may the bridges i burn light the way

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

Grooming involves someone deliberately trying to gain a minor's trust and open them up for sexual abuse. The intent is important here, because a lot of the actions that can constitute grooming are superficially completely benign.

For example, being kind, listening to a child when they talk about their problems or giving them gifts can be grooming if the person doing it intends to abuse the child, but otherwise it is just being a decent person.

That's developmentally normal - there are always edgy teenagers - and it's something kids have been doing for as long as kids have had widespread access to recorded media.

I know a lot of abuse survivors - people who experienced serious harm and lasting trauma from things other human beings did to them. It's not the same as just being weirded out because you played a game or read a book or watched a movie that was a little too graphic for you.

What did I say at the start of this, as to the Queen, as to destruction unleashed? Something about the regretful dead and the...hmm, what was it? Traumatized alive. That I had made a contribution. Let me take that back. The fault was mine. All mine.

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.

What makes this story so important (and not fridging) to me is that this isn't some half developed character that only exists to create something for Kattigan to overcome, Kattigan is an alcoholic and a druidic initiate that has been heavily implied to have had a land stewardship relationship with the land he was living with his family on, and it's for these reasons that people assume his missing and murdered wife and daughter are neither missing nor murdered and that has severed his relationship with his druidic magic and connection with the land.

This is important to me because my great great grandfather's murder was ruled accidental without criminal investigations because he was an alcoholic and he was drowned on his indigenous band's historic land which is on an archipelago and the only people who had evidence and were calling for an investigation were indigenous women. The first time anyone outside of the band took it seriously was in around 2014, 40+ years after his death, when a new hire at the cold cases unit saw the case after the TRC investigations, but the murderer that everyone in the community agreed had done it had already died of old age.

The reality that came with that? My great grandfather converted to the LDS and joined the military, getting himself disenfranchised temporarily along the way. I never once heard him speak his indigenous language, not even to say hello, even though I know he grew up speaking it even after his father was disenfranchised for 3 generations and his mother was sent to residential school. His family fell apart when his father was murdered. I've spoken to his five sisters a total of 9 occasions, and not 9 each, there have been 9 occasions I can remember ever where I have seen at least one of them, despite the fact that they are all still alive. One of those occasions was their mother's funeral in 2009 which was the first time I'd ever seen smudging done, and remains the only time I've seen members of my family smudging. 5 years before anyone called. In 2015 he got into a car accident and stopped being able to visit the archipelago safely, so he got one summer up there since having any inkling of justice before he couldn't be on his land anymore. I've been to one pow wow in my entire life and it wasn't with him or any of his other descendants, only one relative from his side of the family was there, one of his sisters, and she was part of the organizing council, it was my other parent's family that came with me, and at that point my dad didn't even know his mother was indigenous because she was adopted in the 60s and her birth certificate has never had her real parents on it or she wouldve been scooped never would've known it either. My dad didn't learn that past the fact that she was adopted until a year and a half later in 2023 when I asked her point blank if she was indigenous after hearing decades of suspicions from my mother's family. My great grandfather died early May of this year.