Individuals in a big bad world

It feels trite to start a paragraph with a list of the ongoing crises in the world. Can you imagine, what a world we live in where crises are so plentiful and abundant that listing them out feels like a cliché. More than a cliché it feels like a ploy to trick your readers in order to push your own agenda, like this guy who look at crises as a means to push for increasing privatization – the stuff that created the widespread desperation in the first place.

Desperation – that’s a word I don’t see being used enough in this context, when to my mind that is the best way to describe what more and more people are feeling. Desperation to get and then hold on to well-paying jobs that are increasingly more precarious and limited, desperation on seeing your income reduce year after year because your livelihood depends on fishing or cultivating or on ecologies that have no space in our world anymore, desperation that leads you to work for garment factories where you may risk your life because of poor fire and construction safety, desperation when a big competitor comes out and wipes out your ability to make even the most meagre of profits, desperation when you see your children having no chance to survive in a world where it takes more and more to come out on the top, desperation when not being in the top means being a dispensable drop among the struggling, toiling masses.

And that’s on a slow news day.

There’s the other kind of desperation when a litany of bombs and bureaucratic orders likening you to animals means that you have 24 hours to leave the open-air prison you’ve been forced in for decades. The kind when a cartoonish villain dictator decides to invade your country to create relevance for himself again. The kind when millions and billions of people will face when our lands become inhabitable and more and more of us will be sacrificed to the cruel, uncaring parts of history.

Please see this petition from Birzeit University: Do not be silent about genocide

And then there’s the desperation that I feel, that we all feel, individually in our homes reading yet another trite list of crises – still protected from the worst, but increasingly unsure of the degrees of separation between us and the day when loud, visceral screams may indicate our own annihilation. We share posts on social media, we sign petitions, we write blog posts, but the way our system is created- where all decision-making rests on top and all risk is borne at the bottom, nothing happens.

“What’s the point of having these discussions,” I’m asked by a family that is genuinely so bored of me and my outbursts. It’s true- we don’t live in direct democracies; we often don’t have the ability influence our elected officials and many of us are rightly afraid of creating a noise when look what happens to people who do. Our personal goals for ourselves include good incomes and wealth that have become essential to living in a good home, having access to education and healthcare. The only sure shot way to create or maintain upward mobility (or create wealth) in this world is to help rich people get richer— that’s what all lawyers, investment bankers, management consultants, high-level tech employees, private equity, and venture capitalists are doing. Many of us are intricately implicated in these systems in a way that feels impossible to escape.

Some of us, like my brother, look at this diversion between our material reality and our values and artificially deny morality any space in our “it is what it is” type of thinking – some of us, like me, have made peace with our hypocrisy and consented to being tormented by our useless feelings of guilt.

Here’s something else I’ve learnt, the alchemy of forces that impact the world are constantly in motion which means that problems don’t just go away or stop with magical thinking. They either become bigger or smaller, better or worse – big scale problems like the patriarchy/caste/race/capitalism/imperialist occupation/climate crisis, or small-scale ones like that senior-level asshole in the office who doesn’t respect interns, that friend who you know is ‘weird’ around women, or the knowledge that you don’t pay your domestic worker enough. To borrow Marx’s understanding of conflict in society, these tensions are everyday conflicts that indicates that our society exists on power and domination and not consensus. Unfortunately, most of us only recognize conflict when the volcano finally erupts and poor working conditions are uncovered, or #metoo happens, or domestic workers are held hostage by well-respected simple, middle-class folks. And we wonder- how did this happen? How did we miss this? And if these problems are either going to get better or they are going to get worse, we should know that there are billions of dollars invested in systems that make it worse.

I guess what I’m trying to say is skip the guilt and go straight to action.

Many of us will never have the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time to lead the charge against injustice. But something we can all do is look within our discomfort and our desperation to identify these everyday conflicts and come up with everyday resistance. Little acts that create courage to do more little acts to build more courage. This is something I learnt from my time as a grass-roots advocate for domestic violence survivors- we’d ask the women who attended our sessions to do homework and the homework was ask their sons/husband to make tea. The notion- the very notion would create fits of giggles among the women and they’d look at us as if we’ve suggested they burst out into song and dance. But it was based on research that showed resisting male domination and gender roles in their everyday forms made it way more likely that women would resist violence or at the very least seek help if it happens.

