The Invisible

The people who sweep our streets before we wake up to the morning sun, the ones who clean our sewage, the vegetable vendor who sits at the same corner of the same street for years, the guard outside our homes who also doubles as the informant on maids and cooks, they exist everywhere. Yet in an ever-increasing world of personal glory, they are invisible- as individuals and as collective. They are embedded in a system that operates like a smooth machine, each of them easily replaceable by another. Economics, caste, class, gender and religion are the oil that grease this machine. The grease prevents the invisible from attempting to assert their visibility in the larger world, while the transformation of relationships under the neoliberal capitalism further deepens this invisibility through displacement, migration and increasing precarity of work. It erases any scope for assertion of rights, clouding the debate under the garb of duty and karma by means of religion and civics, while economic vulnerability and the instinct of survival eliminate any remnant motivations.

The beneficiaries of this massive invisible force, are themselves invisible in a different context, part of a different yet similar machinery. What is distinct then is not the invisibility per say, rather the degree of it. These hierarchies reproduced as a part of the global capitalist machinery benefit from invisibility, occasionally opening up windows of visibility through an appreciation of values and ideas it holds dear. Yet that glimpse of visibility eventually fades into the background having strengthened the machinery, by letting us believe there is a way out.

Nevertheless, there exists another form of invisibility that derives power by virtue of its invisibility. The sovereign farmer living off the land, the tribes of the world, who acknowledge their invisibility yet have no inclination to make the switch. By avoiding the battleground, they avoid the battle, not the one with the outside, but the one with self. The world, though, doesn’t allow them to avoid the battle with the external. It hunts for them from within their enclaves of invisibility and declares their lack of immunity from the battle of the material. While they triumph the battle with the self, they lose the one against the capital, with an iniquitous transformation of their invisibility from a source of power to a symbol of weakness.