Ashrita Achar

A radical politics of love merely requires an expansion of the types of relationships to which expectations of love should be attached.

Politics is inescapably emotional. Political ideas – such as freedom or equality – are often talked about as if they’re dry concepts, sandpapered down in a seminar room or a theoretical conversation. But political ideas involve feeling. The singer Nina Simone once said that freedom is ‘just a feeling’: a feeling of ‘no fear’. Justice is a state of... See more

An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism. Society tells her to want independence, but she has declared her interdependence. Society says we live in a materialist reality, but she says we live in an enchanted reality. Society tells her to keep her

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Much of modern social thought, drawing on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and modern economics, sees human beings as fundamentally selfish. Children, Freud wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” Most of modern thought was written by men, and often a certain sort of alpha men,

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Building solidarity infrastructures, entrenched in opposing hierarchy and centralisation of power, is crucial. This requires addressing the ways in which we have internalised the oppressive systems around us and dismantling those structures, first within ourselves and in our day-to-day relations. This might require at times venturing into... See more

The mindset of singularity takes away from the collective processes of healing and self/collective care which centre addressing systematic injustices. For example, instead of healing through a collective process of transformative justice, one is made to understand that justice - as a cornerstone for healing - can only be attained and understood... See more

This misconstrued belief around the singularity of catastrophes renders living under injustices in times of so-called normalcy as acceptable, not requiring urgent intervention. It also renders the daily struggles due to, say, structural racism, as “personal problems.”