#OccupyGateway and the Dreams of Resistance

deepanjana pal

Sunday, January 5, 2020
By 10.30pm, my head was throbbing. For more than two hours, I had been reading messages that offered terrifying glimpses of an attack on JNU in Delhi. The timeline would later show that the violence began at 3.45pm, when masked men gathered at Periyar Hostel. Most of us started getting alerts around 7.30pm when JNUSU head Aishe Ghosh was brutally assaulted. Ghosh was beaten with rods, kicked and dragged behind a car by a group of 20-30 people. A photograph of her, with blood streaming down her dirt-smeared face and someone holding a bandage to her head, seemed to be everywhere.

We’d later learn that while some of us were trying to make sense of the reports we were getting — masked men and women who were allegedly from ABVP entering JNU; acid being thrown on students; aforementioned vandals tearing hostels apart; teachers and their partners…

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Books i loved in 2019

2019 was not the best year for me- reading wise and otherwise. That sucks for me but we’ll get over it. But I did read some books I liked and here are they I guess?

1. Logicomix – Apostolos K. Doxiadis

I’m not the Man Booker so you can be sure I’m not going to cause any controversy at all by listing a graphic novel as my favorite book of all of 2019. Actually, I don’t know if this is going to be ranked at all so you don’t need to hold your horses for nothing. Whatever, this graphic novel is about the life of Bertrand Russel and it’s a lovely delightful mathematical philosophical mess and I love it to bits. I also am in love with Wittgenstein thanks for asking. This book is messy and meta but it’s also a confluence of confusion and heart and it is what we need in these troubled times. Wittgenstein ❤ forever.

2. A good man is hard to find by Flannery O’Connor

A friend told me that her stories were delightfully dark and yes I agree, eat my heart out, one of the best ever short story collections to ever exist!!

3. Letters to the lady upstairs by Marcel Proust

Proust is that good. These letters are one sided letters but they still encompass their relationship so well and I love seeing how letter writing is different than our current day communication methods.

4. Antigone by Sophocles

Plays! What a delightful thing! I read 2 versions, the Sophocles one translated by E. F. Watling and the one by Anne Carson one. I loved both but I liked the language in Watling s’ translation more. But overall, just a hard love. (I also read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw which I also liked very much. I dig plays.)

5. A Single man by Christopher Isherwood

Can we have more books like this? Is that too much to ask? This book is the perfect amount of pages, introspective, observative, interactions with people, societal influence, setting, etc etc. This book is like entering a warm sea, it’s calm while being powerful, you can be in the turbulence without feeling the panic to flee.

7. The lover by Marguerite Duras

Magical and enchanting writing, even if the plot didn’t hold much in. I need to read more of Duras.

8. Raise high the roof beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction – J. D. Salinger

The Carpenters are my favorite fictional family and Salinger is such a pro at making his writing on them so funny but so heart breaking. The first part of this book Raise high the roof beam was amazing but Seymour: An Introduction dragged on but I’ll lap it up, no regrets.

9. A very easy death by Simone De Beaviour

I don’t know how I’m feeling about this on my list but I did like it, maybe just not that much. De Beaviour is so honest, her politics is ever present and she’s often looking in the face of an uncomfortable and unpleasant truth. I admire her for that.

x-x

In retrospect, 2018 was a reading year filled with so many favorites that I’m deeply upset I did not incur as many warm and heartful connections this year. It’s very nice feeling, finding a favorite book. I hope you found a few, at least. Tell me about them, if you want?

Le Salon (II), Balthus

The entire fucking point of this page is to come in here once a while and pop something on it with the slight possibility that this can grow to be actually something. So excuse me, but it’s on you this time (for following me. Click unfollow, u’know!!1)

For once though,I’m going to pop something actual, not just 5 words of my thoughts (surprise!!). But what is it?

It’s this- painting called Le Salon (II) by Balthus, dated 1942. He liked painting children and cats, although he also painting them naked, which raised some eyebrows and made some confidants. A friend of mine had this in her `tinyletter` and I quite liked it. The reason why is due to the poses they are holding, it seems like they are momentarily paused. Balthus had this things where he liiked depicting children in a state of enrapture- different from their typically fleeting play, these kids are engaged in a firm world of theirs.

