previously aborted posts

March 25, 2021

 

It’s been three weeks since my last blog post. I have made several—three—starts to writing a new post but felt defeated by my feelings of helpless rage and deep sadness, and not completed them.

 

The first was about a 13-year-old girl who was gang raped by a bunch of young men. The family was then told that if they tried to lodge a complaint worse would happen. The father of one of the young men was a police official and the man threatened, that if they lodged a complaint the girl would be raped in public, the middle of the village, and nobody would be able to stop them. Such arrogance—where does it come from? Just knowing that he had more power than the girl’s family and so he felt he could do anything to them? The father did take the girl to the police station and while she was being examined in the hospital the man was run over by a truck right outside the police station. The story ran for a day and then disappeared. The girl was not important enough and the man powerful enough to obliterate the story and the event. 

 

The second was about a book I read, ‘The Terrorist’s son’, by Zak Ebrahim. Ebrahim is the son of an Egyptian man who was convicted for the planning of the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993. The man’s family, which included a wife and three children, was hounded for this act and they moved several times to try to conceal their identity. 

 

On the first pages of the book Ebrahim writes, ‘There is a reason that murderous hatred has to be taught—and not just taught but forcibly implemented. It’s a not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a lie. A lie told over and over again—often to people who have no resources and are denied alternative views of the world.’

 

Ebrahim goes on to say that statements like, ‘All Jews are evil’ or that ‘Homosexuality is an Abomination’, were as much facts to him as were things like ‘Paris is the capital of France’ or ‘Pi is 3.14’. Ebrahim was beaten by his step-dad and at some point began bullying others at school until the day the look on the face of a boy he was bullying reminded him of how he felt when his step-dad beat him. 

 

Ebrahim’s father was imprisoned, Ebrahim was ostracized at school as the son of a terrorist. Later he was the victim of abuse. These two coupled with finally meeting the very people he was taught to hate and seeing them as human changed him.

 

But what if he had been a white boy whose father suffered no consequences for lynching a coloured man, or he was a Hindu whose father was hailed a hero for killing a Muslim? What if he grew up hearing the man his father had killed being called a termite, a traitor, a cockroach? What if he was taught to think of the heads of these ‘traitors’ as a coconut that could be broken with one swing of the lathi? What if he realized that this was the easiest way of turning his feelings of powerlessness into those of strength? 

 

What would it take for a person in that situation to turn away from prejudice? Maybe if he was stuck in a situation where he or a loved one could die and the only person who helped him was the ‘other’, he might stop hating? Maybe if the same system and institutions he committed violence for began oppressing him he might be forced to rethink his stances? Ebrahim’s short book really moved me. He says towards the end, ‘As for me, I am no longer a Muslim and I no longer believe in God’ and, ‘I put people before Gods… my whole life I have seen religion used as a weapon, and I am putting all weapons down.’ It felt similar to something I feel inside about being a Hindu in today’s India. 

 

The last post I began was the on-going saga of the car with gelatin sticks left on the same street as the phallic residence of the Ambani’s. In the way this story is reported one would think…

(a)   That the car was an actual bomb and that it was left just on his doorstep. 

(b)  Nobody else lived on that street but the Ambani family.

But the fact is that…

(1)  The car was left about a kilometer from the Ambani gate. And that the street is densely populated with other buildings and if indeed it had been a bomb the Ambani’s would have felt an aftershock but the others on the street closer to where the car was parked would have been blasted out.

(2)  The Ambani gate is guarded heavily with armed men (and this frightens me—what if one just opens fire for fun?) The area has barricades and no cars are allowed to be parked close to the gates. This heavily inconveniences many other residents. The street has become more dangerous because the Ambani’s live there, not for the family since they have 24/7 protection, but for the rest of the residents. 

Yet in the way this story is told nobody thinks of the other less wealthy and ordinary citizens living there. And this story unlike that of the 13 year old raped girl’s is told daily.

 

I have one more, or two more, or many more, stories swilling within. With so much going on it is hard to say anything at all. I get stuck, paralysed, numb. I find it hard to organize my thoughts, to find words to express the chaos within. I feel why bother, it is all too much, and I am but a mote of dust. Have you felt that feeling? How too many horrible things, especially things you cannot do much to change, silence you? Better to push them away and get on with the task of living, which can be hard enough often?

 

This is an attempt to try to move out of that space and keep speaking about the things that matter. I know the post I really want to write today is the one about a Bill that was passed in the Rajya Sabha yesterday. One that is another death blow to Democracy in India. But it is too painful to think about it today. I need distance and time. Do you know that feeling too?

