Unquiet Yet

July 28, 2022

 

A long unquiet time it’s been, and the mind’s felt like a cardboard box holding hand-painted porcelain teacups that have been crushed in transit. I constantly hear the rattling of the broken pieces. I dared not open this box until today. 

 

On Tuesday, I couldn’t wake to the alarm and had to take a taxi to the group I was co-facilitating in. It was my last day at the outreach I have volunteered for all July. Rain fell in thick sheets and the large meeting room was too cold for my thin black sweater. My head hurt because the weather had aggravated the sinus again. After the large group presentation, I walked to one of the smaller rooms for the breakout groups. Mine had five young men, two of which I had seen dozing off in the first hour. I shook away the lethargy that remained after the two cups of tea and approached them.

 

Right away the young men all identified themselves as people who didn’t talk to anyone about their problems. Their ways of destressing were smoking, alcohol, football, or music. Right away they expressed thoughts and opinions conflicting with the presentation. I pulled down the sleeves of my sweater to cover my reddening palms (when very cold they lose circulation sometimes) and began doing what I know how to do — throw in all ideas presented into a pot, elicit more, and begin to cook them. The sleepy group livened up as they argued with me and when I requested them to remain open through the role plays to explore new ways to respond to crisis, they did. I ended up having the best group of the month. 

 

It felt like the river’s flow was favoring me again. I paced the corridors, by the floor to ceiling windows, to warm up before the debrief. I encountered one of the other co-facilitators, whom I don’t know very well, wearing just a t-shirt over jeans. She had been drinking hot water through the morning she said, and stood next to me for the group photo. I said she was so warm and it felt nice, and she hugged me closer. And just like that I wasn’t cold anymore and I broke into a huge smile. It's lovely when a project ends on a high note. 

 

Soon, I hurried out of the building to the warmer outside. The rain had stopped, and cloud cover made it a pleasant day to walk. I pulled my mask off and walked, and walked, beside the waters of the Singapore River, feeling my ruptured, jangling mind settle into temporary quietness. I found a quiet place to eat, ordered chicken curry, and drew in my journal. 

 

I have moved away from True North again it seems. Or rather True North is being redefined internally. I haven’t been able to see myself clearly for a while. It’s all been murky and sluggish with a sense of ‘non-starting’. It has been so in my swollen sinus and throat, and my always roiling stomach. My state reminds me of what I felt in those times, 1992 and 2003, and places when the raw material of myself was being sorted through to be re-organised. 

 

Today I opened the cardboard box and began sorting the broken teacups. I wrote for a while about the raw ingredients within me. Unsure if the cooked product will be palatable or will have to be discarded. 

Miscellanea

July 15, 2022

 

Yesterday I left my Sunday dojo with a vague disturbance. I no longer have a need to know exactly what any disturbance I feel is about as soon as I become aware of it. Instead, I leave it to swirl and mature within before I try to examine it. 

 

I was extremely tired yesterday as my white cat had kept me up, like he usually does, the four nights he’d been here. Actually, he just comes to cuddle and purr on my stomach but being a light sleeper, I have trouble falling back to sleep. I needed a nap but it eluded me so I journalled hoping the disturbance would appear on the page and reveal more about itself. Instead, I wrote about change and how I know I might have changed. I wrote about aging and what urgencies are arising around that. These have been like suspended particles spiraling in agitated eddies for a long time. Now they feel settled into the deep waters of a still pond. 

 

For a couple of weeks my connection with my artist friend on our Wednesday chats has been fragile. Both of us are going to several layers of heaviness. His related to personal loss and strong body symptoms and mine very concentrated in the grief I feel about India, a thing I keep patrolling the perimeter of. 