Right now, I have two tiny ideas on what I personally can do, things that may take a lifetime, (a) reduce as much as I can, the amount of money, resources, luxuries I need to live a happy, fulfilled life thus reducing my dependencies on a world that exploits people for these things, and (b) find ways to reduce desperation in this world when I can- whether that’s through empathy, kindness, time, or money. What are yours?

Schrodinger’s Cat was Drunk

Note: This is a bit out there for me but I’ve been wanting to prove to myself that Dubai, as non-analogue-y as it is, can be written about. And so I am writing about it.

I left the chilled trendy interiors of the newest neighbourhood bar to meet a gust of hot and inexplicably humid desert wind, as one often does in Dubai. A less than 500-meter walk had me questioning whether I should take a taxi, if only to avoid the inevitable drip of sweat rolling down on my back. It was Tuesday night, I had not yet scaled the summit of the ongoing work week, and here I was already drunk in that restless unsatisfied way of two watered-down happy hour drinks. So far little had surprised me in Dubai, with its cheque-red money-ed past and present. Yet, I often found myself marveling at how many people braved the 40 degrees weather by existing outdoors, come morning, day, or night. At 10 pm, the usual crowds of people returning homes from office, dinner, and workouts had not yet lulled, and bright white lights exasperated my vision. In all that hustle, there lay a cat, an ordinary sized, common, brownish black cat. It was sprawled across a bench, head nestled between outstretched paws, one eye completely swallowed within a big black splotch. That cat understood me- and I understood it, this is what the heat made me feel like—slowing down, giving up.

I stood awhile, watching this cat as it lazily existed until I noticed its abject failure to move. Having no pets and nearly no interest in them, I did not know whether this was normal or if the cat was sick and then the heat got to me, and I moved on. As I was hurrying back home to the cool embrace of another chilled interior, I spotted a water dispensary and it struck me that I could probably help the cat with some water, but having nothing to collect such water, I didn’t pursue it.

So that’s how I stumbled upon a queasy philosophical thought. If I had known for sure the cat was sick, I would have gone to a nearby store and bought some water to serve this sick beast. It was simple enough, wouldn’t be more than a five-minute detour. But not knowing for sure whether the cat was sick, made the effort seem misplaced or even disproportionate. So, if the cat was sick, I’d have helped, but because the cat was either sick or not sick, I had walked past it. I became increasingly bothered by the certainty that it was uncertainty that was causing my continued inaction. Was this Schrodinger’s point all along?[1] It’s just like when I refuse to check my bank balance for days even though I could be financially solid or totally broke because until I check it, I could at least theoretically be fine. Same for unopened emails and doctor visits that could confirm scary diagnoses. And then to think of uncertain futures. Like how I am not giving up everything and permanently moving to Costa Rica because the world could either become a dumpster fire in my lifetime or it could not. And thus, heady on my drunken pseudo-philosophical extrapolations, I took a hard look at my life, marred by so much resistance and non-fulfillment.

I reached home, certain that I had discovered some sort of untrodden philosophical embankment wherein hidden deep underneath the sand, lay some sort of answers to my life. Unbothered by the possibility of a world where the cat could actually be really sick, unaware that there was another thought experiment that more closely applied to my conundrum. Totally and blissfully happy.

[1] It was not. Schrodinger was trying to make a point about how simple misinterpretations of quantum theory can lead to absurd results which do not match the real world.

Notes to self: A few analogue ways to memorialize a holiday.

A holiday isn’t a holiday if I haven’t taken nearly 30 indistinguishable photos of the same clump of leaves until my phone sends me a storage almost full warning every hour. But not being on Instagram (where one of those 30 photos would eventually end up) led me to think of other ways to mark a holiday I don’t want to be forgetting anytime soon.

A tan: A deep golden-brown tan evenly spread across your skin, preferably, with bikini lines embellished onto your shoulders. Best for staring at wistfully on dreary Monday mornings once you are back.
Maps: Folded and re-folded to the point of being torn, ink-blotched with rain drops and waterfall mist to mark all the trails and hikes you aimlessly wandered on.
Shells: tiny turquoise-blue pieces of corals, a bead that looks like an eye on drugs, sand coloured scallop shells, and prettily patterned sundial ones. Make sure they aren’t still inhabited before you pick them.
Goodreads update: The five regency romance novels you read in quick succession to while away the 24 hours travel time (each way). Rhetorical question: How many times can you read the story of a quick-witted bluestocking besting a rakish rogue only to fall in love with him, without getting bored?

