Where’s your glitch in matrix?
While reading Babasaheb Ambedkar’s books, you are bound to experience several eye-opening moments. His literary body of work is like a huge window into the lives and times that surrounded him. Armed with precise words and an unknown fearlessness, he walks you through subjects he has poured his attention into. An avid reader — we had a Marathi chapter in 9th class about his love for books; others got souvenirs from the West whereas he shipped trunks full of books — he turned out to be a prolific writer too. Although I’ve been reading about him since childhood days, it was much, much later that I read Annihilation of Caste. This book shocks you, even if you are aware of the nexus caste system enjoys in the Indian subcontinent — no, not just India — but I believe his original intention was to tell things the way they were. That’s Ambedkar’s trademark approach to literature. No beating around the bushes. He wrote over 20 books, with some incomplete, and others research papers. And on the internet, you can find hundreds of his insightful articles on contemporary subjects. It’s amazing how we tend to reduce historic figures to few lines or paragraphs when they actually require books. Lots and lots of pages to be figured out completely.
There are many nadirs of humanity but the practice of employing lower caste folks — mahadalits, to be precise — to clean sewage with their bare hands is not only sickening but also prevalent. Not to mention the sheer indignity associated with it, the fact remains that manual scavenging is a deadly job even in Indian cities. No prizes for guessing which caste is predominantly engaged in this profession. For centuries, a particular section of the society has been cleaning shit for the privileged lot. It’s 2020 and the tradition continues. This is why I feel pet dogs are trying to create a dent here. Imagine an upper caste fellow taking his dog for a walk and bending down to clean his furry friend’s poop in public. A little spit of justice, there.
The ongoing lockdown has made us realize that we do miss each other a lot. Earlier, we took people in our ambit for granted because they were readily available. Now that there are some restrictions (and apprehensions) on meeting our beloved, we are understanding the gravity of our loneliness. For a change, I’ve come to accept that I am not a recluse that I thought I was. Earlier, I avoided humans as much as possible. As of now, I am always looking forward to hosting a zoom quiz because that could be an hour of interacting with people I’ll never meet anyway. Wonder how we’ll ever recover from this atrophy of relationships. For instance, there are people out there whom you have been avoiding for ages and then there are people out there whom you want to reach out to but can only do via messages and video calls. Between these two extremes, how are you to know what sort of a person you’ve become anymore?
During my childhood, a Hindi phrase “dil jeet le” was commonly heard. To win someone’s heart could be the prime of your existence. When you do something that makes others drop their armour and embrace you, you prove your victory over them. We can fight and win land, coast and ores but heart remains the most coveted of properties. It’s quite a difficult task, isn’t it? With his toothy smile, Ronaldinho might have won hearts of millions across the globe but what about those who don’t care about football? For them, his carefree nature and exceptional skills amount to zilch. Similarly, you might be a fabulous singer but if you aren’t singing a song in the language I understand, how will you truly win me over? John Nash might have been a genius but you don’t understand economics. The only way you could connect with him is because they bothered to make a heartwarming movie in 2001. Given the amount of obstacles we have here, it’s only natural that the battle of affection will continue — irrespective of the dream and distance in between — as long as we use our brains. After all, other’s hearts may not come under your jurisdiction but their minds do.
Remember when you were in school and used to take delight in the pencil-shaadi-cancil joke? Back then, you had no idea that 20 years later, we’d be living in the Cancel Era. Nowadays, things are so sensitive that everybody stands the chance of getting canceled sooner or later. Turns out the dirt in the closet of the dead still matters. Alternately, what you tweeted 10 years ago still matters. What this so-called cancel culture is alluding to is a fictional fantasy of a world where the moral high grounders are going to push others down the stairs until the point they get cancelled by woker standards. There is no way this is a sustainable model because humans by nature fuck up or have already fucked up. In the same spirit, humans grow from their mistakes. To brand a person XYZ is nothing short of a modern version of witch-hunting, and will lead us to nowhere in particular. I like to think of myself as woke at times but not of the extreme kind. I won’t call you a racist just because you cracked a racist joke that you didn’t even come up with. You’ve got to earn the right to be canceled. Unless we are talking about cheques here.
When Matrix (2001) released, I remember being spellbound by the CGI in it. I didn’t really care about the time-space theory, mainly thanks to my lack of knowledge. Years passed by and I learned a thing or two about Vedic philosophy and its emphasis on time as a cyclical (non-linear) feature. That’s how I came to terms with the whole glitch-in-the-matrix concept. However, if you ask people around, almost everyone will be able to share at least one unexplained event from their lives. Something that simply didn’t make sense when it unfolded and doesn’t make sense even after several years. In my case, it happened at my tutor’s place in 8th grade. I had a blue transparent plastic pen — it was a fad back then to have a pen with two refills inside — and I dropped it by accident. I remember clearly not hearing the sound of it hitting the floor but at that very instance, the power went off. A few minutes later, when the power came back, there was no trace of that pen. There were only two (my friend and I) of us in the room. Wonder whether that was a glitch in the matrix.
Jane Goodall is 86 years old and quite active. It won’t be an overstatement to suggest that she is the most respected voice on chimpanzees. If you go to YouTube, you’ll be impressed by her work as well as her words. Very eloquent and affable, she puts across her observations with so much clarity that there are no questions left in you. When you read about her work, you’d be inspired to find a purpose for yourself the way she did. Her spending so much time with our hairy cousins in the wild not only made her an authority on the subject but also shows us what dedication to a goal and attention to details can do to a person. For instance, I recently read that she conducted a series of experiments to gain acceptance amongst the chimps. They didn’t instantly grow fond of her. In fact, when she reached Tanzania in 1960, she didn’t have the familiarity factor at all. She had read about them but haven’t worked with them. So she had to go through a lot of trials and errors before setting common base with the larger family of suspecting primates. One of the practices she embraced, to gain their trust, was mimicking their behaviour. And most importantly, she pretended to eat their food, be it bananas or other fruits, with the same level of relish that they showed. When you eat together, you become one. Isn’t that the case with human society as well?
If your body is an embarrassment for you, do one thing: stop thinking too much and start doing a little. I am saying this from a place of collective failure. Being in the mid-30s range with one leg constantly stuck in the quagmire of nostalgia, I don’t do much. I am as lazy as they come. No sex pun intended. Memories soothe me and the present scares me. While my missus embarked on a fitness mission and lost 13+ kg during lockdown, I remained where I was. The secret goal was to Make Abs Great Again but that didn’t happen due to a series of health issues and blind luck and lame excuses. Fortunately, I’ve always had a lean body: my face gains weight because of the beard. Unfortunately, I never geared it to my advantage. Being in your 30s means your days of physical agility and mental resilience are past you. You’ll have to focus and work harder on yourself. Failing which, you’ll continue to post embarrassing paragraphs like these.
Gandhiji left India at the age of 19 and returned home at the age of 45. He was a different man altogether. When he visited Bombay in 1915, he wrote, “I don’t like Bombay,” before adding, “…it looks as if it were the scum of London.” The second sentence here is interesting given how scummy London used to be merely a century or two earlier. Dickens’ novels take us on a tour of the dinghy streets with little to no respect for gutter — not very different from where Gurgaon is today — and people wearing high shoes to keep the muck from touching their britches. Of course, with the passage of time, things often improve at civic level. Roads get cleaner, if not wider, and citizens adopt lawful behaviour. Going back to Gandhiji, he vociferously wrote that India can only grow when her villages grow. Over 70 years have passed and we are still trying to figure out where exactly does the border between villages and cities lie, especially when people from either sides can’t wait to move to the other side for different reasons.
