All the Right Reasons

Oh my God! Look how they protest! Look how they come on the streets with their placards painted in middle-class anger to shout out the second-handed slogans against a ‘callow, careless’ State. How they stop trains, disrupt buses and show their impotent angst by howling at the ‘solitary soul’ doing an ounce of honest work on the day of National Bandh. At one level, I feel sad; almost sympathetic towards the stupid, stupid common man and his eternal conquests with the daily-dom of routine existence-struggling to pay the electricity bill in long lines bathed in sweat, struggling to get a gas connection, struggling to save and save and save for the next generation, struggling to hold on to their gloriously banal 9 to 5s, and struggling more so to have a decent orgasm at the end of tired, harrowing day! Sad…

But place this against his complacency at seeing 82 CRPF jawans man slaughtered, or the daily rape occurring in the capital, or the sloth of the modern day Judiciary pronouncing sentences for murderers and rapists after decades of debating; and you’d see the how pathetic, myopic and narrow the stupid, stupid common man and his sphere of concerns really are! That social, ethical or moral obligations do not even figure in the A-list of the collective’s concerns is not only noteworthy, but beckons a sarcastic sneer as well! But then Black Gold is a tricky bitch. Somewhat like the modern day incarnation of Cleopatra! If she could hypnotize Uncle Sam to kill a few million Iraqis in its megalomaniacal whim to conquer her, guess a hundred thousand Indians going berserk over her is understandable!





Maybe at the heyday of philosophizing, Marx would be the only one, whose ghost would be roaming about our protest-impregnated streets and laugh the mocking laughter of a true fortune teller at what is happening! The dynamics of economics, of demand and supply and resource and limitedness is what drives Man then…the tri-murti of roti, kapda, makan or jar, joru and jameen …no glory there!

But after all, Marx was whom the Existentialist Sartre had turned to when the meaninglessness of existence had given way to ‘finding meaning’ in the paying of electricity bills, taking the yearly vacation to Manali, Shimla or Goa, watching the evening news and probably breaking windows and burning BEST buses to register hollow protest too.

But maybe there is a catch to this situation: the same age old scenario wherein the faceless, direction-less collective and the power of its numbers has been tapped in by the purveyors of impious ideologies; the ones who realise the awesome strength of number and the flavour of their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ and use it to implicate their own private agendas, the background of which are very much banally political in nature. So when I realised that most of the states wherein a thorough breakdown of state machinery did take place, where there were bandhs and demonstrations and slogan shouting and tear gas and lathi charges and political shenanigans courting arrest and bus burning and train stopping it reminded me of the ‘Lotus-followers’; the saffron-clad youth belonging to a sect whose growling reminds us of the loud sound of a chocked lavatory just when it is in the process of being flushed! Awe-inspiring it is to realise of how much their growling can really absorb! Almost sixteen states lie marred in the predicament of inconvenience; probably this one single day of (supposed) protest (instigated by a saffron-clad, top-heavy organization constituting the drinkers of their own hypocrisy-flavoured urine,) is a good enough reason for another ten million ‘normal’ people to protest! To come out on the streets and protest against the inconvenience caused, buses burnt, trains halted, flights delayed, shops closed, businesses suffered, hospitals rendered dysfunctional etc etc etc.






But unfortunately they never learn! They are like cattle, like clouds, like hollow pebbles waiting for the tumult of saffron-coloured vomit to come and carry them away into the horizon of irrational protest! After all that has happened too many times to refer to it as a mistake.




True, there has been a price-hike; true the stupid common man’s struggles will only get steeper from here on, true! Inflation has sky rocketed to Andromeda! But to vindicate one’s own lack of direction by being allowed to be lead into a protest whose agendas from with out seem noble, but whose implications from with in stink of the age-old, Great Indian Political manoeuvrings practiced since the days of Nehru and Patel is a sorry, sorry picture!



Point here is not that the “masses” on the streets are protesting. That’s a good thing, right? Else the Government is likely to shit in our backyards, grow poppy out of it, and tax us for smoking weed! Point is, protest is a good thing. But the idea that it is not really protest but cheap political manoeuvrings; which is not only adding to the woes of the fabled and celebrated Common Man, but also exploiting him, in an age old way to score over the exiting set up, is what adds shades of ‘ugly’ to the picture of a burnt bus or an unattended patient!

Anyways, hope O! kind reader that you enjoyed your one extra holiday; and if you were on the streets pelting stones at policemen, you were doing it for all the right reasons…

Peace