Today’s memo has nothing to do with business or branding. It’s about something I posted on Instagram this week that I have been sitting on quietly for weeks. Years, in fact.
I often feel so mute as an NRI. Like my opinion on anything happening back home arrives with an asterisk, because I am not there to feel the pulse of it, because I chose comfort somewhere else, because my navy blue passport boarding a flight out of Dubai apparently means something different than the same passport boarding one out of Bombay. I have carried that particular kind of muted for a long time.
This week it tipped into something closer to anger and a whole lot of frustration.
I will not walk through every detail of what has unfolded in Delhi over the last month, because the specifics are not really the point. Here is the shape of it. Young people, protesting peacefully. Some of them fasting for weeks. Doing it the way we are all taught as good citizens of Gandhi’s nation - filling out the forms, asking permission, sitting peacefully with signs rather than burning anything down. Satyagrah.
And on the other side of it, largely, indifference. Not disagreement. Not even a proper argument to push back against. Just silence, and every so often, a joke.
That word, indifference, is the one I keep landing on.
I can hold space for disagreement, genuinely. I am a debater at heart, which mostly just means I know there are always two sides to an argument. What I cannot make sense of is a side that will not even acknowledge the other one is allowed to exist.
My own parents' generation, broadly, falls into that camp, and I do not think it is because they love their country any more or less than I do. I think somewhere along the way, loyalty to whoever currently holds power or whatever mainstream media projects became the whole identity, and anyone who says otherwise gets waved off as young and dramatic, or anti-national.
I want to be careful here, because I know exactly how this can get read, and I am a journalism and communications undergraduate at the end of the day. This is not about picking a side in a political fight, or naming and shaming any one person over any one decision.
It is bigger and smaller than that at once.
Bigger, because a broken system will keep breaking things no matter who happens to be running it that decade, and only the people in charge of that system can actually fix it, which is what makes this inherently political - whether you like that word or not. And smaller, because underneath the politics, this is just about whether young people, and their children after them, get to grow up somewhere that actually listens to them at all. After all, we are meant to be the world’s largest democracy. A secular republic.
So this week I decided the least I could do from an ocean away was open up a room for it. A handful of us are getting together in Dubai on Sunday, 2nd August, in the afternoon to talk about exactly this. No phones, no filming, nothing to win. Just a space to say the thing out loud to people who will not roll their eyes at you for feeling it. If you have been feeling any version of mute lately, you are welcome in that room. Just reply to this email or message me for details.
And if your hatred still outweighs your humanity, then I rather be mute with you.
M.
M’s Currents
A small thing I loved this week: no structure or theme, just sharing some favourites.
Read: A CNN feature on Abhijeet Dipke from a few weeks ago that lays out simply what, how and why he is rallying this movement (and being called a ‘terrorist’ for doing so).
xx
Manuja
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