THE DEFECTIVE PEACE! (GROUND 0)

Fiction always scared me both as a reader and a writer. I wished always to escape it. Unless I escape it, I know it will definitely engulf me. I was perplexed from the childhood about why I fear stories so much! the more engaging the story, the more intensely I feared the story. 

The reason, I suppose, lies in the fact that the realities that we, in India, are forced to live, makes us too insecure to slip ourselves to random imaginative fictions. 

Ours is a country of fictions. There exist lesser and lesser facts in this country and more and more fiction. So much fiction that it is very easy for a sane person to turn into a lunatic/ And since this kind of Lunacy is widely accepted in Indian societies, nobody suspects that a mass lunacy exists. 

So, for people like me, it is really necessary to constantly force ourselves out of these fictions and try to live as much as possible in reality. 

Defective peace will be, as I have planned, a set of essays on my experiences, as an educated, secular, socialist, upper caste male, in a south Asian country called India, Experiences where I found myself in a rebellion against the popular stories that the Indian Society wished to force down my throat. These anecdotes and then commentaries on it, are of different types, sometimes about caste, about gender, about communalism, about regionalism, about all negative and positive experiences that made me conclude that India is a place of defective Peaces. Not a single peace, but Peaces. It is of course a double ententre, which means, there is a word play between Peace and Piece. There are layers. first of all, it is not a peaceful society. There are sub-conscious tensions always just waiting for a malfunction in the fabric to just come out, hence Defective Peace. Also, there is no single peace in society. 

What does it mean by "no single peace"? It means, as I intend to describe it, there are communitarian perspectives about peacefulness, and all communities tend to live that aspect of peacefulness. Rejecting the popular narrative that all religions preach the same peacefulness, I claim that Indian versions of religions, have intrinsically in them, a secret call for war and violence, hence they come in contradiction with not only other religions but also with themselves only. 

So, there are multiple Peaces. And finally, which leads to the underdevelopment of individuality in Indians. Psychoanalysts, especially post-colonial psychoanalysts, claim that this is not the case. Rather, they claim, the individuality of Indians is not individual but commutarian, that is, instead of a self, they possess, a family self. 

I reject this proposition, and I will try to prove where this concept of "familial self" ruptures and actually this concept of familial self is placed to justify the exploitation of women through non-waged domestic labor. In economic terms, "the so-called care economy" is a careless economy, in the sense that women are socialized to remain incompetent and serve as maids to masculine members of the family. 

The crucial aspect of this anthology of essays is that none of these essays are fictional. Whatever I saw, I am journalling verbatim. The interpretation is mine. But that does not change the truth. If a knife penetrating the chest of a man is interpreted as a murder, I do not think there is something wrong with it. 

Hence, I present to you, Defective Peace.