Lists: The list of over 50 birds, mammals, insects, and amphibians you saw and identified (thank you naturalists, everywhere!).
Bruises and bites: The ant bite from where you sat right atop the leaf-cutter ant (it survived), the prickly chafed skin on your belly from where you spent an hour bougie boarding without any sunscreen.
Sand: The grains of beach-sand you’ll inexplicably find in your clothes days and weeks and multiple rounds of laundry after being back.
Arts and Prints: Kooky anthropomorphic art featuring birds in breeches and another one that can only be described as sexy jaguar art.

Coffee and Chocolates: Also, coffee-coated chocolates and chocolate-flavored coffee.

The Summer of 2022

The Summer of 2022. That’s the last thing I remember of the before days. Before seasons stopped to be distinctive periods, before winter disappeared forever, before the start of The Great Burning.

I remember it so well, this time. I remember small things about it, like how it was the first year the rosy starlings didn’t visit the city and I remember the big things, like how countries around the world were collapsing in real time. These days I spend most of my time in the bunker, remembering. My sister tells me there’s no point living in the past, it will only cause you heart break. But she misunderstands. I’m not living in the past because I’m nostalgic, or because I want to remember the days when the city would be overtaken by beautiful pink bougainvilleas, and trees would light up with the fertility of spring. That’s not what I am doing. I live in the past because I’m looking for signs, looking for clues that would have told us of what was to come. Looking for evidence that should have warned us, that could have allowed us to fight this future. I look up the skylight and see the now permanent orange-grey sky.

In the Summer of 2022, we were coming out of a two-year long pandemic. Everyone around me was determined to re-create the roaring 20’s. I cannot count the number of Gatsby themed parties I went for, but I do remember never stopping to recall what they had meant to Gatsby. I went to each one, with a new shimmering outfit and a new feathered headdress. Those days everyone I met was somehow involved in the online world— marketing, modelling, advertising, influencing, all fancy words for selling things people didn’t need. But boy did they look good doing it. And that’s what mattered. Aesthetics was everything. Not how much blood, sweat, tears it took behind the camera, only how good you looked in front of it. I remember watching these videos for hours, where they’d take tattered old decrepit houses and – within seconds – aestheticize it with beautiful pastel colors and clean marble tops and dim lighting. It was called a glow up and we did it to everything, to ourselves, our clothes, our food, until it became difficult to differentiate reality from the perfectly curated imagery of the internet. Before the sky became the vicious orange-gray it is today, it had taken on a lovely pinkish hue. I remember reading that it was a sign of an increasingly warming earth and still taking a photo, filtering it to cull out the smokiness, and posting it online. Aesthics was everything.

These days in the bunker, it’s common to hear things like no one saw this coming. “Who could have known” muttered solemnly. Nobody asks why there was a network of underground bunkers spread all around the city, ready for use. It happened almost overnight. One day, there we were doing our jobs, hungover from the weekend, saturating ourselves with content and the next, everyone we knew, everyone with any money, was buying slots to the bunkers and making plans to move indoors. They had kept it a secret, so they could make a killing when the madness finally hit us. Now they say that in a few decades, the surface could get cool enough that we could once again begin to build above ground. They say that one days we can look outside our windows, and it won’t just be endless darkness. But what the fuck do they know?

Back then, we often pondered our own mortality. We laughed about the doomsday clock that was close to striking 12, we recounted each climate disaster with a horrified comment about how the end is near. Maybe we all believed that it wouldn’t really affect us, that somehow it was in the abstract; yes it was happening to humanity, but not to us. The most powerful had assured us that we could fix the climate crisis, that it was possible, that human ingenuity alone driven with the rational incentive of profit could solve this problem. They were sure of it. And maybe we believed them. Maybe we had gotten so addicted to a particular type of story where no matter how bad things got, things always resolved itself in the end, that we forgot that this was real life. As a society when you get too big, when you produce enough cars and clothes and monuments and art and money, you begin to think you are invincible. That you are too big to fail. Nothing could be further away from the truth.

There’s a running joke in the bunker. Someone will get a frantic look on their face and say, “I think I left the geyser/stove on”, or “oh no, I didn’t lock my door”. It’s funny because it’s so ludicrous. But it’s also funny because that’s what it was like. Like leaving your home in a rush, except it was the last time we left it.

