by SHOBHITA THAKUR
As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of disciplined distance; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing.
As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of discipline d distance ; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing. But some time ago, I watched a video of Sonam Wangchuk speaking after his release from detention, and that distance quietly collapsed.
What I saw was not an activist, not a figure of resistance, but a human being carrying the visible weight of care. His face was drawn, marked by fatigue; there was a faint, almost fragile smile, the kind that seems less an expression of ease and more an act of endurance. I could see a thousand quiet wounds etched across his face. And yet, there was dignity, an unbroken composure that did not harden into hate, nor dissolve into despair. He spoke gently, almost tenderly, as though the very thing he was fighting for, his mountains, his home, still required softness to be protected. What stayed with me was not what he said, but how he remained: unbitter, without rage, still capable of care and love. It is difficult to understand how someone can move through such strain and not be altered into something unrecognizable to love. And perhaps that is where the unease begins, not in his suffering, but in ours. In how easily we receive such moments, process them, and move on, as though they belong to the ordinary rhythm of things.
As though this quiet erosion of the human spirit, this demand that love must endure struggle to justify itself, is somehow normal. His suffering did not turn into hatred; it remained, stubbornly, a form of love. And in that persistence, something about the rest of us, our ease with forgetting, our fluency in indifference, the quiet coldness of the human heart feels far more unsettling. Why is it that those who love hardest, feel deepest, think most clearly and remember, like elephants, with a quiet and unrelenting fidelity are the ones the world turns against? They are the ones who are made to suffer, to be broken, to be silenced, jailed, even erased.
As though memory itself were a threat, and love, when it refuses to fade, becomes something the world must discipline, its hunger to possess, to command; because a world that can inflict and endure violence often cannot bear the persistence of memory, nor the clarity of those who refuse to forget. Orhan Pamuk is someone who has a deep love affair with his city, Istanbul; his words carry the power of visuals. He has captured memories and emotions of himself and of his city and his people in ways no historian ever could, not just recording the past but inhabiting it. There is something quietly disconcerting about a novelist needing protection. Pamuk was not inciting violence; he was naming it, speaking about histories his country preferred to leave unspoken.
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