in search of heroes
in an era of cravens, where do we go looking for the brave?
“I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.”
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
A few weeks ago, YouTubers Samay Raina and Ranveer Allahbadia were caught in an outrageously manufactured controversy. Ranveer had cracked an unfunny unoriginal “anti-family” joke, and as a result had found himself, Samay and all previous guests of Samay's show facing FIRs for obscenity. Even before the controversy could erupt into being a nationwide sensation, Ranveer had taken to social media to apologize. He said he was neither funny nor smart nor original, or something along those lines. Samay Raina removed all episodes of his show from YouTube, saying all he wanted was to entertain, not offend. As the media circus expanded and the noose of the law tightened, thousands of people poured out in their support, all over social media. Badshah shouted 'Free Samay Raina' at his concert. The political left that Samay and Ranveer had both alienated by either platforming right-wing intellectuals or with their anti-woke optics, was split between offering idealistic support and enjoying the fallout. Meanwhile the media, manufacturing consent for the BJP's agenda, clamoured for laws to regulate influencers and content creators.
I didn't have much interest in this controversy. The joke was not that interesting, but I do understand how political parties swimming in corporate donations could energize an army of unemployed and restless youth over some minimum wage to care enough to keep up the heat on these influencers, and away from all real issues. While online death threats continued, some people even invaded Ranveer's mom's clinic posing as patients. It's not easy bringing a nation of over a billion to a halt, except when you have the backing of the entire corporate-bureaucratic nexus of a fascist state, and so this nation could, this time, come to a halt.
About two days before this controversy broke out in Mumbai, a bit north of the opposite coast in the same country, buddhist monks and nuns from all over the world had begun sitting on an indefinite fast in Bodhgaya, protesting to reclaim the Mahabodhi Mahavihara complex, which houses the Bodhi Tree under which Gautam Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. On 25 February, in the dead of the night, 25 of these monks were forcefully detained by Bihar police, forcing the protest to shift base away from the complex. The media coverage this incident or protest was fated to receive would pale in comparison to what Ranveer and Samay were gifted.
Around the same time, a journalist shared a heartbreaking video of a homeless infant feeding his supine handicapped mother a porridge of salt and plain rice. A few days later, incipient proletariat toilet paper, The Economist boldly announced that India has eliminated extreme poverty. On the same day that this article came out, and just a week after the riling up of the Indian media against Ranveer in defense of the Indian family, sixteen underage girls were rescued from an orchestra in Bettiah, Bihar. Some of these girls had been sold by their mothers for just ₹5000 and ₹10,000. One of them was pregnant, the other was bruised from being beaten. You can imagine how many news segments were dedicated to them by the tele-circus and the toilet paper. (Apparently, mothers selling their underage daughters into sex-work for one-tenth the rent of a Bandra studio apartment isn’t extreme poverty.)
Around a week after the nation was hurt by a crude joke, a gang of lawless lawyers beat up a Muslim man within the premises of a Madhya Pradesh court for daring to show up to claim his constitutional right to marry his brahmin girlfriend. Bleeding from his face, he was forced to perform utthak baitthak. The next day some JNU students exposed their administration for practicing the outlawed and deeply casteist, inhuman practice of manual scavenging on the campus of this 'India's most prestigious university'.
In case after case, as the media frenzy around Samay and Ranveer amplified, as the Supreme Court scurried to quickly arrange their hearing, as national commissions were formed to tackle the collapse of morality initiated by them, as police forces from Assam traveled the subcontinent to bring these men to account, and as creators in my feed started sharing their two cents, I began to wonder what it would take for me to care.
