A few weeks ago I found myself in the peculiar position of reading A Promised Land alongside The Handmaid's Tale (in anticipation of the next season, which is taking aeons to air in the UK). The simultaneous reading is habitual, which you would know if you followed my Bookstagram account (plug intended). But the literary combination was curious.
While I don't intend to compare two genres so distinct, the dichotomy between them has been playing on my mind ever since. How they articulate two competing visions of a nation, one believing in the best that it has to offer as it introspects on its past and the other conceiving its most dystopian future.
Funnily enough, I find this conflict evocative of my own sense of nationalism, which started out fiercely optimistic, but has tempered along the way. But more pronounced than my waning idealism is the detachment with which I now regard the state of political affairs in my home country. The fact is that my newfound realism is not grounded in a grasp of daily realities, but an ambivalence and even apathy toward them.
This drift is one that I am still trying to make sense of, reconciling that I now embody the same diaspora values that I once so successfully desisted from despite several stints of living outside my homeland. But even as someone with the peripheral political opinion of an emigrant, it is hard to ignore how de-intellectualized our discourse has become. That my rant about the foreign hand trope enjoys continued relevance almost six months later and the very premise of our most recent humanitarian debacle is up for legal contention are only the latest exhibits of a more disturbing trend.
Of course this is not to suggest that my sentiments lie solely with camp Gilead (for the uninitiated, that's a Handmaid's Tale reference to America's fictional totalitarian future). My musings, after all, began with two contrasting imaginations, a duality that I intend to continue entertaining. For like Obama, there are possibilities of India that I am not yet ready to abandon. And in a country as complex, perhaps hope itself is the ability to imagine plural worlds, no matter how disparate or divergent.
Happy reading, reflecting and bearing with my musings.
Yours half-baked,
Saanya