Confederacy of Autonomous Individuals

A black hair strand on my white worktable. Not mine, surely. This single thread of blackness against a sea of whiteness presents itself as a problem — one that demands resolution. Part of my mind insists that picking it up and throwing it away would bring satisfaction. But after much deliberation, I decided otherwise. I would not let myself be bothered by a strand of hair

I am at the Station Kadavu junction (don't ask me why I'm there) watching people waiting to cross the railway tracks. It is evening time, and everyone has that look of weariness on their faces. As soon as the gates are open, tricky traffic formations come to a bottleneck as everyone is scrambling away to cross the tracks. Comparatively, the car drivers have it easy, since they are not exposed to the elements. yet their faces are no less burdened. The bikers have it harder, their bodies tense and their faces showing the unease of working their clutch through the spaces, weaving between cars and autos.

What is this, then? 'insouciance'. The people on the internet might be familiar with 'nonchalant', but 'insouciance' is the more precise word. Recently, certain characters from pop culture have become memetic for their peculiar lack of concern. These are people who supposedly handle stuff efficiently, without any outward signs of stress or concern.  In other words, The task gets done, but the doing appears effortless. And that appearance matters because people are watching. Insouciance, in this sense, is also a kind of performance.

People care for others. As they should. Even when people are insouciant, it does not mean that they do not care. But they may appear indifferent. Personally, I am someone who gets that momentary concern for the small things, but usually unbothered about significant events in general. But there is a certain sort of appeal to being insouciant. A composed exterior without bother and stress, even when you go through all the complications of getting things done. In other words, insouciance doesn't come from irresponsibility. And insouciance doesn't promise a life without stress and tension. It is a mental reorientation — a way of engaging with the world without being consumed by it. Since it takes a great deal of practice to learn how to live, I believe insouciance within the right parameters also requires patience and deliberate practice.

The practice of insouciance, however, does not excuse you from the obligations of care. Take the case when you are needed. A friend wants to talk to you about life in general and maybe how everything has been hard for them recently. In this situation, the friend does not expect you to give them the perfect answer. The friend wants you to just acknowledge their condition, their struggle. Every struggle, however private, needs a witness. That is the basic human condition. There used to be a time, when I thought this to be an artifice of the self — a manufactured need, the ego constructing a requirement that isn't really there. But the fact remains that every person needs that acknowledgement.

There are moments in life that force you to acknowledge the struggle of others. One way is to share similar experiences of your own when a friend in the middle of their struggle turns to you. Not to redirect, not to compare, but to say — I have been there too. The struggle is never singular. Every one of us moves through different complications, but they rhyme in the larger experience of being alive. And it is in that recognition — that your pain is not alien to me, that mine is not alien to you — that something quietly forms between people. This is the confederacy of autonomous individuals, singular yet common.

Even so, there are times when you grow tired of the confederacy. Recently, I was inside a chair car on a train, briefly immersed in what I was watching on my phone. But then there was a sudden urge to look up and see whether everyone around me was still there. I needed to make sure the world hadn't flown by. But I hoped it would move on without me, leaving me alone, stuck in its machinations. That is not how it works, though. We are all in this together, whether we like it or not. As Hisham Matar notes, "existence, though delightful, is haphazard" — and perhaps that haphazardness is precisely what binds us to each other and to the confederacy we sometimes wish to escape.

Foreclosure of the Alternative

The CPM-led LDF government recently began the preliminary construction phase of the Wayanad Twin Tunnels. The project carries significant ecological concerns, and the government's eagerness to fast-track it signals a deliberate unwillingness to engage with them. Setting aside the question of whether the ecological assessments are adequate — the tunnel cuts through Ecologically Sensitive Marked Zones — the more fundamental issue is that the government is actively avoiding questions about consequences. The obsession with building a concrete utopia is evident in its marketing. But infrastructural ambition should not foreclose questions of feasibility and sustainability. The stakes are too high. Temporary gains that force permanent setbacks are not development — they are a transaction made at the expense of the future. Keralam deserves modern infrastructure. It also deserves better judgment.

With the Keralam Assembly Election set for next month, the foreclosure of questions takes on a sharper political dimension. The catchphrases circulating in the campaign are telling. The claim that the LDF government has, over ten years, completely transformed Keralam infrastructurally is not without merit. A ten-year mandate — one that modern Keralam has never extended to any other government — has been capitalised on decisively by the CPM. And there is genuine agreement on what the state has achieved. But what the CPM tends to forget is that every agreement carries within it a concealed deeper disagreement. This is the foundational principle of politics — what theorists call agonistics.

The party and its members claim that the government has completely transformed the public sector. This may be partially true, but the untruth within it is significant. The government has built better schools, bridges, roads, and hospitals — but the modernising stops there. What good are schools if adequate teachers are not hired? What good are hospitals if the doctors and nurses are underpaid? There has been no meaningful investment in human resource development in line with a changing economy. And yet the government insists that everything is in order. The protests and strikes by nurses and Asha workers tell a different story — they are not aberrations but cracks in the illusion of development. Comrades are quick to label these shortcomings as "systemic". Yes, these problems are systemic. But that is precisely the question — what has the government done to meaningfully address them?

This is where the LDF's political slogans become revealing. "Who else but us" is not merely a campaign slogan — it is a foreclosure. It suggests that the development the government engineered is beyond interrogation, that alternatives are not just unnecessary but unthinkable. The notion of development that the Communist government has envisioned is one built on infrastructure and welfare schemes — both real and measurable — but it stops short of the people who must sustain and be sustained by them. Of course, welfare schemes count in the short run. But they do not build a future.

It is clear that the LDF government's conception of development — "build back strongly" — is, for all its visible achievements, fundamentally exclusive. That said, the coming elections will be historic precisely because the exceptional circumstances that COVID provided are no longer available to legitimise paternalistic governance. The question is now an open one — will people vote for the LDF despite the systemic failures they overlooked over ten years, in favour of the infrastructural and welfare paradise they undeniably delivered?