;3

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.

The core of the grievance is that Greek antiquity has been narrated on screen overwhelmingly by British and American actors for the better part of a century, for stories that belong to a culture that is very much still here. The Odyssey production, funded in part by several million euros in Greek government subsidies, produced a cast that is, to my knowledge, entirely non-Greek.

Why does this matter, though? Greek epics are part of the Western canon and taught everywhere. Doesn't that make them fair game, free to be reinterpreted by anyone without a second thought? To answer that, it helps to look at how they got folded into that canon in the first place.

This can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century, when parts of Europe began constructing ancient Greece as their own intellectual inheritance. The claim, in essence, was that the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of classical Athens flowed forward into contemporary Western Europe, not into the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, Ottoman-ruled population actually living on that land.

That claim required a certain amount of erasure to hold together. The people constructing "Greece" as a philosophical and aesthetic category in Northern Europe were doing so entirely without reference to, or need for, actual Greek input. Fortunately for them, at that exact moment, Greece was under Ottoman rule, and had no institutional voice in how its own antiquity was being interpreted by people who had never set foot there.

As a result, Modern Greeks have been forced to inherit both the prestige of our ancient ancestry and the burden of never quite living up to a version of ourselves invented for us by outsiders. This mismatch was so pronounced in the wake of the War of Independence that foreign visitors to Greece were frequently disappointed to discover that the Greeks they encountered bore little resemblance to the imagined version of Greeks dreamed up by the West.

A recurring feature of Western classicism has been the separation of an idealized, Westernized “Greece” from the living Greek people, followed by the presentation of outsiders as the more legitimate inheritors and interpreters of Greek antiquity while modern Greeks were treated as irrelevant to it or as evidence of how far Greece had supposedly fallen.

The extreme logical endpoint of this line of thinking is what happened with Nazi Germany, when Nazi racial theorists tried to appropriate the ancient Greeks as a race of Aryan ancestors whose civilization supposedly declined after their descendants mixed with the peoples of the Mediterranean and Asia. This pseudohistory claimed ancient Greek achievement for northern Europe while treating modern Greeks as racially “degraded” heirs. Ancient Greece could therefore belong to Germany even while Nazi Germany invaded, occupied, starved, and devastated Greece during World War II. (As an aside, this is why I hate Rick Riordan for making the Axis leadership descendants of Hades while Greece itself was invaded and devastated by the Axis).

And it is why apparently minor conventions, like giving nearly everyone in the ancient Mediterranean an upper-class British accent, are not neutral decisions. The “Queen’s Latin” trope implies that antiquity sounds most intelligent and civilized when voiced through Britain.

Odysseus is repeatedly described as a “veteran” by both himself and others in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation of The Odyssey. No such word exists in Attic Greek. There is a word for men who are absent or else too sick to fight (ἀπόμαχος); there is a word for old men (γέρων), who would not have been expected to fight anymore (see, for examples in the art of the time, Nestor in The Iliad). But there is no one-to-one translation for the English word “veteran” for the simple reason that the Ancient Greeks had no such concept. City-states went to war every couple of years, meaning no one could ever fully move beyond it. War was not something you sign up for, leave, go do Over There, and hopefully come back from. Virtually all men fought in wars, which meant soldiers were not a minority — they were not special.

...The Odyssey (2026) brings the American tradition of shooting and crying to Troy. Odysseus the veteran cannot fully come back home from the war until he has made peace with the crime he committed overseas. Smuggling soldiers into enemy territory via wooden horse might not constitute a war crime by today’s standards, but Nolan frames this strategy as a violation of “Zeus’ law”.

...Anne Carson calls the Odyssey a “postwar epic”. Crying after shooting is simply what a postwar epic looks like in America. In that way, Nolan truly has adapted Homer; Nolan has imported his own cultural situation into the myth.

Just as The Aeneid used Homeric archetypes to express Roman national identity, The Odyssey (2026) shows Americans how we view ourselves: we love our home; we love our family; we come from multiple races, but most of us are white; we are world-weary; we did something wrong far away, but our memories are foggy, and it’s best not to dwell too much on our victims; our hands are perpetually innocent, and stained with fresh blood.

I've been super bird heavy this year on ArtFight. I was considering making individual posts for them but its kind of nice to have them all flocking together. Character links below

New Sona 🕊️

Be prepared for a revamp impending! 💙

They have no concept of the human idea of "freedom" no matter how much you keep saying it. No concept of laws or right and wrong. No, that animal isn't "evil" you're just ascribing morals to a creature that has no idea what evil even is.

Projecting any of this onto an animal is just anthropomorphism, which is dangerous in so many ways.

And don't get me started on so called "animal rights activists", projecting their own wants onto the animals, deciding they know what they need. Because of course they do. "If I want it it's something this animal wants as well." Can you not hear yourself? God just stop.