A Tryst With Destiny

Recently, I have been laughing my head off listening to proverbs and quotes with a slight twist... to make some impression, I notice that people add a list of (for no better way to put it,) 'bad' words to their punchlines. I hate being judgmental while at the same time wonder why people call certain words as "bad" nevertheless get offended by them when most words actually are just another way of mentioning frivolous aspects of our lives. What makes us laugh, sure makes us think.

Of all the things happening around that one may laugh at, the chance to laugh at 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' or rather the idea that cleaning a country's filth left over by the dumping of wastes and irresponsible discharge of pollutants into land, water and air (like many of our politician's speeches that we accidentally listen to,) by giant, greedy corporat(e)s rests on the hands and head of the individuals, is hilarious as it makes no sense. Shouldn't the cola companies and mining companies be cleaning their own mess? Shouldn't they be held responsible for that? Or should the burden be passed on to the citizen's shoulder for the government's incompetency to stop the corporat(e)s from littering?! Anyways, why bother when a broom in the hand and dirt pan on the head can spin a political wheel or should I say, help a political flower bloom in India.

India's tax policy is another joke that drives me bonkers. Just take for example the case where a baker pays GST for the bread, another GST for the olive, yet another for the cheese and one more and another for the meat, pepper and anything else he throws into making a pizza and charges us for all the ingredients, why does he charge us yet another GST for the whole pizza one more time?! Isn't it multiple taxation yet again for a country that is already unbelievably in a double taxation system without going for war?
Concerning concepts for jokes, no one in India dare claim a shortage - the idea of imposing the aadhar down the throat and up the arse of every citizen, the dysmal disregard for privacy and total disregard for personal rights, the soaring prices, the plunging pay scales and when I start counting the jokes one has that can make use of proverbs and quotes with the added twist, the chances of finding concepts for a hilarious laugh are limitless as the issues knock down one domino after the other and one can have a knock-out night of stand-up comedy just by speaking the truth. 

70 years of independence and I am still waiting... like many in our villages and high ranges do as they wait for electricity to light a single bulb while our ministers howl over a digital India and e-payments that will surely brighten the lives of the entire nation, waiting like many who lack a toilet in their home or even the basic sanitation and like the many more who live on the pavements for the lack of a home to begin with - to be saved from our superstars and their kids who run on alcohol who in turn wait to run over them with their super-fast, imported sports car that run on liquid gold for remorseless fun and know how to get away with it too, I am waiting like the scores whose land has been grabbed, whose jobs have been looted and their livelihood pushed off their grounds to give way for some luxury hotel or a chain of resort to come in, like the many whose daughters have been raped, son's illegally detained, father's tortured and mother's abused as they are voicelessly forced to wait for justice as they hide from the stigma cast by their own shadow, I am waiting just like that 70 year old man named independence who has seen enough, with just as much strength, with just as much hope that the 70 years of life of watching the same ruthlessness over and over again can bear before singing the eulogy of an entire nation go down the pits of a pre-dug grave right in the front, left, right, state and center. 

Even death, as I see it in India, is merciless as the poor, innocent migrant worker from Tamil Nadu - Murugan, who met with an accident in Kerala would have experienced it last week as he was rushed from hospital to hospital, pleading with one doctor and another to treat him and finally after being refused treatment by several learned doctors in seven different hospitals, after almost seven hours died helplessly due to neglect of treatment. (These are times when I feel like screaming underwater.) At the end of the day, all that the government needed to do to get away with this inhumane murder was mention a 'sorry' - a 'sorry' that marks the state of our conscience 70 years post-independence for the world to see.  

Meanwhile, Indian politicians have resorted to the culture of silence by learning the art of evading questions in political platforms and have decided to grow fat in silence on their loot. India's freedom struggle kicked off with a debate over the dead fat of mute animals and today's reason to celebrate our freedom seems to be for no different reason. 70 years of independence and I am still waiting like many... for the freedom that was supposed to be.

Wake Up And Smell The Coffee

These days I hear some people say with a glee that they want to bring up their children the American way. When I ask them what this "American" way is?! it seems they feel that logical upbringing based on well founded, profound and established psychological theories and "expert" advice picked from parenting magazines is what they claim to be American. The great American dream I thought... perhaps to be honest, even I have had my share of pull towards this lure to attempt to try and control others by forcing them into the box in which I would like to see them contained so that everything becomes easier for me (unbothered about what harm I do to others)... the American way.

Then when you face reality and decide to brave it, the humble Indian ideology of giving up control and understanding the beauty of nothingness seems much more comforting, easier and worthy of pursuing.

Today, I see nations getting a taste of their own medicine otherwise prepared for others. Wars planned out to explode in other countries, break out within their own boundaries; nuclear war heads and power stations and armouries stored to the brim and even overflowing with weapons of mass destruction which were supposedly meant to protect a country and indicate development, has become the weakest spot which needs to be protected and has strained our concentration and has diverted our attention away from things more humanely worthy of pursuing like education, health, employment and sustainability so much so that we have hardly moved anywhere and in the charts of development, "stagnation" seems to be a pretty spot at which we sit. Countries have chosen to build industries on farm lands and raise their begging bowls for food to neighbouring states; States on the other hand, chose to build dams to keep water for themselves and end up flooding their land instead. Oh! what a community of idiots we live in, a community rich with idiot admirers and a community of idiots we have become... hahaha... 

