Of a democratic polity. and me.

I participated in an “alternate” space, which for a while, I have called my own. With sub-sets of spaces of inspirational people and spaces that looked beyond binaries.

Sometimes, the alternate falls into the same rut as the 'mainstream'. Politics is about the personal. And sometimes, collective politics becomes exclusionary. Replete with unmistakable hints of incestuous alliances, and “part of the movement” also embraces egos, alter-egos and super-egos.

The politics discourse is often partitioned into that for the classes and the masses. Here, language, for me, posited as within or without. My ghost for the day was having to communicate something that I believed so strongly about, in Hindi. I had psyched myself into believing that my inability to communicate would be seen as clinching the suspicion that my involvement was superficial. I apparently am the urban “Pepsi-Cola” peoples, and will allegedly fly the patriotic coup. I felt strangely like an outsider. Of course, I rationalize it by thinking that it was my own sense of insecurity or some sort of complex that cropped up.

If you’re part of the same space, do you still have to gloat? Are new members in a collective supposed to “fit in” to the uniform? Doesn’t inclusively also mean that those from the 'mainstream' are also welcome; after all, isn’t that a sign of the success of the alternative? Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, to fight to larger battle, one cannot afford to laud the exceptions. The larger space continues to exist without them.