That’s all folkxs! Eat you l8er.

 

Runaway Reel

Why is it that I want to keep imagining my leaving after I’ve left? What use is this game of predication? Protection? Continuation? Avoidance of death in lived time? Whatever truth does this future hold for me, it is destroyed here. Yet in its futile recreations, the tug of inverse desires, needs. All to be vanquished.
3 July 2019

Hope I didn’t just insult you by calling this poetry. What did I do to you?

What’s good about Donald Trump?

Trump or no Trump, asking America to reconsider it’s relationship with Saudi Arabia over one journalist is silly thinking!

‘Trump Shrugs Off Khashoggi Killing by Ally Saudi Arabia’ (NY Times, June 23)

What would Obama (or Hillary) have done?

America has a lot at stake with Saudi, exactly as elucidated by Trump here, which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are willing to forfeit. That ally in the “vicious and hostile region” (however true that is) is not worth one Washington Post journalist (or the entire population of Yemen), and Trump has made that crystal clear repeatedly, decrying any pressures to give the Saudis’ a fitting reply.

In countless occasions as this, Trump has made America’s self-serving stance (“America First”) loud and clear- most often a stance it’s had pre-2016. The difference is in the fact that Trump is quite open about it. In contrast to Obama, Trump is stark naked and see through, revealing the true nature of American Foreign Policy like never before. While a Democrat candidate is prone to pay lip service to the cause of ‘good’, Donald Trump doesn’t care.

“I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them.’ And by the way, if they don’t do business with us, you know what they do? They’ll do business with the Russians or with the Chinese.”

And why should he?

America has, for a long while now, not been a bastion for freedom and democracy (a country that it squeezes right now into regime change, it’s democratic leader it once overthrew). Rather, it has an illustrious career of coups and mass-killings, each to/for it’s own leverage. Yet repeatedly, we operate from a position of expecting/awaiting ‘good’ from America. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, speaking on the nature of political discourse, “The Peace Process does not refer to the process to bring about peace, it is whatever the US happens to be advocating for at that time”.

And every time the facts are revealed to show otherwise, we point at them, open mouthed, our complaints innocuous. We feel those actions as uncharacteristic of America, despite recurring evidence otherwise. America is presupposed benevolent, until proven otherwise, until next time.
It’s time to graduate from that misconception. The legacy of America upholds is not one of global good and there is no reason for it to be.

For America is a country in a capitalistic economy. It’s only sensible that it have it’s own advantage in mind. Breaking with Saudi Arabia would be a stupid move that even Democrats don’t want, as made clear from the Congress’ vote on the withdrawing support for Yemen’s war. We wouldn’t expect Russia or China or even India (due to it’s democratic trait) to act against it’s advantage. To put it as Vladimir Putin has, “Our goal is to reinforce our country”.

Donald Trump seems to acknowledge just this. Trump has no qualms about being as transparent and naked in his aim for the sole good of America itself. Everybody exists so as to benefit it. He doesn’t waste his words trying to come of as civil or considerate, posturing for global good or the noble act of some country’s emancipation. Quite the opposite, he has admonished the needless interfering of America into the matters of countries that don’t serve it.

Wherever you stand, America s intentions are out in the open, and for the first time in a while, they’re true to their word. This can only be a boon. Even so for the democrats, whose benevolent touting can only look better in comparison.

On sadness

“The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.”

Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

Franz Kafka

“Hide your sadness, no one cares”

Twitter user Mayedalmazrouei

I don’t look my face in the mirror (avoid). My face, an unchanging beacon of stuck in time, refusing to respond. It’s pallid skin, under grime and dust, gloomy eyes, drooping circles. Sadness spills. leaks out. I’m an empty note.

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Hi is anybody there

you don’t have to be saying something new for it to be worthy of being said

really? how should i know? where’s the validation/recognition i should receive if that is true? am i not even saying it in a new way? i’m just full of regurgitated trash.

everyone is a creator

except for me of course

is this site dead/

should i kill it/