It was the fall of 2017. My twelfth grade was about to end in six months and I’d already started receiving advice, mostly unsolicited, on what to do next. Gazillions of my relatives, who I never knew even existed, had mentioned to me about two or three apparently brilliant career options. The most obvious and irritating among them was engineering, a tag which had been fixed onto me right from the very day I had opted for the science stream. I was clear in my mind about two things. I did not want to do engineering and I’d dropped out of my coaching classes in silent protest for the same. Secondly, I wanted to step out of science, into humanities.
During my relatively sadder days, I’d come across Emile Durkheim’s ‘Suicide.’ It detailed and described how suicide was not always an individual act, and there were strong cases when it was induced by society. It appealed to me, not because it was about suicides but because there was someone in the entire wide world who thought human relationships and society mattered. I dug a bit deeper into the matter and I found out there was an entire discipline about the same – sociology.
I made up my mind to pursue sociology.
Fast forward to August 2018. I had performed averagely in my boards, paving my way easily into the humanities. I’d admitted myself into B. J. B. Autonomous College, once the premier institution of Odisha and now, basking in the glory of yesteryear.
Right from the day I entered sociology, I learned something of quintessential importance. Everything that we believe in, from the values we follow to the norms we observe are socially created. Every reality was not essentially a reflection of truth, rather it was that way because political superstructures wanted it that way. Not every value we adhered to, encased what was right. The subjugation of women by being treated as inferior beings to men and the exploitation of lower castes by the upper castes were all once and still continue to be treated importantly because of the social values people believed in, then. It was also a result of the interference of those in power to push the exploited ones further lower down through a process of self-subjugation.
Having studied sociology for almost six months now, if I’ve learnt something to carry on for life, it is to rise above my biases. I learnt to get over any false sense of vanity or feeling of ethnocentrism that I still had.
At the end of the day, I realize I can think rationally now. Be it the glorification of Jauhar in Padmaavat, or the issue of women entering Sabarimala, I now see it is not so much about the traditions, as it is about the oppression of women and perpetuation of patriarchy. It is not as much as the fault of poor in their poverty as it is in the rich in maintaining the disparity. At the end of the day, sociology helped me become a better human, which I think is the ultimate goal we all strive for.