Liberty is Doomed — Long Live Liberty!!!
If you grew up in the 90s and the early 2000s — you’d have seen a lot of optimism. I personally traded porn-time with Britannica Encyclopedia time for a good part of this century’s first decade.
Why wouldn’t I?
State Board Indians who grew up on shoestring libraries like mine, for the first time, had access to all the information they could devour — and mind you, this was the time before attention economy. The 2000s were still the information economy. If you knew more, you were better. If you knew more, you could argue. If you knew more, you could impress girls.
Knew more I did…everything from Norse Mythology to the names of classic rock bands…i figured it all out.
By the time I was 19, I had already given up on movies in favour of Salman Rushdie — Chirstopher Hitchens conversations…and made documentaries a staple (rock music still stuck around till my introduction to Massive Attack).
The problem with infinite browsing was that you could dedicate your attention to only a finite number of distractions. I have listed out some — but for many peers and cousins, personal curiosity wasn’t the shiniest of portals, as they decided to stay in the fairly comfortable zone of Bollywood and Asa Akira (who I was to delightfully ‘discover’ later).
This is, where I believe, the bifurcation started.
A man tasting the ideas of Nietzsche, Hitchens, Borges, Stephen Fry is doomed to go the liberal way..and this is dangerous in a society that rewards conservatism. I mean doomed in many ways — but mostly you end up idealist in a nation that doesn’t understand the idea of Liberty. Mind you, our best bets against a Right Wing Communal Government are guys who would be communal and beat people up at the drop of a hat.
India doesn’t offer Liberty…India offers a crude, unsatisfying alternative to whatever bad is going on every five years.
For a man growing up and still grasping the ideas of Thomas Paine — identifying as a Liberal in a perpetually- poised, eternally-static society is frustrating because one grows up to understand that arguments cannot be won on the basis of a solid historic argument. We don’t have any. It’s a game of “ BJP is fucking up a community” versus “ what about 1984?” — and you’re shut up. And it’s correct…because, really, “What about 1984?” — we did fuck up BIG TIME then, and many other times.
So, whom do you fight for?
In India, having solid life long political affiliations is as bad an idea for Liberals, as it is for politicians themselves.
Coming back to the bifurcation.
My pals and cousins from back in the day are catching up on their reading these days — and FB Pages dedicated to Nathuram Godse look like a good place to begin for them. For the ones earning 4 times as much as I do, I am still the English Speaking Elite because they were jerking off to Asa Akira instead of Googling George Orwell in 2011.
Being a liberal is tough.
You try to be compassionate — and usually try to steer ideas to a place where no one has ever been. Conservatives have history on their side — liberals have an idea of the future. Men and women who stand for liberty in the face of Fascism, hyper nationalism, communism are usually at the receiving end of the gun barrel.
Thomas Paine almost died for Liberal Values during French Revolution…Emile Zola died for appealing to the better nature of Frenchmen just over a hundred years ago…People were stabbed and shot because the madman of Iran wouldn’t take back his fatwa on Rushdie…
Sometimes, however, in the midst of all things ugly and being in a nation where Liberalism is a far off dream — you come across little sparks of progressive solidarity.
These sparks are far away from vapid Twitter Leftie intellectuals, and SJW Instagram pages who solve nothing but call out everything. These sparks are in the middle of the day when your friend’s dad sees through a politicians parochial speech- and calls it out in his lungi…these sparks are celebration of the woman of the house getting a promotion. These sparks flicker brightly when women are undone from the shackles of primitive and barbaric practice of triple talaq — or homosexuals are no longer persecuted for their nature.
So you have to ask yourself — what chance does an Indian Liberal have?
We live to see more sparks.
