The Universe in One Tangerine: A Politics of Inter-being

I have always been a fan of salted cashewnuts—a very expensive treat anywhere in the world. When I was a child, the canteen of Metro Cinema in Bombay had them and if we were very good and very lucky, we might get to eat them during the interval. Those were the only salted cashews I had ever eaten. As an adult, it felt luxurious finding them readily in American supermarkets and of course, on the road in Sri Lanka—still an expensive treat, but available! Like others, I eat cashew nuts quickly and thoughtlessly, as if to catch them before they disappear.
 
Recently, I got to meet people who work in this sector. They do not like to eat cashew nuts. Perhaps this is because they cannot forget the work that goes into making the nuts look and taste as we like them. They are peeled by hand, stinging and staining the hand. Processing them is laborious. It is not as if cashews grow on trees all the time! It is a short season, and the trees take a long time to get to the point where they yield fruit. Into that long time, many disasters may fall—cyclones, floods, droughts. Life is really like a game of snakes and ladders. In a good year, there is a good local crop, good credit for purchasing outside cashews and decent prices and a decent market.
 
All of this depends, distantly but definitely, on whether I keep the air-conditioner running while I eat the cashews. When I do that, I contribute to global warming, which then makes climate disasters more common and places agrarian livelihoods and all our lives, in jeopardy. And then I think of those fruit-stained hands, and look at my own, and at the quality of my consumption. We are strangers but our lives are interwoven.
 
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We live in an age where everything can be recharged electrically except for human beings, and maybe that is around the corner. Energy hunger is as endemic as food and water shortages are.
 
My need to run a fan, a refrigerator, computers, industrial machinery, water motors (to source depleted groundwater), motors for mechanised agriculture and air-conditioners is directly responsible for ever greater state investments in cost-effective energy projects. The challenge is in how we define ‘cost-effective.’ The simplest definition might be—getting more for less and this has taken us towards nuclear energy. However, through the same logic, the people of Kudankulam and Jaitapur have arrived at a different result—less investment, greater risk to their lives and future generations. They worry about safety, about health risks, about the impact of effluents, about the discharge from the reactors and about disaster risk in tsunami and earthquake sensitive areas.
 
The post-World War II development model of the United States—big cars, big homes, lives lived on a large canvas—is commonly associated with the US energy dependence on oil imports from West Asia. The need to secure oil sources and delivery routes has dragged the US into regional conflicts and politics since the 1960s, to the point where, from its location one hemisphere away, it is a regional actor. This involvement has come full circle since 9/11. On a day to day basis now, it is hard to disentangle and regard as separate violence in Gaza from the growth of ISIS from the random hate crimes in American cities from the politics of immigration.
 
More and more people are looking to simplify their lives, but it is too little, too late. For countless others, even survival is a long distance away. The short run as we know it involves more consumption and more wastage. The problems we have created boggle the mind; the solutions seem too complicated for individuals or small groups to attempt. But the Butterfly Effect gives us hope: if a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico can cause a hurricane in China, surely there is something each one of us can do.
 
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Although our view of international relations has progressed from ritual courtly dances to dense and dynamic movement of people, ideas, resources, and goods, it is still hard to imagine any role for ordinary individuals.
 
Therefore when a large number of individuals (some better known than others) signed a petition in May, supporting an uninterrupted peace process with Pakistan, it was met with skepticism. Who were these people? What would they achieve? How was peace possible? (And perhaps, what were they smoking?!) One month later, peace has not broken out but two things have happened. First, over a thousand people on either side of the border have taken a stand publicly against continuing hostilities that serve no useful public purpose. The petition is still open for signatures and the numbers continue to grow. There have been other petitions before this one but they have been drafted and circulated within a small coterie of like-minded individuals usually located in capital cities. This one has truly been open to the public. Second, for about two weeks, a petition for peace became the subject of commentary and discussion rather than violence and conflict. This is no small achievement in our times. Anyone who thinks a petition is going to change the world probably hasn’t read history, but petitions have the power to get us talking about controversial issues in ways that can change the world. That is very important to remember. Those who have signed on to this petition have signaled that they are part of a constituency invested in peace and that constituency is growing every day.
 
And take the now-extinct hobby of penfriendship. As a teenager, I had penfriends all over the world and from places in India I had never visited. We learned from each other’s letters how similar our lives were although we were far apart—all of us doing homework and exams, enjoying summer holidays and looking forward to college and adult life. We also experienced difference and distance. Photos of a cane fire in Queensland were inexplicable to me—why would you take photos when your farm was burning? Vignettes about the civil rights movement in the US would find their way into news about history homework. Letters traveling undisturbed across the border between Islamabad and Bombay were their own miracle in the late 1970s and 1980s, and an early visa application by my penfriend was my first encounter (at 16) with the Intelligence Bureau on this side. But, would you not want to visit your friend’s house? The point is, we grew up together, we learned from each other and we also entered adulthood unable to imagine a world without the other person in it. One little postcard could bring home the world—a world we could not allow to be destroyed.
 
