Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” COMMUNITY Radical Rhetoric, Pedagogy & Academic Complicity Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” Aneil Rallin Along with scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Susan Griffin, I want to reject the notion that academic scholarly writing has to be pedantic, or that it can't be playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative. There seems to be a distrust in academia, of playfulness and creativity, it's not seen as serious or critical or important. But, I like bringing together lots of different forms, critical writing and anecdotes and notes and analysis and snippets of conversations and fragments and juxtapositions. RECOMMENDED: Dreads and Open Mouth: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly by Aneil Rallin. Along with scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Susan Griffin, I want to reject the notion that academic scholarly writing has to be pedantic, or that it can't be playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative. There seems to be a distrust in academia, of playfulness and creativity, it's not seen as serious or critical or important. But, I like bringing together lots of different forms, critical writing and anecdotes and notes and analysis and snippets of conversations and fragments and juxtapositions. RECOMMENDED: Dreads and Open Mouth: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly by Aneil Rallin. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Radical Rhetoric Politics of Citation Rhetoric Rupture Composition Queer Spaces Pedagogy June Jordan Susan Griffin Politics of Location Location Adrienne Rich Complicity Complicity of the Academy Academia Nature of Credibility Corporate Queer Identity Gloria E. Anzaldúa Eunice de Souza Women's Participation Gender Gender Studies Women and Gender Studies in India Queer Activism Nature of Radical Activism Universities Experimental Methods Trinh T. Minh-ha Whimsy Playfulness Centering the Silly Fragments Mixed-Genre Multimodal Personal History ANEIL RALLIN grew up in Bombay, lives in Los Angeles, and does not drive. He is the author of Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly , co-editor of the “queer and now” special issue of the journal The Writing Instructor, and a scholar of Rhetoric, English, and Literary Studies. He has held tenure-track appointments at Soka University of America, York University in Toronto, and California State University, San Marcos. 18 Jan 2021 Interview Radical Rhetoric 18th Jan 2021 Fictions of Unknowability Torsa Ghosal 28th Feb Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement Sangeet Toor 29th Apr It's Only Human Furqan Jawed 26th Apr Experimentalism in the Face of Fascism Meena Kandasamy 7th Sep The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde Partha Mitter 25th Aug On That Note:

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“Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Disaster-Verse AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Mary Oliver Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? Amy Hempel Rapture. July 2017. Some months back, at work, I daydreamed about disappearing. I felt invisible regardless, and the world did not seem quite right for me. It seemed not quite right because it rarely isn’t for anyone at all. A plot hatched. A plot to be raptured. It was something of a lark, but not really. At the time, the final season of The Leftovers was airing, and I found Evie Murphy’s hoax to be aspirational. It was easy to imagine. My friend Chris would ordinarily be the most likely to notice my absence, but we’d fought months earlier and had since been avoiding each other. My roommate would probably assume—if he wondered—that I was sleeping at some boy’s place. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I said out loud in lab the next day. Everybody in the lab told me to go home, as expected. Once home, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks. I’d considered Milwaukee, which I’d passed by once, but landed elsewhere. It was a house overlooking the lake. It was cheap. It was beautiful. I’d have it all to myself. It was meant for four or more. I packed lightly. I bought a new toothbrush and razor, split my medications into separate bottles, and put unread books on my nightstand. I did the dishes, threw out the trash, folded my clothes, and got to the train station early. All on my own! It was the first time I’d been punctual in months. See, for the past two years or so, I’ve tried to kill myself several times. Some were not at all intended as cries for attention, but it was fine. I made peace with them being seen as such. Thrice, I stockpiled an increasing number of benzos, along with increasing amounts of alcohol, and went to sleep. Each time, I woke up in the afternoon, befuddled. The third time, I could no longer make sense of my body’s ability to metabolize a month’s worth of prescription pills. And that was that. Others were indeed intended for attention, and I reliably got caught. I became good at pretending I meant it, at the tearful apology administered while thinking unspeakable things. But what I never said—because no one wanted to hear it—was that though my friends and family did a great deal for me, they also greatly exaggerated their importance. And, honestly, how could sixty 2 milligram pills of clonazepam be so unsatisfactory? Then when I was gone, they never found out. I wanted to keep up the disappearance, like a character in a spy novel you let yellow in your bathroom. I’d fake my identity! Become the ghost of some much-lauded novel! I knew, of course, that any such story would end with deportation, but still. It was a nice daydream. Things were different on the train back home, two weeks later. Everyone who wanted me alive had gotten lucky, they wouldn’t know just how much. I knew that most ways of narrating the story would elicit some proclamation that I was “burned out!” and I needed to get away. Which was fine. But it wasn’t true. A strange new axis of time snuck in. Any time before, I would’ve gotten caught. Once, years ago, my sister had called the police when my flight didn’t land on time. Now, I was perfectly capable of life in whatever narrow sense it meant. The day after I got home, Chris walked over to my desk in lab, frowningly. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Just seeing someone,” I said. “Probably not anymore. Why? What’s up?” “So you weren’t sick?” “No. Well, I was, but nothing major. I needed a break.” I don’t think he bought it, but he didn’t push it. I’d missed him, he’d missed me. The following Sunday we watched the new episode of The Leftovers , as we had the two years before. Laurie Garvey went scuba-diving, possibly to commit suicide. It was marvelous. I spent two weeks at that lakefront house, armed with Diet Cokes, pre-made deli sandwiches, cookies, and a carton of cigarettes. I watched old seasons of The Leftovers . Then Lost . Then The OC . I kept my phone on silent. I didn’t hear from anyone. My greatest act of attention-seeking got none at all. I slept till mid-afternoon each day. After a week, I thought I had bedsores. Then I got restless. I fumed, as I still do, about society’s extreme moral judgment of suicide, which I consider—if I’m honest—just as much a human right as any other. We cannot, we must not, ask anyone to live if they do not wish to. We mustn’t ask for them to relinquish that right, no matter how terrible it may be for the living. It was odd, I thought later, how the future returned. Privately, reflexively fuming about moral beliefs much bigger than me was an old sensation, but more than that it was a new one. An idea whose absence I had not noticed rustled back to me. A knot tied loose. Passively, I began to make decisions. A sprinkling of the still “so much to see, so much to do, so much to read.” For a little bit there, I remember thinking very hard about time and the world in the way I imagine Bill Bryson must, like an unfinished picture book freshly encountered. It was chronological. That’s one way of narrating it, which makes it sound very triumphalist, if it weren’t for how funny it was. Forced solitude cures suicidal ideation—hurrah! But then there was something else too. I learned about a very strange people. During my little Eat, Disappear, Bon Iver retreat, I read only one book I’d pulled from the bottom of my to-read pile that I assume I bought because I used to have a morbid fascination with libertarian culture: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture . A suicidal person and a peakist walk into a bar. Someday, there’ll be an audience for a very niche joke. Between 2005 and 2011, the particular subculture of “peakism” emerged in American society. Peakists believe that global oil production, in particular, had either already peaked or was about to. So is everything: food supply, energy, topsoil. Things are about to get dire. The global economy is on the brink of collapse, as is capitalism itself. As a group, peakists are left-leaning and white; they hold graduate degrees; they’re pessimistic about the possibility of political change. Peakists are survivalists, but ordinary. They stockpile resources, grow their own food, ride bicycles, compost, and try unsuccessfully to convince their friends and family to buy into this impending doom and gloom. They make fringe websites, write books, and become YouTube stars: like “Oily Cassandra,” who preached peakist dictums while performing a striptease. They do not often meet : they become hermits. The more pessimistic amongst them foresee apocalyptic scenarios, like in The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and Mad Max . Warfare over scarce resources. Famine. Epidemics. Billions dead. The slightly less pessimistic see a post-peak world with more self-sufficient communities. Yet, they live, despite having all the makings of a suicide cult. These are people who had seemingly answered Camus’ famous dictum that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” On the heels of the Great Recession, the burst of the housing bubble, Occupy Wall Street, peakists are, by their own definitions, convinced not of the resilience of capitalism but its imminent collapse. Perhaps the strangest thing is that very few of them (28 percent) have ever been involved in formal or political activities related to energy or environmentalism (most who made up this figure had only attended a meeting or so). They see the apocalypse coming not by way of radical Christian millenarianism or eschatology but as an extrapolation of what we all know. To foresee the end of American imperialism or global capitalism: if only. And, of course, of course: it’s a shame to have so little hope—which must be what their friends tell them, making them want to gouge their eyes out. But at the same time: how much evidence do we really have, at that guttural, searching level, that peakists are irrational? I can’t imagine believably pathologizing such beliefs or compartmentalizing them into “religious fervor.” If a peakist dies by suicide tomorrow, won’t we do what we always do—ascribe it to mental illness instead of seeing it as a reasonable conclusion of their own ideology? I can’t say why, but peakists have been crowding my head, fuming in it, ever since. I found the forums, the books, and Oily Cassandra. I want to hold onto that. They’re in this “category” I can’t quite name, a resolution that I know has many more forms. I want to find enough things to fill this category, to figure out what it really is. I won’t be trying to kill myself again anytime soon. I’ve been reassuring my friends and family that I’m no longer suicidal for a while now. I reassure them that I’m no longer suicidal because I sense that the things that feel suicidal seem to be expanding. They don’t yet know I actually mean it now. Which is fine. Chronology still matters little to me. Even the possibility of all this newness peakists see coming feels woeful. But there is something about this time, in forward motion, that feels unanswered. Into this computer screen bubbles the thought, I know these people, don’t I? Team Sweet Meteor of Death. May 2023. If this is dying, death sure is noisy. It’s all gotten a bit much, see. All this anticipation of extinction. Almost as if we’ve all signed some collective suicide pact, waiting in the wings to be euthanized. Almost none of us have any ability to change things, which has ossified into an excuse for some very loud resignation. Almost as if Stoicism has finally prevailed as the most wise tradition in moral philosophy. Montaigne once praised the tranquil nature of peasants who had been ravaged for war, plague, and destruction, and remained stoic above it all. Perfect little saints, those peasants. The ones who paid no mind to the horrors they endured. They accepted it all willingly, and quietly. But we’re not those peasants. We’re certainly not quiet. We seem perhaps a little too willing. I’m talking, of course, about the apocalypse and that all who anticipate it do so with such wildness. Despairing with such hedonism, we herald autumn upon a single fallen leaf. Every moment in time brings cultural affirmation of an infinite number of responses to climate change ranging from the gleefully optimistic to the pessimistic, and now we are at its most abyssal ebb. Everywhere, there is a feverish variation of that Larkin verse: Most things may never happen: this one will. And that faint hint of the absurd , an inner voice insists, for the sake of completeness. More than a faint hint. Recently I spotted an issue of Harper’s in an airport harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. Subtitled “The Sense of an Ending,” which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination, the story is mostly a long list of apocalyptic trends. One could conclude that it is about reaffirming Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of late capitalism’s impending “systems collapse,” but mostly, it’s a lengthy primer of, and thus more about, Christiandom’s long history of thinking about the end times. I couldn’t say. It’s horribly imprecise. In the most recent editorial of the Real Review : “If every summer is the worst on record, then all summers are one summer, an identical experience; disaster as inevitability.” Alas, alack: we are going to die. