Thievery Returns

Dec 2, 2021

It’s all about stories for me. Stories are my first love and that I realised very late in life. How cool it would have been if I had actually not tried to adapt myself to the world but my dad had a role to play in that because all that mattered to him was academics. At this state I realise that academics matter shit in a country where people mental faculties can be limited artificially and by social sabotage. Follow your heart, follow what gives you pleasure and follow what makes you happy, that’s what the bottomline is. My medical studies did not harm me, they made me better, they helped me to take care of myself but what really gives me pleasure are stories. I grew up and I had conflict, between the reality, which is invariably shitty, of this country and my world of stories. The higher class of India lacks indigenous realms when it comes to stories. We have a lot of stories in middle and lower classes, our mythology is rich, but in higher classes it all becomes western. They live western, they copy western, they lift western stories and when they can’t lift, they “remake”. You can get inspired from good art but here in India, the storytellers get more than inspired.

I was in Bombay and the teacher I was training under at that time was “told” that I was similar to “Laden”. Many other people were “told” many things about me, and it is when I did not offend anyone intentionally. The people fucking up my life were rich, but they were not “big” people. I mean who can actually be big with the mentality of roadside trash but then if you are well connected you can fuck up others from “inside”.

At present I feel I have achieved my singularity when it comes to stories and art. I feel the time for Indian graphic novels has arrived and it had actually arrived in the year 2012, but from 2013 there was a sudden shift in the narrative of the country. I like Shekhar Kapur’s graphic novels, his vision of contemporary Indian mythology. Vivek Goel and Shamik Dasgupta have been doing a good job and probably only ones left in the business. Raj Comics which was a part of my childhood now suffers from something I wouldn’t want to talk about. It was hugely disappointing when I realised how many Raj Comics superheroes were “inspired” by American superheroes.

If India wasn’t governed so poorly we wouldn’t have needed escape, but since it is governed poorly, we would need our escape. Since 2013 even that escape doesn’t seem possible probably because of change in the national narrative of the country. Good YouTube channels and filmmakers somehow got trapped in molestation scandals and stopped creating. The ones creating patriotic or nationalist media do not have skill. Recently there was this movie called “Tanhaji”, I mean I did not have high expectations from that movie but still it disappointed me. If a movie is patriotic after 2013, it is most surely a propaganda movie. The nationalists of this country are so less skilled that when they do propaganda it is clearly visible that doing propaganda. They don’t know what art is, and most of them are nationalists not because of love for their country but because they have no choice. Because they have been rejected by the elite liberal circles of this country. They don’t have skill and they are not accepted in the liberal intelligencia of this country and thus in their frustration and powered by Baniya money they keep singing songs of nationalism.

One of the biggest mistakes I have made in my life is respecting people, I can’t help it because I am a respectful person but it eventually backfired on me. From where I did my schooling it was basically every man for himself. I had a habit of loneliness but one mistake I made was thinking that there is hope. There isn’t.

I had thought internet is a tool for knowledge and for connecting. I loved the Yahoo Messenger era of the internet when we could roleplay in the chatrooms, but after that, internet became a huge trap. They have been developing the internet as a huge prison for people. They know about your likes, your dislikes, everything about your personal life and sell you the shit they want. It’s actually not a problem, until they want to destroy you. But then it’s too late, and you have no option but to live in this prison now.

So, in this shitty world, my only escape are stories. Good stories. Benign stories.