PART I.
I wasn’t recruited. I was already at war. A few months ago, I was writing. Not for money, not for fame. I was putting down my thoughts on history and politics because the rumors and the hatred had finally broken something in me. My neighborhood had started banning certain families from the local market. My own relatives were openly talking about cleansing in living rooms. My classmates, educated and privileged and modern, were repeating slogans that made my skin crawl. I had two enemies – communalism and casteism. I didn’t know how to fight them. I just knew I couldn’t stay quiet. Then a man I didn’t know reached out.
He didn’t sell me anything. He didn’t flatter me. He said something like – “You’re thinking. Come join us.” That was it. I went to a meeting. Then we started talking privately. Then the real conversations began. Months of late nights. Months of him dismantling everything I thought I knew and rebuilding it piece by piece. He showed me documents proving how the economy was rigged. He explained how caste sustains itself through marriage markets and labor exploitation. He introduced me to writers I had never heard of, thinkers my education had erased. He didn’t just give me facts. He gave me a way to see. And then he gave me something more important – access. He connected me to a lady who ran a feminist collective. Through her, I met more people. Real organizers. People who had been fighting on the ground while I was reading in my room. These weren’t social media warriors. These were women who had sat with survivors, who understood that patriarchy isn’t a bad attitude but a system of stolen wages and stolen years. They taught me that feminism without caste analysis is useless, that labor rights are women’s rights, that your pretty slogan about equality means nothing if you won’t share the kitchen or the factory floor. I was from a privileged family. Upper-caste. Male. Educated enough to be dangerous. I knew nothing. I thought caste was disappearing. I thought patriarchy was about bad men. I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. They didn’t shame me. They taught me.
Why did I stay? Not because he asked me to. Not because I owe him anything. I stayed because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t alone in the fight. Growing up where I did, every critical thought was met with “you’re just a traitor” or “you’re with them” or “you hate your own kind.” The pressure to conform was constant. The loneliness of dissent was real. Then I found people who said no, you’re right, and here’s why, and here’s what we do about it. The man who reached out is brilliant, wounded, and strategic. He compares himself to conquerors. He talks about shifting populations and decolonizing spaces. He can be cold. He can be cynical. He has every right to be. The caste system broke him before he learned to weaponize the breaking. But he never asked me to be his soldier. He asked me to be his comrade. And the feminist workers he connected me to never asked for loyalty pledges. They just kept showing up, kept doing the work, kept letting me sit in the corner and learn.
What have I gained? Clarity. This country is not one place. It is several countries stacked inside a trench coat. The city is not the village. The upper castes are not the lower castes. The problems of one are invisible to the other. Method. Feelings are not facts. Stories are not data. He drilled this into me – you cannot fix what you cannot count. I now ask for evidence. I cross-check. I use every tool I can find to interrogate my own blindness. I learned this from him. Community. I have people now. Real organizers, researchers, fighters. We don’t agree on everything. But we agree on what matters – caste must die, communalism is a cancer, and justice is not a favor, it is a debt. Purpose. I am privileged. I did not earn it. For years I felt guilty about this. Now I feel responsible. Privilege is not a stain. It is a resource. Deploy it or waste it. I choose to deploy.
What have I lost? The comfort of not knowing. I cannot unsee what I have seen. I cannot pretend that my uncle’s joke about reservations is harmless. I cannot smile when my friend talks about genocide. I cannot sit quietly while my neighborhood excludes. This fight has cost me relationships. It has cost me peace. It has given me sleepless nights and a permanent low-grade anger. I am not a saint. I am not a hero. I am not even him. I am just a person who decided that silence is betrayal. My real enemies are not the shouting men on television. Not individuals. Communalism is the enemy, the systematic use of religion to divide workers, protect the powerful, and excuse violence. Caste is the enemy, the thousand-year-old engine of hierarchy that makes one man believe he is born to rule and another that he is born to serve. Injustice is the enemy, the quiet structural everyday violence of a system that feeds me and starves others. He did not give me these enemies. I already had them. He just taught me how to aim.
I stay loyal. Not to him as a person. To the work. To the version of myself that wrote alone, before anyone had my back. He saw that person and said come. I came. Now the work is mine. He is just in the trench with me. That is not control. That is comradeship.
What do I want? I want a country where your birth does not decide your access to water, school, or dignity. I want a country where a family from the wrong background can buy a home anywhere without a committee deciding. I want a country where women do not have to choose between safety and freedom. I want a country where labor is respected, not squeezed dry. I want the country that some died dreaming of. I may not live to see it. But I will die trying. I am not a hero. I am not a saint. I am not even particularly brave. I am a privileged man from a small city who met a broken brilliant lower-caste strategist, who then introduced me to feminist organizers who refused to let me stay stupid. That is my story. No poetry. No romance. Just the facts. The fight continues.
