The cartoon above is me, these last few days. Actually, the last few years, but somehow, it all feels more immediate, more burdensome, just now.
#1. The first thing I saw when I turned on Twitter Monday morning was this cryptic tweet by novelist/columnist and good friend Nilanjana Roy. That led me to reading about sexual abuse allegations against Neil Gaiman, which he has since denied. One news story led to another which led, eventually, to this piece on Medium that made me think.
That same post also led me to reading about Alice Munro, widely credited with bringing the short-story form back into vogue. Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner, in a signed (paywalled) piece in the Toronto Star, writes of having been sexually assaulted by her stepfather since the age of nine, and of how her mother knew of the abuse and protected the abuser through her silence.
“I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” Skinner continued. “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
“Have no heroes”, Nilanjana tweeted. Those three words took me down a rabbithole, back to the mid-nineties when I first heard stories of the dark underbelly of cricket, a sport I have loved since I was a toddler whacking baby coconuts with a stick; poring over pictures of Indian cricketers in newspapers and in magazines like Sports & Pastime and imitating them in front of a mirror and, later, playing the sport at the school and collegiate levels.
I rationalised the stories I was hearing. ‘Yeah, well, maybe there is betting and fixing and stuff going out, but He is too good, no way He can be involved…’ — the ‘He’ being the cricketer(s) who were my heroes of the time.
Then came the revelations of the early 2000s. The identity of my ‘He’ had by then changed as one generation of players gave way to the next, and I moved from watching and playing the sport to writing about it for a living — but it turned out that my new ‘He’ was involved, neck deep, just like the old one.
I think that is when I finally grew up. That is when I learned to admire a stroke of sublime beauty, a piece of bowling that seemed to defy the rules of geometry, without idolising the person who had produced that incandescent moment.
The higher the pedestal, the more clearly you see the feet of clay. And it keeps happening — because we keep searching for new heroes. It happens with sportspersons, with writers, with filmmakers, with people of accomplishment across various fields — and each time it happens, I am reminded afresh that the ability to hit a ball, or to craft stunning prose, or to conjure magic on celluloid, is no guarantee that the person behind the admirable act is worth my adulation.
There are no heroes, no gods. Even Achilles had his heel. The trick, I suppose, is to not look for them, but to try and incorporate into your own life the values you look for, mostly in vain, in others.
My timeline is flooded with images of floods, from around the country. The rains play hopscotch — deluge in Delhi one day, in Jaipur and other parts of Rajasthan the next, Bihar, now Mumbai where, as I write this, there is a red alert on and educational institutions are closed…
And Assam. News reports say that 23 lakh people have been impacted across 29 districts in the state. Out of curiosity, I checked Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s Twitter stream. While I do not think that Twitter is a comprehensive, and reliable, record of our every preoccupation, I found Sarma’s feed instructive (check it out).
Yesterday, the CM excitedly posted that in Kaziranga, a ‘Harry Potter snake’ has been found. Too cool. Meanwhile, my news feed tells me that 137 animals including six rhinos have been found dead in the national park.
This morning, Sarma shared the “good news” — the water level in the Brahmaputra is receding, he informs us.
That is nice — we can now put the deaths, the destruction, the devastation behind us till next year, when it is time to rinse, repeat.
Earlier, on 7 July, Sarma said “Our focus should be on finding a national solution to the Assam floods, unlike those who only want to declare it a national problem.” What that means, I have no idea — how do you find solutions without first recognising a problem as a problem?
He continues his whataboutery with this gem, where he tells the media that “In 2004 there were 400 embankments breaches while today we have only 4 such breaches” — oh goody gumdrops, we are making progress, then?
Elsewhere, Assam’s Water Resources Minister Piyush Hazarika assures us that this year, 220 km worth of new embankments will be constructed. My instinctive reaction was, oh shit no!
If you are trying to solve a problem, identifying it correctly is a good first step — and that is not MBA jargon, merely common sense.
It is now 10 years since four of us got together to start Peepli— a website dedicated to deeply researched reporting on the environment, climate change, development and on forests, wildlife, and man-animal conflicts. (That effort came to grief due to lack of funding).
Back then, my friend the multimedia journalist Arati Kumar-Rao (Instagram), whose work on environmental issues has placed her on BBC’s 2023 list of 100 most influential women, did an extensively reported piece she titled Delusion of Dykes. Quote, emphasis mine:
12:30 pm: The first midday meal had been served in the Lower Primary School, Rekha Chapori, Upper Assam, when the dyke began to crack.
The river came rushing through the village. It took homes, homesteads, farms, a hospital, the school. Only one bench from the school was spared. The alert headmaster of the school had noticed the crack and had rushed the kids to higher ground.
He saved 80 lives that day. 21 other families were not so lucky.
The embankment that breached was built decades ago and forgotten by the government. It had weakened. The Brahmaputra followed the innate nature of water. Pushed back by dykes and constrictions for the Bogibeel bridge downstream, it carved a path of least resistance. In this case, past a misplaced embankment left to weaken over time.
Assam alone has 4,400 km of old dykes. Some over 60 years old. Living out afterlives, way beyond their 25 year lifespan. Weakened, eroded, tired, more than ready to give way.