We have chosen to exchange life for death and freedom for security. We have failed to understand the meaning of life in our attempts to conquer death. We have brilliantly mutilated genes, produced bio-engineered vegetables and have exemplified our scientific advancement in bio-medical, bio-tech and bio-xyz and have made our land worthless and as barren as a frigid woman and we dare to call her with shameless pride "our motherland" after abusing her with so much of experimenting right in her womb. If our people show any sign of dissent or grief or growth, we label them as "grave internal threats" without wasting time to look into what they are crying about and take them up into the stakes to be burnt; and the rest of us, with folded hands watch in silence fit for the dead; instead, we might as well stand and applaud-might be the same thing. We have shown the world, especially the white world, that the brown people are the next best replacement for rats, rabbits and monkeys which the whiteman and woman seem to really care about and feel are too delicate to experiment on; here, we, who pledge that "all Indians are our brothers and sisters" at every patriotic gathering and assembly, have gladly given up our men, women, children and aged-mostly ignorant, commonly innocent and always poor as testing grounds and as human samples for experimenting their new found drugs on as medical trials; and our coastal lines have become the dumping ground for nuclear waste, scrapped ships, outdated technologies and desolate garbage of other countries. 

Traitors and betrayers are never born outside the borders, they are always, as history shows us, within; thriving like maggots inside our borders, within our states, within our communities, within our families and within our homes-those that we seldom succeed to recognize even if exposed right in front of our very eyes. Its the so called "our people" who cut those traps for our miserable (down) fall all along the way. These days, I abhor this category of ridiculous, filthy species puddled in their filthy hypocrisy, prejudice and bigotry... Isn't it wonderful to watch-the complacency in which the children rest watching the filth that cover the "mother"land?!  

"So what?!" some of my friends have asked and still do. "Afterall, if it brings in the moolah (a.k.a money) why bother?!" Well, I think its time we begin to see the trade-off. We have started trading our brains, backs and body for this well chosen money as we claim. We are elsewhere and chose to work for someone else or we are here yet work for someone else; we have made ourselves a plastic world that thrives on plastic cash to acquire plastic things... remarkable. We have learnt to spend money that we don't own and slave to pay off the acquired debt with money that we haven't earned yet... all for what?! Material that we don't even need. We have exchanged sense for greed and we think accumulating enough to call it a day is somewhere right there round the corner; yet, no matter how many twists and turns, the unwinding road keeps on drifting. 

This world likes packages; gifts, commodities, machines, salaries, men, women, children, body parts, womb-name it and you have it sold in the nearest market...  packed, tagged and sealed ready for consumption-some sold local while some go global. In the 'global market'-(as we lovingly call it,)-everyone is up for sale-some to the highest bidder and some to the longest keeper; it is here that morale and values get traded for cash; it is in here that the shapeable-flexible-twistable mind and pre-shaped body conforming to social preconception of beauty, fit snugly into its prefixed contours-that the buyers seeks gladly to pick; the remaining leftovers-considered unfit-the free minds and the complacent bodies, are shelved till they begin to crawl to survive and their back is bent; its (only) then, that they get picked and sent to be indented, smashed, thrashed and polished till they shine like the keeper wants them to. Objects of desire we have become, as we deserve to be, for letting others decide who we ought to be. It is in this belly of the market that people sell themselves everyday, to survive, some sell their bodies, some their minds and everyone their soul. This market perhaps is synonymous to a place we find shameful to mention or find hard to be associated with... "So what's wrong afterall its for moolah?!" I ask them. 

To be rationale and not ridiculous, lets agree... this great force-fed "American dream" that we try to grab like arse-scratching apes, is not even worthy of pursuing to begin with. Well, how well have those American kids brought up the "American way" turned out to be at the end of the day?!... there are still more muggers, still more murderers, still more psychopathic children, sociopathic teenagers and almost every other adult is fear-ridden, fear-driven and fear-controlled, ever more need for old-age homes, orphanage, shelter-homes and jails, more and more desolate and broken families with run-away parents as well as run-away children-who don't want to take care of their own; there is still no dearth for rapists and racists, divorce and separations, teenage-pregnancies, homelessness, drug, alcohol and other substance abusers; social fragmentation, defabrication, stratification, pain, pathetic chaos and panic that is still nakedly visible and rampant in the great and mighty, almighty U.S of A that tries its best to hide behind the Emperor's new robe and waiting for that moment for a child to say, "But, he has nothing at all!" 

Chewing paan and spitting witnessed in other places is considered disgusting by them; yet, chewing someone's head walking into their own homes and spitting blood, is glorified in the name of war and security as the world watches on(?!)-How civilized is that?! 
Attempts to Americanize the whole world goes by not just seeding their products, genetic modifications, drugs, pesticides and people yet also by installing weapons, aid and military which goes to prove the terrible and horrible insecurity of a minority that is solely dependent on others for its survival and bothered about its survival alone; this is not just boring, it is unsustainable and simply not possible with a better world lying outside and often within our own territories that is seldom realized yet hard to let go.

Yet, muted, mutilated, humiliated and lost, we stand at crossroads; stuck, stranded and stagnant-this my friends, is the reality India wakes up to in the stroke of the midnight hour when the rest of the world sleeps, on our close-to-7-decades of unclaimed independence left to rot. It is in seeking goodness that I wish that as a nation what we require is perhaps a "Time-out" like American parents do, the glorified American way, sit and think in a corner and reflect on what we have done and what we can do to undo the damages done. Once undone and done with it, let us awake, arise and stop not till our goal is reached (as we can't reap harvest by ploughing and rolling the field in our thoughts alone) to bring forth a better India, a India that moves, a India that is sustainable, that is grounded and above all, a India that manages to find the courage to stand in its own feet. 
Till that day comes, sleep on India, sleep on... after all thy mother's lap treasures thee, as she sings a lullaby with tears swelling up her eyes as she waits for her children to wake up from their pretended slumber...  

p.c: National geographic