Think twice, it’s not alright
This is a blog about the stuff that goes on in my mind. This is my scratchpad. Why not simply write a journal you ask? Well, I do actually keep a journal but the stuff I write there isn’t very coherent nor is it intended to be read. The stuff I write here is going to be something that I’d like to communicate to someone. Don’t know who, don’t know how, don’t know when. It’s an exercise in penning down my views and presenting them to anyone interested. Perhaps it will spark a dialogue, perhaps it will start a discussion, perhaps I will learn something new but must importantly, I will get it out of my fucking head. Things have a tendency to stick around in my head and writing them down and organising them makes them less sticky and makes me slightly peaceful for some odd reason. So this, my reader, is the primary purpose for writing this blog.
Recently — or perhaps not so recently — I have felt very confused, regarding the very basic assumptions of our lives. Take for example the assumption we tacitly follow that life is worth living. If we assume that one’s actions are a representative of one’s beliefs, we would conclude that most people believe this. Since the people alive currently haven’t stopped living yet out of their own volition, then they must have the implicit belief that life is worth living, or they would have ended theirs a long time ago.
However, coming to this conclusion doesn’t quite feel right, does it? Do most people really believe that life is worth living? I hear so many people complain about how difficult life is and how bad things are, which would suggest otherwise. At the same time that we criticise life for all its problems, we are unwilling to end it and we still participate in it, just by being alive every second. For many it’s a half hearted participation, a participation based on the assumption that maybe life might be bad right now but someday it will be good. If only I could get my dream job. If only I could move to a different city. If only I could get the partner I really want. If only I stopped being so fat/skinny/lazy/restless/vulnerable/closed-off/gullible/cynical and so on.
Now if you participate in something half heartedly, it is likely that you’ll not enjoy it very much, not just because the activity was intrinsically boring or unpleasant but because your initial assumptions prevented you from doing the things that would make you enjoy it, like a self fulfilling prophecy. We are not ready to embrace life and we are not ready to end it, we’re sitting on the walls. Here I have a certain respect for those who commit suicide, since it requires a certain courage to actually go through with it; to actually end your life. Now of course I am not saying that we should admire people who commit suicide. I certainly do not envy the fate of a person who commits suicide, someone who is driven by his circumstances (mental, physical and/or social) to such a horrid state that the magnitude of his misery overcomes the very basic, deep animal instinct of self preservation. I feel that it is a moral failure on our part as a society that such conditions were allowed to be created for a fellow human being. Now some of you might bring in the nature vs nurture question here. I’ve seen some form of this argument float around in discussions about student suicides in Kota and IITs “A lot of people faced the same stress and they didn’t commit suicide, and he did and hence it must be because of his personality, some people just can’t handle pressure (i.e. it’s their nature, it’s not nurture)” .
To these people, I say this. Fuck you. Also that firstly, your personality is affected by your environment, not just your genes. It’s a result of the interaction between the two. So you can’t take our environment from the equation. Secondly, of course different people are going to react to stress differently yes, but that’s not the issue here, the issue is that the stress being created is unhealthy, unnecessary, artificial and avoidable. Why have that in the first place? The stress didn’t make the lives of the people who endured it but didn’t commit suicide — your so called mentally “strong” — people any better. It damaged them too, it hurt them too, it also caused problems for them, just not enough for them to commit suicide. It’s not like the same stress is making some people happy and some sad so only the whole it’s good and it’s the fault of those who are sad for feeling sad. The stress is making everyone feel well, stressed, which is not a pleasant feeling. Some of them will develop self esteem issues, will start to hate themselves because they are not as “successful” as others. Some of them will madly chase the “success” and grow to believe that beating others in a competition is the only way to remain happy and is the only worthwhile thing to do. All of this leading to years of sadness and suffering and pain. And yes, some will break under the pressure and commit suicide.
Don’t you see the distress is because of the system set up which rewards and reinforces only one thing and only things constantly: success? A kind of success which by definition, for someone to be at the top, requires someone to be at the relative bottom. You’ll always have people who failed; the major chunk of them, only a select few at the top are apparently worthy of anything. There can only be one topper. Elon Musk is “great” because there’s only one Elon Musk. If everyone was “successful”, then no will be “successful”, because that’s how the system’s set up.
Now some smart-ass bitches will come up and say “You want to eliminate competition and if you do that you will end up with everyone being less competent because there’s no incentive to be good”. To them I would like to say two words: B and D. You son of a bitch, the website you’re reading this on is probably being served from a server running Linux which is open sourced (Along with probably using multiple open-source technologies like apache,nginx, redis, angular, react, nodejs to name a few) Yes, you free market slut, there’s no external incentive for people to contribute to it. “Oh so it must be shitty like all free things’” No my dear friend, it is what powers most servers — because it’s just better. Yep. Better than the stuff created for your highly-incentivised-fatly-paid people at Microsoft and Apple. So please take your “carrot and stick” worldview of human behaviour and stick the two eponymous objects up your arse.
Coming back to the fucked up system, if not anything have some fucking empathy you capitalist degenerate. It always amuses me how people all the right wing seem to be ultra religious and simultaneously hardcore proponents of capitalism in it’s purest form. What about your religious teachings? Love thy neighbour? Protecting the weak? Charity ? Helping others?
Anyway fuck them. What was I saying again? Ah yes, the suicide thing. Now don’t take me for a “xyz is a social construct” guy. Yes, different people are predisposed to different behaviours and of course biology plays a role. Ignoring it is simply being stupid; contorting reality to fit your ideas instead of looking at the reality to form them. Not a big sin to be honest, we all do it on a regular basis. Beliefs are a bitch. Hard to get rid of your beliefs and to change them with just the force of reason, especially the ones that are deep seated and unconscious. Anyone who’s felt guilty after masturbating or after a hookup would testify to this; on a rational level we know that there’s nothing wrong in it, but the belief still holds power over our emotional life. The other thing with beliefs — especially the conscious beliefs that we espouse and advertise — is that the more we believe in something the more it acts as a filter; deflecting evidence against it while wholeheartedly taking in the evidence supporting it. That’s how we are. This makes changing them so much harder and we just end up more entrenched in them over time. For both kinds of beliefs radical, physical, in-your-face kind of experience is something that really helps demolishing them, given that you enter the exercise with an open mind (without which no change is possible really). One example of such a belief-changing-experience from my life which I haven’t shared with many people (mostly out of embarrassment and fear of judgement) happened to me when I was a teenager.
I must have been around 13 when I was sitting in a train to Jaipur with my dad. There’s something about trains that makes you more likely to chat with the person near you, as opposed to an aeroplane (perhaps the fact that the seats are facing each other in a compartment or that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more chatty, anyway stashing that discussion for now). So just like that, all the occupants of that train compartment — including an elderly woman who I remember thinking was nice — were talking to each other, sharing food and in general just passing time in each other’s company. Eventually the train journey ended and the son (presumably) of that elderly woman came into the compartment to receive her. By his name I realised that he was a muslim. Oh, so the lady I had been talking to was a muslim. Something snapped in my head. “Wow. Muslims are normal people. Damn” I thought to myself.
Okay wait! Stop! I can feel your judgemental glares. Ouch. Please stop.
Let me explain. I grew up in a house with my maternal grandparents and very close to my maternal family. Now my Nanaji happened to be a member of the RSS, a pretty dedicated one at that. He recited patriotic poetry with such fervour that it would make any urban naxal give up his jhola and JNU degree and sign up for the nearest RSS shakha. I grew up reading the RSS literature lying around in my house and my impressionable young mind soaked it all up.
Muslims: they were invaders, they were rapists, they had destroyed our culture, repressed our faith, forcibly converted Hindus to Islam, abducted and raped our women and committed horrendous atrocities on us for over 700 years. My memory fails me regarding the specifics right now, but I remember some tidbits of what I read in those magazines and books(paraphrasing here)
“When any country gets free from their oppressor, the first thing they do is to destroy the symbols of the oppressor. When eastern europeans countries got free from the hold of communism, the first thing they did was to destroy the statues of Lenin. When will we do that? Why should we be proud of the monuments left by the Mughals?”
“Mulayam Singh is a “Mulla” who mercilessly murdered our brave karsevaks and opened fired on his fellow Hindus just for a few muslim votes”
“Almost all living muslims in India are actually descendants of forcibly converted Hindus, they should be made to realise this and come back to the roots”
Other than this they would generally be about how Aurangzeb was an oppressive manic, how Maharana Pratap was a glorious king who stood up to Akbar, how traitors like Man Singh were the real cause of Rajput defeats at the hand of the muslims, how Prithviraj had forgiven Mohammed Ghauri 17 times and that is this mistake of his — being merciful — that led to the destruction of our civilisation, how Somnath was plundered again and again by muslim invaders, how Gandhi and Nehru were traitors to the nation and how they gave everything to the muslims by being weak, how congress hides behind it’s mask of secularism to actually advance the interests of Muslims over Hindus.
Thus, despite meeting many muslims in my school and the neighbourhood during the 12–13 years prior to the aforementioned experience, this belief of distrust of muslims stuck, since all my experiences with Muslims until that point had been coloured by this belief of them being the “other”: mean-spirited, possibly violent, to be feared, to be distrusted. But this time my experience had been raw — I didn’t know that that woman was a muslim, my belief had not been activated — I was simply taking in what came to me without a bias. My old belief suddenly crumpled in the face of this clearly contradictory information that had been able to sneak past the belief’s defenses by happenstance, destroying its foundations, through raw, direct, undeniable contrary experience. And that’s how I happen to shed a harmful belief. I am glad that I did.
Okay, I am tired now. I see that I started from the commentary on the question of whether life is worth living or not and somehow ended on an anecdote from my childhood. Phew! If you’re looking for a conclusion then you’re about to be disappointed because I don’t have one. I am tired and uhh, I can’t summarize it. It is what it is. I hope you had fun or atleast slight amusement reading this, I sure as hell loved writing it. Until next time.
