One home To Another.

The chaos is constant. I've never lived in a place so disordered. I drive out into the streets and it feels like I may be the only person who knows about the existence of traffic violations, including those who are charged with enforcing them. There are cows, everywhere, even for a city in India, it's too many cows, I am constantly looking out for them when I drive past traffic lights that are operational for two hours a day, four days a week, six months a year, every alternate year. I've never encountered ornamental traffic lights before and I don't know what to do with that information. Well, I do know. It's the first thing I did when I moved here, write to the District Magistrate and demand better implementation of facilities, and more facilities after diving into the district budget. It's okay to laugh at that, I laugh at myself too when I do such things, but I have to.

It's just, having political opinions is great, you know? Every day I have them, I read the news, all day long, I write about it, and it's natural, at the end of that process, to have opinions, but I am also, tired of opinions. I just want things to work. Do I loathe our current government and the infection of majoritarian control they seem so intent on spreading? Of course, what else would I do with my time? But also, I like traffic lights. Order is wonderful. I don't know how to get rid of our government (except for voting them out, but like, lol, you know?) but I do know the process to request traffic light repairs or new lights. I want to change the world, totally, but also, I want to be able to drive to the store without risking my life, and that of a dozen cows (which also, by extension, risks my life) on the way. It makes sense to me to invest in those things, and I want to, it seems like the best hobby I could have.

I realised that in 2019. That was only a few years ago, but somehow it seems like I was a lot younger then. In 2019, I unwittingly became part of an act of authoritarianism that made for a very strange social experiment. Five days before we moved to a new state, they decided it wasn't a state anymore, and to keep people from "disrupting" the peace, they turned the internet off. If you're Indian, you probably get what I am talking about, but if you're not let me explain, it was a border state that had special status under the Indian Constitution, and a lot of military, border and militant activity over the past 7-decades (there's a lot, lot more to this, so don't make any deductions based on that statement alone), they removed the special status, arrested the leaders of the state and turned the internet off. No but really, it was *off*. No mobile internet, no wifi, nothing at all. For a little while, not even telecommunication services. 12 million people with their voices turned off, for over six months (parts of the internet returned in phases, but really, it took alarmingly long for even that to happen). In any case, I'm not here to discuss the politics of that move, but the experience of it.

I invite everyone who has ever disparaged the world as it is now and longed for when it was a "simpler place" to wonder for a second, not about the fact that they wouldn't have all the stress from doom scrolling anymore, and think about the fact that you'd still be expected to do your jobs even without the internet. You'd have to book appointments to use it at dismal speeds at public libraries and you wouldn't necessarily have one close to your house. You'd still be expected to continue your education and take exams and apply for jobs. Don't think about how relaxing it would be not be caught up in the excess of the internet, think about how you'd have to pay for everything in cash because card swiping machines or digitals wallets would not work. Think about all little things you do everyday, like reading this or paying that bill, you do every day that would have to be done in an alternate way that you don't know but you cannot look up. You wouldn't know what's happening where you live either, because local papers are not being funded like they once were, and national papers won't give you the information you need around you, so everything you know of the world around you could be hearsay. Think about the fact that even to pay your kid's school fees, you would have to take time off from your work during their working hours, go down there physically, and make a cash or cheque payment. The entire experience was dystopian. I felt like I had lost several limbs, and so did everyone around me, but there was nothing we could do. Nothing on a large scale anyway, I felt powerless, like the way of life I had been taught, and by that I don't just mean the internet-life, I mean democratic life (and whatever semblance of that exists) was stripped off me. For every citizen who went through this, it was disempowering on a daily basis.

But as a social experiment, and condition, it was interesting to me. My anxiety dropped to zero. I could only work in the library where I had to register my devices to be allowed to use them, so the separation between work hours and life became absolute, I had never experienced that before. I read the entire newspaper every day, and every news piece I saved to read later, I devoured in its entirety. I read dozens of books a month, granted I was enrolled in a literature program so there was more motivation to do this than ever, but the lack of distraction makes you read more, and being graded on it, makes you do it faster. I've always talked to people a lot, almost annoyingly much, but I talked to people at an alarming level. One of my most prevalent social groups at the time, were my classmates. The were all much younger than I was, and raised in a very different part of the country than I was. For me, I enrolled in that program, because I wanted to do something else as well, for them, it was the primary focus. They suffered greatly from having no access to cheap, abundant study material, and while they could get textbook, the rot of privilege and disparate development is very deep, and they couldn't teach themselves just with the textbooks. Our teachers never came to class, and when they did, it was clear they didn't deserve their jobs. These weren't "bad" teachers, they were completely and totally incompetent. They had PhDs and couldn't spell.

It was horrible, as a social condition, but I realised, I could make a lot of noise because I wasn't scared of the professors or the consequences of angering them. I started filing complaints. I crowd-sourced them and filed them all under my name. With the principal (at one point he had an entire section in a cabinet with just my letters, so proud), the district authorities, the university, the education department, the education ministry. If they had an address, I filed a complaint. I filed so many complaints, our teachers started showing up in class because enquires had been launched into the college administration. Following up with students. Actually holding lectures. You don't understand, there are generations of students who graduated from this institution who have no idea who their teachers were, and somehow we got them to fear being fired enough to show up. I got to know every fine detail of how these colleges functioned administratively, and I befriended everyone who was in any way disgruntled, from peons to professors to former principals, and I just filed complaints about every single thing that wasn't up to standard. It actually made a fucking difference!

And that is when I realised, it's wonderful to have vast political opinions, but it's much more gratifying to get a traffic light to function. Without the absence of the whole world that the internet allows one to access, I immediately felt more motivated to help fix the whole world that I could physically fathom: My surroundings.

These new surroundings are unfathomable. They make no fucking sense to me. Where we lived before was a tiny, sleepy town able to fall into complete dysfunction because it was so easy to ignore. This town is not sleepy or easy to ignore. God was born here, evidently. If you take a look around, it will take you no more than a few seconds to conclude that God has definitely left, and in his wake a construct of commercial worship and communal politics has been built. I've been here before, I was here for a month for work seven years ago, and riots broke out the day we arrived. So when I found out this is where we were moving, I laughed for one hour because of course that's what would happen to me. *Of course.* Everything I ever said I would never do, I have done because I had no fucking control over it. I love yoga now, I haven't lived in a *metro-and-parliament* city in *years*, I have lived without the internet, I have a dog, I got married, I am even parenting (my goodness, wtf happened), I bought a yellow dress, I studied literature. I never thought I would do any of that, in so far as I explicitly stated I would never do any of that, and then, all of it happened. I should dedicate a day a year to laughing at myself and the confidence I have to make definitive statements.

In any case, we moved to the city I associate most closely with riots. It's chaotic like nothing I have ever experienced. It's loud. It's violent. It's conservative as hell. It's polarized. Nothing works whatsoever. The teachers at the kid's school are problematic as hell. There are so many people. So many cows. Intermittently, there is boisterous festivity that feels vaguely threatening. People dance to prayer in the streets and if I hadn't been here before, i wouldn't know to be wary of them. I don't get this place at all.

But I'll learn it.

I'll find my place with relation to it. I'll figure out what I was meant to do here. For now, I know I want to get the traffic lights to work or I will lose my fucking mind.