Courage to Art
Attention, Art and Ancestry as Weapons Against Apathy
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Namaste friends,
A lifetime ago, when I lived in Dehradun, I would gaze at the distant beauty of the Himalayan foothills clustering together in the misty horizons of the Garhwal valley and wonder about the future—my own and the world’s. I dreamt of all the places I would see, the things I would do, the people I would meet. You see, I was still possessed by the clueless romanticism of youth, untouched by the cruelty of life, unfazed by the abuses I survived, the losses I endured. I thought of the world as a place of progress, where goodness ultimately prevails, and the dark history of wars, genocides, colonialism, and oppression remains relegated to the obscure shelves of libraries and the occasional Oscar-worthy cinema.
Little did I know that I was stepping into an era of extreme spiritual crisis—one where pandemics, cancer, and war crimes are as commonplace as smartphones. That, I would not be living in my mother’s world of hopes and possibilities—but in my grandmother’s era of wars, displacement, and survival. I have inherited not a world of progress but one of repetition—where the same cycles of destruction replay with chilling precision. The world as it stands today is a testament to how ordinary individuals, stripped of critical awareness, become instruments of the grand machinery of violence. It is not merely the tyrants and despots who enable doom, but the silent acceptance of the majority that ensures its continuity.
To say it is frustrating to exist in this world is the understatement of the century. The nonsensical declarations that charlatans masquerading as world leaders toss around like holiday candies, defy all logic. Meanwhile, the planet burns. The forests shrink. The seas rise. Eco-toxicity seeps into our bones through microplastics and industrial waste. And yet, the wars expand—ruthlessly, endlessly—because there is always more to extract, more to exploit. I cannot help but wonder what will become of our story—the human story—once we have successfully hollowed ourselves out to the point of no return.
Power of Attention
“Because you see, when at a moment of attention all the conditioning disappears, all the image-building comes to an end. It's only when you are not attentive then the whole thing begins—you are a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, you know, communist and all the absurdities.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
It took a decade for me to sever the systemic apathy ingrained in me through the subtle normalization of violence in school education. We were taught about wars and revolutions, encouraged to remain unbiased and inquisitive in our thinking. Yet, subconsciously, our attention was hijacked by manifestos of greed and cruelty—kings waging wars at the cost of countless lives, colonial powers dehumanizing the inhabitants of newly “discovered” lands – political crises of unfathomable scale reduced to mere textbook subjects at an impressionable age.
I wonder why children are so subtly exposed to the political ideologies of megalomaniacs but are not taught to focus on the spiritual crises of ordinary human beings overcoming extraordinary circumstances. Attention is a sacred currency. It should never be desecrated by the relentless noise of power structures. Instead, it should be refined through conscious focus on something fundamental—the knowledge of the self.
Attention is the melting pot of generational and even interspecies wisdom—the one truth that resounds through eons of Earth’s evolution. It is the space where knowledge ceases to be distorted by the ripples of ego’s conditioning and reaches a deep stillness that moves just beneath the surface, connecting all life alike. In the stillness of such attention, resignation and numbness from the stress of life dissolve. It is here that true intelligence awakens.
French mystic Simone Weil prophesied, “We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.” My qualm with the world is not that, for the longest time, it stole my attention and kept me numb—because even as a child, I felt the kindling of empathy far beyond history’s capacity to muffle. My frustration lies in the specific theft of opportunities to know the people and stories that could have drawn me closer to healing the wounds of my inner landscape, fractured by apathy. Desensitized to the suffering of others caused by wars and destruction, I internalized the same numbness, becoming indifferent to the battles waged within me. The suffering I ignored in the outside world wrung me senseless within the crevices of my subconscious. When suffering manifested with faceless precision, cutting me open where it hurt the most, I learned effortlessly that we all bleed the same.
Showing up Flawed
For so long, I have wandered through life, scrambling to grasp my volitions of self and identity—forgetting, all the while, that I am merely a vessel of life’s longing for itself. As the mystic poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
I don’t want to be afraid to live and create—wildly, intentionally—with as much flaw as deliberation, in this world overtaken by beautiful but lifeless generative art. To create is to reject the passivity that allows injustice to fester. It is an act of defiance against the machinery that seeks to render us mute. I don’t want to fear losing my identity or hesitate to clumsily topple over a few things on my way to creating something honest.
Because life is flawed, life is difficult—it is a complex web of joy and sorrow, dancing on the boughs of the southern spring, bringing with it a splash of rain, a wave of warmth, sprouts of mango buds, and pollen dust in the wind. Life is messy, and I want to live defiantly, refusing to bow to the gods of perfection.
