Letter to my Friends

Things that happened:

This week my horoscope said that I should not make myself so vulnerable to criticism that it becomes a wound, and this is why I still read the particular horoscope app because it provides much needed advice thrown away inside of a poignant and polite paragraph meant only for me.

Yesterday, I was talking to a frolleague who is experiencing toxic behaviour at work much the same way I had experienced it, which hacked away at my self-esteem, and my past flashed in front of my eyes.

Today, I cleaned a new glass bottle and it is catching the sunlight before it catches something else we might put into it.

***

Discerning toxic behaviour is one thing, and being able to cut it off quite another, but I am hard pressed to say that the level of what my frolleague is witnessing might as well be called evil. The nature of evil seems to have reached a crescendo in modern Indian society, unchecked, running amok the spaces that were supposed to be decent and civil. But what does that even mean? I was watching Lessons in Chemistry and in one scene, the tv plays a video of Martin Luther King being arrested by the police for peacefully protesting. In today’s world racism is illegal, so can you imagine that there is so much happening around us which could be potentially illegal in a future not so far away, if we did something about it?

I consider deleting social media from time to time to cut off this indecent, unequal, and horribly polluted country we live in, but I would miss talking to my friends who live away. All I want is a way for me to talk to my friends, share things with them without the encumbrance of advertising, manufactured news, and political shenanigans that are downright evil in the garb of clownery. I want a smaller and cleaner Internet where I can stay in touch with the wonderful people I’ve grown up with, have come to know over the course of the years, and with whom I have shared hopes for our collective future, gifs, and memes. I want a space to post my silly little pictures and have three people like it, and I want to listen to some music once in a while. Is that too much to ask? (No, friend, no; it is not too much to ask.) All this social hullabaloo is grating on my nerves, literally at that. To be fair, the consistent breaking down of my city, in real life, isn’t helping either.

During the month of Ramzan I stayed at home, fasted, ate only home-cooked food with the occasional local fare, and didn’t travel into the city. By the end of it, I was feeling healthier, my skin was glowing, though my hair was a rowdy mess, but that is always the case. In the weeks that followed, going back out into the world has tanned my skin and I find myself easily exhausted because of the dust and the heat. There’s enough uproar on the Internet about how the municipalities are crumbling our city to dust. However, a recent win gives me a flicker of hope.

I had recently informed my municipality to fix a fault in a footpath near my home and they obliged. When I returned from office, I saw that the area had been cleaned and cemented the way I requested. This small act of fixing a fault in the road, might seem minuscule in the face of the every day devolution of humankind, but I will take my wins as they present themselves (which I am sure my horoscope app would wholeheartedly encourage me to do).

All I want right now is the simplicity of living, clean air, green spaces, the predictability of people & systems, the cutting off of evil at its root, the ability to talk to my friends, and mildly sweet cake with a cup of chai.

***

I am looking for a place to post pictures without some tech company meddling in my business and how it is displayed, and perhaps, this is where it will be.