Ruchira’s daughter Sanjukta shared my tribute on Facebook this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog, and that a stranger’s grief could reach her family and land as comfort is the whole case for keeping BP alive. The original post is here, Ruchira’s obituary is here, and her daughter’s own tribute is here.
Rest in peace, dearest Ruchira.
In her honour I have started using “I” again instead of the impersonal “we”. I wanted to emotionally invest in this space the way she did in her interactions online.
Moments like this are what I want to cultivate here, so, two years after I revived the blog here from Chennai.
Admin: Agni and myself.
Authors: RNJ, 0M-3, formerly brown and Arkacandra.
It is a tight ship, I am constantly scanning for activity, and authorship is a privilege.
To the authorial cadre, a suggestion about how to spend that privilege. When Kabir argues that South Asians are not natural democrats, or that monarchy suits “a culture that is status and caste-conscious”, the response I want is a reasoned post, not a thread war.
The same standard runs the other way: the comment claiming Pakistanis/haaris are uniquely amenable to feudal domination, should be comprehensively rebutted. Sweeping claims about any community should get answered above the fold, with texture and context. That is the point of a humanities engagement.
The blog is very active, and thanks to Calvin it now has a captain of the Opposition. The divide is ideological, not sectarian, and I intend to keep it that way. Any drift back to sectarian lines or TNT relitigation will not be looked on kindly. This blog is concerned with the Indian subcontinent, of which India, that is Bharat, is the central and defining feature; the neighbours are covered sometimes in their own right but primarily in their bearing on the natural hegemon, India.
The Nicobar thread is the kind of discussion I most want here, since I care about environmental degradation as a general matter (maybe that is Western privilege; it is a privilege I intend to keep).
Here is to the next 15 years, and to a space that Ruchira would appreciate.