Sitting with a friend over tea, I ruminated that the conditions of India today, specifically in terms of free speech, weren't that different from that of America in the mid-twentieth century. Their Hays code, various FCC regulations and some 'decency laws' penalized everything from lewd jokes to provocative performances to suggestive dresses, hard as it may be to believe now for awestruck young Indian comedians and edgelords, who are heavily enamoured by the 'absolute freedom' american artists seemingly enjoy these days. The point I tried to make to my friend was that these freedoms (as farcical and shallow as they are, but we'll talk about that some other time) didn't emerge like nature's bounty without any human endeavour. To win their rights, artists had stood by their works, and had fought the state tooth and nail. As Rega Jha details in her eighteenth here/now studies newsletter, similar defiance was shown by the writers Manto and Chughtai in the last century. So I asked my friend, wasn't this a great chance for Ranveer to expose the hypocrisy of the corporate-state machinery that was manufacturing outrage over a joke when such extreme assaults to human dignity have been normalized all around us? Wasn't it smarter to shield himself from the assault of the ruthless media and state by exposing their own hypocrisy, based on their own metrics of outrage? I realized I couldn't care for a guy who apologized even before the outrage had begun. My friend didn't agree with me though. 'If I was in his place, I would have done the same. I would happily choose to apologize and lie low, than to go to jail.' He made sense, Ranveer was just a human like us, after all. Would we wish to face the angry mobs and the billion dollar outrage machine churning them? Was it fair to expect from Ranveer what we couldn't imagine doing, what could be termed extra-human? But I couldn't bring myself to agree.
It occurred to me much later that what I had been trying to express wasn't addressed by empathizing with Ranveer. Empathizing with an apologetic, defeated man only made me apologetic and defeated. It only normalized apologia and defeat. And it was only because over the last decade, the progressive youth of this nation had been browbeaten into bending the knee in surrender to fascist forces, and it was only because a fear had been instilled in our minds with acts of police brutality, mob rule and barbarous sycophancy, that people like Ranveer and Samay had inherited the values and ecosystems of convenience and pragmatic, hollow self-preservation. It occurred to me that from the summits of history, silently watching the Indian peninsula being engulfed by the ascending tsunamis of organized communalism, casteism and fascism, I was desperately looking for a hero. Someone who stood for something beyond material comforts, someone with values beyond 'money comes first'.
No one can deny that heroism is a scarce trait. How people feel about acts of valour isn't that hard to scrutinize. Bravery is very personally felt as akin to foolishness. While we love the folks who jump into a fire to save a stranger, most of us would wait and hope for someone to do it. We'd much prefer to applaud from a distance. In the intellectual sphere, there are those who see the very act of seeking and celebrating heroes as a sign of tribalism. These cultural critics (I have been one of them) consider hero-worship unsophisticated and irrational.
But as I sat famished of heroes, appalled at the lack of a spine or a sense of strategic adventure amongst the youth icons of our times, I felt an itch growing. What was the cost of surrendering our demands of heroism from our society, I began to wonder.
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” ~ Umberto Eco
Hind Rajab was a five year old Palestinian girl who was martyred by the Israeli Occupation Forces last year. 335 bullets had been fired into her stationary car. Seated with her were six other dead family members, including more children. They'd all been killed three hours before she was shot, by an Israeli tank. For those three hours, Hind had been on a call with a Red Cross operator, telling them how scared she was for her life. The operator, in a progressively more broken voice, was assuring her an ambulance was coming to rescue her. In those three hours, Red Cross did all they could to get permission from the occupying forces to rescue Hind. The permissions came, the ambulance left to rescue her, but when it was just feets away from Hind's car, it was bombed by an america-made missile, killing the two ambulance workers inside. The five year old baby was then shot from an Israeli tank with 335 bullets fired at her car. Days later, CNN journalist Kasie Hunt, while mentioning Hind, referred to her as 'a woman who was killed in Gaza', probably to make her death seem less disturbing. Some CNN staffers eventually told The Guardian that this american media house has been acting as a "surrogate censor for the Israeli government".
