Namaste dear friends,

For those of you who are new here, welcome! And to my old friends, welcome back to Berkana. During my sabbatical from publishing, I never forgot how grateful I am for your support and presence in my tiny corner of the universe, where you witness my truth and share yours. You were here as I grew, marrow expanding from my hips through my spine, to bear the weight of the world within and around me. Together, we will continue to weave our little songs of persistence for courage, compassion, and justice for this beautiful blue mother we tread upon. May we journey together through as many cycles of the moon as are numbered for us.

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It's been a long time since I was last here, so I arrived wanting to write something clever, but the rain arrived first. From the safety of my balcony, I watched it pour down without warning on the unsuspecting passengers disembarking from the rickety old buses. The rain seemed to flow through the wide paved roads and disappear down the narrow country paths, forming streams of grey, muddy channels that opened up to expansive, unenclosed fields of paddy. The water flowed indiscriminately, taking the course it pleased before disappearing.

Where does the water come from and where does it go? Is the water lost? Can anything ever be lost? Absorbed as a witness to the rain’s lifespan, I felt negligent of my own wit. I let the monsoon lash through rather than summon memories of anything significant. In this state of emptiness, like the yielding softness of a mushy garden after a storm, I feel content to exist silently in inactivity.

The last few months have been heavy, and I kept reminding myself that writing is not so much about exercising creativity as it is about opening doors of perceptions and walking through them. Over the last few months, I have completely tuned out news notifications. However, I still do not have the privilege to live in complete oblivion to the political climate of the world; none of us do.

Even if I could ignore the political circus the world has become, I could never close my eyes to the ongoing wars, suffering, and inevitable pain perpetuated even during the darkest weeks of my personal life. My heart aches to console those who suffer greatly due to human greed and selfishness. We live in a broken world, with thousands of dollars invested to keep it that way. This is an effort by agents of capitalism to profit from every ounce of insecurity and suffering.

The brokenness doesn't baffle me as much as the extent to which one group of people will go to protect their narrative of purpose within the brokenness, identifying against another group. The boundaries between these groups are nonsensical, held together by ideologies laughable from a cosmic perspective. As the fret and anxiety over disparities grow, I observe the effective use of silence in controlling the masses. No answer is the best answer to keep people trapped in fear's toxic lair.

We live in a world where collective dissent, moot, and prayers echo through the empty halls of democracy and fall on the deaf ears of our omnipresent digital gods, who watch and record all the data but respond to none. We are essentially data points for advertisers, haunting our digital dreams and pouring vitriol and hate into our unconscious minds, keeping us in a perpetual state of fear, creating more data for them to feed on. The gluttonous monster of consumerism will finally convince us to buy products to fix all our problems.

We are forsaken, with the knife of mistrust stabbed in our collective back, and it is only about to get more engorged and twisted with time. Unless we wake from these digital dreams, we will never realize that we are fragments of the universe wearing people's names, looking for a home that we already are.

As Antonia Malchik muses in her most recent essay

If we know ourselves, we might have to be ourselves, and the dominant culture has spent thousands of years ensuring we can’t do, and even learn to avoid doing, either.

I am astonished by how quickly wisdom fades; even the hard-earned insights are swallowed whole by the hungry ghosts of habit. The obstinacy of the human race is immense; nothing scares us except the imminence of our mortality. But it is not death we fear; it is the obliteration of the ego. Consequently, all our ventures and projects compel us to make this ego a permanent image by striving for a goal worthy of us.

Wars are fueled by hate—hate for an antagonist made out of a particular group of our own species based on differences in institutions like religion. Waging war is the most feasible mechanism to serve the super-ego of the collective. It is the most viable form of heroism because, as long as there are sides, there are stories of victories and defeats, heroes and villains. What we often forget is that this duality hands the "F..k you" card to everyone involved.

Hate can be perpetuated easily when disharmony is rampant and resources are scarce. It is no coincidence that war-torn countries are often those where citizens are reduced to scavenging for resources under a government that failed to secure public faith. Democracy holds less value when the economy is crumbling, and extreme political or religious ideologies promise an enemy whose elimination will ensure a return to the glory days. The instances are countless, including but not limited to Sudan, Lebanon, Myanmar, Haiti, and Afghanistan—each dislodged by military coups, multifaceted civil wars, communal rifts, and economic monopolies by the state.

