Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment. - Mahatma Gandhi
Welcome to The Hit and Miss!
When I took the poll to see how many people would actually be interested if I decided to pursue the idea of publishing a newsletter, I was overwhelmed by the response. And for that, a big thank you to you! I send big warm hugs to you for trusting and being so bloody supportive.
So, in the first issue of The Hit and Miss, I wanted to talk about something that is very close to my heart, The Internet and Love! The internet - this beautiful place that lets us tell people what we are doing, what we are thinking, and what we feel about certain things. It helps us see and understand what other people are doing or thinking, or their opinions on issues.
“We are all now connected by the internet, like the neurons in a giant brain.” - Stephen Hawking
Instagram, the one platform that has more than a billion people right now. Which means a billion opinions are on their Insta stories. Of late, this very effective social media tool has become a catalyst for comparison, ego, and worse – hatred. The two very recent happenings that caught fire on social media were of Agrima Joshua being threatened because of her joke on a religious figure, and the riots that broke out in Bengaluru over a derogatory social media post on another religious figure. It got me thinking and going back to a book I very recently finished, about how we are never taught to love.
As a very ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’ generation, we often run away from the word love because that’s not cool, is it?
Bell Hooks, in her very famous book, All About Love, talks about love as something that can create revolutionary movements of social justice, of human rights. Something that we are lacking as a generation. Something whose power we have never experienced. Hooks talks about how all the big movements have had the basic prerequisite – love.
What I did for a very long time was reduce the word ‘love’ to either love between friends, lovers, or family. (pets in some extreme cases) But I never moved beyond that. And so today, we set the tone for the future issues of The Hit and Miss, by talking about love as a force of social justice. Read here an article on Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of love and its power.
Kamla Bhasin, one of India’s most celebrated feminists, talks about the need of love for social justice and human rights. Let me take you back to the preamble of the Indian Constitution.
JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY – the four words we stand by, as a nation. Bhasin asks if any of these words would actually manifest itself if it weren’t for love? For love of another human being? For love of a person from a different caste, class, or sexual orientation?
Would the judiciary work fair without love for all human beings?
Would we be equal in giving resources to everyone, or equal pay to men and women, if we don’t have love for all of them?
Let’s come closer to home, do you think our Indian society would have banned the practice of Sati if it did not have love towards all the genders? Or maybe can you respect your friend’s opinion that the current prime minister is the best prime minister, if you didn’t love them as a human being with an opinion?
We are surrounded by conditional love everywhere, from our family to our friends, and the society in general.
if you marry someone outside your religion, caste, or class, we will disown you
if you do not put up a story on your social media wishing me Happy Birthday, I will give second thoughts to our friendship
(this one’s close to me) if you do not complement my political ideology, I may not tolerate you at all and remove you from my friend list
Often times we either hear these, or be a part ourselves without even knowing what biases our minds are forming.
Last month, a famous Instagrammer Santoshi Shetty decided to do something to help people with mental health issues, she posted a video that got serious criticism and she was literally bullied online by our very ‘woke’ generation. In popular terms, this is what we call the Cancel Culture. Read this and this very interesting article on her controversy.
Read this New York Times article to understand what cancel culture is.
Rage comes easy to us, especially for people whose opinions are different than ours. On the other hand it is very easy to befriend someone who complements our ideology - something that could be related with confirmation bias.
Read here if you want to know about confirmation bias.
This takes me to one of the institutions that teach hate, from where the title of this issue is taken from – schools and colleges!
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, talks about how the power is woven in the society, and how hierarchies are created at the cost of the oppressed. The institution of education is no less. Think about all the times that you have not performed well and how the teacher and even your parents have encouraged you to score good marks. When the root is competition, does love for other students and their individual cognitive abilities has any room?
would you love someone who scored more marks than you, someone your parents always compared you with?
would you love your classmate whom the teacher praises every time in the drawing class and tells you to learn from him?
I never could. I have always wanted to score well. I always wanted people to be jealous of me and my scholarly achievements rather than collaborating with them on assignments and working together. Our educational institutions work on competition, marks, and showing off which schools have performed better and gotten better passing grades.
G. Ananthakrishnan pens down a beautiful article about exams in the Indian education system for The Hindu. Access it here.
Amy K.Jo pens down an interesting article on the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, access it here.
On the similar lines, read this article by Harvard Ed. Magazine by Lory Hough, on John Miller’s new book that sits very well with our topic.
Maybe it’s time we rethink our approach towards people on the internet expressing their opinions, policymakers who without understanding love won’t be able to argue about the idea of justice. Maybe we need to change the way we look at feminist and human rights movements!
As Kamla Bhasin says, the binary of social and spiritual transformation needs to merge and the personal has to become the political. (it took me a while to understand how much depth this sentence had). A very interesting interview of Bell Hooks on her book and the idea of love from a totally fresh perspective is here. I would highly recommend you watch it, take notes, and if possible order a copy of your own.
And with this, we conclude the first issue of The Hit and Miss. The reason why I chose this topic was simply to set the tone for the remaining issues of the newsletter, because in those, I would be talking about some serious issues. I will mostly be focusing on issues that you wrote about in the subscription form, but it is also important to keep this issue at the back of our minds so as to not let us become the ‘pseudo-liberals’ that the world now has many.
With this I am attaching a very interesting essay by Bell Hooks on love as a practice of freedom.
In the subsequent issues of The Hit and Miss, while we initiate conversations about various topics from different perspectives, please look at me as a human being, look at me and my work with love.
The books that I have read and referred to in this and would highly recommend are:
1. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire – access it here
2. All About Love by Bell Hooks – access it here
3. Hind Swaraj by Mahatma Gandhi – access it here
4. If you want to study more formally about how love can be used as a tool for social justice, I recommend you check this online course by Standford. It’s online, free, and you get a certificate!
In the next issue, we are going to talk about the drastic events happening across the world, and a very important role that media plays in representing them. We would be looking at situations of Kashmir, Beirut, China, and India from the lens of Media. If you or any of your friends might find this interesting, do feel free to share with them so that they can subscribe and start receiving the subsequent issues of the newsletter.
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See you next time!
Beautifully drafted. Looking forward to this amazing initiative. All the best!
Way to go, Tanisha!