Hunger Strike

I don’t cry easily, but this morning I had rivulets of tears on my face while watching a documentary at a labor conference. I choose to watch the movie over attending other parallel sessions because the theme seemed to resonate with the present—ICW abducting students and spirting them away to detention centres in the back of beyond. And, I wasn’t disappointed. The movie was about a how prisoners in California organized hunger strikes to protest against solitary confinement. The Security Housing Units (SHUs) are, as one former inmate described it, jails within jails. Some inmates spent decades in them on suspicion of being gang members. In many cases, those suspicions were based on evidence as flimsy as having tattoos or reading books by Black Panthers. I was moved to pieces y the courage and fortitude of the inmates as well as their friends and family on the outside who were agitating for their rights. Most of the campaigners on the outside were women (as I have frequently pointed out, most a majority of protesters on Palestine marches are women). If people can organize in the hell that is the US prison system, anything is possible and it is important to be reminded of this fact in these dark times. The cherry on the cake was a panel discussion featuring two former jail survivors who had spent decades in prison. They spoke with a moral and intellectual clarity that blew me away. The movie also reminded me of a blog post I had written six years ago after reading a piece by a former black panther who had spent decades in solitary confinement in conditions even more harrowing than the ones described in the movie. The title of that post was “If you canbreathe, you can get through anything” and it had chimed with my focus on breathwork as part of my yoga practice. This is also a good reminder to return to my yoga practice, which I have neglected. I am trying to avoid sitting cross-legged as I am nursing a sprained ankle, but my yoga practice just doesn’t feel the same without that foundational pose.

February 2016

My last post was about how the present times feel like the first few weeks of the Covid pandemic. But, then my mind went back to the winter of 2016. I had returned to India after finishing my Master’s in Holland. In January, the Dalit student Rohit Vemula had taken his own life a few months ago after months of harassment by the university administrators in Hyderabad. His death had sparked protests in several central universities, which were at the time bastions of the ‘left’. And, then, the Modi government targeted India’s premier social science institution, JNU. It detained the head of JNU’s student union on charges of sedition, the same British-era law used to target revolutionaries. JNU was convulsed with student protests. I was visiting friends in Delhi at the time, who were also harbouring some students on the run from the police. I participated in a march too, my first student march ever. Such was the fervent in the air, such was the sense of outrage among all left-progressives that even stoic cynical me couldn’t remain untouched. I contemplated applying to JNU for my PhD studies. That phase passed and in a few months I was thrown into the most challenging period of my life. Trump’s fascist onslaught against students feels much more audacious and ferocious than Modi’s, but the parallels are unmistakable.

Events in India would continue to singe my heart over the coming years, but from a distance. And, then they would pale in comparison to the genocide in Gaza and the monsters that it unmasked.

If India offers lessons on how fascism in the US will unfold, they are lost on me. India is a right-wing society led by a far-right government. The US, for all its considerable ills is not. Maybe the fascist here are moving at breakneck speed because they know they have limited time.

 

It Feels Like The First Few Weeks of Covid Again

It is coming up to the five-year- anniversary of the first Covid Lockdown (in the UK) and it struck me a few days ago that the present times feel like those first weeks of March 2020. Trump's fascist takeover is in overdrive. Israel has resumed its genocide in Gaza Trump is gutting the American state, the threat of deportation hangs over every non-citizen who has participated in activism for Palestine or criticized Trump in any form or manner. Just like then, no one knows how the next few weeks and months will pan out. Just like then, I read horror stories in the press but doesn’t know anyone who has been personally affected (yet). And, a sense of foreboding that things will get worse before they get better as the fascist juggernaut has some way to go before it burns out or burns the world. So, I went back to my posts from that period out of curiosity. I was surprised to be reminded that my mental and physical state were poor. In the past few weeks, I haven’t been sleeping great, and I feel myself filling up with tears, but, unlike that past fateful March, my anxiety hasn’t kicked into high gear. My chief fear at that time was how I would cope with losing access to the PhD room at uni, which was my safe haven away from crazy housemates. As it turned out, I coped just fine, and was able to return to the PhD office after a few months. I wouldn’t catch Covid until two years thence, but the pandemic did cause tumult in my life, as it did with most others. Tumult that we didn’t and couldn’t have imagined during those first few weeks of that March. We, and our world, carry those scars with us. But if there is one lesson we can draw (and if one can rue or reminisce the past, one can occasionally learn from it) is that we like our all creatures great and small, are endlessly adaptable. Someone said to “Adapt or perish is nature’s inexorable imperative”. There is, of course, a difference between adaptation and submission. One should not submit to fascism, of all things, and resist as much as possible. As I write this post, I am reminded of a passage from Ship Fever, a short story by one of my favourite authors, Andrea Barrett. The context is the Irish potato famine and the ensuing typhus epidemic and, I think it is worth quoting at some length. “That was what she’d learned from her grandmother, during the days they’d cared for the sick together. You ought not to lie down and let your fate roll over you, her grandmother taught her; neither ought you stand unbending, as her father had, and wait for fate to lop off your head. There was a bending, weaving, cunning way, in which you appeared to give in but rolled aside just slightly, evading the blow at the last minute. The way of eating whenever there was food to eat, sleeping whenever a stray minute came; never angering anyone stronger nor harming anyone weaker. “Make your mind like a pond,” her grandmother had said, when she found Nora weeping at night. “Push away longing and fury, and make your mind still, like water.””