 

On Saturday for some reason, I decided to not be so obsessive in following the news. I guess it happened after hearing the absurd allegations made by a spokesperson of the ruling party claiming that the Congress party had instigated the Gujarat genocide of 2002 to defame Mr. Modi. The same genocide that had lead to Mr. Modi being denied a visa to the US. Those of us who have been involved, even in a small way, with investigating the violence know how absurd the BJP claim is. But the Supreme Court gave the PM a clean chit and instead named human rights activists and victims of the violence as those wanting to keep the pot boiling. A witch-hunt of activists and police officers who had clearly identified the Hindutva elements, with close connection to the PM, as perpetuators of the violence, began. After hearing this new allegation by the State Police and the BJP I felt lightheaded and slightly vertiginous. I knew that history would be re-written as fiction. Whatever inaccuracies and biases any history has, I hope that it does begin with a quest to document something ‘truthful’. This one is a deliberate attempt to whitewash. Yet I wasn’t depressed, despite knowing that the corruption, brainwashing, and infiltration of all democratic institutions is complete and none with power will use it for an unbiased probe into anything against the current regime. I should have felt hopeless, but I just felt—this too shall pass. Though not as quickly as the declared emergy of Indira Gandhi. I knew I was unlikely to see the other side of it in my lifetime.

 

On the comments section of an article on an independent website, a Hindutva male trolled me. He told me to keep crying for the next twenty years, he called me Begum Aunty, Liberal, Leftist, Jihadi, in need of Burnol (an ointment to soothe burnt skin) etc. I told him he was unoriginal and that if I was Aunty, the PM was Grandfather, and he too would one day be past. The troll-man didn’t like it and upped his attack, but I walked away. 

 

I have changed. Few months ago, and for a while before, I often wrote about how I don’t know myself at all. I realized this week that I have come to know myself again. I see the changes, but I don’t like many of them. Why do we become that which we do not like? I ask this of myself personally and also of Right-Wing Religious Extremists. I am thinking about the Hindu ones who are mirror images of the Islamists ones they despise. 

 

Maybe if I understand why I became what I do not like, I will also understand them a little bit? 

 

Now that this I have become slightly detached from this heaviness, I wonder if I will connect better with my friend’s heaviness. While I was carrying my pain, I felt too full to be able to talk about his. And visa versa. 

 

Today my cats go back home. I will get the deep sleep I badly need, though I have an early start tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow afternoon after my morning co-facilitation work, I will sit in a café and free-write about my disturbance from Sunday post karate. It still intrigues me. 

What Offends...

July 13, 2022

 

My stomach had gone through huge exhausting churnings in the last week, and it might just be that I have serious digestive system issues, but often it feels like internalized churn from happenings in India. 

 

Lately it’s become difficult to express personal choices and opinions about religion. Since I am Hindu, I am speaking about Hinduism. The way religion has been weaponized and politically used has bothered me since LK Advani, a leader of the BJP, zoomed around the country on his Rath Yatra in early 1990’s. It resulted in an ancient Mosque being destroyed by Hindutva fanatics and riots in other parts of the country.

 

I’m simplifying those events by describing them this way, but to me they were the beginning of the divisiveness that is all pervading today. 

 

Hmm, on second thoughts, it isn’t difficult to express religious choices if they are aligned with what the Right-Wing Hindutva (RWH) groups want you to say. The noise around religion got louder recently as the RWH’s started a movement to dig up and destroy more mosques around the country. One called the Gyanvapi mosque had been in the news constantly for the RWH’s believed a lingam—symbol of Lord Shiva, was found on the premises. Apparently though, the residents of the area were not involved or impressed with the news and controversies for they say many shivlings were destroyed when the Central government made the Kashi-Vishwanath corridor, and they wonder why the RWH’s were not bothered then. 

 

I tried to detach myself from the fray but sometimes it felt absurd when RWH’s asked for Mughal emperors to be removed from history books, or for present day Muslims to pay for the sins of those invaders. It was disturbing to hear RWH’s say that Hindus—yes, they were speaking for me too—were offended by this or that. It was even more disturbing how easily the Police helped them to remain offended and exact their pound of flesh by locking up 'offenders' and ensuring they never got bail. It offended me how selectively the law was applied and how 'offenders' on the other side escaped arrest. 

 

I don’t get offended easily around religion but recently it offended me that a priest who called for the rape of  Muslim women was called not a hatemonger but a great Mahant, respected by many Hindus. It offended me that it took so long to arrest a man that called for genocide of Muslims, and after he was out on bail, where one of the conditions was he not make hate speeches, he made more hate speeches, and as far as I know hasn’t been re-arrested. 

