is co-founder and technology head of Lightcube, New Delhi - a company that organises film screenings across urban and rural India. He has been awarded the ARThink SouthAsia Fellowship 2018 for his work with The Dhenuki Cinema Project. He spent four years in the radio industry, as consultant, and works as trained actor in immersive performances, among others. 

Walking down the North Bridge in Edinburgh, with the roads blocked on each side by X Rebellion protesters with drums beating, placards and banners hoisted in the air, hundreds of young and old men and women - demanding urgent action towards climate change. I couldn’t stand away, joined the group and raised my voice too in the crowd - inspired by the courage of what started just a year ago and has snowballed into something so glorious. It is all about having the courage to standup and speak.

 

Six months ago I received a copy of ‘Courageous Citizens’ published by Valiz with European Cultural Foundation. The book drew my attention immediately by its design, textural quality and weight - not just of the paper but of the words on it. My expectation was that it will present me with direct arguments that I can use to further my own work, however, it was quite the opposite. To me it was a strange book that I had taken up to read and review, it challenged my perception.

 

I am a slow reader and my vivid imagination makes the process all the more slow, with Courageous Citizens I had to spend a great deal of time because every page of it is a condensed argument distilled by practitioners over years of their engagement with arts, culture and society. I come from a rural background in India and my education has been of a technical nature, however, my practice and engagement with projects over the last year has given me a certain vocabulary - it is essential to understand the role that vocabulary plays in a cultural discourse - and with that I found it difficult to catch speed with the book, but I believe that it was for the good. I had to invest more time than I would usually do reading through each page, allowing myself to fully understand it before progressing to the next. 

 

 

The book is divided into three sections, the first part being about observations and contemplations on diversity and equality - terms that have had increasing presence in the popular discourses in the last few decades, that seem too simple but have far deeper meanings, and that have engaged the politics in the better half of the last century into fulfilling their meanings. The section tackles not just the various origins, linkages and meanings of these terms but also looks at the efforts that policy and civil society have taken to achieve (partly) successes.

 

The second section moves further and investigates some of the emerging alternative definitions and practices around Community and Democracy, how movements emerge organically and how they can either die out or be co-opted by capitalism. David Harvey and Pascal Gielen help imagine the multiplicity of thoughts and world views that emerge out of or lead into such movements. This is supplemented by an excerpt from "The Imaginary Reader” - a book about the relationship between fiction and reality - that highlights the very crisis and limitations of our collective imagination as a society.

 

In its third section, Courageous Citizens progresses and makes an attempt to create new connections of solidarity by examining how individuals are expelled from a society and pointing out methods of exclusion and inclusion. Marina Naprushkina’s account of how to be an aide for a refugee and Fatima El-Tayeb’s essay on European Others enables the reader with tools and perspectives to process and react to situations the modern world presents, and gives you reference points to keep you from losing sight.

 

 

During the last years, I engaged in organising an event to mark the second cycle of an archive of Indian Cinema that we have been working for some time, travelled to UK for a fellowship secondment, went through a family crisis, and had to let go of the small team we had due to shortage of funds. I found great support and inspiration in these moments from what I was reading in Courageous Citizens, most importantly from the understanding that culture has a longer, more arduous journey than any other means in shaping our world. It takes far more effort and a long time to build a friendship, to accept the ‘others’, and to develop inclusive communities and minor successes, and failures do not matter as long as your objectives are in sight.

 

For thousands of years, humans have developed in myriad ways with multiple cultures, attitudes and inclinations - we live in a world that is extremely tilted, microscopically divided and massively controlled. Case in point is the Indian society that has countless divisions based on caste, class, religions, languages and food. For the longest period it was a landscape divided into smaller kingdoms battling with each other until foreign forces came and changed the dynamics for worse. Creating a harmonious society in a country like India will take far longer than the last seven decades since the country gained a national identity and independence. From the outside it may seem like a wonderful, diverse nation, but on careful examination one becomes aware of the violence that runs under the surface, there are millions who live as refugees within their own country. Can any singular project or initiative ever hope to change this?

 

Reading through selected portions from Marina Naprushkina’s article "Neue Heimat? Wie Flüchtlinge us zu besseren Nachbarn Machen” (New homeland. How refugees make us better neighbours) I am instantly reminded of the anecdotes I read about the Indian partition of people helping out ‘the other’ who was a neighbour just the day before but is now an enemy. David Harvey’s deeply personal and critical observations about culture, tourism and capitalism opens me up to new thoughts and ways of looking. Through Rosi Braidotti’s Politics of Location, I now have a way of understanding my own identity as a migrant in my own country.

 

We need more courageous citizens, people who can invest time and energy to cogitate, articulate and design ways to challenge the existing systems. More often these people will feel disillusioned, failed and defeated, it is important that they do not give up, it is important that they continue to speak and act and inspire each other. Many of them would be young people like me, still trying to acquire a vocabulary, for those, I highly recommend ‘Courageous Citizens’.