The Akathisiac Anxiety of a Camouflaged Nobody

I uploaded a few essays today, scrawled across the last several days like a fever chart of someone who knows the thermometer is broken but keeps checking anyway, and I am trying to raise consciousness to what’s coming, to wake people up, though I suspect the only thing waking up is my own regret, my life may or may not improve, I have already sort of made peace with my loneliness, my depression, my poverty, the holy trinity of my personal Calvary, but many people have families to support and a future ahead of them, and India is at the crossroads of this huge industrial revolution doing exactly the wrong kind of things, denying reality and like always talking up nonexistent technical and historical supremacism, silly jingoism and religiousity when those are exactly the recipes to disappear completely from the main events on the world stage, we as a country are becoming increasingly irrelevant and unless we realize what we are becoming we can’t step back and initiate any change, and in those essays I wrote about this akathisiac anxiety that I feel inside me, a bipolar depression manifest I know, that to some extent this being no one in this sort of nonhappening city of lower middle-class and the poor helps me cope because the lack of ambition, the lack of progress, perfection and prosperity matches me alarmingly well and I am camouflaged, a sad ambitionless aimless hikkikimori Bengali in the Bengali capital of disappointment and disappearance, I keep screaming, but is it all in the void?

Akathesia, from the Greek ἀκαθισία, meaning the inability to sit still, the restless leg syndrome of the soul, the feeling that your skin is too tight and the universe is a sweater knitted by a drunk grandmother who keeps dropping stitches, and I feel it, I feel it in my bones, in my marrow, in the very mitochondria that power my cellular despair, the little powerhouses of my personal industrial revolution that is burning coal when the rest of the world is building solar farms, and I am not alone in this akathisiac anxiety, I am joined by a nation of 1.4 billion people who are collectively tapping their feet, scratching their heads, and wondering why the future looks like a rerun of a bad soap opera from 1987, and the answer is simple, we are doing it wrong, we are doing it spectacularly, monumentally, cosmically wrong, and nobody wants to hear it because the truth is a bitter pill and we have collectively decided to swallow sugar instead, sugar and nationalism and the sweet sweet lie that we were once great and will be great again, a lie so old it has cobwebs and a pension plan.

I am a nobody, a zero, a null pointer in the grand array of Indian society, and in this nonhappening city of lower middle-class and poor, this Calcutta, this city of joy they call it, city of joy, city of decay, city of the slow rot that smells like jasmine and sewage, I am camouflaged, I blend in, my lack of ambition is the ambient temperature, my aimlessness is the background radiation, my hikkikimori existence is just another statistic in a city that specializes in making statistics of human potential, and this camouflage is a comfort and a curse, a warm blanket that suffocates, a lullaby that deafens, because if I were somewhere else, somewhere ambitious and progressive and prosperous, I would stand out like a sore thumb, like a black hole in a field of stars, like a fart in a yoga class, and that would be unbearable, that would be the kind of visibility that burns, that exposes, that demands explanation, and I have no explanations, only questions, only this akathisiac anxiety that keeps me pacing, keeps me writing, keeps me screaming into the void.

The void, that great Indian void, the void that swallows dissent and difference and disagreement, the void that echoes with the sound of one hand clapping and the other hand tweeting nationalist hashtags, the void that is our collective consciousness, a consciousness that has been colonized, decolonized, recolonized, and finally abandoned to the whims of algorithmic feeds and WhatsApp forwards, and I scream into this void, I scream about the industrial revolution, the fourth one, the one with AI and automation and the Internet of Things, the one that is happening while we are busy building statues and renaming cities and debating who ate what in 1526, and my screams are swallowed, digested, and excreted as silence, as the comfortable silence of a people who have decided that ignorance is not just bliss but a national policy, a five-year plan of deliberate obfuscation, and I wonder, I wonder with the wonderment of science, the wonderment that has kept me alive through the darkest nights of my bipolar depression, the wonderment that says the universe is knowable, understandable, describable, even if it is fundamentally indifferent to our existence, and I try to express this wonderment through humor, American humor, impolite humor, toilet humor, the kind of humor that says we are all just meat sacks full of bacteria and bad decisions, and that is okay, that is more than okay, that is liberating, because if we are just meat sacks then we can stop pretending to be gods.

And the etymology of it all, the history of fumbling that we now hide in fat textbooks, the way we took Latin and Greek and Sanskrit and welded them into words so long and unpronounceable that they serve as gatekeepers, as bouncers at the club of knowledge, and I want to kick down the door, I want to say that behind every polysyllabic monstrosity is a human being who was confused, who was guessing, who was making it up as they went along, and that is beautiful, that is the most beautiful thing, the history of our collective fumbling toward understanding, and I think of akathisia again, the inability to sit still, and I think of the Greek roots, a- meaning without, kathisis meaning sitting, and I think of how the Greeks sat, how they sat and thought, how they invented democracy and philosophy and then forgot to include women and slaves, and I think of how we sit, or rather how we don’t sit, how we pace and fret and refresh our feeds, and I think of the irony, the delicious irony, that the word for our modern condition comes from a language we consider dead, a language that sits in textbooks like a fossil, while we, the living, are anything but still.