International education is a third element in this. Learning a second or third language, traveling for any reason and education outside your home expand your universe in unimaginable ways. The lives of individuals who transformed the world were often first transformed by education away from home. That encounter with people who live differently from your family and that process of give and take by which you make a place for yourself in another world, teaches you about acceptance, sharing, learning and negotiation. Along that journey, people will take care of you that you might otherwise never have met—not family, not colleagues, not neighbours—but from across cultures, they will watch over you, bring you a meal when you are sick, pray for you when you worry and allow you to sit with them while you gather yourself after a bad day. They will remain in your mind the evidence that we share a common humanity and a capacity for love that transcends everything.
 
Individual acts of conscience and kindness lay a concrete foundation for peace.  When all else is forgotten, through the bitter memory of injustice and the unhealed wounds of conflict, stories about an individual’s compassion or care remain—the seeds of peace.
 
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In our organisation, we approach people to let us do informal discussions about women’s rights in their setting and they say, “We don’t need this. We are allowed to do as we like.” The use of the word “allowed” gives them away. If we probe, we learn this is for their protection: “We cannot allow our women to be at risk.” We do a cost-benefit analysis ourselves at this point—the cost of letting the ‘our’ and the infantilisation go is outweighed by access to a new platform for our message. We are told that it is domestic workers—the poor, the underprivileged—who really need to be given awareness about their rights. We offer them a compromise—let us visit you first so you can help others.
 
The other day, someone asked me quite seriously if I had ever experienced gender inequality in my own life. Often, journalists will probe my motivation for doing this work. Perhaps I have a story of violence in my own life, tucked away in some closet? When I sidestep the questions to answer in relatively general terms, there is a grudging admiration: My work is my contribution towards improving the lives of the less fortunate. After all, privilege (which I clearly enjoy in spades) entails responsibility.
 
In my life, gender inequality manifests less visibly and less dramatically than in the life of a girl sold to a trafficker or a woman being battered by her family or young women workers who are groped by their boss or girls who cannot go to school because they cannot sit next upper-caste peers. But our lives are inextricably linked. When the trafficker shows up at my door as an employment agent; when I choose not to intervene in someone’s family matters despite an inkling of abuse; when I remind the girls that they need their job or when I declare in a living room conversation that caste does not matter nowadays, I am contributing to their vulnerabilities.
 
Even more than that, the same structures of inequality pin each of us to our location, ignorant because privilege isolates us and sanguine because of that ignorance. “My life is fine,” we say, as we bear the pinpricks of middle or upper-class life—peer pressure about body image, family pressure for housework performance, gendered family work or that bane of any social gathering—un-funny sexist jokes about women drivers, wives or mothers-in-law. When someone talks about gender violence, we worry about the men who will have to face false allegations and the misuse of the law for personal vengeance. When there is sexual harassment in our homes and we are torn between gender politics and class solidarity, we fail to protect one another and we also enable other acts of violence. We hold up the walls of our oppression to prevent them from falling on our heads. Each person’s experience of injustice, violence, and discrimination is one reflection of the pervasive hierarchical patriarchy around us. Each one just has a different piece of it at a given moment. We are the tangerine and we are the universe.
 
Just as we are, when political discourse takes the form of personal attacks or hate speech; when people are trolled for what they say or write; when the agencies of state are instruments for the suppression of dissent or when we try to undermine those who courageously speak the truth as they see it. Martin Niemoller’s oft-quoted words, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me,” offer an instrumental reason for speaking out against injustice and repression.  A far more important reason inheres in the reality of our inter-being. We are, because of each other. Hashtag activism speaks an important truth we barely understand: We are indeed London, New York, Kabul, Beirut, Nairobi, Kandhamal, Malegaon and every site of human experience in the world. We are the world.
 
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I, insignificant speck in a universe whose temporal and spatial limits I cannot imagine, make a difference as a result of my choices—my air-conditioner use accelerates climate change and creates energy deficits that have consequences for people’s lives far away from me and result in market and political shifts that then impact war and peace choices within and outside my country which are expressed through gendered language and reflect other hierarchies of power and privilege. My taste for tangerines or cashews begins with someone’s labour, someone’s love and create or limit someone else’s life-chances. My friendships cement bridges of understanding and acceptance and my prejudices vitiate the political environment. Through my values and the practical ways I express them—my vote, my donations, my social choices—I create your world.
 
As you create mine.
 
To come back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible for everything that happens around us.” Find the universe in your tangerine and make it better.
 
Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist by training.