Editorial

Enough About Hows
It is frustrating to still sit through AIDS awareness sessions and hear ‘experts’ delve on how HIV can spread, what kinds of contacts are safe, who is at risk… In fact, more than frustrating, it is disturbing. This, for two reasons – one, the possibility that despite more than a decade of living with HIV in the State and the years of heightened international coverage about the virus in all forms of media, there continues to be the need for talks on how the virus spreads to be the mainstay of awareness initiatives across the State.
The second possibility is the one that disturbs more though - the possibility that AIDS awareness has become a routine, token affair that moves from one World AIDS Day to the other without direction, stock-taking or plan, packaged whatever theme it is that WHO decides for the Day or how NACO directs as priority interventions. This just won’t do, not because WHO or NACO are wrong, because HIV scenarios and recommended means to generate genuine awareness differ from place to place and interventions thus have to be more nuanced.
Even if the comparatively low number of HIV positive cases in Sikkim is taken as a consolation, what cannot be denied is that the virus is known to explode suddenly, and when that happens, kneejerk fear and paranoia will manifest causing even more damage. The stakes are too high for awareness to be compromised by misdirected ideas of moralities and self-imposed censorship which gropes for propriety and comfort levels in the face of a pandemic that feeds on these very inadequacies. The concept of high-risk groups, and we are still speaking in Sikkim’s context here, is now obsolete all over the world and was always pointless in the Sikkim context. To begin with, the state is too small for any clear segregations of the population group either by profession or social strata. The State will be well advised to henceforth direct its awareness drives believing that everyone is at risk. The Red Ribbon Clubs at the school and club level were a positive move towards this realisation, and what is important now is to convince the people that, well, everyone is at risk. What the awareness sessions have to now do is share stories of how infections have happened from even the most “dependable” of sexual contacts and how infections have travelled from even the rarest exception of needle sharing.
Yes, these sessions could frighten the target audience [even embarrass the counsellors], but really, how does one expect people to prioritise safety when there is no real fear? The sanitised language of pamphlets and posters should be the tools that ease HIV and AIDS into public debates, not the only modes of communicating. While this happens, Sikkim could also do with an increased focus on how lives continue to be lived with self-respect and dignity even with the virus and showing that Sikkim will care even when AIDS sets in. Apart from the numbers that make it to the official list, there are undoubtedly many who live in the fear of having already contracted HIV but are too scared to get themselves tested, they need expressions of such compassion made in the public domain [by lay people and not counsellors alone] to step out and access the counselling and support that is available to them.