 

It feels very absurd that it is ok to abuse actual living citizens, ask for a genocide against them, ask for the women from the community to be raped, call the community jihadist and traitors, economically destroy them by boycotting traders and workmen from that community, even illegally destroy their homes, arrest and torture them in police custody — but it is not ok to say something the RWH’s don’t want to hear about a Hindu God or Goddess. 

 

Just wrapping my confused head around this. 

 

Meanwhile life goes on. My cats will come live with me for a while their parents go for an anniversary holiday. I am meeting a lot of people I normally never would and hearing about their lives through my newest volunteer activity. I find that exciting. 

Do Not Go Gentle…

July 4, 2022

For the first time in two years, I am alone — have no one else present — for more than a few hours. The spouse is away on a business trip. The first one after 2020. 

 

It’s been a busy few days, each with an early start, but today was deliciously slow — woke to no alarm, a large pot of the assam masala chai, reading in bed, and late arrival at my desk. My body and mind feel traumatized. My body because of a flare-up of sinusitis and a subsequent throat and chest infection for which the doc insisted on a seven-day antibiotic course. Today is the last day J The mind is coping with accelerating destruction of democracy in India. 

 

Maybe others might not see it that way, but the collapse feels quicker now to me. Yet the country has been on a slow boil for a while so it’s hard to tell. Unlike the 1975 declared emergency where everything shut down in one swoop — and we didn’t have to guess if the media was free, or if the police were fair, and the courts just — right now we are still arguing about our democracy.

Many things have happened in the last tenday, but I am not here to list them all. Maybe those that disturb me the most?

 

A tailor who shared a post supporting the now infamous BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma was beheaded Taliban style in Rajasthan on June 28^th by two radicalized Islamic youth. They recorded the killing and shared it gleefully on social media. It shook me in a different way than the persecution of Muslims by Hindutva groups, because I cannot remember when something like this happened in India. I googled it but found nothing before this beheading. But soon there was another one in Amravati. It was not the same — as no video was made but that could be because the killers didn’t have time. But the victim here too had shared a post supporting the woman. These are terror attacks — as in attacks to terrorize Hindus who support the woman who made remarks about the Prophet. 

 

We have been slowly conditioned to terror attacks on minorities — by Hindutva groups and by the State. Attacks that are meant to terrorize them, scare them into submission, keep them in their place. These have been filmed and shared gleefully by BJP supporters to subdue and show them their minority status in our country. When they happen, I feel disgusted, nauseous, but they don’t have the shock value the first lynching of a Muslim man did. They have been normalized and justified. Hindus are no longer tolerant and that is ok, we are told. 

 

This one was chilling because it was the first from ‘the other side’. And there will be more —  as it does feel that some larger planning, some group is involved in this. 

 

Now both sides are terrorized? Both polarities gleeful when 'their side' avenges something, while we in the middle feel the horror of them both.

 

The law though is increasingly applied differently to both. The police have been weaponized against one and pamper the other.  Hate speech is defined differently for supporters and opposers. Hateful or false tweets by one and the other are treated differently by the Government — State and Centre.

 

Yesterday Twitter filed a suit against the Government for forcing it to take down tweets, by political opposition, in a non-constitutional manner. I had to laugh and cry. Twitter enforcing the Indian constitution? A dark day indeed.

 

But I was reminded by a spokesperson of the BJP — the fact that twitter can do this shows India is a vibrant democracy. The fact that we the citizens of India hear about this says that the media is free and India is a vibrant democracy. A thriving, radiant democracy. 

 

Will these be the last things that go? Do we wait in this slowly boiling pot for that to happen to declare India an authoritarian state where the constitution functions differently depending on your caste, religion, class, one day perhaps gender too, and whom you criticize? Do we wait patiently till then? Is it possible that a part of me thinks a declared emergency might be better? Because this is a mockery?

Absurd. These are absurd times. Brutal. And I don’t know how those of us who want ‘more democracy’, are surviving them. Be gentle with yourself if you are suffering like I am, but for everyone’s sake, Do not go gentle into these dark times. Rage, rage, rage…

 

If I went gently, I would regret it hugely. But everyone is different and you should do what keeps you well. 

 

My way of gentleness with myself are these slow days of trying to gather my pieces, meeting with friends that contain and make me forget for a while, reading, and this blog where sometimes I try to prevent my insides from being polarized.