Gimmick

The issue of identity is a complex one. Actors and spies assume identities. Common people too assume identities when they are roleplaying and sometimes when they are meeting other people. Has it happened to you that you are travelling somewhere and you feel like you could be anyone you wanted? In old times people used to go away from their regions, from their countries and start over. The time to start over has passed, and from the looks of it, it was never there but yet people did start over. People went to foreign countries and assumed new identities and forged new destinies. I like roleplaying, and I can trace it back to the Yahoo Messenger days, when I used to go in Yahoo Chatrooms mostly the Harry Potter chatrooms to roleplay as one of the Harry Potter characters. Alter-egos allow people to explore those sides of themselves that they can’t by society-defined identities. Comics have a lot of these identities like Clark Kent and Superman, like Batman and Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker and Spiderman. In the movie Matrix, the protagonist Thomas Anderson had a hacker alias named Neo which ultimately became his destiny. Societal definitions of identity box us and then we ultimately end up playing the role defined for us in that box. In a hyper-connected world, moving somewhere and starting over is not an option anymore. How great would it have been in the olden times? I’m a fan of the off-the-grid life but I ultimately ended up realising that there is no off the grid in this world. When I was younger and seriously considering being a writer I used to search for a pen name, I was studying to be a doctor so I didn’t really want to use my real name for writing, and numerous authors have done it and still do, writing with pseudonyms and pen names. I had thought of some great names but then as the world unfolded in front of me, I realised that there is no privacy so secrecy is out of question and so I was like fuck it and started to write with my own name. I’m defined by many constraints, like being from a particular caste, being from a particular region and other such things but in my early youth I wanted to be a physician-writer and so I write. I don’t know if I’m a physician-writer or not but I’m licensed to practice homeopathic medicine and I write and anyway the way the world has unfolded in front of me making me realise that people are actually kept in imposter syndromes even about profession and ranks by the politics of the land, it all really stops to matter. As a person who writes I know that a writer is a roleplayer. He writes something, some character, and he has to think like that, like that character. The politics of modern times has locked us in our identities, the sociopolitical  identities and now we can’t reinvent ourselves, can’t start-over. We will remain what we are born as sociopolitically, though it’s not bad for me but for countless others it is. Imagine being from a family that carries people’s excreta on their heads, yes, such people still exist in this country in 2025 and the irony is that such people would be humiliated for wanting to change their religion, say christianity. I know a thing or two about alter-egos from being a roleplayer and a writer, it’s like the personas of wrestlers in American professional wrestling, the alter-ego allows you the vent of your desires without it being socially harmful for you, like a professional wrestler can do anything as a gimmick and it would only entertain people while also allowing him to unwind. This was the freedom that was present once which has been curtailed in the modern times. You still play roles though, as a child, as a parent, as a professional, but your real self evades you and you end up realising that what you think of as your alter-ego, your gimmick, is the real you.