A letter from Mahesh to those who are annoyed by what he writes
Dear Friend,
I have been thinking about you. Not with any particular agenda. Just thinking about you, and about the conversations we have had, the ones in public and the ones that never happened but probably should have.
I know that some of what I say out there unsettles you. I know that some of you have come at me hard because of it. Some of you have pulled me aside with genuine worry in your voice. Some of you have gone quiet in a way that says more than words. And I have not always responded with grace. Sometimes I have responded with a point I could not resist making. Sometimes with a mischief I probably should have resisted and thoroughly enjoyed not resisting.
I am not apologising for that. I want to be honest with you about that upfront. The mischief is staying. It is not cruelty. It is how I think out loud. It is how I test ideas. And sometimes it is simply because the opportunity was too good and life is too short. You know me well enough to know the difference. I hope.
But underneath all of it, under every public exchange and every prodding comment and every eyebrow raised in your direction, there is something I have perhaps not said clearly enough. And this letter is my attempt to say it.
I am not trying to win anything. I am not trying to convert you. I am not trying to position myself above the argument. I genuinely do not experience what I feel about our country and our people as a position to be defended. It is just what I feel. It runs in me the way blood runs. I did not choose it and I could not stop it if I tried.
I think what troubles some of you is that I seem too comfortable with things that deserve discomfort. And you are not wrong that those things deserve discomfort. The frustrations are real. The failures are real. The things that drove good people away are real. I am not dismissing any of that when I speak the way I speak.
I am just also holding something else at the same time. The thing that never broke. The thing underneath all the failures that kept breathing quietly. You know what I am talking about. You have felt it too. In your mother’s kitchen. In a stranger’s unexpected kindness on a bad day. In the way someone you barely know will drop everything for you without being asked. That thing. It has a name. Manussakama. And it is mine to love as loudly as I want to. Just as the grief is yours to carry as honestly as you need to.
We are not in opposition. We are just different expressions of the same love for the same place.
So please, do not stress about me. I know what I am doing. I know the risks. I have thought about this more carefully than the mischief probably suggests. And I intend to keep saying what I say, keep poking where I poke, and keep writing letters like this one to people I genuinely care about.
You are one of those people. That has not changed. It will not change. Not because of anything you said or did not say. But because that is just how this works.
With love, and with the full disclosure that I am absolutely going to keep causing trouble,
Your friend