Time to Lay Low

 Till yesterday, I was reassuring people spooked by Trump's crackdown on Palestine activists. I told a friend that Mahmoud Khalil was targeted for his high-profile activism, for being Palestinian and because he is at Columbia. You are not going to get detained for attending a rally at UMass. But, yesterday, I joined the ranks of the spooked. An Indian PhD student at Columbia who was not even an activist, just a sympathizer, had her visa revoked and fled to Canada to avoid the ICE dragnet. Those of us who imagined ourselves quite low in the list of potential targets are scared because that list has now been scrambled, which was probably the intention of the powers-that-be at ICE. Although I realise my odds of being targeted are still quite low, I can’t take any chances, and I have already taken some evasive action. Now is the time to lie low and let the fascists juggernaut barrel on towards more powerful people and wait for the inevitable backlash. Because there doesn’t seem to be any method to this madness, and capitalism has little tolerance for prolonged madness.

Till yesterday, I admit I looked at people who had stayed silent on Palestine with judgemental eyes. But, now they have been proven right. Or rather, their collective silence has allowed the situation to deteriorate to such an extent that silence now seems the most judicious course of action. And, I will not tolerate any “told you so”s from them. That said, I must constantly guard against feeling sanctimonious because of the little activism I have done for Palestine. I have been a scab before, and I can’t guarantee that I will never scab again (although, I hope I won’t ever be in such a desperate situation). My motto is do whatever makes you sleep better at night.  

And, there is plenty that one can do without taking on a very visible role in activism.

Mahmoud Khalil Rally

Sometimes I feel, to paraphrase Kate Tempest, I have already said whatever there is to be said on this blog, and every new post is just old wine in a new bottle. But, old wine is also wine, so I will keep going. One week after Hamas' attack on Israel, I attended the first of many London marches for Palestine. I came away from the march feeling fortified. I was reminded about that period this week, after a Palestinian student at Columbia university was abducted by ICE and whisked away to a detention facility in a god-forsaken town in Lousiana ahead of his planned deportation. The fascists like to make a performance out of cruelty, and Trump said they would be many more deportations of ‘Hamas supporters’. I felt the same mix of fear, helplessness and distress I had felt in the days after October 7, when the UK Home Secretary Cruella Braverman threatened protestors on visas with deportations. At least, she was good enough to mention that arrested protestors would be deported, not all protestors would be deported. But, not going to the protest was not an option, and I am glad I went. At times like this, it is good to be in community from time to time, even for a lone ranger like me. Being among like-minded feeling almost the same emotions is soothing. The conversations I had at today’s protest were about a  lot of things in addition to the situation we had come to protest. Because, in times like these, one becomes suspicious and judgemental of people who appear not be distressed by what is happening. One cannot wholeheartedly engage with people who appear not to be incensed about the situation (even though they very well might be, and could be doing more about it than you). But, if you are at a protest in this environment, you obviously care enough to turn up. Once it is established that the opposite person is a kindred anti-Zionist soul, it is much easier to talk to them.

Clocks Go Forward 2025

This winter was not like the previous ones, because I sprained my ankle a week after my last “clocks go back/forward” post. A sprained ankle meant that I couldn’t sit cross-legged, which put me off doing yoga. So, no cozy winter yoga sessions, or any yoga sessions at all. I sure could have used some relaxing yoga sessions because it has been an eventful five months. My last “clocks go back/forward” was a few days before the US elections, and expressed misgivings about each possible result. The (less) genocidal fascist corporate shill came to power and is unleashing chaos on a colossal scale. I have spilled enough ink writing about how the mundane will have to co-exist with the momentous. And, also about the realisation that I will have to play a part, however small, in building a world that I want to be part of. That has conviction has grown stronger, I am happy to report, despite the roaring binfire that the world is right now. The past few months have also been a period of personal growth on the personal and professional front. A popular saying goes that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. I think that is a bit harsh because performing the same action in different circumstances can yield different results. But, one has to balance that with the  openness and humility to trying new things, and I have started to take baby steps in new directions on both fronts.

Nice Men

 I recently came across a twitter thread from a male dating coach for men about the scourge of Nice Men. A lot of women have written about men who are ostensibly "nice" and very vocal about how nice they are, hoping to win medals from women for their niceness. These are men who are nice beacuse they know they cannot get away wth being ass-holes. Because they don't have the looks, intelligence, talent, wealth, personality or anyone of the other virtues that move people to ignore your vices, at least temoporarily. At least the ass-holes are candid about what they want from women--which is usually sex--unlike nice men, who also want the same thing, but coupled with oodles of validation for their niceness. nice men often don't take rejection nicely. People, mostly women, have written reams about this online. This twitter thread was about the difference between niceness and kindness, which according to the poster, was mostly about being able to set boundaries. Needy people hesitate to set boundaries because they feel that will drive people away. Kind people accept that boudnaries might drive some people away but will lead to more authentic interactions with those that stay. If you are a nice person trying to turn into a kind person, you might try to overcompensate by being assertive when you don't need to be. If you are a caring, sensitive person with an anxious attachment style, the thing to work on is the attchment style, not the caring, sensitive bit.