it's a silly stray blog!

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.

I was having a conversation with my dad a while back, and the subject of the police came up because my then girlfriend's abusive ex was squatting at her house and neither of us wanted to call the police. He knows I'm an abolitionist, its probably my single most vocal belief. And he says, "I know you've had bad experiences with cops but they're not all bad."

And thats when it occurs to me that he hasn't just disagreed with me during our past conversations on the matter, he literally was not listening. Or, he wasn't equipped to listen. I'll explain later on.

When I was arrested, I was not treated particularly bad by the police, and I've never claimed to have been. I was white, and I was in the closet. From the back of the van they loaded me into after cuffing me, I saw first hand how much worse they treated the black man they arrested on the way to taking me to jail, not even allowing him the dignity of stepping inside his home to dress.

When a liberal hears someone say ACAB, they think they're hearing someone say, in addition to being a police officer, every police officer is a bad person. They're all corrupt, they all beat their partners, etc. And thats closer to the truth than not, genuinely, but its still not what we have ever been saying.

Its not the fault of the acronym, that would be a goofy claim. But a more accurate one could be ACIAKOHT: A Cop Is A Kind Of Human Trafficker.

One of the main things a cop gets paid to do is traffick human beings to do forced labor. When they do this to trans women, this forced labor is sexual, it is sexual slavery, something that the vast majority of people I love will risk in every single interaction they are ever made to have with a police officer. Its a matter of policy, its called V-Coding, google it. Even in cases where no forced labor occurs, they are committing kidnapping.