You say you want a Revolution

- The Beatles

 

 

I’m having a strange day today. And it’s okay, I like strange days...days where thoughts collide, merge and separate, sometimes feeding from each other, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes indifferent. When I opened my Facebook Account today and was ransacking the usual unreal media realities, I stepped upon a dear poet:

 

“the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip.

― Zadie Smith

 

We entered into a conversation, me and these words, into Rimbaud and Kundera and into Time itself. How slow and how fast can we be with Time? What works with pleasure and what doesn’t? Is everything doable, are our pains and sufferings an accomplice to simple and sinful Lethargy? Can we forgive ourselves because of our limits, or do we challenge ourselves despite them?

 

What is ‘mordern’?

Can you interrupt Time itself? Do you indeed want a Revolution?

 

--------                          -----------                      -----------                      -----------         

 

“I hope you understand that we are here not for a reform, but a revolution” - Gloria Steinem

 

Scrolling down I was attacked by…”MP openly threatens to rape opposition party’s women’..

On investigating the obviously fetching header, I knew that a Member of Parliament of the state’s ruling party has been recorded on camera at some remote village, saying that he’ll go to any lengths to protect his own work men, even to the extent of raping the opposition women. The fact that the leader in question is also a leading vernacular actor, nay, an Artist with movies that portray him as The Virtuous Man Of The Societal Fabric added a  peculiar ironic gash you couldn’t sponge out easily.

 

The rise of the Weapon Woman.

Easy does it.

 

I’ve shut down the browser since, because the comments and controversies that follow are like moths hovering around any burning object. But this, unfortunately is a primal fire, the same that has burnt away the Dinosaurs, the same that has made us humans from apes. This in short is the fire of Time itself.

 

------                             ---------             ---------             --------- -------  

 

I am any other girl, in any other city, in any other village, in any other town. I am white, black or wheatish. I am a mother, a sister, a poet, a CEO, a human, a woman. I am the ‘fairer sex’, I am feeble, I am the ‘sweet thing’, I am for the indoors, I am a liability. I am paid less, I am raped, I am murdered, I asked to sleep in strange marriages, I am asked to burn with my man. I can be bought, I can come free, I am what I am in the mind, I am what I am in your actions. I do the housework, I do the cleaning and sometimes an executive too, but that’s just cute and sexy.

 

You are any other man, in any other city, in any other village, in any other town. You are white, black or wheatish. You are a father, a banker, a farmer, a CEO, a tycoon, a human, a man. You are rough. You are meant for freedom, for the outdoors. You are the breadwinner, hence you are justified. You are strong, brutal. You can buy me, rape me, dump me, kill me. You can ask me to follow you into your afterlife when I am not done with this one. You can force love out of me, you will not allow hate. You use me as a doormat, as a trophy, and sometimes as a weapon. You invade me, you belittle me, you break my heart because you can. You think it’s your right and I am your property.

 

Haha. That’s cute. A cat and dog fight.

Right?

 

Don’t deny it. I know it’s a tall ask.

How can you push aside the Societal Ego?….look at us, the huge couch potatoes we’ve become, so comfy in our beanies. staring into idiot boxes, sucking in perceptions and letting them make the evil journey to prejudice to belief to pride.

 

And yet Science. And we mole-headed people seldom deny Science. It tells us our DNA structures are much the same. Waito. Do we see our age-long structures crumbling down. Since I didn’t start the fire, I’ve no right to stop it.

 

What about religion itself? All those burqas that hide vulnerable fair faces, the slokas, the chants, the Holy Waters. The Seminal truth behind the most violence of violences lies in singularity and peace. Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ were two sides of the same coin.

 

But this is not about a man and a woman. This is not about Egos and Ecclectics. This is about Revolution.

A revolution can’t be begun or ended. What we mistake for a Revolution is a movement. The span of a Revolution is beyond the human mind. A revolution is what happens after the ‘happily ever afters’ of the media-reality. Movement is but a taste of revolution, a fleeting thought in the Cosmic Mind, a bruise in a Civil War, the hum before the song. Just like a person who lisps and stammers to form a single word, we’re but tuning our Guitars for performance we think is happening.

 

It’s easy to mistake collective rebellion for a revolution. And in this case, as Camus eloquently puts in ‘The Rebel’ we believe in theoretical equality over factual inequalities. Anything which is floating on the boats of subjectivity, struck with choices and dilemmas is but a glimpse of the whole canvas. What we know as revolution today is just another ‘ism’ that has mass agreement or disagreement as the case may be. And so, if you are just another ism in a ism-soup, how does it matter what voice you are raising?

I am not talking of morality here, as that is another variable. I am talking of Absolutes, of solutions. The journey towards the Absolute is the only Revolution. It has been happening since the beginning of Time – since we lost our paradise.

 

Have you noticed how very few Revolutions lead to long staying Reforms? They stay in our memories, our literature, our governments, our beliefs and many other things am sure. What they don’t do is change things in action forever. Because most of them fail mid-way.

Our lives are like babushkas. Everything is a microcosm of a macrocosm which is again a microcosm to another macrocosm. The failing of movements perfectly replicates the Loss Of Paradise. The bigger a movement grows, the more alienated it becomes from its roots. It is like a enormous tree, whose roots are growing weak. All kinds of things start happening – the lower rank of people are dissociated from the Idea (Paradise) and hence drawn to vested interests (the Apple). The Idea or Belief System falls into the ominous trap of revisionism. The betrayer (serpent/Judas) emerges and the movement crashes.

 

You are shocked, hurt, mortified. You remain a staunch believer. But you too are Time’s doormat.

What we need is a reverse arrangement of the Babushka. We need to reach the Mother Doll and not make do with the lesser ones. Any ism will get you stuck. I secretly think Steinem hates the word ‘Feminism’. She is what I call an ‘equalist’.

 

All said, movements are our finest stairs in the ladder to the Ultimate. This is how far we can conceive an awakening. And someday, we’ll see the light shining on our stairway to Heaven.

 

 

Sreemanti Sengupta, Odditor