We like to believe our emotions are our own - personal, organic, and free. But in a world increasingly shaped by identity politics, social media, and historical forces, our feelings are no longer just ours. They have become political. In the run-up to our latest magazine issue, Love and Loneliness, we revisit Outlook’s early 2023 issue, Politics of Feelings🏅, where we explored how feelings construct identities and, consequently, politics.
Our emotions are shaped by the world around us. Some feelings aren't just spontaneous but are influenced by history, power, and media. In the issue, Margrit Pernau looked at how emotions, particularly joshಌ (burning passion), were expressed in colonial India.
🔯The shaping of emotions is not confined to history. It extends to the unspoken rules of society itself. In a world where everyone tries to be positive and strive for happiness, sadness has become a symptom of personal failure. The pressure to project our lives in a certain way has put us out of touch with our feelings. We are so eager to say everything is fine, that the sun is always shining, that we deny others the chance to be vulnerable. The world has become more about how people see us than how we really are. We write things we don’t mean and mean things we don’t say.
Abhishek Anicca, a Patna-based writer and poet, argued that we must reclaim our right to be sad. In Politics Of Hate𓃲, Abhik Bhattacharya explored how hate does not always need a reason to exist. It is as much a human emotion as love, deeply embedded in how we form collective identities. Hate fuels political movements, offers people a sense of security, glory, and imaginary rejuvenation of an ancient past.
At the same time, emotions like love and longing have become increasingly fragmented in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Sreedeep Bhattacharya wrote that in an era obsessed with the new and the nowꦏ, relationships are shaped by a logic of consumption - desiring, acquiring, exhausting, and discarding, only to start the cycle again. In the restless game of Grab and Grab More, friends-with-benefits have back-benched the idea of ‘forever’. Open-endedness and uncertainty are the normative social principles around which we meet, mate, relate, relish and reject. In this endless chase for newness, do we even have time to feel deeply?
To read more stories from the issue, click here.
