Journalist and organizer Riddhi Dastidar worked tirelessly throughout 2020 and 2021 for pandemic relief in Delhi. In our event In Grief, In Solidarity, Dastidar recounts their experience of being in Delhi as a reporter in April 2020, when the enormity of the situation truly hit home. Amidst the many dead, dying, and a severe shortage of hospital beds, Dastidar was making urgent calls for oxygen tanks and hospital beds.

Here, with Art Director Priyanka Kumar, Dastidar explained how the grief and devastation motivated Mutual Aid India—an act of confusion and desperation as much as urgency. "If I compile a list of campaigns that are working on grassroots relief, would you be willing to volunteer?" they remember asking, imagining it would be a relatively small thing to begin.

The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the divisions and marginalization within Indian society. As Dastidar explains, how grassroots organizations seemed to assess the "veracity" of need seemed ignorant of what lived reality was like.

Dastidar later discusses, citing Kaveh Akbar, that this was the sort of time when art and poetry were simply not activism. Only organizing was. Their refusal of a conflation is, in itself, an act of demonstrating veracity.

Kumar, in turn, asked: How does somebody involved in both investigative journalism and mutual aid organizing also make sure to attend to one's own grief?