From uneasy to Solid

  

March 5, 2021

 

I feel uneasy, more and more uneasy, like I am not really present. Like even if I am, I can be blown away like a feather in a storm. I ask a question and there is silence. Somebody else talks as if I hadn’t spoken at all. 

 

It’s an unpleasant state to be in. I try to change it. But before that I try to define it. 

 

I think it, the state, is related to the things I am seeking to understand. I am having a hard time even pinning down the questions I want to ask, research, ponder.

 

I made a start and asked a few in an email group I am part of. I wondered how the complete co-opting of the Indian public was achieved by the current rulers.  I see how the Hindutva rhetoric, of India becoming a Hindu Rashtra, appeals to a certain mindset -- from all classes/castes, but wondered about those not interested in a Hindu nation -- what messaging had been able to hold them to the Modi ideal? What keeps them from seeing and reacting to the events around? What helps them normalise everything? Have answers to things, or quote the answers that the BJP IT cells pump out? 

 

Like the Income Tax raids on dissenters, or jailing of activists who obviously did not provoke violence, while those leaders that did being free and even making more hate speeches. How do they justify this? Or when freedom watch’s downgrade democracy in India they repeat that these organisations just want to defame India? They say we still have elections, don’t we. They don’t have questions about corruption in the ruling party, though it is fairly obvious. They don’t worry about GDP or un-employment. In fact a lot of them have stopped posting about anything political. Not a peep even when the world’s largest stadium was named after Modi. Though they all had made noise about how many statues and institutions were named after the Gandhi’s and praised how NaMo was humble. Right now though nothing at all.

 

Ya, I’d really like to understand how the current state of things in India has been achieved. When Gandhi was killed by an RSS member the RSS became a reviled organization in India. But slowly Gandhi’s killer gained stature, Gandhi himself lost it at first, and then was co-opted by the BJP, misquoted, to further their agenda. The extreme RSS ideology has infiltrated into many parts of society and nobody finds it strange at all. What was has been obliterated. I find my mind and my questions similarly obliterated even as I try to think.

 

Earlier I watched a man talk about the Freedom House report that had down-graded India from free to partly free. He said India had only fallen by 4 points and was at the top of the partly free category. From 2018 to 2021 India has fallen by ten points. But if you look at it yearly and the fall is only two or four points then I guess we can fall to the not free category and we won’t really notice.

 

I feel like an anomaly, a ghost, a figment of I don’t know what, most times. When I asked some of these questions in another group everyone went quiet and after some time someone shared a video about the success of India’s vaccination drive and how it is shipping vaccines to other countries. In another group I censor myself and don’t even ask these questions. 

 

Luckily this email group can hear me and answers my questions. They too are bewildered by much of what is happening in India. Someone in the group said that a lot of people prefer authoritarianism to the uncertainty of freedom. She said they don’t like to admit it though and thus pretend not to see the obvious signs that democracy is being dismantled. I think that one day even this unease will go, and they will admit that they are happy with dictatorship. Ya, I think that this will happen.

 

I feel solid when I read these responses. Or when I type this on my screen and my thoughts appear as visible black marks. I like that feeling.

Risk and applause

 March 3, 2021

 

Today I found a quote by Mary Karr, while looking for something to help me get unstuck about writing. It said, “You owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself." Advise for when one sits down to write and fear stops one from reaching the darkest places.

And I realised, yes, it does not serve me to write the way I have been writing this blog. This saying a little about my despair but saying much more about the happier things. This blog is just about being, being me in whatever rawness I am. The risk then is to write close, to cut into the bone. 

…Like saying that though lightness wafts through my moments increasingly, most of them are spent in dark heavy energies, even today …Or saying that dark energies predominate with a rare sprinkling of lightness, and not too much has changed since the months I first wrote of feeling depressed.

To definitely not stay safe.

But it is scary. Scary to admit these things to myself. Scary that someone might read it and either judge me as broody, further think that I like wallowing in these depths, and that I could easily get out of them if I chose to, but I don’t. Tell me that to my face or worse yet think it and let it affect the way they interact with me. Or, on the other hand be all concerned and whisper down the phone line, ‘Are you suicidal.’ Hoping that I say no. What if I said yes? Could the person actually then sustain a connection with me?

 

No, I am not suicidal. But I am exhausted by the heaviness. The not being able to find that which might make it light. Exhausted by the effort of turning to the things that used to bring joy and not finding it there anymore. Not being able to find the new things that are joyous. Sometimes circling and circling, wondering how to find those moments where the body is not leaden, and the mind not congested, inflamed, raw…

 

Most times what others think about me, or what I say about what I feel, doesn’t matter. But in vulnerable times external criticism, verbalized or not, takes on an entirely more dangerous edge. It cuts and cuts and I bleed, even when I toss my head and say, ‘Who cares.’