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious deconstructs apocalyptic tropes in culture: the match cut montages in films and television shows, the attempts towards making the apocalypse ridiculous, the consumer demand for hours upon hours of television shows about the world after the Big Thing happens. At some point in the early days of The Pandemic, I realized just how homogenous my to-read pile of books, recently or imminently published, really was. Disaster. Catastrophe. Death. Precarity. Crisis. Extinction. Apocalypse. We could quibble all day about each of their different meanings, but boy, do they blur together nowadays. I started keeping a list of all this apocalyptic stuff when the pandemic began (like Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I feel an urge for the plural—unhappy with the real one and doomed by all possible choices, I proffer a gluttony of apocalypses). The list kept me from feeling too useless, but soon it became so long I started using tally marks. Before I stopped counting entirely, I had a tally of seven pieces in the New Yorker , with the annotation “somehow mostly about Trump?!” I do not recall any of them, but the note sounds plausible. I did, however, write a generous paragraph on Amanda Hess’ piece “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll” in the Times. Then other lists of lists. Philip Lehmann wrote about climate engineering: he began by listing recently-published books Generation Dread , The World as We Knew It , and Global Burning . As I read, I got caught up in a series of semantic dilemmas. Has the meaning of “late capitalism” changed, I wondered. Late capitalism today seems to mean the phenomenon of a system going extinct because humanity is too. It’s not just a pyramid scheme anymore. It’s not just about the gig economy. It’s just late, as if to a party. There was also Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All , a technocratic tract that put me off reading for weeks. Climate Change Apocalypse: A Young Engineer’s Travels into the Science and Politics Behind Global Warming , of which I received two advance copies. There was The Apocalypse and the End of History , which I did not read and did not seem to me to be about climate change at all, but the title reminded me of Rancière's idea of “endism,” a phrase used to describe the post-Soviet trend for historians and philosophers to declare something major had ended : whole eras of history or culture. There was a truly startling number of opinion pieces on climate depression, a mental health issue to which I’ve become quite indifferent because it seems to depend on “bad news”, of which we’ve never had a shortage. I begrudgingly watched The Last of Us . Bella Ramsey’s thirteen-year-old Ellie quipped: “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” I chuckled, then thought: if only. Used to be that whenever I read the testimony of survivors of tragedy, I retracted in anguish: accounts from bushfires in Australia, post-nuclear Japan, witness accounts from genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh, or the numerous accounts in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions reports from South Africa, El Salvador, and many other countries after years of unspeakable horror. People who have befallen no such tragedies talk like that now; they use millennial therapy-speak. Why bother calling it “climate anxiety”? Let’s call it what it is: climate nihilism. Usually, when a friend needs to vent and starts with the disclaimer that it’s “not that bad/first world problems,” I reassure them that nobody will be ranking their problems. But in this case, scale really is the nub of the issue. Whose climate nihilism are we hearing from nowadays? Who comprises all these storied authorial voices? The survivor of a flood that’s claimed countless lives writes an obligatory column or two. Quasi-simultaneously, American East Coasters, in presumably their first heat wave, tie themselves up in knots, and that’s all one hears or reads about until it’s over. Climate nihilism is very de rigueur . Like buccal fat removal and crop tops in the men’s section. With the apocalypse all around us, it's hard not to keep thinking of Rancière. Endism was not about climate change, but that tendency he saw—to proclaim an end to History or Politics or Ideology—is easily extended to Humanity. On endism, Kristin Ross wrote in 2009 that “philosophical activity undertaken under the sign of urgency is a new version of an old phenomenon: the heroicizing of the philosopher’s voice, the philosopher as prophet who can see ‘the end’ that others cannot see.” Endism is a viral meme now. There are TikTok stars who may as well all be named Francis Fukuyama. But, I insist, if we’re going to die, let’s at least take a moment to find the right words. The placement of the stress matters. We are going to die. We are going to die . We are going to die. (We are going to die. Too far?) Or we could defer to a YouTube commenter who wrote, on the partially unrelated subject of social media: “I’ve been on Team Sweet Meteor of Death for at least six years.” It’s a bit derivative, but it sounds fun! Apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, indeed. Climate Psychiatric Alliance. July 2023. In the New Yorker , Jia Tolentino writes about “climate anxiety” and how psychology and psychiatry conduct “climate therapy.” Her sources are in unison that “climate anxiety” is a legitimate pathology peculiar to our time. “Climate anxiety,” writes Tolentino, “differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away.” It’s an awfully pedestrian way to think of anxiety: there are any number of things that are unresolvable, but sure, I suppose, we can sigh and pretend this “new” pathology, too, is believable. Halfway through the piece, Tolentino pivots, pondering her own luxury to pontificate about climate change. It's a welcome pivot, to be sure, but it seems designed to be surprising . A young Filipino woman, Isabella, skewers the Western tendency to be “thinking about the Earth, and journaling about it.” Isabella survived Typhoon Ulysses; she experienced more immediate emotions of panic and grief, with little time to process them. Later, a Native American fisherman impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill confesses to living and organizing through a sense of vengeance. None of this is surprising, of course, but it allows Tolentino to end ambivalently. For whatever reason, the story’s surprise element is conveyed most through Tim, a Floridian millennial with whom the piece begins, a man whose journey is meant to seem epiphanic. Tim majored in mechanical engineering. He later traveled to Indonesia, where he felt “dazed by grief” upon the news that orangutans were going extinct. He traipsed around the Sumatran jungle, returning unable to stop thinking about polluted water and carbon footprints, and with a viral case of climate anxiety. He went through a breakup during the pandemic and spiraled into a deep malaise. He then improved through therapy through the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. When we return to Tim at the end of the story, we discover that he had undiagnosed A.D.H.D. “He’d come to suspect,” Tolentino writes conspiratorially, “that he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.” Well, duh. That’s obvious for the same reason this essay may feel obvious: humans are self-indulgent. That is fucking banal. Not so for Tolentino. Save the global pandemic, Tim suffered no natural disaster. He did, like many of us, suffer more prosaic disasters. Breakups. Intense isolation. An undiagnosed condition. In the meantime, psychiatry constructed a whole new pathology to ascribe to his fixating mind. Tolentino unfurls it like some freshly discovered ancient scribe. I may be a formerly suicidal person, but I’d like to think I’ve never thought of myself as uniquely grappling with anything at all. This is what everyone deals with. Isn’t climate anxiety, or even active crisis, always simultaneously in the domain of the intimate and the global? The notion of “climate anxiety” can support a plausible story of a fixating mind. But it cannot support a plausible story of disaster-induced anxiety: a brand-new thing! The neat story can ascribe anxiety to climate change, even pathologize it. An unrelated diagnosis can undo it entirely. Pathologies are often fragile and fictitious. And that’s fine to admit! My own woe led me, rather inexplicably, to study the very thing breeding peakists and nihilists—climate change—and I insist it’s fine to admit to all the conflation. The Climate Psychiatric Alliance cannot possibly be “holistic”; there will always be something greater one will attempt to perceive. And that’s fine! It would not be cruel to deny its categorization, which, I suspect, might be what the Climate Psychiatric Alliance might argue. Yes, I find the pathologizing of “climate anxiety” simplistic and ahistorical. That doesn’t mean that I dismiss the psychic toll of impending disaster. Relationships or careers crumbling as orangutans go extinct? Depressed because you lost your job at the same time as islands far from you are sinking? Therapy’s great for that. Disaster is always personal, always omnipresent. It’s a given. Not the apocalypse— disaster . The kind that reaches into our lives. The kind that is never unique because it lives in skies, seas, selves, and cheap similes. It patiently grows until we can see it. Like any life lived, it aches. Elsewhere, it blazes across scales. In every part of our being and everything else too. Disaster, like life, is all-encompassing; let it be so. Carbon footprints cannot assess pain, for pain is comorbid with far too much. So is disaster. Twin Bed. October 2017. I’ve just realized that I’ve lost another of my closest friends, a friend from college. I’ve sent her so many texts I feel like I’m in a Taylor Swift song. She loves Taylor Swift. I hope she listens to more of her music and gets back to me. “You will lose people!” Zoya is telling me very gravely. Zoya is one of my childhood best friends. She does not tolerate self-sabotage. “And you need to grow up about it,” she continues, because, of course, she does. “I know you’re really bad at letting people go, but you need to get better because this shit happens. People lose friends.” My friend hasn’t gotten back to me. She never will. I’m really not quite sure why the end of a friendship is so much more emotionally gutting than most everything else in life. It’s confounding. Once, my mother didn’t speak to me for six months, and I spent them with no knowledge of how long it would last. I have lost romantic partners. Friends, though—those are some real disasters. They have so little cultural weight. You can’t use them as excuses. The last time I met my friend, I was staying at her apartment in New York. As usual, we shared the bed. One night, halfway to sleep, she told me about the moment she was certain we’d be in each other’s lives forever. A year or two earlier, we’d had a very big fight on Christmas in Chicago. Drunk, we went to a CVS together because we needed to pee. Outside the bathroom, we happened upon a corkboard where the store’s staff had pinned wish lists for a Secret Santa party. That’s so sad, I said. That’s so fucking condescending, she said. It was a glorious fight. I argued that it was really sad because the things they asked for were really cheap and for family members: "$7 airplane model for my son,” “$4 bar of chocolate for my mom.” Wasn’t it enough that they had to work till 2 AM over the holidays? She argued that regardless of my insistence on some sort of solidarity, I was looking down on them. We yelled at each other for twenty minutes, fumed all the way back to my place, and didn’t speak for two days. Neither of us apologized, and then one day, I needed her help, as the only fellow biologist, for an important presentation, and without noting what had happened, we were friends again. Such things happened with many of my friends. But she and I rarely fought because when we did, it was terrible. We once cleared a roomful of drunken partiers dancing to EDM music. Our fights required resolution, or else. The night she recounted our sole unresolved fight, she told me that that was when she realized that no matter how angry she got with me, I was too much like family to her. When I remember that fight and its desperate need for resolution, I return to something about respect. I still think I had a point in that fight, but she did, too, because she has a strong moral compass. Even if I was sometimes at odds with it, I respected it. It was close enough to mine that I could understand it. We didn’t need to say anything that time, I noted in bed. We trusted in each other’s goodness enough to know it was just about the yelling. I don’t understand how we got from then to now. Sleeping next to each other in a twin bed like only significant others and best friends can, we went to sleep cozy and loved. That’s gone now. No fight took place, but I must have done something morally unconscionable because I cannot imagine her having any other reason. I don’t know why it hurts so much, but I have a strange feeling it has something to do with how common it is. Other situations garner far more sympathy. The loss of a friendship is devastating—and banal. People talk about how time heals all wounds, but I am not a paper cut, I am not a severed salamander capable of regeneration, I am not a time-traveler with something other than now. Now, I am indicted for reasons I do not know, and I believe I never will. But Zoya’s right. I’m too old to pretend these things do not happen. I’m walking home as she tells me. There are times even the most romantic amongst us must master moderation. The air was misty when we started talking. It seemed so wispy and idyllic. But now it’s snowing quite heavily, and I must be more pragmatic. My jacket has a hole in the back, and there’s snow wedged near the bottom of my spine. There are more urgent concerns. There is no such guarantee against such losses. A moral compass is no match for the bigness of this world, its ability to keep us separated for the rest of our lives, and its agility with turning fickle decisions to certainties. How much of disaster resides here? In a lost friendship. In days and nights. In the anhedonia of the mind. Do people sit back and wait for the end of days because they’re afraid of losing things or because they already have? Always-Time. November 2019. I’m co-presenting in a session at an Environmental Humanities seminar on “Futurity.” At my suggestion, we've started