I am a Palimpsest

Every narcissist loves to leave a mark wherever possible.  Writing is the easiest way to produce marks.  Ink is indelible.  That’s why democracy uses ink to brand every voter.  And now I have a ruler who uses the same ink to brand anyone who takes out her own money from the bank. 

Source

I have had so many rulers that I am not surprised by anything anymore.  They came from all sorts of places crossing oceans and mountains just for leaving their marks.  They left their marks in the wombs of my women too.  That’s also a kind of writing; a rewriting of history.  The deepest marks are made in history.  The Mughals did it best, I think. 

Long, long before them came somebody who wrote in Sanskrit.  They were the best, perhaps.  They wrote the Vedas.  Then they wrote the end of the Vedas and called them Upaniashads though Vedanta was a more logical name.  But the Vedas never ended.  The Vedas continue to live even today while the Upanishads died natural deaths.  Religious rituals don’t die, you see.  People need religion, not philosophy.  That’s why the Upanishads couldn’t live on.  Philosophy is dead; Long Live Religion. 

Philosophy was erased and written over.  By the Mughals, for example.  But the Brahmins did it much earlier in the subtlest of ways, in fact.  The Brahmins knew how to conquer without shedding blood.  Without soldiers.  They just created a system.  Very subtly.  Very religiously.

And now another such subtle system is being written on me.  By a man who belonged to the lowest caste of yore.  If the Brahmins rewrote religion, if the Mughals rewrote religion, this new man rewrote currency.  Ah, that’s the religion today, isn’t it?  So he has repeated history. 

That’s what I’ve seen all along.  They all come and make the same marks.  But they erase the old marks just to show that now it is their mark and not the old one. 

I will live on.  Just to see more narcissists come and leave another mark after erasing a very similar one.  They call it strategy.  I really don’t understand that term except that it’s a kind of deception.  But history is all about masqueraded deceptions.  Every winner worth his throne is a deceiver.  Bet?

A few more years.  That’s what I give to the present narcissist.  And another one will come along to erase what this one has written.  I will have yet another painful erasing and rewriting.  That’s how history is.  That’s what I am.