One day I was on my way to office. It was peak noon during the peak of the deadliest summer we had seen in over a hundred years. Traffic loomed like a great, big serpent before me, spitting and slithering. The AC of the taxi was alternating hot cold air and no amount of technological advancement could do anything about it. In the view afforded by the windshield, I saw a man get off his scooter, his helmet still on, drops of sweat pooling around his eyes, walk up to the driver of a tempo, pull out his thin flailing body and beat the living daylights out of him. Unprovoked, he took the man and smashed his head on the bonnet of my taxi, again and again, while I had the front seat view. I remember people coming and trying to save him, I remember the blood dripping from the windshield. When the police came, I remember telling them, he did this because of the heat. It was because the heat got to him. They had laughed at me then, but now I can’t stop wondering if that was it. If that was the beginning of this end.

Short Story: Jokes and Genocide

[Note to Reader: First, Content Warning: Religious Slurs / Abusive Language ; Second, I wrote this as part of a writing workshop where we were supposed to take two intersectional identities and bring them in conflict with each other, so that’s what I’ve tried to do.]

Saad: Hey I need to talk to you about something?

Dhruv: Yeah?

Saad is typing…

Dhruv: Are you writing an essay bro?

Saad: We’ve known each other for so many years, literally our whole lives, we’ve grown up together, all through school and college we’ve been best friends. From day one you’ve stuck by me, and I treasure our relationship more than anything in the world. And so with that of course I have also given you a certain level of comfort, a certain leeway, not just to you- to Shobhit, Bunty, Matthew. Because I know at the end of the day you all have my back. But things are changing now and some stuff that was acceptable no longer is, and I need you all to understand that.

Dhruv:Huh? What do you mean, what leeway?

Saad: I mean, Muslim, Biryani, Terrorist …should I go on?

Dhruv: What?? Where is this even coming from? You know it’s always been a joke. You’ve made these jokes yourself and laughed with us all the time. Haven’t you yourself called Matthew – Jesus lover, missionary?

Saad: Yes, I have. And I may have laughed and made jokes before, but I don’t want to be part of this anymore, isn’t that my right?

Dhruv: Why are you talking about your rights? Come on Saad, dark humor is our thing. You have always hated how offended people get about jokes as if joking about dead babies makes us baby killers.

Saad: I’m not sure about that anymore. Have you seen what’s going on in our country? Have you seen what they are doing to us, how they are coming after us, dehumanizing us? Do you even know?

Dhruv: Are you saying that we are the same as these hooligans who go around vandalizing and killing people?

Saad: They aren’t just hooligans; they are Hindus who have been radicalized by the leading Hindutva party to hate me and people like me because we are muslims.

Dhruv: So what’s that got to do with the five of us?

Saad: Because the ‘jokes’ you are making, that’s part of the same narrative they have out against us.

Dhruv: It has always been a joke, and you cannot just read it a certain way because of the political situation.

Saad: But don’t you understand, it is no longer the something small, something happening in the fringes, something that will go away. They are literally making plans to come kill us all.

Dhruv: Why are you being so dramatic? You know it’s just media frenzy and pre-election schemes, nothing like that will happen.

Saad: Are you for serious right now?

Saad: ITS ALREADY HAPPENING.

Saad: OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AROUND YOU.

Dhruv: Why are you screaming??? I know things are bad but don’t act like doomsday is at our doorstep.

Saad: Okay tell me something. What do your parents think about muslims?

Dhruv: What does that mean, how is that related?

Saad: Tell me that they don’t think that muslims are terrorists, we are dirty, we mistreat women, that we are the cause of our own poverty, that we should have all gone to Pakistan.

Dhruv: Why are you saying we, you know it’s not like that between us. My parents love you; you know that.

Saad: It doesn’t matter if they love me. It’s not about me, it’s about my religion and people who are like me.

Dhruv: When did religion become so important to you? And why are you talking about people like you. Do you not think you and I have more in common than someone who you share a religion with?

Saad: Do you think the mob cares about that? What do you think they see when they hear that my name is Saad Ansari?

Dhruv: Yes, we all know assholes exist in the world. We were the ones that got that ABVP member who abused you in college, suspended. Because we know there’s a difference between jokes we make, and what assholes say and do. We – the five of us- we are a safe space. Why are you not seeing that?

Saad: I cannot believe you are using that to justify your bigotry.

