being removed

20.08.2026

Humans crave connection. They crave the feeling of oneness with someone. The feelings of intimacy. At the same time, we are removed from one another. Social status removes us from one another. How close do you feel to the senior management at work? To your university professor? To the Prime Minister? Ethnicity and race remove us from one another. How close do you feel to refugees, to immigrants, to ethnic minorities?

In fact, disconnection and removal are active processes that are being constructed all around us. Currently, we are seeing disconnection and removal being implanted between men and women. The rise of incels and misogyny and their equivalents on the side of the women, these are now all familiar aspects of the terrain. The attendant consequences are that fewer people are dating and having babies.

The Indian view of this disconnection and removal is quite clear. It is a process that is implanted by political elites to separate and divide us. It is easier to rule over those that are divided. It is easier to rule over those that are not united. Because unity is strength. The big example is the partition and how it separated the might of India into fragments. Fragments which favoured the West and its power structure.

My grandfather used to tell me stories when I was a child, wisdom stories from all over the world. There were us three brothers. The story was for us. Here is the story. There was an old man with three sons. The sons would bicker and fight. He decided to teach them a lesson. One day, he gave them all a single stick. He told them to snap it, which they did easily. The next day, it was two sticks tied together. Again, relatively easy to snap. More and more every day. Eventually, there were two many sticks joined together to snap. The lesson? Unity is strength.

A recent film I watched was about this message. Batwara 1947, by my favourite director Rajkumar Santoshi and my favourite actor Sunny Deol. The forces of disconnection and removal utilised by unscrupulous politicians were rendered powerless in the face of a show of unity across the divides of religion. The message was clear: the Indian way is syncretism. The joining of perceived opposites. The merging. All in the name of one thing: humanity is the greatest religion. Connection to each other is the greatest good. The lessons that my grandfather taught me.

The activist and the good human wishes and hopes for this connection. For the people to be one and to be one with the people. It is connection that the good person seeks out. And when you find those that seek out disconnection and removal, isolation and marginalisation, that is when you know that their politics are corrupt. Reform UK, the Conservatives, Donald Trump and his stooges in America. This is what absolute corruption looks like. It is anti-human and inhuman.