Who Let The Mongrels Out?

 11/10/20

Do mongrels have a right to live? My belief is that everyone has a right to live. But then opinions are subjective specially in a democracy.

Anyhow, the main question is that who let them out? I ask my pardon in advance for offending delicate sensibilities, but even though I tried hard to use butter with my words but despite my VIP Frenchie underwear, I couldn’t do it. I wanted to be a writer once, I know, very foolish of me, and that’s the exact reason I gave up on it. Now I write only when I have no options left.

Life is painful especially when you can’t do things you love and you are blamed for things you haven’t done. But, good thing about getting blame for something you haven’t done is that you don’t feel guilty about it, so despite all the ashleel music playing around you, somewhere you are at peace, even though you haven’t been at peace for long because you have been wicked to your own self. No rest for the wicked, they say. Although I have my doubts about this statement in the present scenario of the world.

I think I have said this before and I will say this again. I am not a very political person. I haven’t voted since I was 18, one of the minor reasons was my health and the other reason was assessment of the mentality of this nation (according to my surroundings, not generalising).

Well, here, BJP goes right, Congress goes left and Indian soldiers go left-right-left. Sometimes I think what should a government, whether it is BJP or Congress do, unless it is run by a deep state (sorry for injecting conspiracy theory in a mostly sane conversation), I think it should serve people, protect people and provide justice, atleast I think so.

What should Capitalists do? Ofcourse their primary goal should be to make profits, I mean that’s how they are defined, I guess. Also, provide goods and services, I don’t think these two functions are mutually exclusive.

India is a socialist country, which was inserted in the constitution by Indira Gandhi. Sorry for digression but Hitler was also a socialist. I mention Hitler so much that I may seem like a Hitler apologist, which is definitely not the case. I like to study people, sometimes the so called “monsters” of History, to understand what made them monsters, and in this pursuit I can just hope that I am not forsaken by my God and gods.

For the record, I am not a very social person, I have a little difficulty adapting well to certain societies, but that doesn’t mean that I am asocial or don’t like people in general. I have called myself antisocial and such words when I used to think that I am funny and also didn’t know the power of words.

I can understand what the government should do and what should the Capitalist do except from crushing the people who come in their way like a worm. I never understood what do the communist do? We all live in our little communes, with family and friends, with our specific communities, but I find political communism incompatible to human nature unless of course our nature gets too evolved, as an idea although, it sounds fantastic. I was apolitical to a point until I was forced to make a political viewpoint by my circumstances and I found integral humanism suitable to my viewpoint. Of course I have some rather strict views when it comes to some things but I do have explanations and arguments to support them, and like many other people I also don’t pull out arguments out of thin air or out of my ass. One of my political viewpoints is, Mongrels have the right to live and Machines should have better intelligence. Sometimes I feel I am being squeezed like a lemon, but then I gotta stay true to myself, and also not let the people who are too stupid to deliver justice, deliver it like bhelpuri.

The Country Doctor

 10/10/20

“Kya Russia mein Russian ladki ke saath vodka pi hai?”

“Maine bhi nahin pi.”

“Kya Goa mein Israeli ladki ko dekhne ke baad baal katwaye hain?”

“Hmm?”

How strange is it that just wanting a normal life and wanting to do your work properly, can lead you to become Aryaveer and later Krantiveer.

Sabke Nana, Peshwa Bajirao par sandeh nahin karte. But who made Bajirao a Nanasaheb? Who made a person who is too lazy to visit Vaishno Devi, visit Bethesda?

Who the hell is a Nazi? Were the German soldiers not human, that they have to bear shame of the decisions of their leader till now? I mean their must be good people in the Nazis, I think it’s possible.

It’s also possible that I may drink Juice and hang myself with a green cloth tomorrow. Heart is at the right place, but why do almost all humans have their hearts on left side?

How do I sitting in the abyss, get to meet local trash, and am supposed to remember my place in the society despite all the hardships I have faced, while Lutyen’s writes books on “Why I am a liberal”.

I think it’s possible that one can become “pavitra” by getting sodomized by a Pandit. I mean he can also give you knowledge, but sodomy has a personal touch to it.

One good thing about being Dushman Duniya Ka is that atleast you unite the world against you. It’s Holi time people.