Over the next few months as Israel continued bombing hospitals, schools and residential places, and indiscriminately killing over forty thousand Palestinians (vast majority of them kids and non-combatants), an organic network of protests began to bloom across universities in America. Starting in Columbia University (New York), students set up tents on campus grounds, launching indefinite sit-in protests, declaring the areas 'liberated zones'. They had a simple demand. Columbia University had reached its $13.6 billion dollar endowment by investing in corporations like BlackRock and Caterpillar, which in turn were directly or indirectly involved with the settler colonial entity of Israel. The students claimed their right to decide how their university used the tuition fees they paid, and asked for Columbia to divest from investing in all corporations that profited off the decades old apartheid, and now the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
An year before these protests, and four months before October 7, the university's vice president Gerry Rosberg was asked if he considered Palestinians to be human, and he refused to say yes, responding that he found the question intimidating. The enforcer president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, has been found to be one of the wealthiest persons in America, earning $2000 every hour. Professor Rebecca Weiner of Columbia University also works as the deputy commissioner for the intel division of New York Police, with one of their offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Is it any surprise then, that on the second day itself of the protests, police was called and over a hundred students arrested, and three suspended?
In response to this repression, the protests spread to Boston, Harvard, MIT and other american universities. In Fordham university, protesting students who were mass suspended wrote 'Free Palestine' on their suspension letters and carried on protesting. In Columbia itself, the students took over a historic lecture building, Hamilton Hall, and renamed it Hind's Hall, sealing it shut to disrupt the regular functioning of their university. Hind Rajab they declared their "kindergartener, daughter, sister, martyr." Soon after the police was called on them again. Videos showed students being pushed down stairs and being dragged and arrested in passed out and wounded states. Professor Alyssa Battistoni remarked at the absurdity of taking an exam to grade her students in political theories of freedom, when they were quiet literally fighting for political freedoms while facing police repression. The faculty at Columbia performed a mass walkout, linking arms and forming a wall of protection around their students who were being threatened with mass disciplinary action. Over 1400 alumni pledged to withhold all “financial, programmatic, and academic support” till the student protestors' demands were met, putting over $63 million dollars of donations at risk. In an interview, Hind Rajab's mother broke down. She said she hoped the protests would continue till a permanent ceasefire was reached, so others like Hind wouldn't continue going through this.
With such a response, is it any surprise that even after being suspended, being violently arrested and being doxxed in front of international media, despite having their degrees and job prospects and green cards at risk, nothing could wipe the smile of dignified, heroic pride off the face of these students?
None of them sought to be heroes, most of them might not even see themselves as one, but by simply believing in something bigger than themselves, and in doing their honest best to stand by their beliefs, in actions as much as in words, they became heroes. They inspired student movements across their guilty country, but also around the world.
Those who believe in nothing at all might amuse themselves by gleefully (or even remorsefully) noting the protests failed, that the ones we shall call heroes were defeated in their goals of divesting their universities from funding a genocide, but who are they to tell us anything? Who are they to us, or to anyone seeking anything of meaning?
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
If, like me, you've grown up with a lot of western shows, movies and thinkers (or lately, even progressive Indian entertainment), you must have sensed that we're taught to fear group thinking. We're told that group-think leads to irrationality, volatility and oppression, especially when compared to individualistic ways of being. On observation, it does seem true. India is a den of caste associations, feudal infighting, and spectacular hypocrisies that hide violent tendencies. To think in groups is to subscribe to the worst superstitions, traditions and beliefs. It is to conform, to reduce oneself to the will of the apathetic samaaj. But is this principle behind avoiding thinking in groups true in general? For instance, was it true for the students organizing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Columbia? The protests worked in such exceptional social cohesion that talking to one person was like to talking to any and all of them. They all followed the rules of not engaging with the press, and always directing the press to their media coordinator. They all had the same thing to share when asked about their suffering: 'What we experienced is nothing compared to what the Palestinian people have endured for 76 years and seven months.' Is this kind of group-think, this collective action to be feared or to be admired?
In other words, is what we are taught about the pitfalls of collectivism over individualism also true for an enlightened society? Is a society that pursues reason, follows scientific enquiry, practices democratic morality and creates institutions to disseminate duty and responsibility based on collective principles worse than a society which guarantees individualistic freedoms, no matter how unreasonable, unscientific or harmful those freedoms are to others?
