Five Years In: When Narratives Refuse to Be Ignored

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 unsettled, something refused to pass unnoticed. This blog did not begin as an abstract intellectual exercise. And somewhere in that pile sits my personal favorite: the “gentleman,” who took the trouble to identify himself just to say, “Hey can you please stop sending me these crap blogs.” I obliged. Mercy, after all, is an underrated virtue. If the words hurt enough to provoke that response, then the words had already done their job; no need to keep pressing on a bruise that has announced its own existence. Let’s be clear about something that often gets lost in the noise: critique matters, but only when it engages the substance. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to receive responses that did precisely that—pushed back, questioned, refined, and occasionally forced me to admit that my own narrative needed editing. That, incidentally, is the only kind of editing worth doing. Strip away the noise, and what remains are the voices that matter - the ones willing to engage, not just react. If there is a single thread that has refused to snap across these 197 posts, it is this: narratives are not decorative; they are constitutive. They do not sit outside reality - they are the mechanism through which reality is understood, contested, and, occasionally, manipulated. Shit happens. That is not cynicism; that is baseline data. What matters is what we do next - whether we curate the story, interrogate it, or bury it under the convenient fiction that forgetting is the same as healing. It isn’t. Forgetting is intellectual laziness dressed up as emotional maturity. And those who play the ostrich, buried deep in the curated sand of selective memory, are not escaping history - they are volunteering to be blindsided by it when it resurfaces, sharper and less forgiving. There are, of course, the newcomers in any narrative ecosystem - the ones who arrive late and decide, with astonishing confidence, that the story can be rewritten without bothering to understand its prior chapters, and sometimes label the stories as “crap blog.” They want to trim context, redact inconvenient actors, and sprinkle in sanitized labels to make the past more palatable. It is a curious kind of arrogance, this belief that complexity can be erased by renaming it. But narratives have a way of resisting such cosmetic surgery; they leak, they contradict, they refuse to stay buried. And when they do, the cost of that earlier erasure becomes painfully visible. Which is why I keep writing. And which is why I must acknowledge Murali - not as a ceremonial nod, but as a substantive presence in this journey. Encouragement is easy; thoughtful disagreement is rare. The latter forces recalibration, and over the years, his responses have done precisely that - nudged, challenged, and occasionally dismantled my assumptions just enough to make the next post less certain and more honest. To those who have read carefully - and I know some of you have - thank you for not choosing the easier path of passive consumption. You have been incensed, elated, infuriated, intrigued. You have felt something. And in a digital ecosystem designed to anesthetize, that is no small achievement. Indifference is the real failure mode of discourse; anger, discomfort, even outright rejection - those are signs of engagement. That is the paradox every writer quietly understands: the sharpest critique is often the most honest acknowledgment of impact. So here we are, at the five-year mark - not a conclusion, but a pivot. The next stretch will look suspiciously like the last one: more lived experience filtered through an unwillingness to sanitize, more narratives that refuse to sit quietly, more responses that oscillate between appreciation and hostility. And that is precisely the point. This is not a space designed for comfort; it is a space designed for confrontation - with ideas, with histories, with the inconvenient fragments of reality that refuse to be ignored. If there is any recommendation to be drawn from this exercise, it is disarmingly simple: think, write, express. Own your narrative before someone else edits it for you. And if, in the process, someone asks you to stop because it is too uncomfortable, too abrasive, too real - well, you will know you are probably getting something right. And thus I say like Clash did in their song, “Should I stay, or should I go?” I am not going anywhere.