The Bitter And The Sweet
We have to stop meeting like this.
We have had guests at the farm over the past few months. Friends of mine who are trying to lighten the load for refugees from Gaza have been bringing them to sit on my lawn, admire flowers, and to eat grilled chicken and salad from a garden. Their children have learned the joy of petting dogs, something that didn’t exist in Gaza. Even a few of the women who come have proudly told me that they have petted a dog for the first time in their life. I tell them that dogs have a special gift to be able to carry some of the grief and pain from the hearts of humans. I don’t know what they do with it, but perhaps they bury it under a tree where it blooms later as a visual joy. It is a lovely thing to see the fear and pain fade a bit from the face of children and women. There are more women who come than there are men. Many of the men have sent their wives and children on ahead to ensure their safety. No one should have to do this.
I know someone who writes about what is happening in the world. His writing is raw and painful to read. He has come to where he is by a long route that I recognise in my own life, and although reading his work is like drinking broken glass, it is very, very real. I have been following him for a time and to give myself a break, I have to confess that I don’t read everything he writes. I find that I can’t. It hurts. I shared a piece of his on Facebook the other day and the second that I clicked on “Post”, I got a message from Meta that they had removed the post. They called it “spam” although I hadn’t posted anything from him in ages, nor had I posted anything like this post. Clearly, Meta did not want me sharing anything about the concept of genocide in a long term view.
Who is this person who pushes buttons so easily online? He is the same age as my own children, and this is who he says he is:
“My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I’m a writer. People call me Indrajit, Indi, Jit, or sometimes even Indica. Most people call me Indi. If you’re younger than me you’d call me Ayya or Anna, if you’re much younger you’d call me Maama, and if you’re older you can call me whatever you want. My parents call me putha, which means human child or more often patiya, which means baby animal.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since Mrs. Stewart gave me scratch-and-sniff stickers in first grade. I was born in 1982 in Vancouver, Canada where my parents were doing their PhDs. I lived in Sri Lanka briefly before moving to Upper Arlington, Ohio, where I grew up (K-12). I studied Cognitive Science at McGill University in Montreal. I started blogging there and have been doing so for nearly 25 years now.
As an adult, I moved back to Sri Lanka where I’ve lived since. I’ve started a few magazines, worked for a big telco in content, helped make a lot of websites, served as online editor for a newspaper, and launched and sold a food content startup. I also helped launch food delivery within the company that acquired us.
Now I write almost every day, which was my dream since first grade. I’m 41 years old now and have a wife, two kids, a cat, a very naughty dog, and three fish no one likes. Thank you for reading. There’s over a million words in here.
The themes I generally write about are collapse (because I can both observe it and my country is generally ahead of the dismal curve), climate change (which I realize now is a symptom of the more general collapse), White Empire (what I call the American empire which has all the old colonizers as vassals), philosophy, politics, parenting, and whatever goes through my head. If you dig deep enough you’ll find my opinions on these changing and they’ll probably keep changing. I’m in a very long process of figuring things out and I don’t think that ever ends, but I’m happy to intersect with you on your path, even if we don’t agree on everything (we won’t).
If you ever want to contact me, please just mail indi@indi.ca.”
I don’t read his stuff because I’m a masochist. I read it because he is touching something very real, something that we all need to acknowledge, however painful it is.