I am awake to this reality as I reach back and touch the history of my own ancestors. Looking at India's major civil unrest during the pre-independence and pre-partition periods, it is clear that the violence did not manifest until the murmurs of independent and partitioned nations began to catch public attention. However, the roots of conflict were sown centuries ago when the British wielded their policy of ‘Divide-and-Rule’ as a weapon to maintain their unprecedented wealth reserves built on the subcontinent's trade monopoly. Naturally, the growing unrest exploded into armed conflict when the policymakers left without a clear allocation of the exhausted resources.

The problem with the modern, siloed way of thinking is that it makes us see everything from an unrelated perspective. We think of today and judge it by today's events, but the seeds of today’s unfolding were sown decades ago. The wrongs of the past went unnoticed because of a mirage of stability and peace. There have always been seeds—of violence, hate, and failing democracy—sown while our ancestors were busy surviving. These unnoticed seeds have now grown into roots and branches, suffocating our need for expression, freedom, and reliance on each other.

Most conflicts start with something small and ego-driven that can manifest into wars stretching over decades. After significant time has passed, no one remembers what lay at the roots of so much hate and disharmony or who started it. This is the nature of war and hate: it obliterates reason and rationale while aiming its crossbow at civil discourse that might hold any hope of reconciliation.

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We cannot thrive while wasting our energy and resources doubting our neighbors. We cannot let our technology run surveillance on them and decidedly rest, aim our nuclear warheads at them when we feel even slightly threatened and then expect negotiation. Our mutual distrust has consequences. Our actions will destroy our illusion of peace and our fragile sense of security. War is the wrong instrument for minimizing differences. The flare of victory won't suffice because even if the perpetrators die, they will do so protecting their toxic ideologies, inevitably creating a martyr image in the eyes of those who will succeed them and live with the same ideologies.

Ideas are like molten lava, moving beneath the crater, waiting for the right tectonic movement to crack open and create firestorms. Ideas cannot be bombed, which is why war can't solve conflicts. Fear can control and conquer but cannot propel peace. Peace requires compassion, dialogue, the removal of misconceptions, and most importantly, the elimination of threats. If our elected leaders condone war, take sides, and sell weapons to any or both sides, then they are more interested in oiling the machinery of conflict and exerting control than in achieving peace.

There is a simple question we can practice asking ourselves every day in an attempt to stay on the path of non-conflict: "Who profits from my...?"

Fill that gap with whatever negative attribute fits—fear, hate, anger, despair, envy, disdain, apathy, ignorance, insecurity, greed. The answer will never be "I" or "my neighbor." It is almost always a third, invisible player whose hands are filled with wealth made from exploiting our unconscious traits. We are living in their worlds, playing their puppets, fighting their wars, and subscribing to their prescribed mode of amnesia via social media and entertainment. Instant gratification and validation from social media have replaced our need for genuine connection. We are digital ghosts wandering through a mirage of our projected lives, filling mundane and necessary boredom with picture-perfect moments in return for virtual token of validation.

If we were not in a constant state of discomfort with the present moment, we would not seek validation to numb it. The discomfort is not the disease; the disease is the cultural conditioning to avoid uncomfortable feelings. We would do anything to avoid facing ourselves, holding our pain, insecurities, and fears with tenderness, and giving them the attention they demand. This is because our inner darkness challenges us in ways that can inevitably transform us. But the process is immensely gruelling. It requires the total destruction of our projected self and walking blind through the fire of self-discovery.

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We need a spiritual revolution that moves in spirals from within to our outer world. Maybe we need to question more about the nature of the world, of hate and discontent, of fear and loathing, of inequality and disparity, of oppression and tyranny. Maybe we need to change our perspectives to understand where we are heading. Perhaps the ugly cracks in our history and all our ancestors’ suffering should lead us to ask: what now? What do I do with the broken pieces of this magnificent world? Maybe we were never meant to fix it but to rearrange these scattered pieces into patterns that evoke beauty.

The other day, while researching another essay on the impact of colonialism on the non-human world, I learned that Stripe has de-monetized my account. Apparently, a newsletter writer from India cannot receive money from international subscribers as an individual but only as an incorporated company. This is a ridiculous criterion given the small size of my network and the tiny revenue stream I create. I could respond to this policy change with fear, or I could reason with patience and invest deep trust in the process of growth.

That evening, I learned that a woman of Indian-African ancestry will be running for America’s presidential election. I thought to myself: she is there because her ancestors were there, from lands stranger and farther from America. She is standing there despite centuries of colonialism, slavery, oppression, and bigotry. What if the whole of life is a process of unbecoming, of stripping away layers of ego that keep our narrative small? Maybe it is the butterfly that goes through the process of chrysalis to un-become the caterpillar she thought she was. Perhaps wearing the caterpillar costume allowed her to crawl unnoticed, but now she dares to fly.