“An elite Australian college has sparked a race controversy after it organised a ‘colonial- themed’ party where Indians wearing traditional garments served guests present at the event.
The St Paul’s college, affiliated with the University of Sydney, had organised its yearly ‘upscale’ dinner with an ‘end of the British raj‘ theme, asking guests to come dressed in ‘white tie of colonial uniform’ and served them Indian food.
College students, who arrived at St Paul’s great hall dressed in immaculate black dinner suits with matching white handkerchiefs, were met by a team of Indian and south Asian waiters, dressed in colourful traditional cultural garments, who served them Indian delicacies and curries, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Sunday.
But within days of the event, ideological war broke out at the university over whether the college was basking in the glory of colonialism and slavery.
Before long, vicious vitriol began ricocheting across Facebook, the report said. “I am Indian and I used to go to college. My relatives suffered in colonial India. This theme offended me and brought me to the brink of tears,” one female student wrote.
“Please, can you all come to our next party? It’s Mexican themed, and we’ll be celebrating all the abductions and beheadings you can poke a stick at,” a student responded. “I have this turban and – what luck! – it’s just your size,” another provoked.
“That’s it, ban ALL the upscale parties!!” another wrote. Had it not been a letter to the student newspaper, Honi Soit, from an outraged arts student, Mason McCann, the white tie event may have gone unnoticed.
“I do not think the party was a celebration of Indian culture, it was a celebration of imperialism,” McCann told The Sun-Herald.
“The party demonstrates a serious deep disconnect between the culture of St Paul’s and the culture of the University of Sydney. I am deeply offended by it.”
“They have a responsibility as a prestigious and old institution to project a positive public image to both the other students and the public, and I think that party succeeded in doing just the opposite of that.”
In response to McCann’s letter which was published in full, Hugo Rourke from St Paul’s, who as senior student speaks on behalf of his peers, wrote to Honi Soit to justify the party.
Again, we normally are not aware and are reluctant to admit our short comings in a relationship.
It is only when we enter into a new relationship do we find that we get the doubt that we have our own shortcomings.
So the maladjustment leaves a scar in our psyche.
To remain in a relationship trying to bear with a partner who is incompatible and cruel is also a pain.
Is this why people say ‘Marriages are made in Heaven?” ,for better or worse-substitute relationship for marriage.
If the relationship is parents/siblings, children?
You can not divorce these.
In Sanskrit there are two words to describe these relationships.
One is Sondham, the other is Bandham.
Sondham is a relationship which is not your choosing-parents,siblings and children. You are stuck with it.
Bandham is what we choose( this might be wrong as well)-wife, acquaintances-you may be able to discard them.
Here’s how most of us who are thinking about leaving our marriage imagine divorce will be like: We’ve had it with our partner (or perhaps he’s decided the same about us and casts us aside, but let’s just say we’re the ones who want out and let’s say we’re the woman because women ask for divorce two-thirds of the time). We think — finally, freedom.
Now we no longer have to feel the brunt of his anger and criticism; we can stop nagging about how he doesn’t pull his weight around the house; we won’t have to fake being in the mood when we’re not, and we get to do and eat and watch whatever we want whenever we want to.
And, we have the kids, so we don’t have to bicker anymore over whose turn it is to bathe them or whether they can have ice cream for dessert if they didn’t finish everything on their dinner plate.
Not so fast.
Maybe that was what divorce was like back in the day when moms were almost always awarded full custody and dads could “visit” their kids. But those days are rapidly disappearing, according to University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson, whose new book, “Family Law and the Indissolubility of Parenthood” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), details the major shift in family law and the incredible challenges ahead.
“Many of the conflicts about family law in the Western world today derive from the breakdown of the model on which divorce reform was predicated in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” he writes. The model he discusses assumed that divorce was a clean break; husband went his way, wife went hers and all was good. “The assumption was that once the property and the children had been allocated to one household or the other, each parent was autonomous. The divorce freed him or her from being entangled with the life of the other parent, except to a limited extent,” Parkinson writes.
But rarely has that been true. Most divorcees learn relatively quickly that although we’re no longer married and living together, we still have to deal with our former spouse in their continuing role as our kids’ mom or dad. He or she still has a say, and can nix our plans to move away for a new job or a new love. Divorce is no longer the end of a relationship; it’s a “restructuring of a continuing relationship.”
Which has made some of us as miserable divorced as we were in our marriage.
“People in unhappy marriages do not look to divorce as a way to restructure the relationship with their partners. They look to divorce to end that relationships, to set them free to start a new life, perhaps to move to a new location and to form new relationships,” Parkinson says.
But, not if you have kids. As Parkinson notes, “The experience of the last forty years has shown that whereas marriage may be freely dissoluble, parenthood is not.”
And a huge reason for the battles in family courts has been the “problem” of fatherhood, he says. It used to be that dads were mostly absent; now, he notes, we can’t get rid of dads: “Separation motivates some fathers to rethink their priorities and to try to maintain their connections to children even if this means struggle and conflict. Because fathers demand a greater involvement in their children’s lives after separation, there has been increasing conflict both at a policy level and at the individual level of litigated cases.” And it’s happening globally.
This is, of course, something to celebrate — dads wanting to be with their kids. Who wouldn’t want dads to be hands-on in a shared-parenting arrangement instead of mom having sole custody? Well, a lot of people, according to Parkinson. Although national statistics are hard to come by, a 2008 study of seven states he cites in his book indicates a dramatic increase in custody filings — 44 percent between 1997 and 2006 — at the same time that divorces had decreased in the U.S. by 3 percent.
Throw into the mix all sorts of new ways of partnering — from cohabitation to same-sex civil unions — and already convoluted and outdated family laws are being stretched in ways they can no longer handle, he says.
Unfortunately, whatever legal changes have occurred so far haven’t been driven by a “philosophical shift in the meaning of divorce,” but piecemeal and too often driven by “destructive gender conflict.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.