Dhruv: Excuse me??? Is that what you really think?? That I am a bigot?

Saad: You are certainly acting like one. What, am I supposed to feel grateful that you don’t let others call me names but of course your right to dark humor is sacrosanct? I DO NOT FEEL SAFE IN YOUR FUCKING SAFE SPACE ANYMORE.

Saad: You know what, I had expected this from Shobhit or Bunty but not from you.

Dhruv: What does that mean, why not from me?

Saad: You know why?

Dhruv: No I don’t know why – please enlighten me.

Saad: Because I thought you’d know what it felt like to have your identity reduced to a few insults and names.

Dhruv: Are you really throwing what I told you in PRIVATE on my face to win your fucking agenda.

Saad: I’m not throwing it on your face. Maybe that’s your problem. You are so fucking obsessed with fitting in, with never being different, never disagreeing with anyone or anything which isn’t the norm that you think something specific about your identity, just because it is a deviation from the group, is an insult.

Dhruv: oh my god. Stop it. Just fucking stop it. It’s not your place to tell me what I should and should not be comfortable with.

Saad: Oh but I’m supposed to listen when you tell me that I should be okay with your stupid and bigoted sense of humor.

Dhruv: Those are NOT the same things.

Saad: And who gets to decide that YOU the all-knowing arbiter of humor.

Dhruv: You know what if you want to turn around one day and decide that you no longer want to be the person you have been YOUR WHOLE LIFE. Please go ahead and do that but don’t expect us to change. We are happy with the way we are.

Saad: I’m not expecting them to change, am I? I am expecting you. Why don’t you think with your own god-damn mind for once in your life? And my whole life- I lived with the fear that I couldn’t think or want things that were different because if I did, I wouldn’t have the friends I do now. I don’t think dark humor is always appropriate. I don’t think we did the right thing squeezing out Priya because she wasn’t on board with the way we talked about women. I don’t think jokes exist in a vacuum and that it isn’t somehow related to all of the fucked-up stuff that goes on in our world.

Saad: The world is changing Dhruv. We cannot go about our lives pretending being apolitical isn’t just a way for us to not be bothered by the things that don’t personally affect us. Sometimes I fear Shobhit, and Bunty are beyond redemption. But I know you, I have been right there with you laughing at things we don’t find particularly funny, abiding by stuff, we aren’t always comfortable with.

Saad: We don’t have to be okay with things we aren’t? And if they don’t accept that, then fuck them.

Dhruv is typing…

Saad: Dhruv??

Saad: ????

…

Saad: I cannot believe you told them. I cannot believe I thought you were different.

Short Story: Pink Toenails

The other day, I was taking a shower when I was startled to discover pink toenails. A flamingo pink that stood in sharp contrast with the dull marble that made up my bathroom floor. I was even more surprised when I saw that they were attached to a pair of brown feet that alarmingly seemed to my own.

“When did I do that” And then somewhere out of the fog, a hazy memory of a pedicure that was forced upon me by my mother. “Who chose this colour? Was it me? That’s not possible, is it? I mean I would have never picked something so… so…” Words failed me.

The colour was bright and girly and so goddamn joyful. A colour that belonged on Instagram reels under shiny ring lights and filtered reality. Not me I decided.

I mentally added it to the list I had recently started building. Me or not me. My therapist had been urging me to understand and discover who I was. She’d repeat again and again, “Who is Vanya?” Every time she said my name so loud and clear, I felt my body clench, worried that somebody else would hear her and notice that I existed. Even the thought of that made the skin under my arms prickle with sweat. Another unwelcome reminder of my humanness.

That night I wrote in my journal.

Not me: Familiarity with bodily functions (Note to self: Do not have children)

Me: Using TV shows as an anthropological study into the social behaviours of human beings.

Also Me: Pretentious as fuck.

Since then, it had become something I did whenever I found the time. Which is not to say I didn’t have time. I had time in abundance, but somehow, I was always losing it. Time disappeared into the invisible cracks of the day. Morning when I woke up and night when I got out of bed type of thing. Whatever happened in between remained hidden in the thick foggy bits of my mind that sometimes made itself known. Other time it floated above my head, just out of my reach.

Well, that’s what my mediation podcast says I should do with my thoughts. Observe them as they float. “Let them come and go” the self-actualized man gingerly whispers in my ears every night. “Let it flow, like bits and pieces of garbage in the ocean.”