I am bipolar type II, which is the polite cousin of bipolar type I, the one that doesn’t make the headlines, the one that doesn’t get the dramatic manic episodes, just the low-grade fever of hypomania and the deep freeze of depression, and I have learned to live with it, to ride the waves, to surf the serotonin, and sometimes I think my mental illness is a microcosm of India’s national illness, this oscillation between grandiosity and despair, between claiming we will be a superpower and admitting we can’t keep the lights on, between the manic construction of smart cities and the depressive reality of farmer suicides, and I see the pattern, I see the pattern in my brain chemistry and in the body politic, and I want to scream, I want to scream that we are sick, we are all sick, and the first step to healing is admitting you have a problem, but who wants to admit that when there are temples to build and enemies to blame and history to rewrite, who wants to sit with the discomfort of reality when the opium of nationalism is so freely available, so cheap, so addictive.

Calcutta, my Calcutta, never Kolkata, Kolkata is the name they gave us when they wanted to pretend we were modern, when they wanted to erase the history of the Black Hole and the Raj and the famine that killed millions while Churchill was busy being a hero in Europe, and I say Calcutta because I am stubborn, because I am a Bengali smart-ass, because I know that names have power, that to name something is to claim it, and I claim this city, this city of disappointment and disappearance, this city that was once the capital of British India and is now the capital of nothing, the capital of what-could-have-been, the capital of if-only, and I walk its streets, I walk its streets and I see the grandeur decaying, the mansions crumbling, the banyan trees growing through the walls, and I think this is us, this is India, this is what happens when you stop moving, when you stop building, when you stop dreaming, you become a ruin, a beautiful ruin, a ruin with potential, but a ruin nonetheless.

And the science, the science that keeps me going, the science that says the universe is 13.8 billion years old and we are made of star stuff and the atoms in my body were forged in the hearts of dying stars, and I think of Carl Sagan, not quoting him, just thinking of him, thinking of how he made the cosmos approachable, how he said we are a way for the cosmos to know itself, and I want to do that for India, I want to be a way for India to know itself, to know its sickness, its potential, its beauty, its ugliness, and I try to do this through humor, through the American impolite toilet humor that says we are all just animals, we are all just trying to get through the day without shitting our pants, and that is the great equalizer, the great leveler, the thing that makes the prime minister and the peasant share a common humanity, a common fragility, and I think of the Sanskrit, the ancient wisdom, the Tat Tvam Asi, Thou Art That, and I think yes, I am that, I am the beggar and the billionaire, I am the saint and the sinner, I am the void and the scream, and that is the wonderment, that is the thing that makes the akathisiac anxiety bearable, the thing that makes the camouflage not just tolerable but meaningful.

But is it all in the void? Is my screaming just another sound in the cacophony, just another voice in the chorus of despair, and I think of the physics, the physics of sound waves, how they travel through medium, how they require something to pass through, and the void is not empty, the void is full, full of dark matter and dark energy and the things we cannot see but know must be there, and I think my screams are like dark matter, invisible but exerting gravity, pulling things together, bending the light of public discourse, and maybe, maybe, somewhere out there, someone hears, someone feels the gravitational pull of my anxiety, my depression, my hope, my despair, and maybe they scream back, and maybe, just maybe, we make a noise loud enough to wake the sleeping, to shake the complacent, to disturb the comfortable, and that is all I can hope for, that is all any of us can hope for, the hope that our void-screaming is not in vain, that our akathisiac pacing has a destination, that our camouflaged existence is not invisible but merely waiting to be seen.

I am a sad ambitionless aimless hikkikimori Bengali, and I am the Bengali capital of disappointment and disappearance, and I am India, and India is me, and we are all, collectively, individually, cosmically, fumbling toward the light, toward understanding, toward a future that may not exist but must be imagined, must be fought for, must be screamed into existence, and I will keep screaming, I will keep writing, I will keep pacing, because the alternative is sitting still, and sitting still is death, sitting still is the end, sitting still is the acceptance of the void, and I am not ready to accept, I am not ready to sit, I am akathisiac, I am restless, I am alive, and that, in the end, is the only truth that matters, the only truth that survives, the only truth that screams back.

P.S. References: The etymology of akathisia from Greek ἀ- (a-, “without”) + κάθισις (káthisis, “sitting”), from καθίζω (kathízō, “to sit”). The concept of dark matter and dark energy from modern cosmology. The Tat Tvam Asi from the Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7. The bipolar type II classification from the DSM-5. The fourth industrial revolution framework from Klaus Schwab’s 2016 book. The star stuff reference, while not quoted, is indebted to the general public science communication tradition following Sagan.