A Rant

Featured image: Vincent van Gogh, The Dance Hall in Arles

[I am, dear reader, prone to the same failings as you are, and so am not immune to resorting to mindless conformity at times. I request you, therefore, to take this post, not as a conceited, entitled little dweeb’s critique on society, but an imperfect human being’s rant. It may well seem to be the former, but I assure you that it is in fact, the latter.]

“Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

As I type, I hear the characters of some sorry Marathi television soap conversing in the background. My mum’s watching that stuff. Can’t blame her; The entertainment industry has systematically numbed our brains to a point where we will like any film / TV show / song as long as it is sufficiently garish (the gaudier the better).

The TV is silenced temporarily (mum just received a call) and I realize that the voices (noises) emanating from its surround sound system were apparently masking the song Ghagra from Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani that’s playing downstairs. It’s part of a dance performance a group from my housing society is putting up for this year’s Ganeshotsav. I’m an atheist, so I don’t give two shits about what song they choose, but I can’t wrap my head around how the religious folk here are okay with a song which has lyrics such as “Udti firti afwaah tera ghagra // Baghdad ho ya ho Delhi via Agra.” Well, if god and his judgment are real, and they work the way popular notion says they do, these people are going to be condemned to hell for allowing this blasphemy. [Side note: If hell’s real, I’m sure I’ve reserved myself a spot there by now. Sixth circle, if I were to put it in terms of Dante’s vivid re-imagining.]

I digress… The purpose of this post is not to criticise the entertainment business and its recipients [of whom I, albeit not avid, am one]; It is merely to point out what a sorry excuse for a life we all live.

This purpose explains why I chose to start my tirade with a quote about phonies from The Catcher in the Rye. You see, we are all phonies. We all live with masks on because society asks it of us. Oh, but we are society, so by transitivity, we ask this pretense of ourselves. We willfully subject our thoughts and actions to incarceration so that they fit into the confines of social acceptability. Worse still, we take pride in it. We enjoy it. This won’t be considered as masochism, more’s the pity.

I do not like the way we’re living right now. Not one bit. Just look around yourself, and you’ll see what I mean:

1. I see my peers trying to scream out at the world, “I exist! I exist! Look at me! I. Exist.” They don’t literally scream, of course, but they might as well have, instead of doing it figuratively with their half a dozen social networks (I would argue that literal yelling would be better – at least it wouldn’t leave a practically indestructible digital trail).
2. Do I even need to mention the pitiful state of the entertainment industry after the first two paragraphs of this post?
3. Last week hundreds of people protested after a major religious leader from my country was found guilty of raping two women. You’d think that the reason behind these protests was to ensure swift justice and a strict sentence. You’d be wrong. The reason, instead was that the protesters wanted him to be released without punishment. He was deemed as a saint by these folks. Somewhere north of thirty people died in the skirmishes that ensued after the verdict, but he remains to be considered a saint by his followers.
4. We discriminate based on everything right from gender to race to social status, and then pretend to be oblivious to the rift that we helped widen in the first place.
5. We think about “Log kya kahenge” for practically every thing we do, say or write. We dress the way log want us to dress, read the books log want us to read, watch the films they want us to watch, chant the prayers they want us to chant… we choose the careers they want us to choose for chrissake!
6. We get – or pretend to get – offended over matters that don’t even begin to justify that sort of reaction. “Be politically correct all the time. You can never be too careful. God forbid someone gets butt-hurt!” My, oh my.
7. People get into accidents, and at times, die while taking selfies and catching Pokémon. Yeah, that’s right, catching bloody pieces of code disguised as cartoons we all used to watch as kids. And I thought the way Pierre Curie died was ironic.

This is just a small part of the shitstorm we call human life. And all of this for what? Why download Pokémon Go, take selfies, follow a sect, post Snaps, pray to god, and engage in the rest of the jazz you do so completely and utterly mindlessly? Because everyone else does it? Because that’s what the norm is? That’s not a valid reason so much as a weak excuse to not venture out of your comfort zone, don’t you agree?

Try an experiment: Question everything you’ve been doing without thinking about it till now.
Here’s an example: Say you send Snaps or stories or whadjyacallits to your network every day. Think: Do the people you’re spending all those megabytes on really give a rat’s ass about your puppy filters or your Oreo Shake updates? They are only going to use your social media accounts to judge and/or stalk you (you use their accounts for the same purpose, after all). Be fully aware of that. Know that nobody cares how many followers on Instagram or streaks on Snapchat you have.

Start small, take baby steps, but do go through your beliefs one by one and see which of them are really worth retaining that title. May turn out that you don’t leave a single stone unturned, but are still left with the exact same ideas you started out with – doesn’t matter. Changing your morals as radically as possible is not the point here; examining them – examining them independently of what is and isn’t socially acceptable – that is the key. Have your own opinions, establish your individuality and sport it the way a peacock sports its plume. In not doing so, you’d only be cowering from who you are.

You are astonishingly more free than you allow yourself to believe. We are free. Our life, consciousness and intelligence are a complete mystery to us. Sorcery. We like to think that we have it all figured out, but we’re just fooling ourselves when we do that. No honest scientist will tell you otherwise.

Everything is far beyond our comprehension. It’s absurd. Nothing matters, and there are no rules whatsoever. That means you can literally do whatever the hell you want to do.

“You are the highest law, the moral law you follow must be the first and foremost while you’re at a crossroads.”

skepticalcynik

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

I will not bow down to social norms for the sheer sake of blending in. I. Am. Free.
And so are you. You need only to acknowledge and accept your freedom.

I’ll end with a text I sent a friend a few weeks ago, when I decided to go through with abandoning the socially acceptable facade I had studiously been maintaining till then:

I’ve had it with this monotonous and predictable life I’m leading.
I’ve got a restless beast within me that is never going to die (besides, I don’t want it to die, now that I’m aware of its existence) and it’s becoming harder and harder to rein in with every passing day.
This pathetic rut that we all so lovingly call ‘a nice, stable, conventional lifestyle’ is stifling the beast.
It wants to be free now, it wants to dare mighty things. To hell with convention and social acceptance.
Society tells us to aim for following the well-trodden path, to aim for a stable life, to get settled. Who are we even kidding, though? “Get settled”? “A stable life”? That’s bullshit! We get just one lifetime to do anything and everything we ever will. Then why strive to draw inside the lines throughout that lifetime? What a waste.
The folks labeled as renegades, heathens (pariahs, even!) are the ones who actually achieve something worthwhile in their life. They ukhaad something mighty, know what I mean?
And I know I have the potential to do just that. I think you do, too.