Fuck Palestine: seems to be the general Indian consensus. Well, okay fuck Palestine.
But what about Bengal?
What about Assam?
What about Arunachal?
What about Manipur?
What about Nagaland?
What about Telangana?
What about Andaman?
What about Kashmir? Kerala? Karnataka?
What about millions of our own country people? People whose lives look like ours? Children who take auto rickshaws to school? Adults who haggle over the price of tomatoes and curse their fate when they step in a pothole? What about those who share your name but will be forgotten because we care more about morals and justifications of genocide instead of people who save their last bite for their children??
Fuck Palestine?
Fuck you.
My friend is moving forward after a traumatic breakup and I'm here making it about myself. This is unfiltered and an expression of my rawest emotions and yes they're not very empathetic but that's the point of this space
A little bit of context. I met both of them through social media, separately and instantly connected with them both. They're both intelligent, interesting people and they both came across as empathetic (one more than other) people trying to make the best of a shitty situation (living amongst cishets yuck). Oh I loved them both so much it physically hurt. They were my first signs of adult friendships, a field I've failed at spectacularly for most of the time before this.
Things escalated quickly after that. My friend told me they like my other friend and for the first time, things started to fall into place. I never had healthy romantic relationships to look up to, so I modelled mine after theirs. Imitation is the best form of flattery, after all. My ex left but my friends were happy and I was hopeful that the next time, I'll do it better.
After a few months, I met my partner and forgot all about modelling my relationship after my friends' because my partner knows healthy relationships. He's always known them.
My friends got engaged. I was so over the moon with happiness, I cried. I mean it's not a big deal, I cry about everything but I was so happy for them. Both of them have had lives of varying levels of difficulty and this felt like the relief they needed. This probably seems a little weird but it had been a while since I'd known them at this point and I started to think of them as my family. Like they're my blood and flesh.
And it all changed. With one phone call. I wanted to scream at the one who broke up. I wanted to tell him he took away my family. He broke my trust in people. Oh I loved him so! My friend who will never hurt anyone knowingly, my friend who protects everyone like his own. He's lost and I'm angry about it. I didn't want to lose him. I needed him to stay the same.
Worst of all, he proved nothing is constant. My whole worldview is shattered. All my life through every up and down I always tried to believe that people are inherently nice. My partner once asked me how come I wanted to live with him even though all my experiences sharing a living space with someone has been so horrible. I told him it's because not everyone is the same and everyone can find it in themselves to be a little nicer. I guess the opposite is true too. I don't know how to go on with that. I don't know how to live everyday knowing that people are not driven by morality but by needs and wants. All my life I have believed people will rise to the occasion if needed. That we'll always do the right thing if offered the choice. My friend having to move forward after this is proof that I was wrong. I do not like being wrong.
How can you be apolitical when the world is killing people like you?
In the last week, India has passed rules decriminalising sexual assaults against male bodied persons. Implications of this being – if you're a 18 year old boy and someone assaults you, you will not be protected by any rights. Your body is to be used for other's pleasure at ge expense of your mental and physical health and that is legally okay. If you're a gay boy, exploring the world of kink, oh honey, you are so massively, irreversibly, fucked. If you're a trans person, existing in the society as yourself, you're fucked too.
Last week India made begging illegal. Last month, India turned down petitions for horizontal reservations for trans people. If you're a trans person, you know how everything is against us from day one. If you're born intersex, you will be given away at birth. Your only option is begging, except now it is illegal. So you serve time in jail. Where your labour has essentially no value. You will be kept in bug infested rooms in extreme conditions.
Last year a man was eaten alive by bedbugs while in his prison cell. The bugs buried into his skin. The medical officer was so disgusted by the dying man crawling with bugs that they left and threw up outside the cell. That's the future they want to write for us.
And yet privilege blinds us so, we remain silent and apolitical because at least it isn't us. Yet.
