A Love Letter To FTII... By Shini J.K

A Love Letter To FTII...

By Shini J.K

11 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

We are going to celebrate the one year completion of our strike by cutting a cake at 12am at wisdom tree. It's important to remember and celebrate the day, we came together as a community despite being different individuals of various backgrounds. Our class, caste, gender, language, ethnicity, political inclinations or any other identities were not a barrier for us to come together, though we cannot afford to forget these multiple identities. Beyond everything, there was so much of love in between and for the space. Being a vulnerable, insestual community is our strength, not our weakness. Our emotion is our politics. We've seen my community coming together, whenever it was needed. For those few students who have cases or who had been taken away by the police, we always had our community accompanying us to the court, police station and so on. We've seen ruckus here, when one or the other member of the community was hurt. Beyond everything, it was all about love, cinema and existence.

Despite having difference of opinions at various points of time, we never let our people and spirit go down. We never defeated us from within. A 139 days complete shut down is impossible otherwise. How much ever pain and trauma we had in our lives during those days and post strike, we should remember and celebrate the day. We all were marked in the history, not as leaders or individuals, but as a community which had the courage to raise our voice.

Cutting the cake to celebrate the b'day of strike may look like an absurd idea. But, everything was absurd for us during the strike and even post-strike. This day and our gathering should bring back the normalcy in the campus, in every means, despite we all facing problems at multiple levels as individuals and as a community. As a community, our politics was beyond ideologies, though spelling it out may seem politically wrong. We don't need to worry about being politically correct always. We have nobody to look at us from the top. No mother parties or party lines. We looked elite for many, we looked weird and ugly. But, that's how we are and we can be happy about not being pretentious.

We should take a moment to thank all people who stood with us throughout. And also to reassure our love and solidarity to all the struggling student communities.

The turbulent time shall pass and we all will still be together for the next struggle against the new establishments.