The Tragedy of the Other
(on battles, lies and weariness)
Like almost every human being in this world, I am perforce political. The fact that I rarely let that side of me seep into my art, hasn’t stopped me from seeing, reading, feeling, reacting. And the singular skew of the narrative and the increasing sharpness of tone of response, and the frightening cohesion of ideologues is disturbing.
It’s a tragedy of our times that time and again we face a world where human beings are razed into dust - and we are asked to be selectively outraged. One fetus torn out of a mother’s womb is less talked about then the bombed-out hospital full of children which is cynically being used to shelter terrorists.
I read, I observe, academically, artistically, with growing dismay. I can see how everything is distorted, where bastions of free media are compromised, and ideology masquerades as unbiased thinking, mendacity struts as editorial slant.
The manipulation of images and stories, the surging protests, the singular pointedness of agony without referencing reasons, are not so much changing my world as making it progressively clear how we are puppets in the industry of the proselyte.
I see good friends, well-meaning chums, whose centrist belief of live-and-let-live, has conjoined with mine, and we have been similarly outraged at extremities of all kinds. Until we started noticing the growing mendacity of feed, the slow poisoning of the story-telling, as it were. And the horrors of both the right and left paled in front of the terror of the liberal. The facade of civilization and the plum accents of those who stood cemented in medieval thought was flooding both news and the timelines.
The thinker Naval Ravikant wrote in his almanack “Any belief you took in a package … is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles. I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.” For good measure he added “ To be honest, speak without identity.”
And as the world was beset with one calamitous flagration after another, it was clear how truth was always the first victim in the tragedy. Newspapers had vitriolic opinion pieces masquerading as front page news items, prominent news channels had clear religious agendas behind their reputation of credibility, poets tore their hearts out only when deaths occurred on one side of the border.
All this was open secret for those who studied, observed, knew. What’s new is how ruthlessly the present tragedy has revealed the hypocrisies of peddlers. The fangs have been revealed for the whole world to see. But are we learning? Go back to what Naval had said. We are all so intricately tied with our ideologies and beliefs that to now abandon them is to lose the core of what we stood for. We would be ‘othered’ in the very society which has given us our identity. So we keep quiet. And the overwhelming lie of the aggressor grows and fills the empty space.
I write this as my attempt to reclaim that lost space inside me. I want to take a stand for myself. To delve deeper into the history and culture and devilish agenda to understand the cynicism of the narrative disguised as a torn body or a dulcet poem.
Maybe, finally, there will be a silence there
which lets children’s voices resound
the way it is supposed to,
and there is space for them
to run free. .
For too long, beliefs of the wise
have imprisoned them
and hatred of the ages
has defiled them. .
Our hearts break
and we cry deep in the night.
When secretly we know we are the ones,
we are the ones - yes, we - who have
let them fester, let them be defined,
let them be spawned
into hatred. .
Till nothing matters
apart from the contorted belief. .
And the very definition of ecstasy
becomes the bullet which finds foetuses
in god’s name,
and a fanatic’s hatred rupturing
again and again
and again and again
till it becomes a war cry camouflaged as a tear,
easy to bluff a world
eager to believe anything
which appears in the fresh edition
of the morning paper.