Love Is A Fart?

9/10/20

Some jobs I guess are generational, I am not sure but it does feel like that. My mind somehow refuses to believe that people who would build power structures would build them so weak that they could be overthrown or overturned. The force of oppression goes from above downwards and the lowermost unit gets to be the coolie number one I guess.

Sushant could lift Sara Ali Khan on his back to Kedarnath, and then go on with his Shree Krishna Govinda Hare Murari. When you refuse to pass on the oppression then what you get is a sandwich. I for one, am a staunch believer in love, I mean it is one thing that seperates us from robots and brings colours of emotions to our otherwise dull lives. Is love a fart? Maybe. But as someone in medicine, I would say farts are good for health. Also, your fart may trouble others but it gives relief to you so I guess it is fine.

These days there is something called “Brahminical Patriarchy”, which according to the commotion on the social media, always has been. I for one have never had any issue with it, although I can’t care about caste when the damage done to me by someone is personal. I do have the habit of generalizing my anxiety but I don’t generalize my grudges. My grudges are focused, but like a good boy, I never act on them. Moral Science is a good subject even if it is an ignored one.

Still, if you have a job of a Zaalim Lotion which you never signed up for, and also of a coolie and a trash can, what can you do about that? I believe in doing my job dutifully but I would readily deny any job my conscience doesn’t agree upon, but how can you deny doing a job which you don’t know you are doing.

Don’t wrestle with the pig, they say, he would drag you in the mud and then beat you with experience. I have seen this example in my own life and whole-heartedly agree with the message. Although I think pigs are misunderstood creatures, and I would also include vultures in the list. But this applies to animals, and not humans who act as pigs and vultures. The real vultures and pigs actually clean the environment by consuming things which would pollute otherwise and in case of pigs, they also provide pork to those who eat pork. If I had to be a pig, I would be Peppa Pig, not as tall as her as I read she is about 7 feet tall, but as happy and playful, without dragging anyone in the mud, and I would definitely not want Elon Musk to insert a chip in my brain (as I had read in an article). As we see daily the two prominent professions which keep trying to outshine each other in pig’ism' and vultur’ism' are law and journalism. I can’t really blame them because I have seen the circumstances that can make a person a pig or a vulture in human form. Still this pig’ism' and vultur’ism' can be applied in a better way.

The difference between people in the power structures and others is that people in the power structures know the rules of the game. I have been ignorant and reluctant to participate but that didn’t stop me from being a Mohabbat Man or a Coolie number One. Like they say “A man’s gotta do what a man gotta do, even if he sometimes has to wear Zivame lingerie.”

In the words of a great man, “Ankhiyan ladi re ladi beech bazaar, dil mera lutt gaya pehli baar, usko bulaya maine kitni baar, aaya ni chandna ik vi baar, totte totte ho gaya dil totte totte ho gaya.”

Anyway, in full disclosure, I don’t think I ever had any doubts about my aukaat, but I did believe in the constitution and freedom of speech, turns out, to exercise freedom of speech one has to first understand the power of words, even if they are hidden in some corner of your diary where they can’t be seen.

Something About Children's Media

 I was lucky to be born in a time when I got to read quality literature and watch quality cartoons. The children of today can't understand that because they grow up watching subpar children shows by people who are not passionate about what they do. The media establishment decided that shows should be Indian, made by Indians, but they forgot that it requires a skill set. I grew up watching Cartoon Network, shows like Batman: The Animated Series, Johnny Quest, Dandare, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Mask were some of my favourites. Today's children on the other hand grow up with cartoons which are not Indian despite being Indian and their plots, plot devices and techniques, everything is lifted from the west. We Indians copy the west a lot. It is clear in our movies, in Bollywood too. Suddenly they have started making remakes of Hollywood films as if there is a dearth of stories in India.

