Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 6
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what here.
Belonging. I keep thinking about that word, and who now gets to define what it means in the cultural and political realms.
Over the past few years, commentators and academics have been talking about a “crisis of belonging” particularly in the US, in which people, disillusioned by civic life and with their attention pulled and fractured by their phones, feel lonely and isolated. I don’t doubt it. But this crisis of belonging often is attributed to certain white men, who it’s reported don’t know their place in the world any longer since people who aren’t white men have stepped up to power, influence, and expertise.
At a time when words like “inclusion,” “status,” and “women” are being scrubbed from national vocabularies, what about these people who stepped up, but who now confront a landscape that is rapidly turning hostile? Where is our crisis of belonging?
When the international order of treaties and tariffs is somersaulting, leading to predictions of fragmentation and decoupling, which certainties do we hold onto?
And when the world seems to be folding in on itself to greater national isolation, with members of the business and political elite creating global networks that enhance wealth while closing off borders and cultural exchange, which communities do we cling to?
For those of us who look beyond the local and the homogenous for connection and community, it feels like an untethering and unmooring of our shared political and cultural identities and a forced fraying of community bonds across borders. (A colleague say this might be a construed as a “cosmopolitan” problem. I misread his meaning of “cosmopolitan” as merely elite, but we were both thinking of it as a concern for people who are also pluralist or diasporic.) Amidst all of these geopolitical and professional threats (and more importantly, the threat to the lives of the marginalized), which worlds do we belong to?
Or the better question might be: Which worlds will we build for ourselves anyway?
These are lofty questions, important in being existential. If we can solve these, we might start curing our ailing systems of othering and fracturing.
In the meanwhile, the feeling of belonging can show up in little, tangible ways. A while ago, my sister helped my Dad find a Sikh couple to periodically make Indian food for him and the household. The couple speaks little English, but we all manage to communicate with them in broken Hindi and with hand gestures, and even manage a laugh or two. They are pillars in their community, integrated and essential to other people in so many ways. On a visit a few days ago, in the middle of work — which this week has been fraught — the wife of the couple asked me how I was, how long I was staying, and most importantly, what I wanted to eat. The next morning, I woke up to a breakfast of fresh hot aloo paratha dripping in melted butter and a masala chai. Culinary heaven and the warmth of home both intertwined.
If only we could bottle that — that spirit, that care, that aroma — we could start curing our ailing systems with that kind of belonging.
Essay 7 is here.
