Oh so easy to take convenient sides and share memes
How my generation is saving the world
It must be all about our very desperate and only human efforts to simplify everything.
You can hardly blame my people of this time to take an enormously complex issue like Kashmir, make a meticulous and clean dividing line, and stand for or against the recent decisions of the Indian government to revoke Kashmir of its special status under Article 370.
You can either support it or be against it, vehemently, aggressively. It is easy that way really.
It is easy really to get on the shiny boat of nationalism and rejoice complete possession of Kashmir. It is also easy to stand on the bay and shout endlessly with your new made banners against the decision.
Easy to take your respective side, find your set of people believing the same and continue to feed into each other’s social media pages and chai conversations hence reinforcing a half baked idea as long as it is believed vigorously by your respective wing.
What is hard is to educate yourself on decades of political, cultural and social struggle of the place as it maneuvered its way around being stuck between two giants with nuclear powers, terror of militants, challenges of minorities, protection of an army, loss of its personal narrative and identity between all of this, and in fact even loss of its own once magnificently rich literature to even express itself. It is even harder to process all the information and history on your personal basis and then come up with your individual ideology and ideas and use them to contribute towards problem-solving.
Why take this long and hard road when you can find your respective groups and use the group philosophy and the power derived from it to superficially attack every problem? Let’s share some memes while we are at it.
Hard to educate yourself, be completely nonbiased and have an actual debate, let alone take any action to support our people in distress. No different from every single topic of resentment between the left and right wings of America. Let’s take our convenient sides and then keep yelling at the wall until no one can hear anything anymore.
What’s very difficult is to come to complete awareness and accumulate facts on the complex history of Kashmir and its devastating humanitarian crisis.
Are people on the streets of Delhi, celebrating the decision, thinking about what people of Kashmir are going through right now completely shut down behind curfews? What if it was your family unable to step out of their homes completely cut off from the world with an army on the streets? Wouldn't you at least interrogate out of mere human decency, if not for anything else?
I wake up every morning checking if Aamir Wani is back with his internet and can share his poetry again but why the fuck should we care as long as Kashmir is all integrated now !? Instead, you are sharing memes on buying plots in Kashmir and marrying Kashmiri girls!! Pathetic. A new low for India.
And are the people showing anger against the decision really being completely non-biased isolated from their perceptions and ideas of what they deem is only a Hinduism propagating government and really seeing through the potential positives of these recent integration efforts to end the pain of Kashmir?
Nooo that sounds way too complex.
No, let’s just take our respective easy journeys of linear ideologies and keep walking like zombies. It should work in the long run when there is nothing meaningful left to be supportive of or be against.
I will personally not take part in this marathon though. I am educating myself and will return with an actual idea to save the world. Thank you very much.
And Kashmiri women are not objects! Those disgusting memes suggesting the same should be banned!
~
Vaishali Paliwal
