’s why, in my argument, most male rapists don’t see what they did as a crime; they see an act, not a transgression. Why? Because the philosophical, legal, and social groundwork never handled rape as it handles murder or theft. It’s not that complicated—they did it, but didn’t feel it was wrong, because the culture never really framed it as such. I haven’t dug deep into psychological research here, but the simple answer is: it wasn’t labelled a crime.

So, let’s get even more specific—“modesty.” Law talks about women’s modesty, but even that concept is warped. Modesty is harnessed to chastity and purity, like a woman’s honor is family property. It’s a rotten framing. Modesty shouldn’t be tied to sex or virginity. Under Indian law, modesty for men basically doesn’t exist the way it does for women, and frankly, even for women, it’s a narrow, unfair focus.

There’s a famous judicial moment—a judge tried to define modesty in terms of sex. Anything that violates a woman’s sexual purity, chastity, is an attack on modesty. But that just turns women into vessels of family honor, instead of seeing them as individuals. It’s limiting and cruel, making women objects, not subjects. Modesty needs rethinking, wider scope: see the woman first as human, second as any trope of honor or purity.

Why isn’t rape of men recognized as a crime, in India or most of the world? Simple: men aren’t given the conceptual space for modesty. Before even considering if men can be raped, society needs to admit men have liberty and consent, but it never did. That’s inherited from male-dominated narratives—men can’t be objects, only agents. If men could understand consent, maybe they wouldn’t rape, maybe they’d realize they can be raped. But they don’t, and without that, justice skips them, too.

Summing it up: Kant’s universality fails for rape, because men don’t see themselves as victims; liberty and consent are new, given to women even later. Men don’t see rape as a crime, neither as perpetrators nor potential victims. The very seed that produced the tragedy of women’s rape also blocks men’s rape from being a crime. Karma, in a way, loops back.

Even when rape is recognized as a crime, it’s through a lens of modesty—a woman’s honor, not her individual self. Kant’s logic can’t fix this until it universalizes personhood, not just specific privileges. We need to see each person as a possible victim, as a possible agent of consent and liberty, not a vessel for family pride or societal function.

That’s the raw observation. No gospel, no diary entry, just one philosophical rant on why men rape, and why, for most of history, rape hasn’t been a crime—certainly not for men.

To further summarise this kants categorical imperative fails first when man and woman are not recognised as equal. Woman often treated as object or property and man as owner this very arrangment led to first easy disnullment of woman right from every start and this context of unrecognition of rape as crime and woman right is the very summary for this whole observation.

One can argue that rape was so called right of man over a woman which was only a property carrying family honor and through history property has only been a subject of expoliation and plunder, and woman being an object was no different or even worse. Such a so called right is very reason of the violation of man’s right against the very unrecognised crime called rape, now unrecognised in contemporary world, subjugated as a privilege by the same man who was born and brought in this privilege to distinguish property as subject and woman as object.

Poets, we are to gods—

they kill us for our spoots.

Like flies to the web,

bees to the sting,

poets to the muse—

we are to progeny,

mistook as lust.

Cine die, no forgery must remain.

The poet must die. Lies must vent.

No moon is beautiful,

only to be called pale—

never the dark that hides.

America is to the moon,

as justice is to Indians.

Brighter it is,

darker the shadow.

The more the religion,

so is the herd of cows—

to be slaughtered,

such is called crime.

Only battery is to the pig,

for the fated lust of lies.

God is to progeny,

as love is to justice.

So is the god,

so is the poet.

Best lies are to vent.

Pigs, poets, or gods—

what’s the difference?

Battery, as usual.

Only cows pastor