The Rabhas Incident

When the sociopolitical realities around you shift, you do not know what to do with your interests. I wonder what I would do with my interest in fiction and fantasy with the existence turning increasingly transactional and commercial. Older realities are collapsing and so are basics the older stories were based on. Life requires mystery to be interesting. I increasingly miss my comics reading days when there were superheroes born on islands, or doing space adventures, going on missions to destroy ancient evil or heroes in ancient feudal kingdoms dealing with martial arts, conspiracies and magic. I say this because these things, these worlds were realities at least till early 2010s. You could come home from school, college or work and immerse yourself in these deep worlds and during this time you'd be disconnected from the actual reality you were living, and I'm talking this in an Indian context, about indigenous fiction and fantasy and realities. I still have western options, like Marvel, DC and others if we are talking comics and Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King and numerous others if we are talking western fiction and fantasy books. Being able to read Western comics, stories and novels in India comes with an invasive gatekeeping in which, in my experience, totally inept and incompetent individuals decide who deserves to read what. The model of the world, and not earth, which includes India is a bunch of decentralised and multi-level genocidal rapists, sadists and exploiters and their employed criminal functionaries raping and exploiting people and turning that rape, torture and exploitation into fate or will of God while government acts as a front for administration and welfare. India is especially demonic because there is zero percent autonomy over one's life unless one has the illusion of autonomy or is educated and aware enough to salvage a little bit, and a hundred percent responsibility and accountability for one's thought speech and actions and this existential totalitarianism goes on behind the facade of democracy as it gives these motherfuckers more field to play with. Impunity for the powerful and privileged coexists with illusion of meritocracy and the carrot of a better future and actually sealed fates for the majority while the majority juggles with traditions, morality, ethics and social conventions and law with a large chunk of them not actually following them but doing pretense. Religious sanctity of the indigenous religion has totally collapsed and if you read older books of literary writers you might realise that it never really existed except in the faiths of actually pious people of this land and local cultures including tribal cultures have totally destroyed by now except as a hyperreality with the substance beneath them totally eroded. There is no doubt that it's all about money, sex and resources and production and consumption. Life for common people is now mostly about consuming and performing for short-form videos as every little things gets either commercialized and weaponised. There is a reason why actual literature is absent in India and writers are becoming less and less and why comics industry has collpased and actual Indian mythmaking is deteriorating and is turning from civilizational to feudal and political in nature. It is because literature and mythmaking empowers people and shows them the truth and comics empower children and impart them values beside helping them to inculcate reading ability and imagination. Totally incompetent, rootless and westrnised at the top and feudal at the bottom individuals are making decisions for people while people's autonomy is stripped and their attentions focused on their economic precarity. Those who are a little stable are forced to consume substandard propaganda without any depth or have to switch to Western writers and Western or foreign media including media from American and Japanese corporations like Anime, Marvel and DC and Hollywood which is unfortunately hegemony under the pretext of globalisation and unfortunately this media is also gatekept from a lot people.