I've never been one for resolutions, New Year or otherwise. Perhaps the post-modernist in me rebels against their reductiveness - something that delimits the endless probability any 'new' year or beginning promises - and doesn't enjoy the confining mono-narrative a resolution would force upon me. I reserve for myself the right to change my capricious mind because (prepare yourself for the ultimate cliché), I genuinely don't know what tomorrow will bring.
However, since we've been asked to this month write about
what we hope and wish for, and resolve to achieve in, the new year that is soon
going to be upon us, I asked myself if there was anything I did - or have been
meaning to do - that I think is worth holding on to in 2018. And there is. I
resolve to keep trying to check my privilege every day as I live and breathe. I
resolve to give until - and even when; especially when - it hurts: whether it
is of myself as an educator, or in my capacity as someone with the means to
contribute to , say, a young Dalit activist's fledgling political campaign, or
rehabilitation programmes for Assam flood victims, or the UNHCR's mission to
provide Syrian refugees with blankets to combat a long, cold winter.
One of these many privileges I've acquired is this: people
no longer try to mansplain[1]
things to me. It's actually gotten to the point where the very thought of this
is, to me, laughable - I pity the poor fool who wants to burn himself trying.
Checking this privilege - acknowledging every moment that despite the fact that
I've worked to make this state of being come to pass, it is one - means that I
have to work my ass off from this moment on to ensure I'm not inadvertently
perpetuating this ridiculous status quo by not encouraging as many of my more
hesitant female students to find their voices as I possibly can.
I also resolve - possibly to the chagrin of anyone who
follows or reads me on social media platforms or has the misfortune of finding
themselves in my classroom - to keep railing and ranting and agitating and
organising against inequity and totalitarianism, wherever I see it, and in
whatever form it takes: race-caste-class-gender-religion-ethnicity - I resolve
to persist with my commitment towards reading/decoding structures of oppression
in all their intersectional dimensions.
Finally, I realise I'm very much a work-in-progress (aside:
we all are - if you're done 'becoming', then what proof have you that you're
alive at all?), and part of what I need to work on is making sure I remember to
be 't/here' more for the people around me, instead of having my nose (long; once
broken) stuck in an article somewhere, telling me about some fresh hell in some
new part of the world. I resolve in 2018, so, to try and start doing just that.
Maybe I'll stop mewing when Ma asks me to. Maybe I'll stop working on my
falsetto (a la Vitus) when dad has had enough. Maybe I'll stop ranting about how
stupid weddings are to Melo, or actually use headphones when Manik asks me to. Who
knows? Hope floats, right?
2018 will probably turn out to consist of the same old shit
we insist on inflicting, as a species, upon ourselves. But I resolve to smile (occasionally),
and remember to be grateful for beauty in both, the most quotidian forms I can
find it (a traffic-free ride; new birdsong!), as well as when the majesty of a
landscape reminds me of my own insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things (in
the face of the Himalayas or the Andes or wherever the year wants to take me).
This much I can do. This much I will do. Thank you for all you've taught
me, 2017. I'm excited to see what happens when the world eats another year.
