Author: Zeyad Masroor Khan

A journalist by profession, Zeyad Masroor Khan writes on minority affairs, drugs, crime, politics and pop culture. In the last seven years, he has worked with Reuters, Vice, Brut India and Deccan Herald.
He grew up in the old town in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh. In an area populated by mostly lock workers and frequently overrun by communal violence, he closely saw how religion, class, caste and gender identities shape the life of huge populace in India’s largest state. An alumni of AJK MCRC,
he has written about satanist cults in Aligarh, Bulandshahr boys running to be armymen, ‘witches’ in Assam, gun smugglers in Bihar, dating lives of Delhi’s urban poor, Istanbul’s Taksim Square protests and India’s presidential elections.

May 5, 2020 /

People who dictate policies and the ones who implement them, those who create the propaganda and the ones who carry it, those who make art out of ordinary men’s miseries and the ones who lecture the world from comfortable TV studios, those who pretend they care and the ones who remain apathetic, those who put their individual interests above the collective benefit and the ones whose rationality borders on cruelty. 
I myself fall in the same group – among those currently facing an epidemic of anxiety, loneliness and mental health issues. Long been shielded by our economic and social status, we now need to loosen our purses and our egos. As we find us and our loved ones to be as susceptible to the vagaries of the unkind world, we should do some soul searching. Here is what the elites of India, and the world, can do in our spare time.