Interest

 I love speculative fiction. Though the experiences I have had in the past decade, there isn’t much left to speculate anymore. I have always had a scientific bent of mind and I loved stories of Jules Verne as they had science as well as exploration. Jules Verne is the reason I appreciate steampunk as a genre. If I have to recommend you some of my favourite TV series, I would recommend two. One would be a more popular Love Death and Robots on Netflix and another an underwatched and underappreciated gem called Electric Dreams on Amazon Prime. As a person I always thought about terraforming of another planets, my scientific bent of mind along with heavy reading of comic books in childhood guided my speculative thought until the political reality of this country and world dawned on me. Once you know the political reality, terraforming of other planets stops to matter. You know the absolute truth of the world? No, not the earth, the world. It’s interest, no not intrigue kind of interest but the kind of interest you pay to the bank. Existence in the world is about paying interest on everything you do, even your suffering. In extractive societies like Purvanchal that’s how it works. You pay interest on your suffering too. An example of that would be a rape victim getting victim blamed. She has been already raped but then it is she who must feel ashamed and not the rapist because the deepest mindset is that the rapist feels entitled to rape. At the deepest level, seldom visible to common eyes, politics in places like Purvanchal which don’t have to protect it from intruders as the Indian Union takes care of it, politics is mostly about retaining the right to rape. Realising this fact as a believer in constitution and the Indian Union was a hard awakening for me. I realised that the world in which people who hold power think of having the right to rape others instead of thinking about terraforming planets in the vast universe, so vast that each person on this planet can have a planet of his or her own, a change for better is impossible. You can see the general experience in this country in the past twenty years. We have mobile phones, computers, internet, e-commerce, quick commerce and yet the quality of life and subjective experience of the majority, if we leave out the privileged, has decreased. It is in the past decade I have realised that real politics of this nation is extractive exploitation while maintaining the illusion of normality. When I understood victim blaming it is then I realised that all religions are about victim blaming, so that the ones in power can exploit them. In India it is visible in the form of things like having to donate a golden cat to a Brahmin if you kill a cat, even if by mistake. I believe in capitalism and I think it is a great political system if practiced ethically and correctly but what we are dealing with in today’s world and especially in this country is extractive capitalism. The most baffling thing that I realised during the course of my enlightenment was that not only these motherfuckers are gatekeeping beauty and aesthetics from the lower classes but also permanently deleting it for them, hoarding all the beauty for themselves. It is here I realised that a common man, even if man as a species, is able to reach Mars or other planets and terraform them, will remain permanently a slave.