a matter of time

'behuda baat' now has a new name

As I launch my newsletter anew, with a changed name and a changed approach, I thought it might be a good idea to explore the very topic of change, a topic I am enamoured by, a phenomenon that to me represents the nature of all truth, and a theme that will run in all my upcoming letters to you. In fact, the very name and the iconography of this newsletter is an ode to change. Change is the beating heart of all that’s real, the very phenomenon of the emergence of absolute truth itself.

I don’t say any of this lightly. Since the big bang, since the creation of matter and time as we know it, nothing has stayed the same. Subatomic particles have cooled down into a soup of lighter elements that have then coalesced into stellar machines to produce heavier elements, only to explode under their own weight to create entire systems of revolving giant balls of rocks, one of which I am writing this from. Elements have become chemicals, and chemicals have become life. Life, famously, defines itself by not staying still, and has continued to evolve over billions of years to transform from bacteria into a fish into a human. Us, early modern humans, over thousands of years, have gone from being passive receptors of change to harbingers of it. Today, from flying in aerodynamic cylinders to using photosynthetic silicones that power our concrete caves, human societies have come a long way since the age of stone, and show no signs of stagnating.

The acceptance and harnessing of change is the only sign of progress. The sole reason Indian polity, society and civility is decaying is because Indians have actively or passively chosen the project of building a static, mythical, idealistic past, of resisting the torrents of change instead of harnessing them, of turning our backs to progress and modernity, picking, instead, the deceptive comfort of our frozen-in-time ideas and ideals.

Yet, resisting change is futile. We’re all struggling with it in our lives. This newsletter aims to be an outlet for my trysts with transformations, in all aspects of my life. To give you a small, unstructured glimpse of the scope, here’s a few changes I’m dealing with.

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When I was eighteen, I used to feel sixteen. When I was twenty five, I used to feel twenty one. But now that I’m twenty eight, I feel like I’m thirty. I hate it, but I don’t resist it. Not that I want to be thirty, not already. But I don’t struggle against it. Like a lifejacket that missed a drowning man it was thrown for, I drift in the waves of time like I have no will against it, like the direction it takes me is the direction I was meant for.

Bryan Johnson is one of the richest men in the world, and he spends all his time, all his money (his by american law, not by the logic that churns human history and progress, but we’ll talk about that some other time) trying to perfect living forever. The greek philosopher Aeschylus used to spend all his life under the open sky, working against a prophecy that he would die from a falling object. The legend goes that he died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock to crack her meal against. Pardon my schadenfreude, but none can escape the tolls of fate. Neither the poorest philosopher, nor the richest pleb.

You could call me the antithesis of Bryan Johnson. (My wallet wouldn’t protest.) Quite unlike him, I live in an age that is yet to come for me. I have surrendered to the intense ethereal flux of change for the cosmic law that it is. I find Bryan Johnson’s project naive, but what else do you expect from a man who looks down upon the rest of the world, seeing nothing redeeming in these living billions, to then use up the money that could save a continent to solve the only real problem his consciousness can fathom - its own vacuous perpetualization.

Whatever we resist, we resist because it’s real and it’s looming. Buddha said ‘suffering comes from attachment’, and the Borg in Star Trek said ‘resistance is futile’. Both could have meant the same thing - everything that’s real changes, and so, to attach to something is to be in pain of an irredeemably fleeting relic. So I have come to embrace change. It is like being light, picking the path of least resistance. It feels light too.

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Most of you know me from my time at Tanmay’s. Those who’d only ever seen me in his vlogs knew me as his flatmate. Those who then found me on Instagram came to know me as his writer, or a writer in general. But if you knew me since college, you’d have come across my comedy sketches and short films. And if you’d have known me since school, you might have read some of my hindi poems, something I’ve not been at for a good decade. If you’ve been my childhood friend, we’ve played board games or Flash games I made, or ones we’ve made them together. Although I fit well into the label of a writer, I’ve only ever loved to identify myself as a creative, free spirit. A fluid label that’s helped me adapt to challenges and opportunities. The path of least resistance.

