Your podcast discovery platform
Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Online Outrage At Slavery: Time To Look In The Mirror
This Atlantic story (also piqued by my colleague) has created a storm of debate online. Amidst widely oscillating opinions ranging from blaming the (now deceased) author for being a slavery apologist to trolling him for being ‘judgemental’ to high praise for its gripping, heart-wrenching narrative, this opinion piece by Jesse Singal stands out for its take on evil and normality.
Briefly, the Atlantic piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alex Tizon is Tizon's own tale of growing up with Lola, a slave, who was forced to dedicate her life to his family — a maternal figure to the author and somebody who his parents often abused emotionally (and sometimes physically). By the time Tizon realised the full import of his family history, it was already late. This intimate narration is his attempt to grapple with its implications.
Singal takes flight from this chronicle and we go on a fascinating tour of the online responses to the piece. One particular category of responses that call the tale ‘bad’ because it ‘normalises’ slavery has got this author's goat. And one would say, rightly so.
Any nuance or texture in description of evil is often met with such suspicions. When evil is looked at in isolation as something deranged and restricted to the dark corners of abnormality, you snatch away engagement with it; you deny explanation. “It's good to normalise evil,” writes the author, and the ‘entire brutal weight of human history’, as he calls it, stands witness to his belief.
Normal people do evil stuff. All the time. As the author describes, at a different age, you or your perfectly normal family could easily have been slavers or Holocaust perpetrators and tweeting in moral outrage will not lessen this self-delusion. He argues that to understand the complex cultural and social dynamics that cause evil, we first have to resist the impulse to separate ourselves from it. Evil is within us and a story like Tizon’s only serves to highlight the thin threads that bind us to morality.
Thank you for picking this story! I am really grateful to hear someone wrote about the banality of evil and the easy with which it permeates every corner of our lives. Nobody is free from it, and the story of Tizon really did show it. To me, the most valuable part was how real and human all the characters in it were. And how the reader really could understand Tizon's family, too. Yes, the author had the option to report Lola's situation to the police. But at what price? Landing his own parents in jail? Isn't that an act of evil, too? The truth of this and many other similar stories is, too often there is no "good" way out.