Musings of a White Haired Teenager

Five years. One hundred and ninety-seven posts. It began in the furnace of lived experience - the second wave of COVID in Kolkata, the spring of 2021, a time when oxygen cylinders became currency, fear became routine, and narratives became survival tools. Layered on top of that was the theatre of state elections, because history, in its usual lack of subtlety, prefers to pile crisis upon crisis and then sit back to see who notices the pattern. Five years later, as another round of elections circles back, I have the opportunity to acknowledge five years of writing.  These numerous posts also elicited two hundred and thirty-seven comments that chose to show up in public on the blog site, and an uncounted archive of messages that arrived privately - some thoughtful, some generous, some irritated, and a few that mistook irritation for insight. This was never meant to be a quiet archive; it has always been a space where reaction - of any kind - signals that something landed, something u...

Anonymous Courage Those who are regular readers of my blog would have noted that in a mildly entertaining turn of events, a supposedly anonymous interlocutor has been responding to my recent posts with admirable enthusiasm, apparently operating under the assumption that anonymity has rendered him unrecognizable . It is a charming belief. One almost hesitates to disturb it. Because, in truth, the identity is not particularly difficult to discern. The patterns are familiar, the voice is consistent, and the performance - how shall one put this -lacks the subtlety required for a convincing disguise. And just to make the exercise even more efficient, I have already been generous enough to identify the author as male, thereby eliminating roughly half the possible candidates in one polite stroke. One imagines the remaining pool is now feeling slightly uncomfortable. Out of courtesy, I have chosen not to identify him. There is a certain generosity in allowing someone the comfort of their cho...

Fakery Without Imagination The notion of being fake and creating information that appears plausible is nothing new. Because mythology, folklore, and everyday life have long operated where deception is not only permitted but often admired - provided it is done well. The Trojan Horse was not the work of someone with a weekend app, a digital photograph altering tool, and an inflated sense of their own cleverness. It required imagination, patience, timing, and most importantly an understanding of how people think. Good deception has always had a certain elegance. It respected the intelligence of the audience. It required the deceiver to be, inconveniently enough, intelligent. Fast forward to the present, where we have achieved what can only be described as the great democratization of fakery. The tools are now everywhere. Everyone has access. Anyone can edit an image, construct a narrative, alter a reality, and present it to the world with the quiet confidence of someone who assumes acce...