Rick Salutin: ‘It feels good,’ they said across Cannada. Who knew?
People don’t like to feel bad about what they’re doing for harmless pleasure. Yet an entire population, who didn’t see themselves as oppositional, had felt under surveillance and opprobrium. A nation with an unseen finger wagging in its face for almost a century. It was normal for so long that only at its end, with the collective exhale, did the stress appear — like removing tight shoes or not banging your head on the wall.