The World We Want to Live In?

January 16, 2025

            This morning the sun was ‘properly’ out for the first time since Friday. Sunlight warmed the white sheets on my bed and my bare feet bringing some relief to my aching knees. It’s still a very slow time externally. My mind is still hectic, my dreams chaotic, but I like the lazy pace of most of my days. I am lost and drifty and my dream activity points to something more within. I dream of being at airports and arriving at the boarding gate, after wandering for a while through arcades and theme park rides, and finding that I’ve lost or misplaced my boarding pass. I have my passport, unlike the phase when I used to dream of being in a foreign country without a passport and money. I suppose this is a shift? A part of my identity less nebulous but perhaps what I need to get to my next destination is still missing. I also dream of people partying and then finding themselves in a drunken state, or in a hospital with spine or other bone fractures. Feels like an unpleasant warning of some sort and I am trying to decide what the ‘partying’ is a metaphor for in my life. It feels like there are deeper anxieties that I don’t want to touch? I think because a lot of them are out of my control to change.

            Yes there is enough on the personal level that is worry producing but the state of the world, the future of the world, suddenly feels more uncertain than before (though I did read about the ceasefire between Hamas and Isreal and am eager to know more). India, besides having a ton of problems related to employment, poverty, economics, is going through a conflict of ideologies and not many whose voices will be broadcast and heard, and not many ordinary citizens either whose voices are unlikely to be heard, are speaking about it. For a while now a starlet (as she was called by a reporter) has been saying that India only got independence after 2014, when Modi came to power. She blasts her opinions around a lot but she is of little consequence and people know she makes such statements to butter up the Modi crowd and many have ignored her. But two days ago, the head of a fascist far right religious organization claimed that we got true/real freedom only once a Ram Temple had been consecrated last year. He claimed we might have got political freedom in 1947 but not until last year could Hindus truly be themselves. The temple was built on the ruins of not just a mosque but on the wreckage, on the beginnings of dismantling the secular, democratic, country I love. This man regularly propagates the idea that India is for Hindu’s and should be a Hindu state, with separate laws for minorities and lowered privileges for lower castes and women – though the latter is not yet uttered aloud, but is obvious for anyone who can think. The man has forgotten that without the political freedom that he and his organization do not respect he could never have demolished the mosque and built the temple. And people don’t seem bothered by what he said though it is an insult to all the freedom fighters who got us independence from the British is 1947 and is also another nudge towards directing us to being a Hindu state. 

            Yesterday, the much maligned, the much joked about and trolled Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in Parliament, said that what the man uttered was treason and, in another country, he would have been jailed. He was speaking at the new office of his party, the party from which many our freedom fighters came, and the party which formed our first government and have been endlessly cursed and condemned for the mistakes they made. Gandhi or RaGa as the trolls have named him was attacked by people from the ruling party, journalists (some who think themselves neutral and clear thinking reporters), and of course trolls who said it is he who should be arrested. Most people laugh at him and urge him to take up issues more important to the people. Most people are oblivious to what the fascist head said or what RaGa said. Most people are not talking about this, while I feel that every street corner should be hosting debates about it. The very nature of our country is being changed, the idea that India is for Hindus is introduced daily in small doses, that normalizes it. I guess this is one reason I don’t feel like going home anymore. I mean what am I supposed to talk about with people I meet when the thing uppermost on my mind is this dismantling of democracy. Shouldn’t we all talk incessantly about the world we want to live in, or should we merely live our small joys and let others decide our the larger landscapes and rules we live in and by. 

            Last night I listened a debate in which Rahul was dismissed and labelled as a ‘bad’ leader of the opposition. It was depressing but today I watched a debate in which the participants though outraged were glad that these discussions were now out in the open and that people could talk about, analyze, and form their own judgments. I wish I shared their hope but I feel deeply anguished. With Trump-Musk now holding the kind of power they do the future feels so, so, so unsettled, though I do try to remind myself that ‘this too shall pass’. 

            These thoughts fill up my head and leave little space for ‘creativity’, I feel no urge to write or draw, though I continue to read a fair amount. I notice a desire—to start a podcast to rant about the socio-political things that bother me. I have observed that my sugar urges have lessened, as have my obsessive need to buy a new pen. I didn’t try to stop either, only noted when I had the urges and the mood and circumstances I was in when I felt them and one day they shifted. This is my belief about inner change. You can’t bring it on with discipline but with awareness. I thought I would be writing about the last book I read that impacted me strongly but something else pushed that aside.