On Confessing, Hoping, and Connecting

Last week has been mad: in the past three weeks I've been in five states and have been massively sleep deprived for the past 4 - 5 days. Its also been a bit of an emotional roller coaster because I was meeting some friends after 3 - 4 years and that has its attendant realizations about how people/things change and how they remain the same.

Yesterday I finally had sometime to catch up on the reading and I read this brilliant article by the Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis. This article was directed to me by the redoubtable Ritwik Agarwal whose own thoughts can be found here. Varoufakis about how Marxist thought shaped his understanding of political economy and how Marx's prime contribution to political thought was that to highlight the conflict that labor cannot be cannot be completely defined in commodity terms and hence can never be completely reduced to a commodity and while the capitalist system constantly tries to do that, the moment it achieves it, the whole system will collapse.

One of the things the kinda tangential things that got stuck in my head from the article is when towards the end of the article Varoufakis talked about how it is easy to fall into a sense of complacency and "how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense...that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement" He completed the article with the humble suggestion that "Radical confessions, like the one I have attempted here, are perhaps the only programmatic antidote to ideological slippage that threatens to turn us into cogs of the machine."

This last thought reminded me of this TEDxDelhi talk by Shabnam Virmani where she talks about her journey exploring Kabir across the subcontinent and in the end she shares this song that tells this tale about a tiny bird that is trying to save the tree she perched on from a forest fire. In the face of the face of the enormity and the hopelessness of the whole enterprise the tiny bird had only this to offer "I'm doing what I can" and I think that is such a powerful message and it fills you with hope for possibilities. 

I could go on and keep talking about half a dozen thoughts buzzing in my head right now but I'll sign off and get back to the real world because as the poet, Robert Frost put it:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.