From someone who has never made any New Year resolutions (which is why I'm now allowed up to 10)

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.                

---

[1] Check out this gorgeous piece for more: https://thenib.com/mansplaining-explained

Of machines, cyborgs, an old imp, and a spinning-wheel (also, technically, a machine)

G. Ramachandran, a young scholar from Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's ode to life, learning, and all that is beautiful, spent a few days with Gandhi in Delhi, in October 1924. Bapu took the time to engage in wide-ranging conversations with this young student, and in them, the two covered much ground. Ramachandran managed to draw out the old man's views on art (anything that "helps the soul to realize its inner self"),  how beauty and truth are effectively the same (I didn't realise how much he loved Keats before I read this), and ultimately, how he felt about machines, given his well-known aversion to them, on account of the fact that they 'dwarfed' human capacity. Ramachandran asked Gandhi quite straightforwardly if he was against all machinery - or the idea of machines, even. To this, Gandhi's response was one which might have surprised his young interlocutor: "How can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery? The spinning-wheel itself is a machine; a little tooth-pick is a machine. What I object to, is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on "saving labour" till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might,"[1] (my emphasis). Remarkably prescient for a text that is 93 years old, don't you think?

And why, pray, do I feel the need to revisit Bapu today, apart from the fact that I'm currently spending my days at the Ashram (and my nights reading that other architect of modern India, Babasaheb Ambedkar)? We were asked, this month, to think about what it means for us as a species, living and working our way through the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution' which seems to be upon us. I would imagine this means dealing with the ubiquity of the internet, fast-changing everything we  do, the ways in which we 'know' (in terms of knowledge production/dissemination, the professions that are currently available to us, economic and business models and c.); more, we'd also have to venture into the post-human space (and you would have no choice but to recognise quite quickly how much the 'future' looks like the present when you read about the various biohackers, cyborgs and other suchlike who 'walk among us' already[2], or note the popularity of shows like the dystopian (but is it? really?) 'Black Mirror' which indicate the firm grapple-hold this theme seems to have on popular culture, always an excellent barometer of the spiritus mundi).

But I realise I haven't answered my question yet, and to it my response is a simple one: the reason I bring Gandhi into play today, to frame this discussion, is that I don't see how we can theorise the so-called Fourth Revolution when we haven't adequately managed to wrest ourselves from its predecessor: you know, the one which gave us Modernity (with a capital M, no less). In the form of late-capitalism and the global corporate order we function (or, more accurately labour and suffer) under today, this is not something we've finished living through quite yet. From it emerges that which will be, and this is why something that was true in 1924  remains so to-day: we run the risk of being 'dwarfed' by technology; slaves to machines (big ones, of course, but so too little ones, as Tagore was to remind Gandhi, on the subject of his precious spinning-wheel). How are machines or the 'craze' for them which now seems inescapable, given how thoroughly they've permeated every aspect of our existence, going to transform our lives? In myriad ways, forcing upon us new epistemes; reconfigurations in how we define 'privacy', 'relationships', 'knowledge', 'work', 'leisure', and other givens around which we've thus far constructed meaning in and for our lives. Is there a chance that this will have to involve re-imagining and re-defining what is meant by the descriptor 'human' itself? Hasn't it always?         

---

[1] CWMG, Vol. 25, pp 247-256.  You can access the entire 100-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi at the Sabarmati Ashram's online archive, https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

[2] See this fascinating piece for more: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/cyborgs-among-us human-biohackers-embed-chips-their-bodies-n150756