Unchanged present, changed methods
Absurdity is in the air. Whichever direction you look, particularly if you are strolling the hallowed grounds of social media, it’s everywhere. Overreach of power, abuse of authority, extreme stretch of theories, lack of accountability, senseless policies… adding to the cauldron of the absurd. In a democracy, each one of us must be able to speak up for what they feel is correct. Here, again, as is the norm with our species, feelings matter. You can’t always have the means to scrutinize facts but your gut feeling can be your best friend. Against this dicey backdrop, it’s important to uphold our freedom of expression. Whether a person is making sense or not is secondary. What’s essential is we are safe enough to verbalize what we feel. Which, no doubt, in most incendiary cases — what isn’t incendiary in today’s knee-jerk environment where reaction is more important than the action itself ?— becomes a problem. When we aren’t seeing clearly, we don’t think clearly and when we don’t think clearly, we don’t speak clearly and when we don’t speak clearly, we create chaos. In the end, you as an individual aren’t very different from the words you use. What you’re saying can’t be absurd on its own: it brings you down too. Absurdity has to be a symbiotic disease.
Whenever anybody asks me about my favourite colour, I always say blue. Not because it’s my favourite colour but because I want it to be my favourite colour. It soothes me but not always. I enjoy the bluishness of a clear sky as much as I admire the deep ink of the sea during sunset. When I am not feeling well, it unsettles. Yet, calling blue my favourite colour is more of an arbitrary drill and less of an intellectual inquest. After you dig deeper, you must accept that your favourite colour is merely a matter of instance. You might love the colour green but you can’t bear to see it in your towels. Maybe you prefer your towels to be white no matter what. Similarly, your wall can be painted mauve as it pleases your eyes but you don’t want that hipster shade to do anything with any of your worldly possessions. Mauve laptop cover? No, thanks. So, in all fairness, our “favourite colour” is a matter of where and when and who we are talking about. In simpler words, your favourite colour becomes your present mood.
One of my closest people recently got married and it was joyous to see him go through the motions of cultural parade. He knows as much as I do: wedding is conducted for parents’ sake; modern couples don’t care. Fortunately, we grow up too fast for our elders’ comfort but understand some undeniable facts of life: respect, love and trust go a longer way than any of the rituals can take you. Yet, in spite of these traditional hiccups, marriage is a sound institution in a country like ours. It keeps us grounded, if nothing else. Until the summer of 2013, I was under the spell of eternal bachelorhood. I enjoyed my singledom, weaning on the possibility of traveling the world someday. But then, I got lucky with a wonderful person. As we near the end of 2019, it’s worth looking back to see how time passed by so quickly. What matters, for a couple, is the stories they create. At the risk of candidness, being married to me is like being married to a child who doesn’t know what he wants. One day, I want to quit everything and move to the outskirts of Mangalore and write something worthwhile. Another day, I want to just try my luck with farming in Chikmagalur. And then, there would be hopes of moving north to Ladakh even though I can’t bear the cold in 15°C, let alone enjoy the snowfall. So on and so forth. However, the stories are still piling on.
Indians are one of the few breeds in the human circle who take an insult and turn it into a compliment. Centuries and centuries of colonialism has done this to us. It explains a rather ironic twist of demeaning our achievements to feel better about ourselves. If something is too good in our country, we praise it by asserting that it “doesn’t feel like India at all” — never specifying the geography it feels like. On one hand, we love saying that nothing will change while on the other, we can’t wait for things to change. The missing piece is our participation required to bring about the change. To understand this inertia, one must look at the tourists who hail from India. They behave like they are doing the country a favour by leaving it temporarily: their attitude changes and so do their behaviour. They are polite and don’t litter as they try their best to fit in with the foreigners. So much so they go out of our comfort zones to appreciate a foreign locale. Best behaviour indeed. My personal favourite is when desis visit European cities and write 250-word essays on Instagram glorifying them, conveniently forgetting the role imperialism played in their respective glories. It’s very akin to visiting somebody’s house and being impressed by the loot their forefathers carried away from your forefathers’ house.
It’s the season of outrage. Everybody is angry. Justifiably so. For different reasons, apparently. A lot are angry at the government’s excesses. Others are angry about the communal tension. Many are angry about the lack of perspective. Some are angry that others aren’t angry enough. In my book, those belonging to the last category are extremely amusing. They are constantly screaming but amid the noise, they can hear the silence of those who aren’t interested in their outrage. Hence, the silent fencers are being shamed for their cowardice (whatever that means in today’s lexicon). To be fair, our country is going through historic events, the kind of stuff we’d be telling our adopted grandkids someday. However, it’s unfair to expect everyone to be equally riled about something that I feel strongly about. Let them take their time to read, understand and then stand up. We aren’t on a Tatkal Revolution Express here.
Speaking of outrage, turns out the origin of the word outrage has nothing to do with the words ‘out’ or ‘rage’. It derives from the Old French ‘oultrage’ which means beyond or excessive. A humble learning for our generation that depends heavily on memes to understand what’s going on in the world because reading (codename: TLDR) is out of fashion nowadays. The only problem with this lazy approach is we miss out on nuances, the very nuances that make us humans. There are all sides to a tale — yours, mine, theirs and everybody else’s.
Youth brings with it so many hopeful vanities. One of them is the desire to change the system. A noble thought, to begin with. Each one of us should subscribe to the idea of destroying old ideas and replacing them with newer ones. That’s template 101 of progress. Yet, it’d be foolish to dismantle a system without fully getting the system. There is a reason why systems last longer than we do. They start as a thought before transforming into an independent organism. If we think we understand the current system, the system is already winning. To give you a political analogy, you don’t know what you are going to do in the second week of 2020. The powers-to-be already have their eyes set on 2024 and beyond.
Being a nano-influencer, especially on Instagram, I am constantly bombarded by messages from young folks asking me to advise them on how to improve their content. My answer is unabashedly simple: create your own content. Inspiration is alright but if you aren’t adding your personal touch to your content, then you are barely a priest of a temple that you don’t belong to. Let your content speak for you, not the other way around. Your aim should be to reach a stage where people consume something, recognizing the taste of your flavour. And that is possible only when you destroy the religion of iteration and let content be your god.
Last night, I saw this dream where somebody asked me, “What are you looking for?” Being somebody who keeps thinking of wordplay and pun, I responded, “I am looking for your truth.” The adorable person, a bit confused, even by the standards of my crazy dreams, asked why am I looking for her truth. I said, “If we keep looking each other’s truths, maybe we will end up with peace.” So, she added another question, “So, you think this method will work?” I woke up before screaming the sentence, “Of course! Whatever we are doing presently clearly isn’t working!”