Instead, my thoughts enter me and never leave. They are trapped in there like laser beams bouncing of every organ, artery and vein, every cell, eviscerating whatever they find in their way. That’s how I live, with permanent heart burn.

The best I can do is ignore it and hope it fades just a little. I leave my reality and tune into another, one that emanates from the hypnotic lights of my screen. A pre-recorded laugh track plays. Some people think it’s creepy, but I like it. I like being relieved of the obligation to laugh. I like that the actors have someone laughing at their jokes and I don’t have to be responsible for their disappointment. That way I can just be there. Effortlessly floating. Like a tiny piece of garbage in the endless boundless ocean.

Waiting, Venting

I often think of dystopias. Who can avoid it these days. Recently I decided if I were to ever write a dystopia, it would have a lot of waiting. Meaningless, senseless, endless waiting.

You would have to wait, nearly every day, for an uncertain number of hours in a grey non-descript room. There would be nary a painting to brighten up the walls nor a wallpaper whose patterns you could mindlessly trace. Instead everywhere you looked, a blank greyness would stare back at you. You would see other people there; their shoulders bent, eyes vacant. You would wonder if they felt the same frustration that was slowly unfurling inside you, but you wouldn’t dare ask. Occasionally the silence would be cut by a throat-clearing, or even a cough, but no matter how much you hoped, the sounds would never turn into words. You often saw people who entered after you, leave before. But there would be no one present to help, no one willing to explain the mysterious rules governing your waiting. I’m not sure what exactly you would be waiting for, but it would be something crucial to your survival. Maybe there would be some posters, with phrases like, “Good Things Come To Those Who Wait” or “Waiting Will Set You Free” even though you knew, not everyone had to wait. Worst of all, no matter how angry you were or how close to upturning a table and screaming revolution, you were also grateful. Because you knew what happened to those who weren’t even given the chance to wait.

This is certainly not a new concept. Waiting has always been a subtle means to subjugate. A sign of powerlessness. The most enduring criticism of the Soviet Union has been that you had to wait for bread. Everywhere, the powerless wait. They wait for the small things—the bus, ration, water, electricity, and they wait for the big stuff— wages, justice, dignity. Maybe that’s why the rich have such an inherent distaste for it. That’s why they pay more, drop names, fake documents, just so they can coolly saunter off to the front of the line, while the masses do the waiting. For a while, the pandemic made us all powerless and so we all waited. But soon the rich began to pay more for hospital beds, for oxygen cylinders, for vaccinations. And the poor are still waiting. Like Mary Gordon wrote, “waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.”

So yes, there shall be waiting in my dystopia. It makes sense doesn’t it, for what is utopia if not abundance for all, all the time.

Feelings in the Metaverse

[Note to Reader: This is not a piece about the Metaverse/NFTs/Crypto/ Web3 as much as it is about my many disjointed and complicated thoughts and feelings around all of this stuff. If you want to read more on this stuff itself and why I think it’s so dangerous, you can check out this and this and this and this (straight from the horses mouth)].

Rage. Red hot rage. Leaving blisters on my skin hot rage. Till it reaches a temperature so high that it becomes pure white. And then I fall. I open my eyes to see the big blue sky, stretching from one end of the earth to another. It’s a resplendent blue, the type that has whimsical shapes of cotton candy clouds, sometimes dense, sometimes fluffy, bursting forth with the potential it offers for boundless creativity. Will they have this in the Metaverse?

They say it’s the future. That it will change the world as we know it. That it will be the thing that finally takes the human race into the next level. But how? Blockchain isn’t solving the climate crisis. NFTs aren’t doing anything to re-distribute the heinously concentrated levels of capital. And metaverse sure as hell isn’t making anyone forget that the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat is getting increasingly toxic. So what type of future are they really building?

Somedays I feel like the whole world has moved ahead leaving behind me and my analogue ideas. I see my friends jumping headfirst into becoming micro-influencers, social media marketers, digital artists, crypto-traders, content creators. I remember how in early 2018 I discovered that one of the categories Facebook had grouped me into was a ‘late adapter to technology.’ I still remember the sting of embarrassment I had felt, despite knowing better, looking down at my two models behind iPhone. How long before it is me who is rendered obsolete?