with a clip of the cold open from the first episode of The Leftovers ’ final season. The clip shows 19th-century Millerites in white robes, standing on the roofs of their houses. They’ve been told a date for the apocalypse. On that day, a husband, wife, and their child climb up onto their roof and wait for it all to end. The day passes, and another date appears; one date after another, they wait, but the apocalypse never comes. The number of believers dwindles; only the wife continues to have faith, and still it does not come until finally, the crushing ignominy makes her a village pariah. The clip ends, and I want to say that now, all of a sudden, a scene I have cried over seems stupid. I’m struggling, really struggling, to figure out what to say next, to move past the Millerites, to find something to say about our future, let alone our “futurities.” Why did I suggest this clip? I’d felt it was relevant to faith, the apocalypse, disaster, change, something—but now I have no idea what I was thinking. Suddenly, I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to equate climate change with apocalypse when, instead, it’s just the same old disasters, except many more and faster. That contraction of time may make it feel like the same thing, but it most certainly is not. And what the fuck is “futurity” supposed to be? I start talking about death instead. About new historical literature on death in the Anthropocene. The collapse of the self in the face of climate change. This happens reflexively, desperately, because as luck would have it, I’m well-versed in the philosophy of death, and remixing snippets of my greatest hits fills up the necessary space. After, there’s a good minute or two of silence, and soon, we’re taking a break for food, piling hummus and tahini and pita onto disposable plates. I’m spending most of my days through gritted teeth. I’m quite exhausted. Look at us, Ivy-Leaguers reading esoteric expositions that are all different ways of saying how our children and grand-children will face the consequences of climate change if we let the Earth warm 3 degrees or more. Our children? If?! How can I emphasize this enough: I have zero idea what exactly I’m supposed to feel when anyone with half a mind knows that we careened off the face of a cliff a long time ago, but is finding ways to avoid admitting that they’re always looking down. Am I missing something here? Am I the only person stupid enough to feel this way? Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic. The Argentinian artist Nino Cobre—sponsored by an environmental nonprofit that seems to have nothing better to do with its money—paints a mural of her on the side of a building on Mason Street in San Francisco. A friend active in the Sunrise Movement tells me she’s exhausted, and her words are all collapsed together with the frustration of her novel-in-progress and the stress of medical bills. I walk out of a class and watch students marching across campus protesting Yale’s lack of action on divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Bernie Sanders details his Green New Deal, and it is the most ambitious set of policy proposals by any candidate. Along comes Jonathan Franzen. “You can keep on hoping,” he writes darkly, “that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” Franzen writes that a kind of denial of climate change catastrophe is present in progressive politics and climate activism. He disparages the “climate activists [who] argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date.” This is the last straw. Here we have a writer who has put down in plain terms the defeatism I feel so often, and I dislike him for it. Luckily, everyone else seems to as well. Why? The easiest part of the answer is that Franzen belittles the Green New Deal with elitist disdain, thumbing his nose at people with bold plans of action. But beyond that, I struggle. Maybe we’re angry because, although there is more than a kernel of truth embedded within the argument, our cynicism and his are keeping us from the work. Sure, I can admit a lot of the work of idealism just isn’t needed. But nobody needs to hear that all we have left to do is to sit back and wait for the apocalypse either. In truth, what we’re all really annoyed by, I think, is the conflation of the affective response of defeatism with righteousness. I may be entitled to feel defeated, but that does not mean it is the right thing to be. Obviously, I’ve felt all along that there’s utility in not admitting what I really believe; why else would it be so much harder than admitting it? But let’s face facts. In a matter of a year or two, climate pessimism will be everywhere very soon, and though we’re fighting for mass action, we’ve really had no good antidote to climate pessimism while we wait. I feel like many of us like to think of climate catastrophe as wholly unique, a real apocalypse. Which it is, but it also isn’t. All the disasters in history have made it so that what we will get is not totally unique. Climate pessimism is what we get when we start to pretend as if nobody’s studied disasters at all. As if people haven’t witnessed them and lived to tell the tale. As if people from the Alaskan Arctic to earthquake-prone island-nations have not been preparing for decades. As if war hasn’t paralyzed peoples for generations, and armies and bombs haven’t obliterated them; as if drought didn’t spark the tinder box of civil war in Syria, and hurricanes haven’t already ravaged New Orleans and Puerto Rico and earthquakes haven’t already devastated Indonesia and Haiti and Kashmir—and oh look, Puerto Rico again too. Climate change isn’t one seismic wave that knocks us all out, and we all know this, but we talk like it is. It will be like it is : a patchwork of storms, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, wars, genocides, civil wars; now here, then there, just much faster, then simultaneously, and many more at an unprecedented scale. Is that better or worse than the apocalypse? What I tell myself is: if humankind had never faced disasters before, then perhaps I could sit around being righteously defeated. It’s a very strange time to be a historian of disaster, which I’m beginning to think of as synonymous with the environmental historian. Yet somehow, alas, I am ardent that this is what I meant to do. I chose this, very actively, this second doctorate, which I realize everyone finds outrageous. And my choice is more confounding because what is it that I am doing ? Looking? Yes, looking. Looking at disaster is paralyzing. Hasn’t that always been the case? Would that be a good reason to stop doing it? Of course not. But the short answer is too short, and the long answer is too long. Sitting here, typing in Bass Library in the extremely peculiar town that is New Haven, inside an empire hell-bent on its own destruction, I want to say it outright: around the time an appropriate arrangement emerges, we will all be dead. But anyway. Simultaneity. November 2022. On a summer afternoon in Colombo, at one of the protests urging the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, I found out that Roe v. Wade had been definitively struck down. I avoided social media, for I was in another place just as afraid. The aragalaya in Sri Lanka had been ongoing for much of the year. With economic collapse came power cuts, inflation went rampant, making all essential goods unaffordable for most. At the same time, I was in the archives, poking my head out every so often for an oral history interview. I was speaking to one diver and reef biologist. At some point he discussed a particular site that has long been a tourist hotspot. His voice cracked, and he began to speak at a lower volume. That site in particular made him sad. I paused to ask him how it felt to be there. “Nothing’s there,” he said. “All white.” We parted ways. I mulled for a long time why it was that the death of coral reefs is often a synecdoche for climate change catastrophe, and not the far better one: sadness. Rajapaksa crept out of the country in the middle of the night. Ranil Wickremasinghe, an equally troublesome man, became President, cracking down on the aragalaya with an abrupt zeal. Something broke between the day before and the days immediately after Rajapaksa’s departure. Those days, people talked how it all now felt a bit pointless, if I asked. They had no fuel in their tuk-tuks, no electricity at home, food was being rationed, shops were shuttering. Then the floods in Pakistan began. Before anyone quite knew the scale of it, I had been on the phone with our co-worker in Karachi who apologized for not having gotten back to me; she’d had no internet or electricity for a week. I told her there was no need to apologize. A question sat momentarily in my mind before it slipped away. That was in July. It is now November in New Haven, and the simultaneity of crises continues to reverberate, as I assume it must for everyone. Recently, SAAG began fundraising for the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan. I read Ibrahim Buriro’s dispatch from his village of Sabu Khan Buriro in Sindh. I was ashamed, because the catastrophe he described sounded quieter than the din in my head, but it felt worse. I didn’t know how to picture it: what losing that many people looks like. There was none. Only centuries-old paintings of the deluge painted by those who predicted the end times. I read the late K Za Win’s poem , written in protest of the military coup in Myanmar, and tried to picture it. I could only see the first row of protesters at a march. Should we resist the urge to project our imagination onto such disasters, as long as we do not not fail to attend to them? The question that had popped into my head before I knew about the floods was: “How bad will it be?” It’s like wishing for the gift of prophecy, even though it would likely cripple us. I wish I could go back to other moments of writing my essay where I was less incredulous of the scale of disaster. Where I can sense myself searching to know what it feels like, to truly relate. I’d like to know if being a witness to the simultaneity of all this is at all useful. I want to know when I’m old enough to stop pretending such things do not happen. I want us to prepare better, together. I want it so badly. Today marks first snow. It’s snowing quite heavily, and I know I must be pragmatic. We may distract ourselves. We may take a moment, and only that. We may distance ourselves, and not only that. A Bunch of Plinys. May 2020. Why on earth did I turn to a second doctorate—to history? I get asked this almost every day. What all those faces say is: this is a crazy person. I answer truthfully. I knew this is what I wanted my life to be, to mean. It is what I want to do. But why? I’ve taken stabs at a number of answers over the past few weeks in this document. They became more and more obscure. Like a tawdry poet, I first went to the Romantics and the sublime. That ambivalence in the face of destruction: horrific, godly, cosmic, perhaps beautiful. But I don’t need any more fucking ambivalence, I am fat with it. I went to the Stoics. To Seneca and Epictetus; to Montaigne, who is not a canonical Stoic, but for me cannot be seen as anything but. But as comforted as I often feel by Stoics, they are revelatory to me almost entirely because of their rhetoric. They are patronizing. I went to Heidegger, with his grand notions of Dasein. Dasein is a human who can only be if they have the foresight to see death coming. Dasein orients towards death as it barrels towards them, with the knowledge of their past. Your futurity —to butcher Heideggerian ideas of “being”—is a state of being in which the future of you is not an unknown. It is not even in the future, really. It is already coming towards you. That was somewhat useful, but it also felt like an elevated version of the Marvel multiverse. I didn’t know what to do with him: emotionally, that is, not epistemologically. “Why does the history of disaster matter to me?” I ask, to explain “in my own words.” Well, perhaps because I feel that familiarizing destruction is key to understanding it. It’s an inexplicable moral sense. There’s a category of things I want to put my finger on, and it pivots on humans, on us; on me, and back on us. It matters because I am not special. Walter Benjamin is famous for his idea of the angel of history. The idea of the angel is simple: The angel looks back and sees catastrophe. A storm hits. The angel cannot help but be swept along into the future while his back is turned. The storm is progress. Benjamin’s oft-cited notion, shorn from context, often loses some of that ambivalent, essayistic quality that makes him so brilliant. The angel of history was a way for Benjamin to recognize what the human is; “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” Benjamin projected his ideas onto a Paul Klee painting in a rhetorical struggle, approaching history like a critic, or even a novelist (earlier in Theses , Benjamin used the more colorful metaphor of a chess-playing puppet to connote "historical materialism." The narrative arc of the angel is clean and thus, perhaps, more memorable). But he was insistent on a "secret agreement" between the past and the present. When people look upon destruction, what can seem feckless, even inhumane, can be the opposite. One needs to look back to move forward. I, too, found succor not in dictums but stories and images . They rang more new and true. For one thing, there’s something odd about the very sources of disaster history. I quickly began to suspect that humans have not historically been good at leaving first-hand traces of the horrors they’ve survived. Most of it happens via proxy. It seems sensible to think that some kind of “instinct,” visceral memory, or closeness would create our corpus of disaster stories, but strangely, none of it seems to push people towards storytelling. Not for that purpose, anyway. First-person accounts from survivors are often obtained, less so offered; often against their will and rarely in a setting of their choosing. Here's one story. The great naturalist Pliny the Elder was a man of his time: he ascribed devastation to providence. He saw Mount Vesuvius explode in 79 CE, and ventured into it. It was the first thoroughly-documented volcanic eruption, a watershed moment for volcanology. He died there. Years later, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with Pliny the Elder earlier on the day of the eruption, related what he knew