Today on our regularly scheduled family phone calls, my mother said, so casually, as though as an afterthought: Oh tor bon {redacted} der sathe {redacted} geche (your sister has joined a cult named {redacted} and has gone to {redacted}).
Mom went on to talk about the neighbours and their leaky pipes and the damp walls. All I could do was nod and smile.
My 19 year old sister has travelled to {redacted} with a cult. My 19 year old sister, who has never gone to school by her own has travelled halfway across the country with a cult. My 19 year old barely out of school sister with no financial independence has gone to some remote cult compound by herself.
The religious fanaticism in our society is so pervasive that no adult thought to stop her. My parents said it's not their place to comment because she is my cousin sister. So? I would do something even if she was my worst enemy's sister. Yes, even if she was my 6th grade English teacher's sister. The fact is that she is young, impressionable and vulnerable.
She had turned to religion to deal with grief like most adults in our lives guide us to. At what point did God turn from a loving, ethereal being with infinite knowledge and kindness to a crusty old shirtless man who sees no harm in indoctrinating emotionally vulnerable people (let's be honest, people means young women) to tend to his whims? When did God go from omnipresent to living in a shitty ass cult compound in some ass crack of the country?
My sweet, amazing, naturally green-fingered little sister is in a cult. And no one seems to comprehend or care for the dangers that loom ahead.
(Update: I have contacted her, she's coming back home next Saturday, tickets have been booked. I have hidden the name of the cult and the place she's travelled to because I don't want undue attention on her during this time. She is living in a compound with 50 other women. My sister is neurodivergent as well so it's difficult to tell if she actually is okay but I'm hopeful. I will also be contacting local women's NGOs near the compound and the office she was indoctrinated at once she's home safe.)
I completed my post graduation in 2021 and thought I wouldn't have to look back at academia ever again. End of last year I got diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. Although the doctor refused to treat me for it, it made sense that I am neurodivergent. I had been craving the structure of student life for the last two years so I took the leap and applied for a MBA program. It's a pretty chill degree after hardcore Physics for 5 years. I had always been told I'm smart and academically prone to excellence. I always took it with a grain of salt. I know my worth is not all hard work. A lot of it is privilege. I stand wham in the middle of the wheel of power and powerlessness after all. Mentally ill, lower middle class faggot with no generational wealth but a pretty surname, a suburban upbringing and a fluent vocabulary in Inglis. Talk about centrists, eh?
In my undergrad, I raw dogged my depression, possible neurodivergence, anxiety, OCD and whatever else doctors fancy I am afflicted with. It obviously caused my grades to fall majorly. The only time in my life when I wasn't at the top percentile. Today while finishing admission process for the MBA, I applied for a scholarship awarded based on merit and I was told I don't qualify because my bachelor's marks were low. I have a decade long academic performance data to draw from and I don't qualify because one year when I contemplated jumping off the train on my way back home from class every single day, I slacked a little, prioritised healing over hieroglyphs on a piece of paper. Because for the first time in 20 fucking years on Earth, I listened to my body and did my best and not the best I was supposed to do. I don't mind not qualifying for a scholarship. My point is that merit which seems like such a well defined term is not based on any rules. It's whatever the one determining it chooses it means. How can you quantify anything when you pick and choose your input data?
Merit is a scam, a buzzword made up to pander to the status quo. When UC people get handouts, it's called scholarships and grants. When marginalized castes, religions, genders get the same scholarships and grants, we're called beggars, exploiters cheating people off their hard earned money with “emotional blackmail”. We're called out for monetising our identities as though our identities exist only for the consumption, romanticisation and distortion by the oppressor groups.
This is a PSA. If you're a minority, you're not void of merit. You just aren't the ones we'd like to give a boost in life. You were meant to never do great things and if you somehow manage to still do something with this wilfully broken system, well the least we can do is make it horribly, cruelly, unnecessarily difficult.
