A Bowl of Elusive

Back in 2013, my uncle used to rant about how, if BJP comes to power, democracy would be in danger. He would cite the Gujrat riots of 2002 as an example - he would say that Narendra Modi got away with mass murder by being in power and he would do the same once he was in power at the center. I was twenty-three years old then and didn't understand my uncle's panic. BJP had been in power earlier as well, during Sri Atal Vihari Bajpayee ji's term as Prime Minister - things weren't that bad. People were not happy with them and voted them out in 2004 - so democracy was still there. So I laughed it off thinking my uncle was being paranoid. I believed that my country was made of sterner stuff - a party with a communal agenda could not possibly change the fact that this country was a land where various religions lived in harmony. Boy, was I wrong! BJP came to power in 2014. Soon, the media started pushing their agenda like anything. People started openly expressing anti-NonHindu

I started sobbing uncontrollably. I am usually pretty detached from things and don’t let them affect me but something had happened and I was in pain. The emotional kind. As warm drops of tears rolled down my cheeks, I wondered what this feeling meant. You see there had been moments like this before and I hadn’t so much as frowned, but this time around, something really hurt. I had hurt someone’s feelings and I was miserable. Then I took out my phone and opened the front camera and looked at my ugly crying face. And I didn’t feel pity at myself. I felt disdain. That is the relationship I share with myself. More than two decades ago, I had a really traumatic experience. I was abused. Which impacted my life in a big way. But childhood trauma is neither interesting nor uncommon. How I dealt with it, though, was peculiar and set the pace of a lot of things to come. I convinced myself that I was actually enjoying the trauma. I even convinced myself that I was in control, that I wanted it. An