 

I started out writing a post about how the two pieces of sharing from my friend in my previous post – the naming of things I orbit around and the compartmentalising – have been helpful. But then I realized that while yes, they have been useful at times, many times they’ve just been meaningless.

 

What I desperately need is to find escape velocity in at least one, but really at least two, of those seemingly eternal orbits. What I also need is for the tide to turn and the hate that the Hindutva blokes spread to be not accepted as ok by most of the people of India even if it is not directed against them, especially if it is not directed against them; for people to stop denying the insensitivity and the incompetence of the ruling government instead of staying silent about fuel prices, misogyny, communal messaging etc. etc.; for people to call out the excesses of the Delhi Police, the UP Police, the other enforcements agencies, for the intemperate use of power, particularly sedition, to instill fear in critics of the government; for people to say no to donating to the Ram Temple when there are citizens going hungry, and hospitals needing to built, and schools started for the poorest. 

 

I need these more than I need to turn the news off for a day or two because I am sick of it, because it is too much, or there is something new and vile every day — and  of course because I can, as what ‘they’ do affects my mind and emotions but does not affect my life and livelihood. 

 

I also read something else today, a Buddhist concept, that encouraged me to applaud the small things. The getting out of bed despite the heaviness, the getting into the bus and smiling at the driver who has been driving all day, the listening with empathy to someone else’s issues even though they are yelling at me because they are so frustrated, for waking up and teaching that class when my muscles ache and I’ve had barely two hours of sleep, for making that five minute, or more, phone call to someone who has been waiting for it even though I want to curl into a ball and hibernate. 

 

I applaud myself today. Even though I snapped at the spouse and didn’t get the work done that I had wanted, and a part of me feels like I don’t deserve it. I applaud myself.

 

And so should you. I mean applaud yourself.

Escape Velocity Unattainable

 Feb 23, 2021

 

Three weeks have passed since I last wrote here. 

 

I’ve felt boxed in and scattered most of this time. How can one feel both? Boxed in and scattered seem to be different states. Hmm…

 

I've felt boxed in by time constraints, never seeming to have enough of it to do the things I want to. Never enough boundless time to sink into and absorb myself within things waiting to be decided (one huge one being the revision strategy for my book). Things in my control perhaps, but needing churning and mixing to resolve. Things that cannot be decided by practical, logical considerations but require that touch of intuitiveness or insight that comes often from immersion. I go in deep into those things and feel on the verge of breakthrough but then the time bubble pops and my immersion bubble with it. I surface with things in the same morass as before.

 

And the number of things, I must do, I want to do, as well as the things that hover, and disintegrate, keep increasing.... Dispersing the mind, not allowing the body to ground… Rushing, and rushing more, physically and internally…

 

So yes, boxed and scattered does makes sense together. Additionally, I lost time in these three weeks. Really hadn’t a clue where chunks went. It happens I know. But I woke one morning feeling like Sisyphus chained in eternal, futile labour.

 

I reached out to my friend, the one who offers his time, ‘to talk it out’. I kept saying, ‘I am a mess, I am a mess, I am a mess,’ not aloud, but I think he heard it.

 

In our talk he told me two things that helped. 

 

He shared a conversation he had with friends in which they discovered how they were stuck by centripetal forces, orbiting around some issues, never being able to break the cyclical movement and fly free of the central objects. Yes, those huge issue-objects with their powerful forces could not be escaped from. All one could do was wait in readiness for that moment when extra force, external or internal, that could help attain escape velocity would suddenly make its presence felt. That image helped me. Remain alert like a warrior to use that moment, I could do that.

 

We then talked of the huge objects in our life that we were circling. The ones we didn’t have control over but couldn’t just drop either. Laying them out in plain view was good.

 

He also told me that another friend told him that she survived the stresses of covid by compartmentalizing. ‘But that is unhealthy,’ I said. ‘A psychological coping mechanism that can lead to dissonance and other things.’ But the woman who had told him that meant in meditative, mindful terms — just staying in the moment with full attention to what one was currently doing. I will try it, I decided. I found it particularly useful to stay fully in those moments of pleasure, without dissipating away into the circles of worry and anxiety about things outside my control, or perhaps within but things I had no influence over and had to orbit. I managed to enjoy deeply my first post covid film with friends — we even drank a bottle of wine with our popcorn — and share Lo Hei and a meal with them. 

