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Showing posts from April, 2018

The good--and guilty--citizen

A WhatsApp message makes the rounds, asking you to join a candlelight vigil protesting the brutal rapes in Kathua and Unnao and asserting that #thisisnotmyindia. I am held up doing my job, sitting in on student presentations while a part of me chafes, wanting to be where many of my friends and fellow citizens are, holding placards and melting candles, trying to find hope in collective presence. I do not make it to the event, and a part of me shrivels a bit in an unavoidable guilt, while the rest of me tries to make sense...of the need for visible assembly, of the necessity of being seen as part of a group that refuses to be silent, of what we achieve through marking our outrage and articulating our refusal to be implicated in the actions that give rise to it.  I want to be there for all those reasons, and I want to be there to gain a bit of strength from the sense that we share the sense of outrage, frustration and are all overcome with a sense of helplessness while wondering how (i