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Back in 2020, when the CAA NRC protests had just cooled down, and the farmer protests were just beginning, when the pandemic was ravaging livelihoods and lives across the world, America was gearing up for its presidential elections. A Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, was promising free education and healthcare, under a ‘radical’ platform he called democratic socialism.

The previous year, a beloved friend at my old writing job had introduced me to Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. Having fallen in love with her work, I’d dived into her essays. That’s where I had come across the name of a thinker Noam Chomsky. If you’d followed me during my stay with Tanmay, you’d remember how deeply influenced I was by him. As an anarchist, he critiqued power. Not just the power of governments, but of bosses too. One of his ideas that had stuck with me was the framing of a workplace as a totalitarian arena (with unquestionable rules on how to dress, how to behave, who to talk to and what to work on, against which he pitted the idea of free worker syndicates or cooperatives - organisations where workers elected their managers and bosses, like citizens elect their state representatives). But overtime, I outgrew his anarchism. It began to reveal itself as an infantile whim, an idealist pursuit of the world that ought to be, beyond what’s historically or materially possible.

Today I see Bernie Sanders’s campaign as a vulgarisation of the term ‘socialism’. His promises cannot be achieved without america looting and plundering and bombing the rest of the world to bring spoils of affordability back home. His platform cannot be replicated by any country that isn’t america. His promise is the path of extreme destruction for the whole of the human race.

Although I am deeply thankful to Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders for all they taught me, I am no longer convinced their ideas will lead us anywhere better. From finding refuge in liberalism as a queer teenager to flirting with anarcho-syndicalism and democratic socialism during covid, I have finally found my way to the only real dynamic solution to the problems the world faces, that of the science of understanding and harnessing change, aka, Marxism.

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Pardon this melting pot of my thoughts that I have so brazenly sent your way, with no disclaimers or elaborations. There was a time I wasn’t so sure where I spoke from, what I spoke for. This was the time I used to call my newsletter Behuda Baat (frivolous talk). It was the title chosen by a shy infant rebel, one who felt the need to hide his convictions and discoveries behind self-deprecating labels, to seek permission to express anything meaningful. I still feel it is a good brand name, it’s memorable and catchy, and it will remain a platform I use, especially on YouTube and social media.

But I needed a better name for these thoughts and letters that I am going to start sharing with you. I needed a name that betrayed a certain seriousness (for I am done sugarcoating important ideas behind the softness of amusement and comedy) and a certain depth, and that stood against the poverty of philosophy that has come to plague and rust our critical thinking in this era of content. But more than anything, I wanted a name that struck the hammer of hope. It isn’t enough to just relay facts and ideas, it is critical to wear those ideas in our actions, and that requires faith, it requires hope.

What is a matter of time, you may ask. What isn’t, I say. The world will be a better place. It is just a matter of time. Truth will break the money-flooded lies of propaganda. It is just a matter of time. Human liberation itself will be brought down from the mythical heavens and karmic cycles, to the real, material societies we are a part of. It too is just a matter of time.

This newsletter is an evolution of the nervous, dystopian, grim themes of Behuda Baat. It is an attempt to revisit the same themes of interpersonal, societal and political realities, but with a sense of agency, hope and conviction. That’s also what the newsletter’s icon, the shell, represents. Change is not a cycle, it is a spiral. Things return to their older states, transformed by the forces of time, having changed yet having retained aspects of their past. That’s what a matter of time is. It’s a refuge from global unrest, universal flux in the comfort of the constancy and universality of change itself. I hope you’re in for the ride!

If you found something of value in this write-up, you can show your love, appreciation and support in a lot of ways. Become a paid patreon member and help me build a team or fund my passion projects. You can also buy my book of short stories for the end of the world. You can also just like this write-up and share it with your friends. But above all, please share your thoughts in the comments!