When conflict becomes commerce, and we become the crowd.
It hit me in a moment I didn’t expect:
Friends and family—people I love—cheering for war.
Not in rage. Not in trauma.
But in the name of pride. Nationhood. Power.
And something inside me broke.
It was a post—viral, triumphant, blood-red.
“Operation Sindoor.”
A name chosen with precision.
Symbolism soaked in saffron and sacrifice.
A campaign rendered in polished typography,
vengeance dressed as virtue.
The comments: thunderous with applause.
But what I felt was grief.
Not just for the lives lost in Pahalgam—
but for the quiet hijacking of our sorrow.
Our mourning, turned into momentum.
Our pride, into profit.
The war already won—
in the hearts of those cheering from the sidelines.
Because beneath the chants and justifications,
I felt something else breathing:
a system that feeds on conflict,
thrives on division,
and profits from distraction.
A system I’ve come to know all too well.
This isn’t just nationalism.
It’s The Longest Con—
a sleight of hand that turns suffering into spectacle,
and ordinary people into defenders of invisible empires.
It’s Capitalism as Parasitism—
feeding off our desire for dignity,
rewriting pride as consumption,
and masking profit as patriotism.
It’s Equity—reduced to performance,
where even justice becomes a commodity,
traded in the marketplace of global politics.
And it’s not just India.
- In the U.S., defense spending surges while public schools crumble.
- In Gaza, the war machine consumes lives while weapons stocks rise in value.
- In Ukraine, headlines shift, but the cash flow doesn’t.
- In the Sahel, coups and conflicts multiply while foreign resource extraction quietly expands.
- In East Asia, tech tensions hide the deeper battle: who gets to build the next empire of influence?
Everywhere, the pattern repeats:
conflict is curated, alliances are brokered,
and the engines of capital hum underneath it all.
We are no longer colonized at gunpoint.
We are colonized through debt, data, defense contracts—and drama.
And more hauntingly, we invite it in.
We repost the memes, without pause.
We echo the slogans, louder each time.
And in the blur of it all,
we begin to mistake profit for progress—
conflict, for clarity.
And yet, what hurts most isn’t the manipulation.
It’s watching people I love—
people who carry centuries of survival in their blood—
become the voices of the very thing that has always consumed them.
But even now, I believe this: survival isn’t silence.
Somewhere beneath the slogans,
the ancestors still whisper.
I wrote this not just in pain, but in clarity.
Because the war isn’t always out there.
Often, it’s within us—
shaped by stories we never meant to inherit.
But clarity is also a beginning.
And maybe, if we name the spell,
we can break it.