During the Pandemic there was a sense of general solidarity. We were all reduced to being in more or less the same boat, though many people’s boats were remarkably bigger and more luxurious. In this present moment, I am struggling to make sense of opulence in one part of the world while in another part, not so far away, crimes are being committed against humanity.

Personally, I think I have been in a state of mourning ever since October 7. All of these months I watch with gaping mouth the extent of the violence of white supremacy. How some lives matter more than others, whose lives are grievable, whose are considered not worthy of rescue. What do we owe each other? I keep asking, and the question keeps getting reframed. Don’t we owe each other something super basic, like the dignity of life? 

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Then I think the capitalist machinery is so deeply entrenched in our day-to-day life that we don’t even see the distraction machine at work, because it is functioning overtime and has replaced reality. The moment we feel even an ounce of discomfort in our bones, we want to shrug it off and distract ourselves instead of sitting and wrestling with that discomfort and converting it into either action or activism.

This International Women’s Day I feel ever more conscious of the hierarchies that exist within this binary category that are obvious in so many societies in the world. White feminism sits at the top globally. 

Just like savarna feminism continues to dictate discourse in India. Where I live, white feminists do not allow me to refer to myself as a third-world feminist. They have no conception of the history of the term third-world feminism and the integrity of its proponents who sought to reclaim the discourse from white feminism and its privileges. There is this feeling of alienation I am unable to shake off because I live in a town in which reality is bubble-wrapped and every effort is made to live apolitical lives. The newspaper is a site of leisure, something you read while drinking your morning cappuccino and catching up with friends after dropping the kids off at school. I struggle to assimilate into such a version of motherhood in which those children that look different are other, divorced from our realities and our consciousness, and in a society where the horrors unfolding in Gaza are often reduced to a tiny column in the newspaper so that more space is given to a parade honouring a local hero. Every day I wake up thinking of how much more work needs to be done. I remind myself of the ultimate dictate of feminism: No one is free unless everyone is free.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.