PART II.
I live a double life, and I don’t feel bad about it anymore.
To my parents, I am the quiet son who rarely goes out. When I do, I tell them exactly where I am going, when I will come back, and I share my live location. If I am gone for more than two hours, my phone rings. They are overprotective. They have always been. At 21, I am still treated like a child who cannot be trusted with his own time or movement.
To the “cool” people my age, the ones who party and roam freely and speak with effortless confidence, I am invisible. I used to feel anxious around them. Lonely, even. But I don’t anymore. Because I have found something they will never understand. I have found my people online. We do not party. We study. We organize. We work toward communist agendas while the rest of our generation scrolls mindlessly or chases validation in crowded rooms. My comrades see me. The real me. The one who stays up late reading theory, who debates strategy, who visualizes himself on a podium giving passionate speeches to move the masses. Like Nehru. That thought gives me more purpose than any night out ever could.
My parents know nothing about this. They do not know about my ideological groups, my Discord servers, or my political ambitions. If they did, they would panic. Not because I am wrong, but because they fear anything they cannot control. So I keep my inner world secret. That is not weakness. That is survival. And it is also strategy. Secrecy has protected my ability to think freely and organize without sabotage. People will tell you that living like this is unhealthy. That you need to go outside more. That you need to be independent. But independence is a privilege of the unmonitored. When you grow up with overprotective parents, you learn to build your real life in the shadows. And you know what? That shadow life can be stronger than anything the “cool” crowd has. They are free in body but empty in direction. I am confined in movement but burning with purpose.
I do not feel lonely anymore. I feel driven. I feel angry at the right things. I want to tear down the world that made me anxious for being serious, that punished me for wanting more than small talk and food. My parents think they are protecting me. But they have only pushed me further into the arms of communism. And I am grateful for that. So let them track my location. Let them call me after two hours. They control my body for now, but they do not control my mind, my comrades, or my vision. One day I will walk onto that podium. Not despite my strange, secretive, overprotected youth, but because of it. The masses are waiting. And I will be ready.
PART III.
I was raised inside a fortress.
My parents are conservative, communal, and casteist. They taught me to obey God. They instilled tribalism into my mind. They enforced strict patriarchy. They built in me a hatred for out-groups, all of it cemented with shallow caste pride and religious arrogance. They thought they were protecting me. They thought they were building a good son.
Instead, they made me a communist.
Every lesson they gave me became fuel. Every wall they built became something I needed to tear down. The more they told me to fear the other, the more I wanted to meet the other. The more they told me to obey, the more I wanted to read the disobedient dead. So I read. I read dead authors from around the globe, from past centuries. I did not stop at the first one who made sense. I kept going. I read the ones my parents would have burned. I read the ones their gods would have cursed. And none of it destroyed me. It built me. Then I did something harder than reading. I sought out people from different cultures, different backgrounds, different castes. I reached across borders they told me were permanent walls. I even talked to people from enemy countries. Not to debate them. Not to prove I was right. I talked to them to find out one thing. Do good people live there?
I succeeded. I found them. I made deep friendships. Across every line my parents drew, I found human beings who were kind, who were serious, who were fighting their own fortresses. My parents taught me that the world outside the tribe was dangerous. The truth is the opposite. The danger was inside the fortress all along. I am not confused. I am not lost. I am not a rebel looking for attention. I am a communist because I looked at the world my parents gave me and found it rotten to the core. Their caste pride disgusts me. Their religious obedience sickens me. Their patriarchy makes me want to burn the whole structure down. And I have done the work. I did not just get angry and stop. I studied. I reached. I built friendships that would make my parents vomit. Those friendships are real. Those comrades see me. I see them. Across borders, across castes, across every lie I was fed as a child.
My parents think they raised a son. They raised their own enemy. And I am proud of that. The fortress did not hold. I broke out. Not through rebellion, but through study and through love. Love for people they told me to hate. That is my politics. That is my life. I am still listening to the dead. I am still reaching across borders. And I am just getting started.
PART IV.
I learned to stand up for myself by standing up for others.
There was a person in my college. They disrespected me again and again. Not because I was weak. Because they were proud. Proud of their caste. Proud of their so-called parental teachings. Proud of the same poison I was trying to burn out of myself. I saw their hypocrisy clearly. I knew exactly what they were. A product of the same fortress, except they never tried to leave. They just decorated the walls. Back then, I could not say much. The words were there. The anger was there. But my throat closed. My training held. Turn the other cheek. Do not escalate. I walked away. And that silence has lived inside me ever since. But not anymore. If that person showed up today, I would rip them apart. No mercy. No hesitation. I would not stop until they understood exactly how small their foolish pride makes them. I vow to invade seventeen times and destroy my enemies with utmost cruelty.
