MAN UP

I am back with another of my speeches in Toastmasters. This is a speech that I delivered as part of the Strategic Relationships pathway's research project.

From 1990 to 2016, the suicide rate among men rose by a humungous 30%. Data also shows that around 50,000 people commit suicide annually in our country and among them more than 60% happen to be men. Why so many more men? Why such exponential growth?

So, ladies and gentlemen, cutting the cackle, let me ask you something:

Have you ever known anyone, deeply rooted and connected, and yet committed suicide?

Some people think you can live without intimacy, without connection. I think it's utterly impossible. Now, intimacy is required to truly live. It's a strong need and often consumes many of us. It's how men feel loved and worthy. We are all designed for connection and to find our tribe. That's how humans work. We all need that one person, who sees who we really are and accepts us and loves us anyway. Most of the time, we don't get that.

How many of you have heard the phrases: "Man Up!", "Toughen Up", "Don't be a sissy" "Real Men don't cry", "Mard ko Dard nahi hota"?

Men, how old were you when you heard it for the first time? 10... 11? What was exactly going on in that moment? Were you sad? Afraid? Were you hurt? Did you get the support you needed? Did you get to cry? Or did you learn to keep it inside?

From a very young age, most of our boys are getting the message that having feelings and needing help is bad. This happens at school, in sports, on TV and sometimes in their own families. They grow to believe that their value, their manhood is in their muscles, their money or their mojo.

Think about it. Did you choose your body or your looks? There's only so much you can do about them. Money can be really hard to make and if ever it happens it goes away very quickly; which probably most of us know by now! So out of the three ways, two you can't really control. What happens then? No wonder they turn to violence, they get desperate, lonely and unworthy. So often they create this mask around them to protect them from criticism, shaming... mostly from other men. A mask of what a man is supposed to be: Stoic, Tough, Fearless, Emotionless. And intimacy and love is the only way where they can express themselves and take off that mask.

So what happens when they are too poor, too afraid and too shamed. We see violent outbursts all around us. They just implode. Domestic violence, radical hate groups, police brutality, in cells...

During the years 2014-2016, more than 96500 cases for murders have been registered only in India.

In the year 2016 only, a total of around 40000 cases of rape and around 85000 cases of assault on women have been registered under IPC sections.

These are huge numbers! As a society we are largely missing out fact that the way we teach our boys to become men is directly related to the violence we are seeing.

Delving deeper, we can say violence is majorly influenced by broadly three causes: genetics, situational, conditioning. We can't cure the genetics yet; can't cure all the bad situations either... but what we can and we must address is the conditioning. It starts with how we talk to our children. We must stop telling them to Man up... to stop crying. We must stop excusing the teasing and bullying as boys being boys. We must allow mistakes in learning...by showing emotions and empathy. We need them to see healthy manhood is about facing your fears, overcoming challenges and living with compassion.

But is that all? Will it be sufficient?

In the end we will still have broken souls. Men who have been through too much... We must address this as well... but the question is: How? How are we going to fix them?

We ask for help in every field of life: education, housework, tax attorneys, plumbing, physical injuries... However it's just that there is a huge social stigma about asking for help to heal the heart... the mind... We must all strive to eliminate this and make the people feel free to ask for help to heal their hearts... We have to learn to accept the differences. We must be that person who loves them anyway. Must give them the liberty to ask for help without any fear, the liberation that we all deserve.