On Sadhvis and sex workers: Listen up, trolls

Two days ago, I wrote a piece for DailyO. It was, according to me, an innocuous, heartening story about two groups of women I have been associating a lot with over the last few months – Sadhvis and sex workers. Now, the problem is not with what I had written. The trolls upon the article's release have taken me to task because I dared to put "Sadhvis and sex workers" in the same space. I felt brave enough to use the word "bed" – considered holy as well as profane. What rocked the boat, I suppose, is the title of my article: What do Sadhvis and sex workers have in common?

And though they shouldn't have, the vitriolic responses to my article have taken me by surprise.

So here's what I have learnt from the first ever troll experience of my life:

These trolls hardly have any following, but they tweet a lot. What they have in common (you will see this if you visit their profiles) is that some of them are politically aligned to Narendra Modi. Abuse is part of their parlance, because none of them are really up for debates. Oh! One more thing… 99 per cent of them are men.

The thoughts of such trolls are entrenched in the hatred for certain communities and religions, and they almost always harp on these very points of hatred. So anything that defies their conception of purity and religious knowledge becomes "pro-some other religion".

Quite naturally, in their words, I am a "convert", a "padre" who should write about Christian nuns instead. Mature? Well I think that perhaps the trolls are actually like school bullies with Twitter accounts. You can be convinced of this if you read the kind of abuse they come up with: "Everything you have is in common with sex workers"; "You know about sex workers because you are one", etc. One of the tweets even brought my mother into the picture.

The truth is that as women in this world we live in, we have been called names so often – to our faces, through the imagery that surrounds us, or just by the look in people's eyes as they react to our sexuality – that we've built an armour around us.

And to tell you the truth, I do feel that I have a lot in common with the sex workers – many of them are single moms, all of them have learnt to laugh about the betrayal in their lives and they are not ashamed about their sexuality. But then I also feel like I have a lot in common with the Sadhvis – I relate to their spiritual quest, their utter fearlessness and love for god.

So dear trolls, here's all I have to say to you: "No offence taken brother… but do go get some love in your life and a larger, better vocabulary."