to the historian Tacitus. On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny’s mother drew her father’s attention to a strange cloud. Pliny the Elder saw it and asked his nephew if he wanted to join him, but the younger Pliny refused (apparently, he needed to study). Pliny the Elder ventured by boat. “In likeness and form,” Pliny the Younger wrote in his letter, “[the eruption] more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else… and then spread out into a number of branches.” "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." Angelica Kauffman (1785) Pliny the Elder, his nephew claimed, journeyed towards the volcano on a small ship. Before he arrived, a woman begged him to save her, and the old man instantly hopped into the role of rescuer. Having saved many other people as well, the older Pliny moved “towards the place whence others were fleeing, and steering a direct course… utterly devoid of fear.” Let’s pause here to note the implausible. Pliny the Elder was notably fat. Most likely, he dictated his observations to an amanuensis from the deck of his ship. Having witnessed presumably enough, Pliny the Elder dined, slept, and died soon thereafter. Pliny the Younger closed the letter with a self-pitying proclamation that his own experience, in Misenum, was of no import. It was an invitation, sort of an “Oh, don’t ask, it was terrible!” And Tacitus asked. So Pliny wrote another letter relating the post-eruption scene in Misenum, where the skies blackened, the streets overrun with “people crowding in masses upon us” to escape the city. Everybody feared death. Pliny’s mother begged of him to leave her to die, for she was old and she did not want to slow him down. He insisted he would not leave her. At nighttime, they returned to Misenum where everything was layered with ashes, in ruin. Pliny the Younger’s second letter is more emotional and evocative than his first. There is a sense that the details making up the knowledge of the eruption—the ash, smoke, the pine tree cloud, the wreckage, the ships, the woman who called for help, the amanuensis who noted what the naturalist saw—are veiling an emotional experience Pliny still shies away from. But he ends this second letter by warning Tacitus menacingly: “You will not read these details, which are not up to the dignity of history , as though you were about to incorporate them in your writings.” We don’t know if Pliny was writing from an impulse of ancient egotism or genuine self-deprecation. But I find an unsettling believability to his warning to Tacitus: even clear-headed observers who survive catastrophe and look back at it feel incapable of the act of doing history. There seems to be a too-authentic closeness that digs a trench, on one side of which a survivor will always be paralyzed, and the job will have to go to someone else. It is like, or perhaps is, post-traumatic stress disorder. Volcanoes took a long time to be figured out; time we do not have. Pliny’s letters about Mount Vesuvius brought volcanology into vogue for a time. And then it's almost as if there was an enormous gap in volcanology from the ancients till seemingly the sixteenth century. Vesuvius erupted again in 1631, and Etna in 1669. Suddenly everyone from Hooke to Newton, Cuvier to Goethe had some opinion. Controversies in volcanology bedeviled philosophers, natural historians, and geologists alike. Well into the nineteenth century, scientists debated ideas of volcanology that could be traced at least as far back as Lucretius. Of course, it's not as if volcanoes went on recess. I can't quite explain the gap, except by way of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that volcanoes, as a concept, are defined by modern science. Thus, perhaps for too many, Pliny the Younger's experience, and the ideas of many others, truly were not up to the "dignity of history." One scholar blames the many lost years squarely on the resurgence of Christian premillennialism, i.e., end-of-days thinking. But premillennialism also coincided with postmillennialism . What with Christian missionaries invading new lands for people to convert, there was also growing optimism for a great era for Christian prosperity; a Golden Age Millennium of greatness before the end was nigh. In this circuitous way, I ended up where I never wanted to be: Christian eschatology, where apocalypse writing always begins. I understand why. The stories are indelible. The Christian view of volcanoes for much of the early modern period does not seem too dissimilar to that of the ancients: both associated volcanoes with punishment and the fires of Hell. Just as Virgil proclaimed that the giant Enceladus was buried under the eruption of Etna by the goddess Athena for defying the gods, Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond proclaimed the upswell of lava as the manifestation of the wrath of God and a damning indictment of the societies inflicted by them. Earthquakes and other disasters, even war, generated similar responses for much of recorded human history: they were all indicative of the wrath of one god or many. The ancient Greeks often blamed earthquakes on the god Poseidon. Japanese folklore blames a great catfish named Namazu. The Book of Revelation chronicles the “seven bowls” of God’s wrath, the bowls poured by angels, each one causing a catastrophic event foreseen in a vision. After the bowls of bodily sores, mass extinction in the oceans, the rivers turning to blood, a literal firebombing by the Sun, and more—finally, there is a giant, world-ending earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth,” the Book of Revelation says, in one of its more modest moments. A rather anticlimactic denouement. Disasters have a way of creating vacancies for moral exhortations—though not necessarily theological ones. All that godsplaining needs somewhere to go. That is familiar to me. I was raised Muslim, and now whenever climate change comes up in the company of elders, all I hear about is qiyamat , or Judgment Day. It’s a busy day. Now that’s new. Growing up, people said all sorts of things were indications of qiyamat . A scandalous billboard. A particularly brazen female news anchor. On one baffling occasion, it was the way my friend’s cat meowed. Peevish uncles often used qiyamat as a nationalist, anti-India sentiment. But it’s so big now. Those uncles now know that the flood and the cat’s meow do not sit in the same category. Like scholars, they invoke human blunders. Qiyamat is a prophecy foretold centuries ago. It’s history; it’s up to the dignity of history. We may be up to the dignity of history. It depends on what we do with ourselves. I wish to dignify people through history; that is my only answer to explain my crazy decision to turn to it. That does not mean I am special. None of us are. The Ruin and the Volcano. November 2020. For Benjamin, “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” W.H. Sebald did that literally. I said earlier that environmental history may well be the history of disaster. But Benjamin and Sebald take this one step further. When the question is strictly material , one could rephrase it: is the history of the disaster the same thing as the history of the ruin? Sebald was born and grew up on the outskirts of the Bavarian Alps in 1944. His father, a prisoner of war until 1947, was part of the Nazi armed forces. Images of destruction and the ruins of postwar Germany were the first things he recalled when he felt like he was returning “home.” In a famous essay, Sebald the child and the adult, reveals himself to be totally confounded by just how little there was to see of all this destruction in the lives of people: It is true that the strategic-bombing surveys published by the Allies … show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the hundred and thirty-one towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about six hundred thousand German civilians fell victim to the air raids and three and a half million homes were destroyed … but we do not grasp what it all actually meant … It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness. So many people all just carried on as if nothing had ever happened. That so much of it occurred after Hitler was long gone, after war elsewhere had ended, did not matter. For Churchill, Solly Zuckerman, and Arthur Harris, the strategy of total destruction was to achieve “wholesale an annihilation of the enemy, with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment, as can possibly be achieved.” Rendered by Sebald, it is devastating, perhaps even sublime, the extent to which the destroyed environment was just as much a part of the architecture of human habitation as a city or a dwelling. “How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin?” he asked. There is no answer, not in Sebald’s novels, not in his essays. There are simply things going on unfolding: things decaying, ruins existing. He walked along the millions of bricks left behind from the air-dropped ordnances and the fire-storms and the collapse of apartment buildings, surveying the postwar city landscape excavating brick-by-brick, and found no answer as to what need there was for such destruction except for the whims of a few men. What we should fear the most is not the hurricane but when people are failed. In his “nature-history” of Paris, Benjamin merges uncontrollable disaster with a proletarian mob—it’s a possibility of great potential. The potential wobbles, though, in his words. In some places, in many places, revolution may manifest as mindless destruction—what if it’s so boundless, there is not enough potential left? There are many who covet the safety provided to many of us; they’re not wrong. The very geography of disaster, we all know, is unjust. And to me, the white-hot anger of a people wronged is more terrifying than a volcano. It is conceivable that a situation arises where it won’t matter who is seen as culpable; it is conceivable that powerful actors make it so. If we remain paralyzed for too long, repeating mantras of anxiety or the denial of its existence, it will not be a hurricane that tears us limb from limb. My friend Meg recently wrote to me about this essay. “I think sometimes you use your brain as a way to step away from the most uncomfortable parts of yourself because you are more comfortable with the realities of global disaster than you are with the personal ones,” she wrote. She’s right, but that also describes most academics. They say to write the book you want to read. Unfortunately, I can’t, for this one cannot be written alone. Now-Time. August 2023. Now somehow, now somehow, the people in the worlds I inhabit most closely—that of academia, environmental humanities, global history, energy history—don’t actually look at apocalypticism, endism, whatever you may call it, straight in the face. Even though the works that define these fields, and those continually published, are painstaking in deepening the scale of the problems climate change poses, the problem of all this pessimism is not spoken aloud, and if it is, the responses are so very trite. There are exceptions—I admire the work of Bedour Alagraa and Anna Tsing, among others—but the hush is deafening. Over the years that I have brought up climate pessimism to various scholars, I have only ever received one answer, delivered in dismissive, patronizing fashion. It is always the same answer everyone has heard many times: about the necessity of hope, rarely justified in any real or specific terms insofar as having reason to hope, but simply an expression of it. As if we haven’t heard that old canard before. As if people are incapable of holding things simultaneously. As if ambivalence or serious engagement is a step too far for academia. Any other answers are mere quibbles disguised as serious responses: “It won’t be an apocalypse,” “We need to organize.” In the very vocation set out to define the problem, to demonstrate how we got here, the people populating it have no answer to how many are responding affectively to climate change, or to the many alarming cover stories and books and articles producing their doom-scroll, or even what all those alarmist signs are a symptom of. Here, in hallowed halls, climate pessimism is verboten. The most generous version of it I’ve heard is by AOC in a recent Instagram Live. After spending half an hour outlining how climate change impacts every aspect of human life, she was in a bit of a hurry. “I am a big believer in ‘climate optimism’, she said. “You ever notice that it's easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is things actually working out and getting better? People are reactive, and the challenges that the climate crisis presents to us are going to require a reorganization of the parts of our society. And people don't like being proactive… I just really believe that climate doomerism and cynicism in general leads you down a very dark path.” There’s the chastisement on moral grounds, and then there are things that, frankly, sound peakist. The chastisement is typical. The biggest part of it is the idea that cynical people are necessarily doing nothing. Then there are the things at odds with the core ideas AOC has long espoused. It’s not the fault of the vast majority of people. Individualistic action will not be enough. Power, capital, and political systems are resilient. The imminent collapse roars back. “[Systems] are simply going to collapse, and we can make a proactive decision about that,” AOC argues. “Certain things collapsing doesn't mean doom. It means we need to make space for a better way. … We should not have to move heaven and earth to save these things that are collapsing under their own weight because they never made sense.” What does this mean? What silent majority is moving heaven and earth to save systems, and what exactly is collapsing again? What proactive decisions were the vast majority of people on this planet supposed to but failed to make? Is the argument that there is some sort of absence of global protest, or do we, as usual, just mean America? There is no shortage of calls for revolution; there is so much uncertainty as to its imminence despite centuries of vociferous argument. But let's run with AOC's premise anyway. If all that is true, perhaps we should also not lose many things that are precious: lives, primarily. How can anyone be sure that “systems collapse” and “death” won’t happen simultaneously? They might! A Marxist education allowed me to understand that acceptance of