Someone I used to know very well and considered a good friend did this thing where they turned into a BJP supporter and I saw them being swallowed up by that ecosystem of hate and totally change into something I did not recognize. What hurt is that at some point I

could no longer have a conversation with this person because of the hate speech about various groups that came into that conversation. I never knew this person to be this way and I had to disconnect because I couldn’t support those views and engaging in a discussion

meant opening myself up to ridicule and barbs.

The failure here was to be unable to get this person to see things minus the lens of hate and propaganda. I couldn’t do anything after a point. Today I saw some tweet by this person engaging in the right wing narrative

and it brought back the pain I felt on losing a friend that I had once sworn by. I did care and I still do. But it is not possible to be friends with people who hate everyone but make a concession only for you. It’s not right and I couldn’t support that worldview because it’s not

how I was raised or how I was educated. I am tweeting this out because I don’t know if we have reckoned with these losses of family and friends. It hurts. Because we didn’t invent the ideology of hate, we didn’t propagate it but our lives have been torn apart by this.

For me the damage has been personal. It’s not just about ideology. It’s about losing friends and not recognizing those same people you dined with and watched movies at Priya Cinema with. I remember the days when hate wasn’t a part of our conversation.

How & when did I first start noticing the listing towards hate in my friend? And what did I do to counter it? Did they need an external source of support that I couldn’t provide? Or were they offered a dream of power? How did a lovely person turn into a hate monger? I don’t know.

Importantly how do we build back a society where community and individual trust in the social contract sense, has been replaced with religious sameness as the glue for any social trust or contract?