The power of imagined communities was never so evident to us as on the other day, when a group of us — Malayalee people of different political affiliations — made our way to Idintakarai in southern Tamil Nadu. In many ways,we were representative of contemporary Malayalee society — we were from districts spanning the length and breadth of Kerala, had very vocally-expressed mutual differences of opinions and interests, and belonged to of different socioeconomic classes, faiths, and castes, were composed of local residents, NRIs, and Malayalees settled elsewhere in the country. Of course, we were also representative of the gender imbalances that characterize even the oppositional civil society here — there were just two women in a group of nearly thirty. We went there to express solidarity with the people of Idinthakarai who have been struggling valiantly against the monstrosity that the government of India is determined to foist on them — the Koodankulam nuclear power plant — and who have been described as traitors to the Nation by the very people who have ripped apart our sense of what a nation should mean to ordinary people. Continue reading Imagined Immunities: The Cure of Idinthakarai →