Dear Readers,
It was 1997 when my family moved from Hong Kong, just before it was liberated from its British rule, to Mumbai, shortly after it was freed from its own colonial name. This same year also marked India’s 50th year of Independence, a fact that was prominently broadcast on television ads and displayed on hoardings.
This intersecting web of freedoms that my life has traversed has been on my mind recently. In part, this is because India just commemorated its 75th Independence Day, a milestone that happens to coincide with the week of my first post-vaccine vacation, the ultimate pinnacle of freedom amidst a pandemic. Yet these images clash so violently with occurrences in other parts of the world, where people have literally died to get on an airplane, that it serves as a brutal reminder of how fragile freedom really is.
Looking back on the year that was, almost all our notions of freedom have been invalidated in some shape or form. And at some level, these curtailments exemplify Rousseau's social contract theory, the idea that we all have to give up certain individual freedoms for the greater good, and in this case, collective survival of society.
Such trade-offs are of course not exclusive to living in a pandemic, but ones that we experience on a daily basis. This idea became evident while reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, one of the more helpful self-help books (especially if you share my obsession with productivity hacks). Clear, while explaining how to build better habits, discusses the common fallacy that a structured and regimented daily routine will inhibit our freedom and spontaneity. As far as habits are concerned he says, they do not restrict freedom but create it. His reasoning behind this is:
“In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom.”
That even freedom is not free from its terms and conditions may seem odd, or even oxymoronic. But it almost always circles back to the idea that freedom is always relative and never absolute, an idea that political and philosophical thinkers have explored extensively. Even the foundations of India’s independent government are ultimately based on an institutional apparatus that was forged by the British empire. Hong Kong, on the other hand, has a vocal section of society that is still trying to preserve its vestiges of colonialism, a past that in their eyes was possibly freer than the present. And for added proof that the world is full of people fighting for relative freedom, look no further than the hoards of anti vaccine and anti mask protestors.
With that, I will free you from my own ramblings, for not just one, but two weeks as I revel in my newfound freedom.
Yours half-baked (and half-free),
Saanya