Happy New Year to all! At the beginning of the year, we remember the not so good part of history so that we learn not to repeat it.
Writers don’t join crowds – Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the Constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibility and obligations and guilt that joining represents. My experience of the violence was overwhelming and memorable of the resistance to it. When I think of the women staring down the mob, I am not filled with writerly wonder. I am reminded of my gratitude from being saved from injury. What I saw at firsthand – and not merely on that march but on the bus, in Hari’s house, in the huge compound filled with essential goods – was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity: in each case, I witnessed the risks that perfectly ordinary people were willing to take for one another.
Needull in a haystack 