Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me
Political ideology is something I can identify with a little more than I did before. That does not mean that I have been adopted by some former Education Minister, but just that I can see things a little clearer. What remained a far-off phenomenon for me brushed past me and pulled me in without a warning. Going by an ideology or an idea of a polity is one thing and taking a stance that is chiseled by strange occurrences, more like a cosmic phenomena, is another.
Few things that brought about this change of sorts could be my recent episodes of public embarrassment. I was stopped one night on the way home, and forced to testify being a drunkard amidst a bevy of cops who looked more like alien to me. They could have said the same about me. It looked like a scene straight out of Crash. And I, for some unimaginable reasons, was haggling with the merciless bearers of the law and legal code of conduct in an offensively aggressive tone. I had no fear, which reaffirmed their once scrawny suspicion of me being drunk to my wits. It went on, and I started enjoying the whole chemistry between me, the hauntingly empty city street, the men in khaki and the commoners in red, blues and yellows, looking paler in comparison to the bitingly gaudy color of authority. As the night went on, it brought along few more surprises in terms of my brushes with disrespect, disgust and embarrassment.
As I would have liked to believe, it should have been over with the night. But my misfortune continued the following week. And as if it was a cosmic plan to inspire me to write or do something revolutionary, event after event kept happening-people showing me the middle finger in the middle of the street for no apparent reason whatsoever, guards of my own building taking me on and asking me my whereabouts, parking guys threatening to assault me, auto wallahs showing their machismo to scare the hell out of me, and some weird French guy driving us out of our regular freak-out-hang-out-smoke-out-make-out-break-out-fake-out spot in the most possibly condescending way. Especially in the last episode, it looked like we are visiting the land of Chocolat and Champagne and had committed some ghastly crime instead of it being the other way round; excuse the ‘crime’ bit.
I had enough of all this, so came home and did my much practiced and revered intellectualization about the whole ‘big deal’ about getting raped everyday, every hour by someone or the other at the cost of your survival and apparent dignity.
Suddenly, all the exploited people in the world appeared brothers and sisters to me! Racism in the west, human trade in Africa, exploitative governments, labor laws, intellectual property, infringement of copyright, omnipresent plagiarism….like Celine Dion would have said, “it’s all coming back to me now”, or some shit like that….
Suddenly, Rang De Basanti has metamorphosed from being that cult-hit movie to an adaptation of my own life. I have become a topic of research, my angst a cultural treasure.
Frankly speaking, I do not really know if we need a revolution. I, for one, might do with one but the entire system? Probably not. And what would they do with it anyways? Tell their children they were revolutionaries? No way. It might be a personally rewarding experience to make people or authorities that stripped me apart of my self-respect, but would someone swooning over a girl in a café give a shit if I ask for a gram of sympathy? Yes. No. may be.
Few things that brought about this change of sorts could be my recent episodes of public embarrassment. I was stopped one night on the way home, and forced to testify being a drunkard amidst a bevy of cops who looked more like alien to me. They could have said the same about me. It looked like a scene straight out of Crash. And I, for some unimaginable reasons, was haggling with the merciless bearers of the law and legal code of conduct in an offensively aggressive tone. I had no fear, which reaffirmed their once scrawny suspicion of me being drunk to my wits. It went on, and I started enjoying the whole chemistry between me, the hauntingly empty city street, the men in khaki and the commoners in red, blues and yellows, looking paler in comparison to the bitingly gaudy color of authority. As the night went on, it brought along few more surprises in terms of my brushes with disrespect, disgust and embarrassment.
As I would have liked to believe, it should have been over with the night. But my misfortune continued the following week. And as if it was a cosmic plan to inspire me to write or do something revolutionary, event after event kept happening-people showing me the middle finger in the middle of the street for no apparent reason whatsoever, guards of my own building taking me on and asking me my whereabouts, parking guys threatening to assault me, auto wallahs showing their machismo to scare the hell out of me, and some weird French guy driving us out of our regular freak-out-hang-out-smoke-out-make-out-break-out-fake-out spot in the most possibly condescending way. Especially in the last episode, it looked like we are visiting the land of Chocolat and Champagne and had committed some ghastly crime instead of it being the other way round; excuse the ‘crime’ bit.
I had enough of all this, so came home and did my much practiced and revered intellectualization about the whole ‘big deal’ about getting raped everyday, every hour by someone or the other at the cost of your survival and apparent dignity.
Suddenly, all the exploited people in the world appeared brothers and sisters to me! Racism in the west, human trade in Africa, exploitative governments, labor laws, intellectual property, infringement of copyright, omnipresent plagiarism….like Celine Dion would have said, “it’s all coming back to me now”, or some shit like that….
Suddenly, Rang De Basanti has metamorphosed from being that cult-hit movie to an adaptation of my own life. I have become a topic of research, my angst a cultural treasure.
Frankly speaking, I do not really know if we need a revolution. I, for one, might do with one but the entire system? Probably not. And what would they do with it anyways? Tell their children they were revolutionaries? No way. It might be a personally rewarding experience to make people or authorities that stripped me apart of my self-respect, but would someone swooning over a girl in a café give a shit if I ask for a gram of sympathy? Yes. No. may be.
posted by humanprojector at 8:26 PM
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