Where to begin?

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Well, that's how I generally feel even before I begin to write. Where do i begin? How do I start? And many more open-ended questions. It’s like a process that has already started in my head, and which generally has no answer. This question was perhaps made to stop a person from writing, or rather doing anything. It’s the same thing even when it comes to clearing a room as well or starting a revolution for that matter. You look at the mess, and then the question comes? Where do I begin? And I guess that’s how it is with anything related to this as well. There is this constant rush of things and wanting to do things and to be somewhere else and wanting to be someone and so on. And then thoughts, so many thoughts, some of them intermingled with other thoughts about some other story or person or sometimes random thoughts that have just floated in your head from nowhere and possibly don’t even belong to you, but you just turned out to be the sorry ass that they could piggyback on until they find a release. And then what? You think, ah man, this is too much; who is gonna clean this up? And you don't even think it’s too much work; you just think it’s too much… The too much is so much that it burdens you to think anymore about it, so you try to escape with anything that could offer you a quick dopamine hit and blind you to the sight of the overwhelming weight of reality.

And That’s why it’s difficult to start a revolution as well. I mean, the enormity of the task is so big and the results invisible and sometimes even unimaginable, that it’s scary even to take the first step. So much so that people would rather become puppets of propaganda— POP. Ever heard the saying, don’t teach your pop how to f… well, it’s because they have chosen to be brainwashed into believing something that helps them avoid the painful truth. You can’t teach such a person; you can only learn to tolerate their stupidity (And, well, in all honesty, who are you anyway to teach someone else? You have your own cobwebs of ignorance to clean.). The truth must be so painful to them that they willingly choose blindness.
When and if you ever heard a holy man speak — all the world is a dream, (It was usually a man, because women weren’t allowed to speak much lest they become too difficult for men to control them, until the advent of social media, when they could speak although that victory got hijacked by onlyfans),
or maybe you saw the film The Matrix and now learnt to use this word Matrix as part of your everyday lingo, (allowing you to feel rather superior to others in a self-righteous sort of manner) you still are possibly escaping reality albeit in a more complex way, where your consciousness is only limited to speaking about a revolution and not indulging in one. POP.

And then what? Nothing. So this way too, revolution doesn’t take place because the repercussions of ‘living in blindness forever’ haven’t created the urgency it must to escape the escape. So the lesser few who have the righteous anger vent it out on social media, or the ones with more courage and more time at hand, come out on the streets and demonstrate it emphatically until they are dealt with strongly by force of authority. Because I don’t know whether Might is right, but it surely becomes the only one who can exercise a right. POP.

This force of authority, indulging in sadomasochist fantasies of lathi charges and tear gases, is no different from the authority of culture or traditions or your own inner conditioning that you live with day in and day out, with such strong attachment to convictions of limiting beliefs that you fail to question them. But the authority of the outside seems painful and unjust, and only when it deals a painful blow to you or your sense of self. Before that, you prefer to be unbothered by the popping sounds of news culture. I was observing that the younger generation was living with in a bubble of safety created by numbness of social media and a sense of entitlement that grows only in the stagnant waters of comfort, that they were oblivious to the ugly side of life, and it has dealt a heavy blow to them in the form of the collapse of the education system and the petty manner in which the authority has dealt with them in what can only be called cold heartless manner. Could this pain give a jolt to them and wake them up from the degradation and the clumsiness with which they were forging their identity with an utter lack of seriousness towards life? Maybe some of them did wake up; others may require personal injury to wake them from the slumber of a false sense of belonging created by an overzealous propaganda fueled by a state of hate. But the question that begs attention: could it give rise to a real revolution and self-actualisation? Before those questions can be answered, can there be a revolution without self-accountability?

Buddha once remarked that the house is burning and the children he wants to save are busy with their toys. Here’s another sound that people are familiar with but haven’t heard: TOYING with life. But have you ever heard  “POP goes the weasel…”? Every bubble comes up to the surface and then bursts at some point. Unfortunately for some, it takes lifetimes because the price they need to pay is personal loss and misery of an extreme nature for the dawn of reality.  Even then, for some, the light is too painful, so they continue to shut their eyes out. And many chose that path in the past, running away and leaving their countries, yet inside they continue to find ways to keep attached to the ghosts of the past. They make everyone around them attach to their ghosts of the past until they become sad, lonely ghosts with nobody to haunt.

Then what is the responsibility of the individual? Where does one begin? One may begin by tidying their bed, and then their room and then the road they feel attached to that is the passage to the place they call home. Perhaps it might extend to a nation and to the whole planet.

When the revolution is silent, people don’t think of it as a revolution. Funnily enough, when People don’t think is then that they truly take action. An action borne out of the need of the hour.

No more POPS to give after that. No more toying with life.

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I wanna leave you be with a poem by RabindraNath Tagore that makes you imagine a unique possibility.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

  Where knowledge is free;

  Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

  Where words come out from the depth of truth;

  Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

  Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

  Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

  Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

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