I walk down Chittaranjan Avenue in the fading light of the late autumnal sun, slogans in my mouth, something suspiciously like hope in my heart. A fellow walker points to the side at something up in the air. It takes me some time to make out what they are staring at. A building as ancient as the street itself, strains to stand upright under the weight of memory. Two pairs of wrinkled faces pop out of identical wrought-iron-clad windows on the third floor. The Tricolour flies bravely from one of the windows, while the other sends down applause to the beat of our chants. My lungs are suddenly too full to breathe. My father’s voice from the morning rings in my head, “You are doing performative activism.” Aren’t all protests performative? They are performed for the system, they are performed for the public, sometimes they are even performed for ourselves. Otherwise, why would four geriatrics choose to show support for our cause from their lonely bedrooms up in the clouds? Who are they changing but themselves? What will they achieve except restoring our faith in humanity?
‘Empathy is at least partly governed by our experiences and context in life’
What defines us as humans? Our ability to think and reason, our sense of order and our imagination are often cited as characteristic traits of our species. But these qualities alone would not have been sufficient to sustain survival for nearly 300,000 years. In a Darwinian worldview, it is tempting to misinterpret “survival of the fittest” as an incentive for increased competition. Reward the ‘strong’ and punish the ‘weak’. But as American anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “The first sign of civilisation is compassion.” In the wild, animals with broken legs are usually eaten before they can heal. When she discovered a healed femur in an archaeological site, it indicated that someone cared for the injured person, stayed with them, and provided physical protection until they recovered. Mead concluded that helping someone through difficulty is where civilisation begins. What makes humans compassionate? Why are we driven by empathy? Biologically speaking, we have mirror neurons somewhere in our prefrontal cortex which makes us feel others’ pain when we see them. But empathy cannot be a purely biological phenomenon, because then everyone would have the same capacity for it. Only one girl in my fifth standard class broke out into tears when our science teacher taught us about global warming. She went on to found the West Bengal chapter of Fridays for Future, and spent most of her teenage and young adult years advocating for climate justice. Later I found out that she was a child of the mountains, and had grown up playing around the rivers and streams that dot the green valleys around Alipurduar. Empathy, then, is at least partly governed by our experiences and context in life — by what we hold important and consider to be worthy of being inside the tiny bubbles we all construct for ourselves.
Empathy cannot be a purely biological phenomenon, because then everyone would have the same capacity for it iStock
My city has always been a fertile ground for providing the kind of context that is essential for empathy to breed. Perhaps it is because we have gone through the pain of being torn apart. And in suffering so, we have clung on together stronger than ever. We have learnt to listen to each other. Through listening, we have discovered that the boundaries that separate us are flimsier than we would imagine. Hence, I have friends in the city who have devoted their lives to the rescue and care of stray cats, at the cost of great personal comfort and ease. I have friends who run vegan clubs and “Meatless Monday” initiatives in a culture where meals are incomprehensible without fish curry. I have friends who teach LGBTQIA+ individuals basic English on the weekends for free, in a country where homosexuality was a crime just six years back. None of these people suffers from the delusion that they will bring forth monumental and drastic change. They help who they can, when they can, and in doing so open the floodgates for osmotic action to take place. They care deeply, and they bring that care out on the streets and the bylanes, on makeshift stages and plays at the Academy, and through windows that open onto the sky. They inspire me to return to this place, again and again, and to join those who, in the words of Arundhati Roy, “go to war each day, knowing fully well that they will fail”.
Through listening, we have discovered that the boundaries that separate us are flimsier than we would imagine Shutterstock
As I walk the roads of my beloved city in one of the biggest civil movements to happen in the state in recent times, I shake off my father’s words from my mind. “This is pointless. Nothing is going to come of this. You cannot change the system like this.” Maybe I cannot change the system, but I can at least change the people who inhabit it. If I cannot change the people, I can at least make them start talking about it. If I cannot make anyone new talk about it, I can at least take comfort in the fact that there are others like me who care. Humans have been built to seek company. None of us can survive on islands of our own, no matter how tempting that might seem. In a world that is being increasingly taken over by either outright hostility or its gentler twin named apathy, I feel seen when I come back to my city. And the four inhabitants of the crumbling house on Chittaranjan Avenue, who defy death to unfurl the flag of freedom to the ground — I see them too.
Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhuri is a software developer based in Bangalore. In her free time, she likes to read, write, travel and occasionally try to shatter the glass ceiling. Her work has previously been published in Borderless Journal and Kitaab.