The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : An opportunity to erase AIDS stigma

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Tuesday, Jan 15, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

An opportunity to erase AIDS stigma

Ramya Kannan

“Pudiyathor Pongal” aimed at mainstreaming HIV-positive people

— Photo: S. Thanthoni

AIDING INTEGRATION: People living with HIV/AIDS celebrating ‘Pudiyathor Pongal,’ organised by the Indian Community Welfare Organisation and the Madras School of Social Work, in Chennai on Monday.

CHENNAI: The transformation was near perfect: city had become village overnight. Pongal, farmer-style, had come to town a day early. Just as quietly as the village crept in, so did a more subtle transformation.

On the campus of the Madras School of Social Work at Egmore, there were plantain festoons, freshly painted pots in which rice gurgled energetically, to the beat of drums and the joyous ululation of women. In rows, women sat on their haunches, cooking rice in earthen pots in traditional mud stoves. Behind them stood men, beating a strange pattern on fist-sized drums. If you just stumbled upon this scene, there was no way you could tell that all the men and women participating in the show were HIV-positive.

“Pudiyathor Pongal” was yet another attempt to attack the stigma that surrounds the HIV victims. Organised by the Indian Community Welfare Organisation and the Madras School of Social Work and supported by the AIDS Prevention and Control Project, the event was structured to make the invisible barriers that separated those living with HIV from those living without it. “This will create an opportunity to talk about stigma and discrimination, marginalisation and ill treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS,” says A.J. Hariharan, founder secretary, Indian Community Welfare Organisation. A festival is an occasion for the community to come together, and there cannot be a better occasion to integrate HIV-positive people into society, he adds.

More than 100 HIV-positive people had come forward to participate, along with almost double that number of students. The participants immensely enjoyed the competitions on cooking pongal and eating sugarcane. There was a rangoli contest for the women and the regular tug-of-war, but the most popular event was the traditional Pongal game: beating the ‘uri.’ Blindfolded men stumbled their way across to swing a rod against a clay pot swerving overhead, hoping to smash the pot.

“An event like this provides a lot of opportunities for people like us to come out into the open,” says Noorie, of the South India Positive Network. She says one of the most stigmatising acts is when people refuse to eat with the HIV-positive, or on plates used by them. “Here, all of us are together, cooking pongal and eating it. There is love and a sense of togetherness. A positive person myself, I know it is a great tonic for survival.”

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