That last part is satire. Mostly. But the feeling behind it is not satire. The feeling is real. I have imagined that confrontation a hundred times. I have rehearsed the words. I have watched myself tear through their arrogance and leave nothing behind. And every time I finish that fantasy, I feel something I rarely let myself feel. Vicious. And right. Here is what I have learned about myself. Standing up for others taught me to stand up for myself. I spent years defending comrades, defending the oppressed, defending people my parents would call out-groups. I found my voice in those fights. I learned to argue. I learned to stay calm while the other side screamed. But I never used that voice for myself. Not really. When someone disrespected me directly, I turned the other cheek. The one who swallows.
No more.
I am not a cruel person. I do not want to hurt people for fun. But I am done pretending that mercy is always the answer. Some people deserve to be torn apart. Not physically. Intellectually. Politically. In front of everyone. They deserve to have their foolish pride exposed as the pathetic inheritance it is. They deserve to be mocked. They deserve to lose. And I deserve to be the one who does it. That person from college was not special. They were a soldier in an army I am trying to destroy. The generals are caste, patriarchy, communal hatred, the whole rotten structure. But soldiers still need to be fought. Every time I let one disrespect me and walk away, I am not being mature. I am being a coward. And I am done being a coward. So here is my vow. Not satire. Real. I will not seek out that specific person. They are not worth the effort. But if they or anyone like them shows up in my life again, I will not swallow. I will not walk away. I will rip them apart with words, with logic, with the kind of cold fury that comes from years of silence finally breaking. No mercy on enemies. That is not cruelty. That is justice. And I have waited long enough.
PART V.
I was blinded once. Not by weakness. By idealism.
I read Gandhi. I read Buddha. I read Jesus. I believed in turning the other cheek. I believed in loving my enemy. I believed that if I was pure enough, good enough, harmless enough, the world would stop being cruel. That was a mistake. Not because those teachers are worthless. Because I am not them. And I was trying to wear robes that did not fit. Then I found the next verse. Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I realized the doves are supposed to look harmless. The wisdom is the weapon. I started working on Just War principle. When is violence justified? When does resistance become obligation? I tried to fight clean. I wanted to be the good revolutionary.
It did not work. It did not go as planned.
So I adapted. I built cynicism. Not the lazy kind. The hard kind. The kind that comes from believing too much and getting burned. I went to Machiavelli. I went to Chanakya. I learned that deceit is not a sin. It is a tactic. I learned that enemies do not deserve my honesty. They deserve my strategy. I started defeating enemies by deceit. Blitzkrieg. Lightning war. Strike fast. Strike dirty. Ask for forgiveness later. All of this gave me purpose and depth. I lost that battle. The one with the person who manipulated me. The one with the system that raised me. But I became strong. And one day the tables will turn and I will avenge.
But here is what I really want you to understand. I am not Gandhi. I am not Buddha. I am not Jesus. I am not Nehru. I am not Chanakya. I am not Machiavelli. I am me. I read them all. I took what I needed. I left the rest. And I never said I would act upon any single one of them. All principles work together. Nonviolence and deceit. Just war and lightning war. The serpent and the dove. They sit in my chest at the same time. That is not confusion. That is dialectics. That is how you survive when the world wants you broken.
I am not a tragic hero. I do not sit in my room weeping over my lost innocence. I read the darkness. I understood it. And I still have room to laugh at myself. That is the difference between dogma and real politics. Dogma is serious all the time. Real politics grins and then strikes. I lost that battle. I became strong. Now I am waiting. Not sitting. Waiting. There is a difference. Sitting is passive. Waiting is watching, learning, building, deceiving when necessary, being harmless when useful, striking when the moment opens. I have read the dead. I have made friends across borders. I have broken out of the fortress. And I am still here. Still angry. Still strategic. Still myself. The tables will turn. Not because fate owes me. Because I will turn them. And when I do, it will not be Gandhi who acts through me. It will not be Chanakya. It will be me. All principles working together. No mercy on enemies. But also no cruelty for its own sake. Just victory. Cold, necessary, long overdue victory.
I am me. And I am just getting started.
PART VI.