Extremely vile and pessimistic rants about dealing with loss
I was 12 when I had my first anxiety attack. I was reading “Life is what you make it” by Preeti Shenoy, having faked a tummy ache to get out of PT class. I was sitting, tucked away in a corner of my school, cool marble against my un-shorts-ed, tighty-whitey wearing ass, the feeling of the smooth pages strange against my sweaty, dirty fingers. I remember grabbing the top right of the page, reading about Ankita's (that's the main character, she's bipolar) first brush with being a survivor of suicide. I remember thinking how I'd feel if a friend of mine died. And then I remembered that she did.
Kanchan was my closest friend for the most formative of my years as a prepubescent child. We experienced our first menstrual cycles together. Kanchan was the oldest daughter of our domestic worker and my best friend. Kanchan died from kidney infection that happened because of bad menstrual health. I never realised the financial mismatch we had growing up. But that July afternoon, it hit me so hard. I lost a friend, at the time the only friend I ever had in all 12 years of life to what? Money? How come no one else saw what I saw? The value that Kanchan had. She loved to sing and embroider and she was fucking good for a 10 year old. She embroidered me a welcome home wall hanging that I still have stowed away in my attic somewhere. It's yellowed now, suffered water damage, the thread are unraveling and some parts of it's been chewed at by some unfriendly rats that cohabited with it in the attic. But it's there. Kanchan isn't. I will never know how much better she'd get at embroidery when she's older. I'll never tell her about all the other boys that came after my 5th grade crush. Oh and the girls and the trannies that came after! Would she still call me friend or delete my contact from her phone the day I'd come out to her? I don't remember what I thought of that afternoon. Just that I thought of Kanchan, the one true loss I'd felt. I remembered how I didn't cry when mom told me the news. I just shrugged. I remember thinking about why I didn't cry. Was I broken? Am I broken?
Last year, another friend died. A medical “misstep”, they said. I cried a lot. I was determined to cry for them and everyone who went away before, cry for Kanchan, cry for my brother, cry for my grandmother, cry for my cat. It felt unreal. It felt fake. So I stopped crying. And it still felt unreal and fake. So I just sat with that feeling not knowing what to do. So I channeled my emotions into anger. Anger at the doctors who refused to listen, anger at the systems that let lives be measured with imaginary, make believe numbers on papers and computer screens, anger at myself, anger at everyone around me who dared to breathe when my loved ones couldn't.
I don't subscribe to religion so I can't even depend on delusions of a better place. I tried. And failed every time. So tell me what do I do? How do I stop whatever this feeling is? Should I just not love anymore for fear of loss? Should I be lost first so I don't have to deal with it?
Extremely vile and pessimistic rants about the state of the world. Proceed to read only if you're able to keep the words at arm's length
Science says our lives start the day we're born. That's fucking bullshit. Our lives start so much earlier- when our parents' lives started, when their parents' lives started, when your favourite teacher's life started, when your worst enemy's life started, when the fish walked out of the ocean soup, when the monkeys rubbed two twigs together, when the genie started getting off to being rubbed. We are an amalgamation of everyone and everything that has been. You're not original. You're just a collage of raggedy old traditions, yellowed pages on appropriate responses to situations, dingy knick knacks of nostalgia, and broken fragments of imagined morality. Our lives are a meaningless march towards oblivion and suffering. And I don't mean hell or other grandiose myths we tell ourselves to make us feel special. We're not fucking special. You go the same place when you die as the maggot that crawls over your 5 week old unopened container of noodle soup. You're matter that doesn't matter. We're cogs in the machine that is the self-absorbed, self-serving universe. We're the fruit flies you swat off your 3 day old banana. We are a blink of an eye. Nothing we do matters. We tell ourselves it's for the children. It's so those who're yet to be can be better. So did those who came before us. Marsha Johnson died just so O'Shea could be murdered on the streets for dancing. There is no better. This is it. This is the hell we dreamt up in our nightmares, only with less hellfire. The world is fucked and you should be angrier about it. Enough to burn it to the fucking ground, cue hellfire.