“Be yourself; everyone else is
already taken,” Oscar Wilde said with his characteristic wit. It was tough to
be Wilde and it got him to the prison in the end. Those were different days.
Today Wilde would have been a hero of the LGBTQ+ community.
Is it easy to
be yourself even today? Ask Teesta Setalvad and R B Sreekumar. Quite many
others are in jail too for the crime of being themselves. Some died there, in
the jail. Remember Stan Swamy? Some died without ever getting a trial even.
Heard of Gauri Lankesh?
More than
half a century ago, Simon and Garfunkel sang about “People talking without
speaking / People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices
never share…” “No one dared / Disturb the sound of silence,” they sang. Today
no one dares to disturb the sound of sounds. The Great Sound.
We can’t be
ourselves today. We wear multiple masks. There is a Covid mask. And there are
other masks: of religion, political leaning, of survival itself.
If you
question the Great Sound you are likely to end up in prison. Pretend. Wear half
a dozen masks. As T S Eliot said, wear “a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
The most
active industry in India today is fabrication of masks. Fabrication of history.
They even dig up those who were buried hundreds of years ago in order to
reshape the skeletons.
What the
Supreme Court said in the aftermath of 2002 Gujarat riots and what the same
Court says today are the opposite ends of a spectrum. Those whom the Court held
in obvious suspicion are the saints today and the petitioners have become the
accused.
It’s tough to
be yourself in India today.
You can sit in the comfort zone of your home and read the following books. There are a lot more coming soon. New history. New demigods. Great Sounds.
Some of those who plotted against Modi
PS. Written
for Indispire Edition 416: Be yourself, everyone else is
already taken. #Authenticity
The faces they wear, I agree on that. Cause I myself have to wear quite so much to be at different levels, I see people gesturing me to keep them back on while I try to rip it off out of suffocation, the covid masks are less disturbing at those times.
ReplyDeleteYes, Covid masks are a welcome relief sometimes because it conceals more terrible ones.
DeleteWhat astounds me is the amount of homework these people do in order to make their horrifying masks so charming.
Your posts are so real they hurt. I have nothing to add to what's been said here. My eternal hope for a fairer world keeps me going.
ReplyDeleteI too keep hoping. But a lot of damage is done in the meanwhile, some of it irreparable.
Delete