Here is the paradox. Gandhi is still in my bones. And Nehru is in my blood. I love humanity. I will continue to love every person who is kind and respectful. If they give me a flower, I will give them a bouquet. That is not performance. That is not weakness. That is who I am. I read the dead not to become them but to borrow their fire. And Gandhi’s fire, the part that believed in human goodness, never left me. It sits next to Machiavelli. It breathes the same air as Chanakya. They do not fight. They cooperate. But I am not a fool. I am not a martyr looking for a cross. If anyone shows me a knife, I will draw my sword. That is not contradiction. That is boundary. That is the difference between love and suicide. I will not hurt the kind. I will not punish the respectful. I will give more than I receive to those who come in peace. But the moment someone shows a knife, the calculation changes. Not because I stopped loving. Because love without defense is surrender. And I have not fought this long to surrender.
Long live humanity. I mean that. It is not a slogan. It is not optimism. It is a choice. I have seen what humans do. I grew up in a fortress of caste pride and religious obedience. I have been disrespected by people who wore their bigotry like medals. I have lost battles. I have swallowed silence. And still, after all of that, I say long live humanity. Because the alternative is to become what I hate. The alternative is to let the cynics win. I refuse. I shall continue to do my work. What work? The work of building. The work of studying. The work of reaching across borders and making deep friendships with people my parents would call enemies. The work of holding a bouquet in one hand and a sword in the other. The work of knowing when to use which.
I am not Gandhi. I am not Nehru. I am not Machiavelli. I am me. And I have decided that I will not let the knife-wielders turn me into a knife-wielder against the innocent. I will defend. I will strike when necessary. I will avenge when the time comes. But I will also love. I will also give flowers to those who deserve them. I will also believe, against all evidence, that humanity is worth fighting for. That is my politics. That is my life. That is the resolution of the paradox. There is no paradox. There is only strategy and love, held together by someone who has read enough to know that neither works alone.
Long live humanity. Long live the sword, drawn only when needed. Long live the bouquet, given freely to the kind. And long live the work. I am just getting started.
PART VII.
I spent countless nights longing. For a purpose. For people I could love. For people who could love me back. That is not weakness. That is the soil. Every revolutionary I have ever read spent nights longing. The difference between me and the broken is that I did not stop. I let the ache stay alive. And that ache became a magnet.
All the years of tears. Pain. Diseases (fibromyalgia). Distress. They finally ended. I am in extreme ecstasy. Not happiness. Happiness is mild. Ecstasy is what happens when a door slams open after years of pounding on it from the inside. I crossed a desert and found water. And here is the part that should make every nationalist, every communalist, every caste-proud bigot choke. People from distant lands and across borders miraculously came to my rescue. Strangers from enemy countries. People I was taught to hate. They gave me what my own home failed to provide. What my classmates failed to provide. Love. Purpose. Rescue. My own blood could not save me. People across borders did.
But let me be clear. It is not that my home or my classmates are uniquely rotten. They are not the exception. They are the rule. The same wrong foundation exists everywhere. Caste here. Class there. Nationalism in one place. Religious bigotry in another. The walls have different colors, but the prison is the same. And here is the part most people never understand. The same applies to the people who saved me. The kind strangers across borders. The comrades in distant lands. They too were raised inside fortresses. They too were taught to hate someone. They too carry their own poison. The difference is not that they are pure. The difference is that they chose to reach across anyway.
That is the foundation I am building on. Not purity. Not a perfect ideology. Not a utopia where no one has ever done wrong. A shared recognition that we are all trapped, and that the only way out is together. That is not idealism. That is the coldest realism. Because if you wait for perfect people, you will die alone. The question is not whether someone has wrong beliefs in their bones. The question is whether they are willing to fight against those bones. If we people ever united. Across cultures. Across backgrounds. Across borders. We could throw away all the power structures. Not defeat. Not reform. Not negotiate. Throw away. Like garbage. Like the rotten furniture of a house that needs to be burned down. That is the clarity that comes from years of pain and sudden ecstasy. I am not asking for a seat at the table. I want a new table. No, I want no table at all. I want the whole hierarchy dismantled.
Unity across borders is not magic. It does not happen because we want it to. It happens because we organize. It happens because we forgive each other’s small betrayals while never forgiving the system. It happens because we learn to trust people who were raised as enemies, and that trust is fragile and must be rebuilt every single day. I found people across borders who rescued me. That is my proof that unity is possible. Now the question is not whether it can happen. It already happened for me. The question is whether I can help it happen for others. Whether I can become the stranger across the border for someone else who is longing, crying, sick, alone. That is the work after ecstasy. The work does not end because I am no longer lonely. The work begins. Now I have something to lose. Now I have something to defend. Now I am not just fighting against the fortress. I am fighting for the people across the borders who saved me. That is stronger than any revenge fantasy. That is stronger than any ideology. That is love with teeth. That is the kind of purpose that outlasts ecstasy.