Creating beyond the permissive limits is like breathing life into the stories we are born to invoke. It is a statement—to the state, to the billionaires, to our neighbors—that we are not born to appease. We are here to write, to sing, to carve our verses into the bones of time, to walk until our feet ache with the weight of anticipation for a world we love into being, a world we birth through our work. We create from the crannies of society that no one wants a piece of—because they are not glamorous, because they do not flatter the status quo.
The quiet power inherent to art is often mistaken for something soft, something docile. But those of us who practice speaking power into words know better. We know that cultivating a force-of-nature kind of creative voice is so all-consuming that what it yields, can never be meek.
The most insidious violence is not just in direct oppression but in the quiet normalization of cruelty—a world where horror is dismissed as routine, where suffering is made abstract, where no one is accountable. Art disrupts that normalization. It carves out spaces for radical attention, for remembrance, for unsettling the comfortable.
Where the Ancestors Stood
This world rewards violence. Polarity is a valued asset in the hands of those who seek to split open the belly of our great green mother just to plunder her. History has borne witness to this over and over again—especially in the lands deemed wilder, where entire civilizations were brutalized in the name of taming that which surpasses human greed. The survivors, those who lived to tell their stories, carried a terror so deep that even the sound of their own hearts frightened them.
My grandparents were among them—witnesses to the partition of the Indian subcontinent, bearers of a blood-stained history. And so, I will tell their story a thousand times if I must. Because there is nothing normal about genocide and imperialism. Because the violation of human rights is the symptom of a society that is rotting at its core. Because to normalize these atrocities is to perceive morality as an afterthought.
It cannot be allowed. It must not be allowed.
In times so tumultuous, the shoulders of the giants on which we once stood seem so stooped that we could almost touch the ground if they lowered any further. There is a kind of impotency of courage that has transfixed the collective conscience in a dumb stupor. Have all my heroes lost themselves while shadowboxing their own demons?
I think of those who are gone, who guided me forward, who taught me courage—the people whose spines were strong enough to carry the disappointments and hopes of the whole damn world.
Maya Angelou said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently,” and Harper Lee wrote, “I wanted you to see what real courage is... It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what,”
I felt these words in my bones when I first read them. I still do.
Steer my Voice
My heart feels heavy, and I am not going to sit around pretending that everything is alright—because it is not. It is not a sane world where hate and crime perpetuate under the guise of normalcy. The suffering of children in war zones is not just collateral damage—it is an indictment of a civilization that has failed its most fundamental duty to protect the innocent. The maimed, starving children on the streets of this burning world are life’s children—and since I am life too, they are mine as well. I cannot pretend that everything is fair and good in this world when, every day, children are dying because of wars fueled by the egos of greedy men.
In the past few weeks, I have made some promises to myself. I will not close down to the world turning into ashes in my mouth. I will not be silenced by grief, nor will I numb myself to the world’s decay. I may be living in my grandparents' generation of war and upheaval, but I will not live in their paralyzed resignation to life’s myriad cruelties. I will unweave the bystander from my soul. Even if my actions are but pebbles sinking at the bottom of a vast pond, they will still make ripples. I will refuse to speak in low-stake words, to imply what I do not mean. I will not critique choices I lack the courage to live. I will not overestimate my empathy, nor will I demand justice without relinquishing the privileges that injustice affords me. I will not wish for the end of hegemony while remaining complicit in its comforts. I will never be the person who wants the wars to go on but refuses to fight them.
Perhaps I, too, am worthy of life’s desire for itself, if I can look my shadow in the eye. If I can practice courage—always a little more courage.
But this is not only about me—courage is not an individual pursuit. If we are to create a world where truth matters, then we must ask: What are you willing to risk for it? What are you willing to create, to name, to refuse? The weight of this moment does not rest on a single voice, but on all of us choosing to show up, to resist, to create. Let us not resign ourselves to silence. Let us steer our voices toward a world that demands to be heard.
Friends, I have been battling a massive block for the past few weeks and have been thinking of all the small ways I could crawl back into the purifying fire of attention. I am still working on my last project (the essay series on Meghalaya), but lately, I seem to lose my way through it more often. My thoughts, circumstances, and the world in general keep pulling me into distraction.
I am trying to gather my attention by cultivating small rituals and habits to regain my focus. Have you been feeling exhausted lately too? What rituals help you untangle such knots?
Swarnali, I am so grateful for your voice in this space. And what is more, since your post where you recorded yourself reading, I read this with your own voice in my mind and it added so much richness! Loved it. So powerful and clear and inspiring. We stand together dear sister. 💜
Yes, also exhausted. Daily walks help. Now on vacation for a couple of weeks. It takes a few days just to detox.
Thank you for this, Swarna. Take good care. 🕯