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.