lives lost is at the heart of the idea of revolution. Is climate optimism too shy to admit into its arena that horrible, uncertain trade-off? For me, climate optimism is denialism that there is logic to pessimism; a relegation of pessimism to the emotional, supposedly illogical. It requires recourse to very dubious things: that imagining utopia is difficult, that our imaginations can incite action, that our actions are sufficient, that doomers are uninformed, that systems are tottering. Climate optimists often directly contradict what they elsewhere preach—that the scale of the problem is pervasive—with a strange Pollyannaish turn to hope as a cure-all. At best, it is an unfinished thought. Like mine. The overwhelming majority of peakists express views that are far-left. And of course, it should be said that some of what peakists believe doesn’t justify their survivalist thinking. They’re largely anti-capitalists who believe capitalism is short-lived, and that oil production will peak soon, or it already has. To me, either of those seems like a reason to hope—I just don’t quite believe them. Different people take the same evidence to mean radically different things. The human brain is not internally consistent in its own logic, and in this peakists are not unlike climate optimists. Peakists also believe the state has not done anywhere near enough for racial minorities. They express the belief that the US is an oligarchy, they disdain both political parties, and electoral politics in general. They sound like almost everyone I’ve met in the US who identifies with the left. Doomers, as a group, may well be overrepresented on the left. They are many of the people we are looking to recruit. Some have been pathologized with “climate anxiety.” Climate optimism would have us shame it out of them. Validation of what another might be feeling cannot exist here. To which I must ask: are we trying to lose? Then, that canard—that being pessimistic is unethical and dangerous . It’s a slippery slope argument. Like most slippery slopes, it’s facetious and determinist. It’s a finger wag—one might say “~vibes~”—as a statement of belief based on illusory evidence. Lynne Segal in the Boston Review argues that “such pessimism can dangerously align us with a form of reactionary conservatism, merely gawping at the dire state of things, apparently helpless before impending disaster.” Segal mentions the dystopia of The Hunger Games as a fantasy that obliterates utopian visions. For Segal, what combats pessimism is collective action and solidarity which produce care and joy. It is a lovely thought, but again: we have and continue to do all of this, and there is no magic threshold Segal or any theorist can come up with. Which makes it all just hoary preaching to the choir. There is no reason to believe pessimism should necessarily make one a reactionary conservative. Emotions are not partisan objects. I’ve been a pessimist, and I persist with my work. I believe it very important. As I see it, most people who dedicate time to understanding and combating climate change feel a great deal of pessimism actually: it’s perfectly natural to feel several things all at once. And while solidarity is joyful, organizing is exhausting . Ask anyone organizing a union: most of the time, it feels like we’re on a giant hamster wheel. I see no reason why my most doomer self would spurn collective action in perpetuity. It feels strange, yes: why bother fighting when you feel so defeated? But that’s precisely it. So many things are not unique about this time. Humans fight unwinnable battles all the time; chastising pessimists with variations on the same cliché is not, in fact, a solution. And neither Logic nor Rhetoric have ever been the wisest antidotes for depression , though they’ve been deployed for much of recorded human history. And also: excuse you, The Hunger Games is excellent . There is no evidence that its audience slipped into reactionary conservatism upon its end. Why would it? It ends by dismantling the dystopia. My point in all this, my reason for vacillating so violently seems plain to me now. I want admission. Our own private disasters collide with global ones, and we feel terrible. If we want to organize, surely part of the “care” of solidarity is to recognize the thing climate activists and scholars seem loath to admit: we’re not feeling good about it. And that’s fine. Sure, it will make the slogans harder to write, but it’s better than deluding ourselves that our comrades truly believe that we can pull off fossil fuel divestment and break pipelines by the end of the year, and if we do so, we’re saved . But most of us don’t believe that’ll happen, any of it. Sign us up anyway. In 2017, Ashley Dawson argued that global capitalism now is not so much about uneven development but about uneven disaster, even if Western media scarcely covers disasters in developing countries. Spectacular, record-breaking heat waves struck the Pacific Northwest, on the heels of of all those elsewhere in the Americas. Then the catastrophic wildfires devastated Hawai’i, with thousands dead, injured, or missing. I suspect those were the things we all heard about. Meanwhile, Typhoon Khanun hit the Korean Peninsula, where there have only been five typhoon-level storms since 1945, and Russia, destroying farmland, killing and injuring hundreds. Typhoon Doksuri killed approximately sixty people in Fujian province, China. The El Niño phenomenon causing drought in much of East Asia has villagers in Indonesia digging up river beds. 8,000 evacuees are stranded as the wildfires in the Canary Islands continue to rage. Wildfires rage in Greece. These are just some natural disasters. I’d wager every country is plagued by problems we parcel as political or economic that are exacerbated by climate change or energy in some way. I intend this match-cut exposition to situate us, at the very end, not so much in time but in banality. None of us know how to simultaneously obtain the stories, persons, and sentences of disaster, let alone the planet. Disaster resides. In the now-time, as in the everywhere-time, always-time, and to-be-time. It seeps. It sets up house. The doomer is Cassandra. Some may suspect she is telling the truth. They all treat her as if she is insane. In John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Gena Rowlands’ Mabel, supposedly a manic psychotic, is stranded in an aggressive family who do the opposite of what they say. They all keep insisting they must have a good time, but they never even try. All they do is caterwaul. Mabel knows how to have a good time. She reacts, she loves, she dances, she sings. She seems to know precisely what’s going on. She demands someone tell her the truth, but they never do. Six months pass in a mental hospital, where she is treated with electroshock therapy. When she returns, her husband asks her at the dinner table what the hospital was like, her eyes dart around. “Everybody’s here,” she says tentatively, like someone learning to speak. “Seems like a party.” Later, when she mentions the hospital routine, she is chastised. The cruelty of this fait accompli is immeasurable. The sane peck and pick away at you until you howl in pain. “Aha!” they’ll say in unison. Mabel asks tearfully of her father at the crowded table: “Dad, please stand up for me.” He stands up. She says no, not that, sit down. “Please stand up for me.” He stands again. “I don’t understand this game,” he says. “Good times from now on,” Mabel’s husband yells. “Things are gonna get better and better and better, and then they’ll get better than that and then they’ll get better.” I do not endorse this ridiculous notion that this is how we should treat pessimists. I do not endorse it because oftentimes, I agree. Oftentimes, I don’t. So what? What are we so afraid of that we can’t admit how afraid we are? What’s the worst that can happen? That with their last breath, the doomer turns to smirk and say: “Told you so”? At the Sentence. December 2022. It is the day before 2023. I don’t know what I was yesterday, but I am a pessimist today. Not so long ago, believing in climate change at all was the strangest kind of inversion: we, the believers, were equivalent to the Millerite pariah; the deniers the apocalypse-skeptics, all the people who rolled their eyes at religious zealots. Now it feels that axis has spun, bewilderingly pitting optimists and pessimists at opposite ends. Of course, we all have our reasons. We think they are good. But is there an axis at all if anyone can be of two minds? Recently, I pulled up my list on the impending apocalypse, and instead of alarm, I felt inadequate to actually work on climate change for a few reasons. The first is embarrassing. In the beginning of the 2020, I fell into a deep writing slump, and aside from the words on these pages—which I considered diary entries—I have written nothing since. That is until two days ago when my friend Sarah read this draft and forced me to complete it as an editorial. What’s worse, I’ve lured you into reading about disaster, but I still don’t know what it means. What is it? As far as I can tell, the disaster we chronicle does feel more like ruin. Like Sebald, that’s the only way I can really picture it, and the picture is after the fact. Not writing had an interesting effect on my brain. For the first time in my life, the closest I can come to original thought is in visual art. Six months ago, I bought some fancy artist papers and a canvas, acrylic paints, India ink, and I started to paint something I’d sketched out. I’d learned to embroider over the pandemic so every time I just didn’t know to make something, I’d correct it by using thread. Not to give anything form, just to fill space. I tell myself they’re supposed to be columns and I let the stitching falter, to make myself feel better. I’m making an old ruin. So, in other words, I learned how to embroider, paint, color, and flounder solely to attempt at making a point. Isn’t that something? "Untitled" Acrylic, india ink, thread. By the author (2022) Two things bubble out: aesthetics and death. In recent years, I’ve become a particular fan of Derrida, which is surprising, because for quite some time, he was more impenetrable to me than even Heidegger or Foucault were. Then just the other day, I read Brian Dillon on the subject of Derrida. Dillon writes: I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgment of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along… I fell in love with such moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there was anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The way Dillon links Derrida’s personal history to disaster and language makes my heart skip a beat, as does the defense of the aesthetic. It would be wise to use every thinker or theorist in this crisis this way. Trying harder than we have before to humanize one another, a prosaic thing to say, but what tactic could be sounder? What is it about the aesthetic that can feel like it might just save us, save everything, even if not in the literal sense? In an earlier draft of this essay, I’d written: “Nobody, not even Greta Thunberg, needs a mural of Greta Thunberg.” I really believed that at the time, very deeply, like I believed all things. But whenever I’m sure, I begin to suspect myself more. The whole premise of my woes on disaster are linked to the aesthetic, particularly the avant-garde. I, too, hate the word “aestheticizing.” The aesthetic is the one realm instinct has yet to fail me. I cannot explain why I love something aesthetically: I do or I don’t. That’s how it is with language. The thing I’d missed about disaster for a long time was how banal it is. I’d failed to keep up with where it was—which was everywhere. When I stopped writing, for example, it was as if there was a crashing. A compaction of words occurred, and words began to slip away from me, as if a whole era’s trace in the geological record had just collapsed in on itself. That is a ludicrous analogy, but I wanted to make it, and so I did. Because I am not required to be equivalently important to the geological record. I did not sign a legal document or swear an oath, “I will never use language that may imply that two things are equal in importance even if I do not mean it.” I made the analogy because language and aesthetics are battlegrounds. They shift. We try to keep up. We fail. We try to specify them. We fail. And we will always fail because they make up the “we.” We fight this losing battle so hard. We even pretend we’re winning. We play with things that seem very real all the time. Right now, we’ve fixed time on terms that are wholly mine. The world outside is moving faster than us. It doesn’t care. That may lull you into thinking that what is happening does not matter, but we do this all the time. We fix borders, even though we know they do not exist, which is why what our brains somehow seem incapable at holding many things at once. We foreclose the simultaneity of disaster. For no good reason, and against our principles, even the best of us hold onto borders for dear life. Floods devastated villages, towns, cities, and peoples across Pakistan—and actually, Afghanistan, and this omission does actually matter. Border disputes and lynchings occurred so close to us that some of those killed may even have popped up on your Tinder at some point. In Sri Lanka, economic and political collapse may have seemed joyful in what it brought forth—the mass protests—but in truth, the disaster crippled the whole island-nation’s well-being, health, ability to work, to heal, to move. In the Maldives, an archipelago not far away from Sri Lanka, a brutal Islamist government has cracked down on the most benign of citizens, all whilst a drug epidemic and gendered violence continue unacknowledged. There are some luxuries some places have: its writers do not need to write anonymously, for instance, as I do not. It’s only occasionally even crossed my mind. But we know just how many places this is not true for. We all accept how little agency we have over the climate crisis individually. But we do have agency: over time, over our minds, over our language, over our aesthetics—all places disaster will reach into and hollow you out unless you grab ahold of it. My own agency is in these words; if there’s something other than ideas or a shoulder to cry on to offer, I haven’t found it yet. Has all this been about politics? That’s the wrong question. In The Origins of Dislike , Amit Chaudhuri writes: “That word, “about”, is a key term in Anglophone literary discourse, and is meant to enforce a dichotomy between creativity and thought, writing and event.” The “about”, he says, “may be dispensed with in a way that allows poetics and politics to flow into each other.” I want to return to the category: that question I asked myself many years ago. What is it that I have been writing for all these years? It reads like a diary. Slowly, it became an essay. Thankfully, I saved the original drafts because as I read back, I sensed continuity. It is being published as an editorial. It’s all a category problem I bring up because my insistence that this be seen as an essay, not a declamation, is characterized by doubt, by my inability to give you direct answers as a form of mimesis for the mind. The problem with doubt is the insolubility it creates with myself. On the one hand: I am not pertinent here. I am not at the center of the point I am making. None of this has anything to do with me. But maybe: I am pertinent here. I am at the center, and although I do not like it, I chose it. It is self-centered. It is all about me. And everyone’s pertinent here: the individual and the collective need not be at odds. Queen Bed. June 2023. I spent a few nights at my friend Nur’s place in Brooklyn just before I left for Colombo earlier this month. It was good for me. No, it was necessary. The night before I left, I awoke abruptly at 3am. I’d had a dream about my lost friend, the one I hadn’t heard from in years. I didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though I assumed she still lived in New York. On a lark, I searched on Instagram and came across a montage from a few months earlier. She’d gotten married. I watched it over and over. I sat up, elated, pausing the video to look at her face. She was happy. She was mid-laugh in every photo. I could hear it, that laugh that was like if Phoebe Buffay was a cartoon witch. I recognized other faces from college. They were adjusting her hem, holding her hands, or stiltedly smiling. I was so happy; she deserves nothing less than such joy. I didn’t even notice that I was crying. My simultaneous reactions were extreme. It felt so strange to catch myself in the process of feeling them. I felt guilty the next day when I asked Nur the next day as she got off a work call if I could talk to her. I told her how the two sentiments were completely separate: my genuine happiness for her and my self-pity. I remember them differently, even. I’d pored over every frame because I was desperate to know if she was happy, and she was. I’d cried for a long time, before I called Zoya. Whether I schedule my confiding or not, I feel guilty. Neither Zoya nor Nur had any advice for me; they just listened. Until this time, I thought I’d gotten quite good at letting my friend go. I thought of her now and then. When I read the melodramatic letters of Pliny the Younger, I remembered thinking how funny she would have found them. I remember this one time years ago when she, too, had gone somewhere alone: Paris. I don’t know if she “disappeared,” only that, as she told me later, secretively, that she’d had a grand time. I didn’t pry. Speaking to Zoya and Nur was an admission of defeat. Turns out, I’m still not good enough at letting people go. But it also turns out that nobody expected me to be. Maybe what Zoya had wanted to do was permit me to think I could. Maybe she changed her mind. Either way, she did not say, “told you so.” It was kind. Kinder still to admit that it doesn’t work. Then I knew something else. The problem was considered fixed. For some, it’s easier when a problem can be marked “complete.” I cannot control other people, only myself. A knot tied loose is two or more threads dangling in the wind. Different friends see different hues in us. Those hues don’t disappear just because they aren’t perceived. They’re still there, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is the problem. I hope to reunite with them my whole life. I’ll hold candles for them, like Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers . “People hold candles, Nora,” he tells an old lover, presumed dead for decades. It’s unfathomable to me that people live with regrets they know they will carry. Kindnesses were done. Then they were over. Things were accepted, and with yet more friends, I receded into the black. Which is nowhere at all, or so it feels. This time I’ll tie a different knot. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. FEATURES On Smelling Men’s Hair & Other Lessons in Impropriety Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. Rasti Farooq Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ SUB-HEAD Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Ode To History" (2024), gouache on paper, 21 x 28 inches, courtesy of Khadijah Rehman. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Lahore RASTI FAROOQ is a writer, actor and producer from Lahore, who, having worked with Lahore's pioneering animation studio Puffball for 8 years, is now adrift as a freelance creative. You can find her in the film Joyland playing Mumtaz, or in one specific coffee shop around 11 a.m. playing Girl With Book. 25 Mar 2026 Essay Lahore 25th Mar 2026 KHADIJAH REHMAN (b.1992) is a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from the National College of Arts (2017) and works in both traditional and digital mediums. Her work has been on display in galleries locally and internationally, and ranges from gouache paintings and embroideries to digital explorations. mourning in schizophrenic time Jaan-e-Haseena 27th Oct Beyond the Lull Pramodha Weerasekera 2nd May The Cost of Risk in Bombay’s Film Industry Nihira 5th Aug Into the Disaster-Verse Kamil Ahsan 12th Mar Fictions of Unknowability Torsa Ghosal 28th Feb On That Note:

ORGANIZER Sharmin Hossain SHARMIN HOSSAIN is a Bangladeshi-American queer Muslim organizer and artist, from Queens, New York. She is the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising , building national Asian American political power that contributes to movements for racial justice, abolition, anti-militarism, and democracy through political education, and deep base building. She was the Campaign Director of the Liberate Abortion Campaign, managing the coalition of more than 150 reproductive justice and rights organizations, groups, and abortion providers fighting for abortion access. ORGANIZER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Ibrahim Rayintakath IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH is an illustrator from and art director from Kerala, intrigued by all forms of visual communication. His clients include The New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, Harper Collins, and more. He is currently based in Bangalore. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

PHOTOGRAPHER Mashal Baloch MASHAL BALOCH is a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Balochistan, Pakistan. Baloch is a trainee at DAP (Documentary Association of Pakistan) for their six month documentary training program called Doc Balochistan , supported by Berlinale Talents. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Diplomat and Baluch Hal . She has been awarded Pakistan’s largest-ever filmmaking grant, Stories From Southern Pakistan, by Patakha Pictures. PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement Feb 28, 2021 Mashal Baloch Mahrang Baloch's Struggle Against Enforced Disappearances Feb 18, 2021 Shah Meer Baloch LOAD MORE

Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. OCTO, BLUES OF MALAYA (2024). 23.5” x 35.5”. Artist · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Struggling for Self Respect LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 20 Dec 2024 th . Letter from our columnist . To counter the growing influence of Hindu extremism within the West Malaysian Tamil Hindu diaspora, Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai ( Black Shirt Youth Movement ), a new Periyarist coalition in the country, organised the International Youth Rational Forum . It was meant to educate the public on the anti-fascist and rationalist principles of Periyar’s Dravidian ideology. The forum held on December 24, 2023 , welcomed several prominent Periyarist speakers including Tamil Nadu’s SM Mathivathani and Sri Lanka's Sathees Selvaraj. It was initially scheduled to be held at the MySkills Campus in Kalumpang, Selangor, but on December 18, 2023, the director, Pasupathi Sithamparam, received harassing phone calls from Hindu extremists. Fearing backlash from donors he revoked permission forcing the organisers to find a new venue within a week. The following day, 27 Hindu organizations urged the Malaysian Home Ministry to stop the forum alleging it went against Kepercayaan Kepada Tuhan (Belief in God), the first clause of the Rukun Negara (Malaysian National Principles). The clause states that citizens must submit to the power of God. While the Malaysian state claims that the Rukun Negara, constructed in 1970, was a way to reconcile with the aftermath of the 1969 race riots, prominent Malay-Chinese intellectual and former political prisoner Kua Kia Soong counters this narrative. He argues that the “race riots” were exploited by the emerging Malay capitalist class to gain political authority over the then-ruling aristocracy. According to Kua, the principles were designed to control the masses and prevent challenges to Ketuanan Melayu (Malay Supremacy), embedded in the national constitution. This is also evident in the second and third clauses, which reify citizens’ unquestioning allegiance to Malay royalty, the country, and the constitution. On December 21, 2023 , Karunchattai held a press conference refuting the allegations from the NGOs. He stated that the principles are not against the nation’s political foundations of race, religion, and royalty (the "3Rs") and Hindu extremists are targeting them for their Periyarist identity. Despite obstacles, the forum's programming was effectively executed. Photo courtesy of the author. Following the press meet—while organisers were picking up the international speakers from the airport—they were informed that the permission to host their forum at the Wisma Tun Sambanthan hall was revoked after the venue received complaints. Fortunately, that very same night, members of Karunchattai met with the management of the KL & Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall who granted them permission and declared solidarity. The next day, Nagenteran Sandrasigran, the founder of Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai, was called into the Dang Wangi police station following additional complaints. The police interrogated Nagenteran about the nature of his organisation, the forum, and Periyarism, but he was released the same day without further action. The Malaysian Immigration Department (MID) also intervened, informing the organisers that their international guest speakers had travelled under the wrong visa and needed a special one to participate in the forum. MID restricted the live streaming of the event and also implemented orders to stop and interrogate the participants as they travelled to the region. "There have been many Dravidian forums in Malaysia before, where overseas speakers were invited, but nothing this severe has ever happened before,” Nagenteran observed. Harassment and deliberate sabotage were inflicted on both organisers and speakers. On the day of the event, while the speakers were in their hotels, they received suspicious calls from people pretending to be the organisers, asking them to come down to the lobby. “I told them to stay in their rooms until I called them and not to pick up calls from unknown numbers,” Nagenteran said. The entire forum took place under the vigilant presence of the Malaysian police and immigration department. Seven police officers, including the Dang Wangi Special Branch, Bukit Aman Special Branch, and the Kuala Lumpur Contingent Headquarters, along with nine immigration officers, surveyed the forum. There were several other events organised after the main event with constant police presence throughout the day. In addition, about ten representatives from various Hindu NGOs attended the event. One representative, Rishikumar Vadivelu, vice president of the NGO Hindhudharma Maamandram , refused to stand up for the Malaysian Tamil Thai Vaazhtu (Tamil Anthem), penned by Malaysian Tamil writer Seeni Naina Mohamed . Secretary Ponvaasagam of Malaysia Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) and several other MDK members noted his behaviour and approached Rishi to firmly advise him to stand up, but he refused. Later, when a photo of Rishi’s antics went viral on social media, he declared that he didn't want to, nor should he have to, stand for a Tamil anthem written by a Muslim. He insinuated that the Tamil literary icon Seeni Naina Mohamed was a “Muslim missionary” trying to proselytise Tamil-Hindus for Islam. Hindhudharma Maamandram's President, Radhakrishnan Alagamalai, sent a letter to Deputy National Unity Minister SaraswathyKandasami reiterating that the forum was in direct opposition to the Malaysian national ideology. Saraswathy, an opportunistic caste-Hindu politician with strong ties to caste-Hindu associations, sent a letter to the home ministry emphasising the much speculated threat of atheism. She also mentioned that one of the speakers had a speech titled “Periyar from a Marxist Perspective,” fueling the anti-communist sentiment already present in the state. The ministry advised Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports Adam Adli , who previously contributed to the cause and accepted the invitation to inaugurate the forum, against following through on his plans. Just a day before the event, Adli’s assistant, Mr. Amar, informed Nagenteran that the Deputy Minister would not be attending. Nagenteran expressed his disappointment, stating that moral support from the governing party could have been significant in legitimising their cause. The influence of Periyar in West Malaysia dates back to the 1930s, driven by the Tamil diaspora. During this time, Periyarists established their own Dravidian organisations in erstwhile-Malaya that engaged with the political realities of Peninsula Malaysia, alongside the self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu. Malaya’s Tamil Reform Association (TRA), founded in 1932, published Tamil Murasu , a newspaper dedicated to cultivating Dravidian ideology. The paper covered various topics, including: Tamil social reforms, Indian nationalism, Dravidian nationalism, and the conditions of indentured workers from Burma to Ceylon. Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Above is a special edition of the newspaper Tamil Murasu in celebration of ponggal, which the Dravidian movement celebrated as Tamilar Thirunaal (Day of the Tamils), celebrating the secular roots of tamil society. Many successful reforms were also introduced by the MTRA revolving around marriage, specifically widow remarriages, self-respect weddings, and the endorsement of the Sharada Child Marriage Restraint Act. However, this momentum drastically diminished in postcolonial Malaysia. Nagenteran detailed how, until the late 1980s, the Malaysian Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) had been a strong community ally of MIC. During the internal power struggle for party leadership between Samy Vellu and Dr. Subramaniam Sinniah , however, MDK’s then-president KR Ramasamy threatened to contest the elections if MIC didn’t change its opportunistic ways. Samy Vellu, aiming to extinguish political rivalry and appease the opposition, lured MDK members into joining MIC, rewarding those who did exceptional work for the party. “Then, the splinter between Pandithan and Samy Vellu happened,” said Nagenteran, citing how caste politics within the party caused MG Pandithan, who belonged to the Paraiyar caste, to split from Samy Vellu, a Thevar. The former formed a new political party called the All Malaysia Indian Progressive Front ( IPF ). Paraiyars and other caste-oppressed individuals from MIC and MDK left their respective organisations to join the IPF. Due to these deviations, the influence that MDK and Dravidian ideology once had on the Tamil population greatly disintegrated. “In the 90s, we could speak about Periyar to our families, but now it has become a taboo subject,” lamented Nagenteran, describing how the political situation shifted drastically within a single generation. Wider Malaysian politics also faced the decline of progressive elements with the rise of Malay Muslim ethno-religious supremacy, who demanded that the Malaysian people come together to form a united front. “We have to embrace multicultural politics,” asserted Gausalyah Arumugam, the secretary of Karunchattai, while also criticising the existing caste pride within the Malaysian Tamil-Hindu community. “When caste prevents them from viewing members of their own ethnic group as equals, how can they form genuine political solidarity with other ethnicities?” Tamils in Malaysia In the early 19th century, European imperialism forcefully displaced many dalit and lower shudra Tamil peasantry as indentured labourers to colonial West Malaysian plantations. While the migration of the Tamil workers was controlled by debt-bondage, free Tamil merchants were able to move with ease. The hellscape system of the plantation was shaped both by European imperialism and brahminical hierarchy. By the 1940s, Tamil workers led labour unions and contributed to the anti-imperialist armed struggle of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Britain's counterinsurgency across Southeast Asia, however, made progressive movements a weak entity in Malaysia, paving the way for the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) to be endorsed as a communal party that could de-radicalize Tamil workers. Nevertheless, Nagenteran notes that since 2008 MIC’s hold on the Tamil workers has drastically deteriorated. The weakening of MIC is attributed in part to the 2000s Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) movement, inspired by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), an international branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS). MIC's continued incompetence in fighting for Indian/Tamil minority rights led to a loss of support among Tamils and relegated it to the sidelines under then Prime Minister Najib Razak. Nagenteran explained that although Najib was a corrupt criminal, he successfully established strong bonds with working-class Tamils through opportunistic concessions. Instead of using MIC as a communication channel, Najib reached out directly to meet with Indian and Tamil communities, Hindu NGOs, and caste associations to protect his vote bank. He visited the Batu Caves Murugan Temple for Thaipusam , provided a grant of RM1 million for the development of the Sri Murugan Tuition Centre, and offered Indians and Tamils the opportunity to invest in the Amanah Saham unit trust funds. In post-Najib Malaysia—with the chaos of COVID-19 still fresh—leadership changes further degraded the hopes of working-class Tamils. The current government is no different in exhibiting a lack of interest in the Tamil population. “Anwar has missed two Thaipusam festivals. There are no Tamils in the cabinet. They even complained that no diaspora ministers were invited to the inauguration of the King!” exclaimed Nagenteran, who detailed the disregard faced by working-class Tamils from political parties, further contributing to their political demoralisation. Hindu Extremism and Casteist Violence in Malaysia Some Hindu temples, like the Batu Caves Murugan temple, are advertised as emblems of religious harmony in Peninsular Malaysia, while others are sites of contention. The Seafield Mariamman Temple is one such example. It was the site of a major dispute between its property owner and the public, revealing the sinister truth undergirding the dysfunctionality embedded within Malaysian society—resulting in a riot in 2018 that made national news. The recurring demolitions of Hindu temples find their roots in the destruction of the rubber plantations and subsequent displacement of Tamil workers, directly influenced by Razak’s New Economic Policy of the 70s, and then cemented by Mahathir's industrialisation throughout the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s, this complex crisis evolved into fertile ground for the emergence of a reactionary Hindu rights advocacy, which uprooted the crisis of the temple from the historical caste-labour politics of the plantation, indentureship, and caste-feudalism. Folk deity temples are among those most often demolished. They are part of Tamil Hindu heritage and are maintained by workers who are descendants of Dalit and Shudra villagers. The villagers used to worship folk deities rather than more Brahminized deities, however, Gausalyah states that, through the influence of Hindu extremism, Malaysian Tamil Hindus are abandoning their folk practices in favour of Vedic traditions. This shift in religious practices is endorsed by temple management in the nation, which is typically governed by members of a specific caste. “Casteists and Hindu extremists work in parallel to each other,” noted Gausalyah, discussing how these spaces are weaponized to assert brahminical hegemony. This, in turn, cultivates extremism under the guise of cultural preservation. Malaysia Dravidar Kalagam Ticket, Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Just like the temples, Tamil government schools are disempowered, receiving very little financial or moral support, making them susceptible to political extremism. Despite schools being secular educational spaces for multi-religious Tamil children, extremism is gradually transforming them into Hindu education camps, with some schools receiving religious textbooks published by the Hindhudharma Maamandram. “It's so easy for Hindu NGOs to work with schools, but they won't let us (Periyarists) in,” stated Nagenteran. Hindu and caste dominance is propagated to children by school management, teachers, and staff of particular castes. Gausalyah notes that the hiring is predominantly caste-based to maintain control over the education system. This influence of Hindutva-led caste segregation is reaching far beyond grade school and into university clubs as well. Gausalyah speculates that extremism has been growing for the past six years, tracing the birth of the movement to a trip Rangaraj Pandey took to Malaysia. “Hindu extremism did not grow this strongly in Malaysia without receiving financial support,” she stated. Although they do not have concrete evidence of where this funding may have originated, Karunchattai is certain that a financial network has been established between groups in Malaysia and stronger Hindu extremist bodies like the RSS. Considering the rate at which Hindu extremism has developed—mirroring the RSS's fascistic language, educational and cultural programs, and political influence in Malaysian governance—the movement cannot sustain itself without substantial financial support. Karunchattai hosts reading groups and classes to support grassroots political work against Hindutva-backed caste extremism. They hope to introduce Periyar into Tamil schools and envision connecting with anti-caste organisations worldwide, fostering a strong internationalist anti-caste vanguard that can support one another in defeating the rise of Hindu fascism. As the politics of Malaysia differ greatly from those of Tamil Nadu, propagating Periyar to the Malaysian masses is a significant task set before Karunchattai, to which Nagenteran responds with determination: “Win or lose, we want to see how far we can go.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 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Features West Malaysia Malaysia Malaya Fascism Hindu Fascism Hindutva Black Shirt Youth Movement Periyar Periyarism Tamil Tamil-Nadu Tamil Diaspora Dravidian Tamil Dravidian Activism Alienation Self-Respect Movement Tamil Reform Association TRA Tamil Labor Unions Malayan Communist Party MCP Malaysian Indian Congress MIC radicalization de-radicalization Hindu Rights Action Force HINDRAF Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS HSS Corruption Anti-Caste COVID-19 Hindu Extremism temple demolition attacks on folk deities Tamil Murasu Singapore Colonialism Hindutva-based Caste extremism Caste extremism Civil Society Organizing Liberation ideology Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

WRITER Kanya D'Almeida KANYA D'ALMEIDA is a writer and reporter whose work has appeared in Granta, BBC Radio 4 , and the Bombay Review . She was formerly the race and justice reporter for Rewire.News, and regional editor for Asia and the Pacific for the Inter Press Service . From 2010-2015 she reported for IPS from the United Nations, Washington, Mexico, and Sri Lanka. She hosts The Darkest Light , a podcast exploring stories of birth and motherhood in Sri Lanka. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST OCTO OCTO is a self-taught Malaysian artist from Mentakab, Pahang, whose multidisciplinary work focuses on the violent politics of the Malaysian state, creatively engaging his practice in themes of police brutality, statelessness, and urban poverty. His art has been featured in Amnesty International's We Make Our World exhibition and Patani Art Space's Kenduri Seni Patani exhibition. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Sophie Neak, Hang On, no.18 (2015). C-print photograph. Artist · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Paean to Mother Nature LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 25 Feb 2025 th . Letter from our columnist . In Cambodia, activists are facing a crackdown on their fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The state is particularly targeting those advocating for environmental and labor rights, and as civil society space continues to shrink and tolerance for dissent wanes, the government is increasingly resorting to arrests to silence perceived opposition. “We have fallen deeply in love with nature, and we don’t want it to be destroyed by corruption. People’s livelihoods depend on natural resources, and they don’t want to lose their land, their home, their culture. We understand them, we feel the pain, so we want to protect them. Our lives are inspired by nature, and that motivates us to take the risk of standing here.” These are the words of a young activist from Mother Nature Cambodia , a youth-led environmental rights organization that launched in 2012. He requested to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. Since the organization’s launch, its members have campaigned on a raft of environmental issues in Cambodia, leading to multiple arrests, members being jailed, and authorities attempting to silence their voices. In July 2024, 10 young Cambodians were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. Three of them, including Spanish co-founder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson , who was deported for his environmental activism in 2015 and permanently banned from re-entering Cambodia, were sentenced to eight years in jail and fined USD2,500. The others were handed six-year terms. Five, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were sentenced in absentia. Ahead of the verdict at Phnom Penh Court of First Instance, 26-year-old Long Kunthea, who has already been imprisoned for her activism, told a group of supporters who had gathered around her that she would not be silenced, encouraging her peers to remain undeterred. “May you all not be hopeless but continue your work in protecting the environment, your rights, your land. Although we are in jail, we will be strong. They can only arrest our bodies, but they cannot arrest our will and conscience,” she said. The sentencing has been condemned by various international organizations, who are lobbying for the release of those imprisoned. “The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment,” said Bryony Lau, the Deputy Director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, in a statement in 2024. “It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, Montse Ferrer, said in a statement that the convictions were “another crushing blow to Cambodia’s civil society,” adding, “Mother Nature Cambodia is a renowned activist group that has brought attention to environmental degradation fuelled by long-standing corruption in the country. “Instead of listening to young leaders at the forefront of the environmental movement, the Cambodian government has chosen to jail those that dare to speak out. The government has shown time and time again that it will not tolerate any dissent.” Attempts to silence the defenders Since 2012, Mother Nature Cambodia has lobbied on environmental issues from illegal sand dredging and lake-infilling to pollution and protesting against mega