That Anand Teltumbde, the Annihilator, who lives in a small part of a very large building called Rajgruha in Mumbai, was going to attend the ongoing Kala Ghoda Arts Festival was not known to us at Navayana. Most of the world minus the minor elites of Mumbai and those plugged into lit fest circuits would not have known about this festival or this one small event within it. Then the state gets in on the act. Cancel, they say, and the organisers of KGAF, whose slogan tellingly is ‘ahead of the curve’, quickly oblige before apologising to Teltumbde and his fellow panellists with a ‘Hi all’ email. The show, as they say, must go on.Now this news is everywhere. The act of suppression has given Teltumbde and his work more traction and urgency than what would have actually happened in letting his book event happen. Most lit fest affairs come and go like that.The reaction of the organisers of KGAF was as can be expected of most other lit fest mafias. Bend, they are told, and they crawl. In November, I had approached the curator of the Goa lit fest, called GALF, to invite Teltumbde. The answer was a quick, pre-emptive no. The curator pleaded helplessness without even making an effort: “You know the others who call the shots at GALF will anyway say no to him.” He was right. They are all right. They are alright. We all make the leader of our nation look bright. All hail. Hail all.On paper, Teltumbde, who is out on bail in the Bhima Koregaon case and lives in the larger jail called uncivil society, is allowed to travel within Maharashtra and Goa. Yet, even within this confinement, his freedom is pre-empted. It is actually shown to be empty. It is first pre-empted by learned members of civil society, and then the state follows with a peremptory strike, as with all such lawless arrests. Teltumbde’s life is suspended. He is not free to move. We keep moving on.Also read: ‘Ridiculous’: Anand Teltumbde Slams Police After Kala Ghoda Arts Festival Cancels Book EventWhen Teltumbde was invited to the Hortus Manorama Festival last November in Kochi, he had to go through the humiliating process of getting his lawyers to move an application in the Special NIA Court to seek permission to travel outside the state. Why? The bail is conditional. His freedom of movement is restricted since he’s deemed a potential troublemaker and a flight risk. Judging that the request to attend the launch of his book The Caste Con Census is benign and harmless, the special court initially gave him permission to travel.We were all delighted. The air tickets were booked. Teltumbde was looking forward to breathing the air under a different sky and meet new people. But just a day ahead of his travel, the court went back on itself and said it actually didn’t want Teltumbde to go to Kochi since attending such an event was merely ‘academic luxury’. Since he’s deemed guilty until proven innocent, the guiltless state weighed him down, like it does with thousands of others. Teltumbde felt frustrated, cheated, angry.Luckily for us, the curator of Hortus, Bandhu Prasad, and the organisers agreed to host him online despite difficulties in holding the event next to a naval base in Kochi where jammers operate, for ‘security reasons’, and the Wi-Fi wasn’t great. The audience wasn’t as packed as it would have been with us in person. I found myself like some TV anchor asking questions of Teltumbde, who was flickering virtually if not virtuously, looming on a large LED screen like some spectral figure: there but also not quite there. We berated the state to start and got on with our business discussing his book Navayana had published.But in all this doing, the state comes undone: it has ended up providing great publicity to Teltumbde and his prison memoir, The Cell and the Soul and his prodigious output in the last year or two. The state’s directive to cancel has resulted in a slew of reports across all forms of media.I told Teltumbde on the phone that finally the state was working in his favour. We then discussed the deep negational dialectics of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, a second-century Buddhist work of philosophy written in 453 metrical verses in Sanskrit that I’m currently immersed in. MMK, as it is known, is an exposition of the Buddha’s teaching of Pratityasamutpada (or Dependent Arising). This meditation on shunyata – emptiness or the void – comes alive in how Teltumbde goes without going. How he can be vitally present in his very absence. Teltumbde is the void we have to avoid, but cannot. To wit:2.7गन्तारं चेत्तिरस्कृत्य गमनं नोपपद्यते।गमनेऽसति गन्ताथ कुत एव भविष्यति॥ ७॥gantāraṃ cettiraskṛtya gamanaṃ nopapadyate|gamane’sati gantātha kuta eva bhaviṣyati||7||Having set the goer aside, no going goesIf the going is not going, where will the goer go?अब पथिक जो ना रहे तो कोई गमन न होगाअगर गमन हो अनागत तो पथिक कहाँ जाएँगे?Teltumbde enjoyed this wit and said, “Karo karo, Nagarjuna karo.”Fine, the organisers of KGAF are pusillanimous. On their website they have already thanked the following: ‘A SPECIAL THANKS TO Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Govt. Of Maharashtra, Dot, BEST, The Collector of Mumbai, Mumbai Police, Traffic Police’ … and of course a slew of corporate sponsors.Damn them. What about other politically informed authors gracing such an event? Will they all, or at least some, step up to say: We won’t be part of this charade if Teltumbde is not there? Is that even a stand they will stand up for? Or if they think nothing will be gained by such self-cancellation, will they all stand or sit wherever they do and read out passages from Teltumbde’s many books? Will they stand up for Umar Khalid and Rona Wilson and the BK-16? Will they stand up for their own sakes?This is my appeal to anyone and everyone who attends these tamashas: You are all Teltumbde by another name. Today it’s him, tomorrow it’s you. One show of award-wapsi is not enough. It’s time to be counted every time, all the time. Otherwise, you’ll all be part of the con.Let Nagarjuna have the last word:2.8गन्ता न गच्छति तावदगन्ता नैव गच्छति ।अन्यो गन्तुरगन्तुश्च कस्तृतीयो हि गच्छति ॥ ८ ॥gantā na gacchati tāvadagantā naiva gacchati|anyo ganturagantuśca kastṛtīyo hi gacchati||8||The goer does not go, nor does indeed the non-goer goBesides the goer and nongoer, who’s the third that goes?Will you go with Anand Teltumbde? Nagarjuna is going there.S. Anand is a poet, musician and translator. He is the author of The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire.