Like many of you, I, too, had a facepalm moment when I read the headlines about the Mumbai police filing an FIR against Ranveer Singh, for posting nude photographs of himself on social media, on behalf of Indian women whose modesty had allegedly been outraged. Where does one even begin entangling the misogyny of this supposedly valiant gesture? Even though the complaint is directed at the Bollywood star, the motivation behind it is inherently patriarchal. That one person should take it upon themselves to speak for Indian women and their hurt sentiments is brazenly paternalistic and infantilising. I stopped myself from reading more about it, though, because soon enough I happened to read about another patriarchal gesture on behalf of the state in the form of the construction of a port and corresponding road and railway network in in Honnavar in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district that violates the CRZ regulations and threatens the traditional dry fish business-led livelihood of over 2,000 fisherwomen. I arrived at this news thanks to the journalist Supriya Vohra’s Instagram Handle, and came to know, through her post, about the incredible work being done by Living Earth Foundation, an entirely women-run non-profit working to empower the marginalised and dispossessed communities in Honnavar and across Karnataka.

Reading these two reports in close temporal proximity to each other made me think about the predominant culture of outrage activism. Thanks to social media, we express selective anger against issues that seem to surface algorithmically in our consciousness. This is inevitably linked to the attention economy. Causes that are able to grasp our interest get traction, the rest fall to the wayside. And yet, there are many battles that continue to be fought beyond the dimensions of social media, by activists who are committed to the cause, who stake their lives in pursuit of social justice and equality. I have been thinking a lot about how the issues that make it to the headlines serve to distract us from more insidious injustices that befall those whose lives unfold in the background of mainstream consciousness, the people we exclude from our thoughts in order to continue to inhabit the bubbles we build to shield us from the cruelties of Brahmanical patriarchy and racist capitalism.