Threatened by memories, the world chooses to forget

Shobhita thakur

The Statesman

0
03.04.2026

As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of discipline d distance ; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing. But some time ago, I watched a video of Sonam Wangchuk speaking after his release from detention, and that distance quietly collapsed.

What I saw was not an activist, not a figure of resistance, but a human being carrying the visible weight of care. His face was drawn, marked by fatigue; there was a faint, almost fragile smile, the kind that seems less an expression of ease and more an act of endurance. I could see a thousand quiet wounds etched across his face. And yet, there was dignity, an unbroken composure that did not harden into hate, nor dissolve into despair. He spoke gently, almost tenderly, as though the very thing he was fighting for, his mountains, his home, still required softness to be protected. What stayed with me was not what he said, but how he remained: unbitter, without rage, still capable of care and love. It is difficult to understand how someone can move through such strain and not be altered into something unrecognizable to love. And perhaps that is where the unease begins, not in his suffering, but in ours. In how easily we receive such moments, process them, and move on, as though they belong to the ordinary rhythm of things.

As though this quiet erosion of the human spirit, this demand that love must endure struggle to justify itself, is somehow normal. His suffering did not turn into hatred; it remained, stubbornly, a form of love. And in that persistence, something about the rest of us, our ease with forgetting, our fluency in indifference, the quiet coldness of the human heart feels far more unsettling. Why is it that those who love hardest, feel deepest, think most clearly and remember, like elephants, with a quiet and unrelenting fidelity are the ones the world turns against? They are the ones who are made to suffer, to be broken, to be silenced, jailed, even erased.

As though memory itself were a threat, and love, when it refuses to fade, becomes something the world must discipline, its hunger to possess, to command; because a world that can inflict and endure violence often cannot bear the persistence of memory, nor the clarity of those who refuse to forget. Orhan Pamuk is someone who has a deep love affair with his city, Istanbul; his words carry the power of visuals. He has captured memories and emotions of himself and of his city and his people in ways no historian ever could, not just recording the past but inhabiting it. There is something quietly disconcerting about a novelist needing protection. Pamuk was not inciting violence; he was naming it, speaking about histories his country preferred to leave unspoken.

And yet, words were enough to endanger him, to require a bodyguard. It suggests that even language that preserves the past, when it carries the truth of memories, can become a threat in a world that depends on forgetting. It isn’t that the world has suddenly turned against memory; what is more unnerving is that, even after extraordinary leaps in science and technology, even as we now build systems of artificial intelligence that can store, process, and simulate vast realms of human knowledge we have barely begun to understand love. We remain uncertain about something far more immediate: how to let another human being live, love, and remember in their own way.

The arc of human evolution appears advanced on the surface, but emotionally and ethically, we circle the same unresolved questions. What happened to Socrates, the silencing of a voice that challenged his time, repeats itself in different forms across generations. It is one of our greatest failures as human beings that a profound artist like Ai Weiwei could be detained for 81 days, not for violence, but for remembering too precisely, for insisting that memory must remain visible. His work does not merely express; it preserves, it records, it refuses disappearance. In giving form to loss, to absence, to lives that might otherwise dissolve into statistics, he turns art into a kind of moral archive. And that is where the discomfort begins.

Because a world that is both comfortable and complicit in wars and human suffering at a distance begins to resist when memory becomes specific, too close; when it acquires names, faces, and permanence. His art is not loud, It does not argue, it remembers. And in doing so, it denies the world its most convenient escape: forgetting. Perhaps that is why such acts are met not with dialogue, but with containment. Because when memory is held with care, when it is shaped by love and carried into the public realm, it begins to unsettle the very structures that depend on erasure. And so the punishment is not just of the individual, but of what they represent; a refusal to look away and feel nothing. I might sound cynical, but that day may not be far away when the same impulses that drive wars and concentrate power will begin to shape not just the world we inhabit, but the reality we are allowed to remember.

We already live within architectures of algorithms that decide what is seen, what is amplified, what quietly disappears. It is not difficult to imagine a future that resembles the controlled world of Severance or the constr ucted consciousness of Westworld. And yet, for all our technological advancement, there remains one limit we have not fully surpassed: we cannot yet erase memory at will. Perhaps that is why, in its absence, the world continues to rely on more visible forms of erasure – containment, isolation, slow psychological attrition. What happened to Julian Assange was not just punishment; it was an attempt to exhaust memory itself.

To confine a body long enough that the mind begins to dim, that clarity becomes fatigue, that truth becomes too heavy to carry and finally pain engulfs the human. And that may be the most unnerving truth of all: when memory cannot be erased, it is made to suffer until it begins to fade; and then, like Yayoi Kusama, we retreat into an asylum and keep making art just to hold on to ourselves, not because we are broken, but because the world outside is, where those who feel and remember are ostracized, and those who do not are left to rule.

(The writer, an alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India, is an author and filmmaker.)

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Threatened by memories, the world chooses to forget

Shobhita thakur

© The Statesman