The obscenity of our indifference

Palestinians search for survivors in the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip on March 4. Pic/AP

I never imagined feeling nostalgia about Pandemic times. It's not the isolation I miss, or the fear of contracting the dreaded disease, or the paralysing feeling of uncertainty that shadowed us every day - not knowing the span of a given lockdown, the inability to work because the market was in a state of crisis because of all the ambiguity, not being able to meet friends or family or even one's neighbours without a mask on. What I miss was the fact that for most of 2020 and even 2021, the world beyond our domestic lives had also slowed down. If I had to choose between news cycles, I would prefer to go back in time. And yet, there is an irony that I cannot shake off - that death felt so personal and so possible and mass scale. It could so easily have been us, and for so many people during India's second wave, it was them or family members and we felt rightly horrified by the extent of those deaths. We were angered by the inefficiency of our public officials, the government's lack of accountability towards its people, and the general callousness because of which the death count raged on. We noted the waves in different countries and the closing of borders that complicated all our lives. We were not indifferent.

That is what lies at the heart of my discomfort around the present news cycle. The glaring indifference towards the precarity of the lives of Palestinian people. It is shocking and horrifying to watch the world continue with its daily business while a particular part of the world has been reduced to rubble, while tiny children are starving and mothers are forced to have C-sections without anaesthesia. I cannot even wrap my head around that last fact. One of my most enduring memories about my adolescence in Mumbai and my time in Delhi is around how quickly aid was organised in the aftermath of disaster - whether natural or man-made. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to go from being borderline self-sufficient to now having to run to grab aid falling from the sky under the threat of being killed for wanting to sate one's hunger. I am genuinely shocked by the apathy that allows such a reality to exist, where the lives of people are being gambled with, invalidated and regularly dehumanised.

During the Pandemic there was a sense of general solidarity. We were all reduced to being in more or less the same boat, though many people's boats were remarkably bigger and more luxurious. In this present moment, I am struggling to make sense of opulence in one part of the world while in another part, not so far away, crimes are being committed against humanity.

Personally, I think I have been in a state of mourning ever since October 7. All of these months I watch with gaping mouth the extent of the violence of white supremacy. How some lives matter more than others, whose lives are grievable, whose are considered not worthy of rescue. What do we owe each other? I keep asking, and the question keeps getting reframed. Don't we owe each other something super basic, like the dignity of life?

Then I think the capitalist machinery is so deeply entrenched in our day-to-day life that we don't even see the distraction machine at work, because it is functioning overtime and has replaced reality. The moment we feel even an ounce of discomfort in our bones, we want to shrug it off and distract ourselves instead of sitting and wrestling with that discomfort and converting it into either action or activism.

This International Women's Day I feel ever more conscious of the hierarchies that exist within this binary category that are obvious in so many societies in the world. White feminism sits at the top globally.

Just like savarna feminism continues to dictate discourse in India. Where I live, white feminists do not allow me to refer to myself as a third-world feminist. They have no conception of the history of the term third-world feminism and the integrity of its proponents who sought to reclaim the discourse from white feminism and its privileges. There is this feeling of alienation I am unable to shake off because I live in a town in which reality is bubble-wrapped and every effort is made to live apolitical lives. The newspaper is a site of leisure, something you read while drinking your morning cappuccino and catching up with friends after dropping the kids off at school. I struggle to assimilate into such a version of motherhood in which those children that look different are other, divorced from our realities and our consciousness, and in a society where the horrors unfolding in Gaza are often reduced to a tiny column in the newspaper so that more space is given to a parade honouring a local hero. Every day I wake up thinking of how much more work needs to be done. I remind myself of the ultimate dictate of feminism: No one is free unless everyone is free.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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