critikal analsis

Ajay Navaria's Unclaimed Terrain is a harrowing account of the juxtaposition of financial mobility and social stratification.

But I'll probably analyse that in a term paper sometime soon. Today, I want to talk about the conversation I had with my ethics professor after the class.

There's a prisoner dilemma at play when you are part of the hegemonic class in a social structure. How do I trust those pitted against me to not misuse the power they wrest? I suppose it is emblematic of understanding your own apathy. 

As a political being, there is a dilemma at play in pledging your solidarity to a political movement. What if the consequences roll out of your hands? Is it precisely your demands that it's trying to meet? What is the cosine similarity between what you want and what the movement wants? 

There are of course a substantial number of people in any movement who want the ruckus and the chaos. They thrive in the rioting, because there is no existential depth to their grounding. They are passing time no matter if they're living or dying and beating, raping or killing people is nothing much but entertainment for them. I saw it firsthand when my JEE exams got postponed and cancelled. A substantial portion of people weren't really interested in giving the exam after one point. The valid concerns get drowned out, but the vanguard of any movement needs to shape the many voices precisely. Ashgar Wajid's Mai Hindu Hoon is another example. For the juvenile boys, there's nothing much to the bullying except for one more evening of entertainment and yet it traumatizes and scars the boys whole life. 

But even within the same movement there's a continuous process of deconstruction going on. Perhaps the best example of this from my experience is leftist moral purity spirals on twitter. For example there was a whole spectrum of voices within the Queer movement, and I saw some people getting cancelled for arguing about the validity of restrictions in sport against a swathe of people who had probably not showered or seen the light of day in the past week. 

Numbers and solidarity does have power, regardless of where it comes from. But this constant need for deconstruction - that reflects perhaps the internal state of a large set of the population in these movements too can stem from self hatred. Equality is considered an unquestionable sacred axiom, and since reading Nietzsche who obliterated my worldview with his intellectual hammer I have been wary of this pedestalization. I like equality, but I realise, perhaps unwillingly to myself that maybe I would like to be special about the things I'm insecure about. Realising that makes me more aware and want to listen to others. 

But it also makes me hate myself. I've hated myself for a very long time, because I've been pretty priveleged (pretty privelege too ig) with being Hindu, northern, well educated, able bodied, Brahmin, cis bla blah blah (put your intersectional choice of spices here). I questioned and argued about this elevation of equality as a sacred axiom. This insistence of critical theory and political beingness to erode into my life. Because it had, and I let it. My way out was scrambling and gasping through Deleuze, Nietzsche, Deconstructionist Literature, Decolonial Dharmic reclamation, Eastern spirituality, a fuckton of metaphysics and I've still not fully made out. 

It's full of so so so many booby traps, because each of those places where I broke out of could have been political projects of a lifetime. I don't know where I am currently, and I don't know how to define it either. I'm a skilled person, I can write code, I can do math and science and make cool shit, I can write, I can fuck around with computers. Is this critical deconstruction directed onto myself the best thing to do with my time?

And the thing is, I'm priveleged but at the grand scale of things not the greatest either. I'm no white man, or even neoliberal white woman. I'm no trust fund kid. And I'm not even like all the others around me who optimized the niche through STEM to get to that San Francisco investor money (though I might). It's good to recognize where you come fromand love yourself fully for it. 

I come from an honest government officer's family. My privelege was that my mom fought and was smart as fuck and educated herself. But there's problems that come with everything too. 

I suppose the rage of criticality is good. To turn that blazing eye and quiet rage that burns everything in its wake. But the real thing to be studied is that movement of human inspiration. That revolutionary spirt that moves through marx, the viveka that burns in the Upanishads, the Fire in the Mind that Krishnamurti Ignites, the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari, the spontaneous archetypal creation of a liminal space in Jung. 

And all that is art. A study of human inspiration. The only honest study of the human. 

 एक आग लगती है, पता नहीं कैसे।