
India's First Openly Transgender Mayor in Her Own Words - bhaumik
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/01/07/indias-first-openly-transgender-mayor-in-her-own-words/
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rmxt
An article about a politically significant LGBT person in South Asia without
exploring or giving a more substantial background on the concept of Hijras
feels a bit like having pizza without cheese. Being from the West and growing
up with its binary sex and gender concepts, even reading the Wikipedia article
on Hijra makes for some eye-opening reading.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_\(South_Asia\))

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bhaumik
Thanks for sharing. In my last trip to India, I visited Bahacharaji and didn't
understand why most people would pray with (and offer money to) the
transgender women before entering the main shrine. I had no idea they
considered themselves to be part of a third gender.

Highly recommended Joothan [1] if you want a first-hand account of a Dalit
(member of the "untouchable" caste). "Joothan" refers to chewed up food or
leftovers on a plate that a higher class would throw out. Many Dalits in
Indian slums would resort to that for food. Fascinating autobiography with
controversial theories on the origins of vegetarianism in Hindu culture.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Joothan-Untouchables-Life-Omprakash-
Va...](http://www.amazon.com/Joothan-Untouchables-Life-Omprakash-
Valmiki/dp/0231129726)

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isgood12
I'm sorry, but my main take away from the discussion wasn't about the LGBT
community at all. It was that India is still not ready for democracy. A
candidate decides to try out this election thing without any agenda and plans,
and they win without any reason. They don't even know why they won and what
they can really do for the community. Giving government jobs to beggars isn't
a plan. And I'm saying this as an Indian.

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lotsofmangos
_" A candidate decides to try out this election thing without any agenda and
plans, and they win without any reason. They don't even know why they won and
what they can really do for the community. Giving government jobs to beggars
isn't a plan."_

Actually, that sounds like normal democracy in action to me. Unprepared
candidates being voted in happens all the time in all democracies. And this
candidate seems reasonable and may end up doing a good job.

If you look to other democracies for comparison, Talkeetna in Alaska has had a
cat named Stubbs as the elected mayor for years. Mel Carnahan got voted into
the US senate in an election 3 weeks after his death. And Tiririca the Clown
got voted in to Brazil's congress and was completely inexperienced and was
accused of being illiterate. He apparently worked really hard and did a very
good job of it.

Remember, democracy is not a plan and nobody is ever 'ready' for it. It just
tends to be usually less objectionable than the alternatives, especially the
planned alternatives.

edit - Also, Ms. Kinnar did not win for no reason.

 _" I have no experience, I’ve never made a public speech, but while
campaigning, I went to every household."_

And she seems to have a clear idea of what she wants do to for the community.

 _" I feel the most-important responsibility I have is towards my people. My
community. I have to stop them from begging for money on the trains. Instead,
I want to give them jobs in municipal corporation. Apart from that, the
deplorable condition of roads and drains in the city worries me. Raigarh
doesn’t have a water shortage but taps often run dry. I want to make sure
people in Raigarh get adequate water supply."_

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isgood12
I agree that democracy is arguably just better than other alternatives.
Nothing more. However I can't be happy about a candidate just because they are
at least not a clown. Yes, they may do a good job. But that's as good as
randomly choosing a candidate and hoping that they do a good job, right? We
can surely do better than that.

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HCIdivision17
I accidentally started to think seriously about your quip, and I think it
belies the profound difficulty of the problem. I would contend that it's _not_
obvious that we can do better than random elections.

There's all sorts of perverse and misaligned incentives otherwise. I'm not
politician or historian, so I'd love some insight into the consequences of
such a system. Intuitively, I would assume it'd just implode from
incompetance, but bureaucracies are shockingly resilient on government scales.
And I'd have no idea how to reliably find qualified individuals; the USA has a
long history of effective leaders coming from seemingly random backgrounds.
(Whether these individuals did _good_ or not, well, that's _hotly_ debated to
this day... I don't often grok politics.)

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isgood12
Yeah doing better than random is more of my wish than anything based on facts.
Now that I think about it, considering the population that self selects itself
out of politics in India, maybe random selection of a candidate from all of
the population may do better than what we have currently.

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lotsofmangos
" _Now that I think about it "_

This is one of the best phrases ever invented.

By the way, I am not meaning to attack. I completely understand the
frustration of watching completely unqualified assholes run the country. I
live in the UK.

However, to see what happens when qualified assholes run the country, look to
China. They are the world's most successful technocracy. There are more people
with engineering degrees in government there than anywhere else I know of. (if
anyone cares to correct me on this, please do)

The results of this are nicely mirrored by your respective space programs.

China has people in orbit.

India found water on the moon.

Just so you know my biases, I like what I see as India's democratic openness
and China's secular practicality (being a stereotypical Brit who goes around
stereotyping stuff so it will fit into all the neat little display boxes).

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muktabh
She is not India's first openly transgender mayor. My city elected one more
than 10 years back. She was later disqualified because India's Supreme Court
did not recognize "third-sex" officially then and she contested stating her
gender as female, and my city's mayorship was reserved for women . Here's a
link about her dismissal:
[http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/13up.htm](http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/13up.htm)
.

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sighsigh
Failing to see why pop morality is on HackerNews?

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lotsofmangos
This is a new section for things that are both popular and moral.

