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April 10, 2026
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"... "hysteria," it appears, is .. an epithet with which men have stigmatized women across the ages."
"... the word itself has become so generically linked with the feminine in popular understanding that we need to specify male hysteria the way we specify women writers, whereas to say female hysteria sounds redundant."
"... throughout the centuries doctors have sought to find other names for hysteria in men. As [French psychiatrist Lucien] Israel explains, "The hysteria diagnosis became for a man . . . the real injury, a sign of weakness, a castration in a word. To say to a man 'you are hysterical' became under these conditions a form of saying to him 'You are not a man.'""
"... hysteria has been constructed as a perjorative term for femininity in a duality that relegated the more honorable masculine form to another category."
"Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination... Alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve."
"This moment in time... anywhere you turn people are talking about how bad things are, how terrible it is...everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria... and it’s getting worse... We’re not supposed to match it or even get locked into resisting or pushing against it. We’re supposed to see this moment in time for what it is. We’re supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.