The trick is doing things for passion instead of "roti", and this is the only thing we Indians failed to copy from the west. I have read a lot of quality literature in my childhood, and there was this era of comics too back then due to which I am a fan of comics and graphic novels even today. Chandamama, an awesome magazine of my childhood era is defunct today and the quality of other children magazines, I would take one name, Balhans among others, has reduced drastically in content. I did not take the name of Balhans because it is the worst of the lot, but because it was one of the best children's magazines at one time along with Chandamama. Children today are thrown into the furnace of society from a very young age, you have online coding classes, guitar classes and God knows what all, and I think it is natural, the competition is high, my personal thinking is that the child should know at least one vocational skill such as carpentry, bike or car repairing/mechanic skills, pottery or cooking etc. Coding skills can be useful too, but not everyone is going to be Linus Torvalds or Mark Zuckerberg and the education system does provide basic coding skills to understand the concepts. But in the end it's all up to the parents to decide, to each their own. 

A Little About My Kind of Literature

When I was little, my grandfather used to take me to the bookstore and get me children's magazines. I developed a habit of reading very early in my life and it helped me a lot during my life. The downside of the habit of reading is that you become too idealistic and when the real world hits you it hits you hard, but then due to the same habit you are well equipped when it happens. Read good authors, not that anything is going to help you when "the sky falls down" but writings by good authors are a consolation. When I was a kid I used to read a lot of comics. Comics are a beautiful way of unlocking the imagination of children. I read a lot of literature, both Hindi and English. Like many children of the 90s I love Harry Potter, it's a beautiful book. I still like it and I think it's one of the best children's novels. I read authors like Khushwant Singh and Taslima Nasreen and many others. When I was in college I used to do a lot of poetry and story writing. Grammar has never been my thing but I write for the sake of creativity, expression and aesthetics. I read a lot of short story writers, like Chekhov, O. Henry and many others. I started reading classics in college and read Conan Doyle, Tolstoy, William James and many others. I have been a fan of Kafka since my early youth and I like existential literature. I like noir for the style it has. And as the world opened up to me I started liking transgressive fiction and cosmic horror. At present my favourite genres are science fiction and cosmic horror. I have a lot of appreciation for Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Back during my younger years I used to like transgressive fiction, but then there is so much transgression in the world itself that that fiction is almost reality. I also enjoy dark humour a lot. Dark humour is not everyone's cup of tea but then it doesn't have to be. 

Literature is the mirror of society and also the mirror of the mind of the individual who writes it. When I was in college I used to write satire and existential literature. Some of the stories that I wrote were dark and dealt with things like revenge, others were romantic and idealistic kinds. I like revenge stories, because I have appreciation for justice and I have always wanted to write a noir story with a lot of stylized violence. But I am not into writing fiction anymore, still I will give an excerpt of a stylized noir (and a bit transgressive) fantasy that I had written:

"She was so beautiful, his mother, and that's why a deva from the heavens made love to her when she was asleep. A minor deva, he was infamous among the apsaras for his ways, they called him accidental deva, thought of him as a lustful asura, and he was lustful, and so his mother got pregnant with him. She died a lonely death, just after his birth, because that's how the Indian society is to a single mother, and she couldn't explain how she became pregnant, she couldn't explain even to herself. He was a beautiful boy, and the government took him in as a baby, along with others for Project 1347. That's what was happening to all orphaned babies at that time. They were taken in by the government for Project 1347 and mothers were assigned to them. A lab situated deep in the jungles of Himachal Pradesh directly under the department of defence was tasked with Project 1347. He was assigned a name, Vikram, and a codename, 077.

Vikram was sitting in the car waiting for Tanya. He lit a cigarette and changed the radio channel to news. Matoshree (Mother) was directly overseeing the mission. Tanya was inside the hotel having sex with Prateek Goel, Indian head of an American technology company, the camera on her handbag recording everything going on on the bed. Prateek is fucked, Vikram thought to himself. Maatoshree would now blackmail him to give secrets of the cutting edge technology his company was researching on, and of course the Indian government would then sell it to the Indian corporates who were just too lazy to develop their own authentic technologies. Tanya was Matoshree's go to for jobs like these, she was extremely beautiful and good with conversations, as far as skills go, everyone who was a part of Project 1347 was skilled. Skills were a dime here, what was important were their roles."

Hello Friends, Paani pi lo!

9/10/20

I couldn’t bear to watch the Netflix series, Leila. 'The Namesake’, a movie by the same maker is very close to my heart because of some reasons but Leila is just unbearable. One can say it is based on a true assessment of future depending upon your political leaning but if there is a futuristic near post-apocalyptic fiction, I would prefer it to be simple, like Mad Max, without trying to specifically malign or slander a specific community. Obviously every piece of art including movies has politics in it, but if it’s not a documentary, the least it could be is engrossing or entertaining.