Is it as bad as you say it is? Is the Metaverse really that big of a problem? You like to read don’t you. Imagine this. Imagine your favorite author, the woman whose words make you believe for one brief second that everything is alright. Well, she is hosting a reading on the Metaverse. You can sit in a cozy little bookstore while she reads out an excerpt from her latest novel. And then when she finishes you can raise your hand and ask her your questions and have her look at you as she answers and finally at the end of the event you can walk up to her and ask her for a personal digital autograph, all the while sitting at the opposite end of the planet. Will you not be even slightly tempted?

Some of us have endless green gardens at our disposal, some of us make do with a single tree outside our window and some of us are surrounded by heaps of waste so highly toxic that no living thing can emerge. How can there be one metaverse when our worlds are so different?

You are sitting in your room. A tiny, crowded space, in a massive, crowded city, in the wrong side of town in the wrong side of the globe. It’s hot, hotter than it’s ever been in your already pretty hot tropical country. Electricity cuts are normal, so you don’t have anything but your own hand fanning your face. Sweat is dripping down the side of your face, the heavy leather headset that’s been on you for hours making things worse. You are attending an office meeting in the metaverse where things are always fresh, dewy, and sanitized. A mosquito sits on your arm, and you slap it. You’ve learnt to kill those pesky little pests even without being able to see them. How long till they can upload my body into the metaverse?

They’ll say it’s opt in. No one’s going to force you to go to the metaverse. It’s always going to strictly be your choice. But is it really? Is being on Facebook/Twitter/Whatsapp/Instagram really our free choice. Is the endless scrolling, the countless ads, the constant consuming, the emotional exhaustion, the changes in human behaviours, is that all the result of our free volition? Let this be a reminder to myself that even if I didn’t opt in- I do need to opt out. Because if I don’t stop scrolling now, if I don’t resist the power of a small box that I can switch off and keep aside, how will I resist when they come to alter our whole reality?

#2 Things to do on the Weekend: Take A Walk Through Time

A historian with mild manners and a loud voice organizes heritage walks in Delhi all year round. He attracts a small but loyal crowd who follow him week after week along the corridors of yesteryears as he regales them with stories of times long gone. This week I join that eclectic group of people who woke up bright and early on Sunday morning to walk around a famous historical garden in Delhi.

There is a lady with fiery silver hair. A tall gentleman whose wife helps refugees in Tunisia. Two architecture students whose pens always hover in anticipation over their notebooks. Two sisters wearing similar jackets who studied in a school very close to the garden. A mother with her child. A man with his mother.

We start in 1936. The origin story. Imagine a vicereine driving around land that has been newly designated the capital of the colony her husband has been sent to rule. She spots a beautiful, if dilapidated, mausoleum and then yet another, and then one more, all within a five-mile radius. She proclaims, “let there be a park” and so there is.

It is now the 14^th century. A young king, the third of his line, abdicates his throne to pursue a lifelong interest in Sufism. Before he does, he orders the building of a tomb on behalf of his father, the second of his line. The architect believes the top of the dome to be where his god resides, and the mason believes the lotus to be the seat of his god. So together they build a lotus atop a dome.

Soon we find ourselves in pre-historic times. People are coming together to cultivate land and are in need of storing grains. So, they begin building pots. Massive, red-baked, earthen pots that store grain and seeds for the community. Because these pots hold the ‘seeds of life’, they come to signify fertility and fecundity and centuries later, young brides begin gently kicking the pot filled with seeds as they enter their marital homes.

Suddenly it’s the 20^th century again. 1960’s to be exact. A quiet stuffy afternoon in India’s second decade of independence. Two boys bunk school to roam the halls of a tomb that is surrounded by its own private garden. They climb through the dilapidated stairways and stuff themselves in the nooks and corners of the silent tomb, lazing and languishing.

Just like this, what started out as a heritage walk on art and architecture becomes a trip through time, where in patterns that sometimes resemble zigzags and crisscrosses and other times the unending circles of the Tibetan infinity knot, the historians spins stories after stories that leave me dizzy. Until I filled with a deep sense of unease. It’s eating away at me, taking out all of the goodness of what I have learnt.

I recognize it to be fear that stems from the knowledge that our future does not stretch out as far ahead of us as our past does behind us. That somehow after centuries of slow and steady progress, we have decided to make a clean break and are charting into terrifying territories that we may never return from. Will heritage walks exist in 23^rd century? What stories will future historians share if we never build anything to last?

The walk ends. I chase after a young boy selling tea. With a cup of steaming hot tea, I sit on the steps of the last tomb, surrounded by endlessly green gardens as far as the eyes can see.

