Against the system
Love, be it conditional or unconditional, should be built on silence. Failing which, it won’t last long enough. One of the most recurring themes in a human’s life is the desire to be wanted (not by the law enforcement authorities, of course). We may take solace in the fact that we aren’t vocal in expressing our need to be loved but it’s evident in almost everything we do. Being social creatures, we seek silent approvals all the time from our parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, strangers on the internet, etc. The L-word is very strong here. As well as the S-word.
In India, barbers have the power to make your day or to destroy your week. They might rank lower than doctors on the pay scale but both are similar when it comes to NOT listening to you. For courtesy’s sake, he will ask you how you want hair to be like, before delivering you how he wants it to be like.
Based on such experiences, I randomly scribbled a haiku:
The hair is going to grow back
The moustache is going to grow back
The beard is going to grow back
The ugliness is going to grow back.
Why should I go back?
We are blessed with only five senses and yet we managed to do a bloody brilliant job of ruining this planet. Imagine where we would have been if we had 2 or 3 senses only. Strange, no? Being used to the awesomeness of having Pandavas of perceptibility, we underestimate our body. Also, we tend to believe that our nose is pretty useless, when compared to what a dog can do with its snoopy snout. But comparison is unwarranted in this particular case. I recently learnt that Bill Pullman can’t smell. Shocking, isn’t it? Despite being an elegant actor, he doesn’t know the difference between a rose and a fart. If there is a cooking gas leak in his house, he won’t know. That helpless (or blissful) feeling of ignorance is what it must be like for those who deny that our planet is on fire.
English is a wonderful, wonderful — I repeated the adjective to make a point; try using an adjective repeatedly in any other tongue and you’ll realize how lame you sound — language. Yet, it has its shortcomings too. According to John Humphrys, the decline of the most popular language in the world is already in motion. Apparently, words safe haven (all havens are safe), future plans (plans are meant to be in the future, not the past), past history (history can’t be in the future), new initiative (initiatives can’t be old), live survivors (you expected survivors to be dead?) are not only examples of lousy tautologies but also symbolic of an inherent lingual decay. In my opinion, he is overreacting. Why? Because when we have words like chai tea (tea repeated twice), naan bread (bread repeated twice), Illiad (Troy story, it can’t be Iliad story), Sahara desert (desert repeated twice), Pangong Tso lake (tso is lake in Tibetan/Ladakhi), Nathu La pass (la is pass in Tibetan/Ladakhi) and so on, there is a bigger fish to fry. And this hook should be stuck on external misunderstandings, not internal baloney. By all measures, it’s blatant ignorance of language playing into the hands of those arrogant enough to believe English is perfect.
Things I feel strongly about:
·Cinema
·Music
·Chess
·Literature
·Football (not just Liverpool)
·Tennis (not just Federer)
·Knowledge/Pedagogy
·Food/Resource wastage
·Farming
·Nature
·Public cleanliness/Littering
This list must either grow with time or I must stop growing as a person.
When I ask people around me what they will make them happy, they have good answers to spare. But as far as sadness is concerned, people tend to retreat into their warm cocoons. They become defensive all of a sudden because it exposes them a bit more than they agreed to. Their subsequent reaction is to ponder and then say something which is more generic. For instance, global warming. No, Rita, climate change doesn’t make you sad. It makes you hopeless. Sadness can be fleeting. Despair can turn eternal.
She: “How is your life going?”
He: “It’s not going anywhere. My life is like a lake where people visit only to dump bodies in.”
She: “What do you mean?”
He: “I absorb too much from my surrounding but I don’t effect a change in my surrounding.”
After watching Article 15 (2019), one can fathom how little we know our country. To fight a system, we need to study it. To stay a system, we need to unlearn. There are moments in this movie where you don’t know whether to cringe or feel empathetic. So many tragedies have unfolded on the so-called majority that you’re forced to recalibrate the essence of majoritarianism. Caste system is one of the oldest running — if not the oldest — systems in the world and it will take individual efforts to overcome its ills. Especially for the urban-dwellers who don’t see how entrenched the system is.
Speaking of the varna system, what do you think is the role played by space in this equation? Time is obvious on the X-axis. What about Y-axis? I was thinking about it and it struck me how much Mumbai’s local trains have helped in our fight against casteism. It’s the most overcrowded moving entity in the world: about 15 standing passengers per square metre of floor space. But what it also means is that you don’t care what caste the person standing next to or in front of you, directly or indirectly breathing into your lungs, belongs to. There is no space whatsoever left for hatred, bias or prejudice.
On a more serious note, casteism can be systematically broken down by economics. Money speaks the loudest in almost every single room. We, the desi morons, assume that there could be bonds stronger than avarice. No, not really. With the world fast turning into a global village, we are bound to witness the sheer influence of ‘respectable’ job. The caste system of the past doesn’t have a place in the caste system of the present. So, in effect, the system has evolved while those fighting the system haven’t. Not only has the caste system become more intricate in smaller towns (which can’t wait to become cities) but it has also turned more survivalist in villages (which can’t wait to become smaller towns). Which explains why a lower caste dhobi (washerman) doesn’t see a problem with the upper caste folks. He is fine working for the masters because his house has to run. His immediate enemy is the washing machine.