Lack of water is a real thing, and could stem from personal or larger factors. How strange is this world where people sipping cocktails complain about lack of water.

India has no dearth of stories if you want to make webseries but for some reasons Netflix only chooses projects which have the capacity to fan unrest.

I got confused between Atish Taseer and Prayag Akbar, and I don’t think it’s that much of a big mistake, atleast it doesn’t feel like that.

All I can say is sometimes the thirst may not even be real but induced, and even if you want to protest against the lack of water, their can be a balanced way to do it, especially if you have that ability.

I’m no one to long for a Utopia but not having a mountain on the head and not being hammered would be nice, especially when the things said had context. Still, why would I mind when I myself have the habit of oversimplifying things.

Evolution of The Internet

There were times of Yahoo Messenger, when you could make any chat id and get into a chatroom of your interest. I used to be in the Harry Potter chatroom a lot. Only the ones who have played Age of Empires on a dialup lan would understand the sheer fun of it. The internet was a whole different beast back then. There should be two things clear though, there is nothing that is private on the internet, and the government records all your activities on the internet. The illusion of privacy on the internet may sell VPNs and anti-virus software but it's just a way of helping the software economy. When 3G mobile data came to India, the internet started becoming mainstream, and now, with classes being held online during the pandemic we can safely say that it has become mainstream. Data is the most important commodity these days. Big Data and Big Tech control the world now. And who controls Big Data and Big Tech? Guys (not girls) who would probably be bullied in school in a world where there was no technology. Of course they are overseen by individuals not necessarily facing the same issue.

Is there a problem with today's internet compared to Yahoo Messenger days? That depends on your point of view. When the internet was new, people wanted to connect, share interests, make friends, but with the internet boom came information boom, and now we face issues like a patient "knowing more about his medical condition than the doctor". The expression "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" can't be truer in the case of the internet. You do searches, accept cookies, fill in your personal details, and these things are then used for targeted ads. To assume that Big Tech and Big Data would follow ethical practices will be a far cry. Businesses have only one ethic generally, profit, and we can only hope that they follow ethics, which is highly unlikely given the amount of spam we receive in our inbox. But that's not the only problem. Advertisements are fine, because we use the internet for free, what we pay for is the data connection, so it's simple give and take, even if we get the ads of what we were talking about just another day, on our insta feed, or an ad of something we searched about on Google, on a totally unrelated app. You see, the problem of the internet is not here. The problem is that it is swallowing the very basic things that make us human. Everything on the internet is permanent. What you are doing now, will be seen by your children and after that your children's children. We can't do much about it. The main issue here is commercialism and narcissism becoming a way of life, but then who doesn't want to make money? And the internet lets you do that from the comfort of your home. You just need to be able to attract the attention of people. Let's talk about journalism now. It's not about news or good writing anymore, it's about clickbaits and keywords. Good journalism in the present day is the journalism that makes good use of SEO, that's all there is to it. And the real culture of our ancient civilization is starting to show in the facebook comments. Now, let's see the dangers of the internet. You can be easily psychologically profiled by the kind of content you watch on the internet, by the government and the corporate equally. Your internet activity can be used to blackmail you, again by the government and corporate equally. Ethics is just for books and good people, and according to Murphy's law, things are not looking good in this respect. 

The internet which used to be a rendezvous point to meet new friends with shared interests is now a warzone for propaganda peddlers and is turning into a permanent prison for common man, which he is not even aware of. Still, it has given rise to a whole new economy and the ones who took advantage of this economy and got rich wouldn't be complaining. This new economy allows you to monetize your talents, whether it be dancing, acting, comedy, cooking or something else. We are more connected than we ever were, we can video call people, still, loneliness remains. You can do payments and banking from your phone, do trading, invest, apply for jobs, do reservations, order products and services. Everything now is at our fingertips. Our collective psychology is going to get affected by these major changes and it would be curious to see how society evolves in coming years. Some of us miss the old internet, when it was just a source of knowledge and a way to meet new friends with similar interests. But there aren't a lot of us.