Who The Hell Are You?
The search for one's identity is an exhausting journey. For a very long time, I was stupidly patriotic, thinking that "Indian" was my only true identity. But out on the streets, the story is a little different. When a group of frightening hooligans corner you on the street, catching you completely off guard and you find yourself unprotected, your principles evaporate faster than water on a hot frying pan. You're suddenly a Marathi man. You say you belong here. Your identity narrows down a bit. You escape public humiliation. When you go home and begin searching for a place to park your car, you feel it unimagineably irksome that some wise yuppie had the audacity to park his swanky Honda Civic exactly in front of your house. In the slot you always thought rightfully belonged to you. Your identity is now a narrow slit. Your house.
So, who the hell are you?
The answer is simple; disturbing, but simple. You are a pawn. You are a servant in the hands of a higher order of existence, a little screw or nut or gear in the giant political machinery, a subject of experiment, a resource in the collosal vote bank, meant to be exploited and utilized for sectarian, political and financial gains of a few. You are an instance of a category, one in a thousand, broadly identical with a million or more others of your type, selectively targetted and carefully, deliberately and almost completely brainwashed into believing he needs this and the other until he becomes so consumed with being a consumer that buying and owning is all he can do, think of and aim for.
You are not free. Your fundamental right to speak is bound by language otherwise you shall be singled out, isolated, treated like an outlaw, like a hoodlum immigrant, like weed that grows in a rose bed until you find yourself compelled to leave or fall silent. Your fundamental right of movement, your freedom to go anywhere, is bound by your domicile certificate. You must prove that you have been there for a minimum of five, ten or fifteen years, before you can say you belong there, even if it is a territory within the same country to which you pay your taxes. You have no absolute freedom in the real world. Nor do you have any intellectual freedom.
Your intellectual freedom is just an illusion, cunningly created so that you feel proud of yourself when you allow the cacophony of others to flood your mind, as you begin to copy and imitate without reason the thoughts and beliefs of others in the name of liberal thinking.
Your happiness is a false signal, a dummy impulse, because you measure your happiness against standards, which corporations set for you. Owning a car, a luxury apartment, a Rolex watch or the most advanced in entertainment technology doesn't really make you happy. You feel happy because, among the horde of men and women trapped in the corporate game of fooling and hoodwinking society into thinking owning what they make, completes you as individuals, you are the one that owns the most expensive of those little trinklets.
Everything that you have created for yourself in your life- your goals, your ambitions, your perceptions of happiness, of accomplishment and fulfillment- are all borrowed ideals, copied beliefs. Your definition of your own self is one that was assigned to you by society, by people who, in the hierarchy of power, were above you. You by yourself are nothing. You by yourself are vacant, empty, incapable and confused.
You are a pawn. You are a lab rat. You are a rack in this huge filing cabinet called society for corporations, governments and political goons to stow their garbage in. You are a nameless, shapeless mass of nothingness, completeley helpless in the tidal wave of social transformations, lost in translation of a language you cannot understand, searching for words in a dictionary that is not complete.
Hi, common man!