Short Story: Sundered

It had been hours since I had been cycling around. Occasionally I recognized a particular tree or a rock that I was sure I had seen before but when I followed its path, I came right back to where I started. Finally, I stopped to look up at the sun as it peeked out of the thicket above me. It was still glistening, but it had lost the power of its zenith. I realized the day would end soon and my knees wobbled at the thought. But I continued to cycle.
…

It’s been three days since I last saw another breathing, living thing. That’s not true, I remind myself, I am surrounded by plants and bushes and trees that are alive and thriving. If this place has taught me anything it’s that trees have their own secret lives. I have been observing them closely, tracking their movements. I have learnt that they twinkle in the mornings, and flutter during the day, yawn under the afternoon sun and shiver before the evening. At night I lie under a big banyan tree and trace the long-knotted roots as they are silhouetted against the gray night sky. My thighs feel sore from another full day of cycling, and I say good night just to hear the sound of my voice, for I have no other reason to speak.
…

We were a group of eleven cacophonous cousins. We descended to this bustling town for our annual trip to our grandparents. This year too we made our way to the city zoo, a sprawling forested area of 50 acres, smack in the middle of everything else. It was the place for many a childhood wonders. Where I saw my first green-eyed black panther and where I craned my neck to see the giraffes as they ate the leaves out of the tallest tree I had ever seen. It wasn’t like the other zoos, there were no big black cages that separated us from the animals. Instead, each animal got its own little island that was separated by a big moat that went up to ten feet. On their little island, the animals were free. Free to roam and sleep and eat. But that’s all they were free to do. Maybe that was the problem.
…

A few years ago, my mother’s younger brother, Sharan uncle, who accompanied us on our yearly trips, told me a story. It was another hot sunny day, and we were eating our ice-creams while standing before the tiger enclosure.

He asked me “Do you know why Whisker is so sad all the time?” Whisker was what I had named the in-house tiger. Sharan uncle was the only other person who called him that. Whisker did look sadder and weaker every year we came. Right then, he looked like his body was a balloon that had been deflated.

“Many years ago, his tigress went missing.”

“Do you mean she jumped out of the moat?” I had been secretly entertaining that possibility, even though my sister thought I was stupid for thinking that.

“That’s the thing—nobody knows. One night, the night keepers heard loud tortured howlings from here. When they came to investigate, they saw that only Whisker was left. You can imagine the panic that created. The whole zoo was put on lockdown for months, they searched every nook and cranny, every little cavern, looking for her. For a while there were even talks for shutting down the zoo forever because the risk was too great. But then after six months of complete lockdown, one day they opened the zoo. Just like that. No one spoke of the missing tiger again and no one to this day ever discovered where she went.”

We continued to silently lick our ice-creams, quick and methodical, before the sun got to it.

“Do you know why I am telling you this story?”

He never told me why.
…

This was the first year where no adult accompanied us to the zoo. The oldest amongst was seventeen and so we were allowed to go out, adultless. Everyone except me was in high spirits. They tended to pick on me less when there were adults around. But there was one benefit. Whenever Sharan uncle accompanied us, he’d always ride in the back, making sure that everyone, especially me, was going the same way. Lest I go missing like the tigress.

But the truth is, I wasn’t trying to get lost. My cousins had the habit of riding their cycles really fast and only stopping for the big-ticket animals. They’d all congregate before the bears and the giraffes and the big cats, but I liked to see them all. There were over six types of deer and that’s not including the gazelles, there were birds and then there were water birds, there was an entire pathway just dedicated to snakes. And so, I stopped and observed, except with no one to hurry me. When I looked up and saw that I didn’t see any of the distinctive orange cycles. I pedaled down the most obvious route but then I saw a beautiful white butterfly with a deep blue border on its wings and turned my cycle onto a grassy pathway, chasing and cycling, until I looked around and realized that I was here and all alone. That was days ago.
…
It’s been two weeks since I followed a butterfly and entered this world. I still cycle all the time, but I am not looking to find my way back. I know why the trees and rocks all look familiar. It’s because we are in the same place but in a different dimension, one without my cousins and the little island zoos. Last night Sharan uncle came to me and asked me how I was doing. I told him that I was mostly okay, but I missed him a lot. He asked me if I knew why I was here. Now I know I am not alone. I will find her. I will cycle through this forest until I do.