Experts believe that more devastation from swollen rivers have been caused because of these dykes than if they were not to be there. Dykes are supposed to protect populations from flooding. What they have succeeded in doing is provide a false sense of security.
How? Entire villages huddle in their shadow, secure in the government’s assurance that the river raging beyond will not touch them. But neglect and age, and interventions like dykes to protect bridges downstream obstruct natural flows of the river and put immense pressure on already weak structures. They breach. The swollen waters race and swallow whole villages.
That is a vivid picture of what happens when one embankment collapses, and here we are congratulating ourselves that only four such breaches occurred this year. Elsewhere, Arati says:
The mindset of trying to control a river, especially one like the Brahmaputra, is one that may need to be fundamentally altered, if one is to seriously address the annual loss of life and property that results from these interventions.
But never mind science, the hell with ecology — let’s build more embankments. It is the politician’s syllogism in action: We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this.
Building embankments — which are the cause, not the solution — is a way for the government to show that something is being done, consequences be damned. And there is a lot of money to be made through such initiatives, which is a bonus (or, more likely, the main reason for doing this).
Elsewhere, the government seems hell bent on going ahead with plans for a hydel project on the Siang river, which is the Brahmaputra’s main tributary, even in the face of fierce resistance from the locals whose lands will be submerged.
On a personal note, Peepli was founded 10 years ago — which is when Arati did the reporting reflected in the piece linked to above and elaborated on, in far greater detail, in a chapter from her book Marginlands, which you should read, if you haven’t already.
Disclosure: Yes, we are good friends — but I’d recommend this book even if I didn’t know the author; I’ve thus far gifted over a dozen copies to people I think could benefit. And I am proud that I was part of Peepli, that a decade ago my colleagues were reporting with depth and nuance on issues that are now roiling the country.
AT AROUND 6.15 PM on 9 June 2024, terrorists opened fire on a passenger bus carrying pilgrims from the Shiv Khori cave to Khatra, in the Reasi district of Jammu. The driver was hit; the out of control bus plummeted into a deep gorge. The terrorists continued firing. Nine pilgrims, including a two-year-old, were killed in the attack, and an additional 41 were injured. (Approximately an hour later, Narendra Modi took oath of office to begin his third term as prime minister).
A joint search operation by the J&K police, the Indian Army and the CRPF, using drones and dogs and aided by village defence committees, yielded no result. On 17 June, the Ministry of Home Affairs transferred the investigation to the National Investigation Agency headed by Ajit Doval. Nothing further is known.
On 13 June, a CRPF jawan and two militants were killed, and seven security personnel injured, in three separate encounters in the Kathua and Doda districts of J&K.
On 7 July, six militants and two soldiers were killed during counter-insurgency operations in the Kulgam region while in a separate incident, one soldier was injured in a militant attack in Rajouri.
On 9 July, five soldiers were killed and five others injured when militants attacked an army convoy in the Kathua district of J&K.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is deeply anguished. The PM is currently occupied in Russia, where he is deepening ties via a one on one meeting with Vladimir Putin — ties that had last been deepened in a bilateral meeting in December 2021. This is Modi’s first visit to Ukraine since he stopped the war in Ukraine. Associated Press has a story, including details of a buggy ride to view Putin’s stable of horses.
“Stronger ties between our nations will greatly benefit our people,” he (Modi) wrote (on Twitter), also sharing a picture of himself and Putin hugging. (Zelensky is not amused. Neither, apparently, is Washington, DC.
Home Minister Amit Shah, who during the recent election campaign was beating the drum about how the abrogation of Article 370 had restored peace to J&K, is currently busy negotiating with major allies Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu, ahead of the budget. (Then again, maybe Amit Shah not saying anything is a good idea — he is the guy who thinks there is a “flood-like situation” in Assam, where the number of those displaced currently stands at close to two million.)
But not to worry: Defence Secretary Bharat Bhushan Basu says the sacrifice of those who were slain in the most recent attack “will not go unavenged and India will defeat the evil forces behind the attack.” So that is ok, innit?
Americans are sleepwalking through an emergency, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic some months back. They are rank amateurs — we here in India are capable of sleepwalking through a dozen different emergencies at once.
See why I used that cartoon as today’s lead image?
Am just depressed. Yes, yes I know we mustn't give up, and keep fighting the good fight. Yes, the recent elections made me say a silent Hallelujah! Rahul Gandhi seems a messiah one day, and his party a council of dunces the next. The less said about non biological being the better. And the state of the country? Oh well, we need to get into whataboutery here - see US, see Europe, this is happening everywhere, etc etc., are the tropes we hear. Just fed up. Want to just curl up, cry, and then wake up the next morn, shorn of anxious thoughts, wear the war paint, and get ready to fight. But God, it's exhausting. And yes, must read Aarti Rao's book. Missed her discussions at BIC twice. Damn!
So agree with you. The situation is grim indeed...But those of us troubled by it can't afford to give up, can we? :)
Karl Marx would have to be adapted to the times: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his means'. There is a fair amount all of us can do to make a difference. The recent elections, if anything, should give us hope that all is not lost and much can be done with 'right intent'.