It's a quiet Saturday night here in Dilli, and I'm in my room chatting with friends from different time zones, on difference continents- working in war zones, waking up and making breakfast, sitting at work on a Saturday afternoon.
At a very young age, I had the chance to step completely out of my cocooned reality in a metropolitan city in the south of India and step in to one of the biggest, craziest, multicultural cities in the world. My senses were assaulted- everything was a first: living on my own, working a part-time job, cooking my own food and yes, for the first time, being asked for my opinion.
What it did was to catapult me into a seriously privileged space- not in terms of money or power, but in terms of the collision of cultures and experiences and lives. It was intoxicating. Those important and formative years were filled with deep, meaningful, critical discussions over cups of tea, pints of cider, glasses of cheap red/white/rose wine- about Egyptian activists in jail, Black History Month, Patrice Lumumba, corporate crimes by Coca Cola and wars in the Middle East. My eyes had been forced wide open, and the possibilites seemed endless.
Through it all, I always wanted to come back home. And I was lucky, because I had the ability to do that. For me, it was always about taking all of that and bringing it back here to India, where I could do good work, bring all that discourse into practice. The discourse was powerful enough to make me see the world in all its complexity, and to not take everything at face value, and to question most, (if not all) things.
Time has passed, and I have left that world far behind, and we are all scattered. We are all scattered across time and space (very literally), each dealing with the everydays of living the kinds of dreams we had envisioned for ourselves. Since then, I have worked in the tiny villages and big cities of my country, thinking about problems, solutions, progress and change.
Here's the sad part. Being part of that world has had after-effects. That world convinced me that the work we talked about doing- work that is cognizant of the inequities that exist everywhere, that challenges dominant systems of class and race, that recognises the post-colonial nature of development- actually exists. That world convinced me that I could expect to meet hundreds of people who had this intersectional lens and understanding of issues, in the course of my life. That world convinced me that everyone thought the same way that we did. That world convinced me that I had so much to contribute, and so many places to contribute to.
But this world waits for noone. We have jobs to do and mouths to feed. We have lifestyles that we have become accustomed to. We have societies that we have to fit in to. And the shouting turns to whispering. We turn the volume down and we try to find those spaces that we think we can fit into the best. And we are left with a big spoonful of reality.
I'm left with a whole new set of questions now, which I know I'll figure out and answer eventually- about my career, my life and the things I want to accomplish within it. My friends will log on and off during this time, and I hope to meet them at points in the middle.
And though my prognosis seems grim, one of the better after-effects of my education so far has been that I'll never stop thinking this way. I'll always be a sceptic/thinker/writer/(self-defined) activist, whatever I do and I think I'm mostly content with that.
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