No one can deny the catastrophic rise of global fascism, and the normalization of racism, sexism, casteism and lawlessness in its wake. Faced with such collective irrationalism, all mass media, influencers, celebrities and capitalist intellectuals are telling us to find shelter in our own selves. Build your own meaning, follow your vibe, make money and buy fancy things. Seeking self-fulfilness without first fully understanding the ‘self’ is the geist of our lives. The subtext is that the powerful will do whatever they want, and if you just focus inwards and ignore everything going around you, you will be magically spared the misery being unleashed on your fellow humans, even though all evidence of the last twenty years (from ever-present inflation to rising pollution to eroding pensions to crumbling infrastructure) prove otherwise. In face of such contradictions, to not accept the truth (that we will be next) is to shy away from the demands of history from us. It is cowardice.
In India, we live in cowardly times. I'm not reprimanding us, I'm not even in a position to. All I mean is that we're desperately in need of heroes and there aren't many. Hind's Hall was a place of heroes. By being an enlightened crowd seeking global emancipation, they at once accepted the destructive, reactionary historic role served by not just their university, but also their police and their national government itself. By accepting the real material nature of the violent world they had inherited, and by not bowing to it in cowardice or opportunism, they also accepted their historic role as protestors and activists who had to do whatever they could to change things. And by simply accepting this historic role, they became heroes.
But it wasn't just that. They were able to get as further as they could only because they were enlightened collectively. To be a hero in a sea of cowards, as many today feel, is indeed foolish. It is romantic, it is liberating, but it is foolish. It is in vain. But to accept things as they are and to hope they will never affect you is doubly foolish. Freedom is a verb, it is a continuous process, and it is only won by staking our lives. And when we all stake our lives to add meaning to our lives, we become one. We think like one. And then, when the fellow next to us is jailed or beaten, we feel their pain and anguish. We rise up for them together. When we stick for humanity, for fraternity, we increase the chances of humanity sticking for us. When we push each other to be heroes, we expand the safety net for all heroes who fall, and we make it safer for all of us to be heroic.
I recently got a chance to watch Train to Busan, a multi-star thriller, where the characters were trapped inside a train while a zombie outbreak engulfed South Korea. At the start of the movie, most people were self serving cowards, acting in self interest. It only unleashed anarchy. When zombies are coming after you, and your fellow human throws you at them just to find a few seconds more of self preservation, at that instance, in ensuring your demise that human is being no different than the braindead zombie he throws you at. So later in the movie, their collective survival was ensured only when they started trading learnings and building collective strategies for survival. By the time the movie ended, selfish characters had become self-sacrificing, literally annihilating themselves just to ensure the survival of others, simply because the situation demanded staking one life in hopes that then every other life could survive. The characters had reached the ultimate state of heroism: martyrdom. It is a state of being so stripped of self-gratification that it seems lunatic to us hedonists. But in fact, what drove martyrs like Bhagat Singh, was an extreme level of enlightenment, of realization of the nature of the truth that collective survival lay in collective heroism, and sometimes this heroism meant not surviving the times while trying to ensure collective survival.
So what does this have to do with Ranveer and Samay? In a way, not much. I mean, they're no heroes. But my point has been that it's not just their failing. It's our collective failing. When the killers of Gauri Lankesh can roam free, when Umar Khalid can be put in jail without trial for years, when rapists can be garlanded, and those who burnt Graham Staines, his wife and his two kids alive can win tickets to parliament, and seeing all this, when we hide in our quilts in fear of being next, we cede ground to the fascists to encroach more, and we, the masses, disincentivize anyone from becoming a hero. Tomorrow if we lose our right to internet freedom on the backs of a concocted controversy, we only have our collective cowardice to blame. And things will keep getting worse till we develop the courage to demand rational righteousness from our families, friends, leaders and public figures.
Till we push each other to be heroes and till we stand by each other as we try being heroes, we will all die waiting for one. Our search for heroes begins by being one. Together.