Last week, my alma mater, the CUNY Graduate Center, mourned the loss of Jerry Gafio Watts, a political scientist, literary scholar, and extraordinary teacher, whose work on the politics of black intellectuals will inform the subject for decades to come. Watts’s life and work stretched far beyond the Graduate Center.

Since covering my first conflict in Chechnya in 1999, I have been aware that violence never keeps to a given territory. Violence seeps like groundwater; it branches out and splits as much as it divides individuals into so many rival camps. Later, in Afghanistan, I saw women, children, civilians killed, often in front of my eyes, and the same in Iraq, and today in Syria. I then witnessed the rise of "kamikaze" suicide bombers against whom we struggle to find an adequate response, whoever we might be, wherever we might live, whatever our value system.

Between September 30 and October 1, BBC News and Al-Jazeera Asia ran headlines such as “Indian man lynched over beef rumors” and  “Indian mob kills man over beef eating rumors.” While the headiness may seem absurd, in the Indian context of right-wing Hindu nationalism and politics, the connection is plausible. What does eating beef in India have to do with the hegemonic rule of Hindu nationalism in India?