 

I enjoyed other things too, like spending two hours with paper and colour pencils where temporarily I felt I had escaped from the orbit, though I also knew where I really was.

 

Some other nice things happened. The nicest was that a friend in Bombay added me to an email group of people who wanted to talk about the angst and hope they felt about happenings in India. It was just the place I needed to be to survive the orbit around my strongest force-field.

 

Waiting yet to reach escape velocity for the things that can be escaped.

Farmers and Policemen and Barricades

  

Feb 3, 2021

 

Last evening after I was done with my retreat, I turned on the news and saw this image. Not at the border of India with Pakistan or China (with whom we are engaged in a border conflict currently), but outside Delhi, to barricade the farmers into their protest sites. Iron spikes, concrete walls, trenches and barbed wire. 

 

There are many ways of telling this story…

 

On Republic Day farmers rammed into the Red Fort, attacking Policemen, and throwing down the Indian Tricolour thus hurting the sentiments of 1.30 crore Indians. They replaced the Indian flag on the ramparts with a Khalistani one. Four hundred policemen were hospitalized on that day. A farmer also attacked a Policeman with a sword. The Police had no choice but to fence in the protesting farmers who have shown stubbornness in the face of the Government’s willingness to dialogue with them. The Prime Minister has even set up a direct phone line to him that any farmer can pick up and call from. The protesting farmers, from just one or two states of India, are being maximalists and refusing to compromise, thus harming the interests of millions of farmers from other parts of India who are in favor of the new laws. Those protesting haven’t even defined exactly what they want from the Government. They are just puppets manipulated by opposition parties, anti-nationalists, the Left, China or Pakistan. The Police were also forced to file FIRs against farmer leaders. Some farmers are in jail.

 

The story could also be told in another way…

 

Desperate farmers who had been peacefully protesting the New Farm Laws on several borders of Delhi for the last two months are now being boxed into their protest sites by barricades, trenches, barbed wire and iron spikes. Internet, electricity, water, and other supplies have been cut off. On Jan 26^th a breakaway group of rebel farmers had broken police barricades and proceeded to the Red Fort. The Tricolour had not been touched, as some are reporting, but the Nishan Sahib flag had been put up alongside it. Four hundred policemen were allegedly injured in this confrontation. Majority of the farmers though participated in the tractor march in a peaceful manner and condemned the actions of the few farmers who had entered the Fort. Since then, the Police have cracked down on the borders in an attempt to force farmers to vacate the sites but an emotional appeal from one of the leaders has intensified the protests and more farmers have joined in. Five days ago, despite Police presence, a group of men broke into the farmer site at Singhu and broke their washing machines and attacked the farmers in their tents. In the conflict a Policeman was injured by a farmer using a sword to protect himself. Farmer leaders have been charged under the draconian UAPA. A former Police Commissioner while defending the actions of the Police has also said that both these decisions, to allow tractors into Delhi and to barricade the farmers, were Political decisions and not Policing ones. He said that the Government should stop using the Police as their face. 

 

Same stories, but I suppose if I read one and not the other, I would build a certain idea about the Police and the Farmers. The first sympathises with the Police, the second is possibly attempting to be neutral but perhaps those sympathising with the Police would call it loaded against them. But I could actually write a third story that would show the Police as positively evil or at least crafty and incompetent.

 

Let me take a stab at it…

 

On Republic Day the Delhi Police showed just how incompetent they were. Despite having warnings, from several farmer leaders, about a group of farmers who talked about breaking barricades and going to the Red Fort, they did not strengthen the force around the Fort nor revoke permission for the Farmers Tractor March. In fact, they allowed the troublesome group to lead the march. This along with pictures that show policemen sitting on chairs and silently watching while protestors swarmed into the Red Fort makes one wonder if indeed they were not incompetent but crafty, and planned on allowing this incident to take place. This then would give them a good reason to clamp down hard on the peaceful farmers whom they and the government have not been able to dislodge, or demonize despite propaganda to do so. Questions also arise on how 200 goons entered the Farmer site at Singhu while Police were controlling all entries and exits from it? Surely 200 men could not have slipped through? Also, it is being alleged that the Police stood by doing nothing while these goons attacked farmers. Now they have shut the Farmers into an open-aired prison without water and electricity. I don't need to remind readers that there are women and children present at these sites, and all of them have been living there peacefully for 70 days. The Police have also charged many peaceful farmer leaders with sedition. This modus operandi is how the Delhi Police, under the guidance of the Home Minister, has handled previous situations. Their SOP many would say. 

 

Hmmm…

 

The retreat was good for me, but I felt compelled to explore this today rather than write more about it.