Normalization Of The ‘Gaali’

“Gaali is a way to get rid of the frustration inside of me”.., “It is very normal, I don’t mean like that”..,”My language is like that only, can’t help it”..,So many reason for the use of gaali and not a single reason to feel ashamed of what you just said (if you know the meaning of the word, which we all know, you should be feeling ashamed at the very least embarrassed). But all I ever saw is pride and ignorance.

I was in junior high school when i got to know the meaning of a lot of slang words, from those days onwards I judged every single person I heard those words from(don’t know if its right or wrong but I do like to have a clear distance with them). And thing always amused me how someone can choose to say these words so openly despite knowing the meaning(doesn’t mean they should use them in private sittings)

One time someone said it feels really relieving when you say these words while screaming and it calms your anger. Does It??? Maybe screaming your problems somewhere can still make you feel relieved but not confronting your issue and just screaming gaali to the air, how can it solve anything. And the bigger issue is you are insulting a specific gender and its making you feel better no matter who made you feel that way. So indirectly you are saying that insulting females makes you feel relieved that there is someone who is inferior to you and you can say anything to them so it makes you feel superior and you find your worth in that. (But obviously we are not taking it that seriously because they say its not their intentions…is it not though?)

The other very well thought explanation(some people like to justify) is “It has become a part of our language”. No never, we do not have a shortage of words in any language neither you can say its the part of any language. language is a way to communicate, to develop relationship, to pass on knowledge and many more but it never have and never should be used to suppress a specific gender, caste, class, rase or age. And if your vocabulary is so limited that you have to use gaali to show your anger, irritation or any other feeling so you should be learning language again.

And one unsaid reason is it makes you look and sound ‘cool’. Maybe the people you are with right now are making you feel cool while using gaali but if you really think that it makes you feel cool you should be using it in front of interviewer, your family, political leaders and everywhere where needs to look cool and modern. You are not using it where you need to look ‘cool’ means your cool is only cool for you and you yourself know that gaali is not a part of our language and neither should be used as one.

One very very useful excuse for using gaali is that girls are also using it (I mostly heard this only maybe for LGBTQ+ they also say this). Even if girls are using gaali would it change the fact that we are insulting someone’s friend, mother, sister, Mother-in-law, and many more titles given to ‘women’. No matter what your gender is you are insulting someone you are using violent tone and words for them and will never be justifiable whatever excuses you think for yourself.

Then comes a group who would not use gender-specific gaali but would very comfortably use someone’s caste/class/nationality as a gaali and will accept it as gaali. It is very common to associate a color, choice of clothing, speaking style, eating style and what not with a caste which some people think are lower then their caste. Sometimes while wearing green, orange or dark shade colors you can normally hear the comment like what color are you wearing like ‘lower caste’. This group is not even completely responsible for this situation because people like me and you take these comments seriously we think that its our insult to be associated with a certain group and we give justification so we wan’t be grouped with people we think are inferior in status from us.

We hear so many of these words nowadays that we are almost accepting them in day-to-day life. But should we become comfortable with these words, I hope I would never. I want to feel uncomfortable every single time I hear it. I want to question it every single time and do not want to accept any of the reasons to use gaali rather than just confronting and understanding your own emotions.

I read a poem once by Rajendra Yadav:

“हिंसा सिर्फ़ शरीर की नहीं होती, उससे पहले भाषा की होती है –

आदमी शारीरिक हत्या करने से पहले भाषा और सोच में हत्या कर चुका होता है।”

• राजेन्द्र यादव

If you want to justify something you can find thousands of ways but when it goes through the moral filter we won’t have any words left.