I’m still processing the news coming in from Manipur. I’m still making sense of how it arrives to us delayed and deferred, thanks to internet bans. I’m still trying to process what it must mean to live in various states of emergency without the ability to access the world beyond, without the basic right to reach out for help, and for journalists to work in situations that push the limits of what challenging must mean. I try not to think about it because it is easier not to. Because, from the prism of motherhood, I am too prone to feeling the grief of other mothers. It is hard to step back and not experience it, somehow, as your own. It is painful to read that law enforcement agencies do everything but enforce the law, or when they do, do so with clear bias and prejudice. I am so tired of reading about all the failures of patriarchal forms of governance without any clear propositions about how to move forward. I am tired of raging, tired of my own helplessness, tired by how the system is structurally designed to erase the possibility of joy in our lives. All our little pleasures, all our small delights are measured against the gravity of the world-altering doom towards which we are driving, headlong, led by petty leaders whose motives are short-term, profit-driven and in the service 
of capitalism.

I don’t know how not to feel affected by what is unfolding every day. Some days ago, I read some parenting advice for children of toddlers that explained why they have difficulty with transitions, why they feel such immense grief when you tell them it is time to stop doing the thing they were doing that was so much fun. The counter, I was told, is to offer hope. Tomorrow, we can do that thing again, you must tell them, and you must try your best to honour your word. Offering them this dose of hope helps them to move on to something else. Thinking about this made me wonder about the role of hope as a survival mechanism, and not a mere luxury or privilege. Elizabeth A Povinelli, with whom I was recently in conversation, spoke less enthusiastically about hope. As an anthropologist working with aboriginal communities in Australia, she was relaying what it might mean to people who have been consistently denied agency to govern their ancestral lands. What does hope mean to people whose lives have been continuously and relentlessly upended by the violence of bureaucracy and red-tapism, a bureaucracy they did not choose but was imposed on them through processes of colonisation? To them, hope meant waking up the next morning and continuing the struggle and having that become part of their existence. It sounded bleak when she talked about it, but the more I return to it, the better I understand how this mode of living involves having resistance become part of your raison d’être. And that is a powerful idea that I have seen embodied in the lives of Tibetan refugees, or Palestinian exiles. In hope lies the possibility of futurity.