I haven't slept well at all over the last month. I keep putting it off until I finally succumb out of relative tiredness. I play multiple games of Scrabble on my phone, knowing fully well I shouldn't be exposing myself to the glare of a screen. But there is a restlessness I cannot quell. I realised two days ago that the duration of my sleeplessness coincides with the siege of Kashmir, since the announcement of abrogation of Article 370 that wrested away its statehood. Every day I almost consciously expose myself to news from the Valley that runs counter to the propaganda narrative. It leaves me aghast, the level of atrocities that are being committed against civilians. Even if a small percentage of it turns out to be true, we should be utterly and completely horrified with the normalising of such flagrant violations of human rights.

I like to believe I am not the only one that feels despair. I've been thinking so much about what it means to reckon with the enormity of the helplessness many of us are feeling. We, who have signed statements condemning the actions being committed in our name; we who have attended protests against the rising fascism; we who do not sympathise with the dominant narrative of hyper-nationalism; we who inherited our ideology from Rabindranath Tagore, author of our national anthem; who had this to say on the subject — "Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live"; we who are struggling to make sense of our complicity in what is unfolding, for in this instance, silence is complicity. How do we communally escape the negative spiral of despair? How do we channelise our moments of hopelessness and transform it into a kind of radical optimism, not for the convenience of being able to go on with our lives, but because of what we owe to each other?