Let’s make our outrage count

This could involve beginning a reading circle for feminist texts, or support groups to discuss toxic masculinities, or weekly meetings with like-minded people to think more critically around issues

Like many of you, I, too, had a facepalm moment when I read the headlines about the Mumbai police filing an FIR against Ranveer Singh, for posting nude photographs of himself on social media, on behalf of Indian women whose modesty had allegedly been outraged. Where does one even begin entangling the misogyny of this supposedly valiant gesture? Even though the complaint is directed at the Bollywood star, the motivation behind it is inherently patriarchal. That one person should take it upon themselves to speak for Indian women and their hurt sentiments is brazenly paternalistic and infantilising. I stopped myself from reading more about it, though, because soon enough I happened to read about another patriarchal gesture on behalf of the state in the form of the construction of a port and corresponding road and railway network in in Honnavar in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district that violates the CRZ regulations and threatens the traditional dry fish business-led livelihood of over 2,000 fisherwomen. I arrived at this news thanks to the journalist Supriya Vohra’s Instagram Handle, and came to know, through her post, about the incredible work being done by Living Earth Foundation, an entirely women-run non-profit working to empower the marginalised and dispossessed communities in Honnavar and across Karnataka.

Reading these two reports in close temporal proximity to each other made me think about the predominant culture of outrage activism. Thanks to social media, we express selective anger against issues that seem to surface algorithmically in our consciousness. This is inevitably linked to the attention economy. Causes that are able to grasp our interest get traction, the rest fall to the wayside. And yet, there are many battles that continue to be fought beyond the dimensions of social media, by activists who are committed to the cause, who stake their lives in pursuit of social justice and equality. I have been thinking a lot about how the issues that make it to the headlines serve to distract us from more insidious injustices that befall those whose lives unfold in the background of mainstream consciousness, the people we exclude from our thoughts in order to continue to inhabit the bubbles we build to shield us from the cruelties of Brahmanical patriarchy and racist capitalism. 

Various forms of privilege affect our propensity towards rage and how we choose to use our anger, whether it remains expressed as fake sympathy and solidarity in a cocktail conversation kind of way or whether it actually attempts to perform change. The machinery of capitalism is geared towards distracting us from our own feelings, which means half the time we’re functioning on autopilot mode, unable to make the time to empathise with the struggles of another because we’re so busy going through the motions of our own day, battling traffic, sexism, inflation, and job insecurity.

Anger is loaded with information and energy, Audre Lorde wrote in “The Uses of Anger”, an essay I like to share with my students alongside another marvellous text by her, “Poetry Makes Something Happen,” which binds poetry, thus art, to activism and to embodied living and feeling. She writes: “How many of us feel these tragedies as our own? Yet we are intimately and vitally involved with them. How many of us recognise that they will continue to re-occur until we act, until we use our power, whoever and wherever we are, against these horrors? There is no separate survival.”

I have been thinking about what it means to step out of the autopilot mode and really think about what occupies our consciousness. Many of us are driven by the pursuit of aspirational lifestyles. We want to be able to eat at fancy restaurants and take holidays at Instagrammable locations or save up to buy apartments either as investments or to live in, and we’re often so busy with these preoccupations, we are not aware of how the rug is being pulled from under our feet. We have the audacity to believe that what is destroying the livelihoods of coastal fisherwomen in Karnataka has nothing to do with us; until it floods, or the seas regurgitate dead fish at low tide.

There is brevity to our outrage, because capitalism ensures that we do not have the time to interpret our feelings as anger, and then to sustain them long enough to actually make poetry out of it. What if, instead, we began, slowly, and carefully, to do the radical and revolutionary work of fostering and nurturing communities. This could involve beginning a reading circle for feminist texts, or initiate support groups to discuss toxic masculinities, or meeting once a week with like-minded people to think more critically around issues, or doing the relevant research and donating to organisations actually involved in on-the-ground transformations. It’s easy to share a story on Instagram and feel good about this finger-tip activism. It’s a lot more challenging, however, to actually embody the change we desire to see. 

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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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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