hydropower dam projects. The organization has successfully campaigned to halt the Chinese-led construction of a mass hydropower dam in Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, that threatened the Indigenous community, as well as the delicate ecosystem of the area. Mother Nature Cambodia also played an instrumental role in ending illegal sand dredging operations in Koh Kong. Mother Nature’s philosophy has resonated strongly with Cambodian youth keen to protect the environment for future generations. The environmental defenders, however, have also repeatedly been targeted by authorities. “The main environmental issue is the corruption in the systems, and these diseases are getting harder to solve because environmental crimes are happening all over the country under development projects,” a member of Mother Nature anonymously told SAAG. However, the arrests and intimidation have failed to dampen spirits, instead fuelling members’ determination to continue their mission. “We must empower and mobilize youth in the country to speak up. They must speak up against repression as we continuously demand an end to devastating actions against nature. We stay focused, resilient and innovative,” he said. “People’s voices are needed to lobby the government to give our friends back their freedom. We won’t stay silent if our friends are still not free. We, Mother Nature Cambodia, are demanding power for the people, not the regime.” In September 2023, Mother Nature Cambodia became the first Cambodian organization to win Sweden’s Right Livelihood award for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” Fighting for the disappearing rights of workers It’s not only environmental activists whose voices are in danger of being silenced. Recent years have seen a targeting of Cambodia’s union leaders, who have been peacefully advocating for workers’ rights amid claims of human rights abuses, unfair dismissals and wages, and mass layoffs. On September 16, trade union leader Chhim Sithar, 37, was released after serving two years in Prey Sar, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Sithar is the head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. Sithar led a year-long series of peaceful protests that started in December 2021 against the mass layoff of 1,329 employees at NagaWorld—a casino giant in Phnom Penh—during the pandemic. Hundreds of workers took to the streets outside the casino in protest of the dismissals, with LRSU demanding 365 union members be reinstated and that all those who lost their jobs receive fair compensation from the Malaysian-owned casino. In May 2023, Sithar was sentenced to two years behind bars (having already served almost two years), for incitement to commit a felony, while eight other union members were handed lesser suspended sentences or monitoring orders. “They were convicted for simply exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by both the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by Cambodia in 1992,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said in a statement . “The rights to peaceful assembly and association include the right to hold meetings, sit-ins and strikes, and the right of individuals to interact and organize among themselves to collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend common interests.” Cambodian authorities have maintained that citizens have the right to exercise freedom of speech and hold peaceful gatherings, as stated in the law, and arrests are only made when laws are broken. Khleang Soben, LRSU Secretary General, joined 70 Cambodian civil society organizations and many international organizations, including Amnesty International, HRW, and the US Department of State, in lobbying for Sithar’s release while she was in prison. “Until now, I’m curious about why she was detained as this is a labor dispute between workers and the company,” she told me. “But they accuse worker representatives of inciting social chaos. For me, it’s too much and unexpected that they turn the victim into the perpetrator. It’s very unfair.” In April 2024, Sithar’s “fight for democracy and respect for human rights” earned her the Swedish government’s annual Per Anger Prize, which celebrates courage, capacity to act and engagement. “She is a vital source of support for Cambodian women who are forced to work under appalling conditions. They are demanding to have their voices heard and their rights respected at their places of work,” the judges said. Sithar’s case is one of a series of targeted attacks by authorities. Despite this, Soben remains determined to ensure Sithar’s voice is not silenced, and pledged to continue the fight for the rights of her members. “Recently, we’ve seen the arrest of many youth and union activists. Saying I’m not afraid isn’t completely true. But I won’t give up as it’s a valuable job that benefits many Cambodians,” she said. “Union work is undervalued and it is unsafe when we stand up for workers and refuse to undertake activities that exploit the labor force and workers' interests. We will continue our nonviolent demands until there is a solution. Even if I am scared, it won't stop me.” Yang Sophorn, President of the 16,000-member strong Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union (CATU), also came under fire during the NagaWorld protests. On 4 August 2022, authorities accused her of conducting illegal activities and threatened her with an unspecified punishment for supporting the ongoing strikes. “We know that when we work in this field, there are a lot of people who are not happy with us, but we still do it for the sake of our members and to fight for their rights. The reason we continue this work is because of love, passion and wanting to help people in need,” she said. “It’s an injustice” “I’ve had violence committed against me and been arrested many times, but I still take on the challenge because I work for the rights of people. I’m not involved with politics, only labor rights. I suffer and have a lot of pressure to stop, but I have no choice. I have to promote the rights of workers,” Ath Thorn told SAAG. The former president of the Cambodian Labour Confederation (CLC) , a role he served for 18 years until May, and president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU) , Thorn has spent the majority of his working life fighting for the rights of garment factory workers. He launched CCAWDU in 1997 while working in a factory, in response to the unfair treatment he witnessed from his employer. “I saw and experienced a lot of labor abuse, violations and cheating on the ground. There was nobody to respond to these problems. So, I established the trade union to address the challenges and negotiate with the employer.” During his time serving as union leader, however, he has been the victim of multiple legal actions and arrests, violence, threats, and intimidation. “As an independent, democratic trade union, we work to promote workers’ interests and benefits, and the authorities and companies abuse us,” he said. “Some of us are arrested and charged, violated and discriminated against, beaten and dismissed without pay. So, there are a lot of cases against us, and a lot of pressure and challenges.” A 2022 HRW report, ‘ Only “Instant Noodle” Unions Survive: Union Busting in Cambodia’s Garment and Tourism Sectors , based on interviews conducted between March and June 2022, found “widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino and other places of business.” On May 7, Mam Rithy, Vice President of CLC, became one of the latest voices to be silenced when he was detained after Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted him for “inciting to commit a crime” and “disbelieving a court decision”. The charge against the well-known advocate for the labor rights of Cambodian factory workers was in relation to a video he posted on Facebook on February 24, 2022 commenting on the arrest of a female union leader in Sihanoukville in relation to a Chinese casino. The 35-year-old was handed a 1.5 year prison sentence and a two million riel (USD480) fine. “Vuthy has now been in jail more than four months and did not expect to be detained for long. It’s really tough for him and an injustice,” Thorn said. While the threats to these activists remain real, it has only served to strengthen their fight. “The arrests only make people get mad at the violent injustice to innocent people without any sense,” a Mother Nature member stated. “We have to strengthen our mental health and capacity-building to keep inspiring more people to become defenders. The more they arrest our members, the more defenders rise up. We will always be here, fighting for environmental justice.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Phnom Penh Climate Cambodia Mother Nature Unions Environmental Science Environmentalist Youth Youth Protest Censorship Ecology Labor Policy Movements Climate Security Community Security Freedom Free Speech Labor Rights Civil Society Civilian Activism Corruption Natural Resources Mother Nature Cambodia Anonymity Imprisonment Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson Deportation Banned Phnom Penh Court of First Instance Hope Political Will Human Rights Watch Amnesty International Dissent Hydropower Dam Hydropolitics Areng Valley Indigenous Spaces Ecosystem Koh Kong Future Generations Empowerment Silence Disappearance Worker Rights Prey Sar Labour Rights Supported Union Khmer Employees Peaceful Protest Monitoring Victimization Targeted Attack State Government Narrative Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union CATU NagaWorld Protests Injustice Violence Political Violence Cambodian Labour Confederation CLC Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union CCAWDU Garment Factory Labor Abuse Arrest Threats Intimidation Union Busting Capacity-building Environmental Justice Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

A panel on dominant narratives about Kashmir: the longue durée of Kashmiri struggle, the continued movement-building between Kashmir & Palestine, the People's Alliance for Gupkar, and what the repeal of Article 370 really entailed. COMMUNITY Discourses on Kashmir A panel on dominant narratives about Kashmir: the longue durée of Kashmiri struggle, the continued movement-building between Kashmir & Palestine, the People's Alliance for Gupkar, and what the repeal of Article 370 really entailed. Huma Dar · Hilal Mir · Ather Zia Just over a year after the repeal of Article 370 from India's constitution, pro-India Kashmiri political parties called for an alliance. What did it all mean? In our second panel from October 2020, Kashmiri activist-scholars Ather Zia & Huma Dar, and journalist Hilal Mir, discuss the predominant discourses of Kashmir that pervade public and international narratives with Editor Kamil Ahsan. The wide-ranging discussion discusses Indian-occupied-Kashmir, India as a settler-colonial state, journalism & how the Azadi Movement and the repeal of Article 370 are depicted, and the many self-serving narratives that don’t take Kashmiri realities into account. Just over a year after the repeal of Article 370 from India's constitution, pro-India Kashmiri political parties called for an alliance. What did it all mean? In our second panel from October 2020, Kashmiri activist-scholars Ather Zia & Huma Dar, and journalist Hilal Mir, discuss the predominant discourses of Kashmir that pervade public and international narratives with Editor Kamil Ahsan. The wide-ranging discussion discusses Indian-occupied-Kashmir, India as a settler-colonial state, journalism & how the Azadi Movement and the repeal of Article 370 are depicted, and the many self-serving narratives that don’t take Kashmiri realities into account. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the panel on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Panel Kashmir Intellectual History Settler-Colonialism Longue-Duree of Kashmiri Struggle Movement Organization Revolution Colonialism Burhan Wani People's Alliance for Gupkar Subaltern Studies Palestine Affect Internationalist Solidarity Media Blackout Radicalization Narratives Bollywood Occupation Genocide Pogroms Erasure Mass Protests War Crimes Movement Strategy Emancipatory Politics Humanitarian Crisis Activist Media International Law Hindutva Military Crackdown Military Operations Kashmiri Struggle Discourses of War Nationalism HUMA DAR 's paternal family was ethnically-cleansed from Srinagar, Kashmir in 1948 for demanding plebiscites under the UN Resolutions. Her maternal family, exiled from Kashmir after accepting Islam during the Dogra regime, fought for Independence from the British. With a background In interdisciplinary Studies, Dar lectures in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies at University of California at Berkeley and in the Department of Critical Studies and Philosophy at California College of the Arts. Dar’s work is focused on the intersections and co-formations of race, religion, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and national politics of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, centered on intellectual and political activism for social justice, especially in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Her published work includes “Cinematic Strategies for a Porno-tropic Kashmir and Some Counter-Archives” in the Journal of Contemporary Theory and pieces in several edited volumes focused on South Asia. Dar is a feature writer at Pulse Media , a collaborative political, activist, and academic weblog, and is a published poet. She is a founding member of the working group on “Muslim Identities & Cultures,” and organized the feminist conference, Boundaries in Question on the theme of Women and War, both at UC Berkeley. HILAL MIR is a freelance Srinagar-based journalist. He has previously reported for Greater Kashmir, Hindustan Times, The Huffington Post, and Kashmir Reader . Ather Zia is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley, the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, and The Frame , and the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak , Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, and A Desolation called Peace. Her work has received the Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, the Public Anthropologist Award, among many others. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective . 24 Oct 2020 Panel Kashmir 24th Oct 2020 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: