As someone who was raised Catholic and who did immerse herself in the principle premise of the New Testament; loving your neighbour as yourself, which also entails doing good to those who hurt you, hate doesn't come naturally. It's easy to casually say I hate something or someone, but because I have been so deeply conditioned to look for the humanity in those who seem to exemplify evil, it's hard not to over-empathise, not to make excuses that justify their acts of oppression. I keep arguing for a subversive brand of political consciousness that has love as its foundation; love for self, love for those who are othered, love for those responsible for their othering; and frequently, I find myself feeling challenged by the conundrum of self assertion and empowerment and its relationship with humility and affliction. I think it's why I find myself drawn to the political activism of moral intellectuals like Cornel West and Bell Hooks, who preach the indivisible link between love and justice, bringing spirituality firmly into the realm of activist thought. Justice is what love looks like in public, according to West. "To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak," he said.

How then to celebrate in any meaningful way 73 years of Indian independence, when a whole territory is being explicitly colonised under the guise of nation? Last week, the post-colonised Indian republic officially embraced the mantle of coloniser, complete with the propaganda rhetoric to justify its claim to a land without considering the consent of its people. Until now, it had been more covert. Until now, the Indian state's "settler colonisation project" in the Northeast, in lands it occupied under the loophole of a "liberating" mission, like Goa, had been cloaked; until now its preoccupation with militarising vulnerable regions and getting away with severe atrocities through the veil of the violent AFSPA had been permitted through public inaction.